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Category Archives: Development

How games are developed

Principles and Practices for Productive Teams - Slides from my GDC Paris 08 talk

27-Jan-09

Regular readers may remember that back on June 23rd 2008, I gave a presentation on productivity and being a producer at GDC Paris.
Well, I am happy to announce that about 6 months later, I have finally given the slides a final polish and converted them to an accessible format. It only took me a few [...]

Game Development Failure

30-Dec-08

Why did that take so long? Apart from legal issues I mean. I Get Your Fail is a blog showcasing failure in game development. The fun kind where you laugh, not the kind where you spend 3 years and 20 million dollars on a flop. Every game dev project has some good failures… often these [...]

Slides and videos from IGDA Leadership Forum 2007

25-Jul-08

A ton of material from the IGDA Leadership Forum 2007 is online now. Videos, slides, summaries… a lot of stuff. I haven’t even started looking through it yet, but the list of sessions looks very tasty:
Leadership Track:

Building the Perfect Team
Leadership Lab
Death By 1000 Ideas: Managing Designers and Creatives
Managing Engineers
Managing Artists and Art Outsourcing for [...]

Some interesting Javascript projects

12-Jun-08

Bomomo is a drawing program written in Javascript (thanks Stéphane). It doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, but then, who uses that? Cubescapeis a 2.5D brick building program written in Javascript. Meebo is a meta-IM client written in Javascript. Impressive!
Apple just announced that they are working on making Javascript 60% faster in WebKit (in other words, [...]

The usability testing on Halo 3

27-Jan-08

It’s time to close some tabs. This Wired article is about the usability testing that Microsoft and Bungie did on Halo 3.
People who know me know I am a big fan of quantified and/or empirical approaches to game design. I really truly think that if you’re not using these kind of methods, over time you [...]

Why game design is important

01-Oct-07

A long, long time ago I worked at a company that did not have a game design position, and I wanted to convince the people there that, you know, maybe you should have game designers. Like, one per project, at least. Ah, the good old days.
So with the help of Mark Barrett I wrote a [...]

Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development

19-Jun-07

If you know what the waterfall model for software development is, you might get a kick out of reading about Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development. It has tons of great tutorials by well-known software development experts - here is an excerpt:

Take Control of Your Team’s Decisions NOW! by Ken Schwaber
Avoiding the Seven [...]

Complete, produced game design documents

10-Apr-07

A friend of mine just asked me if I had any complete game design documents of released games lying around. Since I happened to know of a few, and this is not the first time I get asked this question, I figured I might as well turn the answer into a blog post.

Coolest middleware brochure ever

08-Apr-04

CRI Middleware Co. Ltd., a Japanese middleware company, has the coolest marketing brochure ever. And their products sound good too.

The orc vs deer wars

27-Mar-03

Gamasutra has an article up called “Neverwinter Nights Client/Server Postmortem: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Magic Missile”, by Mike Brockington and Scott Greig, and based on this year’s GDC lecture. Going far beyond mere client/server problems: it discusses various problems that can occur on a very big, very long project with [...]