There’s an excellent article entitled “Games as Art: Project Horseshoe 2006” on Amped News. It goes into more depth about not just the “Influences” talk I gave, but about many of the broader issues as well.
Which serves as a good reminder to also point to Dan Cook’s summary of development processes in the games biz, advocating stage gate development. This was a major topic of discussion at Horseshoe 2006.
I mentioned this already in my post on GDC talks, but I wanted to call out Jon Blow’s very cool session entitled Nuances of Design, which he has written up over on the Braid blog. Basically, most times you go to GDC and watch people with Powerpoint presentations about games or at best videos of games.
But Jon is doing something different — he’s asking some of us to actually have games on hand, and he’s going to provide every person who walks into the room an installer so they can play the games as we talk about them.
Well, here I am doing a whole bunch of talks and panels and stuff next week at the Game Developers Conference. What’s more, I go straight from there to SXSW Interactive, where I’ll do two more panels.
Here’s the short form, and the long form is after the jump.
GDC:
Alas, this means I will miss this session which may be of particular interest to some readers here. I know it has some inspiration from the talk I gave two years ago, and can’t wait to finally see what they have developed!
A Working Notation for Game Design (Sponsored by ITI Techmedia)
Speaker: Paul Sheppard (R&D Programme Manager, ITI Techmedia), Andrew McLennan (Metaforic), Chris Walton (Metaforic)Session Description
Making games that play well is an uncertain business, widely regarded as a black art. This session proposes a working notation for game design that can be used to understand games and why they work or fail. Real examples will be shown to illustrate the notation and its practical application.
SXSW:
But for all-new jobs! What we’re looking for:
We’ve got benefits, stock options, all that jazz. Drop a line to [email protected] if one of these people is you!
For some reason, today was “REALLY retro” game day here at work. And after we moved from Star Raiders to the TRS-80 version of Space War, I remembered another oldie game I loved: Star Traders, which I played on an Osborne I running CP/M.
A quick Google later I find bsittler’s Home Page, which has some very familiar source code on it (scroll a bit down). I remember trying to port this very same source code from MS-BASIC to Atari BASIC…
And then, a bit later, I’m playing it. Grab it here (tiny ZIP file). The “ntrade” version no longer works, but the old classic version still does. Eridani Outfitters has merged with Betelgeuse, and there was a 2 for 1 stock split…
