What's the Story?

13 May (Wednesday) A.M. Game Design - Developing the Story/Game Scenarios (Trainer: Murase-san) Events builds up a story of a game by punctuating gameplay and show the progressof a game. Early games were primitive and only showed either the player's score for winning or a "Game Over" screen for losing. But as games became more complex, game situations required more detailed explanation, leading to the events such as introduction to enemy bosses.

We also looked at the types of events, the role of story in various game genres, game scenarios, their function (describe the circumstance, motivate the player) and their structure (straight road, branching, parallel, tree, multi-scenario, flagged events).

P.M. No Lesson (Trainer: None needed) Since Kawashima-san was still needed at the university, Ron and I did our own self study again. I explored more of the PlayStation Home features, read up a bit of the HDK docs that we obtained yesterday, and did some LUA scripting in an attempt to create gameplay elements in my Home scene. Again, the docs were severely lacking in examples and explanation, and even the first one-page tutorial took me a hour or so to get it working. There were no step-by-step instructions and the user is left on their own to analyze the few basic sample scenes given.

By the end of the day, I managed to hack some moving platforms into my scene, but I had to hard code and bash things directly to get the script to work due to lack of instruction and documentation. Hopefully I'll learn more from the resident Home experts during the OJT part of our training.