Football Drama Is Live

Going live with Football Drama was our first time in publishing a commercial game, so it was also very important.

Football Drama went live on September 18, in 8 languages (EN IT DE FR ES PT ZH RU) on these platforms:

Google Play (Android), App Store (iOS) (also Mac App Store), Steam.

Football Drama has been built by these guys:

Football Drama Development Team

From left to right: Daniele Giardini “Demigiant”, Pino Panzarella “Pugusel”, Marta Ascari “Ascari”, Pietro Polsinelli “Punkard”, Matteo Bicocchi “Pupunzi”.

And Football Drama is maintained and promoted with the help of Laura Mirri and Daniela Calogiuri. We also got an amazing launch PR from Charlene Lebrun and her Player Two PR.

To celebrate the release, once on sale on the stores we started streaming gameplay and chat with game designer friends, here is the video:

And here are all the guests:

We Are Muesli.

wearem

Daniele Giardini “Demigiant”

daniele1

Konstantinos Dimopoulos

kostas

Yonder.

yonder

Marta Ascari “Ascari”.

marta

Because of a mistake on our part, we didn’t make it in chatting with Florent Maurin – but fortunately, I had a chance to discuss Football Drama and narrative games with him a few days before. Here you see him playing our dear game :-)

Florent Maurin

In the chat we referred to the research done for Football Drama, here is a video that has many of the references:

And the world cup posters:

World cup posters

This was also an opportunity to try to make the application more visible, and for this, we had the great help of Caterina Chimenti “Kikaweb”.

So dear all, we made it, we released it: also thanks to you. THANK YOU.

 

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Designing More Charming Game Dialogues

Here is a Gamasutra post Direction Tools For Your Game’s Dialogues and a new video

where we present several ideas for improving a game’s dialogue user interfaces. Hope these examples are useful :-)

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Museum Digital Transformation: Talk And Workshop Materials

Museums are research institutions that often have a multi dimensional mission: research, preserve, teach, communicate. Digital tools can sometimes help in maintaining this mission: how and when has been the topic of the conference and set of workshops Museum Digital Transformation held in Florence on the 12th and 13th of April 2018.

I both had a talk (together with Alice Filipponi) and taught a workshop. Here you find links to all the slides and supporting materials I used.

Talk: Museums And Learning

Slides of the talk Museums and Learning – an open dialogue through digital transformation:

Here are two videos presented during the talk:

Workshop: Designing An Applied Game For Your Museum

Workshop exercise booklet

Slides of the workshop:

And here is a public link to a folder with supporting materials.

Thanks!

I hope this material can be helpful. I wish to thank Alice Filipponi, Francesco Pallanti, Pino Panzarella and Matteo Bicocchi without whom these projects and events would not have been possible.

As a way to keep in contact I publish every month or two a newsletter with new research on applied games. You can subscribe here. :-)

 

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Getting Google Sheet Data Updates In Unity

Separating data from Unity code is one of the main ways to keep your project maintainable and resistant to change. Anyone who has experience in game development knows how quick iteration in a constantly changing universe is a necessary part of the process.

(Yes, you are the cat.)

In case your game has a substantial narrative part, facilitating writer/developer interaction is also very important; I was reminded how common is this need by a recent interview of Leigh Alexander The Most Important Part Of Writing A Video Game Is The Tools, on her writing experience for Reigns: Her Majesty.

Writing for games has specific needs and contexts (see a detailed post of mine Videogame Dialogues: Writing Tools And Design Ideas), and so its important for the writer and the developers to quickly see how the text appears in the context of gameplay.

Supposing your writer is updating a Google sheet, I provide you with a very simple way to automatically get an updated textual asset at each Unity run, so making it easy to check how it feels in game.

The solution is simple as Google lets you download any shared doc in CSV format by just requesting the correct URL; you can also specify a target sheet in a multi-sheet document. What is a little bit tricky is that whenever your writer is using newlines, commas or quotation marks, this may break the CSV format.

What is cool of the solution is that it creates a textual asset of the downloaded content, so that say as long as you are running in Unity’s editor, you download the updates, but as soon as you build, the app will use the asset.

You find a complete solution as a Gist on Github :-)

Follow me on Twitter where I post about game design, game development, Unity3d, applied / serious games.

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Presenting A Board-game On Platform Cooperativism

I’ve posted on Gamasutra the full story of creating Coops & Dragons, a board game on platform cooperativism which is free and available on Github.

I also published a “how to play “video:

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A playable showcase of applied games created by Open Lab

We just created a web page which lists the main applied games we created in the last four years. These are all playable, either as direct link in the page or by requesting a link, for games unreleased or still in private beta.

We learned about game design, development and domain modelling from each project. Each game has been effective in some application, and we thank all the people we worked with that made this possible. Learning from many and always new :-) mistakes, we refined our process along the way.

We now cover all aspects of creating applied games, from creating a concept, to domain modelling with the field experts, to mechanics and multi platform release.

We worked with museums, research centres, private companies, NGOs – always with people with specific, refined knowledge and expertise, focusing the game design process on their core knowledge. This process generates original, unique game play experiences.

I hope you will work with us to create more games, using this wonderful medium for making learning complex topics a more accessible and universal experience.

Open Lab Applied Games Website

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All Mailings Done On Applied Games

Here are all mailings done on applied games, in case you missed some.

And here you can subscribe. :-)

Open Lab Games mailing

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Talk “Applied and Persuasive: Playful Learning In Museums” (video with slides)

Here is the talk I gave at the Museum Digital Transformation conference in March, 2017:

 

 

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Several useful writings on writing for games

I just posted on Gamasutra a curated list of recent and less recent posts / videos on writing for games – here :-)

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A post on videogame writing tools and user interface techniques

I just published a post on Gamasutra Videogame Dialogues: Writing Tools And Design Ideas, written with the voltairesque Daniele Giardini. We write about our current experiments with writing tools and dialogue user interface design. Hope you’ll find something useful there!

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