PHOTOS: LORENZO REDAELLI'S FROM ZERO TO GAME TALK (DECEMBER 11 2019)

How can you design a successful video game without prior game design experience? On December 11, Lorenzo Radaelli, an alumnus of the M.A. in Game Design at IULM, discussed his design philosophy through a detailed postmortem of Milky Way Prince: The Vampire Star, a first-person interactive visual novel about an abusive relationship between two individuals, one of whom suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. What did Lorenzo learn from this process? And what are the take away ideas for aspiring game designers? The journey from zero to game is full of challenges, failures, and surprises.

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EVENT: STORYTELLING IN VIDEO GAMES: A WORKSHOP (NOVEMBER 27 2019)

On November 27 2019, game designer Pietro Polsinelli will lead a workshop on merging storytelling principles and game design tool for the students of the Master of Arts in Game Design at IULM University. The workshop takes place during GAME CONTEXTS, one of the Program’s core courses. It is also open to all alumni of the M.A. Program (to enroll, please RSVP at least three days in advance).

When defining the narrative of a game, even at the concept level, it is useful to write down short characters bios, articulate the game's background universe, outline the possible endings and so on. Writing a sample dialogue or textual introduction can reveal several hidden or undefined features required and how they should interact with the game mechanics. Polsinelli will illustrate the development of the recent Football Drama, and how that process was expanded for his next project, Roller Drama concept design, pointing out some specific concepts needed when making narratives and mechanics interact. Students will work together with Pietro to add narrative background research and mechanics to their projects.

Pietro Polsinelli is a game designer and developer, mostly working on applied (a.k.a. educational) games. He co-authored a book on applied games in Italian and is currently writing a book on applied games (in English) titled Explaining With Games.

Read more about Pietro Polsinelli

MARE SHEPPARD ON N++

Professor Mare Sheppard (GAME CONTEXTS discusses her minimalist momentum-based platformers N/N+/N++ on Gamasutra. You can read the full feature by clicking the image below. 

As she writes,

"[O]ver the last twelve years we've gone from a scrappy little sketch of a game called N to a fully-developed and mature one called N++, and we definitely think that some of the decisions we made really benefitted from our having devoted plenty of time and thought to them. It's not something that one can always do, of course, but we would recommend sleeping on an idea, once in a while, to see how it feels the next day. Or the next year ;) The journey to N++ has been a very personal for us, which seems natural for a project which has taken up so much of our lives. One thing is certain, this series will always hold a very special place in our hearts, and we're glad we've finally managed to do it justice." (Mare Sheppard)