Not much different, really. I mean, yeah, the blog’s published to a closed audience, which is nice, because that way I don’t have to watch out for the details quite as much, but it’s not like there was a whole host of super seekrit stuff I was holding back anyway. If there was, I wouldn’t have had to have closed the blog in the first place.
For the record, the reason for this is that in the “Blade Runner & Melancholy” post, I mentioned “arbitrary limitations set by someone who’s bascially incompetent…” and of course, the incompetent person in question happened to find my blog online, and sent me an e-mail. Suffice it to say, going back to work on the 7th ain’t gonna be a grand ol’ ball of fun. But it’s my fault entirely, and much as I’d like to be mad at someone or something, the only thing I can be mad at is me.
So, that’s fine. A pain, but what can you do?
In a sort of tangential-ish thing, though, while walking the dog, I was thinking of what I would do if the situation at my current job really became untenable, and the sad problem is that there aren’t that many really great places to work in the game industry, and most of them aren’t in the Bay Area. The sole real exception being Maxis in Emeryville. But even then, I don’t think I’d want to work on Spore ad nauseum, which is what I’m sure they’re going to be relegated to for the next few years.
The thought that I had (and this is one of the benefits of a non-public blog) is that I think it’d be really interesting to write a text-adventure game for the xbox 360. Using a system like Mass Effect/Brooktown’s conversation system, creating a game with essentially minimal visuals. The only real visuals I’d had in mind was some potential Flash-esque text animation, like this sort of thing:
I mean, obviously, text like this would make a game without voiceover really… hard to read. But something along these lines, where the text is delivered in an animated way – I’ve heard that Nightwatch has similar subtitles.
I’ve really enjoyed NaNoWriMo the last couple years (I didn’t do it this year, though). It’s been a really creatively fulfilling process, I write really goddamn fast, and frankly, one of the things that really interests me about games are the interactive stories, so this is a way to hone in on that without the extra baggage of graphics or animation, both of which are huge time/resource sinks.
Anyway. Just a thought, but XNA would allow stuff like this to happen, even possibly co-op over Live, which would be incredibly strange. So, that would probably be a fun side project over the next year or so…
I don’t know much about the XBox Arcade stuff, but I think I understand that it’s a pretty open publication system, so just about anyone can put a game up there to sell?
That would be a really neat way to flex your game designing muscles outside of the work environment. 🙂
Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) is very tightly controlled by Microsoft. If you want to publish to XBLA, your content goes through a pretty strict approval process.
However, they have something called “XNA” that’s basically a set of tools that allow you to program for the 360 without all that licensing jazz. The catch is that you can only publish to the XNA Content Creator’s Club, which costs $100/year for a membership, and the only people who can see/use your games are other people who have signed up for the XNACC.
So, it’s not quite as easy as all that. But that said, short of publishing, we can build something like this. Honestly, in its most basic form, it seems like a pretty simple endeavor.
It’ll be mostly in designing the content to work well, and coming up with a good story. But Ei-Nyung’s a fantastic writer, I can generate a shit-ton of content, and between us and various other interested parties, I don’t doubt we could come up with something cool.