Here’s some poorly-edited footage of the game I’m working on. I’ll be replacing this with an actual trailer at some point, but this is good enough for now (it was shot with an iPhone). Music credit goes to Jason Cathey.
Yup! I’m no longer a freelance writer. I’ll be writing exclusively for Wired for the foreseeable future. Among many other things, that means that I get to go to E3 again this year.
I am very, very excited about this job. Check out some of the stories I’ve already published on the site:
Review: Hero Academy Stomps Other iOS Strategy Games
Asynced: Multiplayer Gaming’s New Revolution
Hands-On: Mass Effect 3‘s Resurgence Pack Adds Variety to My Failure
Postmortem: How iOS Game Waking Mars Came to Life
iPad SpellTower Drops Price In Quest To Be #1
Review: Trials Evolution Flips, Explodes, Sticks the Landing
Trailer: Elijah Wood Debuts in Red vs. Blue May 28
Alright, so there are three updates to share here. I’m a bit late with all of them, but that’s nothing new:
1) I wrote an article (my first) for GameSpot.com––a lengthy feature about the creation of Temple Run (as well as all the previous games developed by Imangi Studios). It was a huge honor to have a big feature story on the front page of GameSpot. They’ve been a wonderful website since the mid ’90s, and it was sort of surreal to see my byline under their logo.
2) I wrote this article for Gamasutra explaining why we’ll be publishing FAST FAST LASER LASER as an Xbox Live Indie Game, and Gamasutra’s features editor, Christian Nutt, was kind enough to push it to the site’s front page. Lots of experienced developers popped into the comments section, and they successfully convinced me that we should price the game at 80 MSP ($1).
3) FAST FAST LASER LASER’s Kickstarter failed, but we have other funding options in the works. I’m not worried, and neither is the rest of the team. Thanks to all of the people who contributed to the Kickstarter!
There’s one other piece of pretty huge news that I’d like to share, but I’ll have to wait until Monday to post about that…
It’s called FAST FAST FAST LASER LASER, and we’re making it for the Xbox Live Indie Games Channel.
You can find out more about it by visiting our Kickstarter campaign page. We made a snazzy video to explain the project (and hopefully make you smile).
Oh, and check out our totally sweet box art (image credit to Keith Burgun):
If you’re one of the 20,000 people who’ll be in San Francisco for this year’s Game Developers Conference, be sure to pick up one of the free copies of Develop Magazine that will be floating around––a chapter from Buttonless will be featured in that particular issue. I’m told that it will be the chapter on Enviro-Bear 2010, based on my extensive interview with Enviro-Bear creator Justin Smith. Smith is probably one of the funniest people that I interviewed for the book, so pick it up if you’re in need of a smile!
On that note, several other chapters from Buttonless have already been posted at various outlets on the internet––here are some links:
Gamasutra posted the lengthy chapter on Nimble Strong: Bartender in Training, a game by Adam Ghahramani. One of my personal favorite stories from the book.
Joystiq posted just the story section of the chapter on Broken Sword: Director’s Cut. Charles Cecil is a fascinating guy.
148apps conducted an interview with me, and then capped that off with the chapter on Fruit Ninja. Easily the longest chapter in Buttonless, this one is full of things that I guarantee you didn’t know about Halfbrick’s biggest hit.
You can get it right here. I also wrote a lot more about the book on this page.
In just a few days, I’ll be turning in the final manuscript for my book. I’m going to be spending my remaining time before my deadline editing the book into perfect shape before sending it off to the publisher’s copy editor, but here are some fun stats in the meantime:
Total number of words: 82,907
Number of characters (with spaces): 476,969
Developers interviewed: 76
Emails sent: About 2,000 (seriously)
Number of days between the moment I pitched the book and the moment I finished it: 127
Number of days between the moment I signed the contract to write the book and the moment I finished it: 86
Average words written per day (from the signing date): 964
In college terms, I wrote a three-and-a-half page double-spaced essay every day for 86 days straight, including weekends. I poked my Macbook Pro almost half a million times (far more than that when you account for the emails and the interview transcriptions). That can’t be good for it.
I also believe that I’ve found a name for the book. I’m still waiting to hear back from my publisher about whether or not it’ll be the official title, so I’ll save that information for my next post.
However, while we’re here, I can reveal that the book’s foreword is written by none other than John Davison, the VP of Content for Gamespot, Metacritic, and GameFAQs. John was easily my first pick for that job, and I admit that I’m pretty proud to have such a prestigious games critic involved in my work.
More details will be coming soon!
Gamasutra: The Portrayal Of Joan Of Arc In Age Of Empires II
This is a ridiculously in-depth article that I wrote about Joan of Arc and the historical sources that Ensemble pulled from when creating her campaign in Age of Empires II. It’s over 4,000 words in total, so you might want to use Gamasutra’s handy printer-friendly mode, or perhaps bookmark it for later.
I’ve spent the last two years writing about iPhone/iPad gaming for places like GamePro, Macworld, Mac|Life, and Touch Arcade, and that has recently culminated with me signing a book deal with A K Peters/CRC Press. The book is still in its early stages, but I can say that it will be a sort of “best of” collection highlighting around 100 of the most notable titles on the App Store. The value of my book will not be determined simply by the fact that it reveals excellent games that consumers might not know about, because the book will also tell the stories of the people behind the games. It will be a revealing, journalistic work, full of interesting stories and little-known information about the featured games.
So basically, I’m doing TONS of interviews with developers. I’ve already gotten in touch with many of the biggest names in iOS development, including ZeptoLab (Cut the Rope), Firemint (Flight Control), Mobigame (Edge), Chair (Infinity Blade), Illusion Labs (Labyrinth 2), and PopCap (Plants Vs. Zombies). There are still plenty of Skype calls to make and emails to send, but enough with the name-dropping. I’m going to be pretty consumed by this book for the next few months, so for now I’ll no longer be writing my regular iOS reviews/columns for GamePro.com.
Well, that’s really all there is to say about it, at the moment. I’m sure that I’ll wind up posting more about the book at some point before its release later this year.
Due to some recent changes to my work schedule (which I hope to be able to speak more candidly about soon), I’ve had to re-evaluate some of the responsibilities that I’ve accepted and do a little reshuffling of my work load. It was a hard decision, but I’ve decided to step down as the editor-in-chief at Pocketful of Megabytes.
The good news is, the site will be almost entirely unaffected by this change. Robert Williams (who has been with the site since its launch) will be taking over as EIC, and I’ll stay on as the owner––meaning that I’ll worry about most of the behind-the-scenes technical whatnot required to run a website, while Robert can focus on creating and editing actual content for the site.
It was an excellent 6 months, and I had an excellent staff of writers under me. I’m sure they’ll continue to do great work with Robert as the new EIC, and I look forward to reading more of their stuff. It’s not entirely unlikely that my byline will continue to appear on the site, occasionally.
For those interested, here’s are a few links to some of the articles that I produced for Pocketful of Megabytes while acting as the EIC. Needless to say, I enjoy interviews.
- Team Meat Super Interview
- CBS Interactive’s John Davison on Metacritic’s Embrace of the iPhone (Interview)
- Firemint on the Beautiful Real Racing 2 and Flight Control on PlayStation Move (Interview)
- IGF Nominee Erik Svedäng on Shot Shot Shoot and Future Projects (Interview)
- Indie Developer Zach Gage on the Sociology of New Media (Interview)
- PopCap Games talks Bejeweled 3 on iPhone, Casual vs. Hardcore Gaming (Interview)
- Halfbrick Studios on Retail, Android and Steakfries (Interview)
