Jackpot Trivia

 Posted by (Visited 8436 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Mar 102015
 

A while back I mentioned a few game announcements coming soon. One was, of course, Crowfall, about which I hope everyone knows at this point. This post is about another one!

A year ago or so I started working with NTN Buzztime as a consultant– these are the folks who provide bar trivia to venues all over the country. You might have seen their stuff if you ever go to a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant, for example. They have been doing networked bar trivia for decades now.

I worked with them to revise the core trivia experience. The press release about the resultant game, Jackpot Trivia, went out today. The chief goal was to make playing trivia more of a local multiplayer game, and to get more people to feel good about playing when they’re in a world with terrifying trivia experts. And yet, you still want expertise to come out ahead… so it was a fun design problem. Read on for how we tackled it…

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GDC: Community Management in the Culture Wars

 Posted by (Visited 6459 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 032015
 

Slide15This morning, Gordon Walton, Rich Vogel and I presented our talk on “Community Management in the Culture Wars.” I realized as we started that the last time the three of us were on stage together at GDC to talk about community was 14 years ago (!). A lot has changed… and a lot hasn’t.

The slides are pretty self-explanatory, and can be found here.

There has been a surprising amount of coverage on it.

 

The Game Design section

 Posted by (Visited 5296 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Feb 122015
 

Slide1It has taken me almost a year, but the Game Design section of the site has seen truly massive revisions.

Among other things, I have managed to find several presentations which were never on the site:

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A Career: GameDay Peru talk

 Posted by (Visited 5965 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , ,
Feb 042015
 

IMG_3663Long-time blog readers know that I spent a large chunk of my childhood in Peru. It was there, in fact, that I first started to make games. I lived in Lima, in San Isidro, a relatively well-off neighborhood. It was the height of the Shining Path terrorism period: gringo things were blown up with great regularity. The KFC. The Pizza Hut. The local arcade.

The art institute Instituto Toulouse Lautrec is launching the first ever game design program in Peru this year. There are programs for 3d modelers, animators, and programmers there and elsewhere already. There’s a small but thriving work-for-hire community that also does original game development. The time seemed right. When they asked me to come give a talk, it was an emotional moment — and the first time in almost thirty years that I had set foot in Lima.

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Working on Crowfall!

 Posted by (Visited 10306 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Jan 222015
 

Crowfall_CaravanBanner

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me mention that after a couple of years of being fairly quiet, a lot of game announcements would be hitting soon. Well, one of them hit today! I am very happy to be able to tell the world (finally!) that I have been working with Todd Coleman and my other friends at ArtCraft on Crowfall!

I’ve been hopping on Skype every couple of weeks to go over game designs with Todd & crew for almost a year now. It started out as general brainstorming stuff, and as the team grew, we’ve been able to move on to working directly on designs and even picking apart UIs. I’ve helped out on everything from economics and materials design to yeah, dipping my toes into Todd’s bloodthirstiness and the warfare design that is embodied in “play to crush.” 🙂 (If there was any doubt this is Todd’s game, that should be a hefty clue!)

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