Troy Gilbert

Building Gaming’s Future

This morning I read Edge’s article on building gaming’s future. It’s a decent summary of the growing audience/market for consumer game making. Of course, we’ve been talking about this at Mockingbird for a few years now, but Edge really hits it home with all of their examples that it’s truly becoming a mainstream activity (for gamers).

Needless to say, I’m bummed that we didn’t even warrant a mention, even though we were one of the first in the present push to get out there and do this. I’m cool with that because I know all of the other folks mentioned in the article (XNA, Whirled, LittleBigPlanet, Playcrafter) know who we are. ;-)

Uncategorized — No comments
16
Jan 09

New Industry Broadcast

Ryan has recorded another pair of my blog posts over at Industry Broadcast. I originally wrote the articles over two years ago. Very strange to hear someone reading them. While I remember writing them, they don’t seem like my writing when hearing someone else read them (they sound better!).

Mockingbird — 2 comments
09
Jan 09

Mattel Gets Into the User-Generated Games Market

Mattel gets into the user-generated game business, according to this CES press release:

Virtual Worlds News: Mattel Developing Digital Network; Adding Game Creation to Funkeys.

I can say that we’re apart of the strategy mentioned in this press release, and that I don’t consider Mattel a competitor. :-)

Game Design — No comments
22
Dec 08

Deconstructing Adventure Games

Great article on the interface of Adventure Games, the components that go into them, and their evolution over time [via Kottke]:

Strange Horizons Articles: Searching Under the Rug: Interfaces, Puzzles, and the Evolution of Adventure Games, by Mark Newheiser.

Uncategorized — No comments
17
Dec 08

Industry Broadcast my blog posts

If you’re interested in hearing someone read aloud my blog posts, check out IndustryBroadcast.com.

Mockingbird — 4 comments
10
Dec 08

Mockingbird on Kongregate

We’ve posted our first build of Mockingbird on Kongregate. It’s a platformer kit… start runnin’ and jumpin’!

Over the next week, we’re going to rework this version of Mockingbird and re-integrate it into our site. New things on the way…

Game Design / Web Dev — 4 comments
01
Nov 08

Cute.

SIDEROLLER.

Indie Game Dev — No comments
28
Oct 08

NPR story about “indie” game developers

Of course, I don’t think these are as *indie* as games could/should be, but compared to EA or Activision, I guess they’re indie enough: Indie Video Game Developers Have Room To Play.

Game Design / Mockingbird / Programming — No comments
24
Oct 08

Minimize Code, Maximize Data

The Database Programmer: Minimize Code, Maximize Data: an excellent description of something I’ve learned as I’ve worked with game development tools over the last 10 years (warning: quickly becomes SQL-focused). It always distinguishes game makers who come from an art/design background and game makers who come from an engineering/scripting background.

Non-programmers only have data to work with so they solve their design problems by pushing different/more data into a fixed toolset. Programmers solve design problems by writing software. Unfortunately, the way software ecosystems work, the data-side of the equation is less error-prone and is the fastest to iterate on.

One thing we’ve tried to do with Mockingbird is build a game development toolset for non-programmers. Not folks who don’t program (yet), but non-programmers — folks who won’t ever be (by choice) programmers. HTML does the same thing (which Mockingbird is closely modeled after). That’s one of the big reasons “it works.”

Movies / Web Dev — No comments
23
Oct 08

Text-to-Movie

Text-to-Movie by xtranormal. Very cool. Reading the “about us” page sounds familiar. They’re clearly wanting to do the same thing with movies that we’re doing with games.

Nice metaphor they’ve taken advantage of is the notion of a “script” (i.e. typed dialogue and stage direction) as a fundamental component of movies. People get that, they can wrap their heads around it. I think we’re close to finding the same thing with games, but the metaphor is not quite as concrete yet.

Troy GilbertGamedev 2.0