Chris Crawford on Game Design

Faces

While I was at Atari Research, I was fortunate to meet Susan Brennan, who had done impressive early work in the algorithmic representation of the human face. Susan's ideas greatly affected my thinking about the importance of the human face in all communications; I resolved to make best possible use of the human face in my future work. Unfortunately, the best I could do with the hardware and storage available was to depict static faces, simply blitting artwork onto the screen. It was nice, but not good enough. But with Guns & Butter, I saw an opportunity to apply some of Susan's ideas. For the diplomatic interactions, I realized that it would be useful to communicate the attitudes of the various characters toward each other. A perfect application ...