Three Moves Ahead 178: Unit Customization and Game Design

Three Moves Ahead

Idle Thumbs

Strategy, Games & Hobbies, War, Strategy Games, Games, War Games, Video Games

4.8 • 532 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2012

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sixth Beatle Soren Johnson returns along with new guest, Cliff Harris from Positech - designer of Gratuitous Space Battles and the new Gratuitous Tank Battles. This week, how does the idea of unit customization fit with general design principles? At what point is this mechanic an intrusion into good 4x game design? Where do designer and player expectations collide?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zackney.
0:04.0	With me tonight, we have one of a regular panel, Three Moves Ahead founder, Troy Goodfell. Troy, welcome to the show. I'm always glad to be here, not talking Pokemon. You know, you brought it on yourself. You threatened to do it for years, and you finally did it. So I did it. But that's my bucket list is now Phil. it's full of
0:21.8	Pokemon as a matter of fact
0:23.2	we also welcome and you finally did it. So I did it. But that's my bucket list is now Phil.
0:23.2	It's full of Pokemon, as a matter of fact.
0:30.3	We also welcome back, our friend, design director at Zinga, Sorin Johnson.
0:31.4	Soren, welcome back to the show.
0:33.3	Hey, it's great to be back.
0:38.2	And finally, we welcome, for his first time appearance on three who is ahead.
0:40.6	Positax Cliff Harris.
0:41.7	Cliff, welcome to the show.
0:44.4	Hi, it's good to be you at the right time at last.
0:47.2	Yeah, that was, that cracked me up, actually.
0:50.8	When I woke up and saw that email from you at 3 a.m.
0:52.9	When you're like, hey, guys, I'm on Skype.
0:53.9	Where are you?
1:01.4	I felt so stupid because I normally laugh at people that get that wrong. And I never get it wrong.
1:03.7	I'm just suffering at the moment, maybe.
1:10.5	The reason we have Cliff on the show is because he's uniquely qualified to talk about our topic for today.
1:16.5	Unit customization in games, particularly strategy games.
1:23.5	It's a feature that seems to be really popular, particularly in relation to the space 4x genre.
1:24.7	There seems to be a lot of interest and excitement around the idea of like
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Idle Thumbs, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Idle Thumbs and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.