Conference opening by Game Developers’ Association of Australia President, Tom Crago, followed by international keynote speaker, Tim Stellmach.
Tim Stellmach is now Design Director at Vicarious Visions, the New York-based developers of the new action-RPG Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. He is an 18-year veteran of the games industry, and a principal designer of such acclaimed titles as Thief and System Shock. Tim has also worked on games as diverse as Ultima Underworld, Deus Ex and Guitar Hero.
RPS interviewed Randy Smith about immersive-sims and the future of games, an awesome read for all the game designers:
“..to make an immersive sim which I’m really excited about, we have to look deeper into the future and make something that would have genuinely surprised the living shit out of everyone at Looking Glass working on Thief.”
“..learning a story through environment and deciding what you’re accomplishing in games… and finding a lightweight way to bring them to a wider audience”
– Randy Smith
I remember finding this a long time ago on the TTLG forums where Haze, a user who happens to be a psychologist, got through Garrett’s life events in roughly chronological order, and exposed as much of his personality as possible based on genuine psychological studies done by famous psychologists.
He explained not just how Garrett behaves and what his personality is like, but also why he behaves the way he does and why his personality is like it is, based largely on the behavioral and cognitive approach to psychology. So yeah, if you consider yourself a Thief connoisseur then you don’t want to miss this, it is a very fine and interesting read!
In this February podcast of Irrational Games, Ken Levine, Dorian Hart, Rob Waters and some of the designers and artists from Irrational talk about Thief, a very interesting insight behind the scenes of the legendary game.
I’ve cut only the 7 minutes fragment of the podcast where they talk about Thief and you can listen to it here:
This dates back to 2002, with Ion Storm’s then-Project Director Randy Smith discussing stealth gameplay fundamentals in the Thief series at Game Developers Conference. The lecture provided what was then an early glimpse at the mechanics of the third entry in the series, Thief: Deadly Shadows.
– download Powerpoint presentation (link)
Also, every game designer should take note of the following quote:
“Don’t create “scripts”
Don’t plan the player’s experiences for them.
Create “possibility spaces”
Populate the world with challenges.
Populate the world with things that interact with the player’s tools, the simulations, manipulate the data flow.
Avoid absolutes, embrace gradients.”
Out of the Shadows – interview with Daniel Thron
I’m guessing that everyone here already knows who Daniel Thron is. We all loved his cutscene art and animation in Thief I and II. Beside these, Daniel also created the box art, the maps, the particle system effects and he even did some voices for all three Thief games. The man behind the unique art of the beloved games had the opportunity to answer a few questions submitted by TTLG.com members about working on Thief.
The Cradle is the penultimate level in 2004’s “Thief: Deadly Shadows”. “Journey Into the Cradle”, originally printed in Issue 146 of PC GAMER, is a ten-page dissection of the level. It is, as far as I’m aware, the longest article any major magazine has printed on a single level in a videogame. Lots of people seem to like it. Download
Some game worlds use religion, and a few even create religion. The world of Thief does both.
GMZ 