• Monday (Tuesday) Mailbag: testing, complexity, a paper

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    This was supposed to get posted yesterday and didn’t. 😛

    Im a concerned mom and my son wants to sign up for $34.99 at www.igametester.com to get paid to play video games. My question is do you know if this is a legitimate company? I guess I come from the ol’skool and if you need people why should they have to pay to work for you?

    I have never heard of the company, but you are absolutely correct that testing games is generally a paid job.

    Read More “Monday (Tuesday) Mailbag: testing, complexity, a paper”

  • Dr. Horrible’s Master Plan

    Hours Categories Watching
    Comments 11 Comments
    The "poster"

    Technically, it’s Joss Whedon’s Master Plan, but who could tell the difference?

    I’m talking about Dr. Horrible, of course.

    ONE WEEK ONLY! AN INTERNET MINISERIES EVENT!

    “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” will be streamed, LIVE (that part’s not true), FREE (sadly, that part is) right on Drhorrible.com, in mid-July. Specifically:

    ACT ONE (Wheee!) will go up Tuesday July 15th.

    ACT TWO (OMG!) will go up Thursday July 17th.

    ACT THREE (Denouement!) will go up Saturday July 19th.

    All acts will stay up until midnight Sunday July 20th. Then they will vanish into the night, like a phantom (but not THE Phantom — that’s still playing. Like, everywhere.)

    There’s plans to have a DVD later, and supposedly we’ll learn more at Comic-Con…

  • Music game lawsuit chain

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 15 Comments

    Just to keep things straight…

    Konami is suing Harmonix over music game patents. Harmonix is owned by Viacom, which bought them because they owned patents on music games themselves, which everyone thought made Activision’s purchase of Red Octane, which published Guitar Hero, kind of funny since they got the brand but not the underlying IP, though then Activision accused Harmonix of being imitative of… itself when Rock Band was announced; and proceeded to have a different developer make the game. Naturally, Konami started out by having patents on Guitar Freaks, though in fact MTV (Viacom) also owned patents on drum games themselves already, and Konami is now also making their own full-band game. Activision apparently has a license on the Konami stuff (did Red Octane?), but they’re getting sued by Gibson who have a patent on music games as well, even though the Gibson guitars were in Guitar Hero based on a licensing deal. Activision did buy a bunch of other patents, and lists them in the game’s docs, though. No word on whether the dispute over royalties supposedly owed to Harmonix, now Viacom, by Red Octane, now Activision Blizzard, over whether the Guitar Hero sequels are new games or the same game with new content, has been resolved. There was a lawsuit about that too, but they decided to negotiate instead.

    You follow?


  • Golemizer!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    Blog regular Over00 writes,

    Like many people, I always wanted to be able to bring some of my MMOs ideas to reality. Of course, ideas are cheap and everybody got THE good one. So I thought enough dreaming and more doing.

    So about a year ago, I started to work on a framework with the same tools I’m using for my day job: .NET, SQL and Javascript. After a month of design/planning and another one of coding, I had a prototype ready.

    Read More “Golemizer!”

  • A game designer’s core skills

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 39 Comments

    The two hardest and most critical skills for a game designer (IMHO):

    • Be able to see the game with no hint of artwork, music, sound, anything — the bare rules, bare mechanics, bare actions, stats, feedback loops. The skeleton, the core, the bone and sinew of it, without any dressing, as a shifting, moving mechanical construct of guy wires and rigid struts. It’s not an attack, it’s force projection, it’s territory control in a graph. And you can see it in your head, and when a feature gets proposed, you can see where it slots in — or not, and know whether the whole construct will tip over.
    • Be able to see the game without any mechanics, any rules, any knowledge of how it should play — to approach it as a user experience, the magical moment of immersion, the confusion, the dazzle and colors, the sheer sense of possibility and play. The skin, the surface, the way the music will swell when you step through that door, the way that moving will FEEL, the way the possibilities unfold. To know where someone would be confused, to know where they will be led, to see the whole construct as an innocent.

    And a great designer? They should be able to see both in their head at once.