Everyone’s doing it, so am I! These are the games of note for me, but I had to separate into categories of titles my friends or myself worked on. I haven’t been able to play many newly released games this year, but here’s a few released this year I’d like to note.
Continue reading Seg’s Game List of 2014Hello! If a friend linked you here, it’s because they care about your online accounts from getting seriously steamrolled. While there’s always a degree of risk, these steps will cut that risk significantly. Where at worse, if one account becomes compromised, it doesn’t give the keys to everything else you have.
Update: Crash Override Network’s tool C.O.A.C.H. is a great step-by-step guide you can also use.
There are two parts to how I protect my online accounts. One is free but available for a few services. The other is buying a piece of software. Together they do change the philosophy of how you create and manage online accounts, but you’ll be much more secure by doing it.
Continue reading The Quick Indie Guide to Protecting Your AccountsAs the producer for Dominique Pamplemousse (or ‘Professional Extrovert’ as Squinky calls me), I have to get the game in front of as many people as possible. With the IGF Grand Prize & other nominations, there’s a lot of opportunities presented to the game and it’s my roll to capture them. Course, we’re limited by budget (there is none) and time (I have little of).
Our sales are particularly high in Europe and Russia. Shocking as the game is English only and no advertising to speak of. Steam is a good partner and everyone at Humble is wonderful! I figured adding Good Old Games would compliment the Eurozone in coverage. The only contact I had was a Submit Your Game link. I gave a little bit of info in the form, and named drop our festival destinations along with the fact the game is already released.
I wasn’t expecting this kind of response:
Continue reading Good Old Games & Dominique PamplemousseI will be presenting a lecture at PAX Dev!
Shipping the Empty Box
Releasing [string:titleOfGame] on [array:platforms]Working on [string:titleOfGame], you need to release it on [array:platforms-0] and perhaps on [array:platforms-1] in the future. You have [int:NULL] time till release. Build engineer and programmer John “Seg” Seggerson (Telltale Games, John McNeil Studio, Dominique Pamplemousse) will help smooth the multi-platform release by outlining build engineering tips for platforms on desktop, mobile, console, and beyond. Increase artist, writer, and programmer efficiency with a set of core specifications and planning applied to existing platforms and future platforms. Skills and knowledge that will reduce release headaches for your [int:sizeOfTeam] team!
This is the build engineering panel I’ve always wanted to do and finally getting to do it. My experience with Dominique Pamplemousse was releasing a game without having to worry about making the game. I needed to create the empty box to ship to Steam & Humble. This clean-room process made me think about the build process in this perspective, and finally got me to apply for this lecture.
Talking with my game industry friends, we couldn’t think of ever seeing a build engineering panel offered. Not just PAX Dev, but GDC as well. My hope was to get accepted to PAX Dev to focus getting the content together in time to apply for GDC. I got my wish!
The lecture will be in two acts. The first act will be guidelines for a build system from my experience. Going into specifics isn’t helpful because game engines are too different for me to cover. Instead I’ll be going to broad guidelines. The second act will be releasing my master asset list, a core asset list, and the philosophy behind it. This list will contain all assets for every platform I can talk about. Then another core assets needed to convert over to these targets. If I have time, I may make a NPM/Bower app to do these conversations.
Over the summer I’ll be working on the details of the lecture and have everything ready for submitting for GDC 2015. I’m super excited to work on this and get to attend PAX Dev & PAX Prime!
For years I’ve been meaning to look this up. Finally did this morning.
When working in CLI (Terminal.app on Mac), you can hit tab to auto-complete a path. However, it’s case sensitive unless you set this up:
echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc
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.
Developing my updated portfolio, I realized I had a lot of API development experience that was internal and can’t be disclosed in the public. While I’m accomplished in interactive narratives, I needed to supplement my portfolio with my technical design aspect background.
I decided to make a proposal to extend the Steam WebAPI with information missing from the current offerings. I’ve worked with WebAPI and Steamworks with Telltale Games; Particularly the global statistical displays for Jurassic Park and Puzzle Agent 2. Recently I started contributing to Steam Condenser and discovered the Groups info was still in an XML format announced as deprecated by Valve. Yet there was no WebAPI method to fill the gap. I decided to dust off my API design skills and get to work!
I’ll go though some of the more detailed background of certain decisions, but do take a look at the docs!
Continue reading Making an API: The Steam WebAPI ProposalI created a new website featuring myself!
I needed a home to showcase myself professionally, so I started working on this site. While this blog fits to my occasional musing of writing, this is a more professional site highlighting my career of the past few years.
It gave me a chance to play around with Twitter Bootstrap and Font Awesome, which are now my new BFFs. Not only do they make development easier, it also scales very well for smaller screen devices like mobile phones. It’s also hosted on GitHub Pages. I wanted to stick to basic HTML this time around since it’s been such a long time. I also used LESS for CSS. While I’ve used SASS before for Umloud.org, Bootstrap uses LESS which made the workflow smoother. Finally, I used CodeKit to compile LESS and minify JavaScripts. Such a wonderful tool that I even paid money for it!
This isn’t the only website I released over the weekend, but it’s certainly the most important! A special thanks goes out to the number of people who’ve gave a lot of feedback during my process. Thank you all so much!
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!
Disney announced the closure of LucasArts as a game development studio and publisher. It will now be operating as a licensing house of Lucas properties for video games.
First a quotable quote from me in case anyone wants the soundbite:
LucasArts in the 80′s and 90′s helped shape me into the interactive media artist I am today. My time at Telltale Games was as close to working in that environment, and I hope shaped positively the careers of future men and women of interactive media. – John “Seg” Seggerson
I am the product of the adventure gaming genre of the 90′s and squarely in the SCUMM engine camp. Besides Myst, Sam & Max and Monkey Island titles are the most influential titles in my life. They shaped how I created my career and thus my life itself. The news of the closure wasn’t unexpected, so I have already made peace with the fate that occurred. But this is a time to reflect on the importance LucasArts has made in my life.
My love for video games is rooted in an interactive narrative. I’m not one for shooting at things a lot. I’d rather be a part of the storytelling process than a hired gun. Growing up with the SCUMM engine games, I had a lifelong goal of working at a place like LucasArts with the likes of Dave Grossman, Tim Schafer, and Ron Gilbert. When the Star War prequels came out, the slow burn to the end of LucasArts began. The shutting of the successor of Sam & Max titles was a solid push in that direction.
Continue reading LucasArts Closes
