Archive for June, 2007

I think I’ve been to Los Angeles about 10 times and have spend about two weeks per year here the last 5 years. Mostly due to E3 of course and this will be the first time for a long time that I’m not going. E3 is quite different this year as well since they have moved it from being in the main convention centre into a couple of hotels in Santa Monica. It’s probably not a bad idea. Still, Leipzig seems like a very good replacement for E3 and is maybe more interesting since it’s for most part open for consumers as well. And you don’t have to fly for 15 hours to get there, of course.

Posted: June 29th, 2007 under Games, Travel.
Comments: none

For some time I’ve been messing around with some homebrew stuff for handheld platforms. I’m incredibly impressed with how far it has progressed with things like devkitPro which is a user-friendly collection of some of the reversed-engineered SDKs that are available for different platform and easily rival the official versions.

Especially the handheld platforms really intrigue me since there is a lot of potential there for new types of games and applications. Colors! is a program I’ve developed that I released a couple of weeks back that are along those lines. It’s more or less a digital sketchpad on the fly, which I’m currently having a lot of fun with.

I’m going to talk a bit more about handheld homebrew in general, but if you want to check out Colors! you can go here.

Posted: June 29th, 2007 under Projects.
Comments: none

Quick stop on my way to the airport

Washington was very nice as well. So much cleaner than New York and with much more space for everything. Still, I prefer New York. Perhaps working with Darkness have made me appreciate dark and broody environments.

Posted: June 28th, 2007 under Travel.
Comments: none

View from my hotel

I love New York. I’m off on a short US promotional tour that will take me through a couple of US cities but I’m pretty sure this is the one I’ll like most. The Darkness is released over here today (yay!), but I’ve haven’t had time to check out any stores yet. Instead I’ve met Nate Wells who will promote Bioshock. It’s pretty amazing to be able to meet people behind legendary games like System Shock 2.

Posted: June 25th, 2007 under Travel.
Comments: none

I hate these

Why can’t they just print them out at the airport? They obviously have all the information. I never got a pen with me and no, I’ve never commited mass-murder. Nag nag.

Posted: June 25th, 2007 under Travel.
Comments: none

My mom called me the other day. She had seen an article in Svenska Dagbladet where I did an interview about The Darkness (I found it on the web here). The article apparently took up a full page in the culture section of the paper. Pause to think about that for a second. A video game was given that much room in the culture section one of the biggest and most respected newspapers in Sweden. I’ve been traveling Europe and US a bit doing promotion work for The Darkness, and from what I’ve heard that is something that would happen in very few countries. We should be really happy that video games have become so accepted as a cultural media in Sweden. Or as my mom said, “You know, that is where they review Shakespeare plays!”. Of course, we have some way to go before games can be compared to Shakespeare and she also said “I almost missed the article, because half the page was covered with this really disturbing picture”. Well, perhaps next game will make mom proud.

Posted: June 24th, 2007 under Art, Games.
Comments: 1

Colors! is a simplistic digital painting application for Nintendo DS that is inspired by painting-techniques using Wacom boards in Photoshop or Painter.

Homepage & downloads: http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors

Current features
—————-
Plain circle brush where pressure controls opacity
512×384 image resolution with 1 stage zoom
Replay the whole painting process of an image
Hue-circle and luminance/saturation-triangle style palette
Simple Load/Save support

I hope you will enjoy it!

Posted: June 24th, 2007 under Projects.
Comments: none

These days I’m eagerly refreshing gamerankings.com to see when the first review will pop up for The Darkness. In just a couple of years that site (along with metacritics) has become extremely important to the games-industry. It took some time before the games-industry found a way to measure the quality of a game, but now it seems to be here to stay.So, why has gamerankings become so important? There are a number of reasons. The obvious is from a sales standpoint, where there seem to be a great correlation between the review score and sales, even though you still need a marketing campaign to back it up. From what I’ve heard some publishers have even started to write into the contract that if the game doesn’t reach this or that combined review-score, the developer is financially penalized.

The second reason is from the developer perspective. You are only as good as your last game and with a game taking two years to finish, that makes scoring well quite important. Especially for the smaller independent developers where it affects what opportunities you will get until your next game comes out (and not to mention the number of new friends you’ll get on your next game-conventions).

So, is it a good thing then? I think so. There are of course other ways of calculating a score. Imdb.com was a model that a few sites tried to use a couple of years back and I’m still not sure why it won’t work, or if it would be better. Also, there are some problems with the current setup as well, where budget titles and XBLA/PSN titles doesn’t really fit. But there is one thing that I think is really great with the current setup: It encourages innovation. Professional reviews usually embrace new and innovative things. Gamerankings effectively gives them even more power to encourage publishers and developers to innovate, and at this time when budgets are huge and risk-taking is minimized, that is something really valuable.

Posted: June 18th, 2007 under Games.
Comments: none

A short presentation may be in order. I’ve been working as a programmer and gamedesigner at Starbreeze for the last 9 years. I’ve worked on games like Enclave, The Chronicles of Riddick and most recently as lead designer on The Darkness.

This will be my place to write about games, the games-industry, homebrew and other things that interests me. I hope you’ll find it interesting.

Posted: June 16th, 2007 under Personal.
Comments: none

This Tuesday we had the release party for The Darkness. For the team here at Starbreeze, that meant that almost three years of hard work had come to an end. For me, it was somewhat different. For some time now I’ve been scaling down on my time and work at Starbreeze, and with the The Darkness finished, another goal has been reached. Working in games is probably the best job in the world, so I bet I’ll be back in a year or so. But till then, I plan to do all the fun stuff that there never is enough time for. Be it traveling, programming, meeting new people or just playing games, but hopefully I will collect some interesting stories to tell and some smiles along the way.

Posted: June 16th, 2007 under Personal.
Comments: none