It’s a little funny that Ken and I are design a multi-player game, since neither of us are big gamers in our spare time. However, we’re both experienced at creating simulations, which seems to be giving us a leg up. Ken has made countless simulations using his Xholon framework. I’ve also made numerous multi-agent simulations, and generated a physically realistic 3D simulation of animal aggregation, which led me to grapple with rendering and visualizing realistic three dimensional object interactions supported by an underlying simulated physics.
That said, there’s a lot to learn about game design over and above the sorts of things you typically see in simulations, and during this project we’ve been having a great time discovering the wonderful world of gaming research. We’re also learning that a number of the aspects of the game that we’ve been designing, and related design activities, have quite specific terms within the world of gaming and game research. We hope to highlight and discuss some of our reference papers as they relate to the Islands Game in future blog articles.