I spent my short holiday vacation playing the recently released indie game Bastion. The first game created by Super Giant Games, this action-adventure RPG tells the story of a kid who wakes up one day with the world around him literally in pieces. Bastion has beautiful art, an infinitely deep concentration of gameplay modifiers, a compelling narrative (narrative [...]
October 1st I attended the Experiencing Stories Within Digital Games talk at Concordia University, where university professors and game writers from around the world gave presentations and led a discussion panel on the philosophy and craft behind the narrative of recent games. The presentations I attended were for Assassin’s Creed, The Graveyard, Mass Effect, and [...]
Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, known for the action-horror game The Suffering and for one of my favorite game development books, Game Design: Theory and Practice. Currently, he works as Narrative Director on an undisclosed IP at Ubisoft Montreal . After acquiring a media pass to the Montreal International Game Summit [...]
Last Wednesday my peers and I went to visit the up-and-coming Miralupa game development studio. In contrast to the other studios we’ve visited (Ubisoft, Eidos, Gameloft, etc.), Miralupa is small – very small – but it has a very big dream. This self-funded Montréal-based studio is made up of roughly five employees and, through the [...]
Monday, September 26: the Boston Bruins versus the Montreal Canadiens; A National Hockey League rivalry considered to be one of the greatest in all of sports. I had no idea what I was in for. I had been to a hockey game once before. I was twelve, and it was a Philadelphia Phantoms exhibition match, [...]
This week in Montreal, my film class had our first guest presenter: Filmmaker, producer, and multimedia graphic designer Noé Sardet. It’s just my luck that this was the day I got to class a few minutes late. I didn’t know what (or whom) to expect when as I entered the classroom, yet despite my interruption, [...]
There’s always a question of how important substance is in entertainment. Whether in games, films, music, or text, the quality of the content in any medium is often called into question by someone. What critics need to realize is that if something comes off as style over substance, or even if something was made purely [...]
I had an interesting revelation today. Adobe Flash and Actionscript 3.0 are fun to use, but in coding my current project I realized that things like collision detection, inventory and menu navigation, and combat are all elements that I now know how to implement. In learning HTML and Actionscript 3.0, the key to the game [...]
