Barriers and Ceilings

I wrote the bulk of this post the day after creating this blog, but keep putting off publishing it because I've been pretty verbose here. I decided that it's not acceptable to delay publishing a post for a whole month in the hope that it'll rewrite itself, so here it is - Please forgive the wordiness.

I've been playing a lot of Tribes: Ascend lately, and before that I played Quake Live a whole bunch. Though I like to think I'm pretty good, there's always someone better. That's OK though - it's a great thrill to test my skills against great opponents, regardless of the outcome.

I'm going to write about rocket jumping later on, stay tuned.

The term 'eSports' is often used to describe the competitive side of videogaming, and high-level competitive play has been seen across many genres and gametypes, from high scores in Donkey Kong, a solo game in which gamers try to beat the reigning champion's high score, to the recent surge in top-level MOBA competitions in which teams compete in real time and in the same gamespace. It's a broad subject and one that I'm not broadly experienced with, so I'm going to talk about some particular design metrics that I feel sufficiently familiar with to discuss in detail, and why they're important for all games, but particularly in competitive ones.

Hello World

I play a lot of games, across many genres and platforms. I was playing games at a very young age, and it's been my main hobby for the majority of my life. I don't do a lot of writing (you can probably already tell), but I think I've got a pretty good understanding of videogames and the communities and media surrounding them. I made this blog so I can have a place to publish my musings on these things, and maybe help some to better understand what has very quickly become a massive culture across the connected world. This post will hopefully introduce you to my background and particular gaming interests.

I'm 25, and I live in Australia. I'm in my third year of a games-programming degree. I intend to make a career out of games development, though this career may ultimately take on many forms. When I'm supposed to be working on assignments or paying attention to lectures, I'm often playing games or thinking about them instead. I enjoy playing solo, with friends, or against rivals. I do pretty well in FPS games and am terrible at RTS games. I have a list of games to play next to my list of games to make. Most of them will never be made, but I look at them and say "maybe one day".

Why is this blog called Rocket Jumping? It's partly that I intend to write a lot of posts about interesting game mechanics, and rocket jumping is a very well-known one. As a game developer I try to examine games from a design perspective and understand how certain mechanics can make a game better or worse. My own personal discovery of rocket jumping marks the day I decided that I wanted to make games.

Screenshot taken using EGL