game development
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Pathfinder Online puts together a Kickstarter project [Updated]
Kickstarter has been getting a lot of attention from the gaming industry of late after a number of high-profile successes. It's even gained the attention of the team behind Pathfinder Online, the upcoming sandbox MMORPG based on the eponymous tabletop system. So instead of trying to secure venture capitalist funding for the project, the development team is reaching out directly to the fans via a new Kickstarter project to assemble a tech demo for the game. It's important to note that the project is only for funding a demo of the game, enough to show bigger investors that the interest in the game does exist. However, the development team has still assembled a number of bonuses for prospective players, including special forum membership, specialized tabletop game products, and promotional posters. If you're interested in seeing the game continue in development, it's well worth dropping by the Kickstarter page and dropping in some money when it goes live soon. [Update: The Kickstarter page is now live!]
Jumala game-building platform combines game creation with gamification
"Man, I've got a great idea for a game," said every single gamer ever. "If only I had some kind of tool or platform that would allow me to build it without having to learn any form of programming."This familiar dialogue has either been spoken aloud by you specifically, or by someone you know and love. It's all too common, and because of the gamer's intrinsic urge to try their own hand at game design, companies like Blade Games World create products like Jumala.At its heart, Jumala is a game development suite designed for Joe Everyguy, devoid of programming languages and requiring no previous game-making experience whatsoever. Working in a fully 3D environment, players can either build their own game from scratch or modify existing template games. Once created, games can be shared with your incredibly patient friends and family via Jumala's social network integration.What makes Jumala unique, for better or for worse, is the ribcage of gamification bones that surround its design-oriented heart. As they create, players earn "Jumala Spark," an in-game currency used to unlock construction tools, items and character models from the in-game store. Jumala Spark is also earned whenever someone plays a game you've created, or when you play a game someone else has created, which encourages game makers to relentlessly spam actively promote their wares.Jumala's free, PC-only beta is currently underway. Creatively minded OSX users, fear not: A Mac version is said to arrive "someday."
The Soapbox: What you loved is still there
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. One of my greatest fears as I slouch toward 30 is that my tastes will become immutable in certain fields -- music, especially. The last thing I want to do is be the obnoxious guy listening to music that was popular when I was in high school complaining about how bad modern bands are. So I try to broaden my horizons because I know that everything I already like is still waiting for me. I want to create a broader range, not just stick within the familiar. It's probably for the best, then, that I don't share that worry about video games in general and MMOs in particular. I don't cry for a return to the MMOs I played in older days because in most cases they're still running. True, in many of them a great deal has changed to the point of unrecognizability, but I never ask what happened to the game I once loved. After all, just because I loved it doesn't mean that anyone else did.
Shadow Government tries to combine real-world policy with casual gameplay
Shadow Government was probably the most fascinating game I saw at GDC. I should probably clarify that: I didn't see much of the game in action, but what I did see showed off an excellently designed UI and some good looking (if a little complicated) Farmville-style game mechanics. The most fascinating thing about Shadow Government isn't what it does, but what its developers hope to do. Nicholas Fortugno is the game's main designer, and though he's still fairly young, he has a number of solid iOS and award-winning game credits to his name. He's also a teacher of game design, and with Shadow Government, he says he's aiming to not only bring up the level of these Farmville-like social freemium games, but also help players to take a long, hard look at the effects of real-life issues. That may sound a little nuts -- it certainly does to me. But Shadow Government isn't just driven by Fortugno's freemium engine. It's also driven by a number of simulations from a real-life group called The Millennium Institute, a think tank that does hardcore policy analysis for a number of corporations and countries around the world, setting up models as accurately as possible that will predict the given effects for any number of real life decisions. What if the price of oil goes up, or agriculture is de-funded, or minimum wages in a certain company go down? The Millennium Institute models situations exactly like that, and Fortugno has been given access to all of those simulations in order to model this game. On the surface of Shadow Government, you're placed in control of the future of the real-life United States and given a set of freemium tools to make decisions for the country. Do you build up industry by building a factory, or grow education by building a school? Underneath that relatively simple interface, the Millennium Institute's simulations are running. If you want to, you'll be able to dive into the background of the app and really see the effects all of your decisions have. Fortugno hopes that the game will actually teach people how certain policies work by dealing with real-world issues in this very social, casual way. The policies and analyses that Fortugno talks about and that the Millennium Institute researches are extremely complicated affairs, some that I'm sure would require multiple degrees of study to really research and understand fully. But Fortugno is convinced that even given the relatively simple interface of a freemium game, he can at least get people interested in making these decisions. Seeing the effects of those decisions might push people to educate themselves further. Shadow Government's not necessarily an educational game. As Fortugno told me, it wouldn't help to market the game that way, and it's not necessarily meant to be an experience built around numbers and simulations. But Fortugno says it is meant to be a title "for people who don't play games in contexts that they don't play games about." In other words, Fortugno's trying to take Farmville and actually use it to make people think about and even understand the real world around them a little further. Shadow Government is currently being worked out in a closed beta, and it's set to come out later this year. Fortugno certainly has the chops for a project like this, and as I watched him animatedly talk at GDC, it became apparent very quickly that he wants to make it work. The game's idea and ideals are both quite fascinating, so I hope Shadow Government pulls it off.
Sketch Nation Studio allows to make your own game, and sell it
I've met with Nitzan Wilnai at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) several times. His Engineous Games has grown over the years. The group recently released Sketch Nation Shooter to great success. It lets you build a shooter title by uploading or drawing your own art. As of this writing, it has been download over 800,000 times, generating a significant user base. Wilnai's next project, Sketch Nation Studio, has been in development for a while, and I suspect it could threaten how the App Store itself works. While Sketch Nation Shooter lets you build a shooting game, Sketch Nation Studio will allow users to assemble games in any one of five iPhone-familiar genres. Here's the kicker: Sketch Nation Studio offers the chance to release those games to the App Store and earn real money. The app is currently testing in Canada, and it works much like Sketch Nation Shooter did. You start by choosing a genre: Up Jumping (as in Doodle Jump), Side Running (like Canabalt), Side Flying (like Jetpack Joyride), Down Jumping (a reverse Doodle Jump style), and Side Jumping (basically an endless platformer). Next, add the art for your player character, obstacles, and rules for power-ups and other information. Sketch Nation Studio adds your art, creates the necessary objects and controls and manages animation. Your game is ready to play. There are three modes to choose from. Simple mode is the easiest, and runs user-created art around a set of existing rules. Wilnai showed me how to create a custom game quickly, using the app's built-in drawing tools to create simple graphics in about two minutes. The result won't win any awards for originality (it was a one-button flyer featuring a bee who had to dodge flowers), but it worked, and tracked the score, and had a losing condition, which is really all you need for a simple iPhone game. Advanced Mode is more complicated. It lets you use your own art and set your own rules. Maybe, for example, hitting certain enemies increases your strength. Perhaps the player character has lives or collects various score items. The Advanced mode is pretty powerful, offering several control schemes (including tilting the iOS device, which can make for some interesting custom games) and "special effects," which let you use your art to create particles and animations. The interface is easy to use, but again, quite powerful for what it is. And finally, "Standalone App" mode uses the Advanced Mode's rules and uploads your finished game to the Engineous servers, where it will then go into a queue for the company to review. Every game that meets its criteria for quality, originality, and fun could become a full, standalone App Store app. In fact, there are already apps like this on the App Store Turkey Run is one example. Wilnai didn't have specifics on how profit sharing would work, but he did confirm that the company plans to split proceeds from these apps 50/50 with their creators. This means that you could potentially create a game in Sketch Nation, upload it, receive approval from Engineous and have them release it to the App Store for US$0.99. You'd then earn 35 cents of real money for every copy sold (half of the 99 cents minus Apple's 30% cut). That sounds crazy, and it probably is. Wilnai says that Apple is in favor of the idea (in theory, at least), and the app is being tested on the Canadian store before being released in the US. "At first we won't release too many games," says Wilnai, just because Engineous will have to figure out what best to put out there and how it would work. But if the plan turns out to be as solid as he expects, Wilnai could basically create a platform-within-a-platform, releasing games users have made with his own app, and filtering the income right through Apple's store. One potential hole in the plan is the users themselves. Sketch Nation Shooter, for example, has 800,000 users, but only 100,000 games have been created with it. That suggests that 1 in every 8 users are actually creating games with it. Additionally, only 10,000 of those games have been shared. While it's easy to make and share a game with Sketch Nation Shooter, not many users actually do so. But Wilnai has a solution for that, too. In addition to the draw of real money, Sketch Nation Studio will also have a virtual currency market. Users will earn SketchBucks (SB) from uploading games, which can be used to download and play shared games. Hopefully, this won't prevent people from just logging in to check the games out (everyone who plays the title will automatically start with 1000 SB), but it should provide incentive to create and share. Art will also be shared in this way, so even if you're not an artist but want to pick up some art for your game with virtual currency, you'll be able to do that as well. The whole idea is fascinating, and it's an example not only of Wilnai's drive to make game development as easy and accessible as possible, but also the power of user-created content, and in this case, its potential to really drive and build up a brand new marketplace. Sketch Nation Shooter should be out in America very soon, and we'll have to see what happens when it finally arrives.
HeroEngine licensing takes off thanks to SWTOR's success
The HeroEngine is making waves in MMO development circles these days, primarily as a result of BioWare's having used it to build Star Wars: The Old Republic. Idea Fabrik says thousands of would-be developers have licensed the tool suite in recent weeks. The firm has also seen a sharp increase in subscribers for its HeroCloud service offering, which is basically a hosted system for making online RPGs, FPS titles, and social/casual games. Idea Fabrik COO Neil Harris says the technology is now a proven commodity thanks to its widespread adoption. "We crossed a major milestone once large games built on HeroEngine proved that our server technology can handle a hugely successful game. This lowers the perceived risk of developers in adopting the HeroEngine platform," he said. The HeroEngine is also powering several indie sandbox titles, including Origins of Malu, The Repopulation, and Dominus. The engine was initially developed by Simutronics for a now-defunct MMO called Hero's Journey. [Source: Idea Fabrik press release]
Unity 3.5 available now, with new effects and performance updates
There are quite a few ways to make and build iPhone and iPad apps and games, but one of the most popular tools to create iOS games is the Unity engine, and that system has released version 3.5. The new version offers a number of improvements and upgrades, with lots of new particle and lighting and rendering effects to make games look better than ever, as well as improvements in the standard AI and pathfinding code for enemies, and lots of improvements to performance and memory. The new kit also now supports a preliminary version of export to Flash, and there's also an option to create a "native" client, which can be played in Google's Chrome browser without the use of the Unity web add-on. There are some iOS-specific updates, including support for cameras, microphone, compass, and gyroscope, as well as support for Apple's iAd program. There's Game Center support as well, though for leaderboards and achievements only -- matchmaking and voice will still require Apple's official SDK. It all sounds good, and it means the tools for developers to use to make games for iOS and other platforms are getting better and better, which of course will eventually lead to better games for players. Unity's SDK can be downloaded for free from the company's website, and of course there are pro subscription programs for bigger developers. Show full PR text Unity Technologies Releases Unity 3.5 SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 14, 2012) - Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and development tools, is proud to announce that Unity 3.5 is now available for download. This latest update is one of the biggest additions to Unity since its inception and includes major new features and a multitude of improvements, tweaks, and optimizations. Unity 3.5 is a free update for all developers using version 3.0 or higher of the Unity development platform. "This is one of the most spectacular additions we've ever made to Unity," said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. "Recognizing that Unity was being pushed harder and harder, we launched our initiative to upgrade Unity with high-end capabilities that larger studios are accustomed to and smaller studios usually don't have access to. We want to make Unity the best choice for everyone and Unity 3.5 is a massive demonstration of our commitment to that goal." The Unity development platform, one of the most popular in the world with more than 800,000 registered developers globally, combines a powerful engine with an intuitive set of development tools in one complete package. "We are incredibly proud of this release and I think it's our strongest yet," said Nicholas Francis, Chief Creative Officer, Unity Technologies. "A year ago, we took a deep dive and began working on developing features for more complex projects and larger teams. It took hard work to do this while preserving the intuitive and usable design that makes Unity so popular, but we are sure that developers using Unity will be as happy with the improvements as we are." Throughout its history, Unity Technologies has continued to rapidly enhance Unity and the 3.5 update provides a long list of additions and improvements: Effects New in Unity 3.5, the highly optimized Shuriken particle system provides artists and programmers with complete control over particle-based visual effects. Shuriken is a curve and gradient-based modular editor, with hierarchies and sequencing capabilities that allow for many particle systems to stay synchronized. Pathfinding and Obstacle Avoidance Improvements to AI provide accurate pathfinding along complex pathways and natural movement through crowds. Game developers can bake navigation data in the editor and let Unity's high-performance path-finding and crowd simulation take over at runtime. Lighting and Rendering Developers can create jaw-dropping visuals with linear space (gamma correct) lighting and HDR rendering, and render them faster than before with Unity 3.5's brand new multi-threaded renderer. Also new to Unity 3.5, light probes add life and realism to lightmapped scenes without the high cost of typical dynamic lights. The addition of light probes to Unity's lighting system allows for baked lighting on characters and other dynamic objects. New Platforms Unity 3.5 supports Native Client as a new deployment platform. Native Client allows for near native speeds within the Chrome browser, without the need for installing the Unity Web Player. Unity 3.5 also ships with the preview release of the Flash deployment add-on, which has already been used by 50,000 developers. Performance Improvements Unity 3.5 includes a completely re-written integration of Umbra's occlusion culling system. The result is incredibly fast and works with terrains and dynamic obstacles such as doors. When combined with Unity's new built-in level-of-detail support, it gives large-scale games the performance boost that they need. Better Collaboration Tools The Asset Server license, Unity's add-on for teams and collaboration, has been enhanced with new features that add greater performance and flexibility. The addition of Unity's cache server dramatically speeds up collaboration on projects of all sizes, and a new developer API for third-party version control solutions, such as Subversion and Perforce, allows larger teams to work more efficiently. To reflect these changes, the product has been renamed the "Team License," and made available as an add-on for all Unity users. Additional Improvements The update includes other improvements such as a new GPU profiler, a fully pluggable Social API to implement social gaming, and low-level audio buffer access to create music games, and directional lightmaps support to name but a few. For a complete list of additions and improvements, please visit http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new. Pricing and Availability This is a free update for all Unity 3 users. Pricing otherwise remains the same. The entry-level product, Unity, is free for commercial use. The premier product, Unity Pro, remains $1500 per developer seat. For a complete list of products and pricing, please visit http://unity3d.com/shop. To download the free and feature-packed Unity for creating games and other interactive applications, visit http://unity3d.com/download. About Unity Technologies Unity Technologies is the creator of Unity, an intuitive and flexible development platform used to make wildly creative and intelligently interactive 3D and 2D content. The "author once, deploy everywhere" capability ensures developers can publish to all of the most popular platforms. Unity Technologies boasts a thriving community of 800,000 registered developers including large publishers, indie studios, students and hobbyists. Unity Technologies aggressively re-invests in its award-winning 3D development tools and democratization initiatives, such as the Asset Store digital content marketplace and Union game distribution service, in order to remain at the forefront of innovation. Unity Technologies is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Japan and Korea. For more information, visit: http://unity3d.com. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/unity3d Twitter: http://twitter.com/unity3d Unity and all other product names are trademarks of Unity Technologies or its subsidiaries or affiliates. All other product names and trademarks belong to their respective holders.
EVE Evolved: Development on EVE in 2012
Following the summer drama that came to be known as monoclegate, the past six months have been challenging for EVE Online's players and developers alike. When players learned that cash-shop clothing was priced higher than its real-life equivalent, the quirky story of the $80 monocle swept across gaming blogs like wildfire. The story's tone soon turned a great deal more sinister with the leak of an internal company newsletter titled Greed is Good, and a second leaked memo from CCP's CEO added more fuel to the flames. Ultimately, players spoke with their wallets; subscriptions fell by at least 8%, and with no financial backup plan, CCP was forced to lay off 20% of its staff worldwide. The staff members who remained were faced with the task of turning things around, and with the feature-packed Crucible expansion, they did so spectacularly. In just a few short months, hundreds of high-profile features, graphical overhauls, and quality of life improvements breathed new life into a neglected universe. I think most players recognise that this has been a genuine turn-around from within CCP, but some are still skeptical that the company has really reformed. The question on everyone's mind is whether CCP can really keep up this quality of development in the coming year as it delivers two full expansions and integrates EVE with DUST 514. Perhaps nobody is better qualified to assess that than CSM delegate and former CCP game designer Mark "Seleene" Heard, who recently attended the December CSM summit and witnessed first-hand the aftermath of monoclegate and Crucible's development. In this week's EVE Evolved, I delve into Mark's CSM Summit report to find out how development at CCP has changed, what we can expect in 2012, and how monocle-gate has affected CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson.
The Soapbox: The Uncle Owen paradox
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. This week, the venerable Star Wars Galaxies celebrates its eighth year of existence. I was there in the beginning -- before the beginning, in fact. I did what a lot of you early SWG players probably did: I had a guild and a guild city, multiple accounts, a booming business as a chef, and a character who could entertain and fight. Even then, we realized how different SWG was from its immediate predecessors like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot. We'd returned to the earlier age of Ultima Online, of persistent worlds (as the term was used back then). It was more a world than a game, and in it we could roleplay whatever we liked, to a point. Nowadays, we'd call it a sandbox. Old-school MMO gamers know well that the sandbox is under attack. Some will blame it on EverQuest, some on World of Warcraft, some on the free-to-play phenomenon. Among the Massively commenters, there's a large contingent of gamers who consider SWG's own NGE to be the beginning of the end of the classic sandbox. I can't say they're wrong when it comes to the philosophy governing new MMOs, but the sandbox isn't dead yet.
Nintendo 'moving away' from insisting on 3D to play 3DS games, wants them all playable in 2D
The Nintendo 3DS has a slider in its side. A slider that adjusts its namesake feature, three-dimensional imagery, up and down in intensity relative to the user's preference. Now, although the 3DS' screen doesn't force glasses on you, it does demand that it be held just right in order to get the most out of the 3D effect and we can imagine plenty of people might neglect its extra dimension in favor of old-fashioned 2D (not to mention those who can't tolerate the third D for health reasons). It's encouraging, therefore, to hear that Nintendo has taken the stance that no game should require 3D as part of its gameplay mechanics. That's the word from Hideki Konno, one of Nintendo's veteran producers, who says the company wants all of its 3DS games to be playable in 2D, essentially reducing the 3D aspect to an aesthetic enhancement. Some might argue that's underusing the portable's hardware potential, but Nintendo has always been in the business of pleasing the mass market -- there's nothing preventing some daring developer from making a game entirely dependent on a three-dimensional perspective.
Global Chat: Game development edition
Welcome to this week's Global Chat! We love hearing what you have to say at Massively, and we love it even more when we can share the best comments with all of our readers. Massively staffers will be contributing some of their favorite comments every week, so keep an eye out every Sunday for more Global Chat! With so many high-profile games both in development and recently launched, the development process for MMOs both big and small is a popular topic of conversation among our readers here at Massively. Follow along after the jump for a look at what a few of our most well-spoken readers had to say this week!
Massively's EVE Online CSM 6 candidate roundup
Starting life as a humble indie MMO development studio, CCP Games was always noted for its close relationship to the players of its flagship game EVE Online. That relationship diminished a lot over time as both the size of the playerbase and the scale of EVE's development grew to immense proportions. Today CCP relies on players to guide development more than ever, but it needs a lens through which to focus feedback from such a large community of players into a form that the team can use. The democratically elected Council of Stellar Management (CSM) is that lens. Fifty-seven players submitted their applications to join EVE's elected player council this year, and all this week, players have been voting to decide who will represent them in discussions with CCP. With so many candidates in the running and only four more days to make up your mind, it can be hard to pick one individual from the list. To help you decide, Massively has compiled a full list of every applicant in the running along with a short message about his or her campaign and handy links to available campaign resources. When you're ready to vote, follow this link to the voting page, log in, and click the vote button to the right of your chosen candidate. Remember to get your vote in before March 23rd when polls close! The results will be published on March 30th, and we'll find out who will be representing the EVE playerbase to CCP for the coming year.
TUAW interviews David Helgason of Unity (part two)
Yesterday we posted part one of my interview with David Helgason, co-founder and CEO of Unity. This time we talk a little more broadly about Unity as a tool and the industry and where Unity fits into the mobile and console spaces. Click read more to see the video.
Age of Conan's Morrison on designing for challenge and accessibility
Funcom executive producer Craig Morrison is drawing on his game journalist roots of late, via a series of in-depth postings on his personal blog. Morrison, a former IGN editor prior to his Funcom days, has a lot to say about gaming trends, which is great news for industry watchers and anyone interested in occasional glimpses into the thought process of an MMO developer. In his latest opus, the former Anarchy Online (and current Age of Conan) game director discusses the challenges in developing, well, challenge. In a followup post to his earlier discussion on progression, Morrison talks at length about the decisions developers face when it comes to providing players with a steady diet of dings and digital pats on the back, while simultaneously making it seem like something worthwhile is being accomplished. The post contains a number of interesting observations, among them the notion that most modern MMORPGs parcel out their challenging content in sideshows that are entirely optional (raids, dungeons, etc.) and, in many cases, tangential to the main event (questing and hunting). While it would seem to be a relatively simple matter to add occasional challenges to the leveling treadmill, Morrison cautions that care is needed to avoid alienating segments of your playerbase. "If you are going to be able to inject occasional challenge or difficulty spikes into the standard progression as well, you need to have thought about it to make sure that it won't become a bottleneck, and that it will survive a review," he says.
Capcom dishes the dirt on its Nintendo 3DS graphics
According to a recent Capcom investor Q&A, it looks like the company's upcoming Nintendo 3DS games will be developed using the MT Framework -- the same game engine used for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii titles. This means that graphics features like "HDR lighting, real-time color correction, self-shadowing, normal mapping, depth of field and motion blur" will be making their way to your handheld -- whenever it should become available. Hit the source link to see several examples featuring the upcoming Resident Evil: Revelations (or, as it's known in Japan, Biohazard: Revelations) and prepare to enter a virtual wonderworld of machine translated tech details regarding game development. You're welcome.
Anti-Aliased: Don't hate the playa, hate the developa
So I noticed something last week, in the comments section of my piece on UI design, that finally kicked me back into "endless rant" mode. It's a sentiment that I've noticed in the video game community at large for a while now, but I never really knew how to approach it until recently, thanks to my own life experiences with games. It's an idea that's pretty misinformed on how the industry works. It's the idea that the developers behind any given game are an idiots. According to commenters, they're all blind, non-gamer morons, bumbling around in the dark without the slightest sense of what game mechanics are actually fun. Why are these bumbling morons in the industry? Why don't they listen to the endless array of golden ideas that pop up on game forums? Don't they realize that these revolutionary ideas will turn every game into double-rainbow-crapping unicorns? Why haven't 15% of my readers (a totally accurate statistic, mind you) figured out how sarcastic I'm being at this point in the introduction? This week we're going after some of the common misconceptions about developers and game design, and how making a game as complex as an MMO is really never as easy as you claim it is.
Final Fantasy XIV unveils the next part in the Making of Eorzea
Any veteran player of Final Fantasy XI will be quick to talk about the marvelously detailed and realistic monsters found across the game. It's been clear from the start that Final Fantasy XIV will continue in the tradition, and the most recent video documentary released by Square-Enix demonstrates that in loving detail. Examining the production of the game's monsters in depth, the video is embedded after the cut and is a visual treat for almost any fan of the series. As the video explains, the process of creating a monster for the game starts with the team essentially sculpting a virtual model at a polygon count far too high for use in the game. That model is used as the basis for the detailed and intricate final models, several of which are allowed to strut their stuff in the video. From the giant sea serpent seen in the benchmark to old standbys like the malboro, it's clear how much work has gone into making each part of Final Fantasy XIV's wildlife seamless and believable. Take a look past the break for the video, and if your interest is piqued, you might wish to try and get into the beta.
The Daily Grind: What game would you change from the beginning?
Let's say for a moment that you have a time machine. Now, before you immediately start making plans to buy stocks and get President Kennedy to wear a helmet, it's a very specialized time machine. It will work exactly once, and bring you back to the development stage before a game has launched. You can't change the team or the studio, but you can have complete conceptual control over the game from the earliest testing until it finally goes live. With that in mind, what game would you pick? Would you go back to a game that's been canceled to see if better development early on could save it? Would you try and tweak something in your favorite game that always altered you? Would you try and make an older game more compatible with future design? Or would you go for a game that you never cared for and try to make it better?
SOE's Laralyn McWilliams talks girls and gaming
Game industry veteran and Sony Online Entertainment senior producer Laralyn McWilliams recently sat down to answer a few questions in an interview with the G.I.R.L. blog's Emily Taylor. McWilliams, instrumental in the development of SOE's Free Realms and now working on a new (and unannounced) social game, talks about everything from her current work, to being an influential woman working in games, to the industry in general. "It's a really exciting time in game development because the industry as a whole has to change in order to survive. We've gone from tiny teams on short schedules to massive teams taking four plus years to finish a game, and now we're seeing it come full circle back to tiny teams with games like Farmville. It makes it a great time for players and game developers because we're starting down the path that will lead us to more depth, new markets, and better games. As a player, it's time to speak with your wallet. As a developer, it's time to speak with your innovation and your drive to make something great and new," McWilliams says. Check out the full interview at the Station Blog.
THQ Partners program to assist publishers and developers with global distribution
Amidst the seemingly endless barrage of recent business announcements from game developers and publishers, THQ revealed its new "THQ Partners" program, led by former THQ wireless head Tim Walsh. Rather than mirroring similar initiatives at EA and Activision, THQ seems to be taking a different approach to its program: the publisher will be assisting developers and publishers in the US to bring their games to a global audience. Like the aforementioned EA and Activision initatives, however, there's a heavy focus on pedigree. "I'm looking forward to working with a select number of world-class developers and publishers to distribute their great games through our global network," Walsh says of his new position, briefly touching on the "quality over quantity" mantra repeatedly preached by THQ as of late. THQ Global Publishing executive VP Ian Curran echoes the sentiment, adding, "THQ Partners is charged with maximizing the efficiencies of our global distribution network by enhancing our product offerings with quality games from developers and publishers who don't have the benefit of our extensive retail and online sales operations." In human speak, "enhancing our product offerings with quality games" means "we're going to publish good games, and more of them," and those other parts in there talk about working harder to bring more games to more markets, on a global scale. Though we've reached out to see if THQ is already in talks with developers and publishers, the announcement says that Tim Walsh and THQP "will be meeting with interested parties at E3." Update: Tim Walsh answers some questions on the new program for us after the break.
