• The Lazy Designer

    Who is Brent Knowles?

    Because I really didn’t want to write a blog post today, I present you with a host of links to old interviews I’ve given instead. Most of these took place while I worked for BioWare — and many of them are Dragon Age: Origins related. A few concern my writing endeavors. (Also, several of these are not in English.) “Interview – An Interview With Brent Knowles: Writer, Video Game Developer” — Blogcritics, 2011 “Interview – Baldur’s Gate II” — IGN, 2000 “Interview – Brent at Diabolical Plots” — Diabolical Plots, 2011 “Interview – Dragon Age” — Eurogamer, 2008 “Interview – Dragon Age” — Jeuxvideo, 2008 “Interview – Dragon Age” —…

  • Game Reviews,  The Lazy Designer

    Minecraft – Everything a RPG Should Not Be

    While RPGs seldom are on the cutting edge of visual quality (unlike shooters) there’s always been a continual player expectation for improved graphics. Over the past decade or so there’s been a push towards realism and a higher visual fidelity — resulting in an escalation of costs to develop large-scale RPG projects. And then a game like Minecraft comes along. Minecraft has dreadful graphics. I know several people who won’t play the game because of the low fidelity ‘art’. Yet clearly, given its impressive sales, there are many more who do not care what the game looks like (or possibly they even play it *because* of the way it looks).…

  • Brent's Toys,  Technology,  The Lazy Designer

    Game Dev Update

    Decent work has progressed on the kid’s educational/robot building game (and to the supplemental document I’m writing to explain my design process on it). If you are bored/curious, it’s the top link on my unity page. Lower your expectations accordingly. It is not feature complete, but it’s feature sufficient and probably won’t be tweaked too much more. The most recent addition I’ve made to it is a player tracking mechanism, so I can keep tabs on how well the kids are doing while playing the various educational levels. There’s no front-end view for the data yet, but I’m tracking what I need to be tracking. This tracking led to an…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Lazy Designer Update

    This is what happens when kids play with the minifridge. Pop freezes. And explodes. We had several of these delicious but deadly grenades the other day. Be careful out there! As for updates… loads of progress on the Lazy Designer series, which is my focus for now. I won’t quite finish the rewriting pass on Book 4 before the holidays but that should be finished by mid-January, at which point I have a series of spelling and grammar passes that I will undertake, as well as building any example images required and the like. And I do have a few stories available, some online, and some elsewhere: Foolish Wishes, Fairy…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Lazy Designer – Book 5 – The Design Manager

    I’ve finished writing the rough draft for the last book in the Lazy Designer series. This book focuses on what it is like to be a design manager in the game’s industry and I hope it is of interest to readers. It sits at about 55 000 words (pre-editing), making it neither the shortest nor longest of the books so far. So what does this mean next? I have a lot of editing to do. I’ve started editing Book 4 and hope to have that released in January of 2014. When that’s complete I might take a short break and write a short story or two (yes, I know I’ve…

  • My Life,  The Lazy Designer

    Brent is Sick

    I’m a week into a flu or something and this has really hampered my productivity. Hence the missed posts. I’m still getting a little bit of work done though — I’ve almost finished writing the rough draft for the final Lazy Designer Book (Book 5) and I’m starting the edit pass on Book 4. I’ve also managed some prototyping. My latest accomplishment has been an upgrade system for the next kid’s game I’m making. With this prototype I’m trying to follow the advice I’ve given in the Lazy Designer books and creating the planning documentation the way I suggest and I’m documenting my process along the way too. I’m finding…

  • The Lazy Designer,  Writing Resources

    Lazy Designer…

    I’ve been working on several Unity projects, none of them are “real games”, just continuations of prototype work. I wanted to see how deploying the web version of Unity went and ran into some snags last week. Ultimately I needed to extract the kid’s game I was working on from the project that had all my prototype scenes — to get rid of some Windows dependencies. That’s done and I’ve uploaded the kid’s game so he can play it on his computer. (It also means though that when I revisit my game-in-progess I need to redo how I handled the conversation system since it relies on some data mechanisms unavailable…

  • eBook,  Game Reviews,  The Lazy Designer

    Fun With Unity

    I’ve had some time to work with Unity the past couple weeks but instead of applying that (entirely) towards the prototype, I’ve been building a kid’s game instead. This is not a commercial thing, just something fun for me to sit with my kids and work out the design for. I like to think I’m being somewhat smart about this though because some of the code systems *will* be useful for the prototype work I’m doing. What I find advantageous about focusing on the kid’s game instead of the prototypes, is that it is smaller. Being smaller in scope means I’m less intimidated by the amount of work necessary to…

  • The Lazy Designer

    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.…

  • The Lazy Designer

    The Long Dark

    Instead of talking (just) about my prototype work, I’d like to mention a Kickstarter for a former coworker. Dave Chan was the sound guy for a significant portion of my time with BioWare and he’s joined Hinterland games to make THE LONG DARK: a first-person post-disaster survival simulation set in the Northern wilderness. How far will you go to survive? If this sounds interesting to you, please support it by kicking some funds to it, or sharing it. In regards to my own prototype work, this was a slower than average week as I’m undoing a bunch of code that was working before to make it work differently. I do…