SCAD Hong Kong Game Design and Development

Lindsay Holloway (left), Noreen Mir, Melissa Kronenberger

You might need the QuickTime components for Windows to listen to this talk http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/components.html

Ronald Grover and Malathi Nayak wrote:

“Walt Disney Co plans to shut the 30-year-old LucasArts studio it inherited with the acquisition of George Lucas’ film company last year, and focus on licensing its “Star Wars” brand externally, a spokesman said on Wednesday.”

“ The decision to shutter LucasArts comes as the developer and publisher, once known for humor-tinged adventure games like ‘Secret of Monkey Island’, has struggled in recent years to produce a hit in an industry increasingly dominated by action-oriented games.”

See the article at:

http://music.yahoo.com/news/disney-shut-lucasarts-games-studio-lay-off-workers-183037451–finance.html

From our perspective: Once more, the lessons learned from 1983 apply, focus on quality of the user experience and the market.  This is easier written than done.  Game design is about psychology, behaviour economics, and business strategy as fundamental disciplines to deliver a user experience of value, not about character design, story development, or even gameplay in isolation.

A History Of THQ, 1989-2013

By Luke Plunkett
http://kotaku.com/5978508/

One of the lessons learned from the history of THQ appears to be “set up your vision and stay on course” -easier said than done, but even students find it difficult to stay on their vision over a short two week assignment.  Creative people are always tempted by new ideas and this needs to be balanced with business context, instinct, education, and heroism.

Julian, Kevin, Henry, and Melissa made their games industry debut by introducing their iPad/iPhone games to a group of professionals.

Thank you to our industry guests Diana, Georgy, Raine, Kennis, Azure, Shuxian, Marco, John, Michael, Philip, Thomas, Leo, Ingo for all their feedback and support and for playing the students’ games!

Yusuf, Henry, Kendall, Beatrice, Julian, Melissa

October 14, 2011

From Yusuf Goolamabbas, CTO of Outblaze:

Please pass this along to your students and hope it helps them build out prototypes of their product ideas.

Corona SDK:  http://www.anscamobile.com/

Modo:   http://www.luxology.com/modo/

Starling Framework: http://www.starling-framework.org/

Game Salad:  http://gamesalad.com/

Push Button Engine:  http://pushbuttonengine.com/