• The Lazy Designer

    Design Expectations

    Much of this will be a summary of my replies to some of the excellent comments I’ve received here over the last few days but I figured those may have been missed by some readers. Game development is a group business. Often in a game one or two individuals from the development team will appear more often than others in interviews and will become figureheads for a project. This might give the illusion that they are the only drivers on the project but that would only ever be an illusion. Each decision, each feature is discussed in numerous meetings. Ultimately a lead in one department can make certain decisions for…

  • Game Reviews,  My Life

    My First Interview?

    Stumbled across this interview with me over at IGN. I’m not entirely sure if this is my absolute first interview as a designer with BioWare but I think it is. One of the cool things with BioWare is that they tried to make sure everybody, especially in the early days, had a shot at doing interviews and sharing the development spotlight. Of course reading the interview I’m scratching my head, especially at this: One day I plan to return to University and complete my masters degree, which will probably involve building robots and other AI related interests. I totally don’t remember wanting to go back to university. I must have…

  • My Life

    Congrats Jason!

    A little late in mentioning this but hey, I’m busy writing. Anyways fellow WOTF winner Jason Fischer has made the Ditmar awards shortlist with “The House of Nameless” his Writers of the Future XXVI story. And he also made the shortlist for an Aurealis Award for his zombie novel “After the World: Gravesend”. Wow! Check his website and go explore some of his writing, you’ll enjoy it.

  • Empire Avenue

    Join Me

    Empire Avenue has been bustling as of late. If you’d like to join, use the following invite code! http://empireavenue.com/?t=5ba93f5d Once joined look for me and join my Robots Minion community… leave a message there and I’ll buy a bunch of shares in you!

  • Writing Resources

    Read this week

    Finished up issue #13 of Necrotic Tissue — this was my contributor’s copy (my story ‘Stealing Death’ appeared inside of it). There were some really exceptional stories in here and I regret having missed earlier issues of this horror magazine. Some of the stories were a bit too graphic for me (I’m a wuss) but all were very well told. Definitely a handful of authors that I’ll be following more closely (in a literary sense, not like a stalker or anything). Do check it out, if you’re into horror I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

  • My Life

    The Flood

    A bit of history for today. “FLOODING OF THE MURRAY RIVER TAKES EIGHT LIVES” — This was the headline of the local paper on March 25th, 1939. The sudden flooding of the Murray River at East Pine during the early morning hours swept away the home of Mr. Wellington M. Warren, carrying eight persons to their deaths in the raging water and crushing ice… If you read the entire article you’ll come to this bit: …learning Edith and Mr. & Mrs. Warren were in the same clump of trees, they ran back to try to save them. Edith had climbed into a tree. Mr. Warren was clinging to the trunk…

  • Writing Resources

    Aurora Awards

    I’ve blabbed enough here about my own eligible work for Canada’s Aurora Awards. So instead here are some links to other writers that you might want to check out when deciding who to nominate (please note I’m just mentioning writers I’ve either talked to recently or have followed for a long time… not trying to play favorites!) For a more complete list of eligible works check out the Canadian SF Works database. Colleen Anderson – has poetry and fiction eligible Silvia Moreno-Garcia – Many stories eligible this year. Robert J Sawyer – one of Canada’s best known SF novelists, his novel Wake is eligible. Douglas Smith – His story collection…

  • Writing Resources

    Hugo Award Nominations

    I’m not eligible to nominate work for the Hugo awards but if you are and haven’t yet there’s only a couple days left. I was going to write a big summary about what to nominate but Eric James Stone has already done so. Check his links out (many of which lead to the stories so you can read them).

  • My Life

    What do you want to know?

    Okay I have a cold and my two sick kids are home with me and I’m in the middle of major novel revisions and Empire Avenue is near to rolling out our super killer robot army to take over the world some exciting new updates. So I’m busy. I have a lot I want to talk about here, some new Lazy Designer articles in rough draft and whatnot, but I need to get Other Things done first. Instead of posting anything today I’m just going to ask if any of you would like to know something I haven’t touched on before. A game design question? A BioWare question? A question…