Back about 8 years ago when I was in the industry, I really wanted to make a game based on the concept of running around, a race game on your feet with a ton of obstacles. I saw it as a mix of Crazy Taxi (especially the bright colored arcadey look), the movie Run, Lola, [...]
The act of mimicking something is interesting. It’s one part empathy, another part motivation. Empathy is of course feeling what someone else feels, often because we have similar personal experiences. Part of our brain is dedicated to this function, and it helps make us the social creatures we are. One side-effect of this is how [...]
We’re now definitely in a new era of game development. No longer is the games industry languishing in perpetual geekdom – it’s going mainstream in a big way. Investment dollars are pouring in, and the hype dial is cranked up very high. A lot of this money is going into massively multiplayer games, for better [...]
One of the few big annoyances in games has always been the rendering of shorelines. No matter what, they’ve always felt really artificial – a hard intersection of the water plane and a solid surface. Take a look at the latest Lord of the Rings Online update for DirectX 10, courtesy of games site HardOCP: [...]
This post over at juice analytics is rather descriptive of my latest project, one which I hope I can launch in January or February. The gist is that constraints really help you focus your thinking, unleash your creativity, and generally make better stuff. I’ve ascribed to this process a lot in my creative work, and [...]
Just mere months after a brutal counter-hype cycle of Second Life bore its ugly head, I’m predicting we’re going to have some of the same counter-hype coming to the Wii. But first, allow me to take a slight (large?) tangent and take a step back from the (legitimate or otherwise) complaints about either product to [...]
