So, we shipped Bioshock 2. That’s good. Next month, the world will finally tell us whether we did a good job.
Now: resting up, rolling on to a cool new project. Making a DOOM map on the weekends.
Stay tuned. In the meantime, read some words Bruce Sterling spoke almost 20 years ago:
Do you remember this place?
This isn’t a standard “old fogey remembers classic game fondly” post though. Ultima IV’s tremendous influence and importance aside, I think for players looking back on it from today, it now exemplifies a value that is quite rare in most modern games: encouragement of the player to engage by using their imagination.
What does this mean though? What does a game that fosters “imaginative engagement” look, sound and play like in 2009?
As of 2009, the game industry seems to want two fairly contradictory [1] things:
A co-worker recently sent along an email from a friend asking an age old question, “How do I get a job doing level design?” I’ve been picking away at a response to this for a few weeks now, and weirdly enough Steve just put up a similar post addressing the same question on his blog. His has more specific “get your first industry job” advice, mine is maybe more “how to learn to think like a designer”… for whatever that’s worth. Here’s what I wrote.
I was on another one of those “MP3 recordings of radio-format shows” recently:
Lots of boisterous nerdiness and interrupting of each other to talk about progressively more obscure old game music. If I meet any of you in real life, I promise not to interrupt you in the middle of a sentence. If I do, I am the ultimate jerk of the planet.
Maybe another new post coming soon.
Hey neat, a mention on GameSetWatch and IGN. Welcome, new visitors!
Anyways, small is beautiful because lately it’s all I have time for. I’ve set up a project at Google Code to house some of the little prototypes I’ve been messing with during the past month… simple, 2D things where I get to dig around for interesting mechanics. It’s very gratifying to be able to get something new and potentially cool on-screen after only a few hours of work, and I recommend it. I’ll put up builds for download here for anything that pans out.
My current projects use PyGame, which integrates the Python language with SDL for graphics, sound and input – quite capable for this sort of work. There’s also LÖVE which does a similar thing with LUA, and of course the cool kids seem to be using GameMaker these days. Flash is as vibrant and viable as ever, and XNA seems to be getting good if you don’t mind being locked into certain platforms.
Hope everyone’s had a good 2008, and congrats to all the IGF finalists!
The good news is, I managed to submit Purity for the IGF deadline at the beginning of this month. Download the (Windows) build here.
Sadly, the day job is now ramping up such that I can’t really justify spending any more time on Purity until the big project ships, sometime next year. As it was, Purity limped in over the deadline at about an alpha level of completeness and polish. I’m proud that I was able to do that in the time I could spare, but it’s really more of a gesture at what I’d like the game to grow into than anything.
All the same, I’d love to hear what people think of the game in its current state.
I’m guessing that by this point anyone who possesses rudimentary google skills and wants to know my full name, and the game studio I work for, can easily obtain such information. So it’s probably fine for me to mention these two things:
A brief teaser for the game I’m working on has found its way out into the world. Tantalizing. What could it mean? Wait and see!
Recently I was a guest on the weekly GameSpot podcast. I can’t remember saying anything particularly insightful, but if you like hearing me say “you know” a lot, this is right up your alley.
Oh, and thanks to Mr. Nowak for the recent mention!
* “mainstream” avec scare quotes – AAA, big budget, core gamer games – whether that’s even remotely “mainstream” is another discussion.
Some of us in the game industry have a secret. We do our profession’s equivalent of putting on a bat mask, going out at night and jumping around rooftops chasing bad guys. The reasons vary – all I can speak about here is what fuels my particular passion, and how it’s changed my outlook for the better.
Time for a little experiment. Here’s the deal: most of my free time on weekends has been going to Purity, as I’m trying to get something decent to submit for the IGF deadline in November. This is well and good, but the casualty is you folks – my miniscule readership. Rarely do I feel I can justify the time it’d take to write an entry for this blog. So the experiment is this: I’m going to post some summaries for longer-form blog entries I want to write, you people tell me which sounds most interesting, and I’ll do that one next. I make no promises for the quality of the final post, even if you thought it sounded really exciting at the time… just like game development!