Spinach is making a documentary about indie video game developers.
At that link above, you can see footage of an interview he did with me, Anna Anthropy, Daphny, and Amon26. Spinach is a cool guy and he’s trying to get some exposure for a bunch of folks who I’m really interested in learning more about. He needs your help to do it, so go and pledge to donate on his Kickstarter page.
This podcast episode is about an unreleased game from 1990 that a guy showed me at GDC. It’s called Awesome Zone, and it was created by developer Theodore Alby for a company called KnowSoft over the course of a six-week nervous breakdown.
The music for this episode is from “Three Goes On Forever” by Time Slips By, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike License as part of the compilation Ctrl-N.
I’ll be out of town all this week attending Flash Gaming Summit and Game Developers Conference 2010. My lovely resident PHP expert will be looking into the Case of the Missing Comics while I’m gone.
I’ve been thinking lately, as I’ve been playing around with 3D tools like Unity, about the nature of perspective and visibility in games. Most games limit the amount of information that the player can see. It’s very rare to see a game where the entire game world is visible from the beginning (see “Flood the Chamber” for a counterexample that does). This design decision, of how much of the world to show and how much to keep hidden, doesn’t get enough credit for its importance to the nature of a game.
Continue reading Perspective and What is Visible
