Being from the Central Time Zone, I'm really digging the fact that I actually am waking up early by local standards throughout the week. My morning office consists of a couch and table in the back of a hotel that I'm not staying at:


My plan for the day was to attend the Game Design Workshop since, w…

"Hi, I'm Randy."

Randy Smith from Tiger style games starts off his GDC keynote with an aptly-titled series of slides.

"WARNING: GOING TO SUCK."

"NOT INDIE." An EA logo is displayed.

"ION STORM." Flashes to a slide with the infamous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" ad.

"NOT INDIE." An Apple lo…

Hyper-prolific independent game developer Cactus, less commonly known by his birth name of Jonatan Soderstrom begins his presentation with: "why you would want to be mean to your players when you make a game."

Cactus then adds an additional warning to anyone prone to seizures may want to be careful …

Like every good day, Day 2 began with the sound of the guy in the bathroom of the room adjacent to mine gargling with mouthwash.

San Francisco is one of the most strangely organized cities I've ever seen. It's like the settlers of 1776 were looking around the Western reaches of this new territory, s…

I'm not much of a traveler. I don't dislike it, I just don't do it much. Going to the Game Developers Conference this year is something I've wanted to do for ages. Back when I started getting involved in game development when I was a tiny little fourteen-year-old kid reading the forums at GameDev.n…

Magnetic Butterfly is now finished.

After a development period of about a month and a half spread over the last six-seven months, I'm finally cool with "launching" it. I started working on the game on January 25th/26th while sitting on a couch at my parent's place in Northern Michigan while visiting…

Bungie's original Halo, released for the Xbox in 2001, was a landmark console game. Aside from giving Microsoft's freshman entry into the console arena a system seller and a uniquely Xbox cultural character, Halo was the best first-person shooter to be released on a console since the days of Golden…

A number of AAA open-world games were released in the last month and, coincidentally, two of these games are based around the concept of the player's character possessing superhero-like powers amidst a major metropolis. It's the video game industry's own Armageddon/Deep Impact, A Bug's Life/Antz, T…

When I was finishing up what ended up being my second-to-last semester at the University of Michigan, I knew I was going to be a High School English teacher. That was my goal. The forthcoming summer was the first summer since my freshman year that I didn't have to take two terms of summer classes. …

After I finished up with the second gameplay section of my Call of Duty 4 level, I decided that Magnetic Butterfly would probably only take a few more weeks of work to get to a decent place. I don't intend to finish it during this development sprint, but my goal is to work on most of its gameplay m…