I can’t remember when I first heard of design patterns. It was several years ago, I’m sure, but my awareness of them was a somewhat gradual buildup, not unlike the sudden dawning that the boss is calling my name while I’ve been daydreaming during a meeting. Whenever it was, I came a bit late to the party, because UI design patterns made their debut into interaction design society about 10 years ago….

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Jenova Chen, creator behind the multi award-winning student game Cloud and flOw, co-founder of thatgamecompany,  is dedicated to expanding the emotional spectrum of video games and making them available for a much wider audience. And how did Jenova “make it” as an independent developer? With a lot of support and a drive for innovation.

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Tamir Nadav, formerly a programmer who has marked his path out as a game designer at KingsIsle, has been involved in the industry for over 5 years with his enthusiastic networking abilities. He’s always up for an interesting conversation and pitches in with events like Women In Games International, which promotes the inclusion and advancement of women in the games industry, worldwide.

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Before making art for Flash games, I spent 9 years working on PlayStation titles in the console games industry. When I first started in games it was fun—teams were small and games were done in 12 months. Usually you had a lot of control over how your levels looked. When I left the games industry, games were 3-year projects, with teams of 50, you were doing collision models for 6 months.
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On my personal scale video game art and the impressiveness of its implementation are easily rated. I’ll tell you now that it is a personal scale—not anything based in numbers or calculations and yet I believe it is relevant. The scale is not based on intrinsic artistic value because I do not believe my own evaluation to be the ultimate assessment of artistic worth. I’m pretty simple: the artistic value of a game is better judged by how many people I show the game to because I think that they will be impressed by it. This goes for double points when I start to share games with people who don’t care about video games one iota.
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So where does someone now considered an industry “veteran” go when they fancy a break from “games”? It wasn’t that I’d stopped enjoying working on games, more that I had a sudden overwhelming urge to do something “worthy” with what I’d learned over the last 16 years. Not that relaxation and entertainment isn’t worthwhile, but surely there must be something else?
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Mythic isn’t bad, they’re just a victim of genre. Jen MacLean, Chairperson of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and VP of Business Development at 38 Studios, recently set the record straight about the Mythic Warhammer Online credits controversy. For those not in the know, Mythic was targeted for press attacks when news got out that people who worked on the Warhammer MMO prior to the studio shift and lost over 3-4 years of work wouldn’t get credit.
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For all of you independent game developers out there, it ain’t always easy finding funding, especially for avant garde or experimental games. That’s where GCube Ventures, an investment firm for interactive entertainment, steps in. Managing Director Shiraz Akmal, formerly from THQ, filled us in on the details of this unique form of financial support for a “gaming ecosystem” from content development to publishing to distribution.

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