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Free and Lazy
If you’d like a chance to read the Lazy Designer for free please head over to my Facebook Page and read the instructions on my latest post there.
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Recently Played – Emissary of War
As I noted a few days ago former BioWare co-worker Tobyn Manthrope recently released a new videogame “Emissary of War” for iOS devices. Well I finally squeezed some time in to play through the free first chapter. It was fun. Regular readers know I’m a fan of tactical RPGs and though Emissary doesn’t have a huge range of character types or special abilities what it does have is engaging and interesting. The combat was difficult enough that I died several times and had to rethink the tactics I used to get through the situation. Players control two characters — a warrior and a potion throwing sidekick. They have direct control…
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Emissary of War
Cedar Hill Games, founded by my former BioWare co-worker Tobyn Manthrope has released a new videogame “Emissary of War” for iOS devices. The first chapter is available for free. He is also writing a series for Gamasutra and so far it has been interesting and full of valuable information, especially to any of you out there looking to enter game development. Links Tobyn writes about his game development experiences at Gamasutra Splash page for Emissary of War (Today is a busy writing day for me but I’ll be downloading it this afternoon and checking it out.)
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Designing Frustration (Part 1)
PART 1 I don’t know about the rest of you but I have tried multiple digital-task management solutions, from Excel to Outlook to Google Tasks and more. Currently I’m using Excel sheets again to keep track of which blog posts need writing, what projects I want to tackle next and so on. But tasks written there continually accumulate. Beside my laptop I also have a pile of ever dwindling sticky notes. Thing is, for many tasks I still find myself jotting notes down on paper. And those tasks I accomplish! Likewise I have hundreds of unread books stored digitally… and these I do read. But my progress through them is…
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Testing…testing…testing
This post is just a test of my using the iPad for posting blog content over the summer. Plan to do a bit of traveling so I wanted to make sure this will work. Any tips from some of the more experienced connected-travellers out there? Also, just so this post has some content, have you read the recent article about Team Bondi and their ‘hostile and brutal’ dev environment? Video games may be fun to play but they can be brutal to build. Long hours lead to frustration which often as not leads to hostile altercations.
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The Lazy Designer
I realize that most of my blog post have been writing related of late and to rectify that I’m going to try to focus, for July, mostly on Lazy Designer ‘video game’ content. I have several half-written articles and will try to finish as many as feasible. There will be a bit of writing news during that time but mostly game design stuff, if all goes to plan. So if you’ve been hanging around here waiting for some more game design insight, it is just around the corner. If there’s specific topics you would like covered, leave a comment here and I’ll dig through my notes and see if I…
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Indy Alpha
Just a quick post to direct your attention to Mark Barazzuol’s blog. Indy Alpha Mark is a former BioWare designer who’s now forging ahead into indie game development. He has a lot of experience (we worked together on Dragon Age) and I’m curious to see what he’ll be working on. His latest post is looking at some of the setup costs for an Indy developer. Check it out.
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Game Design Interview
Had the opportunity for another interview last week. Mostly this one focuses on game design topics, mainly how I stumbled upon a career in the industry and my thoughts on how somebody might go about doing that now. If you would like to check the article out, you can find it here: http://www.squidoo.com/careers-in-the-gaming-industry
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How the story began
Getting some new readers to the blog curious about my time with BioWare. I wrote a series of blog posts, one for each year I spent with BioWare, and I think they are probably the best place to start: This is the first: http://blog.brentknowles.com/2009/08/25/bioware-brent-year-1-1999/ After reading the series I’d encourage you to check out the Lazy Designer posts, which are the beginnings of a book on game design I’m in the process of writing.
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Lego Games on iPod and iPad
Our sons (3 and 5 years old) are playing more and more with Lego, which pleases me greatly as I was a Lego kid growing up. Being a hoarder I kept most of my old Lego as well we have bought several newer sets for the kids. In the last couple months the two of them have started to show more interest in the Lego than simply playing with the vehicles and sets we assemble for them. Now they are starting to build their own things… which is awesome. The other night I decided to check the Apps store on the iPad to see if they had any interesting Lego…
