Each year students on our Games Design and Development course at Southampton produce three games as part of the course. The first is intended to show awareness of core mechanics and tutorial design, the second explore interactive narrative, and the third incorporates some innovation from games (for example, procedural generation, locative, or VR). This year’s […]
Category: Games
Persona 5 and Agency Misdirection
I love a good RPG, but as someone who grew up with PC gaming (ok, ok, it might have been Commodore 64 gaming, but who’s counting a few bits) I missed out on the JRPG experience. Final Fantasy was massive on the NES, but I was busy playing the original Bard’s Tale, and then the […]
The Narrative Structure of The Witcher 3
Let’s get this out of the way first. The Witcher 3 is an astonishingly good game: fun, engaging, massive, and worthy of just about every superlative you could chug down before overdosing on praise and reaching for your White Honey. It’s a very good game. It also has a strong narrative, and while The Witcher 3 […]
GlobalGameJam16, 33 Great Games and Wisp
A couple of weeks ago Southampton hosted one of the Global Game Jam events (#sotongamejam). The Global Game Jam is a series of events across the world where amateurs and professionals work alone or in small teams and try to complete a game within 48 hours, the Southampton event happened in the ECS labs, involved […]
Adolescent 30’s: Grand Theft Morality
Two years ago I wrote how the arrival of a bouncy baby Wii for my birthday had caused me to revert to childhood, well my birthday has rolled around again and this year I received a much more mature and responsible present: an XBox 360. I know, I know (holds head in hands), I’m just […]
Ticket to Ride – New UK Map
A few years ago I created a UK board for Ticket To Ride, the excellent board game from Days of Wonder. Since then the board has been downloaded thousands of times, and I’ve received loads of kind comments from players around the world who have tried it out. Earlier this year I was contacted by […]
Cynical Ticket to Ride UK Variant
We all know that it was the railroads that built America, which might explain the happy and nostalgic feel for them in Ticket To Ride. However in the UK it was the Romans that built everything and frankly the railroads just cut dirty great lines across all their great stuff. In 2007 I received an […]
Ticket to Ride UK Ferries and Tunnels
One of the first updates for my Ticket to Ride UK Board was this Tunnels and Ferries version (based on the Europe edition of the game) sent to me by Rob in May 2007. Or you can download the map as eight separate A4 (or US Letter) sheets: R1C1 – R1C2 R2C1 – R2C2 R3C1 […]
Ticket to Ride UK Map
Back in 2006 I created a UK board for the Ticket to Ride game published by Days of Wonder. I posted the map on the BoardGameGeek website and to date the page has been viewed over twenty thousand times. In the Summer when I redesigned my website the Ticket to Ride page was orphaned, but […]