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June 16, 2010
As a little break from Caper Corp., I finished a making a new video game this weekend. This one is called In the Wind. Much like Balance and Doubt, In the Wind's entire visual style is driven by particle effects. Well 2D text too, but that's only because making particles to represent text looked gh…
March 13, 2010
Today was my last day at GDC and, at that, it was quite a short one. While I was waiting outside of my first session, a woman came up to me and announced she was a speaker and asked if she could borrow my Mac cord. I said sure. She said I saved the conference. I said "I do what I can."
My first sess…
My first sess…
March 13, 2010
Richard Rouse III, a narrative director at Ubisoft Montreal, begins his talk with a slide: "Five Ways a Video Game Can Make You Cry" and the image of a woman wiping away a tear from her right cheek. He opens it with the EA ad in 1983 "Can a computer game make you cry?" and pointing out that a lot o…
March 13, 2010
I'm kind of a big fan of this whole game development and game developers conference thing. This is especially true since the main conference started on Thursday. The Indie/Serious Game Summits are both fantastic, but the lectures and sessions in the main conference are just so good. And it's hard t…
March 12, 2010
Yesterday I learned the meaning of the oft-heard phrase throughout the early part of the week: "GDC hasn't even really started yet." It appears that the Summits/Tutorials make up only a fraction of the total GDC audience once the main conference has started and the expo floor is opened up. All of t…
March 11, 2010
Peter Molyneux's "The Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design" was first and foremost a talk about Lionhead Studio's current project: Fable 3. Behind all the talk about the new game, though, are interesting design discussions. The game aside, the theme of Molyneux and lead designer Josh Atkin's pres…
March 11, 2010
"So apparently you really wanna hear about spaceships, I don't know why" says the representative of The Mittani, mittens [CHEATER], finally, Alexander Gianturco whatever you want to call him. Gianturco, as he says, is a lawyer, not a developer.
"What is a metagame?" Gianturco asks. "The purpose of t…
"What is a metagame?" Gianturco asks. "The purpose of t…
March 11, 2010
Despite being my first GDC, I actually feel like I'm kind of getting the hang of things. I started another morning in the lobby of the nearby Marriott by writing up the day prior (much like I'm doing right now). Unlike the last few days, though, I have 9:00am sessions to make rather than 10:00am on…
March 10, 2010
Adam Saltsman opens up the talk with a slide reading "Indies Rule, AAA drools!" He voices this slide's meaning by saying: "[this is] not a rant about how much Uncharted 2 sucks. Because that's negative discourse. And" as Saltsman changes to another slide "It's not AAA's faults." "If you have a larg…
March 10, 2010
NinjaBee's Brent Fox starts off his lecture with his "top ten development lessons."
Lesson 10: "DLC doesn't make any money." Outpost Kaloki, a previous NinjaBee Xbox Live Arcade game, had two pieces of paid DLC and both had an 18% attach rate. DLC release has a small impact on full game sales. These…
Lesson 10: "DLC doesn't make any money." Outpost Kaloki, a previous NinjaBee Xbox Live Arcade game, had two pieces of paid DLC and both had an 18% attach rate. DLC release has a small impact on full game sales. These…
March 10, 2010
Being from the Central Time Zone, I'm really digging the fact that I actually am waking up early by local standards throughout the week. My morning office consists of a couch and table in the back of a hotel that I'm not staying at:
My plan for the day was to attend the Game Design Workshop since, w…
My plan for the day was to attend the Game Design Workshop since, w…
March 09, 2010
"Hi, I'm Randy."
Randy Smith from Tiger style games starts off his GDC keynote with an aptly-titled series of slides.
"WARNING: GOING TO SUCK."
"NOT INDIE." An EA logo is displayed.
"ION STORM." Flashes to a slide with the infamous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" ad.
"NOT INDIE." An Apple lo…
Randy Smith from Tiger style games starts off his GDC keynote with an aptly-titled series of slides.
"WARNING: GOING TO SUCK."
"NOT INDIE." An EA logo is displayed.
"ION STORM." Flashes to a slide with the infamous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" ad.
"NOT INDIE." An Apple lo…
March 09, 2010
Hyper-prolific independent game developer Cactus, less commonly known by his birth name of Jonatan Soderstrom begins his presentation with: "why you would want to be mean to your players when you make a game."
Cactus then adds an additional warning to anyone prone to seizures may want to be careful …
Cactus then adds an additional warning to anyone prone to seizures may want to be careful …
March 09, 2010
Like every good day, Day 2 began with the sound of the guy in the bathroom of the room adjacent to mine gargling with mouthwash.
San Francisco is one of the most strangely organized cities I've ever seen. It's like the settlers of 1776 were looking around the Western reaches of this new territory, s…
San Francisco is one of the most strangely organized cities I've ever seen. It's like the settlers of 1776 were looking around the Western reaches of this new territory, s…
March 08, 2010
I'm not much of a traveler. I don't dislike it, I just don't do it much. Going to the Game Developers Conference this year is something I've wanted to do for ages. Back when I started getting involved in game development when I was a tiny little fourteen-year-old kid reading the forums at GameDev.n…
August 10, 2009
Magnetic Butterfly is now finished.
After a development period of about a month and a half spread over the last six-seven months, I'm finally cool with "launching" it. I started working on the game on January 25th/26th while sitting on a couch at my parent's place in Northern Michigan while visiting…
After a development period of about a month and a half spread over the last six-seven months, I'm finally cool with "launching" it. I started working on the game on January 25th/26th while sitting on a couch at my parent's place in Northern Michigan while visiting…
July 08, 2009
Bungie's original Halo, released for the Xbox in 2001, was a landmark console game. Aside from giving Microsoft's freshman entry into the console arena a system seller and a uniquely Xbox cultural character, Halo was the best first-person shooter to be released on a console since the days of Golden…
June 24, 2009
A number of AAA open-world games were released in the last month and, coincidentally, two of these games are based around the concept of the player's character possessing superhero-like powers amidst a major metropolis. It's the video game industry's own Armageddon/Deep Impact, A Bug's Life/Antz, T…
June 04, 2009
When I was finishing up what ended up being my second-to-last semester at the University of Michigan, I knew I was going to be a High School English teacher. That was my goal. The forthcoming summer was the first summer since my freshman year that I didn't have to take two terms of summer classes. …
May 21, 2009
After I finished up with the second gameplay section of my Call of Duty 4 level, I decided that Magnetic Butterfly would probably only take a few more weeks of work to get to a decent place. I don't intend to finish it during this development sprint, but my goal is to work on most of its gameplay m…
May 05, 2009
Over the course of the last month I've been juggling a few projects, one of which is Magnetic Butterfly which I have already discussed a bit (and isn't my primary project for the time being). I have also been working as a designer and consultant on an as-of-yet unannounced iPhone game that, hopeful…
April 13, 2009
Resistance 2 is a first-person shooter which doesn't seem to understand what era it was released in. There are moments in the game where a player, in the role of Nathan Hale, is walking through a forest, the screen will shake and some loud footsteps will occur for about a second, and then an enemy …
March 25, 2009
The average video game, as it is thought of by both mainstream culture and even most gamers, is a heavily-authored gameplay experience with a discrete beginning, end, and climaxes strewn haphazardly about. At this point in the life of the video game, gamers are essentially conditioned to think of g…
March 19, 2009
In Resident Evil 4 there is this great feeling that you're going to have to face an enormous giant (El Gigante) as you explore one particular area of the game. Eventually, El Gigante makes his appearance in the middle of a rainy night filled with thunderstorms. As Leon Kennedy runs from tiny shack …
March 17, 2009
So, I'm on Twitter.
I'll assume for the moment that you've never heard of Twitter. First, that would mean that my mother has beaten you to knowledge of something related to technology. More to the point, though, Twitter is a service that connects people and limits communication between them to 140 c…
I'll assume for the moment that you've never heard of Twitter. First, that would mean that my mother has beaten you to knowledge of something related to technology. More to the point, though, Twitter is a service that connects people and limits communication between them to 140 c…
February 26, 2009
There are a number of things that suck about the first public prototype for Magnetic Butterfly. Let's talk about those things.
- It's very much a prototype; it's not at all a "game" yet.
- The butterfly is composed of a capsule primitive and two awful wings. These wings do not flap (or flutter).
- IfWhen yo…
February 18, 2009
What is most astonishing about F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is not its poster-child of horror: that Gothic-looking nine-year-old child look is about as familiar to anyone who has seen any of Hollywood's reinterpretations of certain Japanese Horror flicks. Nor is it astonishing that F.E.A.R. 2 fails, …
February 16, 2009
Flower is a rare video game. For one thing, it has flowers. For another, no one dies. It's a game where the player controls the wind that guides a lonesome flower petal (and its eventual flock of follower petals) through a game world in need of nothing more than some attention, love, and nourishmen…
February 12, 2009
Over the last few years, Relic has been crafting and evolving their very unique take on the real-time strategy genre with every new title they have released. Their shift in focus from a game like Homeworld to their, now, action/RTS genre blend was most apparent in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (200…
February 03, 2009
Mirror's Edge is a game that was heralded by a marketing campaign that wanted gamers to think of Mirror's Edge as a game that was innovative and, more than that, different. It had a heroine that was markedly different from another well-known leading lady. The scenery is comprised of a bright, prono…
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