As a little break from Caper Corp., I finished a making a new video game this weekend. This one is called In the Wind. Much like Balance and Doubt, In the Wind's entire visual style is driven by particle effects. Well 2D text too, but that's only because making particles to represent text looked gh…

Today was my last day at GDC and, at that, it was quite a short one. While I was waiting outside of my first session, a woman came up to me and announced she was a speaker and asked if she could borrow my Mac cord. I said sure. She said I saved the conference. I said "I do what I can."

My first sess…

Richard Rouse III, a narrative director at Ubisoft Montreal, begins his talk with a slide: "Five Ways a Video Game Can Make You Cry" and the image of a woman wiping away a tear from her right cheek. He opens it with the EA ad in 1983 "Can a computer game make you cry?" and pointing out that a lot o…

I'm kind of a big fan of this whole game development and game developers conference thing. This is especially true since the main conference started on Thursday. The Indie/Serious Game Summits are both fantastic, but the lectures and sessions in the main conference are just so good. And it's hard t…

Yesterday I learned the meaning of the oft-heard phrase throughout the early part of the week: "GDC hasn't even really started yet." It appears that the Summits/Tutorials make up only a fraction of the total GDC audience once the main conference has started and the expo floor is opened up. All of t…

Peter Molyneux's "The Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design" was first and foremost a talk about Lionhead Studio's current project: Fable 3. Behind all the talk about the new game, though, are interesting design discussions. The game aside, the theme of Molyneux and lead designer Josh Atkin's pres…

"So apparently you really wanna hear about spaceships, I don't know why" says the representative of The Mittani, mittens [CHEATER], finally, Alexander Gianturco whatever you want to call him. Gianturco, as he says, is a lawyer, not a developer.

"What is a metagame?" Gianturco asks. "The purpose of t…

Despite being my first GDC, I actually feel like I'm kind of getting the hang of things. I started another morning in the lobby of the nearby Marriott by writing up the day prior (much like I'm doing right now). Unlike the last few days, though, I have 9:00am sessions to make rather than 10:00am on…

Adam Saltsman opens up the talk with a slide reading "Indies Rule, AAA drools!" He voices this slide's meaning by saying: "[this is] not a rant about how much Uncharted 2 sucks. Because that's negative discourse. And" as Saltsman changes to another slide "It's not AAA's faults." "If you have a larg…

NinjaBee's Brent Fox starts off his lecture with his "top ten development lessons."

Lesson 10: "DLC doesn't make any money." Outpost Kaloki, a previous NinjaBee Xbox Live Arcade game, had two pieces of paid DLC and both had an 18% attach rate. DLC release has a small impact on full game sales. These…