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Crash Course in Emergent Game Design

by Jason Della Rocca (March 2006)

Nearly 200 local developers came out to watch a lot of cars crashing. Pseudo Interactive sent along Guillaume Provost (Production Director) and William Ho (Creative Director) to the chapter to discuss their design process and challenges in creating Full Auto for Xbox 360.

Essentially born out of the XNA "crash" demo from GDC, William described how they wrapped the game design of Full Auto around the emergent capabilities of their physics technology. While the initial goal was to make everything "as real as possible", they soon realized that that approach did not necessarily lead to fun gameplay (ie, too chaotic and overwhelming to the player). In the end, the design allowed for near limitless possibilities for crashing cars, taking/making short cuts, etc.

Taking questions from the audience, William and Guillaume went into greater depth behind their design process and marketing challenges. They also fielded tough questions/comments comparing Full Auto to the celebrated Burnout series...

(FYI, Pseudo tech director, David Wu, will be lecturing on threading physics at GDC:06.)

The evening ended with the traditional IGDA members' prize giveaway for game development books. Networking activities took place afterwards. Special thanks to our volunteers Isabelle Marazzani, Pierre Tousignant and Guillaume Voghel for welcoming everybody to the meeting.