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...

While wandering around the Atlanta Airport this Christmas, we found an ad for Todd's first game as a lead designer. Brain Challenge has received great reviews even though it had a tumultuous (and extremely brief) development cycle. I've only seen advertisements for the games I've worked on inside gaming stores or magazines; seeing something you developed advertised in an international airport has got to be a treat.

Paul Barnett of Mythic Entertainment gives an inspired pitch for Warhammer Online. Barnett is a master; it is hard to watch his funny, involving, and informative spiel without getting excited about his game. Brilliant!

Friday afternoon, Don, Casey, and I were "testing" Sid Meier's Railroads multiplayer. The game involves laying down railroad track, building depots, buying and routing trains around to pick up goods at certain industries and deliver them elsewhere to make money. The way to win the scenario was by buying out all of your opponents' stock. Anyways, Casey was having a good game and I was having a bad one, and he bought me out pretty early on, with a complimentary "suck it!" when he purchased the last bit of my stock. When you buy out a player you get ownership of all their tracks, trains, and stations, but somehow I was still making money even though I was out of the game. It turns out when a buyout occured, the trains change owners but the train cars did not. So Casey's trains that were once mine weren't making him any money; in fact, they were actually losing money because he had to pay maintenance on all of them while I (a "dead player") wa...

I've been rocking out to Guitar Hero for the last two weeks and wrote the following fan mail to the awesome folks at Harmonix: Wow; Guitar Hero is awesome! The music selection is sublime, the art direction is inspired, the difficulty progression is smooth (ok, maybe not with Bark at the Moon), and the whole feel of the game is great. The loading screen help text is hilarious (the first time I saw the "Freebird" one I almost cried), everything about the game is great. I hope you sell millions of copies of the game and I can't wait for an expansion! Good luck! Soon after I send my message, Mike Dornbrook, COO of Harmonix, replied: Hi Scott, Thanks for the kind words - reactions like yours are the reason we do this. If sales keep up like they have so far, there's no doubt we'll be doing sequels. We've got *lots* of ideas for improvements! Rock on, -Mike Digging around a bit on the company web site, I found out that Mike worked on the Infocom classics Zork, Le...

I had the great fortune of being invited by Tracee Wolf to give a talk about gaming to the Human Computer Interaction Professional Interest Community group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. Tracee was a huge help in getting the talk ready, with hour long phone calls getting my presentation content to be as useful and interesting as possible, and Jason Ellis (aka Plucky ) was werd as always helping resolve all the technical issues and showing me around his work. Here's slides of the talk I gave, brought to you in PDF form by Mr. Ellis.

I've had the fortune of hearing a few talks by Will Wright at GDC and finally one of his presentations has been released in an hour long MP3 . Recommended listening.

NFC Games has an excellent article on the visual evolution of Nintendo's Mario character. Comparing and contrasting the various character designs over the last two decades is enjoyable, but I don't agree with a bit of the analysis. The "Jumped the Shark" Mario section largely features designs not created by Nintendo's core development group in Japan - rather by Square and NST, Nintendo's in-house team in the US. I'd consider the Paper Mario 2 iteration of Mario to be the de facto 2D version of the famed mascot rather than the blurry Donkey Kong Country-style mess in Mario vs. Donkey Kong.

Wow - Day 2 of GDC coverage nearly a month late! Game Design: A Love Story - Raph Koster, Warren Spector, Will Wright, Eric Zimmerman A lightweight session with Warren Spector, Raph Koster, and Will Wright all designing games about "love." Raph Koster blatantly ignored the instructions of "no interactive fiction" and created a multiplayer romance novel game called "Passion's Tender Embrace" where people play out different parts of a generic romance novel online. Warren Spector didn't finish a game idea claiming "I just can't design a game that doesn't have guns." He discussed what he thought was needed to make a game where the player falls in love with a computer character. He clearly did a lot of research on the subject but the design area he was approaching was very difficult and possibly intractable. Will Wright made (yet another) sublime presentation. He proposed a mod called "Collateral Romance" for Battlefield 194...