John Vechey is one of three co-founders of PopCap games, a developer and distributor of numerous casual cross-platform titles.
Starting with Bejeweled in 2001, their games have been downloaded over 1 billion times and released over multiple platforms.
We caught up with John to ask him about the casual industry, the market and PopCap’s upcoming push into console gaming.
The QnA style “stupid Rare letters page” known as Scribes has just been updated on the dev’s official site. Without doubt, the most interesting stuff to come out of the update is some new hints as to what the new Banjo-Kazooie will be all about. The info itself may be hidden under oodles of mocking, teasing text, but there is still some info in there nonetheless. If you want why not wade through the update yourself, or if you value your sanity read the interesting Banjo information below we collected for you.
“Banjo won’t be a shooter (unless we sell no copies like Ghoulies and out of desperation give him a gun for the next game) but it also won’t be a traditional platformer,” humorously comments the update. “We somewhat grandly like to think that it will be a different take on the genre. Some would say a brave gamble but I’m confident it’s the right decision,”
EA would love to bring Will Wright’s Spore to PS3 and Xbox 360, producer Thomas Vu has revealed.
“There’s lots of technical hurdles we have to think about before we can say, ‘Okay, we can do this or not’. But we’re always looking at and thinking about these issues”, Vu told us earlier this week when asked whether it’s the company’s intention to bring the title to the two platforms.
Spore is huge and we know there’s an audience, he added when pressed further on possible PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. “Yeah, of course we’d love to do it, but at the same time we don’t know”.
Spore’s officially been confirmed for PC, Mac, Wii and DS, and EA has just confirmed that it’ll be out early September.
And you can see new screenshots here, plus keep eyes out for a new report on the game hitting the site later today.
May 2008? Crikey, we never expected BioWare’s 360 RPG Mass Effect wouldn’t release on PC, but we’re a little surprised that it’ll be with us so soon.
BioWare’s a developer that doesn’t mess around when it comes to ports - look at Jade Empire for evidence - and so it’s taking pains to optimise the game for the PC platform .
It’s not rocket science, with optimised controls and higher-resolution visuals and textures on the cards, but on top of that the studio’s talking about “Run & Gun Control” (”Players can assign biotic powers or skills to ‘hot keys’ allowing them to play Mass Effect with a heavier focus on action”), a new decryption mini-game and a revamped inventory system and user interface.
What is your real name? Alexis Allen, but please call me Alex.
What is your official title/position? I’m the Lead Artist on Star Wars Galaxies.
How long have you been working on Star Wars Galaxies? Ever since I can remember… No, really about 4 years.
What do you enjoy most about your job on SWG, and why? I like to watch the evolution of the game and know that I had a hand in growing it. I also like to see all the Star Wars concept art that most people never see. Our partnership with LucasArts affords the capability of seeing the ‘behind the scenes’ work to a certain extent, and I think that’s cool.
What types of things do you do in a typical day at work? I ride my bicycle to work most days because I really need the exercise. I eat breakfast while I go over my email. Then I might have a meeting with the other leads to discuss what art items we need in order to accomplish a certain design goal. I gather up those art requests and asses their order of importance and time consumption. I assign those art tasks to the art team, and include myself as much as possible.
Engine licensors often make the argument that by licensing their engines, studios can get a game up and running without making heavy investments in technology and spending a lot of time on developing a game’s foundation.
The time saved by licensing an engine can then be used to work on what really counts: the gameplay.
Right?
“That’s generally a complete crock of shit. It’s almost never true,” argued Insomniac Games engine director Mike Acton at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. “Just ask Vivendi, Midway or Silicon Knights,” he added, alluding to the problems the studios have had with Epic Games’ widely-used Unreal Engine 3.
Some of our readers pointed out a few things that make this story seem faked. One of the obvious being spelling mistakes on the poster! LOL! Consider this story faked! Here is the faked source:
http://x2theg.blogspot.com/2008/02/gta-iv-more-viral-marking-spotted.html
Sorry. We should have looked closer than we did.
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Well, it appears that the adverts for the Xbox 360 version of GTA4 are hitting the streets of Brooklyn, New York. Check out the Xbox 360 exclusive tag lines with no PS3 logo to be seen. Let the war of GTA4 begin! Only time will tell if the exclusive Xbox 360 episodic content will pay off as Microsoft hopes sales wise, but it for sure has an advantage over the PS3 version as it stands.
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Trinigy, a leading provider of 3D Game Engines with offices in Germany and Austin, TX today announced that the latest version of its Vision Game Engine will be showcased to the public for the first time at Game Developer�s Conference 2008 in San Francisco. Vision 6.4 will be revealed in the scope of the firm�s presence at GDC Expo (February 20-22) and will be presented on-site at Trinigy�s booth (NH 6105). The new version of Trinigy�s Vision Engine, whose predecessor has recently been nominated as finalist for Game Developer Magazine�s Front Line Award 2007, features a versatile LUA-based scripting solution which is seamlessly integrated into Vision�s WYSWIWYG editing framework vForge. Additionally, a newly developed visibility system capable of flexibly handling all types of complex game scenes further increases the engine�s performance. Improved support for dynamic resource streaming as well as various optimisations for Vision�s Playstation 3 and Xbox360 versions are complementing the latest release.
MONTE CARLO–Cevat Yerli, co-founder, president and CEO of German game developer Crytek, recently was a featured speaker (for the second year running) at Imagina 2008, the annual 3D technology conference in Monaco. Following his discussion on the lessons learned from developing Far Cry and Crysis on CryENGINE and CryENGINE 2, he spoke about the changing face of game development.
Today’s landscape has fewer independent game studios, especially on the heels of Electronic Arts acquisition of Bioware and Pandemic. Along with Epic Games and id Software, CryTek remains one of the top independent game makers in the world today.
Releasing a quality game each year, Insomniac are at the top of their game and put most developers to shame. Letting us in on their methods of genius is a treat, and today they bring us an exploration of how they create single player levels. From paper to game in nine “easy” steps.
1. Designers create rough map.
From paper to screen, a level goes through many iterations. Often times designers start sketching out setups with paper and pencil, then transfer to a vector map for the Environmant Artists to start fleshing out. The Designer and Artist will work closely to define what these spaces are, how they should look, feel, etc.
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
