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. One of the cofounders of Slick is Nick Waanders. Nick is another one of the guys that I worked with back in the [...]
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 [...]
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. Introversion [...]
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 of the [...]
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 [...]
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 to [...]
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 [...]
In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of stories of meetings happening in hot tubs and deals being done at Bucks. I usually get together with a bunch of friends for a hot tub over at Scott‘s place each week. And we’re usually on the patio at Mel’s Saturday and Sunday morning. A couple of [...]
Tactical Strike is Gold. It was officially announced this morning on the Playstation Blog. There is a trailer for the game over here. I believe the North American street date is November 8th. I’m not 100% sure what the street date is over in Europe and Asia, but it should be shipping soon over there [...]
From here. I fired off an email to Steve Jobs about this. I basically told him that if Apple had to have one must game on the platform that year, it would have to be Half-Life 2. …. At some point Apple did meet with Newell, but I guess nothing came of it except that [...]