Game Design and Development

Almost all high schools require the reading of Jose de la Cruz’s “Korrido and Life Lived by the Three Princes, Children of King Fernando and Queen Valeriana in the Kingdom of Berbanya”, more popularly known as “Ibong Adarna”. The story seems to promote, however, family values that are rife with jealousy and betrayal, as shown in how the protagonists’ older brothers violently turn on him when he just effectively rescued them from certain doom. This paper describes a video game project, Adarna, as it re-imagines Filipino sibling rivalry that evolves from intense competition to brotherly coopetition. The project aims to be a point of discussion in universities and colleges’ game development classes, in particular those that involve the study of the socio-cultural impact of games.

Keywords: Philippine literature, culture, games, family

The creation of video games involves multidisciplinary processes that are not accessible to the general public. Currently, the development environments are very powerful tools, but they also require an advanced technical level to even start using them. This article presents a 2D game development environment to propose an alternative model to reduce the technical complexity existing in these systems, presenting a data model and a game editor that allows fulfilling this goal. In order to test its capabilities, several games have been successfully implemented in the proposed environment. With this achievement, it can be stated that it is possible to create video games simply and affordably for the general public without giving up its potential and remarking that there is still a long way to go to reach democratization in the creation of video games and the need to continue working in this field.

In this paper, the tentative results of an online ethnography on the Global Game Jam 2012 Theme Committee are presented. The role of the committee was to come up with a globally distributed theme and a list of optional design constraints for the participants of Global Game Jam 2012. Within the brainstorming and discussions, several different ideas were proposed. A picture of an Ouroboros and a list of 15 “diversifiers” were eventually selected. The ideation process of the theme was not straightforward: within the discussions, different arguments were presented in support or refutation of the candidate themes. The opinions explicated within the discussion echo different views on game design paradigms.