I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Where to start? Brave New World , the next expansion for Civilization 5 , has been wrapped up and is ready to go. I've was able to fulfill a development dream and design a trade system to be added to the game. Something about caravans and trade ships moving around the screen delights me to no end and I hope other people enjoy it as well. After much discussion with Bessie, I've decided this would be the best time to leave my position at Firaxis Games and work with Todd and Derek at Gopherwood Studios . My seven years (!) at Firaxis have been wonderful and I'm proud that I got to work with such great people on such great products. I will miss my team tremendously; they are my second family and, while I'm not moving away from Baltimore, I'll miss talking to them daily and being a part of their lives. That said, I'm both nervous and excited about working at Gopherwood Studios. I'll be a contractor, largely responsible for pulling in my own clients, a...

After wrapping up core development a few months ago, Civilization Revolution (CivRev) is finally being released in the US this week on the Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo DS. I have been thrilled by the response to the demo on various message boards; CivRev is quite a different game than most console experiences and it was never completely clear to us how the public would respond. Thankfully, most have understood what we've tried to with the series and embrace it as its own thing rather than Civilization 5. I've been particularly proud of the responses of players who have never played a strategy game like this before. The sort of wide-eyed "there can be games like this?!" response makes me feel like we helped expand what people think of games by a little bit. Developing CivRev was quite a challenge for me because it was the first time that I was a lead in charge of other developers, the first time I developed a console title, and the first time we used Scaleform's GFX...

My life's been interesting for a while; finally things have settled down a bit. I left my position at Big Huge Games and recently joined Firaxis to work on an unannounced title. I wish Big Huge Games the best; I'm extremely proud that I was invited to work with them on Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends. ( Rise of Legends has been getting some excellent previews , btw.) They are an exceptionally talented development team. I wish them the best of luck and I hope Rise of Legends tops the charts for a long time and my friends make a lot of money. That said, I'm thrilled to be working on this project at Firaxis and will share details as soon as I have a chance. In other news, my brother, Todd, got a job designing cellphone games at GameLoft in Manhattan. We both want to be game designers and I'm a bit jealous that he gets his shot first. It's his dream job, but he's not much of a big city guy. Seeing some hilarious stories on the horizon, I harassed him into ma...