November Spawned A Monster

Back, finally, with the cover for the November 2005 issue of Game Developer, for "Scaling the Cabal: Valve's Design Process for Creating Half-Life 2", which is actually a follow-up to an article about the first Half-Life that appeared in the magazine back in 1999. Wow. See below for more info about the rest of the contents.

Anyhow, the December 2005 issue just wrapped up, and the soon-to-debut cover features a special game character who's a quarter century old this year... Pac-Man! We got Derek Yu, who draws pretty good and runs TIGSource, to fashion the cover art for us, and it's super-smart - I'll post pictures when I can. Inside the mag, we have a postmortem of the original title written by creator Toru Iwatani, plus a postmortem of the entire franchise by the Game Developer editors, from Professor Pac-Man through, uhh, Pac-Man Fever.

Elsewhere in the issue, we have a smart Paul Hyman article comparing game ratings systems in four countries - from the ESRB through the VSC to the OFLC and beyond, it's fascinating to see how rating methodology differs. Oh, and a neat piece on art pipelines for next-gen games from ex-BioWare artist Rod Green, plus a Business Level from Bill Swartz on understanding Japanese business are also hanging out there... watch for the issue soon.

Outside the mag, well, ended up doing lots of writing for Gamasutra at Serious Games Summit DC, which went really well - lots of fascinating lectures to write about. There's a surfeit of other good Gamasutra features, but just poke around to see for yourself - the Experimental Gameplay guys' piece on rapid prototyping has been particularly well-received.

Otherwise, nice to see that Chris Kohler's Retro Gaming Hacks is officially released via O'Reilly, following up my Gaming Hacks, and featuring three hacks (two old, one new) from me. Also, I finished and delivered my contribution (called 'The Gospel According To Matthew Smith', and you'll have to buy the book to find out more) to Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol's 'game writing' book, very coincidentally also to be published via O'Reilly early next year - the game scribe line-up for it looks ferociously good. Aand... I'm off to have a lazy rest-of-Sunday, keep surfing the linklog 'til next month.