Game Development Insights

The games industry continues it’s current round of belt tightening with the news that Lionhead, creators of Black & White and The Movies, is to cut 50 jobs.

The studio, headed by industry legend Peter Molyneux, announced on Friday that worse the expected performance of Black & White 2 and The Movies meant that the company would need to downsize in order to keep operating efficiently. The company will now only be working on two projects simultaneously, with a small additional prototyping team. Unfortunately the scaling back meant there would have to be some redundancies, and 50 people are set to lose their jobs. This represents around a 20% cull of staff, with the company having employed 250 people up until now.

This news follows the news earlier in the year of job cuts at various publishers including Activision and EA among others, cuts taken as a measure to help ride out the transition year as the next generation of consoles are launched.

Apparently if you fancy doing a bit of Next Gen console development on the cheap, the Revolution is where you should be looking. OK, it may not have the raw power of PS3 or XBox 360, but it does have the cool new controller and the cost of purchasing the SDK to develop for the system is only around the $2000 mark. OK, $2000 may not be all that cheap to normal punters like you and me, but to a develop house it isn’t very much at all. Even the cost for the PSP is supposed to be several times that!

Obviously not just any Tom, Dick or Harry can get hold of the SDK. Nintendo (as with all console manufacturers) vet all applications seriously. You’ll need to have a company in place first of all, and generally you’ll also need to have a full game design before you’re even considered.
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Console gamers eager to realize their movie making dreams had their hopes dashed this week. For the past several months, rumors have abounded that Activision’s Hollywood simulation game The Movies was going to be released on a number of the gaming console systems. Yet a recent conference call between the company and gaming industry analysts have, in fact, confirmed that the game will never expand beyond the PC platform.

Why? The game was released for the PC back in November 2005 and received very positive reviews. PC gamers loved the premise of the game: you play a Hollywood producer and director making a major motion picture. Players could design their own scripts, hire their own actors, direct the action, and edit the film just as though they would do if they were truly on a Hollywood set. Sounds like fun! Read the rest of this entry »

Ever fancied creating your own game, but didn’t have the programming knowledge or artistic ability to do so? Well, if First Person Shooters are your thing, then the FPS Creator package from The Game Creators, makers of the well known PC programming language Dark BASIC, could be right up your street.

This clever program allows you to create your own custom FPS games and features a realtime 3D level editor allowing you to piece together your own levels quickly and easily without a single line of code! The game engine even features a full physics system and is multiplayer, so the games you create could even compare favourably to professionally developed game. If you want to dig a little deeper, the game has a built in state based scripting language which allows you to customise pretty much anything you can think of.
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Sony have just snapped up Zipper Interactive, creators of the succesful SOCOM series, to become part of Sony Worldwide Studios along with Killzone developer Guerilla who were joined the fold late last year.

No financial details about the deal have been revealed, and neither have any details of any games that Zipper may be developing, although it seems a fairly safe bet that a version of SOCOM for PS3 is pretty likely to be among the first fruits of the deal, especially since the PSP game SOCOM: Fire Team Bravo has been selling very well and it’s a well established franchise.

CEO of Zipper Jim Bosler had this to say. “We’ve enjoyed an incredible relationship with SCE for more than six years… As a part of the Sony Computer Entertainment group we can look forward to introducing innovative titles that push online functionality and community experiences even further.“

OK, this video has been around for a little while, but it was sent to me again today and it always makes me laugh. This is a US TV advert (which I believe is still running!) for a games development course at Westwood Online College. Now, the course may well be very good, I really don’t know, but the advert is shockingly poor!

Let me tell you that this is not indicative of your typical games development company, and it’s wrong in so many ways. First, the guys look as though they’ve just stepped off the set from CHiPs (I keep expecting Erik Estrada to walk buy in a tight beige uniform and big black boots - speaking of which, completely off topic but quite hilarious is this video of him thanking NORAD for tracking Santa Claus?! I don’t understand either!)
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It would appear that the assumptions many have made about the expected power of the forthcoming Nintendo Revolution console falling short of the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 are true. The raw capabilities of the machine will not match those of it’s rivals in terms of sheer processing power and polygon throughput, the two main areas where consoles tend to be compared. Instead, we can expect a machine that is roughly 2-3 times more powerful than the Gamecube, according to reports of developers who have had access to devkits.

So are Nintendo mad? Well, maybe not. From the moment it was announced Revolution was always going to be different, and when Nintendo showed us their odd waveable remote control device at E3 this year as the primary input device most people realised that Nintendo were going to do their own thing, which is nothing new for Nintendo.
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It’s the end of an era. Earlier this week, Electronic Arts announced that the head of EA Mobile, John Batter, would be vacating his position as Vice President in a few short weeks. Batter is ditching the gaming giant in favor of a return to DreamWorks Animation, where he spent much of his career before joining EA. His new title will be Senior Production Assistant.

Batter has been highly visible throughout his career at EA. He started out as the general manager of EALA, but was appointed to Vice President and General Manager of EA Mobile in late 2004. Batter’s role was, in part, to lend credibility and good standing to EA’s renewed interest in the mobile gaming marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Well that title was a bit of a mouth full and the game is probably not what most people are expecting, as it features a rabbit of the fluffy blue variety ;).

A game designer from Ubisoft, Heather Kelley set out on a quest to create a game that would “teach techniques of female sexual gratification to a target audience of females.” and the quest resulted in Lapis - A magical pet adventure. The game actually won an award at the Montreal Game Summit 2005 Game Design Challenge.

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Congratulations to the industry’s newest independent gaming development studio! Hyboreal Studios formally announced its entry into the gaming world on Monday, making official the news that several of Blizzard North’s top developers are trying their own hand as full-lifecycle game designers.

Gaming industry veterans Michio Okamura, Eric Sexton, and Steven Woo, all former Blizzard North developers known for their work on the highly successful Diablo series, will be leading the company’s creative development team. Hyboreal has already announced that they have a game in development, referred to as “Starfall” on the company’s website, but developers are keeping mum on any additional details. “The company is establishing a new best-selling game franchise by applying the proven formula of mass accessibility, addictive game play and longevity through re-playability,” announced the developers on Tuesday. What is known is that the company has chosen the PC as its target platform, and plans to tailor games to “low-end systems and laptop computers”, which Hyboreal claims is the fastest growing PC market share in the industry. Based on this, it follows that Starfall will likely be developed with this audience in mind.
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