[einsbern]

I kinda forgot about tumblr It lets you download gifs properly, right? 

[intergalaktea]

Recap: Valve's Erik Wolpaw speaks at NYU Game Center - Destructoid

The NYU Game Center Lecture Series invites influential game designers, theoreticians, and thinkers to the Center to share their thoughts with the community of students, local game developers, & others at the NYU Game Center.

[thegamefreaks]

naughty tweet

homage to the stars (reffering to the once most shared image on twitter). i'll update this posting with links to WIP's and another version as soon as i am back home. hope you like.

[intergalaktea]

[intergalaktea]

“ An interesting side-note on this Beta thing is how the number of bugs always sky rockets near an important deadline. Long-existing issues that have not been a problem for months (or years!) seem to pop up an hour or so before it's time to send out the build. Here at Frictional we call this "entering the event horizon". Just like approaching the singularity of a black hole, outside time goes increasingly faster, things frantically break and the known laws of physics cease to work. For instance, over the last week we've had two hard drive failures, geometry disappearing for no reason, SVN breaking, editors not loading updated files and several much-tested features starting to crash. It's exactly the same every time and yet you're always just as surprised when it happens. “

[intergalaktea]

The game is the boss: A Resogun postmortem

This incredibly detailed postmortem, written by Resogun lead programmer Harry Krueger, offers a look behind a huge number of technical and creative decisions behind the popular shooter.

“When looking at a finished game, everything often feels effortless and naturally integrated into the final product. However, reaching the end result is usually a process of "natural selection" where countless features are eliminated and very few make it into the final cut. At Housemarque, we subscribe to the common game development notion that it's better to iterate and fail quickly. We try to test simple versions of ideas immediately, and then let the game decide: If it works, we keep and refine it, and if it doesn't we discard it and move on.“

[intergalaktea]

“I try to explain to people that game development isn't like laying bricks; it's like people taking turn placing a huge and narrow tower of Jenga blocks. And crunch is like putting everybody on methamphetamines in the hope that they'll make the Jenga tower taller, faster. It's not going to work; it's just going to end up getting the tower knocked over a whole lot sooner. “ -- Paul Tozour

[intergalaktea]

(...) But Suda is a master of subverting expectations, and not every fight ends as the game’s structure might have dictated. After a lengthy build-up, for instance, Letz Shake and his gargantuan Earthquake Maker get sliced in half by yet another adversary in anticlimactic yet comical fashion. “The development schedule was looking tight, and there were so many boss battles already, so I decided to write the Letz Shake fight out of the script,” Suda laughs. 

[intergalaktea]

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion.

Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies

[intergalaktea]

An embrace of creative conflict, a compelling direction that includes commitment to a clearly-defined shared vision, acceptance of accountability, the availability of the necessary enabling structure, the availability of expert coaching, a connection with the mission of the company, a belief that your opinions count and your colleagues are committed to doing quality work, and regular, powerful, insightful feedback all allow teams to work together more effectively.  Put together, all of these make an enormous part of the difference between successful teams and failed ones.

Gamasutra: Paul Tozour's Blog - The Game Outcomes Project, Part 2: Building Effective Teams

[intergalaktea]

When Two Game Designers Argue About Silent Hill

“Note the mirror symbolism. The beautiful thing about symbolism is that the recipient (the viewer, the player, the reader) does not have to understand it in order to have their story-analyzing consciousness affected by it. And such is the case here. I am pretty sure no one really remembers that scene when the game ends, but it still manages to help the player understand that Silent Hill 2 is about evaluating one’s life – just like James evaluates the way he looks in the mirror, metaphorically staring into his own soul. “

[intergalaktea]

Studio Profile: Simogo

“One of the earliest things we did for Device 6 was deciding to divide it up into confined chapters instead of it taking part in one large world,” Flesser says. “We’d treat every chapter as a separate project, and be completely done with one chapter before moving on to the next. That was a very enjoyable way of making a game, because we were being constantly gratified with the results.” With each chapter taking just three or four weeks to make, it was a rewarding process for Simogo – “like making six little projects in one,” Flesser tells us – with the story’s interstitial tests acting as refreshing palate cleansers for both player and game-maker. 

[thegamefreaks]

Red Dead Graffiti

Created by Oskunk!

[intergalaktea]

In my experience, creativity is a process of discovery and experimentation, endless research and constant dead ends. Originality comes from connecting diverse and chaotic ideas into one idea and that process can take many months if not years to set. Sometimes it happens at the start, sometimes in the middle, sometimes near the end of development. But when it happens, it takes on a life of its own and demands to come to life.

Hellblade | Enemy Art: A New Direction

[intergalaktea]

“Curiosamente, una de las más gratas sensaciones de ser productor es que tu equipo de trabajo no sienta tu presencia como una carga. El buen productor no es el jefe de nadie, no da órdenes como si tuviera la última palabra, no impone nada, y se dedica todos los días a inspirar y sacar de cada uno de los miembros del grupo lo mejor de sí mismos y de su trabajo. El productor genera interrogantes, plantea ideas para discutir, ayuda a definir los caminos, y luego lo baja a herramientas de comunicación de libre acceso que todos puedan ver, todo el tiempo. Y se siente increíble cuando el proyecto avanza gracias a eso.”

[intergalaktea]

About Teamwork

What would you tell the fans who think that this hurts Uncharted in the long term and love the work that Amy and the rest of the group did in the past?

EW: I think it's important for everybody to understand something that we've said all along: Everything here at Naughty Dog is done as a team effort across the board.  Everybody has a huge creative input into everything that's done. We never have operated on the "auteur philosophy" in any of our games in our 30-year history, where it's just led by one person and if you remove that head it'll come to a grinding halt. That's not how we operate. So this is, again, business as usual.

CB: You know us. You know every time we talk about this to you, we talk about the team.  There's a reason for that. It's not because we want to sound nice; that's really how we work here. We don't feel like we have changed. We feel we're still the same. We have a crazy amount of talent on this floor and they're really great at what they do. I think the best way to prove it is just to show people. Don't worry - we're doing great. Making a game, before anything else, is a team effort.  And the team is -

EW: Still here.

Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra, co-presidents at Naughty Dog

[intergalaktea]

Sometimes, that sharing looks like somebody working on a project for six or twelve months and then switching to another project. Sometimes a department is actively working on two projects at once and is bouncing back and forth on a weekly or task-by-task basis. We figure it out as we go. That’s how our production philosophies work at Naughty Dog. We try not to be dogmatic. If it’s not working out the way we thought it would, we shift and try something else.

A Candid Interview With Evan Wells And Christophe Balestra - Features - www.GameInformer.com

[intergalaktea]

I love Uncharted 2. I love adventures in exotic places. I even love jumping around and climb like a monkey. But why are there 1000 Russians you have to kill? Sure I have a trigger finger, and I can kill some bad guys. But isn’t there too many bad guys in this game? I like how Nathan Drake will throw out funny jokes here and there. But are you really in the mood to be funny when you just slaughtered 30 guys minutes ago? I recently saw Terminator 2 again. Arnold didn’t kill anyone in the movie. Shooting in the knee actually takes skills. What if a typical modern day duck and shoot design turns into a slow-mo tricky shooting game, where you can shoot anywhere in the room but you can’t kill anyone? It’s a lot funnier to see enemy knocked out by a falling flower pot. And the level can have a lot more varieties based on the environment.

Jenova Chen (ThatGameCompany) on "What do game developers hate the most about gaming?" | GamesRadar