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End of Year Check-In
Hello all. Life still finds me pretty busy with chasing after my kids and work, not doing much in the way of writing. I am working on my own game in my free time, but it is too early to share details there. In terms of other updates, I left Beamdog a couple months ago to join NAIT, a polytechnic in Edmonton. It is quite a change of pace from what I’ve done in the past but it is exciting. I’m not actually teaching. Instead I’m the senior technical lead for the Centre for Innovative Media. Which basically means a lot of my experience in the games industry is going…
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Planescape Torment: Enhanced Edition
As many of you have probably already heard, Beamdog is on the verge of releasing an enhanced edition for Planescape: Torment. I started in the games industry at BioWare, working on Baldur’s Gate 2. During that time Planescape: Torment was released — the first game that licensed the Infinity Engine from BioWare. It immediately drew well deserved praise for its story and characters. I’m very pleased to have had the chance, many years later, to finally be involved with the Planescape franchise. This enhanced edition is fun to play. I thoroughly enjoyed the playthrus I made of the game during our testing phase. Improvements like being able to zoom the…
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Sword Coast Legends
During the last couple years I have been fortunate to have a consulting role on Sword Coast Legends, a new Dungeons & Dragons RPG from N-Space. Today it went live on Steam… I encourage you to check it out! https://swordcoast.com/ A huge congratulations to the team at N-Space who have been working very hard on this ambitious game. It was a pleasure to work with all of you… and I’ll make sure to stop by the office next month when I take the kids down to Orlando for a vacation!
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Brent Returns (Briefly)
I realize it has been a long time since I’ve last posted here. I cannot really get into the details as to why yet, but my personal life has been rather messed up since January. I’m trying to focus on my kids as much as possible through a challenging time. That said, I intend to release another blog entry on my StarHaul Unity Example game in the next couple weeks and another entry in the Lazy Designer series for my newsletter. I also received a nice review for a recent story of mine (which appeared in On Spec #98) over at SFCrowsnest. Check it out!
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The Next Game
Yes, “The Next Game” is the title of my second Lazy Designer book but today I actually want to talk about the next Unity prototype-game that I am actually working on. While building a technical framework to help me get Unity projects up and running faster I also started to think about what might be a fun game concept to explore for my next prototype. I decided upon a simple grid-based area editor. While this does not sound overly exciting it has been an interesting challenge. I’ve gotten it to the point where I can place buildings from an list and rotate them. It ensures no buildings overlap and all…
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Game Hauler Version 3 (Part 4 / ?) “The Big Design Change”
Note: This post has previously appeared on Gamasutra and via my newsletter. Jump to Part 1 (if you have not read it previously). (If you want to play the latest build before reading the commentary then scroll down to the end of this post.) PROTOTYPE 3 (BUILD# 0.0.4.0) When I started building my prototype I had a general idea of where I wanted to go with it. Unfortunately my initial ideas didn’t pan out into anything I thought I could make fun. With this prototype I began the process of developing a rather different sort of core gameplay. The components of the game remain similar to the previous prototype (placeholder-art…
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State of Things
Okay, I haven’t been around much. Here’s a quick update! What’s Am I Doing? I’m finishing novel #7 (8? I’m starting to forget how many I’ve written). I wanted to participate in Nanowrimo this year so I’m ALSO working on another novel at the same time. Yes, writing two novels at the same time is very silly. I’m very silly. (This novel is my first attempt at writing fiction geared towards children, specifically middle-grade readers. We’ll see how it goes. I didn’t have time to complete a full plan, like I normally do, so I have a cast of oddball characters and a weird situation and I’m just letting it…
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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…
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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…
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GAME: HAULER VERSION 1 (PART 2 / ?)
Welcome to Part 2 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 1 here, if you haven’t). PROTOTYPE 1 (0.0.1.1) In the previous post I discussed the many (and serious) issues I had with my first Hauler prototype. This latest version was basically a rebuild and, in addition to the front-facing changes, many internal details (reorganizing code) occurred too. If you play the prototype you will notice that we now have: New Movement Controls. The controls are more logical, with the player deciding which direction to travel, rather than adjusting orientation.…
