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Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition
My friends over at Overhaul Games have released Baldur’s Gate, the Enhanced Edition! If you were a fan of the original or just want to see what Baldur’s Gate was all about I encourage you to check this out. I’ve played the PC version over the past few months and it certainly brought back a lot of memories (and humbled me a little, given how many times I had my butt kicked). It is available for PC and the iPad and there looks to be Android and Mac versions coming down the road. Click here to head over to Overhaul’s page.
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XCOM Enemy Unknown
I should hate this game. Really, if not for XCOM (a remake of a tactical squad-based game that I really enjoyed in my younger days), I probably would have finished Novel#5 sooner. So I really should hate it. But I can’t. It is just too much fun. In X-COM Enemy Unknown the gameplay consists of building squads of soldiers and then using them to stop alien invasions. There are several different types of missions and part of the fun is deciding which types of soldier (heavy gunners, assault specialists, snipers, or support) to bring along for a particular mission. The player doesn’t choose the types of soldiers they recruit, so…
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Guest Blogging over at GamrRank!
GamrRank has posted a guest blog I wrote for them: http://blog.gamrrank.com/2012/10/15/the-new-high-scores/
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What BioWare Has Learned
Okay, I originally started writing this earlier in the week after receiving several queries, in regards to Dragon Age 3 – Inquistion. So, I didn’t know when I began writing this that Ray and Greg were retiring from BioWare. So I want to start this post with wishing Ray and Greg good luck in their future endeavors. Without Ray and Greg’s passion for game development there never would have been a BioWare and consequently I probably never would have entered game development. For ten years I worked and learned and thrived in an environment that is really impossible to describe. It was Ray and Greg who made that possible. If…
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Game Playing
This is a somewhat random post but lately I’ve been playing more games than usual (I blame GamrCred for retriggering the urge). Nothing recent, mostly games I bought years ago or demos. I finally checked out a couple demos kicking around on the Wii (not sure how long they’ve been there, I find the Wii store horrible to navigate through… menus make no sense to me at all so I generally avoid it). What I found interesting was that both were games I’d not normally have bothered playing (i.e., not rts or rpg). One I disliked, one I enjoyed. The game I didn’t really enjoy was 2 Fast For Gnomz…
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Lazy Designer Stuff
It looks like I’ll write the third lazy designer book after all. The first two volumes have done ‘ok’, albeit not spectacular (else I wouldn’t be hanging around here on this blog, I suppose). Though I was reluctant to write the third book without meeting my sales expectations for the first two volumes I figured it made sense to start tackling this while I still *remember* my time working in the games industry. I’m worried that if I put this off too long I won’t be able to write anything relevant! I won’t start it right away though. I want to finish the rough draft of my current novel first…
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Kickstarter Game
A former BioWare coworker, Rob Bartel, is distributing a board game via Toy Vault. They are raising funds through Kickstarter, so if you want to see what another former dev is up to in the world of board games, you should take a look at the project. The artwork looks good and Rob’s quite experienced with board games so I’m sure the gameplay will be great. Check it out: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2092804470/apparatus-a-steampunk-game-by-rob-bartel
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How to Script for Games
I’ve made an excerpt from my second Lazy Designer game design book free for the next few days. Download it here. This excerpt is about *scripting* and not stripping (there’s been past confusion and disappointment and for the record I’d just like to point out that I know a lot more about scripting than I do stripping). Anyways if you read it and like it, please consider leaving a review on Amazon! p.s. Please remember you don’t need a Kindle to read this! There’s software available to read on your computer/smartphone and so on.
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Interesting Podcast – Irrational Interviews
Thanks to Mordi Peshkess for bringing to my attention (through comments here) a recent Irrational Interview with Ken Levine and Amy Hennig about their roles as Creative Directors. I found this quite an interesting interview, with them discussing various issues and processes, from writing to management to dealing with feedback. Definitely worth checking out if you are curious about this aspect of game dev.
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Dave Gross joins as writer for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition
For those of you following the progress of the new Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, I just wanted to share the word that Dave Gross has joined their team. http://www.baldursgate.com/news/2012/04/26/announcing-dave-gross-as-lead-writer-for-baldurs-gate-enhanced-edition/ Dave’s a fantastic writer. He has several published novels and I encourage you to check them out. He’s also a skilled editor. More importantly — to me :) — is that Dave is also the first editor to buy something from me! Over a decade ago he purchased an article I had written “Give Them Pidgins” for Dragon Magazine. It was my first published work. So I’m very pleased he’ll be working on this project.
