Balthazar Auger

Over at the community pages of Spore, the long-awaited (at least for me) “Sim-everything”, developers have released an early prototype, probably used to develop the space-phase, since it deals with gravitational interaction of particles.

From the article:

Usually these prototypes are never seen by the public, but we thought some of the more intrepid players out there might enjoy playing around with a few of our early Spore prototypes. Keep in mind these are not tested, supported or even easily explained.

I have tested this prototype, and it’s really not player friendly. However, since I started making video games, I’ve manipulated countless prototypes or small “code toys” quickly hacked together to prove a certain point or to test an idea. These objects end up being stronger references to the team than every document you will ever be able to write, and yet they are systematically forgotten after the game has shipped. (more…)

The reason I’ve been away from the blog lately is because I was attending the Paris GDC event, held at the “Coeur Défense” conference center. Let me tell you about it a little!

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This week, a little bit of our precious crunch time is being devoted to attending a series of conferences held at our school. These conferences, dubbed “Les Ateliers du Jeu Vidéo” - The Videogame Workshop were organized by all-around cool guy Jean-Michel Blottière. I’ll attempt to report on some of them.

Today, the conference was held by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago via video conference. They talked about how to elicit emotion in games centered around the development of their current experimental game, “flower”.

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La miniaturisation de l’informatique et la popularisation du phénomène du jeu vidéo ont convergé vers l’apparition des jeux dits ubiquitaires ou pervasifs vers le début du siècle. Ces expériences empruntent le langage du jeu vidéo pour immerger le joueur ou les frontières entre le jeu et la réalité se chevauchent, s’entre-effacent.

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Insult Swordfighting: Books that should be made into games

I stumbled upon this through Kotaku’s Maggie Greene. The author, Mitch Krpata kicks things off:

So many games are based on movies and TV shows. Why not games based on books? There are centuries of fantastic literature to draw from, and in most cases the source material is in the public domain — no need for onerous licensing fees.

Brilliant!

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I was at the movies the other day (Charlie Wilson’s war - excellent film!) with my fellow “game design student” friends, and we were so enthralled by the movie’s quality that we started thinking about ways to translate that kind of experience to games.

We talked about a self contained narrative and systemic “unit”, lasting no more than two hours (and costing no more than a movie ticket?).

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There’s a reason I haven’t been able to update the blog in a month (a MONTH? that’s just no good), but it is kind of lame, so I’d rather say I’ve been too busy to even glance at my blog.

Luckily it’s partly true…

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Pippa told me that SAGE were offering all of their papers for free until November 30th.

They cover a lot of subjects, but the journal that interested me the most is Games and Culture, a fairly new but already very complete publication.

To download, you need to have an account (those are free too) and a lot of time… I’m devoting this lovely and cold saturday to it.

Ok, so it’s been more-or-less one month since we started working on the game. What’s up?

First of all, it’s nice to see that there has not been any conflicts covert or open, SO FAR. Of course, it would be foolish to hope for peace and love during the whole pre-production period. This is (SPARTAAAA) the video game industry we’re talking about, after all. What has happened is a healthy mix of rational argument, open speech and open confrontation.

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I’m proud to announce that Poesysteme  is an official IGF 2008 Student Competition Entrant.

No, actually, it’s true! Look here . Neat huh?

But then, look at the competition… Very good games all around! What a blessing/curse!

Oh well, we’ll see on “Monday, December 17th” according to the e-mail.