Wonderful article (in Spanish) by Sergio Garcés, in Designostic.

Think about the code you might have to write, but write only the code you know you have to write.

Wow, the final details on Nintendo Wii’s launch came out this week, and the gaming world seems to be less than impressed. Every final number is at the high end of the bracket people were considering "reasonable". In Europe:

– 250 euros for the console (Wii Sports included)
– 40e for extra wiimote + 20e for extra nunchuck
– games priced between 50e and 60e
– release in December so if the console is a success you might have trouble getting one for xmas.

All this crap about 1 US$ = 1 euro, plus a funny argument between Nintendo of America and Nintendo UK on whether games will, might, or won’t be region-coded. Meh. I’ll probably still buy one, but I’m no longer excited about it.

Enough about Wii; time will tell.

Finally sat down and played some Prey on the PC, after having mildly enjoyed the 360 demo. Hm. One and a half hours later I saved and quit, unsure if I’ll continue playing it (but I will). I was feeling a bit dizzy with all the gravity bending that goes on, but the worst part is, I was simply bored with the game. I only remember two different kinds of scenery: narrow metal hallway, and narrow sphincter-like hallway. Considering that I loved both Doom 3 and Quake 4, my accusing Prey of being repetitive must be something serious. 🙂

The puzzles are clever but too frequent for my taste. The shooting is just ok. Enemy creature designs are uninspired at best. The storyline cutscenes and writing are terrible. The overall flow of scenery doesn’t have any sense of connection or purpose. The gimmicks of gravity bending and portalling are technically impressive, but not enough to support a well produced but otherwise forgettable game.

I have Joel on Software linked on the sidebar list but, if you are like most people, you have ignored it. However, if you are a software developer of any kind, there is a recent series of articles that you simply can not afford to miss:

– Finding Great Developers

– A Field Guide to Developers

– Sorting Resumes

He spoke at the BAFTA in UK, and Functional Autonomy has posted a writeup of it.

The folks over at shmup-dev have started a new competition to develop a 2D shooter with the rule that there must be some form of weapon autofire. Considering that this feature is extremely common, it’s safe to say that pretty much any shooter you could come up with qualifies for the competition. I hope many entries will take the opportunity to do something interesting with the autofire concept.

Wow, it’s been almost a month since I last wrote anything here. I guess blogging is a state of mind, not so much about the importance of the content you write, but about feeling like communicating it to other people. Guess I’ve been a bit asocial lately. 🙂

You can read Ernest Adams’ wonderful article here. He talks about the need for culturally respectable games in order to consolidate videogames as a respected medium itself. He talks about having "highbrow" and "elitist" games, and uses Merchant-Ivory as an example of such in films.

Merchant-Ivory is a misguided example in my opinion, they are largely as populist as it gets among a largely female audience, and their choice of where to put production value is not fundamentally different from that of that of a Bruckheimer film: historically details dresses and mansions or realistic explosions and destructions. Who cares? Frankly, neither are intellectually stimulating. Ok now I’m going to the extreme, M-I films do have reasonably interesting story, characters and setting whereas Bruckheimer’s mental values is barely at the level of adolescent fantasies.

In any case, Adams’ choice of words may be intended to emphasize the idea as well as attract attention via controversy, and going by the number of published letters to the editor, he has hit the mark. I’ll just summarize what I feel is the central idea of the article in one of his sentences:

"To merely be fun is to be unimportant, irrelevant, and therefore vulnerable"

As more time passes, I am more of the opinion that videogames have a fundamental problem in order to be culturally interesting: the interaction distracts us and occupies our minds, preventing any absorption or even interest in the more intellectual aspects that a game may communicate. But then, I’m known to ignore and skip every single piece of text or cutscene I can while I’m playing a game.

I just came back from Mundos Digitales 2006 in La Coruña, where I gave a lecture on Game Design. It was a blast! Lots of interesting presentations, great people from the animation and computer graphics industry, and a whole load of fun partying at night.

Next week I’ll be flying to the north of Spain again. The GameLab group at the Universidad de Oviedo has invited me to give a similar lecture. This one is aimed at explaining the dynamics of game design to programmers. Half of a team’s output depends on a proper, confident and fluent interaction between the different disciplines, and I usually find designers and programmers to have the biggest problems talking to each other.

Hopefully, these two lectures will help spread the knowledge and understanding of what Game Design is.

During Mundos Digitales, I had a very interesting talk with Marco Besas, one of the finalists for Best Animated Short (and quite a character). Among other things, he mentioned how great it was, after hearing my lecture, to see that we had figured how to structure the production and development of games, in stark contrast with the chaos that is so common in filmmaking. You can imagine my surprise! Game developers usually refer to films when we talk about a mature industry that knows what it’s doing… We went on exchanging anecdotes during my games and his films, and I think we both learned that the grass is not THAT greener on the other side. 🙂

Edit: Lecture slides can be downloaded here.

I posted the slides (in Spanish) for the design lectures I gave this month. Hope both designers and programmers find them useful.

I also went to watch Cars from Pixar, and was once again surprised at the ways these guys can twist stories, objects and characters. The plot itself is very predictable and derivative, but there are lots of genuinely funny moments. Technically, rendering is very detailed and the camera and animation are once again brilliant.

Mark Rein’s dismissal of episodic content as a "broken model".

He mentions marketability, user interest, price and other things that have come up in this thread. Can’t wait for the full writeup. Although I can’t avoid a certain level of agreement with him, it does seem to me that he’s talking as if the whole distribution and publishing model is not going to change at all.

+ Yes, in the current retail, console manufacturer-controled, extremely competitive market, boxed episodic content can’t work.

– No, the market is evolving and changing (thanks in no small part to downloadables), and the future will likely be more friendly to episodic content, making it a viable model.

Unos cuantos profesionales de esto de hacer juegos han creado un blog en español desde el que van a contar muchas cosas interesantes: Designostic. Espero que pronto se convierta en una visita obligada para todos aquellos desarrolladores españoles. Hale, todos a suscribirse a su RSS y a participar (aunque para empezar solo sea un "hola")! 🙂