Iterative Games

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

I recently updated our slogan to better match our company vision. "Delivering the next generation of games, today" felt ambiguous at best; corporate BS at worst. This time, we are making it clear and simple: "Increasing Fun In Games".

A company I've admired is 37 signals. One of their mottoes is 'Less is Better'; keep things simple (http://uxmagazine.com/strategy/less-is-better). I think this is an important thing to remember in level design.

A few quick thoughts, torn from the headlines, on the future of gaming.

Using perks is one of the most important and fun ways you can customize your character in UETF. Perks are a familiar game mechanic dating back to the original Fallout and recently used to great effect COD4: MW. The mechanic is also comparable to the character 'Feats' found in tabletop DND. We modeled our feat system in a similar way to give players the option to really personalize and diversify their characters.

(From our UETF blog, dated June 27th, 2007)

On Loose Ends - Sometimes a developer just has to know when to let go. So this is the official announcement: I’m putting UETF Chronicles for UT 2004 into deep cyro freeze...

The last release of public release UETF was Jan 9, 2006. A lot has changed since then - we've learned a lot and have returned to this project as better artists, developers and developers. We've changed as a company, changed the type of games we want to create, and wanted the chance to return to the UETF universe and do it right. So after an extremely long time MIA, Iterative Games is proud to officially announce development of next release of the UETF series: UETF Chronicles: Complete Anthology The Complete Anthology is what we always wanted to UETF to be and we hope you will be as excited as we are about our new release.

As game designers, the mechanics and rules we create direct the way players behave. Sometimes we see unanticipated emergent behavior (Tribes skiing, grenade climbing in Deus Ex) but by in large, we can direct the way people will play. Consider it our responsiblity to create mechanics that support the game-play that we envision. There is a lot of science as well as trial and error involved but it be the core of the games we design. To demonstrate how we are driving behavior through mechanics at Iterative Games, I'm going to cover two mechanics we are adding in our next release: bonus damage for flanking attacks and headshots.

Leave your hubris behind - Pride in your work is not a bad thing, but sometimes it gets in the way of the best solution. For the first releases of UETF, I tried to "hand roll" everything to ensure I knew everything was up to my standards. This was time consuming and ultimately ended up in a less stable product. This time around, I studied and utilized the existing code at my disposal and implemented solutions that took a tenth of the time and had less bugs. Don't assume your way is always best.

Creating the tools for player customization.

Adding personality to the programs pulling the strings.