Insert Witty Caption Heading Here

I’ve been granted seven and a half minutes to write this post, between finishing my work for the day and when I need to pick the kids up from school (and rush them off to the Lego store). Somewhere along the line we may eat supper. I’m not sure.

So, what’s going on in game dev land for Brent?

Prototyping continues, kind of. I’m doing some experimentation in regards to AI management while building my youngest kid a learning game (basically hunting down evil letters and stuff). Given his 15-minute attention span, the work progresses in small chunks, but we have movement controls and enemies (the letters) and basic attacks. Often when I ask him what he wants done next, I need to go off and do some research in the evening, to have something ready the next day to play with. In general I think he’d rather be playing Minecraft, but he’s being a good sport about the game development.

Speaking of Minecraft, my other little project I’m working on is a mini-adventure built inside of Minecraft, for my older kid and his friends. Effectively, I’m going to be dungeon-mastering a short adventure for them. I haven’t worked out exactly what I’ll do, but I’m finding it entertaining to watch them play on the server I’ve created for them and I think the next step is actually designing scenarios. The challenge with this will be introducing story elements consistent with the Minecraft narrative, that are prompted primarily via gameplay.

Also, I went out for lunch with Mark, a former colleague from BioWare. We had a good chat about game development, though I suspect I derailed the conversation into Minecraft-land, a bit too much.

Anyways, us Canadians have this Thanksgiving thing happening this weekend, so I’m not sure if I’m going to get any more prototyping done this week. We’ll see. Depends on how much turkey I eat.