We often consider artistic works from a creative or cultural perspective, but I find it just as enlightening to examine them from an economic or evolutionary lens. How does the economic environment within which a developer finds themselves shape the form that art takes? As a case study of this in practice, I’ve been fascinated by a class of content-focused game that’s recently found a stable niche in the maturing mobile, PC and console […]
Here are the slides and notes to my GDC presentation, “The Game of Platform Power”. In our industry, history repeats itself again and again, but each new generation of developers often fails to learn past lessons. Platforms in particular have a well established life cycle and their relationship with a developer changes as they mature. Yet, I regularly see developers completely caught off guards as their new favorite platform suddenly stops being their […]
Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Hello Flash game developer, Over the past couple months, I’ve spent a bit of time looking at Flash gaming on web portals like Kongregate and Newgrounds. There are over 14,000 games spread across 30,000 portals with hundreds of new games coming out every month. The output alone is amazing. Let me cut to the chase. I think that you, Flash game developers, are some of the most talented […]
Gamasutra posted up an article that has been bouncing around in my documents folder for a little while. The original title was “A Services Strategy for Casual Games”, but the new one is a bit more punchy. One response that I’ve heard quite a bit is that portals will never allow user data to be released back to developers. This is quite true for most established portals that have traditionally focused on selling packaged goods […]
An essay on how to treat customers and employees like owners and reap the benefits. In any meeting, a negotiator can adopt a variety of strategies. Typically, they horde information, pick apart their opponent’s every move in hope of understanding hidden meaning, and ultimately attempt to gain the upper hand through manipulation. Sometimes you outsmart your opponent and win. Many times, you are so busy protecting yourself that a deal never happens. There is a […]
My article introducing folks to the genre life cycle is up on Gamasutra.com. Woot. Gamasutra is a site that I respect quite highly, so I’m honored to see them taking an interest in these esoteric writings of mine. 🙂 Let me know what you think: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129880/the_circle_of_life_an_analysis_of_.php take care Danc.
The further I dig into new product development practices the more I crave a simple way of helping folks new to the concepts visualize them quickly. In that spirit, I’ve assembled a little pictorial journey through the intriguing landscapes of waterfall, agile, portfolio management and stage gate. For fun, there is also a description of how you can apply portfolio management techniques to individual agile project as a technique for additionally reducing the design risk. […]
I just came across an article by the good folks at Introversion discussing procedural animation and its benefits versus hand crafted content. Some of my favorite games of all time are riddled with procedural content. The universes of Elite, the dungeons of NetHack, the random maps of Age of Wonders…all these are littered with procedural content. And how could I forget Dice Wars. Or Tetris. Or Poker. The more handcrafted content you build, the more […]
The 2006 Project Horseshoe reports are out! In the place of my irregularly scheduled essay, I’d like to point you toward the collaborative report that I’ve been working on with our appropriately named “PlayDough.” We dug deeply into the issues around funding innovative games and ended up producing 18 pages of revolutionary white paper goodness. Click here to read the report. Now for a bit of commentary on the topic of innovation and business. We […]
I had a delightful lunch today with Amanda F. and her handsome, watch loving friend. She is the driving force behind the new indie RPG Aveyond and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what she does next. Most of my contacts with the game industry go back to the old PC shareware glory days, so it is quite enjoyable to connect with one of the rising stars of the new generation of entrepreneurial game […]
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