Andrew Dowell

As I said in a previous post, I love board games, and that got me thinking. What is the intrinsic link that made me select, and keep playing these games? There must be a pattern, formula or at least some basic design principle to follow that will establish how a great game is created. I should probably do the same for computer games too. Anyway, this is a rather long blog post as I've been writing it for several days, and I'm still crunching away to discover the game secrets and process my findings. Ok, lets start with the classic and build from there. Hero Quest , released in1989, designed by Stephen Baker, Art by Les Edwards, Published by Milton Bradley. Hero Quest is Milton Bradley's approach to a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure game. One player acts as the game master, revealing the maze-like dungeon piecemeal as the players wander. Up to four other players take on a character (wizard, elf, dwarf, or barbarian) and venture forth into dungeons on fantasy ques...

I love games, I really do. From cards, video games to board games I'm hooked. What's better than playing a great game, building your own mods and add 'house' rules. As a wee young boy, we had the standard household games such as Monopoly, Cluedo, Risk and snakes and Ladders, but nothing was more exciting than playing Draughts with my Mum. I remember she was merciless. But I remember clearly thinking about it like soldiers fighting in a medieval war and far more fun than the other games. A few years later, back in 1984 we also got our first home computer, his name was Arnold and he was the Amstrad CPC64. I started learning AMSDOS so I could create my own RPG games. Typical the ones like "You are standing in a forest, there is a mountain to the north, a wolf den to the East and the City of Bones to the West. Which way do you want to go?" Kids these days really don't know what they missed out on. The next natural progression should have been Chess, but tha...

After spending some time with the Ansel plugin from Nvidia, and having some real problems controlling it through blueprints I decided to take another look at the Kite and Lightning plugin. Kite and Lightning is a Los Angeles-based creative design studio sitting at the intersection of brands and VR. Kite and Lightning was started by Ikrima Elhassan and Cory Strassburger. Both started off creating visual effects for films. Strassburger worked more on the art side. He'd been involved with TV shows from the X Files to movies like Minority Report. http://kiteandlightning.la/#about Their plugin can be controlled through console commands and has a wide range of parameters, although currently, I'm struggling with capturing the rendered dynamic shadows and other post processing. For anyone starting to play with screen capture for 360 renders and immersive video, the following blueprint was a great starting place for me. Thanks to the unreal engine community and Gavin Costello, Lead Pro...