Dave Gilbert’s gamedev blog

So yesterday I was plugged into the Adventure Europe forums for two hours, so I could take part in the online adventure game developer’s conference. It was tremendous fun, and some great questions were asked. However, as six o’clock rolled around a last-minute question was put forth:

Can you decsribe you game making proccess from concieving an idea to publishing it , and the difficulties with working with people over the internet ?

Bonus point if you answer in rhimes.

Far be it from me to back off from a challenge. I came up with the following:

Here’s how my time is spent.
While I’m in development.
Once I get inspiration
Here come motivation
I just hope that it pays the rent.

It starts with writing a doc
That’s solid and tight as a rock
All items common and rare
They are all written there
‘lest anarchy come by and knock

Once the design is complete and computed
The team members must be recruited
For if it were all done by me
Nasty things you would see
‘cuz it would all come out convoluted

Then we all get right down to work
We do our jobs and we’ll never shirk
Pixels are dutifully slammed
The game’s mostly programmed
And hopefully no one’s a jerk

After months of blood, tears and sweat
It’s complete, but it’s not over yet!
Heed the words I am telling
For now starts the selling
Lots of money we hope we shall get

The advertising’s never much fun
But on it’s shoulders a business is run
Marketing Rosa or Stone
Is a whole different poem
So I that believe this ditty… is done!

Phew.

The alleged world’s oldest competitive gamer, Doris Self, 81, of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, passed away earlier this month after a car accident.

A moment of silence, if you please.

Do you think games are art? Join this IRC discussion next Wednesday and voice your opinion. I’m going to try to be there. Well, I’m going to try and be online.

For those of you living in NYC and interested in gaming events, my friend Sande Chen is having a promotion event for her book, Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform, next week. Sande’s a super cool lady who has helped me out a lot. She’s also doing the voice of Rosangela Blackwell in the upcoming Blackwell Legacy. More information about the event can be found HERE.

And now, since I am lacking anything of interest to talk about, here’s another character preview from the upcoming Blackwell Legacy, as drawn by Ian of Herculean Effort:

Do discuss.

As mentioned previously, in August I presented “The Shivah” at an IGDA meeting here in New York. A reporter from Gamasutra was there and did a write-up about it, in addition to interviewing me. It took a month, but it’s on there now. You can read about the event, read the interview, and learn about some of the other games that were presented here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060926/hawkins_01.shtml

The event was also videotaped, and was placed on Youtube. You can view the videos here:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P18jOFoiyR4
(Where a trailer for the game is played, and some features are demonstrated)

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWJ6BN4wokI
(Where I open up AGS and recreate a small scene from the game)

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsy-n17i4ig
(Where I answer questions from the audience)

Holy crap, did I need a haircut that night. Anyway, enjoy.

One thing that’s missing from the new Shivah is the original soundtrack. For anyone missing the old music, the composer has zipped it up in a nice little package which you can download HERE

And apparently I confused some people when I moved the “click here to purchase Shivah” button to the games page, as I immediately got some emails asking how to buy it. Sooo, I’ve created another button and put it below. I’ve moved the donation button to a seperate donation page.

L’Shana Tovah, everybody.

The Shivah was recently discussed on the latest edition of the AGS Podquest. The Podquests are fun little podcasts staring Francisco “Grundislav” Gonzalez and Sam “Zoot” Gray, where they discuss various goings-ons in the AGS community.

There are two files you can listen to.

First, they discuss the game amongst themselves here. It’s worth listening to, if only for the amusement of an english guy trying to pronounce the word “putz.”

Mr. Sam Gray also interviewed me, which you can listen to here. Now you can HEAR me babble incoherantly instead of just reading it! The information is a bit out of date and it suffers from a few weird audio glitches, but it’s there.

I do know that I’ve been talking about games and stuff way too much. As mentioned in a previous update, a sister site is in development that will seperate the game stuff from the bloggy stuff. In the meantime, I hope you’re not bored.

So I got a message from a customer today, which went something like: “I wanted to donate more money to you and your site, in addition to paying for the game, but there was no option to.”

Suffice to say, this was unexpected. Such generosity is rare, and is something I am not used to much anymore now that I am back in NYC.

Well, far be it from me to not give my customers what they want. So behold, the return of the donation button. If your wallet is still heavy after purchasing the game and you want to donate more of your hard earned cash to the cause (the cause being, of course, me), feel free to click on the button and throw it my way.

As a small incentive, I also will give free gifts to people who donate, as well as put them on my newly created “Donation hall of fame” list.

Thanks again, everyone. I’ve been sick and feeling really rotten, so this brightened up my day.

Over the recent months, I have started to do my work in Starbucks. It started one day because there was too much noise in my apartment, and it has slowly become my primary place of doing work. Every morning I pack up my laptop and lug it over to Starbucks, where I dutifully situated myself and started typing away.

I used to hate Starbucks and everything it stood for, but now I love it. I adore Starbucks. Especially the people who work there. If you want to go someplace and be left alone, there is no place better than a corporate chain. Why? Read on.

My typical morning would be to order one cup of coffee and then remain there all day. Four, five, sometimes up to eight hours at a time on a good day. Nobody would bother me. Nobody would say a word. I go out to lunch, I come back, I sit down, and keep working. It’s like I’m working in a real office, except they’ve got cooler music.

I’ve even taken this a step further. One day, I was severely short of cash. Since I’ve become medically addicted to coffee, I bought a cheap 75 cent cup from a street vendor to get my fix. I entered the Starbucks with trepidation, thinking I was going to be ejected from the premises at any moment. I sat down, slowly took the coffee cup out of the paper back, looked guiltily back and forth, and began drinking it.

Nobody bothered me. Nobody cared. Life was good.

In recent days, I’ve become braver. There’s this corner deli that offers these great breakfast specials: an egg sandwich and cup of coffee for two bucks. That alone is cheaper than a glass of water at Starbucks. So I purchased this special and brought the whole thing into Starbucks. I sat down and ate an entire frigging meal, complete with coffee that I bought somewhere else, in full view of all the elitist Starbucks baristas and staff, and nobody batted an eye.

Yes, I love Starbucks. It’s a relaxing place to work, they are all over the city, and most importantly the people who work there are so desensitized and bitter about their place in life that they don’t give a crap what you do.

Yay for corporate America!

The astute of you might have noticed that the site went down today for a few hours. For a moment I thought it might have been due to a huge influx of traffic that my wussy server couldn’t handle, but nope. As cool as that might have been, the reason was far more mundane.

My domain expired. My host, ipowerweb.com, had sent the notification to an email address I never use anymore, so when I didn’t respond they shut the doors on my site and locked it down tight. Fortunately, I managed to get through to them and set everything straight, so this little corner of the web is safe for another two years.

So, um, yeah. I’m sure this is totally fascinating. Yeesh, what a boring update. Sorry folks. Maybe you should play my game instead.