Game design lessons learned from World of Warcraft – Part 1

Given that I love gaming, and I love programming, it’s only natural that I put the two together. Now while I haven’t yet gotten deeply into game development and design, I have become acutely aware of design decisions made in the games that I play, and I like to take mental notes of what works, and what doesn’t. I also spend a lot of time watching game-related news and lurk the GameDev forums to keep up-to-date on the latest game development trends and advances.

I figured, now that I’ve got a blog, it’s time to start taking more permanent notes on the design decisions, both good and bad, of the various games I play. To start, I’m going to pick on the 800lb Gorilla in the room, World of Warcraft (known here on out as WoW). This is the first of what will be a multi-part series of articles, as I tend to delve in to rants and ramblings at time. However, I will try to keep it all coherent. So, without further ado…

Read the rest of this entry »

Blog Named!

That’s right, I decided on a name. Being a huge fan of Douglas Adams, and especially the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it seemed only right to pay homage to such a great author and fantastically weird story.

So the choice of theme made, the name came down to two: Forty-Two, otherwise known as The Answer, or Slartibartfast, because the name really doesn’t matter. I was leaning towards Forty-Two, and with an extra vote from a good friend of mine, it became the name.

I’ll probably update other parts of the site to fit the theme, like the subtitle and the categories. All in all, feels good to have a solidly named site.

Now, what do you get when you multiply six by nine?

There are two hard problems in Computer Science…

Cache invalidation and naming things, and the latter is most definitely not a Computer Science-only problem. I have no idea what to name this blog, so for now, it’s going to remain un-named until either a good suggestion comes along, or inspiration hits me.