Game Design Thoughts: Building emotional engagement

Decided to drop by again, since i’ve been a little out of touch with watchhogging as of late, and voice a few pontifications surrounding an area of game design that i’ve been thinking about for a while now..

Since the I watched my first movie I realised something. As a human being it’s pretty easy to enjoy and be immersed in some form of media when it engages you emotionally. From reading a love story novel, to watching a hollywood flick it’s clear that the “human element” of being able to connect with the individuals who make up the centre of the plot really help to draw the reader/user in and (for the most enthusiastic) provoke thought and sometimes even emotional responses surrounding the experience, decisions and actions the fictional characters face.
So it seemed pretty strange to me that the vast majority of video games over the years seem to fail, all to well in fact, to captivate its audience in the same way with very human, believable experiences that enable that user connection..

XNA Tutorial 1 – Reading Sequential Data From An Xml File

Ok so here’s my first tutorial! I thought I’d go with something light to ease you into it, hope you find it useful…

So this tutorial focuses on retrieving data for your C#/XNA application from an XML data file. The idea is so that data elements can be parsed and read into your application sequentially (as opposed to serialising the entire xml document into an equivalent binary construct) . This can be especially useful for a number of reasons; if you have a large amount of data of the same type that you wish to store in a single file (a list of bitmap font data descriptions for instance) then you can simply read each element of the data one-by-one and do something with it (sotre in an internal/external structure, process it and move onto the next etc..) This is much simpler than having to create a seperate xml file for each description and serialising each one which could become painstakingly tedious..

Welcome to WatchHog!

Welcome to WatchHogStories! This is my new blog dedicated to the art of video games development, a love of the industry and a passion for all things gaming… Here I’ll be chronicling my adventures as a newcomer to working life in the games industry (and what it’s like working for a professional development house), expressing my views on industry related topics of the day but predominantly I’ll be using this blog as a platform dedicated to the joys and terrors of hobbyist games development (since I can’t get enough of coding at home)…

Watch this space for news, views and my own tutorials dedicated to games development, primarily in both C++ and on the XNA games development platform (C#)…

Check back soon for more updates!

- Hog