Mr. Smoozles
Partly inspired by the wonderful drawings on Skudfisher, but also by the need to do something new and from scratch, I introduce the legendary Mr. Smoozles. (Well, he’ll be legendary when I work out what he does…)
Skudfisher
Go to the Skudfisher site now! If you’re still reading this, you didn’t do as I told you. What, you want to know what it’s about? Lots and lots and lots of wonderful doodle-characters. Someone let me make a game with these characters… 🙂
Crunch Time is bad
An excellent article, Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 Lessons has been posted on the IGDA site. I’ve long felt that the inefficiencies of crunch time far outweigh the benefits and this article backs up that view with some excellent facts.
Aww… Don’t you feel sorry for them?
More EA troubles. I loved the following: “Hasty’s lawyers contend that Electronic Arts’ software engineers should be eligible for overtime because they “do not perform work that is original or creative,” have no management responsibilities and are seldom allowed to use their own judgment.” Is it me, or does that just say it all? 🙂
Radical ideas
Ron Gilbert suggests that games journalism should take the industry to task much more and in the main I agree with him, though will it ever happen when magazines are regularly sucking up to publishers and developers in the hope of getting an “exclusive”? The word “exclusive” has actually become meaningless, due to its misuse …
Bone, the game
Telltale Games have just announced that they are making a game based on the comic book series Bone by Jeff Smith. As Bone is one of my all time favourite comics, I hope that the guys over at Telltale are up to the huge task of matching the storytelling and characterisation quality that made the …
Dane & Joe
I’ve just updated Dane & Joe with a strip that finishes off the storyline I started ages ago. My intention is to revive it again within the next couple of weeks and have already created another new strip and am currently writing more in my spare time. Well, the bit of spare time that isn’t …
KOTOR 2 and other stories
I’ve just got my hands on KOTOR 2 and have managed to play a couple of hours so far. It’s pretty much more of the same, so we’ll see if it’s possible to improve on the previous, excellent game. One of the things I like about both of the KOTOR games is the way the …
“It Made Me Laugh” No. 78
These people never should have gotten married. By way of Neil Gaiman.
SC1 moves forward
I’ve spent the last two days doing some work on my personal project, SC1. I did some work for my prototype yesterday, but today I pushed on with the actual proposal document, which is moving along nicely at last. Any more work on it, however, is going to have to be done at weekends for …
Don’t mention the A-word
Having grown a little tired, over recent years, of seeing the same diatribes trotted out in condemnation of the adventure game genre and how it’s either died a million deaths or is the epitomy of boredom, I thought that the best thing would be never to refer to the term again. With this in mind, …
Great Designers – article
I’ve just read a very interesting piece on what makes a great designer. This came by way of Ludonauts. I agree with about 90% of it, but any differences are down to a simple matter of outlook, not principle.