gewgaw

It’s official!

After a bunch of hard work, MySims is finally up on the web! I *still* grin from ear to ear when I see this trailer! Love love love our animators!!!

As things move forward with the game I have learned a lot, both as a manager and as an individual contributor to the team’s overall work. Tmost important lessons I am learning are about predictability, agility and individual empowerment in large team environments.

We all know the deal: it’s hard to schedule out a creative software process. Goals change, technologies fail, people get sick… etc. But in the end, balancing the demands of the day with the process at hand is what it’s all about.

Someone posted a link to this article on the intra-web, in an article about agile development styles and how they have helped previously measurement-based teams become more flexible. Mostly it’s an overview but I was especially keen on this part:

The first part of self-adaptivity is regular reviews of the process. Usually you do these with every iteration. At the end of each iteration, have a short meeting and ask yourself the following questions (culled from Norm Kerth)

• What did we do well?
• What have we learned?
• What can we do better?
• What puzzles us?

These questions will lead you to ideas to change the process for the next iteration. In this way a process that starts off with problems can improve as the project goes on, adapting better to the team that uses it.

If self-adaptivity occurs within a project, it’s even more marked across an organization. A consequence of self-adaptivity is that you should never expect to find a single corporate methodology. Instead each team should not just choose their own process, but should also actively tune their process as they proceed with the project. While both published processes and the experience of other projects can act as an inspiration and a baseline, the developer’s professional responsibility is to adapt the process to the task at hand.

I liked this becasue it underscores how iteration can happen across a team if the management/organization is willing to make communication and self-reflection a key comoponent of success. In a nutshell: If games can be tuned to be more fun for a given audience, development methodologies can be tuned to be more productive for a given team. It’s all about listening to your customers!

“Fox’s Magic Trick”

Amazing photographic realizatioins/transformations of children’s art by Yeondoo Jung.

Link courtesy of Lulu

Looking for the perfect Valentines day gift for you favorite gamer? Consider Chulip.. the kissing RPG!

Kissing people to make them less depressed – improving the world with the power of a smooch! Comparisons to Animal Crossing, Katamari and others make it a sure bet for those of us who can not resist the power of cute, the power of style… the power of love!

You gotta believe!!!

Congratulations to the Dixie Chicks for their stunning 5 fo 5 Grammy truimph, to the talented Texan teen who did such a fantastic job in her dial-a-winner Timberlake duet performance… and her inspiration, 3-award winner and survivor MJ Blige.

And a big nerd shout out to Dr. Faust, whose appointment to the presidency of Harvard University makes her the 4th woman president of the ivy’s. You go girl!

Looking up movies on the interweb, the glory of a not-so-well-placed Ebay ad really had to be saved for posterity:

We went to see “Curse of the Golden Flower” instead – which was basically hours of painful-looking bodices and gilded, puting lips, on tear-streaked faces. Cool jewelry, not enough kung-fu. Perhaps little children would have been better?

It has been a while since I went to see Stephanie’s professional website, and I must say that the collections she’s put together since first arriving in Iraq are just overwhelming. It seems like a different lifetime when we were both in Chicago, drinking beer, talk about music or art.

Her work is present in the way that only photographs can be, in the way that only people can be, in the way that only war can be. Slicing through your worries about morning traffic or a head cold or the laundry. Intimidating? Painful? Real? Pictures/words – you know the drill.

Check them out here.

More pain for the PS3…

So much better when the crowd works for you!

Interesting article on Gamasutra about Adventure Games and the Wii platform. Snippet:

Along with tycoon and real time strategy games, adventure games have been, by and large, stranded on the PC. One look at console sales figures is all it takes to realize this is not where the action is. A symbiotic relationship between consoles and PCs is beneficial to both sides; consoles offer a much wider user base and its accompanying revenue, and PCs offer an easy development platform where risky IP can be tested before the cross-platform SKUs run budgets into the millions.

It is no secret that adventure games need to break into the console market to remain (some would say become) viable. There is no reason to think Nintendo couldn’t help usher in this era if they chose to do so; after all, they’ve changed the rules before. Ironically, they may have done much to seal the fate of classic adventure games in the 80’s by creating the aforementioned action-adventure genre. You can keep your Link – I’ll take Guybrush, thanks.

According to the ESA, computer game dollar sales in 2005 were just under $1 billion. 5.8% of that revenue came from adventure games. Over on the console side, although sales were in excess of $6 billion, adventure games don’t even make it into the pie chart. If adventure games – once introduced in a tangible way onto consoles – kept their PC market share equivalent, it would be a tremendous shot in the arm.

I don’t think this is an unrealistic expectation; I’m inclined to argue that it’s rather conservative. Given the extra manpower and marketing inherent in bigger development budgets, it seems logical that adventure games would surpass their current standards both in quality and quantity (I am aware that throwing money at a development team does not guarantee a higher quality end result, but I’m speaking in broad strokes here.) Would this result in higher percentages for adventure games across the board? I hope so. After all, many of the bullet points for recent shooters read like a list of adventure game staples – a high density of character dialog and interaction, a strong narrative, and a high density of environmental interaction. That particular niche of gamers is starting to demand more from a game than three-figure frame rates and the odd scripted sequence. They would do well to look to adventure games for a change of pace.

To be fair, adventure games have long suffered from a drought of meaningful innovation. I’m not entirely certain where this culpability lies. I realize it’s a cop out to blame he-who-holds-the-purse-strings for all developmental woes. It’s easy to complain that you simply do not have the time or money to experiment with non-linearity or a new mechanic that might improve gameplay slightly, but will most certainly add a plethora of bugs.

I suppose the key ability here would be recognizing those ideas that give you an efficient ratio of manpower vs. return. It’s a skill that draws more from experience than precognition, and I wish I had it. Again, I realize that the solution is not to throw more money at the problem, but surely if more adventure games are being attempted, more minds are bent upon turning the genre on its ear – and occasionally one of the more insightful or lucky of them will strike gold.

In addition, this supporting article includes good read about mechanics and balance issues, format challenges and other design goodness. Thanks, Joe!

Took a long walk in Golden Gate park this weekend… would you believe that this was my first visit there since I moved to the city? It’s probably 15 minutes from my house by car, and 25 by bike – yet I’ve never been. That’s pretty sad.

It was much bigger than I expected, and much less solitary. I find the winding road and cars and people all a bit much – but the plants and trees are spectacular, so things balance out. The magnolias are in bloom right now, and smelled beautiful.

Post-stroll, we stumbled upon The Little Shamrock – a 112-year-old bar where you can play backgammon at large, leather-topped tables. Guinness, dice, heavy chips moving on the smooth board… it was perfect for warming up after the chilly walk.

Today was a chore day – mostly spent dealing with my own plants. Spring is just around the corner and everything is starting to bud. I took an afternoon to prune back the dry winter stems, making room for new growth, and then hosed down the entire porch to deal with the pine needles and pollen. It felt good to put things in order.

In the background, I’m going over the game… again and again. I’m between a rock and a hard place with one particular set of mechanics and cuts… nothing seems to make the balance right. The walk, meals, gardening – even my dreams are filled with variations on the same themes, churning, trying to find a loophole.

Somewhere.