Category: Projects

Making games is easy. Belonging is hard. #1ReasonToBe

The past few weeks I have been honored to be producer and ‘professional extrovert’ to my good friend, Deirdra “Squinky” Kiai’s IGF nominated work “Dominique Pamplemousse“.

There’s a lot I have to process in the experience which I will share later. But now I need to point the microphone to Squinky on a very important speech. The following link is the transcript to their talk at the #1ReasonToBe panel. Sitting in the audience, I cried as my dear friend had the courage to publicly share such a raw experience. I am extremely proud of them and honored to work alongside them.

Making games is easy. Belonging is hard. #1ReasonToBe

Steam WebAPI Proposal

Steam WebAPI Proposal

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the Steam Condenser project. It’s library to make sense of the Steam Community, Source, GoldSrc and Steam master servers information for PHP, Java, and Ruby. They’re still using the deprecated XML data which Valve replaced with the Steam WebAPI. I’m starting to work on converting the PHP library to WebAPI, when I discovered the community data was stuck in XML and no replacement.

So I made a public proposal to the Steam WebAPI.

I wanted a public demonstration of my API development work. I’ve done a lot of this stuff before, but it’s all private and can’t be shared. While this is just a proposal and lacks the consulting with Valve employees, it does demonstrate my skill under the limited circumstances. Course, I wouldn’t mind working with Valve on this. Or working at Valve on this. 😀

I also found there’s no good way to get game information — including pricing and other data. There’s gameplay stats and the news feed, but there’s no way of getting the kind of data you’d get at a store page. That’s my next step!

Global Game Jam 2013: The Rooms

Over the weekend I participated in the Global Game Jam 2012 in San Francisco. The results was “The Rooms”, a text adventure of sorts:

The Rooms

It’s all done in Javascript and HTML. Did it all in about 10 hours, though there were a few iterations in the process. Could spend a bit more time for a better ending, but whatevers.

You can get the whole thing on GitHub if you’d like, showing how I code when I have 10 hours of working time along with writing time. There’s also the Global Game Jam page for the project as well. Later this week I’ll dive a bit more into the development.

Non-Fiction Games Manifesto

With the advent of starting my own game studio and using the term “non-fiction games,” I figure I should explain my reasoning behind the term.

My Background

Space Between Studios

My work as an artist is narrative based interactive fiction. I grew up on SCUMM era games like Sam & Max and of Live-Action Video (LAV) titles like Tex Murphy. I explored the ages of Myst and the saved the time-space continuum in Buried in Time. Art to me is exploring the space between the audience member and the work of art itself. Good art allows the audience to fill in that space by giving enough information to make the experience owned by the audience. I’m constantly perfecting my skills in this craft to explore this space.

The Current Serious Space

While and establishing myself in fiction works, I started to think about the other areas of thought this art form can tackle. I’ve mused about this before with topics like “The Corporation for Public Gaming” for the Serious Games space. Loosely described as games that have a real-world purpose. While there are great works, I find the space lacking. There’s a series of toys created to find the quickest way to illustrate a narrowed concept. They’re not rewarding experiences for the most part and at best a sense of guilt that you must play this game rather than wanting to.

Bow Street Runner

A browser based LAV game called “Bow Street Runner” has stuck out with me in what I want from non-fiction works. Done by Littleloud as a commission for a Channel 4 show called “City of Vice,” the game is arguably more rememberable than the show. The player is a Bow Street Runner, the pre-cursor to our modern police system. While the game is historical fiction, it is still taking history and only filling in gaps to make it approachable in our history. Different from the attempts that Assassin’s Creed takes where a completely alternative universe is created with our existing understanding of history.

Non-Fiction Gaming

For the better part of my career, I’ve worked on making games that fit within the universe of an existing IP. While some were more restrictive than others, the titles I help to realize had a certain degree of rules mandated by the franchise. The question I ask: How is this different from a non-fiction topics? How difficult is it to follow the rules of the universe of a fictional franchise to the universe we exist in?

Non-Fiction Gaming is my approach to close this gap. Non-fiction gaming is taking the same approach of fictional game development to non-fiction topics. Instead of deep-diving into a fictional world, I choose to dive into our own world. Gaming needs it’s Maus and Persepolis. It needs it’s NPR: Planet Money and This American Life. It needs it’s Cosmos: A Personal Journey. I choose to take the same love and care I approach an existing fictional universe to the world of science, history, art, and anything else I care to talk about though my art.

In the end, what I care about is the space between the work of art I create and the player themselves. That part where both sides come together and only the player can create. A space that isn’t restricted to works of fiction. This is why I started my studio.

Edits: Added headers and corrected grammar. (1/15/2013)

Ümloud! 2012: Done

Another Ümloud! is in the bag! While there’s still paperwork and other bits of things to do, the show is over and we have lots of money to give to the hospitals. Have to wait for the numbers to settle before giving a final count, but needless to say, it’s a much larger number than the year prior. 😀

This year we had a new host for the event: Tim Schafer. Growing up with the SCUMM era of games, never would I thought I’d be introducing him onto the stage of a show I’m putting on. Certainly a highlight of my life.

This year I'm getting a lot fewer complaints about how the show went. Sure, there are still improvements that need to be made, but we're starting to actually know how to do this show now. Moving forward, I hope we can expand the team even more and thus become a better production.

I'm still processing all of the things that went on with the show, hence this rambling of a blog post. One thing is clear for me. After all the bad things that happened to me this year, the show shined a very bright light into a darkness. There are many people to thank for that, which will be the subject of another blog post.

My next steps: Employment via employer or myself!

My Unannounced Title

I have decided to do something that which is likely my destiny, but it took my broker to convince me to go forward with this plan.

I am developing my own game: A project about the art of video games.

One of the very few textbooks for my BFA at Emerson was Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. The text looks at the aspects of visual communication in which comics work. It’s a comic book explaining the art form of comics in a comic book. I want to make a video game explaining the art form of video games in a video game.

Continue reading My Unannounced Title

The ending is not yet been written…

As of last Wenendsay, I am no longer with Telltale Games. After over five years with the studio, I am now looking for other opportunities and projects to work on.

This is the e-mail I sent to the studio and is what I also want to share with all of you.

There are a lot of words that come out of me right now. Many stories of great people and the great work produced together in the over five years. Too many to detail for any one e-mail, but it speaks to the many accomplishments that this studio has afforded all of us. I developed as an artist and storyteller though this place. I developed as a producer and a programmer though this place. Now I am off to find my own voice as an artist. To find new ways to engage an audience in this art form we all love.

Telltale is a success story in developing rich narrative environments. It is that belief that kept me working hard all of these years and though all the titles I’ve had. And even as I depart, it is a belief I still carry with me.

So to all of you, thank you for allowing me to be a part of this work. It is truly an honor to work with you and being apart of greatness.

I close with one line from a video game that’s always been very dear to me and is perfectly fitting:

“… and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.”

Antidote

I’ve released over 130 SKUs of video games to date.
These Mac & Windows SKUs are the most personal.

Play Antidote

Thank you to the many people who helped me Antidote! While I wish the project met the expectations I and others had, it still provided me and others the experience that helped all of us to become talented and successful practitioners of interactive media and beyond.

I would not be where I am today, making video games for a living, if it wasn’t for Antidote and all the people who helped to make this happen. For this I am forever grateful. Now, to formally announce the release in my traditional manor:

Please enjoy this game.
It was made for you, with love, in Kalamazoo, Northville, Ann Arbor, Boston and Berkeley.

Child’s Play, Ümloud! & Anitdote

A few quick items of what’s been going on in my life and what’s to come.

Child’s Play, Ümloud!, PAX East Panels

For PAX East 2011, I reprised my role in the Child’s Play Charity panel. This time it was extra special as Kristin revealed the first full-time hire for Child’s Play, Jamie Dillion! You can see her interview process on PATV (Part 1, Part 2). Her roll with Child’s Play is to help expand upon the org and deal with community fundraiser people like me. I’m really excited about working with Jamie and see a lot of cool and awesome things in the future for Child’s Play.

For the panel, I wrote this document as an extended outline for the panel. It will soon be expanded upon and made into a Child’s Play publication with a lot more info soon.

Antidote

The other panel I was on was AJ’s “The Sorting Workshop”. It started out with a game “preview” in which attendees had to write about the game for 10 minutes. From there, the other panelest would read the writings and comment with notes on how to write for journalism, marketing, pr, etc. AJ asked me to be the dev to preview a game. She was expecting something of MSPaint quality — Something with little effort to use. Instead, I used a live-action video game called Antidote. 😉

This got me thinking that I should release the thing, though I am nervous about it. I’ll just go out and say that this isn’t a good game to play and I don’t plan on fixing it. I don’t worry about people trashing it in reviews, but I worry a little that people think I’ve at that level with the art form when I’ve grown well beyond that in the years. So the website’s going to have notable disclaimer setting the exceptions low and pointing them to better games I’ve worked on like Puzzle Agent.

On the tech side, I was glad to see that the Mac build was able to run on an Intel based Mac. This is especially key as the version of Director that I used was before the Intel business and thus a PowerPC executable. The saving grace is the Rosetta layer on Mac OS X. It’s technically an optional install with a “just-in-time” download and install when the user first runs a PowerPC executable. However, Rosetta will be removed from Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”, so the time is now to release the thing. For the curious, it would cost me $300+ to get a version of Director to make the Intel version — which I don’t plan to spend.

The Windows version runs without problems on Win7. I did remake an installer last night using Inno Setup so the install process flows better. There is the requirement of having Quicktime installed, but if you have iTunes you have it. I also have the Mac installer redone, but still need to make the DMG background for it. From there, I’m going to clean up the website and make it pretty. I’ll be using Amazon S3 to distribute the builds as straight downloads and Bittorent. The download is big at 240-260mb, but bandwidth is much cheaper these days than five years ago.

I plan to get everything ready and released by the end of April, if not sooner.