Some of my personal criteria for game titles were:

• It’s nice when a game’s title starts with an “a”, because then the game shows up at the top of alphabetized lists.
• It’s nice when the game’s title is not truncated by the operating system. Albion was a DOS game, so it’s nice to have a name of eight characters or less.

However. Albion started off as an Amiga game, and Amiga’s operating system allowed longer filenames than DOS. So either we came up with the name after we made the decision to switch to DOS (because Commodore had gone bankrupt), or we were just lucky in this regard.

So someone, maybe me, came up with “Albion”. We didn’t know what it meant, but we knew it sounded vaguely Celtic. As this was before we could have looked this up on Wikipedia or Google, we had no idea Albion meant England… In retrospect it’s a weird name that creates associations that have nothing to do with the game. This is probably how Japanese developers pick names all the time.

Anyway, that’s how we came up with the name.

Andy and I have decided to leave Vienna and move abroad (or, in my case, another abroad).

Why?

A lot of reasons have accumulated over the last couple of years. Andy wants to experience living in another country. I have lived in Vienna for 11 years – the longest I’ve ever lived in one place in my life – and I am ready for something new.

Vienna’s game development industry, while having grown considerably over the last few years, is too small to offer Andy the decently-paid, full-time game design job that will allow her to get to the next level as a designer. (Apologies to her previous and current employers, who are fine people working on fine projects, but compared to bigger game dev clusters, or just bigger companies, the choice of game design jobs in Vienna is poor, and I think my wife deserves better.)

Also, I was struck by this article by Steven Berlin Johnson, particularly the bit about time speeding up. I’ve noticed that I’m stuck in routines, both personally and professionally, and I want to change that.

Where?

Narrowing down the countries we could imagine ourselves living in turned out to be surprisingly hard, but in the end we ended up with:

The Netherlands is obviously an option language-wise (Andy has learned Dutch in record time), and I could imagine living in my home country again, but I’ve been observing the industry there for a while and I just don’t know if it can provide the jobs we’re looking for.

I’ve lived in Germany for 7 years and, well, it wouldn’t be a big enough change. The Nordic countries and France have their charms but one or both of us would have trouble with the local language. I don’t mind learning languages – au contraire – but I also like using language at a very high level, and I’ve noticed that my German and French, while good enough for fluent speaking, are not as good as my English, and I feel this is holding me back.

So an English-speaking country it will be.

These locations are not equal in terms of being easy to move to. The UK is no problem, Canada seems doable, but moving to the US is a pain because we need two H1-B visas, there are quotas, there are deadlines, and it restricts us to the kind of companies that can sponsor our visas and probably won’t go bust or lay us off while we’re there. We know it’s a long shot, but we love the Bay Area, so… who knows.

When?

We’d like to move, or at least know where we’re going to move, in March at the latest. (Our respective employers, co-founders and co-workers have known about our plans for a number of months already.)

What?

Andy is looking for a decent game design job at a professional company. She has been making games for 8 years. She is passionate about storytelling in games, languages, teaching through games (not necessarily all at the same time). I have hired her at Mipumi once and, to my great chagrin, have never managed to hire her again, because whenever we needed a game designer, she had another job, and whenever she was available we couldn’t afford to hire anyone.

As for me: I started off as a programmer, then turned to design and production, then, as co-founder and creative director of Mipumi Games, I not only got to do more programming again, I also got to wear a lot more founder-related hats (something I spoke about recently for the AltDev Student Summit – you can see that here). Basically, I can get things done.

Life is too short to talk about what I think will get me a nice job as opposed to what I really want to do. Like I say in my LinkedIn profile: I am passionate about the intersection of interactivity, technology and storytelling. So that means interactive storytelling, AI, procedural stuff, design-programming hybrid positions, or managing projects involving any of that are my cup of tea. (Note that I am not a game AI expert.)

I also want to work on high quality games that advance the medium. I get very unhappy when I have to work on bad or mediocre games. And I think there is still an enormous amount of things that can be done in and around games, and I can’t wait to help make that happen.

As for what kind of position in what kind of company that boils down to: you tell me. I can go from hands-on development all the way to the executive level if the people and projects are right.

That was a lot about me. Sorry.

How?

We’ve already been talking to various companies, but we both need a job in the same place, so to speed things up we’ve decided to talk about this a bit more publicly. If you could help spread this blog post through Twitter, Facebook, etc. that would be lovely.

If you are looking for people like us: please look at our LinkedIn profiles (Andy Schmoll and Jurie Horneman). References are available on request, or, you know, just look for common contacts on LinkedIn and ask them. We also have normal CVs of course.

Please get in touch if you work for or know of companies that we should be talking to. My email address is jhorneman@pobox.com, Andy’s is schmoll.andrea@gmail.com.

Thank you for reading this far, and thanks in advance for any help.

I have a ton of ideas for things I’d like to do and that might turn into something. If I had a million dollars, I’d develop a lot of those ideas as cheaply as I could and then pick one to expand, polish and release. Or I’d get a bunch of super-creative people together for a couple of days and see what happens. I don’t have this one dream concept lying in a desk drawer, and I’d worry if I did.

But back in 2001 I was asked that question in an interview for a job at Ion Storm Austin, and instead of explaining why I didn’t like the question I told this group, about 10 people from one of the hottest development teams back then, about this crazy game idea I had. (TL;DR: I didn’t get the job.)

A guy I worked with once remarked that Lara Croft’s view of the world in the original Tomb Raider resembled that of a psychotic character: everything is grim and trying to attack you. This goes for a lot of games, not just Tomb Raider, but I thought it was an interesting point. And it led me to the following idea:

Imagine the US, anytime between the last ten years and the near future. Society has a problem. People are frequently running amok and killing others indiscriminately. (I mean more than in our world.) Nobody knows why, but the FBI has an elite squad of agents who can sense these attacks a short time before they happen, and then rush in to prevent it from happening, or at least to limit the damage. And you are one of those agents.

In between missions you’re in your elite squad base, watching TV. Then you or someone else gets a hunch, and you run off to some mall or square or public building to find and stop some man or woman about to snap and go crazy. Then you go back to your base to watch TV, and you’ll see an anchorperson reporting about some incident, a terrorist tried to attack, brave officers saved the day, etc.

But then, over time, something starts to change. Little things you see in the corner of your eye. Little flashes. Monstrous shapes that turn back into normal people. This happens more and more. Your colleagues start asking if you’re OK, but you insist on you’re fine and continue to go on missions. And then you realize you understand what those people, the people who snap and need to be taken out, are screaming about. You realize you can sometimes see what they are seeing. A grim world, all brown and grey, populated by monsters. (A world from mid-90s Quake-likes.)

Pretty soon you see this world all the time. And the monsters are coming for you. And you have to defend yourself.

And then you’re not in your base, watching TV. You’re skulking through alleyways, cradling your gun, catching glimpses of the news through the windows of bars. Some madman is on the loose, they say. A rogue officer.

And you know you’re former colleagues aren’t far behind.

So in the end you get shot because you’re crazy (OR ARE YOU). Basically it’s an elaborate joke to say something about how first-person shooters used to be. The setting doesn’t fully make sense and I don’t know if the game would even work as a game. Ironically, the chances of this getting made are not bad these days, and there might even be an audience for it if you did a good job. In 2001, in a commercial context, it was not the best answer, and I didn’t get the job. Over 10 years later, it’s at least an amusing anecdote.

Why grieve over the death of someone I never met? Someone who had his dark sides? Who made products that are not perfect? Someone who we all knew was not doing well, health-wise? Why grieve over the death of a rich white man who made expensive gadgets, while many things that are much worse happen every day?

Because I find Steve Jobs inspiring. He was a creative person who cared about quality and details, and who won. He pulled it off, he was successful both creatively and financially. His success was not something only insiders could appreciate. It is measurable in crass numbers.

As someone who is creative and who cares about quality and details, it is immensely inspiring to know that it is possible. It is possible to be uncompromising, to care, and to succeed. That doesn’t mean I can do so, but knowing that it’s possible makes me at least want to try.

And I love using Apple products. I don’t consider myself a dyed-in-the-wool, hard-core Apple fan. I’ve never used an Apple II. I used Macs at work in the 90s, but I was indifferent about them.

I bought my first Mac in 2003, a second-hand white G3 iBook, after my Windows PC, the only one I ever bought, started getting too long in the tooth. Then I bought a G4 iBook. And an iMac. Then I got a G5 PowerMac for free (long story). Then I bought my current machine, an Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. And now I’m considering buying a new Mac.

I won’t bore you with the details of my iPods and iPhones.

But I’ve obviously become a fanboy. I drank the Kool-Aid. I buy the line about control and integration leading to a better user experience. I care about user experience, and nothing is as nice to use as Apple products. They may be imperfect, but that doesn’t mean they’re not miles better than the rest. By now I have trouble understanding why anyone would not want to get an iPhone if they could afford one. Or use Windows, except for hard-core gaming or because you’re forced to, by work. It’s a mystery to me. (And I realize this might offend some people. Sorry!)

Sounds cultish? It gets worse. One reason why I’m sad that Steve Jobs has died is that, while he was alive, I knew there was someone who was actively making my life better. Who was bringing me the future, in a way that had a real impact on my life.

And now he’s gone.

This morning I started watching the 2007 iPhone presentation on my MacBook Pro. I had never watched it before. (Because I had all the time in the world. Right?) While I was watching, the screen started flickering and glitching. And then it turned black. I closed the lid, opened it again. It stayed black.

So I realized I had a MacBook Pro, that when opened would show a black screen and Steve Jobs’s voice would come out.

Anyway.

Jason Kottke has an excellent summary of what people wrote today about Jobs’s passing, as well as the same question I’ve been asking myself:

I am incredibly sad this morning. Why am I, why are we, feeling this so intensely?

Marco Arment, maker of the excellent Instapaper, puts it nicely:

But it feels like someone close to me has died. He was so intimately involved in his company and its products (which have become critical parts of my career and hobby life), and he has publicly injected so much vision, personality, and care into our entire industry for so long, that I do feel like I knew him, even though I really didn’t.

Panic are an excellent example of the kind of software developers that make software you just don’t get on Windows. Here they explain why (although it might be gone by the time you read this).

Be sure to watch (or read) Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech:

One more thing has been going through my head today. Jobs was 56. I’m 40. What have I been doing with my life?

As you may or may not know, I co-organized Stagconf, a one-day conference on storytelling and games, together with my wonderful wife Andy Schmoll and our good friend Harald Eckmueller.

Like the best of adventures, it seemed like a good idea at the time, turned out to require much more work and energy than we naively expected, involved a lot of drama and excitement, and had a happy ending.

It took place last Tuesday, September 27th. So far, the positive feedback has been very, very positive, and the negative feedback was along the lines of “I didn’t get a chance to eat one of the donuts and they looked yummy”.

I didn’t write much about it here. Apart from the fact that I don’t blog much anymore in general, the main reason was fear. Fear of announcing something that might turn out to fail. Fear that my terror of this whole thing becoming a spectacular and costly failure would be obvious, and would jinx things. Conquering this fear was a wonderful experience, one that I’m very glad to have had. Despite it being terrifying.

At some point it became clear to me that we were effectively running a little startup on the side, next to our day jobs. A day job which in my case involved working at another startup. If you’ve been in a startup, you know it’s an emotional roller coaster. Being on two emotional roller coasters at the same time was stressful to say the least, especially in late July and August when we had just started selling tickets and had not closed any sponsorship deals.

This stress also lead to, ironically, me not wanting to deal with games or storytelling in games or any other side projects. And in the final weeks, it lead to my wife and me not wanting to deal with cooking, cleaning or having a social life.

But now the conference is over. The last speaker is flying back to the US. I still have to organize some feedback surveys, and we’ve started thinking about next year’s conference. But today, I can sleep in, catch up on my reading, think of new adventures, and enjoy the beautiful weather.

Sadly, I missed the opening keynote by Martin Schwiezer on AAA development in Germany, but I was able to squeeze into the completely packed room for Ron Gilbert’s presentation on the making of Maniac Mansion. It was great to see how that game was made, and one of his key points was that not knowing things (such as “making a game with 3 main characters out of a possible 7, with custom puzzles and endings for each combination is really hard”) can be very liberating.

Ron was followed by Mike Acton from Insomniac, with a talk based on his recent blog post It doesn’t have to suck, which was reposted on Gamasutra. Mike used a very simple presentation structure combined with a lot of interaction with the audience. This worked very well for this topic, because he challenged the audience to think about how to decrease the suckage in game development in their daily lives.

After the lunch break Ryan Challinor from Harmonix Music Systems explained how the the gesture-based UI navigation approach in Dance Central was developed. I, like many others in the audience, haven’t played Dance Central, so hearing about all the dead ends was actually quite suspenseful, and I was glad to hear that they found something that worked well in the end.

Mary-Margaret Walker then talked about how to nurture your career and why you should keep your resumé updated, even if you’re happy in your job. It was great to get tips from someone who’s seen as many resumés as she has.

I missed the panel discussion on recruiting talent, partially because of the amazing apple pie that was served during the coffee break and for which I must get the recipe, but I was back in time to see Benedikt Grindel and Christopher Schmitz’s presentation on how Blue Byte took the Settlers brand to online and social games. It was very interesting to hear how they were able to cut costs by reusing assets, and how these games fit into the larger Ubisoft strategy. (It was also somehow touching to me since I worked at Blue Byte a long time ago.)

The first day ended with a great party in the Sol y Mar, where I got to catch up with old friends from the German games industry and talk to new ones.

The second day started with David Hellman’s presentation on the art of Braid. It was amazing to hear how much thought and effort had gone into creating the look of that game, and it made me want to start up my industrial vacuum cleaner Xbox and play it again, and maybe finish it this time.

Andrew Walker then gave an overview of the publisher-developer relationship ten years ago versus now. Working at a small developer, this is a subject I have a lot of interest in, so it was great to hear what someone who’s worked at a very high level at a top publisher had to say about it.

Mary Bihr from LucasArts Entertainment talked about the history of games based on movies, specifically based on Lucasfilm movies, going back to the very first Star Wars games and the humble beginnings of LucasArts. She also gave away prizes (sadly, I was not eligible), which greatly increased audience participation.

After lunch, Richard Dansky gave a really good talk on genre stories in video games and why they are so common. The audience responded very well to his talk and there were a lot of questions, including the dreaded question-that’s-not-a-question, in this case about Heavy Rain being the savior of interactive storytelling. Hmmm….. no. Although I have nothing against Heavy Rain, I wasn’t convinced before, and certainly not after Richard’s comments on it, which were of course blithely ignored by the questioner.

Jeff Ward gave the final presentation on pitfalls and best practices in data-driven development. He had shown me some of what he’s done in AngelXNA and it’s definitely a cool system.

The conference ended with a discussion by Mary, Ron and Noah Falstein on the history of LucasArts. I missed that for no good reason, but I hope I can catch it on video.

The presentations were great, but for my wife and me, being involved in the organization, the real treat was hanging out with the speakers. Just like last year we had a really great little group, all passionate about video games, and we had a ton of very interesting discussions. We spent Saturday walking around Hannover and visiting the Wilhelm Busch museum, finally ending up in a great steak restaurant. Today my wife and I flew back to Vienna, exhausted, but also energized and inspired. I’m already looking forward to next year.

Although it’s a nice number to drop into conversations from time to time, it remains, of course, an arbitrary milestone. There are enough people with a much longer career in the industry, and I am proud to count some of them among my friends.

But arbitrary or not, it’s a good opportunity to reflect. I like to think that I’ve managed to keep learning and growing, and that, with time, I am slowly managing to make new mistakes instead of just repeating old ones. I’ve found that delivering good work doesn’t become easier with time, but I’ve mostly grown used to the difficulty.

Today’s date also means that I moved away from my native Netherlands 20 years ago. I have now lived more than half of my life abroad. Is that meaningful? I don’t know. It has definitely changed me.

Today, after some detours into jobs where I was removed from hands-on development, I am not that far from where I started 20 years ago. I design and manage now, but I also still program.

I now work in a time when games are much more accepted as an industry, a medium and an art form, and when the interactive entertainment landscape is as exciting as ever, with more platforms, more play contexts, and more paradigms for games than ever before.

I am as passionate about the combination of interactivity, technology and storytelling as I was 20 years ago, and I still believe that the best is yet to come.

I could write more, but I have work to do.

It worked out very well. Every talk exceeded my expectations, and all of the feedback I’ve gotten so far has been very positive. The organizers did a great job in making sure everyone had a great time, and the mood during the conference was very good.

I either had no time or no Internet connection, or I would have tweeted my head off. But the upside is that I now have a very good reason to blow the dust off of my blog and write something longer than 140 characters.

Here are my impressions of the talks at GFG 2010:

Industry legend RJ Mical opened the conference with a look at the history of video game hardware and how hardware has affected the games we play and vice versa. RJ worked on the Commodore Amiga, a home computer which was very popular in Germany in the 80s and 90s. This, together with a rumor that RJ would reveal juicy details about the PlayStation 4, meant the room was packed. RJ is an incredibly charismatic person and his talk was great. (This page gives you an impression of his personality.)

RJ was followed by Raphael Lacoste, an incredibly talented artist, who explained in detail how he approached the art direction of Assassin’s Creed. He showed the paintings that had inspired him, including many by Caspar David Friedrich, then analyzed various shots from Assassin’s Creed to show how he had used contrast, silhouettes, filters and other techniques to create the game’s look.

Jason Gregory from Naughty Dog (author of Game Engine Architecture) explained how to set up game loops in AAA console games (especially in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, of course) so that they run efficiently on multiple processors. He succeeded in making this somewhat esoteric subject accessible, even to non-programmers. And he discussed the Uncharted 2′s awesome train level in great detail.

Risa Cohen, Jane Corden and Térence Mosca held a very slick presentation about the business side of games, talking in depth about the marketing of digitally distributed games and the use of completion bonding in games. This was followed by a panel discussion (moderated by myself), where we were joined by Mary Matthews from Blitz Games Studios and Stefan Weyl from Namco Bandai Partners. We touched on a lot of (perhaps too much) interesting subjects, ranging from marketing to finance to new platforms.

Steve Ince closed the first day by giving an inspiring talk about aspects of characters in games.

On the second day, Darius Kazemi presented a structured approach for convincing people (going back to Aristotle!) and how you can mine data at work to support your arguments. The room was not that full, but that was due to the excellent party the night before, and not because of Darius’ talk. (Darius also transcribed RJ’s talk here.)

Jeff Lander described in detail what it takes to develop very high quality character animation systems, where the pitfalls are, and where middleware will let you down. Like Jason Gregory, he did an excellent job of presenting a very complex topic so that it was accessible even to people unfamiliar with the subject.

Chris Foster from Harmonix Music Systems gave a very inspiring talk about collaboration and how it is central to game design, giving concrete examples from the development of The Beatles: Rock Band.

Matias Myllyrinne from Remedy talked about their company philosophy and how they use playtests and usability tests. He also showed us footage from Alan Wake, including some clips that had never been shown before.

Finally, Thomas Bidaux from ICO Partners talked about the state of the free to play games market in Europe. He seemed a bit worried that page after page of business statistics would bore his audience of mostly developers and students, but he did a great job of conveying what makes these games interesting, and how big they are, especially in Germany.

(Videos from all the sessions will be put online soon. You can see videos from previous years here. There’s a little German here and there, but the talks are all in English.)

I had a great time. The conference was not too big, the people were nice, the food was good, the party was great, the lectures rocked, I met old friends and made new ones, and I had lots of time to chat with other developers, which is one of my favorite things to do in the games industry. This time I had the additional pleasure of sharing the experience with my wonderful fiancée. It was her first time at a development conference. She wrote about her impressions here.

Some of you – well, one person anwyay – may have noticed that I am not blogging much these days. There are two reasons for this:

One, I am hard at work. For ludicrous reasons entirely my own I can’t yet tell you what I am working on, but it’s fun and it’s taking up a lot of my time.

Two, like Ragnar Tornquist, my Internet activities have been largely taken over by Twitter. That means that both my RSS news reader and my blog posting application have been languishing. I write gnomic mini-blog posts, which you can see in the side bar or if you follow me on @JurieOnGames. I also get most of my news over Twitter now. It’s a different experience from reading RSS feeds, but Twitter sort of forces me to admit I can’t read everything, unlike my news reader with it’s quietly judging ’1000 unread posts’ display.

So, there you go. I don’t intend to stop blogging, but the short messages will definitely be going on Twitter. I intend to set things up so my tweets get posted here as well, for those people who really don’t want to set up a Twitter account. Which, you know, is not that hard – set up a protected account, follow me, and it’s like reading this site on the web.

Also, 5 months ago today I met my lovely girlfriend, a far more significant milestone.