An update, and New Year’s resolutions ideas for the uncreative

You may have noticed the severe lack of updates on the blog lately. Blame my 6+ day work week involving multiple projects, I suppose. While my Kickstarter project may have tanked, I am quite happy to keep working on the game under my own devices – I especially appreciate the support from everyone who backed the project. I may not get your pledges, but knowing people are interested in this kind of game is actually more motivating than money in the bank.

Here’s my three part series on Gamasura’s Blogs about my process using Kickstarter:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3 (where I also interview indie game makers Daniel Benmergui, Deirdra Kiai, and Vince Twelve)

You can check me out this March at the Serious Games Summit at GDC talking more about the prototyping process for the game and my attempt to combine engaging gameplay with serious themes. I’ll also be helping out at the AI Summit, giving a rant and taking part in a panel on middleware use.

And now, for those of you looking for New’s Year’s resolution ideas, here are a few:

• The only time I will mention Citizen Kane is in critical analysis of the work of Orson Welles.
• I will not tell anyone what kind of games they should make, or what kind of games are the future. Because you will inevitably be wrong, so the only thing you really are saying is “I have an ego the size of the landfill they put all those Ataris in”.
• I will play an interesting, thoughtful indie game and tell as many people as I can about it.
• If you are a games journalist: I will not try to impress people with how smart I am. This includes inserting <laughs> when an interviewee laughs out of pity at your poor joke, attempting to use terminology from film or game development without actually knowing what it means, and doing pieces on how games could be meaningful instead of actually talking to developers that already do so.
• If you want to, or do, design games: I will not use chess as a primary game design example (because you’re kind of full of yourself  if you think you can make chess, a product of a longer time period than you will be alive).
• If you are a game developer: I will attempt to put well written characters that are not buff white straight men in my games.

And for you game of the year list making types, I think my offical game of the year is Every Day the Same Dream. Maybe I’ll even write about it – probably not though. The blog will most likely be on hiatus till March given all the work I have.

So have a good holiday and see you on the other side of 2010. It will hopefully be a good year for games – let a thousand flowers bloom!