June 3rd, 2010 | 
Author: Been very busy on various fronts, but work on The Unconcerned is going slowly but surely. I’ve been cranking away on the sprite animation tool to be used for the game, and Dan and I have been finalizing the overall plot and level breakdown. Amanda has been working on the background art for the first few levels, so I wanted to show a little snippet of the very first one (because it’s a lot prettier than a page of my story notes). Enjoy!
I’ll be giving a talk at the Game Developer’s Conference on March 9th, on the prototyping and design process for The Unconcerned, dealing with how to approach making games that are both engaging and deal with serious topics.
Shortly thereafter, I’ll be at South by Southwest Interactive March 14-16th, the game-focused section of the huge music & film festival. The Unconcerned is a finalist in the ScreenBurn Game Design competition, so I’ll be giving a 10 minute talk about the game for the final judging process.
If you’re in San Francisco or Austin, and you’d like to chat about the game, let me know!
A Gallup poll recently showed that in the US, Iran is viewed 90% unfavorably.
Sure, it’s easy to blame general opinion on the media blasting concern over Iran’s nuclear program, and that this finding is of little actual effect. Meanwhile, economic sanctions against Iran have led to multiple airplane accidents.
It’s a complex, deeply historied, diverse country, yet this September 2009 Larry King interview with Ahmadinejad betrays King’s bare-bones understanding of the issues at play (I’m surprised he could find it on a map). That, sadly, is indicative of the best American mainstream news outlets can do with respect to journalism on Iran.
Jason Rezaian asks the same question, and calls for citizen democracy to change people’s impressions of a country where a significant percentage of the population disagrees with its government.
Sadly, news out of Iran from yesterday, the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, isn’t great. Jason Rezaian reports on Slate, concluding with the likelihood that the Green movement will be forced underground due to the administration’s crackdown. People were bussed into Tehran to protest for administration, opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi was attacked, and the city of Tehran was essentially locked down by police forces. All so Ahmadinejad could tout Iran’s advances in uranium enrichment for its nuclear program. Access to Gmail has been banned, and access to other social media is poor as well, but protesters continue to upload videos (PBS’ Frontline collects several here).
Despite their hampered ability to continue to protest, it’s obvious the unrest won’t be resolved via the government’s tactics. If history is any guide, from the Constitutional Revolution of the early 1900’s, the removal of Prime Minister Mossadeq in 1953, and the revolution of 1979, each period of turmoil had been years in the making. Without any ability to fight back armed Basij, arguably without a clear, charismatic enough, leader (who has to deal with the strong possibility their family would come under attack as well), the Green movement may be subdued, but the will of its members is obviously far from defeated.
I’ll be updating the progress of work on the game here, in the Development Blog category. Here’s a quick summary of all the stuff I’ve written on the process of working on the game so far:
- The original Kickstarter page for the game
- Kickstarting a Serious Game – part one of my Gamasutra blog series on how to use Kickstarter.
- Kickstarting a Serious Game Pt 2
- Kickstarting a Serious Game Pt 3 – I interview several other indie developers using Kickstarter or patron-based funding to get a wider perspective of how feasible it is for game development.
- Early Prototyping – short video of the very first set of prototypes for the game
- The Spatially Driven Story – via my personal blog, I take a critical look at several popular games and the problems of in-game tying locations to the story of the game.
- The Kickstarter Blog: Creator Q&A: Yancey Strickler, one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, asks me some questions about The Unconcerned.
- A Hardy Developer’s Journal: Indie game developer Igor Hardy interviews me about the game.
I hope to have more info on the game available after my whirlwind conference tour next month!
The South by Southwest festival has a game design competition, called ScreenBurn, which is in it’s second year. The game’s been picked as one of the ten semi-finalists. Four of those will get picked to present at SXSW (and then winner gets some additional press and interviews).