The last two weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. First, Yuki and I flew to Vienna, Austria where we visited our friends Lev, Christoph, Claudia, and Babsi. While there we attended the Game City event and visited the swank offices of Avaloop. While sleeping in Vienna we took advantage of its location to make day trips to Salzburg, Budapest, and Bratislava. We’re in agreement that Budapest was an awesome surprise.

Next we went to Copenhagen to attend the Unite 2008 conference. I covered the event for Gamasutra; here are some stories that I submitted:

• http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20773
• http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20779
• http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20813

While there I had the chance to participate in a round table interview with Unity execs, Atari President Phil Harrison, and former Criterion CEO David Lau-kee. If Gamasutra doesn’t post the entire interview I’ll eventually post it here on my site.

Other highlights from Copenhagen included the Danish Design Center (a museum of product design) and a brand new restaurant in the trendy Norrebro neighborhood. It was very reasonable, the service was friendly, the latte was outstanding, and the atmosphere was cozy. It is called Café N, except there is an Arabic-like tilde above the N. You can find it here.

And finally, I’ll be leaving Copenhagen tomorrow morning and heading to Toronto to represent Core Talent Games at GameON: Finance 2.0. Core Talent Games was announced earlier this week and is a new venture that I’ve been working on with the other co-founders since April. I love it when a plan comes together.

Yesterday was pretty eventful. First of all, the Game Career Guide was released, you can get it here for free as a web viewable magazine, or as a downloadable PDF. It includes a top ten list for aspiring producers, written by my good pal Michael Boccieri (page 58). It also includes a quiz written by me (page 103), with a few questions by my friend Brandon Sheffield. Some of my more sarcastic questions which didn’t make the cut are viewable in this post’s comments.

Next up, Kongai, Kongregate’s Online Collectible Card Game was finally released. My friend Sirlin lead the design on this project and has really done a great job with it! Early in the project I helped Sirlin with some of the usability and mechanics design. I got my first chance to play it today and was really happy to see that many of my contributions made it into the final game.

And Finally, my friends Charlie and Max at Unknown Worlds announced that they are rolling their own engine for their forthcoming game Natural Selection 2.

No wait! This just in, my friends Dan and Zach at The Retronyms released their first iPhone app. Yestesterday was truely a day of releases! The app is called, simply, Recorder. You can see a video of it in action by following that link, or a funier one here. Both videos were made in another Retronym application called InOneTake.

Dancing is a series of videos on wherethehellismatt.com. I found out about this on my friend Dan’s blog. These videos, which have gotten progressively better, are really amazing. If you have time I suggest watching them in this order: Dancing 2005, Dancing 2006, Dancing 2008; if you’re short on time then you can just watch Dancing 2008. I was very moved by these videos and have watched each of them at least three times! Matt, who is dancing, used to be a game designer!

The Passage is an Art Game that has gotten the attention of many designers. You can download it here. Play through it a few times (5 minutes per session) and then read the Creator’s Statement. I think this is a game that Matt would appreciate!

I wish that there was a greater amount of moving media. I’m really happy when short form, somewhat avant guard stuff—like the above—ends up being genuinely moving. When you compare this to the amount of stuff that tends to be just a distraction, or art for art sake, it becomes an unexpected treasure!

The minimal website for Studio Interrupt, my new venture, went up earlier this week. Studio Interrupt shares the name of a previous entity through which I used to collaborated with friends during university; a name I continued to use as a documentary film maker before entering into the video game industry. Now, with much more experience under my belt, but the same collaborative spirit, I am devoting my full-time efforts to getting Studio Interrupt and our various productions off the ground. So far it has been an, at times intimidating, bag of fun, stress, limitless possibilities, learning, and a test of self-discipline. I’ve been getting tons of advice from entrepreneurial friends (thank you!), and a lot of buy in to our model and ideas from other developers.

Our focus is co-producing game projects, but we are very interested in collaborating with specialists from other fields as well. I can’t say too much more for now but I’ll definitely continue to update the world through this blog and the one on StudioInterrupt.com!

Stormfront Studios sent out an email to their employees this week asking what games they “respect for their fun, creativity, innovation, and quality”. There will be a vote to determine the top four names which will be used to name the Scrum rooms in the new office. Here were the game titles given by the respondents:

Advanced Wars, Asteroids, Axis and Allies, Battle Balls, Blood Wake, Bubble Bobble, Candyland, Castlevania, Centipede, Checkers, Chess, Civilization, Clue, Command & Conquer, Contra, Cyberball, Deus Ex, Diablo, Diddy Kong, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Doom, Frogger, Galaga, Gauntlet, Go, Gran Turismo, Half Life, Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Hogan’s Alley, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Jedi Knight, Joust, Katamari Damacy, Legend of Zelda, Lode Runner, Magic the Gathering, Marble Madness, MegaMan, Metroid, Monkey Island, Mousetrap, MULE, Myst, Netrek, Oblivion, Pac Man, Parappa the Rappa, Pikmin, Pitfall, Poker, Pong, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Puerto Rico, Quake, Rez, Risk, Robotron, Scrabble, Seven Cities of Gold, Sim City, Skara Brae, Sonic, Space Invaders, Spy Hunter, SSX, Starcraft, Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros, Super Sprint, Tempest, Tetris, Tie-Fighter, Ultima, Unreal, Virtua Fighter, Warcraft, X-Wing, Yahtzee, Zork

Which names would you pick? Are there any you would add or remove? It is interesting how the majority of the titles are old games; perhaps these are games that inspired game developers to become game developers, or maybe it’s just the nostalgia factor?

BTW, the above image is only related to this post temporally; it is a NASA photo of the San Diego fires that were burning this week.

I have been keeping my eye on an interesting game engine named Unity. The first Unity users conference, entitled Unite 2007, was held in San Francisco last week; I was asked by Gamasutra to cover the event! This was my first time to officially cover an event and resulted in my first two press credits. It turns out that covering an event is way less stress than running an event and way more stress than simply attending an event. Other than some formatting errors, I think that the following two posts turned out pretty well, thanks to Brandon Boyer for editing and to Brandon Sheffield for supporting my involvement.

Day 1:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15815

Days 2, 3; Event Wrap Up:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15851

Other impressions not conveyed in the two reports above: the Unity user community is super friendly, this was really clear. The founders of Unity Technologies are fashionable and exude a lot of confidence and enthusiasm. What I like about them is that anything is possible; they are not an arbitrarily closed black box, marred by bureaucracy, rather they are open to feedback and are very flexible about policy, preferring to form good relations and do what it takes to get thing done. Another admirable quirk is that they profess to borrowing good ideas when they see them, implementing them in Unity “only better”. They seem to be sticklers for doing things well or not at all. I look forward to future developments in their product; if they can stick to their ideals Unity will continue to grow feature rich without sacrificing usability.

My friend Brandon Sheffield interviewed my friend Christoph Quas about the DS tactics game he designed entitled Panzer Tactics. When I spoke to Christoph about his game at GDC 2007, he told me that there were 150 units with something like 40 tuning variables each—what a balancing task!

The interview can be found here on Gamasutra.com.

The game that I have been working on at Stormfront Studios has finally been announced! From here on out, the project that I have referred to as Ogre shale be known as The Spiderwick Chronicles.

The project is being published by Sierra and is slated to be released February 2008. Check out the press releases on Kotaku and Gamasutra. It is also being developed as a film by Paramount; my friend Hans is working as a creature animator on this project at Tippett. Here is the trailer:

Or you can go here for a Quicktime version.

Serialization FTW!

The Spiderwick Chronicles film and game are both based on a series of serialized children’s booklets of the same title, much in the same vein as the Lemony Snicket booklets. Out of curiosity, I did an estimate on the total word count of all five Spiderwick books; somewhat to my expectation I discovered that it was approximately the same length as Roald Dahl’s classic The BFG. However, each of the Spiderwick books retails for a price greater than that of The BFG! Now, they are hardcovers, so lets say that they’re actual profit margin per book is the same as that of a paperback The BFG… they make five times the profit per word! I think this is a lesson that any creative type should pay attention do if they are interested in monetizing their IP—serialization for the win!

I finally got a chance to play Super Puzzle Fighter II HD Remix on Partner Net yesterday. Partner Net is where X Arcade Games are put to test before releasing them for real. I have to say that the visual quality blew me away. This is surprising because I had actually done a lot of the art management and art prototyping; figuring out the various convoluted aspect ratio conversions from the original sprites and exploring directions for the shape, transparency, and lighting of the gems and the inner effects of the crash gems. I left Backbone before anything other than proxy had found its way in-game, but this is clearly a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. I haven’t asked anyone if they ended up using pre-rendered or realtime 3D gem assets, but the lighting pass looks better than any of the test runs that had been done while I was there and the explosion effects look really really good; way better than any of the still screen shots on the net and way better than any prototypes I had seen before leaving. Also, I love the radial win/loose effect, kudos to whoever is responsible for that!

This game holds a special place in my heart because it is the last game that everyone from my previous tight-knit team worked on together: Sirlin, Bocci, Eric E, Chad P, MK, and technically even my wife Yuki. Speaking of diaspora, Bocci is off helping to produce Golden Axe at Secret Level and Yuki is working for herself to connect japanese developers with people from other countries: congratulations to both of you!

Sirlin, who is still at Backbone, has made a post about Ballencing Puzzle Fighter on his blog. Check it out!

He says that a successful game is a game that sells, period. He then goes on to say that the following—in order—are the most important things to make a successful game:

1. Good Concept
2. Timing
3. Execution

The only games that I can think of that satisfy this are Doom, Quake 1, and The Sims. Despite this, he goes on to mention Gears of War as an example of a successful game. I think that Gears of war has the reverse order: the execution was amazing, in terms of timing it came out when there was little competition on the 360, and the concept was standard fair. Another game in this same boat was God of War; amazing execution, pretty good marketing, fairly standard concept. Please don’t think that I’m criticizing these two games; it’s so rare for anything to be executed well, so they are above the curve in my book.

I would argue that the most frequent order of a “successful” game is the following:

1. Name on Box
   This can refer to a franchise name, an ip name, an auteur’s name, or a company’s name such as: Madden NFL, Zelda, Harry Potter, Sid Meier, or Blizzard.
2. Marketing
3. Execution
4. Timing
5. Concept

When that name on the box has been hard won by releasing great game after great game as in Zelda or Blizzard I am at ease, but that Cars was on top of the UK sales charts week after week saddens me… I wish that the order was simply:

1. Concept/Execution

Example: Katamari Damacy and most of the “art house” games that never get the attention that they deserve due to a lack of marketing.