• Empire Avenue

    Got GamrCred?

    The team who created Empire Avenue have launced a new sister site, oriented towards gamers called Gamrcred. “GamrCredâ„¢ is your ultimate rank based on how you play, what you say and the respect you earn” So congrats to the team for putting together a slick looking site. Gamrcred is going to be invite only for a while, but I might be able to get invite keys for a few people. If you are interested toss me an email at my brent@empireavenue.com address. Want to learn more about it? Check out the blog: http://blog.gamrcred.com/

  • My Life

    My (3rd) Largest Online Community

    I’ve been building up various social networks over the past few years in an attempt to learn more about social networking and to also increase my visibility as a writer (and hopefully find readers). This morning I was rather horrified/amused to realize that my third largest online gathering ‘place’ was a test site I had created several months ago using wordpress and some social networking plug-ins. I had created the test site to explore a couple technical ideas I had. Now it has a few hundred members on it! Without advertising or soliciting. And really without any features in the site. Of course these members aren’t real people. They are…

  • Writing Resources

    Busy!

    Still not around online much but figured I’d toss out a quick update. Hope everyone is doing well. What am I up to? – I’ve passed the halfway mark on edits to Novel#3 – I’ve finished some design projects (documentation) for Empire Avenue – My game design handbook (Lazy Designer) is almost halfway to the sales milestone I set. If it reaches the milestone I’ll get a second book written, which will go into more detail on design specializations in the videogame industry with more examples from my time with BioWare And that’s about it. What about you?

  • Empire Avenue,  Game Reviews,  Writing Resources

    Hathead

    So I’ve come to recognize that I wear many hats. I’m a retired game designer, a writer, a software developer, and a consultant. I also blog and I’m (somewhat) active on various social media sites. While wearing the vast majority of my hats I truly want to encourage others to connect with me. I enjoy talking about writing, or engaging with other users on Empire Avenue, or passing on game design advice. However many people seem interested in only one thing: for me to talk about my time at BioWare! Again, I like taking my experiences and generalizing them to pull out useful bits of game design advice. And in…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Accountability in Game Development

    Overview This post will cover a topic that doesn’t directly relate to what goes into the games you are building but is more about how the team builds games. I’m going to touch on the idea of accountability, starting with a general overview of what I like about accountability and why I think it is important and then digging into some specifics with my experiences in the game industry. An Accountable World When making a decision I like having reasonable data beforehand. I read reviews on products before I buy them. I talk to people I know who own the product. I visit the company’s website and look at how…

  • Empire Avenue

    Vital Empire Avenue Statistics

    So in the last couple weeks I have reached a few milestones on the social network exchange Empire Avenue and I thought I would share them with you today. The Numbers I sold my 105 000th share! I reached 1000 shareholders… yes that means over a thousand people paid cold hard virtual currency to buy pieces of me I own almost 2000 people (but I recently sold a bunch of slackers) My share price passed the 82 eaves mark (eaves are the currency of the Empire and based on my calculations will probably replace the US dollar in 4-5 years*). I bought hundreds of shares in ‘newcomers’ like Intel, Ford,…

  • My Life

    What do you want to know?

    Okay I have a cold and my two sick kids are home with me and I’m in the middle of major novel revisions and Empire Avenue is near to rolling out our super killer robot army to take over the world some exciting new updates. So I’m busy. I have a lot I want to talk about here, some new Lazy Designer articles in rough draft and whatnot, but I need to get Other Things done first. Instead of posting anything today I’m just going to ask if any of you would like to know something I haven’t touched on before. A game design question? A BioWare question? A question…

  • My Life

    BioWare Employees

    I’m getting a lot of cool folks stopping by here and thanking me for games I worked on in the past with BioWare. But I really can’t take all the credit for the games you have all loved, heck I can hardly take any of the credit. Few BioWare folks seem to have websites (or at least websites I’ve stumbled across easily) but here are some of them if you want to go check out what other BioWare employees (both ex- and current) are doing. And if there’s more BioWare sites out there please let me know. Rob Bartel (co-lead designer Neverwinter Nights, BioWare live community and more) http://robbartel.blogspot.com/ Trent…

  • My Life

    Novel Edits

    Sorry for the quietness but I’m busy with Empire Avenue and novel edits… I’m kicking this novel out of my house by the end of the month no matter what. As well I’ve been playing around with a secret project (not writing or Empire Avenue related). And no I’m not telling you about it yet. It’s a secret after all. I’ve also put a link to an Amazon store down somewhere on the bottom of this webpage, I’m going to try and keep it updated with my Kindle reprints and with any stories and novels people I know have available. If you want me to add your work to the…