Projects

LucasArts day 22. I’m slowly starting to get settled in here. After a move into a permanent apartment last week, almost all the stuff related to my big move has been taken care of. I got my Social Security Card, all the benefits form are filled out, my banking needs are taken care of, and yeah… I bought an iPhone. I would estimate that about 80% of the LucasArts employees have that thing. Now I do as well.  Imagine that, being a developer for it and all.

Read more »

Posted: February 3rd, 2009 under LucasArts, Personal, Projects.
Comments: none

My two year sabbatical is coming to an end. I’m starting as Lead Designer at LucasArts in San Francisco this January which is the beginning of a new phase for me. In September I released Colors! for iPhone and iPod Touch. This has turned Collecting Smiles into a full-fledged independent developer, and I wanted to write a few words of thanks to Apple for that.

Read more »

Posted: December 25th, 2008 under Games, Personal, Projects.
Comments: none

Something that is very cumbersome (and boring) to do for every developer out there is the software testing. To combat that, you usually develop a number of methods that helps you track down bugs, for example automatic bug-reports and unit-testing.

One of the more interesting ones is automatic testing. For games, this usually means that you have a system that simulates the player and automatically generates input for it. For my latest project Hyena I’ve had the rare opportunity to play around with an application where the controls are so basic that it was actually possible to write a system that played the whole game for me.

Read more »

Posted: March 7th, 2008 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: none

I’ve released a new version of Hyena for DS and PC at
http://www.collectingsmiles.com/hyena

Read more »

Posted: March 5th, 2008 under Projects.
Comments: 14

It’s time for the release of another project: Hyena

Hyena is something I call an AudioGame player. It is probably more correctly called AudioGameBook which is a combination of the words AudioBook and GameBook, which Hyena is based on. AudioBooks have had a dramatic rise in popularity the last couple of years, probably due to the rise of mp3-players, but they do provide a unique function: Being able to “read” a book while your body is busy with other things. Read more »

Posted: February 5th, 2008 under Projects.
Comments: 14

As you may know I’m currently on sabbatical from the games-industry and my company Starbreeze. After having the best job I can imagine for 8 years, I felt I needed a change of scenery and decided to take the money I had managed to put away and burn it on things that makes me feel wiser. You can see some of those things on this site, with small projects of different kinds; some art-projects, some game-projects and some other things that may or may not be good ideas.

The biggest of these projects is one that I haven’t really started on. It’s the project that I’ve been hoping to do for quite some time, and it’s the project that made me create this site in the first place. It’s the Collecting Smiles project.

Read more »

Posted: December 17th, 2007 under Art, Projects, Travel.
Comments: 2

No one can argue that technology has changed how humans think and behave in a very fundamental way. A very simple example is how easy cell phones have made it to meet up with someone while you are out. Before the cell phone you had to carefully plan where and when you would meet while nowadays you just use the cell when it’s time. This may sound like a small thing, but it’s a big change in how you think about planning and also in required personal responsibility.

Another area that I think will make a big impact is forms of memory enhancing technology. People have used PDAs with calendars for a while, but that’s just the beginning. Read more »

Posted: November 4th, 2007 under Projects.
Comments: 5

One of the hardest things to create in games is the interactive stories. It’s probably because that’s something that is very new for us. Before computers, the only stories you could call interactive or branching were the role-playing game-books such as Lone Wolf (which I remember foundly from my childhood). And even those stories are not much older than half a century. Even so, I wish interactive storytelling had evolved as so many other areas related to computers and computer games like graphics technology and AI has.
 
There are some interesting things going on the subject, though. Read more »

Posted: October 29th, 2007 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: 36

I’ve talked a bit about games and art in the past, but something that is much harder to pinpoint is programming art. I was introduced to programming art a long time ago with the demo-scene, where people are creating beautiful applications that often try to do things with a computer that computers weren’t meant for. Another example is one of my great inspirations Karl Sims. Read more »

Posted: October 5th, 2007 under Art, Projects.
Comments: 2

Having a great idea for a game is valuable. That goes without saying, but exactly how valuable is such an idea? I’ve become rather cynical on the subject after working a while in the games-industry. If 50 people work on one game for over two years, how many good ideas are thought up? And how many of those are needed for the next game? Even if you don’t have a team of 50 people or don’t plan to work on one project for that long, there is a good chance that you’ll come up with a bunch of ideas that could become great games; Ideas that never will be realized.

Cosmonaut is such an idea. Read more »

Posted: October 5th, 2007 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: 6