Tiny Subversions

I loved The Incredible Machine. Myself and others often lament that it didn't spawn a million clones, launch an industry, etc. However, I just found this indie title that essentially the original TIM formula, updated with modern physics simulation! Go download the free demo of Armadillo Run. Took me about five minutes to play through the tutorial, and by the end, I was hooked. It's pretty amazing!

For those of you who never played TIM, well, if you like messing around with the physics in Half-Life 2 or Garry's Mod or whatnot, you should give this game a shot.

From a Gamasutra interview with Keita Takahashi (creator of Katamari):

KT: I don't think it's anything special. I just write down my ideas on paper, present it to them, and if they don't really understand, I say, “Well, you'll understand if I make it.” Then I make part of it, and they understand. [Emphasis added.]

...brought to you by the Committee For Prototyping in Game Development. Or something.

One night, during a Game Developers Conference years ago, I was hanging out in the Fairmont Hotel lobby. This is where all the game developers get together after a long day of sessions and sit around in comfy chairs and drink and schmooze. In other words: a networker's heaven.

I had spotted a guy I knew from the Boston Postmortem. Let's call him Joe.

I said hi to Joe, and we started talking about random things. Eventually, I mention the name of John Romero during this conversation.

"Oh man, Romero?" says Joe. "I fucking hate that guy!"

Joe really runs with his hatred. He goes on. And on. And on. About how much Daikatana sucked. About how he had nothing to do with Doom. About every little thing. I was waiting for him to bust out with a complaint about Dangerous Dave.

Anyway, after five solid minutes, he's still talking smack about Romero, when I notice something.

"Dude," I say.

Joe keeps talking smack.

"DUDE."

Joe stops. "What?"

"He's standing right behind you."

Joe turns around, and there's Romero, kinda looking at him. I honestly forget Romero's expression, but I will forever remember the complete and utter foot-in-mouth etched into Joe's face.

Moral of the story: it's a small industry out there. Don't badmouth people. You might not experience a spectacular failure of cool like my friend Joe did, but it will probably come back around and bite you in the ass one day.

Labels: networking

There's a phenomenal 1996 interview with Dani Bunten Berry that was just posted at In Newsweekly. She was one of the most brilliant and important game designers in the history of the games industry. Read the interview and you're guaranteed to come away with some insight into the way this business works.

From the interview:

Dani: I don't know that I should slam EA or any single publisher, because this is kind of a conspiracy of the whole system.

Brenda: A conspiracy? How so?

Dani: Well, there's the distributors that sit there in between the publisher and the player. They look through these things. They never even play the products. They look at boxes and the blurb that might tell them the "hottest such and such genre product," and that's how they make their decisions. Because of those folks who do not give a shit about these products, all they do is put them on a shelf with a flippy that you can look at, they control what gets produced. I think that's a shame. I don't know any other way to say it without poisoning my own future potential.

I talk a lot about knowing your history.

You should read about the history Origin, of one of the most important game studios ever.

Confession time: I hate most machinima. Not on principle; I just find that most of the higher-quality stuff out there is not to my tastes.

However, you should check out this short machinima film called Deviation. It takes place inside a game of Counterstrike. One of the counter-terrorists starts to question his own futile existence of killing, dying, killing, dying, killing...

The voice acting is really fantastic, and I also enjoyed the use of sound effects to convey emotional state. Plus, it's five minutes long, so even someone with a short attention span like me can spare the time.

Whenever I'm on my way to an event where there's going to be game developers who I don't know, I'm busy composing a canned introduction for the night. This canned intro, or pitch, is one to three sentences long, and it describes where I work and what I do. An example of an old one I might have used back when I was a student:

I'm a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts, where I run the Game Development Club. I do serious games work--you might have heard of MassBalance, the Massachusetts state budget game. Yeah, it sounds pretty boring to me, too, but over a million people played it, so who am I to judge?

Notice it's got a little humor, a little bragging, and a couple of facts, all packed into three sentences. You want to inform people about yourself, but you also want them smiling when you're done with your pitch. If your current job is really boring, and you think you'll bore people to tears just on job title alone, then spin it like I did in the example. Some light self-deprecating humor can work wonders.

Isn't That Kind of... Phony?

Some of you might wonder if this kind of self-pitch is phony. And it certainly has the potential to be phony. But I have a trick I use to keep myself from being permanently reduced to a few sentences: pitches are ONE NIGHT ONLY.

That's right. Think of a pitch for tonight's chapter meeting. Use it all night. At next month's meeting, think of something different to say. Not just a different rewording of the same facts: inject something new into there. You've hopefully done something of note in the intervening four weeks that you can slip into your pitch.

The Bottom Line

Practice your pitch in the mirror. Deliver it with eye contact. Be funny. Be warm. Smile. Keep practicing in the mirror. Make up different pitches while you shower. You'll get it eventually.

Labels: networking

So I was reading some E3 news this morning, and I came across the following advertisement.

It looks sort of like our blonde bombshell Sim is ignoring the advances of the military dude, who is in turn preparing to give her a piece of his mind.

Then I remembered the infamous Hitman ad. Yuck.

The "future of entertainment", indeed.

Because today is Cinco de Mayo, we had a free burrito lunch here at work, from Boca Grande Taqueria. Here's a secret: game developers love burritos.

In a twist of fate and coincidence, I was asked yesterday by the purveyors of the fine Burrito Blog to help spread the word: one of their Burrito Analysts is riding a bicycle 585 miles from San Francisco to LA, as part of the AIDS/Lifecycle event June 4 through June 10. (I try to bike three to five miles a day, and I can barely manage it!) As the burrito dudes put it: they love burritos and they hate AIDS. Can't argue with that platform, can ya? Check out this link to make a donation.

What a crazy day for game news.

Oblivion has been re-rated as Mature, because there is full nudity beneath the clothing that characters wear. Ridiculous. Whereas the re-rating of GTA:SA had a grain of reason at its core, this is just, uhm, ridiculous. It's not like there's a hidden sex game. Just anatomy. Which you have to modify the game code in order to see. I want to hear what the devs at Bethesda think about this.

There's going to be a next-gen Shadowrun game announced at E3. I rather liked the SNES game, but I never played the Genesis one (which is actually a completely different game). And of course I'm a fan of the pencil-and-paper RPG. I played a poet, who was functionally useless until he became a rigger.

EA lost the James Bond license to Activision. Did EA want this to happen? I have a hard time believing they'd let it happen. Although maybe they did something to piss off MGM. The big movie studios are in fact big enough to bully around Electronic Arts.

Well, apparently Hideo Kojima confirmed that there's going to be a Metal Gear Solid movie.

Finally, an MGS product where I don't feel ripped off when I spend 90% of my time watching cutscenes.

Seriously, MGS2 is one of the only games I've ever purchased that I felt was a complete waste of my $50. I realize that these are great games that a lot of people like, but they're sure as hell not for me.

Bought a (blue) Nintendo DS today. Used, good condition, from somebody at work. Came with Tetris DS, Animal Crossing, and Zoo Tycoon. I'll keep you updated on what I think of it. Because, you know, I'm on the cutting edge buying one of these in May '06.

Titles I plan on purchasing:

• Brain Age
• the new Mario game when that comes out
• the Mario 64 port
• Advance Wars: Dual Strike
• Nintendogs
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (if I can find it)
• Electroplankton
• the Castlevania game
  

Am I missing anything?