Pixel Park

Here are the latest sounds I’ve identified through the noise of the tubes.

• John August, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, writes about his craft in an interesting and entertaining way. To an industry outsider like me, it’s fascinating to get some real insight into how that business works.
• Josh Friedman, executive producer of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Cronicles, writes in a personal and funny way about surviving the cancellation of your show.
• Another entry about movie making, and now we’re talking about a real classic. The legends about the production of the movie Apocalypse Now is legion, and here we are given an inside look how the chaos and insanity of the movie colored the shooting of it. Or was it the other way around?
• Trond-Ivar Hansen, a collegue of mine, wrote a report from the conference The Philosophy of Computer Games 2009, which we both attended. It’s in norwegian though, so check it out if you know the language (or have a dictionary and more patience than wits)

Here’s another batch of interesting links that got through the noise of the tubes and wires.

The “Raiders” Story Conference
The blog The Mystery Man on Film gives us the highlights from a transcript of a creative meeting on the story of the first Indiana Jones movie. The participants are executive producer George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg and the script writer Lawrence Kasdan. It should be an interesting and fascinating read for anyone who works with story, inside or outside the film industry.

Color Theory for Cinematographers
This one is about color theory in film, but just like the last link it applies to games as well. It explains some basics about color theory, and shows how effects can be achieved by breaking traditions.

Battleship Island – Japan’s rotting metropolis
A fascinating journey to an abandoned and decaying japanese city island, which was once the most densely populated place on earth.

Here are some post and articles that has caught my attention recently. The theme of the day is Tabula Rasa, an MMORPG that will be taken offline in just over a month from now. It’s always sad to se an MMORPG die, but this one didn’t even get two years to live.

• The ex-CTO of NCsoft Europe (Adam Martin) gives us his view on what went wrong with the development of Tabula Rasa in his insider-outsider (working for NCsoft, but not on the TR team) in “We need to talk about Tabula Rasa; When will we talk about Tabula Rasa?“. Insightful, informed, interesting.
• Scott Jennings (Lum the Mad), also writes with insight about the woes of Tabula Rasa development, in Perspectives. Scott worked on another NCsoft project during the development and launch of Tabula Rasa.
• Valve has a Left 4 Dead blog, where they’ve posted an interesting post about how they used darkness as a vital part of the art direction for L4D. Don’t miss out on their first art direction post, about their “filmic effects“.

Here comes a new batch of articles, blog posts and rants that survived through the noise of the tubes.

• Game designer Soren Johnson (is he of swedish descent?) of Civilization IV fame, has an interesting blog post about common strategy games design mistakes, which he calls Seven Deadly Sins for Strategy Games.
• Mmorpg.com talks to Mythic’s Jeff Hickman in part 2 of an interview about WAR. The interesting part is when he’s questioned about empty Public Quests (lacking other players).
• Ernest Adams is back again with The Designer’s Notebook: Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! IX, the latest entry in a series of game design colums where he looks at common design mistakes.
• Gamasutra talked to Mythic’s Mark Jacobs (and a few others) about the controversy regarding Mythic’s decision to exclude some WAR devs in the game credits.
  

I’m starting a new section called “Through the noise” which I’ll try to post every week or so. Its basically a collection of news and links that doesn’t warrant their own post. Stuff that interests me on some level and are worth sharing with the game dev community.

• In “It’s Ok to Grow Up“, MobHunter compares how he moved on from Sesame Street when he grew older, to how people grow out of World of Warcraft. Don’t blame the game because you’ve moved on.
• Groping the Elephant, in the post “Redundant?“, talks about wheter to avoid the redundant choices in games to improve clarity of those with consequence, or to keep them to define character.
• Double Buffered has some thoughts on a discussion between some industry people Valve’s cabal system was measured against the auteur model.
• A free, indie, point-and-click adventure game called The Vaccum is out, and I can really recommend it. Very old school in graphics and sound, but it actually works for it rather than against it. The game has some interesting design choices that I might write about in a future post.