video game design and development

Guest blog post by Marianne Malmstrom on Net Family News website. Great insight on using Minecraft in education.

Looking Glass is the successor to Storytelling Alice. It was designed to teach computer programming skills to middle school students through digital storytelling. Add characters and objects to your story and drag and drop commands to program the story.

This is a set of resources I have created including videos and 'how to' examples of game maker skills and concepts. The examples use game maker 8.1 and will soon be accompanied by examples using Game Maker Studio.

This video shows the basic format used in creating an interactive story / text based adventure using the Inform software. The video is great as it definitely provides the viewer with the belief that creating a text based adventure with this tool is definitely viable!

Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF.

Blog post by Matt Roberts on the basics of the Interactive Fiction / Text Based Adventure genre of games.

Twine allows you to design and write interactive fiction / text based adventures. Twine provides a graphic interface that links the parts of your stories together and provides a map that can change based on the organization / reorganization of the elements of your story. The completed story is outputted as a text based adventure that can be shared and played online.

Get Lamp is probably the definitive (if not only) documentary on the text adventure genre of games. The advent of the text adventure was a defining moment in the game industry as it was essentially the first time that companies were developed specifically to write and produce computer games.

This post discusses three tools used to design and write interactive fiction. The tools range in difficulty.

This site provides an introduction to interactive fiction and some guidance in terms of downloading and playing text based adventure / interactive fiction games.

textadventures.co.uk provides a web based and desktop (Windows only) tool for creating text based adventures (interactive fiction). The stie also serves as an online community to share your creations.

This site walks you through the basics of adventure games including an Introduction to Interactive Fiction and how to download and play Adventure Games.

This is a very helpful video tutorial on how to make a platformer game in Game Maker 7, but it does also apply to Game Maker 8. It goes through the basics by actually showing you how to make the objects on-screen.

this shows you everything from game art to programming, and shows links to other sites with extensive info. It shows more than enough enough info than you need to really know, so it is useful for an online resource.

This site can help you decide how fast or slow you want the image to appear how it's moving. It is a useful resource

This provides sprites and backgrounds. It is a nice website that helps you to use many different kinds of sprites. I hope that nobody has contributed this yet.

The Game Design Tool Kit

This sprite resource provides hundreds of sprite sheets that can be used for gamemaker. It has topics relating to games, and has topics in alphabetical order. This website is really useful for gamemaker games as it can be used for the adventure games

This resource is a whole list of sprites that work well with the Game Maker software. This is valuable because if you need some sprites, look no further, there are hundreds on this site (including Nyan Cat)!