GameLoop 2009: looping it up like it’s 2009

September 4, 2009

First, some thoughts and observations about GameLoop… Traveler’s guide to GameLoop. You can recognize GameLoop by its: Game developers and similar with wide variety of interests Highly-engaged conversations Extreme nerdiness Total awesomeness Things that I say I did at GameLoop, but without pictures, I can’t prove it Attended some great talks including ones on Player [...]

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Independent Game Conference East (IGC East) Wrap-up

May 13, 2009

This was the first year the Independent Game Conference East has been held, and I think it was a great start. My hopes for IGC East were to do some good networking and see a few interesting sessions, and I feel I got even more than I bargained for. I’d like to recap a few [...]

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BarCamp Boston 4 Wrap-up

May 9, 2009

BarCamp Boston 4 was the first BarCamp I’ve attended, and it certainly did not disappoint! I’d heard great things about it, and last year’s BarCamp-inspired Boston GameLoop set my expectations even higher. What was great was that there were people with so many different technical and personal interests there. We had lots of people with [...]

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AngelXNA spreads her wings!

May 1, 2009

Jeff Ward and I are proud to announce today that we’re officially presenting AngelXNA 1.0 to the world. AngelXNA is a game prototyping engine built upon Microsoft’s XNA framework. It offers all the power of XNA, plus several key features including: In-game interactive Console (ala Quake/Half-Life) Super-simple Logging (to system, Console, and/or files) Basic Actor [...]

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This weekend: BarCamp Boston 4!

April 22, 2009

I’m really looking forward to attending BarCamp Boston this weekend. This will be my first BarCamp, but I’ve heard great things about it. Last year’s BarCamp inspired Darius and Scott to run the very first Boston GameLoop un-conference, which really rocked. I still think about the topics discussed there and the ideas we shared about [...]

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Rockstar web-games integration with GTA: Chinatown Wars

April 15, 2009

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how games can integrate with the web and provide players with a natural connection between the main game experience and the meta-game, where progress tracking, further exploration, and competition with other players can often become enriched in significant ways. So when I noticed that Rockstar now lets owners [...]

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Punishment, confidence, and improvisational play (reflecting on Clint Hocking’s GDC ‘09 talk)

April 8, 2009

One of the very best talk of GDC ‘09 was Clint Hocking’s talk on improvisational play. That article does a good job of summarizing his talk. The element that I want to talk about is the part about giving players the confidence to embrace improvisational play, as opposed to simply seeking the fastest or most [...]

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Quick Highlights from GDC 2009

April 1, 2009

GDC 2009 was awesome. It was an amazing week. For this post, I’ll stick to a quick recap of a few highlights, and I might even get a little sentimental towards the end. GDC, after all, is both a stimulating intellectual and unique emotional experience for many people, myself included. First, there was the Indie [...]

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Game of Nom Post Mortems

March 10, 2009

All three core developers for our Global Game Jam game, Game of Nom, have now posted post mortems of the development process. Amanda Cosmos Mine Jeff Ward Jeff & I wrote Game Developer Magazine-style post mortems and covered a lot of technical details of the project (among other things), while Amanda gives a nice short [...]

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My Games of 2008: Civilization Revolution, Braid, GTA IV

March 5, 2009

This is a continuation of my series of brief write-ups for games I played in 2008.   Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution Why I played it I was highly intrigued and inspired by the bold challenge that Firaxis took on with this game. Re-imagining one of gaming’s most beloved and deepest strategy games for consoles? It [...]

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