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EA staffer says goodbye with Swords & Sworcery-esque creation
EA Tiburon just lost software engineer Ben Burbank. And while the Madden franchise will charge on without him, Burbank made a special creation to remember the people he worked with while at EA. Titled "So Long, Old Friends," the interactive goodbye letter remembers the individuals and teams that shaped his time at the publisher -- from the team behind NFL Head Coach to the folks who work on the annual Madden installment. Visually inspired by Capybara's Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP, the game was built entirely in Flixel, Adam "Atomic" Saltsman's open-source coding engine. And like S:S&SEP, Burbank's creation is more of an "experience" than a "game" (in the strictest sense). It's also rather touching, which is why we can't suggest enough that you spend the five minutes required to check it out.
GDC 2010: Canabalt postmortem
"What kinds of games do you like?" Adam "Atomic" Saltsman asked of his panel audience at the Canabalt postmortem during the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. "Role-playing" was yelled out, as was "puzzler," and eventually Saltsman picked "platformer" as the genre. Without another word, he quietly went to work on a laptop. Then, his partner at Semi Secret Software, Eric Johnson, took the podium to tell us all about what it was like to make one of the App Store's most popular games. He started by saying that the game was originally developed in just "five very long days," and was created for the Experimental Gameplay Project and based around simplicity -- it only uses six colors and, obviously, the one button. For a game that's so simple, it actually had a lot of complex influences. It drew from older games, like Another World and Flashback, as well as modern works, like Half-Life 2 and District 9.
