Parveen Kaler

CEO / Founder | Smartful Studios Inc.

Month: February, 2008

GDC 2008 : N+ Postmortem

If you’re new here, you should subscribe to my RSS feed.
And you should follow me on Twitter here. Thanks for visiting!N+ is a game that game out on XBox Live Arcade this weekend. The orginal game, N, was developed by Metanet Software. Slick Entertainment took this game and ported it to XBLA. [...]

GDC 2008: PixelJunk Series Postmortem

Dylan Cuthbert of Q-Games did a postmortem on the first two games in the PixelJunk series.  He previously worked at Sony on the Ape Escape series out of the Japan studio.
There are a number of common themes that are consistent through the PixelJunk series of games.
1) Simplicity
2) Familiarity
3) Originality
4) High-definition (1080p @ 60Hz)
There are a [...]

GDC 2008: Spreading Your Message As An Indie Developer

Introversion Software considers themselves The Last of the Bedroom Programmers. They are company of 8 full-time employees based out of the UK. They have made the games Uplink, Darwinia, and Defcon.
Victoria Arundel, their Marketing & PR person, did a talk about how Introversion goes about creating buzz about their company and their products. [...]

GDC 2008: The Power of Free to Play

I worked with Adrian Crook back in the day at Relic Entertainment. Adrian was the producer on The Outfit for the XBox 360 team that I was on for a few months.
These days, Adrian is working as a consultant on a number of games. He also runs FreeToPlay.biz. Adrian has become one [...]

GDC 2008: Scattershots of Play – The Potential of Indie Games

This was the first session that I went to.  It was presented by Kelle Santiago of ThatGameCompany, Jon Mak of Queasy Games, and Pekko Koskinen.
ThatGameCompany developed a game called Flow for the Playstation Network.  Jon Mak developed Everyday Shooter also for PSN.
Both of these games are amazing.
Kellee started off the presentation by talking about how [...]

Game Developer's Conference 2008

I am heading to San Francisco for GDC 2008.
I haven’t been to a GDC since 2004, I believe. It was in San Jose that year. I love San Francisco, so I decided to show up one day early and leave one day late. I am in the city until next Saturday.
I plan [...]

Best Practices for Managing Drag in Game Development

Jamie Fristrom recently wrote about the concepts of velocity and drag on his blog. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 2.5, Part 3)
Velocity, in terms of software development, is the rate that a team can pump out features. Take all of the estimates for all of the features that were implemented in an iteration and [...]