http://www.pagtech.com Pierre-Alexandre Garneau's thoughts on designing remarkable video games Mon, 09 Feb 2009 03:14:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Few things are harder than predicting the future. The people of Wall Street were paid vast amounts of money to do it and they failed miserably, causing an international financial crisis. I can't be worse than those bankers, so it's my time to make some predictions about the future -- ... http://www.pagtech.com/2009/02/08/predictions-on-game-development-in-a-time-of-economic-crisis/ If you look on the sidebar to the right, you'll notice a new box at the top: "Twitter Updates". So yes, I'm trying out this whole micro-blogging thing. You can also follow my updates on Twitter itself. If you're not a social media expert, you might be unfamiliar with Twitter. Essentially, ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/11/29/as-seen-on-twitter/ Magnus Alm, CEO of Muskedunder Interactive and good friend of mine, pointed me toward his company's latest creation. It's a fun little rhythm advergame created for Pepsi's Swedish website with a few cool songs. The game is in Swedish, but if you've played Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, you ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/11/04/3d-browser-gaming/ The rise of popularity of casual games has demonstrated that two great principles of game design are not nearly as universal as we thought -- Guitar Hero is a great example of that. The first principle came from Chris Crawford. This early thinker about video game design compared a game to ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/09/21/sacred-cows-make-great-steaks/ MTV has an interview with John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, where they ask why Will Wright's name would not be on the box of Spore. He answers:  In music it’s typically a writer and a band of four. With films it’s a couple of lead talent, actors and actresses, a ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/08/12/credit-where-credit-is-due/ "Final Fantasy XIII" is gaming's greatest oxymoron - sequels are used and overused a lot in gaming. One of the greatest challenges when making a sequel is how to add new stuff for  experienced players while still keeping it approachable for new players. If you keep adding new features, you'll ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/08/06/keeping-it-fresh/ E3 is underway and Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have all presented their keynotes. Microsoft left the whole gaming community in shock by anouncing Final Fantasy XIII would be available on Xbox 360. Sony couldn't match Microsoft's anouncement, but did alright with a few interesting titles coming up -- nothing earth ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/07/16/microsofts-bombshell-sonys-alright-nintendos-wtf/ After a long wait, Apple has finally enabled third party applicaations to be installed on the iPhone and iPod Touch. All applications are distributed through the iTunes store, where a lot of games are already available. What will be the impact of this on the gaming industry? Will the iPhone ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/07/12/iphones-gaming-potential/ There's a long and fascinating interview with Ron Gilbert on Gamasutra where he speaks about his next project, Deathspank, episodic games and the way the gaming industry works. Well worth the read. Here's an excerpt:  You know, the movie industry certainly has its share of space marine movies as well. There are ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/07/05/gamasutra-interviews-ron-gilbert/ The problem with being an early adopter is that you're the one finding the problems with the first revision of the hardware. I've missed a few weeks' update of this site because my Dell m1330 laptop experienced severe stability problems, then died and had to be sent to repair. Now ... http://www.pagtech.com/2008/06/24/dell-m1330-woes/