I had a great conversation recently with a couple of good friends, both grizzled industry veterans. A couple of quick introductions, before jumping in.

Gareth Hinds kicks off the conversation. Gareth is a creator of graphic novels, whose excellent adaptations of Beowulf, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice are not to be missed. He also has a dark, secret past as an extraordinary game artist.

Dave Konieczny is co-founder of Bithoard Games, whose recent release Blastination is one of my favorite iPhone games.

Gareth: What advice do you give to high school kids who think they want to become game designers? Is there anything like a recommended course of study as they head into college?

I recently got asked about this by two different kids.

Sean: You're asking me? I just made stuff up as I went along, and somehow got people to pay me. But that was more than a decade ago…not sure that works anymore. };^)

Having a background in programming and art is certainly helpful from the standpoint of effectively communicating your ideas. That has certainly been a huge help to me over the years.
There will be math. Algebra, trig, statistics. You will be happy with a strong foundation in maths. The more you know the better off you’ll be.

But the biggest thing, and here is where I think art is important, they have to make themselves keen observers. They also need to read widely, travel, go for nature walks, pretty much everything but sit in a classroom/cubicle all day. Get out of the echo chamber of popular culture once and awhile.

Tell them not to get attached to ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Focus on turning ideas into a product, a demo, something real.

Very cool. Boom Blox Bash Party, which I finished up work on several months ago, has made the LA Times Top Ten Video Games of 2009. If you haven't played it, go out and find a copy. Here's a hint:

Boom Blox Bash Party

It's good darn fun!

But hey, you're busy, and who has time to click on an external link these days, so without further delay:

• No. 10: Assassin's Creed II
• No. 9: Fight Night Round 4
• No. 8: Wolfenstein
• No. 7: Wii Sports Resort
• No. 6: Batman: Arkham Asylum
• No. 5: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
• No. 4: Boom Blox Bash Party
• No. 3: Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
• No. 2: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
• No. 1: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Well done team!

Now, y'all go read the article, they say such nice things!

Top 10 video games of 2009

This is the next step in the evolution of the nGon toy. But into what is it evolving? That's a very good question.



Try here for a full size version.

Now it can be told. The game I've been working on announced today. Here's the skinny:

EA Will Ask Steven Spielberg To Make A ‘Boom Blox’ Level

Boom Blox Bash Party in Pictures

Spielberg's Boom Blox Bash Party Rocks Wii This Spring

I wish all games could be this much fun to work on, and the team is the best I've ever worked with.

So, first...buy this game when it comes out. It really is, no kidding, fun for the whole family.

Second...make sure to try your hand at building your own levels. It has one of the easiest to use editors out there.

And lastly, an oldie but a goodie:

The Expected Result

I'll post a picture once I'm sure the traffic-storm that was Democracy Day Patch has subsided.

US Democracy Server: Patch Day

Version 44.0

President

• Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
• A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
• Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating.
• Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
• Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
• A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.

Vice President

• The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
• No longer immune to damage from the Legislative and Judicial classes.
• The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
• Reveal Identity: this debuff will no longer be able to target Covert Operatives.
• Messages to and from the Vice President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
• A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President’s visibility, making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been addressed.

Cabinet

• There was a bug in the last release that prevented the Cabinet from disagreeing with the President, which was the cause of a number of serious balance issues. This bug has been addressed, and we will continue to monitor the situation.

Judiciary

• Many concerns have been raised regarding balance issues in the Supreme Court. This system is maintained on a different patch schedule, and will require longer to address.
• A large number of NPCs in the Judiciary were incorrectly flagged "ideological." We are trying to identify these cases and rectify this situation.

Homeland Security

• Homeland Security Advisory System: We have identified a bug in this system that prevents the threat level from dropping below Elevated (Yellow). The code for Guarded (Blue) and Low (Green) has been commented out. We are testing the fix and hope to have it in by the next patch.
• Torture: This debuff is being removed after a record number of complaints.
• Item: Large Bottle of Water is incorrectly generating threat with TSA Agents when held in inventory. We are looking into the issue.
• Asking questions about Homeland Security was incorrectly triggering the Chain-Jingoism debuff.

Economy

• Serious on-going issues with server economy are still being addressed. We expect further roll-backs, and appreciate your help identifying and fixing bugs. We can’t make these fixes without your help.

PVP

• Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag.

Quests

• The” Desert Storm” quest chain was displaying an erroneous "Mission Accomplished" message near the beginning of the chain.
• The quest chain that begins with “There’s no Cake like Yellow Cake” and terminates  with “W-M-Denied” has been identified as uncompletable, and has been removed.

Reagents

• Many recipes that currently call for Crude Oil can now be made with Wind, Solar, Geothermal and Ethanol reagents. We hope to roll out even more sweeping changes in the next patch.

Events

• The “Axis of Evil” event is drawing to a close. Look forward to the “Rebuilding Bridges” event starting in January.

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I read with great delight Kevin Kelly's recent post over at the Technium, "The Google Way of Science".

Mr. Kelly is a big fan of intellectual broadsides - technological Zen koans, and this one is a doozie.

The elevator pitch is this: As we accumulate more and more data, petabytes of the stuff, scientists can knock of the difficult and time consuming process of coming up with, then testing, peer reviewing, then repeatedly testing a hypothesis, and simply look with special tools (petascopes?) through these vast pools of data for previously undiscovered correlations, which with enough data points become as good as natural law.

Imagine you had a database with a vast number of entries detailing how long it took objects to fall to the ground from varying heights.

Using the field of Correlative Analytics, you could simple query the database asking how long it takes for an object to fall 25 meters. With enough data points, you could get answers as accurate as if you actually had a theory of gravitation, though the database and related search software have no implicit theory of gravity built in to them.

As it turns out, this is much the way Google language translation services work. They have no theory of French, English, or Chinese, the simply have very large amounts of bilingual translations they can use to look for correlations. It is science by Bayesian filter.

Except that it isn't.

Prototyping gameplay can be a quick and dirty* way of answering design questions. The big  ones, like: is it any fun?

Here's a Flash/ActionScript prototype I did for my last game, a Wii title called "Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed."

There's a more detailed discussion of it over here.

* If you do it right.