Determinance screenshot

On Not Having Too Much to Say

I decided not to submit anything to Austin GDC this year.

Last year, going to Austin GDC was a great experience.  I met a lot of interesting people in the development community there; I got to hook up with one of our friends at Novint; I had a pretty ridiculous night out (crashing a Gamecock party, having John Romero buy me a pizza slice) and I got my silly comments on Gamasutra.

This year, I really don’t have anything to say, because we’re smack bang in the middle of two games.  I feel like I’ve learned a lot since I last spoke in public about what we’re doing, but that needs to be distilled into something of practical use by finishing another two games and releasing them.

I am really fucking tired of a lot of the nonsense that goes on in this industry – we have always set out to try and beat that somehow, and I think we have a novel approach.  We have a lot of things now that we didn’t have before – committed, caring co-conspirators (Ying, our ace programmer, and Bin our ace level designer) for one.  Also intelligent prototyping – these games will beat the living crap out of anything you’ve ever seen even before they leave the drawing board (or your money back).

I recently re-read Steven L. Kent’s Ultimate History of Video Games, and there are some inspirational things in there.  It’s a difficult, slightly self-important and not entirely coherent history of our industry- how more apt is it possible to be?  But it brought home to me how the problems we’re trying to solve (marrying creativity and commercial concerns, par exemple) are basically just age-old.  People think the new indie revolution is exactly that – not so.
So, that’s why I’m keeping to myself a little.  Sure, we’ll be on the Gamespot podcast talking nonsense fairly soon, but it’s in this country at least, so you’ll have to forgive us that.

Fear not, convention circuit.  I will return.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 2:24 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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