I’ve been quite busy lately and haven’t been blogging enough. As reward for your perseverance, here’s a free card game for you to download.

All you need to do is download, print, cut, and gather up 2 six-sided dice.  If you play it, please let me know any feedback you have!

DOWNLOAD THE GAME HERE! (1.2 MB)

Wow, end of quite a busy week.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to sit on the “Low-Fi Game Prototyping” panel at VIGS (Vancouver International Game Summit) this past Thursday.  I enjoyed the experience and the chance to have a dialogue with Design Directors/Senior Designers from Relic, EA, and Threewave.  The talk was well attended although we finished nearly a 1/2 hour early so that worries me that we were actually pretty boring.  Or perhaps we covered all the material very efficiently! (Hopefully the latter, of course).  Game Prototyping is a subject close to my heart, and I see it as an integral, non-optional part of game design and development.  It’s just a matter of figuring out what you’re going to prototying and what tools to use in the effort.

Friday I had to turn right back around and do a 3.5 hour workshop on how Game Writing interfaces with Game Mechanics and Gameplay.  This talk was for the NSI/PlayWRITE “Game Writer’s Bootcamp” program that was hosted this week.  I covered a lot of things in the workshop and I suspect I left the participants in a state of combined bewilderment and enthusiasm.  At least I hope so–the workshop was a little unconventionally structured but I figure games are supposed to be fun, so talking about developing them should be as well!  Giving long lectures or workshops is always hard work and a bit stressful because it’s all for naught unless you succeed in imparting some useful knowledge.  You don’t want to babble for hours and just put people to sleep.  After successful lectures, I always feel like I left a small piece of myself in the room (it’s that tiring for me) and this one felt that way, so hopefully it was enjoyed!

Aside from both of those speaking events in the same week (!), I also had several game pitches, attended a few conference sessions, socialized and met some good industry people at the after-reception, and on top of that managed to keep the DS team organized for an upcoming demo build we’re working on.

Needless to say, I’m a bit tired and looking forward to trying out AGE OF CONAN tomorrow at some point.

Here’s an interesting post about the design aspects that make some modern RTS games like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War less suitable for high level play than Starcraft.  The OpEd theorizes that being less suitable for continued high-level play is one of the reasons why these games, despite their strong critical reception, are nowhere nearly as big a phenomenon as the afore-mentioned Blizzard Machine.

 http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18326

I think the points are excellent and I’ve seen them in other guises (e.g. board games).  Namely, degrees of randomness can work for and against you.  Also, simple presentation = gameplay clarity.  I still think fondly of Civ I largely because the map was SO readable, unit combats had a simple abstract animation, and so on.

But design reasons aside, I think the Starcraft vs EVERYTHING is a bit like the WoW vs EVERYTHING phenomenon.  Both benefited enormously be being “first to market”.  Ok, Starcraft wasn’t the first RTS (I believe Dune was?) and WoW was behind UO, Everquest, etc.

Read more…

Lots of good stuff going on, so thought I’d give an update.  If you would like to see more info about any of these, please <comment> and I’ll prioritize to please!

The Ultra-Secret Nintendo DS Aerial Racing Game

Actually, it’s not that secret, and I’m thinking about getting permission to blog more about it here because really any publicity right now is good publicity.  We are thick in development at the moment, and also in the middle of negotiating with potential publishers.  Exciting times!

I’ve been working on this game under contract to Big Sandwich Games since last May or so, and have really been enjoying it.  The people are great, the project is fun, and the location isn’t bad either (Granville Island in Vancouver BC). 

I’m the lead designer and day-to-day producer on the game.  I don’t typically recommend that those be the same people, but in this case our team started very small and I’ve been involved since the inception, so it just made sense to continue on.  We passed a point where getting a new on-site producer doesn’t make sense. 

Read more…

I was quite late to the bandwagon, but I’m officially on it now. 

Of course, I’m not going to catch this kid any time soon.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band turn out to be no brainers. That is, they’re just about impossible not to like.  I never thought I would ever be persuaded to purchase a plastic guitar, let alone a set of fake drums, mic, and second guitar to go with it.  But here we are, and I own all of them.  And they are worth every cent!

I watched the Guitar Hero thing develop from a bit of a distance.  I thought it was “cute”, but not something I’d be into.  That was until a friend put a guitar in my hands and let me rock out.  And let Jessica rock out.  She was hooked instantly, and me soon after.  Since then, we’ve put our fair share of time into GH3, and that led to Rock Band.  Guitar Hero is fun on its own, for sure, but Rock Band is soooo sublime.  When four people are wailing away on the instruments and they’re into it–I mean really into it–it’s just amazing.  I believe games serve a lot of purposes, and among them is certainly escapist experiences.  Playing rock band is about the closest any of us will come to playing big name tunes in front of a (fake) audience, and that’s what makes it great.  Yeah, the guitars are plastic; yeah it’s “just a game”, but the social and emotional experience is absolutely real, and just a friggin blast!  As a very experienced gamer, it’s also great to have completely new experiences that no game has ever delivered before.  Rock Band does that well.

As games, GH and Rock Band are quite polished designs with constant player feedback and reinforcement, excellent visual designs, abbreviated but effective storytelling, and loads of personalization opportunities.  I’m especially impressed with Rock Band’s rocker creation and clothing system.  It’s really cool how many different looking band members you can get.  The way your band name and the band characters are integrated into all the intro/outro still shots is also pretty slick.  Everything just helps reinforce that you have an actual band.

There is one part of Rock Band which sorta stinks, though, and that’s the user interface.  How many Rock Band sessions have you had where people keep accidentally backing out of the band setup screen, then going back in, then someone else backs out, etc.  Frustrating when trying to bring new players in.  Also, I’m not sure why it’s required that the band leader be present in every session.  It would be so much more player friendly if you could play your band with any combination of instruments you want.  We made the mistake of having the band leader on drums and played a couple hours before realizing we really should have made the guitarist the band leader, since that’s the instrument one of the two of us is most likely to play at any time.  But there are still times I’d like to do drums/vocals, or bass/vocals, or whatever.  Just seems like an unnecessary restriction to me.