So long as you have not been living in a cave for the last year or so, you have probably heard of the game Angry Birds (and its numerous versions). Rovio has done a great job with this title and its quite fun. The controls are intuitive, the gameplay is addictive, and the mechanic is developed.
A few years back we were contracted to come up with some game ideas that involved some educational elements. Ultimately, Kelvin Adventures, came out of that, albeit not in any of its original forms. After a ‘Game Jam’ like evening, we were looking back over previous concept art and remembered one of our first pitches for Kelvin Adventures. It was unfortunately turned down by the client, but there definitely is a lesson to be learned from our ‘could of sold 6.5 million copies’ game concept.
We can come up with great ideas, we just need to bring one to market! A few ideas came out of that session, but that is all we will say for now.
Some pretty famous words from French poet, Paul Valery
Since we heard this a few weeks back, it really served as a clear and decisive way of describing how game development or really anything artistic plays out. There is just so much put into a project when you have your heart behind it, that there is always so much more that you ultimately want to do with it, but eventually you have to put it down and release it out into the world.
Duke Nukem Forever — they unlike so many other developers kept putting more and more of those awesome ideas back into their game. All the while, being harassed about when it was going to get released. Clearly, they went through numerous reiterations; and engine changes (which hurt timelines), but ultimately the ideas for that game have been distilled for many years. We can only hope at some point that it sees the light of day.
Posted in Development, Off-Topic
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Tagged Poem
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What would Mike Holmes do?
It’s our new slogan when we are determining how to solve a problem.
For all you non Canadians, Mike Holmes is a general contractor who has won the hearts of Canadians by doing things right. In a recent Readers’ Digest survey, he was named the second most trusted name in Canada.
When a recent ‘improvement’ request was submitted to our project management system the first thing that popped into our minds was:
How are we going to do this? It will mean redoing a whole subsystem to do it right
The business smart response would have been to hack something together on top of the existing subsystem, but at that crucial decision making moment … out of the corner someone yelled “What would Mike Holmes do?”, and instantly there was no question, the system was getting built from the ground up properly to accomodate the improvement requested and potentially other cool things in the future.
We’ve been operating with this slogan for quite sometime, it was about time that it got publicized in the hopes other developers take on the same approach.
