I am currently at Barcamp Brighton 3. I am kind of rubbish at werewolf; last time I was too quiet, this barcamp I’m too lairy. Keep getting hung/eaten.
In the morning, I will be running a session entitled “Crowdsourced haircut”. Wish me luck…

I went to the Hide and Seek Festival last weekend. It was great and I’ll be writing about it soon, both here and at Pixel-Love. It’ll be a little while yet though since I’ve been laid up with a fever for the past few days.
For now, here are the photos I took there.

(CC licensed image by Roadsidepictures)
I ran an event for work a few nights ago, and one of the things that came up in discussion was this blog entry by Ste Pickford. He raises an interesting question:
I’m playing GTA4 right now but I’m not very good and shooting / aiming games, so I’m struggling with some [...]

Just tried to sign up for the last round of tickets for BarCamp London 4, and they ran out in less than a minute, before I’d even got down the reg form. Friends who were trying to register didn’t even get to see the form.
I went to BarCamp London 2 in Feb 07, and it [...]

I’m about to fly off to GDC 08 in San Francisco, and I’m really looking forward to some in depth discussion on games. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes things into compelling experiences, and am starting to think about the current state of engines, the realisation of their applications in non-games fields, and [...]

I saw Toby Barnes speak at Sense of Play in October on the idea of a British Games Academy, and saw this interview via Gamasutra’s mailshot yesterday:

Speaking in an interview in The Financial Times, Woodward suggested that the industry should help to found an academy similar in function the successful London Film School. “The best [...]

A last post on Sense of Play. I spoke of some of the positives earlier, such as the film set model of game production, but here are the negs.
Basically, an industry blinkered by present market niches and academia bound by funding politics are significantly slowing cross-cultural pollination. That’s a very extreme way of stating the [...]

(I missed the GameCity presentation on music for games, by Mark Canham of Nimrod Productions. Wish I hadn’t).
Something bothered me in the Jumpstart workshop.
It was a projected diagram of a game development house broken down to core and crew type roles, or to put it another way, things that can and can’t be salaried in [...]

Left: Sound check for Richard Jacques. Right: Rag Doll Kung Fu presentation.
All my photo’s from GameCity are here, though not showing up publicly yet. I should disclose that I was working with GameCity, hence having so much access.
All public GameCity photos on Flickr: Here.

Jonathan presented Lego Star Wars II on Sunday afternoon at the Broadway, and more specifically showed not just the game but a lot of material on development disks. The LSW team was just eight people for one year, increasing for the last year and a half, and swelling to about 20 by the end of [...]

Last Saturday. 14th century church and the music from Sonic the Hedgehog on a grand piano. ’twas a bit surreal. More on Flickr.

Left: Lego Star Wars 2 in screen 4 at the Broadway Cinema. Right: Streetfighter 2 tiebreaker for the pub quiz at The Social.

Jamie Fristrom is responsible for the swinging mechanics in Spiderman 2. Didn’t get to see much of this one, but here’s one interesting paraphrased bit:

People are sceptical about working on licensed IP, but I don’t really care. I’m a game designer, I want to make good games.

I asked him during the Q&A if there was [...]

Rag Doll Kung Fu: Yet another “up yours” to the solidly held but rather fallacious view that fun marches in lockstep with system specs and gargantuan libraries of art assets.
While showing RDKF, Mark and Alex spoke a lot about the process of developing a game and getting a publishing deal.
Alex, on pitching ideas to start [...]

Paul Taylor of Mode 7 presented Determinance. I didn’t get to see quite a bit of it due to sorting out tech issues, but a couple of highlights:
Determinance itself looks very interesting. Rough edged like many indie games, but it’s about completely freeform sword fighting, with mouse control and no preset moves. (Edit: Forgot to [...]