At the heart of video gaming’s uniqueness lies its interactivity. Unlike traditional media, games invite players to shape the narrative, leading to a dynamic storytelling experience. This interactivity transforms a straightforward story into a complex web of choices and consequences, embodying the idea that a game is, fundamentally, a sequence of compelling decisions. However, granting … Read more
Have you ever been completely gripped by a video game? Has a game put you in a difficult situation and you still remember how you struggled to find a way out? Or maybe you’ve built up a friendship with a video game character. Games have a unique ability to evoke emotions in players that can … Read more
We recently had the chance to co-organize a Q&A session with several folks from Valve about “Publishing games on Steam”.
This post will dive deep into Dear Esther’s creation, intention, and reception and try to draw conclusions from this unique video game experience.
We recently started our streaming cycle and picked remasters & remakes as our next topic. For this blogpost we summarized our key points – What do we love about remakes? What makes a good remake? And do we have too many remakes and remasters nowadays?
After streaming all of the Adventure Jam 2021 games, we noticed that verbs are an integral part of the design of adventure games, and in game design in general. That’s why we decided to have a little discussion about verbs in games!
This blogpost sums up our talk and gives a few good and not-so-good examples of how games make use of verbs.
As the founder of Off The Beaten Track, Jens combines a lot of positions: From game design and programming to bookkeeping and filing taxes! Find out more about him and why he thought it would be a good idea to found a video game development company.
Adventure Jam 2018 presented me with a new set of challenges I had not anticipated. At first reluctant to join due to time constraints, I decided to team up with old friends and create a small game, optimizing our production by planning ahead as much as possible.
I returned to Adventure Jam in 2017 with a new set of challenges. In 2016 we had joined as a team and always knew what to do and who would do it. We were all working together locally. In 2017 I did not have that luxury. At the time, contact with my old team for AWAKE had broken up and I was a solo developer.
Game jams are a magical thing. You get together with friends both old and new and create a video game in a very short timespan. In a way, jams are microcosms. While the jam is going your priorities are shifted, your whole life seems to circle around this tiny little game you are creating – and when the jam is over, what remains is usually a barely playable prototype, deep rings under your eyes and a huge pile of new experiences, lessons learned and treasured moments.
Adventure Jam is a special game jam in many ways. It runs for two weeks, enabling developers to create games that feel a lot more complete and finished than jam games usually are. It’s also a very open jam because there is no theme – creators are free to work on anything they like, as long as it relates to the genre of adventure games in any way. And adventure games can be pretty much anything. But the most special thing about Adventure Jam is its community. While it is technically a competition, the jam feels more like a celebration of good old adventure games and everybody is united by their deep appreciation of the genre.
© Off The Beaten Track UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
Video game development made in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein.
