Author: Dan Milward

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The Lens of Essential Experience

One of the things we constantly think about here at Gamefroot HQ is how to make good games. No not just good games but awesome games. When you’ve got a game creation tool as easy to use as Gamefroot there can be no excuse for making good games… you should be making awesome games!!

To help us make games our own games we have started to embrace “The Art of Game Design” toolkit; a set of rules / game mechanics that are easy enough for anybody to understand and apply to their game. There are 100 lens for us to learn and we’ll be posting a new one every couple of days. When we post a lens please let us know what you think by leaving a comment.

1 – The Lens of Essential Experience

To use this lens, stop thinking about your game, and start thinking about the experience of the user. Ask yourself these questions:

– What experience do I want the player to have?

– What is essential to that experience?

– How can my game capture that experience?

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Gamefroot at the NZGDC

GameFroot is excited to be at the NZGDC this weekend. We’ll be talking about how to make games with Gamefroot that don’t suck. To celebrate game development in NZ we’re hosting a little competition.

We challenge you to make a Gamefroot game that uses this icon. The best game made before next Wednesday 23rd and linked to here as a comment will win a nice bottle of NZ wine.

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Welcome to Gamefroot

Hi I’m Dan from the Gamefroot team.

Making games has been a dream of mine ever since I was a wee little thing playing on my Commodore 64.

Well kinda.

I think back then I just wanted to blow things up and read 2000AD comics, my first actual memory of wanting to make a game was after completing Leisure Suite Larry. I was well upset that Leisure Suit Larry 2 didn’t exist at the time so I wrote my own game – it never went anyway but it was the thought that counts. All you old school Sierra fans know what I’m talking about when I say this, but has there ever been a more engaging and awesome game then Quest for Glory? Nope. There definitely hasn’t.

So here I am years later, about to launch an HTML5 Game Creation tool that would allow me or anybody else in the world to create their own game. If you can use a web browser and if you can use mouse to click and drag – then you can use Gamefroot. The bar has finally been lowered – other people have promised it but none have been as easy as this, with Gamefroot you no longer need to be a programmer to make games!

What is awesome about Gamefroot in my opinion? Gamefroot allows you to make awesome games. It allows you to make big games, small games, adventure games, happy games, sad games, story based games, space games, sci-fi games, and with our Scratch-based user Interface for creating advanced behaviors, you can pretty much make any type of game your imagination can come up with.

Thanks for checking us out!

Best,

Dan Milward