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  1. Sven's avatar
  2. Unknown's avatar

    I’m one of the author’s in the 2022 opdc (didn’t win anything, still trying to bear up under the shame…

  3. Max Clark's avatar
  4. Kfix's avatar

    Thank you for this very interesting collection, and for wrestling with the obviously mixed feelings on this anniversary. And thank…

  5. KenTWOu's avatar

    I can’t remember that moment when I realized that you simultaneously was creative director, lead level designer and script writer…

  • Our Man in Havana Returns

    It’s been a long time since I posted – but I have a real excuse, with links to prove it. Aside from Christmas, and an extra week of vacation in Havana I managed to squeeze in as a result of the game being delayed, I’ve been busy as hell meeting with the press and promoting the game.

    Our first official teaser trailer has been released. Cheeky commentary from Kotaku and from Joystiq on that.

    I presented the game to Gamespot’s Andrew Park in San Francisco who wrote a great preview here, that follows up an equally awesome preview from last fall.

    Far Cry 2 became Ubisoft’s first game to take the cover of Edge Magazine, with another great article that is available online here.

    Stephen Totilo ran three seperate segments on the MTV Multiplayer blog – one about our innovative integration of explosive barrels (no kidding), one about the PC game market and a third one about the challenges we’ve been facing building real meaningful investment in characters who are mechanically and procedurally developed in the narrative design.

    And speaking of the PC market UGO called Far Cry 2 the 4th most anticipated PC title for 2008… following StarCraft 2, Fallout 3, and Spore. Damn you Will… edged out again.

    There is lots of other new coverage out there if you’re interested.

    On the GDC front – coming soon – I’ll be giving a talk about Immersion, I’ll be participating the Game Developers Rant, and for the first time I’ve been invited to be on the Faculty of the Game Design Workshop. Attending the GDW was probably the most valuable time I ever spent at GDC, and I think everyone in the industry should attend it at least once. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

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  • Canadian Game Industry Tax Credits – Gamespot

    Emma Boyes, out of Gamespot UK, brings us a well researched and interesting piece on Canada’s game development tax incentives.

    It looks at the way the Canadian Government has incentivised the game industry, and the way many other countries have failed to, and why. In particular, she looks at the (increasingly tragic) case of UK game development.

    She outlines the different kinds of tax incentives available to Canadian developers – from basic R&D credits that have been in place for decades, to incentives for employing digital animators to incentives for sound recording.

    Anyway – kinda business focused compared to what I usually put up here, but I think it is a really interesting article and definitely worth a read.

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  • Can a computer game make you cry?

    Yes.

    (thanks to Pat who sent the link)

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  • Lodes of fun

    Busy shipping game. No time to post.

    Just wanted to share a link to a short article on Kotaku where I talked about the joys of Lode Runner and it’s amazing level editor.

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  • 177%

    According to this article, recent figures from Invest Quebec show Montreal’s game development workforce has grown by 177% in the last 2 years. We’re 47 heads short of the 5,000 mark. Awesome.

    I don’t know what the numbers were when I moved here six and a half years ago, but I was (just over) employee 1000 at Ubi Montreal and there were less than 500 of us in the studio when I arrived. Probably the Montreal dev community was less than 2000 back then.

    We’re still not at the size of the dev community in Vancouver or the Bay Area, but with 5000 of us, and with so many major publishers launching new internal development studios, if we can maintain levels of growth anywhere near this for another couple years, we’ll be the largest game development area in the world easily I imagine.

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  • My New Avatar

    Wicked.

    For those who know me, you will probably think I either got some friends at Valve to put me in Half-Life or that I found a way to swap out one of their character heads with on I made myself, but in fact, that is just a stock character from Half-Life 2: Episode 2, who happens to bear a chillingly uncanny resemblance to me. It looks more like me by coincidence than the golfer I created spending a couple hours with Tiger Woods Game Face, to say nothing of how generic my Mii is given my total lack of distinct features….

    So the story goes, one of the designers on my project was playing HL2E2 during lunch the other day and came across this medic as one of the incidental members of the resistance fighting against the Combine and said "Holy shit it’s Clint", and I got him to snap this screenshot – which I will henceforth use as my picture anytime anyone wants one.

    Immortalized in Half-Life 2… accidentally… sweet.

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  • Festival du Nouveau Cinema Presentation

    So I had the opportunity to give a presentation at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema here in Montreal yesterday. The theme of this years Festival was ‘Immersion’ and much of the Festival was devoted to exploring new techniques in displaying film (360 degree projection, 3d, etc), and as a component of the Festival they did a full day that featured presentations and panels with game designers.

    I did a short (25 minute) presentation called ‘The Game Designer’s Toobox’ which is now posted over on the right. It is a kind of ‘intro the the highest level concepts of game design’ and is intended for a general audience. Game dev professionals probably won’t get a lot out of it, and most of the material is stuff I have talked about in much greater depth in other presentations, but for those who know little about games as a medium, maybe you’ll find it interesting. For game developers, maybe you will find it useful as a reference if you are ever called on to speak in front of a more general audience.

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  • Portal – The Cliff’s Notes Version

    Finally got Guitar Hero 2 a couple months ago, and now Guitar Hero 3 is out. Then came Bioshock. I grabbed Battlestations: Midway and DiRT (someone has to play games that aren’t getting 10/10), and also grabbed Halo 3. Assassins is next week. Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect and Crysis are less than a month out. Waiting anxiously for Blacksite. GTA IV, Mercs 2, and my game are coming in spring. R6:Vegas and Viva Pinata are still in the plastic on my shelf… how the fuck am I going to find time to play HL2: Episode 2. Or Episode 1 for that matter?? Nevermind Team Fortress 2.

    And shit… Portal. Now here is a game that is coming totally out of the blue (from the yellow?). I expected it would be a clever little puzzle game not worth spending my time on (with apologies to the crew at Valve – I should have known better). Turns out there is this odd industry wide shockwave of people saying "holy fuck I can’t believe it, but this is the game of the year…". You’re kidding me?! Leave me alone. I don’t have time for this. Will just ONE of the twenty games due to ship between September 2007 and March 2008 please, please, please just suck so I can have a rest?

    For those looking to get the feel for what Portal is about, but who just don’t have time to play it, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version in Flash… I’m having a blast with this. And sadly, unless someone, somewhere, drops the ball and one of these games turns out to be crap, this is all the Portal I might have time for.

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  • NY Times Disses Halo 3?

    Okay, not really.

    Jurie, over at Intelligent Artifice linked off this op-ed piece from the NY Times last week that I only got around to reading yesterday. I was honestly surprised at how insightful the article is. Normally games coverage in the mass media is dull and lifeless at best, or part of a blind witchhunt at worst, but this article really cuts to the core of important standing challenges in game development that people in the game industry are working hard to solve (even the guys at Bungie, whether Daniel Radosh knows it or not).

    Radosh lines ’em up and knockes ’em down: Halo 3 is the Pong of of 2007. Cinematics undermine feelings of agency. Games are ‘backward looking’, and we game designers have still failed to fully formalize the language of our medium. "Transformers" is not art, Bioshock’s reach exceeds it’s grasp….

    While any one of these statements is worthy of thousands of hours of debate, what’s important here is that these ideas are starting to creep out of the pages of game design blogs, out of the post-lecture corridors of GDC, and into the popular press. There’s not much in Radosh’s article that I haven’t said myself (and I’m not typically being original when I say this stuff) – but my 100 hits a day is insignificant compared to the Times. More people probably read that article on the day it ran than will ever read this one in the entire time it sits here.

    You should read it to. 

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  • Harvey Smith Interview

    Last month there was a short interview with Harvey Smith in Game Developer that I really enjoyed, though I thought it was pretty short. Fortunately – it was short – as in a condensed version of a much longer (and much more interesting) interview on Gamasutra.

    Kudos to Harvey for making a game that says some things that he’s feeling, and kudos to Midway for giving him the leeway to say things like that. I think it is critically important – if we want the industry to reach broader audiences – that we let our top creators (and Harvey is one) not only make games about challenging things, but also let them talk about it.

    Frankly I’m getting really fucking bored of reading about how many weapons and vehicles there are in next month’s AAA FPS mega-hit.

    Also – I hope if I ever end up in a position overseeing creative at an entire studio as Harvey does, that I would still have the humility to get my hands dirty if it was needed. That boy’s got character.

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