You’re good at your job. You’re a leader within your discipline and your job title may or may not say it. You’re one of the more senior members on the team. And one day you are told that you are in charge of other people. These people are probably your friends. You play games with them during lunch and go grab drinks after work on Fridays. Now you’re their boss. Back before I went indie […]
The value of bad publicity
Yesterday morning during the Enhanced Wars stand up we realized something fishy was going on. It was 9am on the west coast and already we had 10x the normal amount of email sign-ups for early access to our game. I have been in charge of outreach efforts on Enhanced Wars as we have built up an early audience in preparation for our Kickstarter campaign, and we were already having one of our best days yet. And I […]
On Game Design with Greg Kasavin
The following are excerpts from a conversation with Greg Kasavin, Creative Director at Supergiant Games, makers of indie blockbuster Bastion and the upcoming Transistor. Before helping found Supergiant Games, Greg worked as a producer at EA on Command & Conquer and served as the editor-in-chief for Gamespot. This conversation originally took place in May of 2012. EL: What is game design? GK: Game design is the art of making games, put broadly. It’s coming up […]
On Game Design with Richard Vorodi
The following are excerpts from a conversation with Richard Vorodi, Senior Game Designer at Crytek. Richard’s’s hit games include classics like Wave Race, 1080° Avalanche, Mario vs Donkey Kong, Metroid Prime, and more recently, Darksiders II. This conversation originally took place in April of last year. EL: The question I start everybody off with is, what is game design? RV: That’s the big question. And I think that you’re going to get a different answer […]
On Game Design with Rich Hilleman (Part 3)
Rich Hilleman is the Chief Creative Director of EA. He is one of EA’s earliest employees and is best known for helping to build the juggernaut EA Sports business as the original producer of games including John Madden Football, NHL Hockey and Tiger Woods PGA Tour. This is the third part of an interview that took place in April, 2012. Part 1 and part 2 were previously posted to this blog. EL: For the young designers you coach and help […]
On Game Design with Rich Hilleman (Part 2)
Rich Hilleman is the Chief Creative Director of EA. He is one of EA’s earliest employees and is best known for helping to build the juggernaut EA Sports business as the original producer of games including John Madden Football, NHL Hockey and Tiger Woods PGA Tour. This is the second part of an interview took place in April, 2012. You can read the first part here. EL: What do you think is the biggest challenge […]
Design Tutorial – How to write a feature brief
The simple truth of game development is that a finished game will never be all that you imagine it to be. Even the best managed game development processes result in a game that represents 5 to 10 percent of the initial ambition. Ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive and at a certain point games must be shipped. For instance, even if my team’s current game Enhanced Wars is a runaway success and we continuously improve it for […]
Breaking into game design: Part 5 – prepare to interview
This article is the fifth in a series on how to land a job as a game designer. Check out previous posts for details on setting your career goal, building your portfolio, learning how to sell your experiences and writing your resume. If you’ve followed the series of articles up till now, then you’ve sent your resume and portfolio out to the world and are landing some interviews. The previous article on writing your resume covered the general process of phone and in […]
Balancing your game with tuning reports
To call the Quarter Spiral team process centric would be a bit of an understatement. Two of the three team members have served as producers of software development teams. We love scrum methodology and have been doing weekly sprints with point tracking and post mortems since the first week of our existence. As our tiny team is spread out across two continents, rooting ourselves in process has been essential to maintaining development momentum and creating trust that […]
Breaking into game design: Part 4 – write your resume
This article is the fourth in a series on how to land a job as a game designer. Check out previous posts for details on setting your career goal, building your portfolio and learning how to sell your experiences. Now that I’m devoting my energies to Enhanced Wars, I do not see nearly the quantity of resumes as when I was part of the hiring process at BioWare’s San Francisco office. But I still review the occasional resume for someone […]