The Writing Industries Conference was great. I’ve never before met so many writers in one place and in spite of lots of news of the demise of print in recent months the attitudes were mostly positive.
I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything this week, I’ve been busy with a few things, amongst which has been the preparations for the Writing Industries Conference on Saturday. I shall endeavour to blog about it next week. Because it’s a non-games event I’m sure that I’ll feel a little out of my depth, but I’m …
Graham Linehan (@Glinner on Twitter) tweeted a link to a wonderful article on the Guardian website: Ten Rules for Writing Fiction. It’s two pages are filled with lots of writers’ rules and tips and I’m sure it’s a good read for writers at all stages of their careers.
I started thinking about the possibility of coming up with my own set of rules specifically aimed at game writing and after thinking about it for a little time my initial thought was that it might not be possible to do this at all.
I read this yesterday: Gameplay is King: Story is Distant Second. It’s an interesting read and one which I almost completely agree with. For games, gameplay is the most important aspect and should always be so. If it’s not then it likely stops being a game and becomes something else with gameplay elements. That isn’t to say those other things aren’t valid or equally enjoyable for what they are.
Or, more fully, Stephane Bura’s Handy Guide to Genre Distinctions in Videogames. Through the wonders of Twitter, I came across Jay Lake’s Handy Guide to Genre Distinctions and suggested that we might need something similar for games, which is why Stephane created his version. Cool or what? 🙂
I was looking over the site, GamePeople, which seems to be a gaming site aimed at a slightly older audience who are not harcore gaming fanboys and also not the “typical” casual game player. In a sense, it caters to gamers who might not other wise be properly served by the bigger sites that seem to have almost created a strong polarisation with little overlap. The GamePeople audience seems to fit into another area of the Venn diagram.
The previous post about this “lost game” with the scene between Emily and Crawford was lifted directly from the original scripts. Because the development was cut short, I never had the chance to do a final editing and polishing pass over the whole game. Here is the same scene given the editing treatment. It’s a lot tighter and makes use of the visuals much more.
Considering the game first came out three and a half years ago, I thought that the days of new reviews were over. Then earlier this evening I was sent a link to a great review over at Alternative Magazine Online.
Some photos have been posted of the Games Forum Germany conference on Facebook and show most, of not all, of my fellow speakers. I’d like to say, once more, how much I enjoyed attending and speaking. A big thank you to the organisers for inviting me.