Games from Within

A few days ago I went out to lunch with some friends and they brought up an interesting thought: Will 2009 be the year of the indie developer? I loved the sound of that! I’ve been an indie developer for a year and a half, and I’m seeing more and more people taking tha route. I [...]

I’ve worked with many operating systems over the years: from the humble CP/M, to early versions of DOS, to  Windows 3.0 (if you can even call that an OS), along with many different versions of Linux since 1993, a smattering of VMS, and, of course, all the recent flavors of Windows. But somehow, I always [...]

So here we are, ready to start development of our first game. We have the time, the resources, and the game idea itself. Where do we start?

Since both Charles and I are tech guys, we knew we could implement our game idea without any problem and make it sing and dance at a silky-smooth 60 fps. But would it be fun? Now that we have these brand-new designer hats, finding that always elusive fun factor is a big concern. The idea of waiting for a couple of months before we could tell if our game idea was fun seemed too risky, so we tackled that problem first and head-on by prototyping.

A lot of people have a particular moment or experience that defined their future. It can be anything: reading a particular book, traveling through a different country, meeting somebody special, or going through a very painful (or happy) experience. For me, the future crystallized on a Fall afternoon in 1985, when I sat in front of an 8-bit computer at a friend's house. It was the beginning of a long personal journey.

E3 is just around the corner, so we can expect to finally get the official announcements of Microsoft's next-generation console, and maybe even Sony's. That will mark the official transition into the next generation. And this is not just another console generation transition. This time it's bigger. Much bigger.