“You have to make games for someone you love,” says William, “because that way you can imagine who you’re making it for.
“You can imagine the smiles the game will bring to their face; you can imagine the good times that people you care about can have with your game.”
William Ho, Design Director at United Front Games, is making LittleBigPlanet Karting for someone he loves.
“My name is Paul, I’m mostly into really, really hard movements. Movements that have never been done before, and may have been deemed impossible in the past.
“My goal… in my mind, is to make every movement perfect. I want every movement to feel really, really easy. And when I can do that? That’s the best satisfaction for me.”
When Nike slapped their logo all over their trademark “Just Do It”, they probably meant for it to be an encouraging statement. It wasn’t so much a command as much as it was a “You Can Do It Too!” Yes, that’s right, you — the chubby one with asthma — you can run that marathon and break a record! Just wobble your way down that hill in these ergonomic orthopaedic Nike-approved running shoes and you can win! Just do it!
Game journalists like to think they know a lot about video games. For the most part, they do! Some writers have encyclopedic knowledge of the most obscure games: games are their love, the stirrer of their loins, the honey to their bunny. But how much do they know about making games? If this game journalist is anything to go by, the answer rhymes with “schmuck schmall”.
It arrived on my desk almost three years ago. Sealed in shrink-wrap, protected by packing peanuts, boxed in brown cardboard, it was never meant to be played. No writer in the building wanted to go near it, no reviewer wanted to play it. As I was about to put it in the communal freebie box, the figurative fly swat of the universe came down on my brain to stop me. I put the game in my bag and took it home.
I felt dumb. I stood in a room full of game developers — a mix of students, amateurs, indies, and professionals — as they worked their way through this year’s Global Game Jam. Ideas were flying everywhere, chunks of code ran their way across screens, gorgeous pieces of art and animation came to life — my goodness, these people were talented. And in the middle of it all I stood with my notepad and pen, feeling dumb. Well, I’m about to put an end to that.
Imagine planting a seed that grows into a bush you could then use as a form of cover in the midst of battle. Or a world in which guns must be plugged into electrical outlets. What if you could use the pause button as a weapon? These are the things parody tweeter Peter Molydeux has been thinking about the past two years.
Ten years ago Alex Hutchinson walked into Torus Games in Melbourne with little idea of what he was doing. Today he is the creative director of Ubisoft Montreal and Assassin’s Creed III. This is the story of how one man learned to make games in Melbourne, mastered it at Maxis, and is now steering a behemoth in Montreal.
The doors close, the lights dim, and as the television screens light up the room goes silent. To the left of the audience is a table with trays of cupcakes decorated with an 18th-century American flag; to the right stands the creative director of Assassin’s Creed III, discreet, not drawing any attention to himself. At the front of the room is the first Assassin’s Creed III gameplay footage to ever be shown outside of Ubisoft. The director is nervous, the audience is focused, the cupcakes are delicious.
The world of Fan Fiction is a curious one — an intimidating mass of yaoi, wish fulfilment and sprawling non-canonical fandom. But the reasons for writing Fan Fiction are as extensive as the reasons for writing fiction itself. In this feature, we explore the curious world of fan fiction — from the beautiful to the bizarre.
