• My Life

    Toys!

    I totally forgot to post some pictures of the toys that the kids got over the holidays. Here’s some highlights: (Does posting pics get me out of needing to actually write a post today? For those who want an update… book 4 of the Lazy Designer is done… I’m just doing some final tweaking and verifying it looks okay.)

  • My Life

    Welcome to 2014

    Yeah, I know January is already (almost) over without an update from me. I’m just busy. Very busy. (More on that later). I’m *almost* done the fourth book in the Lazy Designer series… just finishing up final edits on that over the next couple weeks. For now, instead I’m just going to post a few links: 1. I found this interesting article on rapid prototyping… there’s some fairly cool ideas in it: http://devmag.org.za/2014/01/08/rapid-game-prototyping-tips-for-programmers/ 2. I have started curating a list of links about “writing for videogames” and such that I find. Or not. We’ll see. But for now, the start of it, is here. 3. I created a new portal…

  • 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…

  • My Life

    Smarty Games

    Work continues on the second kid’s game I’m building. I doubt it’ll be of any interest to readers, aside from the design lessons I’ve learned (and maybe the Unity experience I’ve gained), but the work-in-progress is lingering on the site if you want to hunt for it :) I’m about 50% complete, in regards to all the features it could have. I won’t add them all, of course. I’d like to wrap up work on it by the end of the year and then take what I’ve learned onto a new project. I’ve created several helper classes and whatnot that will carry over to other Unity projects. I have also…

  • 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…

  • Writing Resources

    Contributor Copies

    This was suppose to go up a couple days ago, but I was busy, so here you go. One of the cooler moments in writing is when you receive a contributor copy. Given that much of what I sell now is sold to online magazines, I’m not getting quite so many print copies as I once did, but last week I received my copy of Oomph, a superhero anthology that my story ‘Great White’ is in. There’s a great lineup of stories in this and the quality of the book itself is nice too. There’s also a Kindle version if you prefer electronic copies. I also received my “proof” copy…

  • My Life

    Game Design Thoughts

    Those following the site probably noticed that the other day I posted a… thingy. (I don’t want to quite call it a game). Anyways, if you follow this link you’ll seen one area (in unity) for a very simple kid’s spelling game. And by very simple, I mean VERY SIMPLE. (If you want to read the ‘instructions’, do so here). I’m sure some of you might be thinking. “Holy !*@*, is this all Brent has got done since leaving BioWare?” Yes. Yes it is. Well, more specifically, this is what I managed to cobble together from some of the prototyping stuff I’ve been doing. It is very primitive and my…

  • 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…

  • Writing Resources

    Update

    I’ve been working on Lazy Designer Book 4 and finished the rough draft of it today (it was mostly done earlier in the year, except for the sections on worldbuilding). I have also continued with some editing chores on other projects. So, as usual, lots of work but nothing much I can show you yet. I do have some stories out soon (or already out). As a reminder the anthology of superhero stories I have a story in, Oomph, will be released soon and my story “Slaying Dragons” is in the first year “best of” anthology from Plasma Frequency (in case you want to check out some of my fiction…

  • Writing Resources

    Oomph

    The big news for me this update is that the anthology “Oomph: A Little Super Goes a Long Way”, from Crossed Genres, will be released on October 28th. This anthology contains my story ‘Great White’ and I’ll provide links and whatnot on the release date. The full table of contents is: “Hat Trick” – Beth Cato “Power Line Dreams” – A.J. Fitzwater “Exact Change” – Christine Morgan and Lucas Williams “Short Circuit” – Kirstie Olley “Random Play All and the League of Awesome” – Shane Halbach “The Writing is On the Wall” – Brian Milton “The Breeze” – Mary Alexandra Agner “Fortissimo Possibile” – Dawn Vogel “Knuckles” – Ken MacGregor…