I am often asked what I mean when I use the term meaningful with regards to games. Most people consider games a distraction or a chance to turn their brains off at the end of the day. The word game has a negative connotation. Adults have hobbies and pastimes and play sports. Kids are supposed [...]
I don’t like the term gamer. It is a limited viewpoint of how a game is actually experienced. When I was young, the game console was usually connected to the second TV in the basement. I played Doom or Warcraft on the PC in the bedroom. Games were played between 10pm and 2am. It was [...]
Jamie’s recent blog post reminded me that I never got around to posting my notes from Josh Resnick’s talk on entrepreneurship. Jamie pointed to a great interview over at GameIndustry.biz. Friday was the last day of GDC. I was planning on going to David Jaffe’s keynote in the morning. However, Jaffe was a no-show. Lucky [...]
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 [...]