Didn't have time to do this midweek, so here's a full week of just the top features and news on big sister site Gamasutra and elsewhere on our Think Services sites/blogs - and there's some pretty neat stuff in here.

Recommended, at least as far as I'm concerned, is our extended interview with Braid's Jon Blow, plus Noah Falstein's article on designers' early inspirations. I also really appreciated Ian Bogost's column on the rise of personal gaming - here's the full rundown:

Jonathan Blow: The Path to Braid
"With art game Braid now a significant hit on Xbox Live Arcade, Gamasutra talks to creator Jonathan Blow on its long path to completion, challenging conventional pacing, and hopes for XBLA's future."

Persuasive Games: Video Game Snapshots
"The invention of Kodak's Brownie made photography accessible to everyone, and Ian Bogost asks whether the era of user-generated content opens doors for games as 'snapshots.'"

Design Language: Designer Derivations
"In this fascinating feature, Falstein talks to many developers about their childhood beginnings in design and play to discover commonalities in their career development."

GCG Interview: Tara Teich, LucasArts Programmer
"Tara Teich, a lead AI and gameplay engineer at LucasArts, shares her experience of what it’s like to work as a programmer in the game industry in a new interview on GameCareerGuide.com. She discusses how she got her first job in the industry and where she thinks game programmers today should be focusing their efforts."

Sponsored Feature: Multi-Threading Goo!: A Programmer’s Diary by Tommy Refenes
"In this Intel-sponsored feature, part of the Gamasutra Visual Computing microsite, Goo! developer Tommy Refenes of PillowFort matches wits with multi-threading in four gripping acts -- and emerges victorious."

Valve's Faliszek: Not All Game Stories Need 'Evil Masterminds'
"Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek of Valve has been talking to Gamasutra on why video game stories don't need "evil masterminds," a principle he has kept in mind when writing in-game dialogue hinging around characters experiencing a "zombie apocalypse.""

An Examination of Outsourcing Part 2: The Contractor Angle
"Recently, Gamasutra spoke with developers and publishers to find out the requirements and advantages for outsourcing -- but this time we take another look at the story, from the perspectives of the outsourcing companies themselves."

GCG Posts Game Marketing Challenge, Results of ‘Olympic’ Challenge
"GameCareerGuide.com, which runs a weekly game design challenge for students and newcomers to the game industry, has this week posted a game marketing challenge. The site also has named two winners in a previous design challenge on the theme of the Olympic Games."

[Want to get RSSed-up with all Think Services' game sites? Quick list goes like this: GameSetWatch's RSS (editor.blog), IndieGames' RSS (indie.games), Fingergaming's RSS (iPhone.games), GamerBytes' RSS (console.downloads), Gamasutra's RSS (main.site), WorldsInMotion's RSS (online.worlds), and GameCareerGuide's RSS (edu.news).]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bad news, game mag fans! If CNN and Fox News are to be believed, by the time you read this, I am going to be dead, my bloated, bleached body floating listlessly in brackish mire, surrounded by waterlogged issues of Game Players' Strategy Guide to Nintendo Games. I'm writing this on Thursday, and I've already put all my affairs in order -- my ferrets are going to the rescue, my dog to science, and my game mag collection's headed to the recycling center. Gotta save the environment, you know?

So while you're mourning my untimely death, why don't you click on and read all about the game mags released to US newsstands in the past two weeks? There's a bloody ton this time around from all corners of the world, and if you need something to read at the shelter in Austin, you're totally spoiled for choice. See you in the next life, everyone!

(Note: None of this is actually going to happen to me, since I'm not that close to the coast -- where I'm at, the worst I have to worry about is power failures -- but I was reminded of that CBS classic Category 7: The End of the World the other day and thought I'd channel it a little bit.)

Edge October 2008

Cover: Heavy Rain

This issue is 196 pages long! 196 pages! Enormous! It's like we're back in 1998 or something! Much of this sudden bloat is the result of the mag's annual "Get Into Games" section, the UK equivalent of Game Developer's Game Career Guide with much of the same sort of job profiles, school listings, and so forth that you'll find in GD's special. There's also a long piece on the game development scene in Yorkshire, a lovely burg to the north which -- no offense meant to Yorkshire residents -- sounds kind of boring. (Sumo and Team 17 are based there.)

The cover feature is pretty basic, largely a description of a demo put on by the director of a completely contrived scene that won't even appear in the final game, and the Nintendo piece (given a coverline up front), while making some use of an anonymous source allegedly close to Nintendo, is simply a more intelligent version of something you could read on NeoGAF any given evening. The neater bits are an article about the design (or, sometimes, lack thereof) in game manuals, looks back at Pikmin and NARC, and interviews with Will Wright, Peter Moore, and a few other smart-sounding lads.

That's all. Mind still slightly blown by the size of the book, however.

Retro Gamer Issue 54

Cover: OutRun

I'm too cheap to subscribe to Retro Gamer ($11.99 an issue is a bit easier to swallow than 80 pounds for a 12-month sub), so I get the issues a month late. For this Britmag, though, it hardly matters given the subject matter. The cover piece is a must-read about one of my favorite driving games of all time in terms of atmosphere, filled with neat tidbits of information -- it, along with similar making-of pieces devoted to Q*Bert and Sensible Software's Cannon Fodder, are completely radical.

Electronic Gaming Monthly October 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Mirror's Edge

The Milkman-ization of EGM is well underway, judging by this eye-catching cover -- busy, but artistic and nice-looking on the table. The feature inside is all business, with a clear design that's obviously inspired by the game and enough cool hyperbole to rival even Shane's treatment of LittleBigPlanet's edit functions (done up in a neat spread timeline sorta thing) just a bit previous. The other main highlight: Jeremy's turn at interviewing Yuji Horii, who's suddenly showing up a lot in American mags. It's got an eye for history and is generally extremely well executed.

Hsu and Chan's replacement on the back page is "Game Over," a name that should ring a bell with moldy EGM fans. It looks like the page doesn't have any regular theme, though -- this month, it's a piece on the top ten badass undead characters from video games. I'm hoping it gets more of a stronger voice in future issues -- if it's meant to be a humor section, well, Seanbaby still has a spread just a few pages previous, so...

Total PC Gaming Issue 10

Cover: Call of Duty: World at War

I'm not sure if I'll be getting this mag every month on the stands. I might alternate between this and PC Zone, assuming my regular outlet for PC Zone doesn't give up the mag (it's been a bit spotty lately). I want something to compare with the US edition of PC Gamer, after all.

The CoD-piece (har) is pretty straightforward, as is much of the rest of the mag. In fact, unlike other books in this update, it's tough to point to any single piece or article and say "This is it; this is why I bought this mag" (though the multi-spread Bullfrog retrospective is quite nice). I think I like TPCG for its design more than anything else -- massively large screenshots, every preview or review designed as a complete textual/visual package (you can tell that the writer works closely with the art guy to make sure every page looks as pretty as possible), and a package that's among the most complete in all of print-mag-dom. That, and the large page size. I can't deny that it makes me feel like I'm getting more, although there's really not much here that ain't in PC Gamer (albeit in small form with fewer words).

Play September 2008

Cover: Tomb Raider: Underworld

Haven't had enough Lara after buying Girls of Gaming Vol. 5.5? (You did buy Girls of Gaming Vol. 5.5, right? Don't think you're too good for it, you perv!) Well, good for you, 'cos you've got ten more pages of her in this issue, though it's mostly comprised of environment shots and an extremely lengthy interview with directors Toby Gard and Eric Lindstrom. A classic Play feature, in other words, and it works -- it always works, really, if the game they're covering is worthy of the space they give it.

GamePro October 2008

Cover: Call of Duty: World at War

It's never much appreciated by readers, I don't think, but GamePro experiments at least a little bit with each issue. You can see it in their opening piece on Mirror's Edge, which is almost entirely a single screenshot blown up over a spread with maybe 120 words of text on top of it. I like the idea, as I did with the CoD feature which is classic GamePro -- lots of box-outs and lists and things. I just wish it were longer.

This issue mentions an upcoming book called The 25 Most Influential Games of All Time, apparently a hardcover coffee-table kind of thing similar to a hefty special Edge put out a year or two ago. Apparently you'll be able to order it off GamePro.com this fall, but I couldn't find any information on the website about it yet. Definitely looking forward to it, though, judging by the sample pages printed in this issue.

The Amazing Cavalcade of Fall Specials

   

Even with the twin spectres of creeping inflation and windy death from the Gulf, Future still can't stop bankrupting me with their specials. This latest batch is pretty high quality, though. Ultimate Guide to Xbox 360 Achievements is mostly original content (most prominent: a roundtable interview with assorted devs about how much they enjoy, or don't enjoy, coming up with achievements).

It reprints the failed "10K in 1 Day" piece from last month's OXM, but supplements it with an original article by Dan Amrich that extends the deadline to 30 hours and shows you how to succeed at reaching five figures -- and he didn't even use Avatar: The Last Airbender, either! Remarkably fun stuff to read, and one of the most buyable Future game specials in a while.

PlayStation Network/D, meanwhile, is a broader overview of PSN today and tomorrow. The reprint quotient is a little higher than OXM's special this season, but the original stuff -- including a critique of some of the most infamous SingStar webcam users on the net -- is super-cute.

   

The Ultimate Guide to Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is not actually a "guide" (ie. strategy) at all -- it's really an artbook and making-of special, and it's pretty nice for what it is. I don't think much of the potential audience will realize this, though, 'cos the cover suggests that it's something akin to an issue of Beckett Massive Online Gamer. Something like this would really be better served by the boutique coffee-table treatment, I think.

Also, CHEATS! Volume 16 came out. I don't know why I buy these. I think I just like the visual stimulus I get from looking up at the bookshelf and seeing CHEATS! CHEATS! CHEATS! CHEATS! CHEATS! all in a row. Does anyone have the first eight or nine volumes of this, by the way, so I can "boast" a complete set?

   

CVG Presents Issue Three departs from the making-of keepsakes that the first two were and provides us with a much more traditional fall-preview special. I will say, though, that it's a fall-preview special with impeccable visual design -- whoever the art guy is definitely earned his salary. Every single page makes perfect use of the art assets at hand, and it's really a beauty to behold. "GamePro on steroids" is what I want to call it. I fear it'll get overlooked in the marketplace, but it shouldn't.

Finally, Game Developer September 2008 isn't a special, but I put it here anyway because it's special to me. (Awwww.) Partly that's thanks to Brandon Sheffield's editorial, where he breaks out the old debate about game "journalism," how it's pretty useless, and what can be done to improve it. Partly it's the N+ postmortem, an accessible and engaging look at one of my favorite games of the past few months.

Mainly, though, it's the mind-blowing piece by Masaya Matsuura outlining his take on music games -- it starts out normal enough, but soon delves into crazy metaphysical reflections on aural stimulation that goes over my head just as quickly as the earlier article on Nintendo DS ragdoll physics implementations. Whew.

[Kevin Gifford bred ferrets and ran Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he did writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies. GameSetWatch will miss him terribly.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days, as well as any notable features on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this latest version include a unique western shooter, a Flash port of an earlier cactus release, a game with a grappling hook as the main prop, and a Game Boy-style remake of Queasy Games' IGF award-winning Everyday Shooter.

Game Pick: 'Gravity Hook' (Adam Atomic and Danny Baranowsky, browser)
"A remake of a prototype game by Niklas Jansson called Gravity Key, where players strive to reach the top of a secret base using only a grappling hook to tether themselves to explosive nodes and swing upwards."

Game Pick: 'xWUNG' (VilleK, browser)
"A port of cactus' earlier release, originally created using the Game Maker engine. You play by moving the mouse to swing a ball that's attached to a wire - both of them destroying enemies on contact."

Game Pick: 'Nobody Shooter' (0rel, freeware)
"A remake of Jonathan Mak's award-winning Everyday Shooter with a glorious Game Boy-style palette. Collect dots from the enemies you've defeated to acquire enough points for an entry in the high score table."

Game Pick: 'Maverick' (John Cooney, browser)
"A western-themed action game which involves using the momentum from firing your guns to move around the screen. To compound to the difficulties you face when dodging spikes and cactuses, gravity in certain areas will be switched around as an attempt to disorient players even more."

Posted by timw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Our new series of ‘Road to the IGF’ interviews profiles the nine recently announced winners of the IGF Showcase at Austin GDC - with the local Southern U.S. indie developers to be showcased at the Texas game development show next week.]

Continuing Think Services' ‘Road to the Austin IGF’ feature, we talk to CosMind's Justin Leingang about PC action adventure title Glum Buster.

The game is yet to see a public release, and is described simply by Leingang as “a collection of my daydreams, for your daydreams”. Its IGF entrant page description is actually even more cryptic: “Cheer up, dear friend, or they may come,” it reads, “And take you where the glum is from.”

What is your background with video games?

Justin Leingang: I started designing games at the tail end of high school, but I really didn’t start video game design until a few years after that. After a couple years of college, I landed an internship at a studio where the Lead Designer split shortly after. It was a tiny studio, and as a result I had to fill that person’s role while they sought another hire for the job. However, they ended up deciding to hire me into the position.

A Lead Designer position is obviously not something that can be coupled with a college class schedule, so I had to make a choice. I chose the former and have been working professionally as a developer since then.

In early 2005, I discovered a tool set and engine that allowed me to quickly develop software on my own, without all of the extra baggage and re-invention of the wheel that’s often associated with game dev. That’s when I started creating Glum Buster as a hobby project.

When was CosMind formed?

JL: Well, I am CosMind – so I guess you can say CosMind was formed over the time period between November 27th, 1979 and today.

What inspired Glum Buster, and why did you decide to develop it?

JL: Glum Buster was primarily inspired by the initial play mechanics of the prototype that I built. From there, bizarre as it may sound, it was continually inspired by itself. I was constantly fueled by the development of each component - be it play mechanics and dynamics, graphics, sound effects, functionality, etc.

As a result, inspiration begat inspiration. It was a pretty gratifying reciprocal process, really.

Outside of that, the largest inspirations were my constant, thick-as-brick daydreams - I'm pretty much stuck in perpetual daydream - and good ol’ Mama Nature. The decision to make the game stemmed mainly from my desire to learn and work with a new tool set in my free time at home.

What were your expectations from your game, and do you feel the end product lives up to those expectations?

JL: I didn’t, and still don’t, expect much beyond an end result that is engaging and memorable for others. Hopefully, players will be able to sit down and learn a new set of play mechanics that they’ve never interacted with before. I hope that they’re deeply engaged in the learning process from start to finish and even beyond. I’m pretty confident that the game will achieve this. Shoot, I’ve been creating this puppy for years and I still enjoy playing it to this day.

What do you think the most interesting thing about your game is?

JL: The game play mechanics and dynamics, for surely. There are a good number of layers and subtleties that I believe players will find enjoyable to learn and continually improve their aptitude with. I’m even still discovering ways to better myself as a player.

How long did development take, and what was the process like?

JL: I started the very first prototype at the beginning of February, 2005. I’m pretty close to wrapping everything up, so the total dev time will land around 3.5 years. The process has been nothing but incredible. It’s been a continuous learning process for me – and I live for and feed off learning anything and everything that I can.

The project is something that I’ve had to dedicate my spare cycles to, so it took a bit longer than it would have if I were creating it full time. Basically, I was able to work on it an average of an hour and a half each weekday and about five hours each weekend day over those years.

What’s the scene in Austin like?

JL: I’m not too involved with the scene, nor do I know much about it - so I can’t really comment.

What do you think of the state of independent development, and how do you think independent games fit into the industry?

JL: I’m not too up to speed on the state of independent dev, but from the little bits and glimpses I get here and there it seems to be doing well. From my perspective, it doesn’t really “fit in” to the game dev industry, but rather it is part of it. I don’t really draw a line between the two. Everyone involved is working hard to create video games, and I don’t see either as being any better/worse than the other.

Where do you see your game going from here?

JL: To the Internet! With a download link! For you to play!

What kind of feedback have you received so far?

JL: Those who’ve played it seem to be pretty pleased.

Have you checked out any of the other Austin IGF games?

JL: Unfortunately not. I intend to make an effort to explore those games while I’m at the conference. The only free time that I get is dedicated to working on Glum Buster. Playing any other games has been a very, very, very rare activity for me over the past few years. I shall be binging hard once I wrap up my own dev, for surely. If you - or anyone else reading this - has any recommendations, please send them my way – commercial games, independently developed games, whatever. I’ll play anything that is engaging and fresh. Any platform. Even on a toaster.

Which recent indie games do you admire, and which recent mainstream titles do you admire, and why?

JL: I really haven’t seen or played much beyond prototypes and previews of games created by the crazy cats in the tiny forum community I’m a part of. But, I have a good feeling that I will admire some of those once they’re finished games. I’m not sure which games are technically ”mainstream” - but, since I really haven’t played any video games at all recently, I guess it doesn’t matter which is which.

Do you have any messages for your fellow contestants or fans of the IGF?

JL: Well, first let me apologize because I didn’t even know this was a competition until some of my buddies linked me to news that mentioned Glum Buster as a [showcase] winner. I thought I was just setting myself up to share the game in a booth at the conference. Ha! That’s what I get for not doing my research before jumping in, eh?

But, as for a message, all that I’d like to say - with a running jumping high five and smile - is, 'Be happy!'

Posted by alistairw at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Bell, Game, and Candle' is, in normality, a regular GameSetWatch column by game commentator Alex Litel. However, for this edition, he has invited prominent hockey mom and Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin to share her thoughts on Will Wright's new game Spore.]

Firstly, I would like to thank the video game web site Game Set Watch for giving me the opportunity to review the new video game Spore. When not encumbered by politics, I like to enjoy leisure time by doing things like hunting, snowmobiling, fishing, praying that Bristol Bear doesn’t do anything else moronic (note to me: remove this from final draft), drinking, and other Alaskan activities.

Much like I have challenged and changed political machinery—namely, the state GOP, which is more corrupt than my old hard drive (that is a geek joke)—up in Alaska, Spore challenges and changes our suppositions of what exactly games are. Your machine does not just immerse you in the traditional game experiences of hunting or racing or bowling or fishing, but fantastical experiences of imagination grounded firmly in the reality of science.

Similar to a book—no, those accusations of censorship levied at me by the suave, salacious polar bears entrenched in the Arctic political muck are not true because I am a believer in freedom—the gaming of Spore is divided into phases (Spore lingo for “chapters”) of cell, creature, tribal, civilization, and space. Those artsy-fartsy amongst us may say that this is a thinly veiled American history lesson, but this is untrue because my Toddie, an amateur space historian, says no American has set foot on another planet—something that you bet will change in a McCain administration.

I showed Bristol Bear the cell phase because it an accurate depiction of what the angel inside her belly is presently doing—eating other creatures and dodging a plethora of dangerous objects. Unfortunately, Levi Jeans watched the cell phase and said, “this ess-aych-eye-tee is boring; this is no COD4 where I can grenade the bastards.”

In proper hockey mom style, I slapped that my future son-in-law’s brain ninety degrees counter-clockwise: primarily for his reductionist worldview and secondarily for his potty mouth. No white trash is going to ruin the establishment of the Palin brand of politicking all over our grandiose nation.

Spore’s creature phase is similar to the tantric survivalism that Alaska’s majestic, various wildlife—against whom I have never used anything similar to or exactly like aerial hunting processes to harm because I am a humane human—braving the tough conditions and fierce opponents that want your special fellow for dinner.

Next is the tribal phase of Spore, which hearkens back to the fond memories of my time in Wasilla, where I served as city council member and mayor to the chagrin of the wayward establishment. In these positions, I looked not after my own self-interest but those of the town; in this phase of Spore, you look after the interests of your tribe rather than yourself—a tribute to the bond exclusively found in small tight-knit communities.

Then we arrive at the Spore civilization phase, in which you advance to sociopolitical development of your planet by building up various cities and colonies with the ultimate result of planet-wide encroachment (gosh gee golly, why must everyone follow the American example of coloni…oh, nevermind, I should remove this parenthetical bit).

This phase is an excellent insight into the managerial zen I have brought to the position of governor of Alaska, maintaining a wonderful state without the reliance on bloated federal bureaucracy. I have laid my foot down against flushing taxpayer’s money down the toilet with waste like the Bridge to Nowhere and united the political corpus of Alaska for wellbeing of our future (the children, of course).

In fact, I have even taken on bureaucracy like when I sued the Bush administration to remove the polar bear off the Endangered Species List so that my state could exercise its territorial sovereignty by drilling, drilling, and drilling more than Toddie does in his Home Improvement: The Musical.

Lastly, here we are out in Spore’s final frontier (Star Trek, not Alaska, reference) of space where you get to beautify the universe in what is, in general, a cosmic expansion of what was found in the previous phase of civilization. Spore’s space is a strong reflection of the global beautification through diplomacy, morality, and citizenry that I will embark on if you allow me the honor to honorably serve your great selves as Vice President of the United States of America.

Spore’s Achilles heel is the community feature, which is loaded with abdominal content I am unsure of how to describe. It has no semblance to the ethical moral values of a small town such as Wasilla. The Spore community organizers have no actual responsibility—preventing me from being able to recommend this product to the wholesome familial legions that are known as Americans.

Again, thanks to the video game web site Game Set Watch. And go vote for McCain/Palin ’08, oh yeah!

[This column may have not actually been written by Sarah Palin, but by Alex Litel; he can be reached at alexlitel@gmail.com and occasionally found at alexlitel.blogspot.com.]

Posted by Alex Litel at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A little more GameSetLinks, perhaps - this time seeing Jellyvision dropping more hints on the delicious return of You Don't Know Jack (Xbox Live, maybe? Or multiplatform?), alongside a glowing recommendation of the Track & Field DS remake, at least for retro idiots such as myself.

Also in here - Margaret Robertson on Spore for Seed Magazine, the GAMBIT/MIT Game Lab getting pretty surreal, the insane popularity of the Club Penguin Times, new analysis of The Last Guy, and more besides.

Straight from Switzerland:

Big News in Jellyland | You Don't Know Jack - BETA
'Hopefully, in the upcoming weeks, you'll hear some real big news about a real big deal we've made with some real bigshots who can help get YOU DON'T KNOW JACK back to where it belongs.' Interesting!

EIGHT TIMES UP: I'm off to EA!
Future's Dan Morris is another recent senior journo industry person => EA shift that I didn't spot until now.

arthouse | exhibitions - RESET/PLAY
Ooo, a good game=>art exhibition that's open during Austin GDC, co-compiled by Treewave's Paul Slocum - tres bon.

Recommendation: New International Track & Field for DS
My Track & Field fetish is well-known anyhow, but Sumo Digital has done a superlative update for DS, once again with awesome Konami fanservice included (Sumo is great at this type of thing - see: Sega Superstars Tennis), plus online highscores that are well-integrated.

Seed: The Creation Simulation
Oh good Lord, more Spore features.

Fans flock to Disney's Club Penguin Times - Los Angeles Times
'Though no one would suggest that the Club Penguin Times provides Pulitzer Prize-worthy coverage, it nonetheless attracts 30,000 daily submissions from children.' Via LightSpeed.

Grand Text Auto » Ars Electronica 2008 Coverage
The festival can be a tad art.wank, but also has some pretty interesting digital interactive stuff in it - worth perusing the coverage.

EA Studio Showcase: Nerf N-Strike | GameCyte
That EA game for Wii with a bundled Nerf Gun/ Wii controller sleeve. Weeeird.

GAME DESIGN ADVANCE » Bob’s The Last Guy Rant; Or: They’re Coming to Get You, FEMA
Oddly enough, there hasn't been a lot made of The Last Guy yet, even tho it's definitely the strangest PSN game so far.

GAMBIT: Updates: Akrasia - a Game Based on an Abstract Concept (or, How We Learned about Drug Abuse)
Serious art game weirdness: 'The team decided to make a game about INNER DEMONS and coming to terms of who you are. It would take place in the mind and the mind would be symbolized by a maze – a common metaphor but through its spatiality particularly well-suited for a game.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Somewhat lost in big sister site Gamasutra's news the other day was a rare Brandon Sheffield-authored interview with the president of Koei, still a surprisingly powerful publisher in Japan. Some interesting perspectives on the Western-Japanese crossover here.]

To the surprise of many, Tecmo last week rejected a friendly takeover offer from Square Enix in favor of a merger with Dynasty Warrior publisher -- and rival -- Koei.

Tecmo and Koei are now working on a detailed merger plan together, as Tecmo has said joining up with Koei gives it a better shot at "boosting corporate value," even though the proposed merger would create a company only a third Square Enix's size.

Separately of these new announcements, Gamasutra recently spoke to Koei president Kenji Matsubara, who says that the current market in Japan "is very tough for third parties like us to do our business," which suggests that it may indeed be better in the eyes of smaller developers to join forces, rather than to be consumed by the larger ones.

"In Japan, it's slow compared with some years ago," Matsubara says. "Four years ago, PlayStation 2 was dominant, and it's not now, so I'd say that it's in a transition situation."

Developers like Koei had anticipated that growth of current-generation consoles would happen even more quickly than in past generations, he says, when in fact it's generally been the opposite.

Nintendo's Wii and DS largely dominate the market, says Matsubara, who currently sees a corresponding software dominance by Nintendo alongside its hardware proliferation. But he says that Japanese third parties will eventually be able to make headway on Nintendo's platforms, and Matsubara also looks to a growing PS3 market in Japan and a still-solid PS2 market to sustain third parties like Koei over time.

"I think it will take some years [for PS3 and Xbox 360] to be a big market," hs says. "The DS is big enough, but the DS has already established a market for third parties. Two or three years ago, only Nintendo could make a business in the DS market, but these days, third parties can make a business. We expect the same situation for Wii."

In the present climate, though, Matsubara says many third parties are encouraged by the PSP, seeing Capcom's Monster Hunter Freedom sell over two million units.

The company plans to announce several PSP titles at this year's upcoming Tokyo Games Show, and while Matsubara declined to disclose details, he did point to Monster Hunter Freedom's team play focus as a factor behind its Japanese success.

"One problem is that in the States, it's not so popular for people to get together and have team play with the PSP," says Matsubara. "Some people say that such team play will grow in the Western market, but some people say that Western people are not so much interested in team play. That's why we'd like to see if such team play could be popular in the Western market."

Given that the Japanese market is currently in a "transition state," creating a "tough situation" for third parties like Koei, the key overall point for third parties' continued survival, according to Matsubara, is to diversify, developing titles for each platform and each region. However, it's a goal easier said than done.

"It's back to surviving the market, I think," he says. "In the PlayStation days, the platform was only one, but the competition was so high. For PlayStation 3, we have to spend huge resources. In the PlayStation 2 days, we could just focus on one platform, but these days, we have to spend resources on handhelds, popular consoles like the Wii, and high-performance consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3. It means that we have to spend too much money and many resources. That's a challenge for us."

In Koei's case, the developer's looking to the online market as well; Matsubara has produced four online titles for Koei, including Nobunaga's Ambition Online, Dynasty Warriors Online, and RTK Online.

"We think we're pioneers among Japanese developers for online games," says Matsubara. But even in that arena, Koei's a bit challenged -- thanks to an early start and solid opportunities in the Asian market, they developed titles modeled on the Eastern aesthetic, incorporating Japanese history and other aspects that made a WoW-dominated Western market harder to penetrate.

"In the Asian market, it's a good business opportunity, but in the Western market, the situation is quite different," he says. So while Koei keeps up development of MMORPGs specifically aimed at the Asian market, they approach the West by adding online features to existing console titles.

Meanwhile, the company founded a Canadian subsidiary in 2001, and progress has been slow there -- it just started packaged game development in 2005. "So far, we're not quite successful," Matsubara admits, "but we have a very long-term view with the Canada studios."

"We're one of the big developers in Japan, but we do not have a big brand image in the Western market. That's what we have to include, and the Canada studio is the key to our success in the western market."

Koei will invest more, both money and human resources, in the Western market, Matsubara says, having the team in Canada build experience on multiple platforms, but focusing on portable titles first.

"Development continues on the PlayStation 3 and 360, but at the same time, we're challenging some new titles for new generation consoles," Matsubara says. "It means that with new generation consoles, we can encourage people to be successful in the Western market."

It also means that projects take time. Koei debuted DS title Gabu Gabu Planet at 2007's Tokyo Game Show, where critics likened its quirky competitive eating gameplay to Katamari Damacy. It's the first DS project forthcoming from the Canada studio, on which Matsubara says "we may have been working more than three years."

"We have to spend on the new generation consoles, but at the same time, we have to train people in short titles. That's our strategy."

But how long will the "transition situation" in Japan endure, and how long will it take for third parties like Koei to ramp up into the next-generation?

"In Japan, it's very tough to see the future. It may take two or three years to go from PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3, or even more," says Matsubara.

Part of it is that Matsubara says Japanese tastes favor 2D graphics more than 3D. "In terms of those game titles, we do not need the PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 2 is good," he says.

"So it may be slow in this year or next year. We'd like to see the PlayStation 3's next marketing strategy. With that, we can expand the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 market in Japan. Maybe it will take some years, but we'd like to have such a big market in Japan. I'm very optimistic about the new generation market in Japan."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Our new series of ‘Road to the IGF’ interviews profiles the nine recently announced winners of the IGF Showcase at Austin GDC - with the local Southern U.S. indie developers to be showcased at the Texas game development show later this month.]

Continuing Think Services' ‘Road to the IGF’ feature, we talk to PillowFort's Tommy Refenes about the action strategy liquid-sim Goo!.

The game comes to the Austin IGF after an impressive showing at the March GDC IGF, where it ranked as a finalist in the Technical Excellence category. The allows players to control “a giant glob of amorphous liquid”, competing against “constantly growing and very aggressive Paint Goo”. The game also features color coded AI, so that “different color Paint Goo mixes, A.I.s mix and the Paint Goo becomes very aggressive”.

What is your background with video games?

Tommy Refenes: I've always had an interest in games and started programming when I was 11. I went to college and ended up dropping out and started working as a web and server developer. At one point, when I was living in Charlotte I decided that it was time to take the plunge and pursue game development.

At the time, a job offer came up overseas so I sold my house, car, and all my crap and moved to the Netherlands. After that job ran its course, I decided to come back and work on Goo! with a friend.

When was PillowFort formed?

TF: PillowFort was originally Amorphous and was founded in May '06. I changed it to PillowFort because it was difficult to make a logo for "Amorphous". I experimented with some Rorschach ink blots, but they all looked like vaginas....

What inspired Goo!, and why did you decide to develop it?

TF: A friend and I started on Goo! together. I was interested in it because of the intense technical challenge it presented.

What were your expectations from your game, and do you feel the end product lives up to those expectations?

TF: Well, to this day the game isn't finished and I’m currently going through a major redesign of it which I'm not ready to reveal yet. I think the game lives up to some expectations of mine, but more technical expectations and not actual gameplay and design expectations. It is an enjoyable game, but there needs to be more to it - hence the big redesign.

What do you think the most interesting thing about your game is?

TF: The tech is the most interesting thing I feel. With thousands of particles on the screen rendering the Goos and doing real time normal mapping on them and still maintaining well over 60FPS - I think that's impressive.

How long did development take, and what was the process like?

TF: Development is still going on. It's been going on for a while, since May of '06 and I've rewritten the engine several times to squeeze the power out of it that it needed to run the game smoothly. The process has been long and tough to be honest but it is really coming along now days.

What's the scene in the South like?

TF: I don't live in Austin, unlike a lot of the other finalists - I live in North Carolina up in the mountains cut off from the populace. The only time I leave the house is to go to the gym.

Was it an easy decision to enter this local leg, considering the success you had at GDC?

TF: Oh yes, definitely. Austin GDC is going to give me a chance to show the game, wet the palate off some publishers and maybe finally get this god damn game out!

Have you made any more progress on multiplayer since its last minute addition to the GDC build in March?

TF: Actually, I have not! When I made the multi-player verses mode at GDC it was fun for a bit, but it had some very glaring gameplay problems to it that I couldn't remedy. I had planned to do so and had several ideas and experiments I was going to try, but I haven't worked on that aspect of the game in a while.

What do you think of the state of independent development, and how do you think independent games fit into the industry?

TF: Independent games offer a new light of creativity into a pretty bland offering from major publishers. Yes, there are some very good games by very large companies, but those companies are all about capitalizing on profits, which is totally understandable, but often times seeing a very creative game makes investors uneasy as they think that people only relate to movie games and games about Hannah Montana.

Independent games allow an individual or team of like minded individuals to create a game without having to answer to investors and publishers.

Where do you see your game going from here?

TF: Giant redesign: the newest Goo! is going to be totally different from what is currently out, but it will still feel like Goo!. As mentioned above about indie games, hopefully this game will be more relatable to those people that write the checks since I need those checks to buy food.

What kind of feedback have you received so far?

TF: Feedback varies across the board really. Some people absolutely love it, they love the colors and feel of the Goo!, other people don't feel it is anything special and too repetitive. I actually agree with both of them.

I want to make a game that people enjoy, money is important, but I also want to offer a player an experience where they actually want to play my next game and not go, 'Oh, he made Goo!...that was okay. Oh look - a nickel!'

People have really short attention spans and when Goo! comes out I want people to remember it and remember that PillowFort made it and associate that name with quality fun games.

Have you checked out any of the other Austin IGF games?

TF: I actually haven't yet. I've been insanely busy trying to get stuff ready for the Intel Game Demo contest and get this new version ready for Austin GDC.

Which recent indie games do you admire, and which recent mainstream titles do you admire, and why?

TF: I very much admire World of Goo, those guys have made a very solid and polished game and have a great business sense about them I know they will do well and I hope that one day I can be right up there with them. I also recently played a game called Dyson that was a very simple game, but extremely engrossing.

Do you have any messages for your fellow contestants or fans of the IGF?

TF: I congratulate everyone that will be at Austin GDC and I look forward to meeting everyone. If they are half as cool as the people at GDC back in February, it'll be a wild wild time.

Posted by alistairw at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, you'll see a more formal announcement about this in a couple of weeks, alongside a very neat (and related) competition reveal, but we'd like to announce our new weblog FingerGaming.com, subtitled 'The art & business of gaming on the iPhone.'

But why? Well, this new site, which is edited for us by Matt Burris, continues something we at Think Services have been doing over the past few months and years - supplementing our industry-leading coverage of the mainstream game business, as showcased with products like Gamasutra.com, Game Developer magazine, and Game Developers Conference, with important emerging and vital submarkets such as Apple's touch-based handheld.

FingerGaming [RSS feed] is already publishing daily news, analysis, and reviews from the swiftly burgeoning iPhone and iPod Touch gaming scene, including the latest from Steve Jobs on the iPhone Store's game expansion, early impressions of iPhone titles including Spore: Origins and iSplume, and increasing concentrations on interviews, analysis, and trends in the new business.

In addition, the site is looking for iPhone game-related tips, announcements, news, and even potential developer diaries from those creating iPhone titles - you can reach FingerGaming via its contact page.

We believe that if we help aggregate information for creators (and dedicated consumers) of these submarkets, and then help them form communities through in-person events, networks, and shared knowledge, then everyone benefits.

Now that we've launched FingerGaming, we'd like to point out our full set of submarket and 'focused' weblogs that Think Services currently runs, including the new site:

- GameSetWatch [RSS, jobs] (founded November 2005), Think Services' alt.game weblog, featuring informal editorials, interviews and opinions from our editors and special contributors.
- Game Career Guide [RSS] (founded August 2006), for student game developers and those considering entering the game industry - also helping to support the Game Career Seminar events.
- WorldsInMotion.biz [RSS, jobs] (founded June 2007), analyzing the business of online worlds - from MMOs to virtual worlds and beyond - supporting the Worlds In Motion Summits.
- IndieGames.com: The Weblog [RSS, jobs] (founded January 2008), for independent game creators, from Flash to downloadable and beyond - helping to support the Independent Games Festival and Indie Games Summit.
- GamerBytes [RSS, jobs] (founded June 2008), for digital downloaded console games, from XBLA through PSN to WiiWare and beyond - helping to support the Indie Games Summit.
- FingerGaming [RSS] (founded August 2008), for the art and business of gaming on the iPhone and iPod Touch - helping to support GDC Mobile and IGF Mobile.

[We also continue to run GamesOnDeck - for non-iPhone cellphone gaming, and Serious Games Source, for educational, social, and other 'serious' gaming.]

In exchange for providing these sites to you, we hope that you'll consider posting your industry jobs on the Gamasutra job network, which includes or will shortly include all of these focused sites, or attending our conferences (such as GDC or Austin GDC) when they include focused content on those subjects.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by game designer Manveer Heir. The goal is to play a game from start to completion and learn something about game design in the process. This week we take a look at The Behemoth's new Xbox Live Arcade beat-em-up, Castle Crashers.]

Cooperative play in games is becoming a huge selling point and an almost mandatory feature in today's industry. From AAA titles like Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2 to downloadable titles such as Schizoid and PixelJunk Eden, co-op play is a regular feature that many games promote.

The Behemoth, creators of Alien Hominid, have released their foray into the co-op world, a four-player side-scrolling beat-em-up called Castle Crashers. The game supports co-op play over Xbox Live, and like with any multiplayer game, occasionally has networking problems.

The technical problems I personally experienced while playing Castle Crashers have led me to think about how design can help mitigate some of those problems, which is the focus of this design lesson.

Design Lesson: By accounting for poor networking conditions, co-op game design can reduce the frustration for the player playing under such conditions

Poor networking conditions are a fact of life. Sometimes you end up playing with someone who has terrible lag and drops their connection all the time. When playing a co-op game this can be frustrating, especially if you know the people who you are trying to play with.

The best answer is to write flawless networking code, but that's not reasonable. There will always be problems. Some poor gamer will always have an issue because their network is horrid. However, there are ways to use game design to lessen the frustration.

The first way is regularly saving the game. Castle Crashers has an overworld that allows the player to choose what level they play (or replay). As you play through the game the first time, levels start to unlock at the overworld screen.

After each level, you are thrown back to the overworld screen and the game is saved. What I realized is, often I would be 3 or 4 spaces away from where I was last on this screen. This is because the game splits up each level into sub-areas, allowing players to not have to play entire levels over if they don't want to.

However, the game does not put you back at the overworld screen each time you hit a new sub-area nor does it save the game automatically unless you go to the overworld screen. So if the game drops in the middle of a level, even though you unlocked some of the new areas, you start the level over since it never saved (you also lose your XP).

Another issue is inability to join and leave games in progress. All players must be present to start a game. One of my friends had a bad connection, and regularly dropped. Everyone else had to stop, restart the game, and re-invite him to allow him to continue to play. It would have been much easier if he could just rejoin again while the rest of us played on, instead of waiting in a lobby.

Joining and leaving co-op games on the fly is becoming standard in co-op gaming, and I see no reason for it not to be included in all co-op games. It requires some more work and forethought from a technology perspective, but is another way for the design of co-op to lessen the impact of people's poor networking conditions (and to allow people to pick-up and play and not schedule their lives around a game).

Even worse than not being able to join a game on the fly is the fact if you are the last person in an online multiplayer game, the entire game quits on you instead of just allowing you to continue alone. The design, instead, could have allowed one (or both) players to continue playing alone or at least saved the game at that point so all progress wasn't lost.

By incorporating these designs into the a co-op game from the beginning, the technical implementation of networking can be suited around them. People will always be frustrated when games don't work 100% as intended. By smartly designing co-op games to mitigate this, however, there is a role to be played to help out when technical issues arise.

[Manveer Heir is currently a game designer at Raven Software. He updates his design blog, Design Rampage, regularly. He is interested in thoughtful critique and commentary on the gaming industry.]

Posted by Manveer Heir at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Every week, sister weblog GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley will be summing up the top console digital download news tidbits from the past 7 days, including brand new game announcements and scoops through the world of Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and WiiWare.]

This week has been announcement after announcement - it's getting a tad ridiculous. It's almost like there is too much going on! One thing is for sure - the future is certainly looking bright for downloadable console games, in terms of diversity -- there's a bit of everything for everyone.

Xbox Live Arcade

XBLA Threefer - Rocketbowl, Samurai Shodown II and Shotest Shogi Make The Scene
Three new XBLA releases this week, filling in a niche each. Rocketbowl actually looks like it could be good fun - it's like Bowling Golf. Samurai Shodown II will be gold for those who loved it back in the day, and Shotest Shogi is a great addition for someone looking for something a little different from chess. Two new expansions as well - new levels for Buku Sudoku and N+ this week.

Plain Sight - A New XNA Game Hoping To Get To Xbox Live Arcade
Upcoming developers Beatnik Games are hard at work at a new 3D platformer / beat-em-up called Plain Sight. Hopefully it'll make its way onto the Xbox Live Arcade.

Win One Of Five Copies Of Shred Nebula!
We have a competition! Want to win a copy of Shred Nebula? Simply follow this link.

The King Of Fighters '98 Coming To Xbox Live Arcade
The classic SNK fighter is finally making its way onto the Xbox Live Arcade -- hopefully we can turn off any visual filtering they may add to it.

Shred Nebula Design Documents Released - See How To Get Your Game On Consoles
Crunchtime Games have released their design documents for last week's XBLA release, Shred Nebula. If you're an up and coming developer or just someone who wants to see how game design works, this is for you.

PlayStation Network

Guest Analysis: A Curmudgeon's Review Of Qore - Episode 04
Matt Matthews sits down to watch the entire episode of 'video magazine' Qore, now available on the PlayStation Network, and takes it apart to analyze what the most interesting tidbits are.

PSN Store Update - Madden Head Coach '09 For the US, Warhawk Expansion Set For Europe
Not a huge week for PSN releases - but NFL Head Coach is now available for download at the same time as retail. Is this the beginning of something bigger?

Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer Coming To North American PSN In October
Long time coming side scrolling shooter Soldner-X has got a date for North America - nice to see it finally coming out.

Lumines Supernova Announced For The PlayStation Network
Last week XBLA got the announcement of Meteos Wars from Q? - now the PSN will have the chance to finally play Lumines in this new variation of the excellent puzzler.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update: Secret Game Release - Groovin' Blocks
Groovin' Blocks was announced days before release. Usually this means a game will be quite poor - but this one actually looks good. It's Lumines meets Columns - drop blocks to the beat!

From The Creators Of Nanostray Comes Fun! Fun! Minigolf For WiiWare
Minigolf is making its way to WiiWare in fantastic fashion - Shin'en are always great when it comes to graphics on a limited platform.

Solve The Color Wheel - Liight Announced For WiiWare
Can't get enough puzzle games on WiiWare? Here, have another - Liight, a puzzle game about setting the right colors onto nodes is coming your way.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Our own Chris Remo has been quizzing High Voltage on the intriguing Wii-exclusive The Conduit, and I figured it was well worth posting here on GSW - particularly for the contrary 'hardcore games needed on Wii' mindset.]

Illinois-headquartered veteran independent developer High Voltage Software (Harvey Birdman: Attorney At law, Hunter: The Reckoning) is taking a bet on the Wii with its upcoming game The Conduit.

Two bets, actually -- that the system's hardware is capable of significantly more than most developers have done with it, and that its broad audience contains a market for a hardcore-slanted first-person shooter.

The Conduit seems to be progressing well on the first front, based on gameplay demos and videos released by High Voltage, but the team will have to wait until the game's planned early 2009 release to see if it succeeds on the second.

Gamasutra sat down with creative director Matt Corso to chat about The Conduit. Expanding on a previous Gamasutra interview excerpt, Corso discussed the impetus that led to High Voltage choosing this route, some of the ways the team has had to treat the Wii hardware to get the results it needs, the company's relationship with Nintendo and its talks with publishers, and design considerations made with respect to the FPS genre.

Development History

What led you guys to start this project, and what was your overall philosophy was behind it?

Matt Corso: The reason High Voltage decided to develop a first-person shooter for the Wii is that it seems no developer was really pushing the system, and we wanted to take advantage of the hardware and show that the Wii was capable of doing much more than what people were actually doing on it.

Also, we felt that there really weren't enough hardcore first-person shooter-style games available on the system, and the system is so perfect for that style of game. So we really saw an opportunity to take advantage of something and make something very special for the system. That's why we chose to go with The Conduit.

How long has it been in development?

MC: The Conduit has been in development since last October. Right now, the team size is somewhere around 30 people.

And you're basically content complete at this point? Are you in alpha yet?

MC: We're near the alpha/beta stage. It's an internal project, so that's a bit loose right now. We are content complete, however. Now, we're getting more into our focus testing phase.

This is the point where we're giving players a hands-on experience with The Conduit, and from there, we're making decisions about how much more additional content, or polish and focus, we need to put into our levels to make sure they really shine.

So far, we've done focus testing with several people. A while back, we did a focus test with about 20 different people of different age groups, and we found that some things were working really well for some folks and they really liked certain aspects of the game, and we also found out that we were missing a few categories. That really helped us out, and we've taken that information and are now working on fixing and polishing, and focusing on developing a very quality experience for the Wii.

You seem to be tackling the system in two main areas it doesn't see much envelope-pushing in, one being this style of game, and the other being the graphical capabilities. Would you say you're trying to prove something, as far as what the Wii's capable of doing?

MC: Yeah, absolutely. The Wii is a really cool game system, and it's worthy of better games than it's getting right now. I mean, there are some great games out there for the system right now, but it just seems like there's such an opportunity to do so much more with it.

Considering it's such a popular system right now, it just doesn't make sense to not focus on making really quality games. As far as the graphics are concerned, from what you've seen of our demo, you realize that the system can display some really quality videos. Right now, the bar has been so low, it was easy to exceed that bar at first, and now we feel like we're going way beyond that point.

But it makes sense. The Wii is very strong, and it's going to have a lot of staying power, and it will be here for a long time to come. So we as a studio see no reason why we shouldn't take advantage and try to develop the best experience possible for the Wii.

Did you start out experimenting with the system before you had a full design for the game worked out? I've seen some of the videos you've released, and it seems like you focused on tech pretty early.

MC: Right. Early on, we knew that we wanted to create the engine to have all these great bells and whistles, so we created our technology demo. That may be what you saw online -- it's a Roman bath house. It shows off our water effects, our heat distortion effects, and our bump mapping effects.

That was our R&D phase where we didn't know for sure if we were going to make The Conduit, per se, but we knew that we wanted to do something with the system, so that was the time when we were just polishing and trying to add all the cool functionality so that we could make a good game down the road. So yes, we did have our R&D phase.

Technical Issues

Why do you think most teams haven't gone a similar route? Is there some aspect of the hardware that is either unintuitive or difficult, beyond just having less horsepower than the other systems?

MC: Definitely that's more of a question for our technology folks back at the studio, but I would say that with systems like the Xbox 360 and PS3, you can use pixel shaders to deliver the great visual effects. With the Wii, things are a bit different, so we had to do a lot more under-the-hood optimizations to enable the system to do what it could do.

And then, even from the art content creation perspective, the system is a real balancing act, because you do have more limited texture space and whatnot, so you need to keep playing with your textures and your geometry resolutions and your lighting schemes to really bring out the visual style. It's not as easy as building your models in Zbrush, mapping to your low-res cage, and then just turning on the cool lights and you're ready to go.

There were a lot of lighting configurations that we were trying just to get to the point right now where it looks so great and it really pops out the normals. If you look at some of the early screenshots that we released, they look good and the normals were in fact there, but we really hadn't brought out the richness of the detail in the models.

It seems like every month we have a new breakthrough, and now with some recent breakthroughs, we're really able to make the graphics sizzle. And we only expect that to continue from now until the end of development, so when the consumer actually buys the game, hopefully, in our minds, we'd like it to look even better than what we're showing today.

And the team is really on board with improvements. It's definitely a labor of love for High Voltage, so they just continue to work and polish. Reworking doesn't really seem to be an issue. In fact, from a manager perspective, it's almost more difficult to get them to not rework things, because they're really on fire right now, and they really want to see this game do well.

Publisher And Platform Holder Relations

Have your tech team members corresponded with Nintendo at all with hardware and development questions?

MC: Yes, absolutely. We've been in close contact with Nintendo, and they've been helping us along the way. We had a meeting with Nintendo today, and we got even more assistance.

Nintendo's been really great to work with and very forthcoming and gracious with their information. So far the relationship has been really great. We really appreciate the support from Nintendo. Thank you, Nintendo. So yes, to answer your question.

Have you been speaking with publishers as well?

MC: I haven't been speaking with them as much as [chief creative officer] Eric Nofsinger has, and Kerry Ganofsky, our CEO. But as a studio, yes, we have been speaking with publishers on a pretty regular basis, and so far, so good.

I don't think it's a matter of if we'll get a publisher. I think it's a matter of when we'll get a publisher, and who is exactly the right publishing partner for High Voltage.

Design Considerations

On the design side, the Wii is, at first glance, well-suited to first-person aiming, but there are also difficulties in terms of being overly jerky or spastic in many shooters on the system. How are you addressing that?

MC: It's just a lot of working to refine the control system so that we don't get the jerkiness. Some of the comments we've heard from folks who've actually played The Conduit hands-on is that it does feel smooth and responsive. That is something we'll continue to work on, especially as we go into the polish phase, where we can refine our collision geometry to make sure the character moves and interacts well with the world.

The goal is to have The Conduit feel very silky-smooth, and then of course we'll have a lot of fine-tuning we can do to the game's control system so that it can feel even better and even more to your liking. We definitely want players to be able to play The Conduit their own way, and set up the control configurations to the way that suits their playstyle the best.

So hopefully, when all is said and done, the game should have a very smooth framerate and play very smoothly as well.

I noticed that you pretty conservatively restrict the Y-axis when aiming. Could you speak a little on that?

MC: We did restrict the Y-aiming. There's a limit to how far up you can look and how far down. We really wanted to focus on moving forward, and the action on the battlefield. We do want to have a vertical gameplay.

You can jump up onto higher locations so that you can get a vantage point and shoot down on your enemies. But of course, we didn't want to take that so far that we would end up with the spinning axis issues that you get with some of the other first-person shooters, particularly on the Wii.

Especially where for new players to the system, it may be difficult for them to control the game because you are using the Wii Remote, you are pointing at the screen, and you do have that sort of direct interface with your targets. It could be very easy for you to have the "barf cam" and be spinning in a circle. That's why we restricted that.

Did that impact level design at all?

MC: It did. There are not very many extremely vertical levels in The Conduit. They're very horizontal, for the most part, with some vertical built in. I don't know that it was a matter that it restricted the gameplay. I think it was just more of a decision early on to keep things on the straight-and-level.

On a more structural level, stepping back to the Wii-specific aspects, as a game, how would you describe The Conduit?

MC: As a game, I personally feel the most comfortable describing The Conduit as a straightforward action shooter. We play a lot of first-person shooters, of course, and we're big fans of games like Halo and Resistance and even Half-Life. We like the types of games that just give you the tools and the abilities you need to get out there and have fun on the battlefield.

With The Conduit, we're trying to stay away from a lot of extra, ancillary gameplay features, and we wanted to be the type of gaming experience where you can hook in and really enjoy yourself and have a really fun, exciting experience with the game, and then progress through a few levels, enjoy yourself, and turn it off when you're wrapped up. And then of course you can go online and play with your friends.

So you're supporting online networking of some kind?

MC: Absolutely. We will have online network support. That's the goal right now. I'm sort of reluctant to say how many players. We do have a benchmark. It is fairly high right now, but it's still something we're hammering out.

We do have The Conduit running multiplayer right now, and it's a lot of fun to play. It will feature all the weapons, including ASE-based gameplay, the ASE being our All-Seeing Eye device that lets the player see alien objects that are hidden beyond the alien cloaking veil. We'll be working that into our multiplayer functionality to make it a much cooler, richer multiplayer gameplay experience.

The Conduit really is on a good track right now. The team is really interested in bringing quality to gamers everywhere. The hands-on focus tests have conclusively showed us that it's a fun game to play and people are really enjoying it right now.

It looks great, it feels great, it's going to be an exciting action experience for the Wii, and it's going to be very exciting when it's all done. I think it's definitely something that players should not miss when it's released.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The GameSetLinks are once more upon us, compiling some of the most interesting game-related links from the 600+ RSS feeds we hit up here at GameSetWatch - no soggy, reconstituted URLs here.

Some of the highlights here - South American Sega Genesis-related fun (thanks to co-worker Brandon @ IC for the above image!), the return of the Blip Festival, some awesome estimated sales numbers for Castle Crashers, the PAX 10 super-overview, and plenty more.

Yee haw haw:

Blip Festival 2008
Confirmed! New York! Do not miss! 'The Blip Festival takes place DECEMBER 4—7, 2008 at [EDIT: The Bell House!], and is presented by Manhattan art organization THE TANK and NYC artist collective 8BITPEOPLES.'

Xbox Live Arcade Sales - 09/06/08 | VG Chartz.com
'Most other games (again, possibly due to the lag) saw large drops from last week. This could also be due to Castle Crashers dominance in sales, as it grossed over $1.3m in 7 days - a very large share of the entire week of sales.'

1UP: Top 5 Cringe-Inducing Videogame Raps
Shaaaarkey!

IEEE Spectrum: Engineering Spore
David Kushner's piece for the geeky coding magazine.

Siliconera » Sound Current: The PAX 10
Good round-up of the PAX-picked indie games.

Loot Theory: The Tale of the Donkey and the Carrot « High Dynamic Range Lying
'Not all games need loot, but it’s not secret that it is what keeps many players motivated to play any game longer than initially intended.'

Some Kill Giants: The Lagos Gaming Scene
'I realise that I haven't really gone into what the gaming scene is like in Nigeria at all.'

Terra Nova: Who plays, how much, and why? Answers.
'SOE has let us access the full data logs generated and collected by the world Everquest II.' With v.interesting results.

insertcredit.com: 'Four "new" EA games on Genesis/Mega Drive'
Oh, those wacky Brazilians.

Jeff's 1UP Blog: Ripples
'But, hey: Let's not get too maudlin here. I'm not dead. This is not my wake.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['The Interactive Palette' is a new column by Gregory Weir that examines the tools and techniques of the digital games trade with a focus on games as art, using a single game as an example.]

In video games, there has been a gradual trend from skill challenge to story. Many of the first arcade games were tests of skill and reflexes: the player was challenged to score as many points as she could before losing. High score tables are a symbol of this era: a skilled player's initials were immortalized for all to see... until more skilled players pushed her off the bottom of the table.

Ever since the debut of saved games and passwords, however, games have been becoming more and more forgiving of failure. This allows for longer, richer experiences, as in the classic The Legend of Zelda, the first game to feature a battery-backed save feature. This has allowed developers to write stories that last longer than one gameplay session, has made death much less final, and has led to our modern story- and character-focused games.

But the skill challenge aspect of gameplay has largely been lost. Players expect a story, and that apparently conflicts with the concept of running out of lives and getting a game over. The loss of that very experience, of finding the player's skill, is often lamented among old-school "retro" gamers and new-wave "indie" gamers alike. The two ways of designing games seem mutually exclusive.

However, indie developer Anna Anthropy's recent freeware PC game, Calamity Annie, manages to do the impossible: provide a cruel skill challenge and still have a long, ongoing game story. It's a groundbreaking lesbian cowboy fast-draw romance where every game ends with the shot of a pistol, and it uses an approach that I think is applicable to a wide array of games.

Love Is A Bullet

There are, as common wisdom would say, two kinds of video gamers. There is the hardcore old-school gamer. She delights in scoring points, in defeating opponents in multiplayer, and in overcoming fiendish challenges. Whether it is a twitchy arcade game or an obtuse and cryptic puzzle, she wants a feeling of achievement from having "beaten" a game. If she has to fail two or three or a hundred times to do so, that's just part of the experience.

The other kind is the artsy, casual gamer. This type is playing for the story, or for the fun, or just to see how the game goes. She likes simulations where she can never really lose, or games where progress is easy or story moves along smoothly. If she comes across a difficult portion, she's more inclined to look up cheat codes or a walkthough than try repeatedly; she's not interested in testing herself, but in moving forward without the annoying interruption of dying all the time and having to start over.

Each of these groups thinks the other is missing the fun part. What fun is it to just sail through a game without any challenge? You might as well read a book. What fun is it to "try it again, stupid?" You might as well just hit your head against a wall. The fact is that there is fun to be had in either approach.

The tenseness of a challenge and the euphoria of success, not to mention the glow of accomplishment, is something that anyone who's won a game of Monopoly can attest to. Likewise, the feeling of experiencing a story, of really being there, is familiar to anyone who's become engrossed in a good film. And if you're partly responsible for bringing about that ending? So much the better.

This apparent dichotomy isn't really that big of a gap. Every player can understand both viewpoints, given some calm thought; it's just that some people lean more toward one camp than the other. The only reason it's seen as such a divide is that game developers seem to only be able to appeal to one side or the other. If a game can appeal to both the challenge-gluttons and the story-seekers, it can reach a wider audience and satisfy both halves of a conflicted gamer's mind. Anthrope's game comes close to this ideal.

I Am A Gun

Calamity Annie is an unforgiving game. The player faces twenty-five bad hombres, each quicker on the draw than the next. She has three lives. Missing an hombre, or shooting too slowly, will take away a life, and free lives are few and far between. Death comes swiftly and suddenly in this game.

However, between every five hombres is a special scene, either a minigame or a cutscene. These cutscenes tell the story of cowgirl Calamity Annie's awkward romance with a mysterious woman from town, and incorporate the six-shooting gameplay mechanic in a seamless and potentially final way.

But instead of restarting the story each time you play, the narrative marches onward past each "death." You see, Annie's enigmatic crush patches her up each time she's shot, so while starting a new game means she starts over at hombre number twenty-five, the progress of the romance continues. Indeed, it continues past the end of the game: there are multiple endings, each meaning something different for the relationship's development.

Here is a game with all the hallmarks of the ancient skill challenge games: limited lives, no health bar or continues, and a posted high score at the end. However, unlike those games, it allows for a story that continues past the player's failure. This technique may be the solution to the challenge versus story dilemma.

A developer can borrow from Annie by separating the story of a game from its rules for success or failure. Yes, one ship has been lost in the battle against the alien menace, but the war still progresses. A brave adventurer dies in the maw of a dragon, but the people she helped along the way are more free and more willing to help the next brave soul defeat the evil overlord... or perhaps more cowed by the grisly example she made.

I Draw First, And The Game Is Won

Calamity Annie is the first game to really pull that off. The only game I can think of that uses a similar technique is the seminal Planescape: Torment where, when you died, you woke up again due to your blessing — or curse — of immortality. The System Shock games and their spiritual successor Bioshock did something similar with their technological healing chambers.

This rebirth mechanic isn't quite the same, though; the games all feel easier due to it. Failure is forgiven, and the player's accomplishments continue. In Annie, though, the game is fiendishly hard throughout, perhaps because the story is not directly tied to Annie's success as a gunslinger. Her misadventures in love are separate from her misadventures with a gun.

It's not a complete paragon of gaming unity, however. Both kinds of video gamers will not be pleased equally. Eventually, to progress the story past a certain point, the player will need to beat all twenty-five hombres. The story-seeking gamer will likely balk at this task, which requires reflexes best measured in tenths of a second.

If the quick-draw game was a bit easier, or if the story was not finally held up by the player's continued failure, then Annie would be an even more effective reason to call for a truce between the two camps of gamers. This game is an uneven compromise, but it's definitely a start.

On the Gamer's Quarter forums, Anthropy writes, "I made the story persistent between games partly because the actions that advance the story lose their impact if the player is forced to repeat them every time she plays... I think that kind of persistence, where one play of the game affects others, is just beginning to be explored."

I'm looking forward to that exploration. Challenge and story don't need to be at war anymore.

[Gregory Weir is a writer, amateur game developer, and software programmer. He maintains Ludus Novus, a podcast and accompanying blog dedicated to the art of interaction. He can be reached at Gregory.Weir@gmail.com.]

Posted by Gregory Weir at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[In honor of the 9th anniversary of the Dreamcast launch in the United States, GSW columnist Mister Raroo takes a look back at 9 of his favorite Sega Dreamcast memories. Beyond simply being a home console on which to enjoy some games, the Dreamcast allowed Mister Raroo to bond with a young student, speak to strange creatures, and even contributed to him falling in love with Missus Raroo. For anyone that fondly remembers the Sega Dreamcast, this article is for you!]

Nine Years Old Already!

The Sega Dreamcast has reached legendary status in recent years, with many gamers placing it upon a pedestal and citing it as the best console in the history of home video gaming. There is no doubt that the Dreamcast was a fantastic machine, but I’ll leave the debate over its place in the annals of gaming history to the denizens of gaming message boards and forums. I love the Dreamcast, and I’ll just keep my opinion as simple as that.

With a software library full of diverse and engaging titles like Chu Chu Rocket, Shenmue, Tech Romancer, and Daytona USA, the Dreamcast offers a smorgasbord of software for just about any gaming taste. Though the system may have lived only a short life, it was an extremely memorable one, and it has made a significant impact upon me as a gamer.

In my opinion, the Dreamcast was the last system that truly wowed me. I’ve had a blast with just about all of the game consoles that have been released since the Dreamcast’s U.S. launch of 9/9/99 (And for the record… Yes, I know, it was released in Japan almost a year before that!), but no other system has struck me as being such a massive step forward. As great as Xbox Live is, for instance, my favorite online gaming memories come from the 56k-enabled Dreamcast.

In honor of the Dreamcast’s 9th U.S. “birthday,” I thought it would be fun to take a look nine memories relating to Sega’s last home console that stick out in my mind. The Dreamcast holds a dear place in my gamer’s heart, and there is certainly a reason it is still hooked up to my television and given regular play almost a decade after I first brought it home from the store. So, without further delay, I present nine of the many things I love about the Sega Dreamcast.

The Day Itself: 9/9/99

I had only one thing on my agenda for September 9, 1999: Play Sega Dreamcast. And indeed, that is all I did. I had preordered the system at my local Software Etc. and, to their credit, they had a very efficient set-up for picking up preordered Dreamcast consoles and games. Granted, there was nowhere near the level of launch day madness that there is today. Nobody was camped out for days beforehand and everything was calm and orderly. But all the same there sure were a lot of people at Software Etc. excitedly picking up their Dreamcasts.

My day was a blur of Soul Calibur, Power Stone, Hydro Thunder, and Sonic Adventure. I remember calling my friend Henry to tell him how awesome the system was, and he quickly drove over to my place for a few hours of Soul Calibur goodness. I was floored by the clarity of the graphics and the intriguing oddness of the system. The VMU, for example, with its little screen within the controller, was so weird and neat! All four of the games I bought that day have held up surprisingly well over time, though people may argue Sonic Adventure is nowhere near as good as it seemed back then. Still, I’d propose that being chased at breakneck speed by a killer whale is pretty fantastic!

Love on the Battlefield

When the lovely young woman who is now my wife and I first met, we were both in the midst of earning our teaching credentials. Though neither of us are teachers now, I consider my short stint as an educator not only a great experience in terms of what I learned, but more importantly pursuing teaching as a career is what led me to meet Missus Raroo!

When we were both student teaching, our busy schedules gave us little time to see each other. Our days were spent with teaching at our school assignments, rushing to attend our classes, and squeezing in some part-time work to earn some much-needed cash. By the end of each day, it was far too late to drive to see one another.

Enter Phantasy Star Online. Before meeting me, Missus Raroo barely played video games, but I convinced her to buy a Dreamcast and purchased her a copy of PSO for Valentine’s Day. It turned out to be the perfect gift, as we’d both head to the online world of Ragol and slay monsters together almost every night before bed. We typed messages back and forth to each other as we traversed through PSO’s environments, and this turned out to be one of the most fun parts of the game. I like to think of Phantasy Star Online as the game that turned our relationship from like to love.

After School Special

There are many reasons why I didn’t continue on as a teacher, but one of the biggest was I simply didn’t follow the rules and got in trouble with the administration a lot. I was young and still fairly immature, and I saw no trouble with making kids stand in front of the class and dance “The Robot” for extra credit. In my defense, I believe I really connected with most of the kids in my classes, so much so that a few of them even keep in touch with me today, many years after the fact.

One of my favorite students was one of the “bad” kids. Other teachers warned me about him before the school year began, saying how he disrupted class and was generally a pain in the read end. In my class, though, he was a great kid and displayed a level of wit and humor well above most of his peers. His family life was pretty crummy, so his acting out during class was simply his way of looking for attention. When he was given proper acknowledgement and some responsibility, he excelled.

One afternoon after school as I was walking to my car I noticed he was sitting in front of the school. It turns out his mom had failed to pick him up and he wasn’t sure how to get home. I decided to give him a lift, but I warned him we’d have to make one stop on the way to his house. When he learned this stop was Funcoland, he didn’t object, and he happily tagged along as I went inside to pick up my preorder of Street Fighter III: Double Impact.

Word spread amongst the kids that I was a gamer, but the fact that I gave this student a ride home also made its way to the administration. The vice principal sent out a notice to all teachers stating that giving students rides home from school was forbidden and could be grounds for dismissal. Obviously, he was referring to me. Thankfully, that incident wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back and I never gave a student a ride home again. But I swear that after our trip to Funcoland, that kid tried harder, participated more, and generally seemed like a happier student. Maybe seeing one of his teachers in the light of being an actual human being with an interest he could relate to made all the difference.

Waiting for Godot… I Mean, the UPS Guy

Street Fighter III: Double Impact represents only one of the many fantastic fighters on Dreamcast. Capcom, in particular, gave substantial support for Sega’s system that made all fighting game fans happy. Marvel vs. Capcom, Street Fighter Alpha 3, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Capcom vs. SNK, Project Justice and many more kept fighting fans busy for the duration of the Dreamcast’s existence… and beyond.

The arcade-perfect conversion of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was especially memorable for me because getting my hands on it was such a problem. Despite preordering the game and paying for it in full, a Gamestop clerk called and informed me that the store wouldn’t have enough copies for everyone who reserved the game and that if I wanted a copy, I needed to be at the store when their shipment came in.

Other gamers also obviously received the same message, as there was already a core group of anxious people hanging about the store when I arrived on release day. After a grueling wait for the UPS man to arrive with a box full of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 discs, the clerk doled out copies of the game and I was lucky enough to snag the last available copy. I rushed home and spent the remainder of the day in fighting bliss with my wonder team of Tron Bonne, Jill Valentine, and Strider.

Shake it!

During the Dreamcast’s short life, Sega seemed to have little fear of taking risks, which is perhaps why the console came to an untimely demise. That said, it was this aggressive attitude on Sega’s part that brought forth the release of not only Samba de Amigo, but also its costly maraca controllers. I scraped together all of my available money to purchase the game and the maracas, and it’s remained one of my favorite gaming purchases of all time. Missus Raroo was so impressed with how fun Samba de Amigo was that she rushed out to get a copy and some maracas so she could play on her own Dreamcast.

Creating the sheer absurdity of a maraca-shaking music game starring a wild-eyed monkey in a sombrero is perhaps one of Sega’s crowning achievements, and it is a game that my wife and I will bring out on regular occasion to this day. Recently at a family birthday party, we decided to set up our maraca controllers and let people shake away the afternoon. Missus Raroo’s dad, in particular, took a liking to Samba de Amigo and enjoyed many rounds, though he didn’t seem to quite understand the proper technique needed to play the game. Instead, he just shook the maracas like crazy while methodically moving his feet in a bizarre rhythm as if he were slow dancing. It was a grand spectacle to behold.

Blasting Zombies With Our Fingers

One of the few games Missus Raroo can routinely beat me at is Typing of the Dead. Being a conversion of House of the Dead that replaces light gun triggers squeezes with keyboard strokes, Typing of the Dead tests the typing dexterity of players by presenting them with a onslaught of zombies that are destroyed by quickly typing often-hilarious words and phrases that appear onscreen. Only the fastest and most accurate fingers will excel, and Missus Raroo annihilates any and all competitors.

Typing of the Dead is a game we enjoy without fail whenever Halloween rolls around. This year will be no exception, and I might practice in secret so I can finally beat Missus Raroo in heated competition. But, in all honestly, no amount of practice will give me the edge. I am a fast typist, but when it comes to destroying zombies with keystrokes, nobody can beat Missus Raroo.

Conversations With a Fish

One of the strangest and most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve ever had was with Seaman, a piece of software in which you literally spoke to a virtual fish. Packaged with a microphone that plugged into your Dreamcast controller, Seaman put players in the role of caregivers of strange, man-faced fish that existed in real-time thanks to the Dreamcast’s internal clock. Stay away from your Seaman (or Seamen, as the case may be) for too long, and you’ll hear the freak of digital nature complain about being hungry or having a dirty aquarium.

Seaman was a total head trip for me, as sometimes the words that came from its mouth were eerily accurate. At the time Seaman was released, I was in the midst of my student teaching and would usually check in with my Seaman in the mornings before I headed out and in the evenings when I got home from my classes. One evening Seaman asked me what I did for a living and when I told him I was teaching, he asked what age group and stated the kids probably pass notes and goof around when I’m not looking. It really felt as if he was alive.

Seaman is so special, in fact, that even my family members were interested in what the little creature would say. To this day, my mom regularly asks about Seaman and wonders how that strange man-faced fish is doing. Maybe I should loan her my Dreamcast so she and Seaman can be together again.

Shoot for the Stars

Until the resurgence of shooters on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network, the “shmup” was more or less nonexistent on home consoles. Prior to today’s downloadable shooters, the last system that provided a safe haven for shooter maniacs was definitely the Dreamcast. With great titles like Cannon Spike, Bangai-O, and Zero Gunner 2, anyone with an affinity for navigating streams of enemy projectiles could find solace in Sega’s final system.

The Dreamcast’s control pad may be ill suited for shooting supremacy, but that hasn’t stopped me from putting in hours upon hours of shooting time on the system. For the hardest of the hardcore, an easy (but pricy) solution for the Dreamcast pad’s shooter ineptitude is to buy one of the amazing arcade sticks released for the system. The spot-on arcade conversions coupled with the use of an arcade stick and the inclusion of a “tate” mode in many games (namely, allowing you to play the game with a TV turned on its side to keep so as to replicate the arcade screen ratio) turns the Dreamcast into a veritable home arcade shmup machine.

Today, spending $50 on an arcade blast-a-ton like Gunbird 2 would seem unreasonable to most people, but I happily paid full price for just about every Dreamcast shooter on launch day. And for the stellar Japan-only shooters like Zero Gunner 2, I paid the lofty import prices needed to secure such gems. As I see it, some of the best shooters of all time reside on the Sega Dreamcast, and that is reason enough for me to keep the system hooked up and ready to go at all times.

Life After Death

Despite the Dreamcast’s short official life span, the system continued to see a small but mighty trickle of releases in Japan for years after its “death.” Games like Rez, Ikaruga, Trigger Heart Excelica, and Under Defeat gave me a reason to keep my Dreamcast set up alongside my other systems. In fact, I believe most of the postmortem Dreamcast releases hold strong in terms of quality when compared to the top game releases on “superior” game consoles.

In addition to official releases, the Dreamcast became a haven for homebrew fanatics, of which a strong community exists today. Some unofficial but rather excellent game releases from the homebrew community have demonstrated that the Dreamcast isn’t going away any time soon. It is one of those rare game systems that not only reaches players on a gaming level, but touches an emotional chord as well. The Dreamcast isn’t a system that people simply play—it’s a console they truly care for.

Though the future will bring new games and systems, I don’t know if any of them will ever surpass what was accomplished on the Dreamcast. New games may boast more polygons, superior AI, and higher definition, but I’m not convinced that I’ll ever have a greater amount of fun and enjoyment than what is provided with my Dreamcast. Not only do I foresee the Dreamcast being perpetually connected to my television, but I have a feeling I’ll be celebrating its “birthday” in many Septembers to come.

[Mister Raroo is a happy husband, proud father, full-time public library employee, and active gamer. He currently lives in El Cajon, CA with his family and many pets. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com. Tonight he'll probably stay up way past his bedtime playing Dreamcast games.]

Posted by Bill Sannwald at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Our new series of ‘Road to the IGF’ interviews profiles the nine recently announced winners of the IGF Showcase at Austin GDC - with the local Southern U.S. indie developers to be showcased at the Texas game development show later this month.]

In this instalment of 'Road To The Austin IGF', we talk to Mockingbird Games' Troy Gilbert about his firm's user-generated games website Mockingbird.

The entry takes a rather different approach to indie development to the other Austin showcase winners, inviting “everyone to make their own games”. It “takes the pain out of game making and helps people tell stories using casual arcade games” using “a simple, intuitive set of tools”. Gilbert describes the site as reaching for the goal of becoming the “YouTube of games” by emphasizing the ability for anyone to make their own title – not just those with programming ability.

What is your background with video games?

Troy Gilbert: I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember, starting on my older brothers’ ColecoVision and Commodore 64 - the C64 is where I got my start programming. Video games and programming have been all-consuming hobbies of mine ever since.

In 2001, when I graduated from college, I finally got to make a job of the two when I joined Criterion in Austin. I spent the next several years flying all over North America trying to convince game developers to use RenderWare and then helping them make their games. This afforded me the opportunity to meet hundreds of game developers and see how dozens of different games were made.

Criterion was then acquired by EA and I was relocated to Vancouver where I helped game teams make their technology decisions.

When was Mockingbird formed?

TG: In 2006, Andy first suggested the idea to me: how would you do a 'YouTube of games'? We dubbed the project “Atticus” and began working on ideas. We both relocated back to Austin at the end of 2006 and kicked off our new startup: Mockingbird Games.

What inspired the site, and why did you decide to develop it?

TG: I think YouTube was the original inspiration. The two of us had been thinking about games from a AAA commercial perspective for a long time. Looking at YouTube - and other social media sites like Flickr - we wondered how you could apply the concept to video games.

Some would say that portal sites like Miniclip or Kongregate represent the 'YouTube of video games'. But they miss the critical feature of sites like YouTube or Flickr that makes them relevant: people. Miniclip, Kongregate, etc., feature games made by folks who know what they were doing: professionals, hobbyists, independents.

We wanted to see video games made by everyday people, games made casually, like one would shoot video with your camcorder or snap a pic with your cell phone. In the end, our idea has evolved quite a bit from where it started.

I wouldn’t personally call it the 'YouTube of games' because it’s not just a dumping ground of any and all game content on the web. But I think we’ve successfully extracted out what made YouTube different than video sites before it: people.

What were your expectations from your project, and do you feel the end > product lives up to those expectations?

TG: We wanted to give people an opportunity they hadn’t had before: we wanted to make it as easy to make a casual game as it is to play one. And I think we’ve succeeded at that. It’s passed the 'Mom test' - that is, both of our moms have made games with Mockingbird – and my mom hadn’t even played a video game before!

What do you think the most interesting thing about your site is?

TG: Its character. We like to think Mockingbird is 'charming'. One of our mantras while building Mockingbird was to “making games should be as fun as playing games.”

To that end, we worked very hard to make our core application not feel like a tool, but for it to feel like a game. That’s one reason why you’re playing your game while building it, what we call “live editing”. That’s also why the website looks the way it does.

Originally, we had a black-and-white, very web 2.0 looking site. It was clean and functional, but devoid of personality. We then had our artist create a banner for the homepage using some of our game characters and backgrounds. We liked the banner so much we redesigned the site to reflect it’s look and feel.

How long did development take, and what was the process like?

TG: We began development on Mockingbird full-time on January 2nd, 2007. The company only has two employees, myself and my business partner. I was doing all of the coding, while we worked together on the design and testing. We hired contractors to build artwork, sounds and the website. Our process is pretty informal.

Initially, I did a lot of experimentation with the user’s workflow as well as the look-n-feel of the app. Because I was the only programmer, I also spent a lot of time initially experimenting with the core engine that the games run on. Once we had a working app, Andy served as our representative user: he’s not a programmer nor a video game geek.

He’d spend a lot of time making games and pointing out the things he wanted to do but couldn’t. We had our first demo-ready build two months in and showed it off to some investor-types. The app was still really early and not entirely functional, but it showed how quickly you could make something “game-like” and how much fun the live editing was.

By mid-summer, we had what we considered to be an “alpha” version of the app. We took it around to a lot of game industry contacts from our former jobs. We were surprised by the feedback. Many asked, 'Do people really want to make their own game?'

Some thought the app wasn’t simple enough, while others thought it wasn’t complex enough to make the games people would want. We went back to the drawing board for a few months. What resulted was what we called the August Beta. I built a rudimentary website to host the app and invited friends and family to log-in and make their own games.

We showed the app to more people and solicited more feedback. We still had similar complaints, but it was easier for people to see our vision for the final site. We headed back to the drawing board for the fall. In December, we released the Christmas Beta. We got more good feedback. We were getting closer.

We came back from a much needed Christmas break and did a lot of brainstorming. During the next three months we went through at least two major re-designs of the entire app and site before settling on what we released publicly on April 30th, 2008.

Since we released publicly, we’ve re-designed the website twice and we’re on the second major revision to the app. For the most part, each change has moved us forward. At the least, we’ve learned something from each change.

How much creativity do you expect to see out of the site’s users in time?

TG: We’ve already seen some really surprising stuff. One of our earliest games was about Mexicans crossing the US border. We’ve had other games about the presidential race, about free market economies and about Indiana Jones.

What’s more exciting, though, are the games people have made about their kids or their friends. We’re going to keep expanding the possibilities of what Mockingbird can do, and I expect the creativity in the games is only going to get better.

And that was really a big part of our original dream for Mockingbird: to somehow shatter the mold of what people expect in video games, much in the same way that blogging platforms have given people a voice on the web that they would have never had otherwise.

What’s the scene in Austin like? Is there a feeling of community?

TG: I’m not as involved in the Austin scene as I’d like to be – a wife, two kids and a startup does not leave a lot of free time. I think Austin has an incredibly strong independent scene and a lot of opportunity for startups. The cost of living, which is the biggest expense for any indie, is way lower than on either of the coasts. Austin also has a community that is very supportive of indie efforts, whether they be in music, movies, business or games.

What do you think of the state of independent development, and how do you think independent games fit into the industry?

TG: I think indie games are stronger than ever. Much of this is thanks to the web. Developers talk to each other more, there are more blogs that devote space to indies, and with social sites like Digg or Kongregate, a good indie game can get propelled into the spotlight. The growing popularity of the “casual” game format has also made indie development more feasible. There’s a huge audience that enjoys short, simple games in 2D.

Much like the short film - and music videos and commercials - is where a lot of feature film directors get their start, I think the “short form” game can do the same for our medium’s indies.

Finally, improved tools make a difference as well. For those indies aspiring to do AAA 3D titles, options like XNA and Torque allow them to skip the drudgery that was the bread-n-butter of indie game
development just 5 years ago. And for those who are wanting to experiment with the medium without having to learn any special skills, there are options like Mockingbird.

Where do you see the site going from here?

TG: The site’s going to continue to evolve. We’ve got a – seemingly - never-ending list of features and variations we’d like to try. A big part of this is hearing from our users and finding out what they want in order to most quickly, and completely, express their ideas as games.

What kind of feedback have you received so far?

TG: Feedback has been great. Since the release of our game kits in early August, visitors are making more and more games everyday, staying longer, and coming back more often. Businesses are talking with us about integrating our game kit functionality into their online worlds and communities.

How important is solidifying a community to the site?

TG: Community isn’t critical to our business as we hope to generate the majority of our revenues through licensing the Mockingbird platform to other brands and businesses. On a personal level, though, we’d love to see a thriving community that can help us evolve Mockingbird organically.

Have you checked out any of the other Austin IGF games?

TG: I haven’t had the opportunity yet...

I’m lucky if I get more than a few hours each week to play any games, and most recently I devoted that time to Braid; an incredible indie title, congrats to Mr. Blow. I look forward to spending some time with the games at the Austin GDC as well as speaking with the developers.

Which recent indie games do you admire, and which recent mainstream titles do you admire, and why?

TG: Like I said, I found Braid to be pretty incredible. The gameplay, like any good puzzle game, is simple to learn, difficult to master. I know I definitely got a few new wrinkles from that game. And its aesthetics...wow...the art and music are beautiful, perfect compliments to the game.

I’ve been a little put off by mainstream titles recently - usually by their length and/or their complexity. I’m lucky if I can devote two or three hours total to any one game, so some of the recent favorites of the mainstream have simply been too big to be satisfying.

As a result, I end up playing a lot of web and Xbox Live Arcade titles. While not too recent, I liked the art direction of Bioshock, the overall production value of Call of Duty 4 and Grand Theft Auto IV, and I thought Assassin’s Creed did some really interesting things in the way
they contextualized their gameplay.

Do you have any messages for your fellow contestants or fans of the IGF?

TG: First, never give up. That’s probably the most common answer to that question but for good reasons. We’re lucky to be working in a medium and marketplace where one person (the true “indie”) can actually make not only critically but commercially successful titles.

But to get there, indies need to keep their focus on quantity over quality - it’s more important to finish five mediocre games than to “almost” finish one perfect game.

Second, try to drop the angst as soon as you can. Like most indie scenes, ours is filled with a lot of folks who are angry at AAA titles and consider all commercial game development to be selling out – which, of course, it is to a certain degree.

But that’s okay. Those AAA titles will blaze a path for our platforms into the mainstream and ultimately fund, either directly or indirectly, our indie efforts. Angry tirades at publishers look juvenile and naïve, while accusations directed toward specific titles discount the hard work of folks just like you and me that work on those teams.

Not everyone is lucky - or foolish! - enough to work independently!

Posted by alistairw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time for another day's hand-picked GameSetLink-age - this time headed by Mark Cooke discussing the history of the stylization of games - or something slightly more sophisticated that I can't quite describe, heh.

Also in here - the source code to the Atari 800 version of Donkey Kong (pictured) surfaces online, a little appreciation for the previously un-noticed Commando: Steel Disaster, more feedback on Christian video games, new archived videos from online worlds, and much more.

Please read now:

g-mixer . mark cooke . blog: Videogames Aging Gracefully
'Before that graphic plateau is hit if you want your game to be looked back upon fondly for its visual style then a realistic style is not the way to go.'

Braid, Aesthetics, and Ethics « Double Buffered
Annotating the recent 1UP FM podcast with Jon Blow, David Hellman, Rod Humble, et aliis.

DadHacker » Blog Archive » DK source code link
'Curt Vendel (who’s been groveling through a bunch of old Atari backup tapes for a number of years) has found and posted the source code to the Atari 800 version of Donkey Kong.'

ARGNet: Media Factory Produces Branded Alternate Reality Gaming Card Game
Detective Conan license in Japan: 'Cardtantei is a collectible trading card game that functions similar to Mind Candy's Perplex City.' Fascinating puzzle/ARG ramifications.

8Bit Joystick.com: PAX 08 : Flipping Sweet Psycho
Some lovingly crafted Psychonauts cosplay spawn a geek out alert.

Verbal Spew: 'The Blink-and-you'll-miss-it Files #1: Commando - Steel Disaster'
XS-published on DS, an so Metal Sluggy that it hurts, from an obscure Chinese dev team (Manasoft).

Guitar Praise Stirs Up A Conversation (a.k.a.–Can There Be Such a Thing as a Christian Video Game?) « The Weekend Gamer
Someone who works as a 'Pastor of Worship Arts' discusses Simon Parkin's recent GSW/Gama article on Christian games - v.interesting.

Will Wright on Spore: Cute vs. Science - Nerd World - Lev Grossman - TIME
'There was a fairly interesting dynamic between certain members of our team that we ended up calling the ‘cute’ team versus other members that we called the 'science' team.'

Update: the Archiving Virtual Worlds video collection | How They Got Game
'I am pleased to announce that the collection is closing in on 200 videos only a couple of months after its launch, thanks in large part to two important additions of videos.' Great Habitat video, via Bruce Damer.

The Independent Gaming Source: 'Action DooM 2: Urban Brawl'
'Whereas the original AD mixed Contra with Doom, AD2 is obviously inspired by beat ‘em up games like Final Fight.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['GDRI Wisdom' is a bi-weekly column presenting highlights from select interviews with overlooked game developers of years past, as seen on Game Developer Research Institute (GDRI).]

Much has been made of developer Tose in recent years, mostly because of the amount of games the company has been involved with and the secretive nature in which it operates.

Interviews have been done in the past with Tose staffers, but they have usually been with higher-ups, not with people who work in the proverbial trenches.

Daniel Auld is an American technologist and consultant who worked as a 3DO programmer at Tose in the early 1990s, and GDRI was very lucky to find his résumé online.

He worked on two games - a fighting game based on the Ultraman Powered television series and a graphic adventure based on the works of Japanese horror author Misa Yamamura. We asked him to share anything he could about his time there, and he gladly went into great detail in his own words, before we quizzed him further in a Q&A.

Auld On Tose

"Tose was a cut-out company, meaning they would be contracted by large game publishers to develop complete products, but would not put their name on it when released. The programmers would only get satisfaction by looking at the scrolling credits at the end of the game where they could watch their pseudonym names drift up the screen.

Tose was one of the first development houses to take on the task of writing software for the 3DO Multiplayer. At the time, there were concerns among investors that this device did not have a "killer app" that would catapult it past the established platforms from Nintendo, Sega, and Atari. Trip Hawkins, who came up with the idea for the product, repeatedly pointed to his reputation and said, "Trust me."

I was brought onboard with great excitement after responding to a classified ad the company had placed in the newspaper looking for American programmers. As a general rule, Japanese programmers are not known to be especially creative. If there is documentation, they are experts at applying and perfecting advanced techniques. But when it comes to "just winging it," they are typically paralyzed.

Americans are known to be very creative, and a great deal of incredible titles were coming out of the gaming houses in California and elsewhere at the time. For this reason, they were ecstatic to have me join their team, and the managers were doubly interested in my Japanese ability to help translate what I read/discovered to the rest of the team.

Interestingly, however, they would not give me credit for my work (possibly out of cultural pride). I would explain in detail some new feature that I had managed to figure out by trial and error (i.e., how to get sprites to behave in a 3D plane with appropriate clipping), but they would all stare at me with blank, confused looks, even though I spoke in Japanese.

Then the manager would repeat my words EXACTLY (literally to the syllable), and they would all say, "Oh, NOW I get it!" Very interesting (and frustrating, as you can imagine). I stayed at the company from 1992 to 1994, making around 200,000 yen per month (roughly $1450 with the exchange rate at the time).

About a year after I got there, The 3DO Company was going to present at a large convention in Las Vegas (possibly the CES show?), and we would be able to ask direct questions to their engineers. This was a perfect opportunity for me to travel with my Japanese co-workers and get first-hand answers to our questions (I would act as translator).

The managers indicated to the president that they REALLY wanted me to go with them -- but the president refused since I had only been at the company for a year at that point, and he "couldn't justify the expense for such a new employee." That didn't make sense to me, but [it] demonstrates how strict the adherence to rules [was] at the company, regardless of rational arguments to the contrary.

In the end, it cost the company more in lost time as the managers who went could barely speak a word of English, and the video tapes they brought back of their trip had such terrible sound, I couldn't make out what was being said. Our questions remained unanswered.

There were at least three managers that I remember, one of which reported directly to the president of the company, who was probably in his early 30s at the time (though it is sometimes difficult to tell the age of Asians). This man was incredibly wealthy, which created a stark dichotomy with the rank-and-file workers (of which I was one). While the president was fussing over where to park his 10th boat, some of the programmers were paid so little, they actually had to stop eating near the end of the month when their money ran out.

The managers were in the typical "salaryman" mode of work, where they would show up at 5:00a and stay until 1:00 or 2:00a. In Japan, it is said that "the company is your mother and takes care of you, so you owe it your full devotion." At one point, I asked one of the managers (who was married with two children), "Doesn't your wife mind that you are never home?" He replied simply, "She minds," and left it at that.

The floor I worked on was sparsely staffed -- about 20 people total. Half were working on cartridge games for the established platforms, the rest on 3DO. The cartridge programmers were on one side of the floor and worked with large desktop boxes that served as emulators for the final product and would compile/run machine code directly. The documentation for these systems was very detailed, and the engineers had no problem finding the information they needed (it was all in Japanese).

By contrast, the 3DO team were all on Macintosh desktops and had only skeletal documentation, all in English, that looked like it had been photocopied at Kinko's late at night. Large sections of this 3-ring binder simply said "TBD," and there were areas where the hardware was changing so fast that what was printed was already obsolete -- the documentation was definitely not keeping up with the hardware evolution. In a few cases, the text suggested some ideas on how to use a particular feature and encouraged us to "play around to see what you can accomplish" -- that was an alien concept to the Japanese programmers I worked with.

One interesting point of working at Tose was the attitude toward copyright and piracy. The company had no problem copying anything they could find, though they called it "borrowing the idea." There were elements of competitors' games that they couldn't figure out how to do (very advanced sprite animation, for example), so they would simply buy the game and without even playing it, put the cartridge in their hardware and pull the code apart.

The societal attitude towards gender roles also came through in the company environment: On our floor was a small area where we could prepare coffee or tea. There were cups, hot water, etc. as well as a sink to clean the dishes once you were finished. At one point, I had finished my drink and began washing my cup to put back on the rack. The president of the company tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, the women will take care of that.""

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Auld talks more in-depth about 3DO hardware and software in the full interview.]

Q&A: Daniel Auld

GDRI: Did you go by a pseudonym on the games you worked on?

DA: I don't recall what pseudonym I used, but it was probably something like "Elvis" in homage to The King.

GDRI: Do you remember any other games being developed at Tose besides those you worked on?

DA: I remember Tose working on the Dragon Ball Z series while I was there, but I don't recall specifically which one.

GDRI: Were employees assigned games to work on? Considering Tose's supposed output, might an employee work on multiple games at the same time?

DA: Employees were definitely assigned to more than one game at a time. While I was there, I contributed to both of the titles I've mentioned, and I know some of the other programmers had been splitting their time between 3DO and console programming (most of our guys came from that side of the house originally).

GDRI: How long did it take to develop a game? Do you know how long it took between the end of development and release?

DA: As far as the time frame to complete a title and then bring it to market, I didn't have any visibility into that realm. I know for the entire two years I was there, we were heads-down on 3DO, and neither game was quite ready for prime time when I left, but they did come out eventually.

Ccome to think of it, I don't believe I've ever heard anyone else mention Ultraman anywhere except me, so that product may have died on the vine [ED: It didn't.] -- the action on the 3DO console was not as fluid and crisp as what was available on Nintendo/Atari/Sega, so it may not have been able to compete. What made the Multiplayer unique at the time was the ability to play video and some of the specialized hardware).

GDRI: Were there any other non-Japanese staffers working at Tose?

DA: I remember there being one attorney who was white, American, and far more proficient at Japanese than I was. I don't remember his name as I only met him once while in a large board meeting. It is very possible there were others as well, as I did not meet everyone in the building.

GDRI: What brought you to Japan to begin with?

DA: Originally, I went to Japan with an exchange program from Antioch College in Ohio. We went over for six months to perform around the country in a traveling theater troupe. When the program ended, everyone went home except me, who had already found work as a programmer (not with Tose yet). I ended up staying another 3 1/2 years until coming back to the U.S. in 1995.

[Game Developer Research Institute is a website dedicated to finding out more about game development companies and people in the industry.]

Posted by gdri at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Over at our sister IndieGames.com weblog, Tim W. has been rolling out some smart interviews recently -- and here's another neat one, from super-nice IGF award-winner and GAMMA indie game competition co-organizer Phil Fish. Hurray!]

It's been close to a year since the last published interview with Phil Fish was posted on the web, so we decided to do a bit of catching up with the designer of Fez and new face of IGF by asking him a couple of questions to find out what he's been working on.

Hi Phil, can you tell us something about yourself and what it is exactly that you do?

I'm Phil Fish, and I co-founded two things: Kokoromi and Polytron. One is an experimental game/art collective, and the other is a company. I do art and design on all my projects. And I guess I'm mostly known for Fez.

Any plans to put out something before the release of Fez, or ideas on what to do next after Fez?

I'm working on a couple of different things. I can't write a single line of code, so I always have to work with a good programmer.

Right now I'm collaborating with Alec Holowka on a little iPhone game that will probably come out way before Fez. It's a bit early to commit to anything yet, but Alec and I are making this cool little game that's all about multi-touch. You play as a little dose of medicine inside people's bodies, and you have to cure them.

And Kokoromi is making a game for GAMMA 3D this year (we didn't make one for last year).

Tell us more about GAMMA 3D then.

GAMMA is in its third year this year, and this time around the theme is stereoscopy (of the red/blue variety). It's taking place in Montreal, on November 19th. All the details can be found at www.kokoromi.org/gamma3d.

I noticed this cool fact the other day. GAMMA, BLiP, T.O JAM and the I AM 8-BIT show are all three years old this year. So I guess 2006 really was the year of the cultural game related annual event!

Any central location where we can get the games submitted to GAMMA from previous years?

All the games that were released by their creators (some weren't) are available on the Kokoromi site.

When will the games from GAMMA 3D be made available for download, for the people who cannot attend?

That's all up to their creators. Developers retain all rights to their games. But usually, yeah, most of those games end up being released online.

What were your favorite GAMMA games from previous years?

Last year saw some truly awesome games. Petri's Bloody Zombies was great fun, and so was Mr. Heart Loves You Very Much. Both made great use of their clever little gameplay twists.

And of course, Jason Rohrer's Passage blew everybody's mind and went on to make waves everywhere for months and months.

Since GAMMA 3D submissions requires 3D glasses, any recommendations on where to get the proper equipment to play the games once they're available for download?

Yes. You can buy really cheap 3D glasses from eBay. They cost like 40 cents each.

We had this meeting with this stereoscopy expert friend of ours, and we asked him what our options were. And he gave us three options. We could use polarized lenses, with special projectors and special screens, all very expensive, and practically impossible for the developers to test on a computer. Then we had these crazy double-matrix TV of the future, that can work WITHOUT GLASSES, but then again, super pricey and impossible to test.

And so remained the good old anaglyphic glasses, which can easily be tested on any kind of screen, monitor or projector, is super cheap, and has that nice little low-fi aesthetic that lends itself so well to the kind of experimentation we hope will take place. We did some tests recently, at the venue, on their projectors, and just a simple rotating wireframe model was spectacular.

Do you have any plans to take GAMMA out of Montreal?

We'd like to take it on the road, actually. Since so much of the fun comes from actually being at the party, we're thinking of taking the party to other cities.

What are your future plans for GAMMA?

Well, we'll wait to see how things go with GAMMA 3D before we start thinking about GAMMA 4.

How did the idea for GAMMA 3D came about?

Funny story, the idea for GAMMA 3D came to us on the cab ride home from GAMMA 256. Last year, our cut for the night (there is a cover) was something like 30 bucks. So we just used it to pay ourselves a cab ride home.

And on the way home, I mused about how since year 2 was 256, we should try to come up with a theme that incorporates the number 3. And the first thing that came to mind was GAMMA 3D. We immediately became super excited about the prospect of a stereoscopic gamma. And it was pretty much decided right there and then.

Then at GDC we met with some gentlemen from Texas Instruments, who wanted to show us their crazy new 3D TVs that use shutter glasses for amazing HD stereoscopy that runs at 120fps. They showed us all sorts of cool 3D stuff in games, but all using games like Call of Duty and Project Gothams. The games jumped out of the TV, and it looked incredible, but there was no gameplay to it at all. But it was fantastic HD 3D.

And that got us even more excited about GAMMA 3D, because stereoscopy in games is still totally unexplored territory. Even the few next-gen games being developed now with 3D modes, they are still being developed to be played on regular TVs.

Since the game is still developed for the lowest common denominator, who's a dude with a regular TV, the stereoscopy remains a flashy extra with no consequences on gameplay. So, if you think of GAMMA 3D as a unified platform where 100% of the users are equipped for 3D, it becomes really interesting.

Will there be free flow of drinks at GAMMA 3D?

Some of it will be free, yes.

Anything you're looking forward to playing in IGF this year? Early predictions?

Well, I'm not sure exactly who's entering what, but I can't wait to find out. IGF just keeps getting better and better every year. And I'm really looking forward to seeing Annabelle's game, Ciellus.

Any plans on participating in another IGF competition?

If I can some other year, yeah sure, why not. It's great fun, and it helps me to have a rock solid deadline. I can submit FEZ+!

I'm really excited to be on the other side next year. And I'm glad I have a good reason to go to GDC again!

What are some of your favorite indie games? And what's your favorite IGF entry from last year?

Well, I don't like to play favorites. So in no particular order I'd say Braid, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Everyday Shooter, Rescue: The Beagles and I totally consider Geometry Wars to be an indie classic, considering it was a one man job, and is totally amazing.

My favourite last year was definitely Crayon Physics Deluxe. It's just such a pure joy of a game. Petri and I have a little idea we want to get started on. He's crashing my place for GAMMA, so hopefully we can get started on that then.

Final question then. Anything you'd like to say to the eager fans of Fez?

Winning the IGF was great and all, but now we're being real careful not to be victims of premature hype. We knew the game was going to take a while to make, considering it's pretty much just me and Renaud. We didn't want to sustain a year-long hype campaign, and it's so bizarre to have fans of something that isn't even out yet!

But if you think you like it now, just wait. JUST YOU WAIT.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aha, now we're picking out the best posts of the rest of the week from big sister site Gamasutra and elsewhere on our Think Services sites/blogs - with a couple of standout interviews leading things out.

In particular, our chats with Tomb Raider Underworld's Eric Lindstrom and Fallout 3's Emil Pagliarulo showcase the thoughtful interview style that we try to engender in all of our writers. And there's also XBLA game design documentation, some neat GCG competitions, Sins Of A Solar Empire's impressive sales number, and lots more:

Gamasutra Features

Lara Croft's Legacy: Moving Tomb Raider Forward
"Crystal Dynamics creative director Eric Lindstrom talks the challenges and joys of designing Lara's next steps forward in Tomb Raider: Underworld -- part renewal, part return to form?"

Revitalizing a Heritage: The Writing of Fallout 3
"As lead designer and writer of Fallout 3, Bethesda's Emil Pagliarulo is in a unique position to craft the game's style -- and he talks in-depth to Gamasutra about designing the much-awaited title."

Gamasutra/Other Originals

Wardell: Sins Of A Solar Empire Hits Low System Reqs-Aided 500,000 Units
"Despite a development budget under a million dollars, Stardock and Ironclad Games' Sins of a Solar Empire has sold a total of 500,000 full-price units at retail and online, Stardock's Brad Wardell revealed to Gamasutra - in part because the PC RTS is "...explicitly designed to work on a wide variety of machines.""

Documents of Newly Published Xbox Live Game Made Public
"Two official documents that got a new game, Shred Nebula, published on Xbox Live Arcade have been released to the public by James Goddard, CEO and founder of CrunchTime Games, Inc. The papers are being made available to foster more open communication between the professional industry and students of game development."

The Advent Of The 3D Camera: Softkinetic CEO Tombroff Sees Console Future, PC Possibilities
"3D camera systems have not caught on in gaming just yet -- but they seem to have massive potential, and in this interview, SDK developer Softkinetic CEO Michel Tombroff discusses his company's role in delivering that potential to both developers and gamers on PCs and consoles."

GCG's Design Challenge: RPG Competition, Weapons Winners Announced
"Sister site GameCareerGuide.com, which runs a weekly game design challenge, has announced a new competition involving scripting a mini-quest for a fantasy RPG, also revealing winners of a challenge in which aspiring game developers designed a new weapon for a FPS game."

Analysis: Pachter Suggests, Sony Rebuts On Xbox 360 Price Cuts
"Analyst Michael Pachter tells Gamasutra that a potentially supply-constrained Wii and a widening price gulf between Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 might give Microsoft a 20 percent sales boost for the holiday season -- but Sony's Julie Han asks us: "How sustainable is that in the long term?""

Bethesda's Pagliarulo: Episodic Gaming 'Just Doesn't Get The Press'
"Fallout 3 lead writer & designer Emil Pagliarulo says great strides in game writing and design are often overlooked in episodic add-ons for Half-Life 2 and Oblivion, suggesting: "Unless it's a full game, unless it's got that full PR marketing blitz... I think people miss out.""

[Want to get RSSed-up with all Think Services' game sites? Quick list goes like this: GameSetWatch's RSS (editor.blog), IndieGames' RSS (indie.games), WorldsInMotion's RSS (online.worlds), GamerBytes' RSS (console.downloads), GamesOnDeck's RSS (mobile.games), Gamasutra's RSS (main.site), and GameCareerGuide's RSS (edu.news).]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Instead of the traditional round-up or magazine focus for Game Mag Weaseling, there is just one page I'd like to share with you: the review of Genesis classic Gunstar Heroes, printed in the very first issue of UK magazine Edge, way back in October 1993.

Modern Edge is written a lot better, I promise!

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[On occasion, I may be reading my Gamasutra colleague Chris Remo's excellent weblog, and ask nicely to yoink one of his posts for GameSetWatch. This post -- dealing with his chat to the Crytek folks about their custom-branded Crysis-related PC -- is one of those.]

About a month ago, I reported that EA was planning to market a Crysis Warhead-ready PC. I have now learned that the machine—which, at least among the Crytek staff that specced it out, is called the “Warhead PC”—will be officially announced next week.

In my original post, I pegged the price to be between $600 and $800; as it turns out, it’s almost exactly in between, at $699, and it will apparently be coming in a single SKU. It will be sold by UltraPC, and unveiled by EA. Crytek, Nvidia, EA, and UltraPC were all involved.

I spoke with Crysis franchise producer Bernd Diemer, who explained the history behind the machine. ”When we started working on Warhead, we decided performance was a big issue,” he said. “So we said, ‘Guys, we’re going to build a PC which has a maximum price of six or seven hundred dollars, and it has to run Warhead in high spec at an average framerate of 30.’ We built that PC—Crytek in the Budapest office [where Warhead was developed]—and we put it in the middle of the studio, and every review was on that machine. All the milestone presentations we did for EA, for the Yerlies [founding brothers Cevat, Avni, and Faruk], for the team, all the new prototypes, we showed on that machine.”

Eventually, they began referring to it as “the Warhead PC,” and used it as a way to force efficiency and optimization: if frames were dropping on the Warhead PC on a high graphics level, the team would tweak the game to better scale to the hardware. (I can attest to the results, having played through a full level today and being impressed by the consistent framerate and visuals, before being told it was a “Warhead PC.”)

“For us, it was really helpful, because we sort of had a hard cap,” Diemer told me. “You couldn’t say, ‘It works on my computer, looks great on my machine.’ No no no, this is the benchmark, guys. If it sucks on this, the whole thing sucks. For us as a team, that was really valuable. We had a tangible border we could bump our heads into.”

The Crytek team originally planned simply to give the Warhead PC’s specs to EA to use for the recommended requirements, but eventually Nvidia got involved and it became clear that there was no reason that such a machine couldn’t simply be sold straight to consumers looking for an easy entry (or re-entry) into PC gaming.

Though I don’t have every nitty gritty hardware detail, I did get the machine’s most important specs:

- CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
- Video card: Nvidia 9800GT
- RAM: 2GB

I snapped a picture of the Warhead PC I used today. It had no external branding, and it wasn’t clear whether the final version (which can be preordered next week and will ship alongside Crysis Warhead on September 16) will, although a Crysis-themed desktop background will be preloaded. It’s a visually conservative rig, but I appreciated that there weren’t a dozen obnoxious blue neon lights swirling visibly through a plexiglass window—we’ll see what the shipping machine brings.

As Diemer was sure to point out, ”EA’s not getting into the hardware business, and Crytek isn’t either.” Rather, the companies are trying to practically combat the idea that to play high-end PC games at high levels of detail, you need to spend in excess of a thousand dollars. “The biggest thing for us is convenience,” Diemer added. “We want to make PC gaming convenient.”

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Hope all of your GSW fiends are having a pleasant weekend - as am I, thanks to a relaxing holiday atmosphere and a bountiful set of interesting GameSetLinks.

In here somewhere - a new mini-competition for the new N+ XBLA pack, custom Bangai-O DS levels from pro designers, new official Amiga emulation packs, Jeff Green's game journalism departure (aw!), geeked-out collector things, and much more.

Things to do:

N+ Level Pack Contesque: Part the Second | metablog
Another gigantic N+ XBLA level update coming, yay. I'm boycotting this competition because there's no level in this pack named after me this time, of course.

IGN: Bangai-O Spirits Elite Design Contest
'D3Publisher tapped select videogame industry luminaries and invited them to craft exclusive game levels using the level editing tools in D3Publisher's latest Nintendo DS system game, Bangai-O Spirits.' Neat idea.

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: The OTHER consoles.
'I'm not suggesting that everyone run out and write games for the Leapster. I don't think the market's there to sustain that many titles. I do think, however, that we could all benefit from having slightly wider peripheral vision.'

News from the the other side: A PR person posts on Shoe's blog - Quarter To Three Forums
The QT3 folks are razorsharp, and many of them on both sides of the biz, thus this discussion is fascinating.

Hit Self-Destruct: Other Things
On Jeff Green's departure to EA's The Sims franchise - further illustration that consumer game journalism is collapsing as a career (but game writing is more vibrant than ever, oddly enough).

Cloanto Releases Amiga Forever 2008 "RP2"
Good to see from a preservation perspective: 'Cloanto released this week Amiga Forever 2008 "RP2", the latest version of the award-winning Amiga preservation, emulation and support suite for Windows and other platforms, and a first batch of 10 games in the new RP2 format.'

Xbox 360 defects: an inside history of Microsoft’s video game console woes » VentureBeat
Excellent longform Takahashi piece.

Kotaku: Why 7-Eleven Suddenly Loves Gamers
Bizarre, pre-ordering top games at your local convenience store?

YouTube - transparentjinjo's Videos
Some pretty interesting Rare prototypes here, including Sabreman Stampede for Xbox 360.

Sealed Sega Dreamcast dev 50 Blank GDROM HKD-06 - eBay (item 190248866984 end time Sep-08-08 20:08:30 PDT)
For all your, uhh, GD-ROM burning needs.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)