In shooting games, if you want to get high scores, you shoot the enemies as soon as they appear on the screen, but if I did that, the audience would just see the bullets and the explosions. So I wait until the ship is halfway down the screen before I shoot it. You can’t get a high score that way, but it looks more exciting.”

(more…)

Why is there such acrimony between these two groups? This is actually by design, if you look at it from the publisher’s perspective. (more…)

I have no doubts about Mr. Carmack’s technical ability. His games defined ‘cutting edge’ graphics on the PC for many years. But even he can’t fight against the biggest weakness of the iPhone, a short battery life.
(more…)

E3 was important to the industry because it represented gaming as a “Culture” and that’s why we need it back.
(more…)

But I bet it wasn’t a surprise for Sony, since a deal between Square-Enix and Microsoft must have been in the works for a while. So have Sony been preparing for this moment?
(more…)

Last time I talked about the ‘Burnout’, this time I’ll be talking about a close cousin to the ‘Burnout’ I like to call the ‘Broken.’

The inspiration for the name comes from something that Dan, a fellow gameplay programmer on BioShock, told me. After I was hired at Irrational, I learned that there was long search to fill the position I was hired for. When I asked Dan why it took so long, he explained that it was hard finding experienced people that still had the passion to make great games, and the person they interviewed right before me was ‘broken and bitter.’
(more…)

Back when we were creating the interface on BioShock, Ken was the one who always pushed for a simpler interface. The main method we used was to remove options from the main in-game menu and placing them into the UI of machines you interacted with instead.
(more…)

This post is about why I created the service.
(more…)

Nowadays, just marketing a high profile game will cost that much, with twenty million dollars being a reasonable estimate for the development cost of a competitive console title.

Many developers have remarked on this huge increase and thinks it is bad for the industry, however I believe that big budget titles plays right into the hands of large publishers.
(more…)

The first personality I’d like to talk about is the “Burnout”, which technically you won’t meet in the games industry since he has already left it. A Burnout is someone who has worked as a developer for many years and then leaves the industry entirely.

Working in as a game developer can be an unforgiving and thankless job, so some turn over is to be expected, but one group in particular seems to be susceptible to becoming a Burnout, the programmers.

(more…)