Date: 16 April 2009, 10:00am - 11:30am in Tutor Hall 321

Speaker: Stone Librande

Stone Librande has been programming and designing games for over 10 years. In this presentation he shares design examples from Spore and talks about how his approach to game design has changed over time. In the early years of his career, the focus was on creating a monolithic design document that was printed out and stored in a large binder. Now he prefers single page, playful documentation as the best way to communicate design ideas to the team. This approach is fast, highly visual, and often results in interactive documentation that can be played as a simple card or board game. Stone will demonstrate this technique using actual examples from the development of Spore and from the newest Spore expansion pack, Galactic Adventures.

After the talk, the class will split up into small groups and design their own simple games. The groups will test out their designs using the Galactic Adventures editing tool and then present the final results to the class for review.

Bio - Stone Librande, Lead Designer, EA/MAXIS

Currently working as a game designer at EA/Maxis, Stone Librande, M.S. MIT Media Laboratory (1992), B.F.A. California Institute of Arts Film/Video School (1987), has worked in a wide variety of technical and creative fields. He has been employed as an art director, video producer, software engineer, free-lance illustrator and, for one long summer, a tractor driver on a farm in Oregon. On weekends he is either teaching a game design course at Cogswell College in Sunnyvale, CA. or creating his own custom card and board games.