levity, design, & play
I just finished teaching a class at Univ. of California Santa Cruz on Simulation for Games. Below is a demo reel of the student projects. At the class page you can learn more about the class, play all the student projects (in browser!), and read the syllabus. Final projects are prototypes of dynamic explanations embedded in Wikipedia pages.
More at the Simulation for Games course web site.
Jan. 2015 update: see the launch trailer and learn more at EarthPrimer.com.
So, IndieCade happened, and we (we being my project & me, I suppose) were lucky enough to be selected for inclusion in the festival! I made two videos for the festival that I’d like to share. First, a trailer so you can finally see the book in action:
Second, an awkwardly candid video of me talking about the project:
Jan. 2015 update: See the launch trailer and learn more at EarthPrimer.com.
Last week I wrapped up my submission to IndieCade. It’s not actually a game—like much of the stuff I find fascinating these days—and this requires some explanation. IndieCade, you might be surprised to learn (I was), isn’t just for games. They want everything interactive, awesome, and independent.
The story of how I got here is kind of long and torturous, but I’ll give you the short version. I was working for a couple years on a project called Pocket Kingdom, that had a people simulator, world simulation, world editing tools, multiplayer—all kinds of ambitious zaniness, when I finally understood that despite having some awesome prototypes, was much more than a single indie developer could pull off. “This project looks amazing, but I want you to finish it while you’re still young,” was Rod Humble‘s response to a (hugely scoped) demo I gave to a San Francisco game design brain trust. What I had was something like 10 indie projects in one, and I started to calve off smaller projects from this bigger one.