August 18th, 2010
Shockingly, baby launch consumed more time than I anticipated, so myriad things are complaining about neglect. One is a set of notes I’ve been carrying around since last year but was waiting for mid-June (hey, only two months ago) to finish.
June was on my mind because of E3 which, in turn, was on my mind because I honestly expected to see something there that would change my mind about Natal / Kinect. From a distance, this product appears so obviously flawed that I imagined at least some people in positions of authority saw it too and had impressed upon all the need for something that would permit a “now shut up” type of E3 announcement.
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Tags: Console, Kinect, Microsoft, Natal, Nintendo, Sony, Trends, Wii
Posted in Games | 1 Comment »
June 6th, 2010
It was early May, 1998. nearly all of Ensemble Studio’s employees were in San Jose, aboard the Queen Mary. We had just been awarded a pair of Spotlight Awards from the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, including “Best of Show.” The statuettes looked like miniature Klieg lights, and someone had plugged them in on one of our tables. Sheets and sheets of stickers advertising an entertainment network called Berzerk littered the bar. We had taken to using them to replace the labels on our beer bottles and, as they became more numerous, to toasting “berzerk” and then just randomly yelling “berzerk.”
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Tags: Age of Empires, Bob Wallace, Brian Sullivan, Bruce Shelley, Crunch, Ensemble Studios, Game Business, Gamesauce, John Evanson, Playtesting, Rick Goodman, Tony Goodman
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May 9th, 2010
Here.
And he’s from Pittsburgh, too.
Tags: Game Design, Trends
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March 16th, 2010
Paul,
You and I worked together at Ensemble Studios for more than a decade. I respect your right to your own opinion and your right to state it. However, I take issue with the manner you have decided to speak about your displeasure with “crunch culture” at the 2010 GDC.
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Tags: Age of Empires, Ensemble Studios, Game Business, Microsoft
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
February 14th, 2010
For fun I tend toward deeper games but I’ve been looking at a lot of web offerings lately, mostly out of professional curiosity. From a design perspective, Neptune’s Pride by Iron Helmet Games is a standout. For anyone interested in the fundamentals of game design, there’s a lot that can be learned from taking a look at how all the parts fit together here.
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Tags: Efficient Design, Game Design, Iron Helmet Games, Neptune's Pride, PC games, Web Games
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January 27th, 2010
While the importance of playtest might seem obvious, the practice took time to catch on and gain acceptance. In the late ’90s, it was still pretty routine to run into developers who didn’t playtest the games they were working on.
Luckily, I earned my bones at Ensemble, where there was never anything else. As the only founder with much real experience making games, Bruce Shelley was often responsible for providing us with some clue as to what we should be doing. Playtesting was the process he had seen work in the past. (Apparently, the development loop for Civilization involved Sid Meier writing some code, then Bruce playing and making notes, then Sid writing some code, then….) Ensemble started with it and we never questioned it.
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Tags: Bruce Shelley, Ensemble Studios, Game Business, Game Design, Playtesting, Robot, Technique
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December 23rd, 2009
I know this will come as a shock but I’m a fan of arguing.
In fact, I’m such a fan of it that I’ve cultivated that truly endearing quality all your favorite debaters exhibit — the ability to fervently argue a position I in no way actually support. That’s right, I’m not happy just arguing with people who don’t agree with me. I want everyone in there.
Some of this is work-related. I only truly get comfortable about some design decisions by attacking them myself, so I pick fights about these and take various stances and see what develops.
Some of this, according to my wife, is that I’m a jerk.
Who’s to say which of us is correct (P.S., I am) but, whatever the reason, I argue a lot and I tend to gravitate toward people who can hold their own in a verbal scuffle. But, while I love a spirited discussion, I am not a fan of several trends in modern arguing, chief among them “the Google argument”.
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Tags: Future of Games, Game Business, PlaySpan, Trends
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November 29th, 2009
I gave Dusty a hard time for his recent assertion that the death of PC gaming wasn’t due to MMOs but rather five years of shit games. I probably should have beat him up for suggesting that there has been any “death” at all….
I’m not overly averse to reality and I can read NPD’s data as well as the next guy, so I’m not trying to suggest that the PC games market hasn’t been suffering based on that metric.
But that isn’t “death”.
Death is when something goes away and doesn’t come back.
Whale oil? That’s a dead business. You probably don’t want to go looking for VC for an 8 track cassette factory either. Rotary phones? Butter churns? Traditional retail stores for games? Elvis, Elvis, and Elvis. (Ha ha, just kidding about that last one, GameStop, everything is going to be fine.)
“Death” happens when the demand for a product shrinks, generally because something comes along and satisfies the need it served better (and / or cheaper). Why don’t you ride a buggy to work anymore? Because your horseless carriage has AC and it doesn’t eat the begonias when you park it out front.
So, if PC games are “dead” what is it that’s replacing them?
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Tags: EA, Game Business, Gamestop, Microsoft, PC games, Publishers, social games, Sony
Posted in Games | 2 Comments »
November 25th, 2009
In 1997, Ensemble had yet to release a game and we were not well known. Despite this, we received a considerable amount of mail (both actual paper and email) from fans. Most was “can I has job” but every now and then there was something special in the inbox.
I started to keep an “X File” shortly after I came across a couple of the more awesome ones and I’ve lugged it around ever since. The crown jewels of this collection are a series of notes that we continued to receive for several years from a fan (?) who had very detailed suggestions for a game.
I got into a discussion about this yesterday and was trying to accurately communicate the glory of these letters. I’ve scanned one in so it can speak for itself.
(Caveat: I do not have the sanity points to read this start to finish. If there’s anything offensive in here, apologies in advance.)
Tags: Age of Empires, Ensemble Studios, Fan Mail, Game Business, Game Ideas, hate Mail
Posted in Games | 1 Comment »
