Nearing the End of the Semester

Well it's almost thanksgiving and that means it's almost the end of another semester here at Champlain College.

A couple things have transpired since my last update about what I'm doing. One, Chris Crawford came to the school to do a lecture and workshop with us. Which ended up being two lectures. But it was still interesting. For those who don't know, Chris Crawford worked at Atari back in the day and then he worked on making games for the mac. Which surprised me cause you know... macs don't really do games. But anyway, time went on and he worked on some other projects and NOW he is working on storytron.com. It's a website where you can play a story that is completely character driven. This is relatively unheard of in the Video game world as it is really hard to do programatically. He's basically retired from the world of video games and is now focusing on Interactive Storytelling. Which is very similar but while he was talking you could tell that he had certain feelings about how you interact with people in games that not everyone agrees about. But he was still very interesting to talk to and to hear his thoughts about interactivity.

The second major thing that happened was MIGS, or the Montreal International Game Summit. I don't have the money to pay for this on my own so I had to get a scholarship to go there. Which was great. I met a few industry folks and got their business cards. Which reminds me I'm working on making my own. I have an old one that is pretty terrible so I didn't bother bringing any with me. But I have an idea for a new one that I was inspired slightly by the card I got from Jason Holtman, who works at Valve. When I finish it I'll post up some images or mock ups so you can see what it looks like. But the good news is that Holtman said that my senior team project sounds like something that valve would be willing to put on Steam. So now the only thing standing between my group and greatness is my group AND don't think I'm not lumping myself in there too. It's a group effort we'll succeed or fail together.

But I met a lot of interesting people at MIGS and learned a bit too. Now I just have to continue the networking process which means emailing all of them and keeping in touch. Which is the hard part for me, because I went to MIGS last year and didn't keep in touch with anyone because I tried to send an email or two out but I just didn't know what to say. So hopefully I can do better this year.

Senior team project is going smoothly. We're almost done with our vertical slice of the game. All that's left is for me to fix a couple bugs and then hand it off to the artists really. And then do some more tweaks and such until we finally hand it in. As is the case that you are always doing tweaks. Everyone in the group has decided that this prototype level is in terms of gameplay not really what we want from the game. But at this point we can't change the level. It showcases the puzzles and such that we can put into the game which we like but we want more jumping in the final version, less safe areas. But maybe that's a bad idea. We need to playtest for that. But again at this point we just want to get a solid prototype level down and figure the rest out next semester.

Advanced Seminar is going well too. I've got the card game pretty well balanced. It's just a matter of making it pretty and finding any loopholes and such in the rules that the players may exploit. I also need to tidy up my documentation a little bit because it is definitely not in the best of shape, the lack of needing to communicate with others has left me a little unconcerned with the design document, but some of the folks I talked to at MIGS said that I should include my documentation in my portfolio so people can see how I think.

That's about it for this month. See you al next month. Happy Thanksgiving.