• My Life

    Game Design Advice on the Cheap

    Just a quick note that “How to be a lead designer” is available for $0.99 (today only, I think though it will be at a lower price for about a week before climbing back to its normal price point). http://www.amazon.com/Lead-Designer-Lazy-Game-Design-ebook/dp/B00JUYRB18/ Also a story reprint of mine, ‘The Monastery’, is now free to read over at Amazon. It was originally published in ‘Not One of Us’. http://www.amazon.com/Monastery-Sabriel-Book-1-ebook/dp/B0052OJAZ0/ I have a bit longer of a post in the works describing what I’m up to and such but for now a quick summary will suffice: – I have a couple weeks left on the current novel (rough draft) – I’d like to start…

  • Writing Resources

    My Fiction Site

    Because I like to fiddle I’ve rolled out a new fiction site — a showcase of my published work. It now supports reviews and excerpts too. fiction.brentknowles.com Unlike past sites, I’ve built myself an admin page to easily add projects. Because it is really only a couple php and json files I imagine it could be used by others, once I cleaned things up a bit. Let me know if you might be interested and I’ll try to help you set it up now (manually) or prioritize building a setup script for my next month’s sprint/workload. You can explore some rough documentation at: YourOtherMind GitHub Reminders Fun stuff is starting…

  • My Life

    Game Hauler Version 2 (Part 3 / ?)

    Welcome to Part 3 in my new series describing my “Hauler” prototype. Links to the web and PC version are at the bottom of this post. (And you can read Part 2 here, if you haven’t). Note: This is a repost (originally appeared on Gamasutra). Prototype 2 (build# 0.0.3.0) The two main issues brought up in the previous version (aside from the obvious like art and sound) were both related to gameplay. The first issue was that the tails were too long. This version doesn’t overly address this, but it does try to solve the second issue (which helps mitigate the first). The second issue? There was no gameplay. Effectively…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Preface: How to Start a Career in Game Design

    Here’s the preface for the original Lazy Designer book. I’m posting this here as a supplement to my serialization of the Lazy Designer via my newsletter. If you would like to read “How to Start a Career in Game Design” then go and sign up now; the first post will hit this weekend. Preface Introduction If you love building videogames and aspire towards a career in videogame development I can relate. I spent my childhood writing stories, creating imaginary worlds and building games but never thought a career in the industry would be possible. It just seemed too impossible. I was wrong. What to Expect I had the pleasure of…

  • The Lazy Designer,  Writing Resources

    Newsletter Woes

    Once again I’ve migrated my newsletter. Most readers have been moved over to it. However there are a few users who signed up to previous versions of the newsletter that weren’t on that list. If you did NOT receive a recent Newsletter mailing from me, then you are not signed up. Head over here to enroll. Why? Well in the near future (i.e., once my newsletter’s subscription base grows a tiny bit more) I’m going to start serializing book 1 of the Lazy Designer via the list. Basically the entire book will be doled out in segments over the next couple months, hopefully with a bit of an update. Also…