22 Feb 2007, 12:43
Late last year, I accepted a job offer from Radical Entertainment, and I will be moving to rainy Vancouver next Monday. The past month has been quite busy with preparations, spending time with friends and family, and yes, playing World of Warcraft as well. The arrangements for the move have been fairly smooth thanks to Radical’s fine HR crew Nicole and Marc (good luck in Google!). I expect to do a lot more hands-on programming there than I have been able to during the past years.
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16 Jan 2007, 19:16
The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft’s first expansion pack, is out, and presumably, 8 million subscribers will be buying it in the next few weeks. As far as numbers go, it should become the fastest selling videogame in history. Aside from a few bugs and the expected server overloads / crashes, the launch seems to have gone quite smoothly, and most people are loving it (me included!). It is more of the same polished and playable gameplay and content, don’t expect any radical changes.
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13 Jan 2007, 05:40
Everyone’s favourite indie developer Introversion have started a very promising development blog where they hope to describe the ongoing process for their new project Subversion. In one of the entries, Chris shows some prototype work on procedurally-generated cities, including a fascinating (and hard to play – use VLC Player) video.
The whole thing reminds me of an older post.
12 Jan 2007, 10:08
Gamasutra has posted a commented reproduction of the Call of Duty: Their Finest Hour development contract between Sparks Interactive and Activision. This document was made public as part of the legal battle between the two companies. It contains everything: clauses, obligations, warranties, assignment of rights, dates and payments, royalties, key team members – the whole shebang. Three lawyers comment the details of each section, and what problems they think could arise in the future.
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11 Jan 2007, 09:14
Designostic, the Spanish game design site, has been recreated as Gameto. It includes a News section along with the Articles, and a lot of new features. The intent of the site creators is to extend its coverage to all aspects of videogame development. I went ahead and submitted a Review of what I consider to be one of the best games of 2006, Lego Star Wars II.
10 Jan 2007, 06:27
In the wake of the Slamdance fiasco (6 finalists have already dropped), I’m ending up checking the entries. I ran into Book & Volume, and thought it might give me new respect for the current state of Interactive Fiction.
After 5 minutes, it’s only given me despair. It works like a classic text adventure: a bunch of text and a prompt where you write what you want to do. So the game starts: I’m in a room, there’s a pager buzzing.
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08 Jan 2007, 09:34
These past days I’ve been increasingly interested in the controversy raised by this game, its inclusion and later removal from the roster of finalists of the Slamdance Festival, and the debates the whole thing has created. I won’t bother linking every piece of the story, as other people have already done so. You can download the game from the Manifesto site, or (given how bad the actual gameplay is) watch a video run of it.
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03 Jan 2007, 19:31
Excellent article here. Worthy alone for the differentiation between having goals and pushing the player in certain directions. It should be obvious that “giving you something to do”, and “forcing you to do something” do not need to be present together, but I had never thought of that in the context of sandbox and linear games.
02 Jan 2007, 09:18
Best wishes to everyone reading this! The rest can go f… nah, best wishes to them as well. 🙂
26 Dec 2006, 12:11
Whereas the visuals for Hard Candy didn’t totally do it for me, Children of Men is a whole different thing. A very unforgiving look at how our modern society would destroy itself if the reins were let a bit loose. The movie has some problems with pacing and very unlikely resolutions to some situations, but it still well worth watching. The visual design is amazing and (in my opinion) deserves at least an Oscar for Cinematography.
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