It only took a three-and-a-half-year wait for it to come out, but we finally have more footage of Limbo, Playdead’s dream-like black and white platformer releasing to Xbox Live Arcade some time this summer. The game follows a boy searching for his sister in Limbo, or “on the edge of hell.”

For those of you that missed the show, the Independent Games Festival Awards selected Limbo as the winner in two categories, Excellence in Visual Art and Technical Excellence. Playdead showed off this first area of the game on the IGF showfloor at the Game Developers Conference last week.

[Via IndieGames.com]

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

Composer Normand Corbeil previously joined game director David Cage and film composer Angelo Badalamenti on the production of Quantic Dream’s paranormal thriller Indigo Prophecy, titled Fahrenheit in Europe.

The soundtrack to Cage’s follow-up title, the interactive drama Heavy Rain, was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and has recently been made available on iTunes. In addition, a code to download the soundtrack album comes with the Collector’s Edition of the game. In this interview, Corbeil discusses his approach to adding nuance to the personalities of the story’s central characters through the use of the musical score.

The Heavy Rain Collector’s Edition released in Europe

The storyline of Heavy Rain involves several central protagonists who each have their own distinct musical themes. How did you decide which facets of their character or backstory would best be complemented by aspects of the game score?

Normand Corbeil, Heavy Rain composer: David [Cage] briefed me very precisely. Each character has a different way of seeing life, and that was more important than what they do in the game.

For Ethan, we focused on the piano. The theme is something very human, fragile but strong at the same time. For Madison there is a chamber orchestra with a smaller setup, both strong and emotional. Jayden is an investigator and researcher in a sad and crazy world, so his theme is dark. There it’s the opposite, a symphony orchestra. Shelby’s theme is drawing on French film noire from the 60’s: cop stories, a bit jazzy, brass and flutes.

I don’t want to say too much about it because I think we love to discover the themes by ourselves—people don’t want too many hints. Also, you never know if what you say will spoil the plot.

David Cage is himself a musician. Did this help make communicating easier in the process of writing the score?

I think the most important part of his being a musician is that he understands the aspects of a musician’s work. He never involves himself directly in the notes, in the way I do the orchestration. He briefs me about the characters and prefers that to talking directly about the music.

Did this allow you greater freedom to make your own artistic choices?

I think that’s it exactly. David really knows when it’s time for him to stop talking. That adds to the great pleasure of working with him.

How would you describe the process behind your previous collaboration for Quantic Dream?

That I did with Angelo [Badalamenti], who I was working with on several projects at the time. The three of us met in New York for an afternoon, and then I worked on it for a month and a half. I think they appreciated what I did, because they called me back for Heavy Rain.

Of course many people know Badalamenti’s music from David Lynch films. Are there particular movie scores of his that have stood out in your memory?

It’s difficult to say. Muholland Drive is a very, very interesting score, and “really Angelo.” I think he is among the greatest composers alive and it was a privilege to work with him and observe his process.

When you are working on game projects like Heavy Rain, do you think of it as “making game music?”

No, especially not at the beginning. I think that David came to Angelo and I because he does not want people thinking too narrowly about games, or musicians thinking too much about cues. He is concerned most with the emotion and the journey. Of course in the end because it is a game we are recording all the variations to the themes, but at the beginning at least it is the same as working in film.

Around how many cues ended up being recorded?

We recorded the cues, varying the mood and duration on the fly with the orchestra, for instance saying to the clarinet player to play the part of the harp. We did all these variations because we could not afford to come back later with the orchestra. At the end I delivered around 250 cues.

Even after that, when I returned to Montreal, I recorded a solo piece on piano. Each time you hear a solo piano in the game, it’s me playing. Now, the number might be closer to 300 cues. That gave Quantic Dream a lot of music to play with, and they said to me they used them all in the game.

How were these many cues labeled?

They changed all the titles for the soundtrack release. For me it was like “Ethan, Piano 1,” “Ethan, Piano 2”… We had only a short time, a couple months starting the fifth of June 2009 and ending at Abbey Road, for everything.

Have you had a number of experiences recording at Abbey Road Studios before?

I’ve done many things there. I’m used to working with the musicians, the sound engineer Jonathan Allen, and the assistants. I love when I’m at Abbey Road because I know that I don’t have to concern myself with anything other than music. Everything else is taken care of. They’re taking notes on all of your suggestions and if you need to hear the 62nd take, they can play it back to you in two seconds. It’s like Jonathan is co-producing with me, the way he knows the music.

This title has been years in the making, and yet the score had a tight production schedule. Did you ever feel pressured for time on Heavy Rain?

Of course. The reason why they waited until the end was because they were not sure exactly how they wanted the music. More music was required than for a movie, because there are so many beginnings, so many middles and ends. You have to take care that each piece of the puzzle fits together.

It was a bit crazy, especially because it was for a symphony orchestra and I am doing the composing and orchestration alone, but I’m used to working that way on films and miniseries and it was amazing to do. I did ask that if I am involved in a next game that I be given a bit more time.

There are any number of activities open to the player that are very uncommon to what we are used to seeing in games. Guiding Ethan through a day of playing with his son at the park is one example. In your observation do you feel this format of an interactive drama allows for the player to be engaged in the story and the identities of the characters on an experiential level?

I don’t want to speak for David, but yes. People want more than to watch TV passively. They want to be involved, and games if designed correctly can offer tools to be involved. Some people are resistant to Heavy Rain because they are used to having a jump button and a run button, but for a lot of people I think it was interesting. Being involved in all these choices, maybe some people will feel closer to the characters.

Are you currently looking into to the possibility of writing for interactive dramas in the future?

Of course. It would be a shame not to use the technology to go further as an art form. Compared with other games, this is closer to the suspense thrillers I’m used to doing, more about human beings. For me the interactivity is inspiring—to know that somebody can decide to go one way or another. I think it holds a lot of possibilities for storytelling and for a composer. Heavy Rain is just the start.

[To learn more about Normand Corbeil, visit the composer's official website. Images courtesy of Quantic Dream. Heavy Rain (Original Soundtrack from the Video Game) is available for purchase on iTunes.]

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (jeriaska)

Noted game designers Jenova Chen, Kim Swift, Heather Kelley, and Erin Robinson presented concepts around the topic of “Real-World Permadeath” during this year’s Game Design Challenge at Game Developers Conference, with Chen’s HeavenVille taking the audience-determined top prize — a bottle of Jameson whiskey.

The terms of the challenge demanded the designers present pitches for games that in some way involve the actual permanent death of a real human being. No further requirements were established.

Last Game & Testament, Erin Robinson and Heather Kelley

Erin Robinson of Wadjet Eye Games and Heather Kelley of Kokoromi, the winners of last year’s competition, collaborated on Last Game & Testament, a piece of software intended to replace a traditional written will, to be played by the family members of the game’s subject after his or her death.

Creating a will is “probably a pretty tedious process,” Kelley said, and “the reading of a will has the reputation of being pretty morose, but also stressful.”

Last Will & Testament attempts to solve both of those issues. The person creating the will uses the software to create unique barcode labels for all the items in his or her posession to be given away to friends and family members. That barcode is linked to the name of the item’s intended recipient, as well as any historical or family-related information the subject wishes to assign to it.

After the person’s death, the family members assemble in the deceased person’s home and load up Last Will & Testament on smart phones or other mobile devices. They then embark on, effectively, a scavenger hunt, finding tagged items and scanning them in.

Every time an item is found, each person must take a guess on which person the item will be bequeathed to, based on their knowledge of family history and the item’s significance. After each person votes, the true answer is revealed, and the software plays a video message recorded by the deceased, explaining the reason behind leaving the item to its new owner.

At the end of the hunt, each person is graded on his or her proportion of correct guesses. The person with the highest score is then rewarded with a particularly high-value item that the deceased family member was unable to bequeath to just one person — it is given to the participant who demonstrated the most knowledge of family history.

HeavenVille, Jenova Chen

Jenova Chen of Thatgamecompany won this year’s competition with his proposal for a Facebook game, HeavenVille.

“Most commercial games are about fiction. We use fiction to tell the truth,” Chen said before introducing his game. “But real-world permanent death is truth already.”

“I’m thinking about a platform for truth, and this [Facebook] is probably the best platform, so I just follow the trend,” he continued, showing a HeavenVille logo, which changed from black to pink when he noted, “After hearing the Zynga talk, pink is better.”

Effectively, HeavenVille is a stock market for dead people. The game ranks people based on metrics of notability like the number of Google search results for their names. For example, he demonstrated, George Washington has 16 million Google results; Albert Einstein has 12 million; and Michael Jackson has 102 million.

But “I don’t think MJ is more valuable than these two guys,” Chen countered, so the game factors in a multiplier based on the number of years since the person’s death. If the person still has a high number of Google results many years after death, that reflects continued notability and value to the modern world. Under those terms, Washington has a score of 4,464; Einstein 660; and Michael Jackson 102.

“That makes sense,” Chen said. “Without George Washington, Einstein wouldn’t have come to America to develop all these valuable things, and Michael Jackson probably wouldn’t be around.”

“But, in a way,” he added, “MJ is a quick-rising stock.”

“You need to look into potential investments,” he said. Someone like Barack Obama “is highly rising” and is already an expensive buy, ahead of his stock’s maturity date on death. But someone like “Britain’s Got Talent” star Susan Boyle would have been an incredible buy just a few years ago, before she shot to worldwide fame. “If you were to buy her before she were famous, you could have made a lot of profit” when she dies, Chen explained.

In addition to the direct goal of earning more virtual money through the game’s core mechanic, those who own stock in a particular dead person’s stock could further boost that person’s value, or use that person for various vanity purposes on Facebook. Presenting a hypothetical situation of the death of Eric Zimmerman, an organizer of the Challenge, Chen gave various examples.

Stock value could also be added by shareholders by tying in connections and achievements like LinkedIn friends and published books on Amazon. “Slowly this game is making people who actually care about Eric to build up a knowledge base, because everything you collect for Eric is going to add to your stock value,” Chen said.

More frivolous activities could include “pokeing fun at them or doing social stuff,” like having the permission to publish status messages like “Jenova Chen and Eric Zimmerman played Pac-Man,” or even selling stock: “Jenova Chen sold Eric Zimmerman to Tim Langdell for 1,300,000.”

Karma, Kim Swift

The last game was presented by Airtight Games’ Kim Swift, formerly of Valve, who famously withdrew from last year’s Game Design Challenge at the eleventh hour. (”We could start a rumor that Kim switched jobs so she could present at this year’s Game Design Challenge,” Zimmerman joked.)

Swift’s Karma is intended as a tool to help people diagnosed with terminal illnesses to come to terms with their own impending death, and to help them use their final moments in ways that bring joy to friends, family, and strangers.

“Most likely I’m going to die one of two ways: from a heart attack, or some form of cancer, based on my family history,” Swift said. “If I learned I had terminal cancer with two months to live, what would I think? ‘Shit.’ That about sums it up. But what about after that? If you have a grim prognosis, you could get prescribed this game, and it would take you through the stages of death in advance, so you could enjoy what time you have left in life.”

The game would have the player control a character who has been diagnosed with two months left to live, and the game’s goal is to deal with the upcoming death in the best way possible, “both inside the game and outside in your own life as well.”

“If you want to sulk and be depressed, it’s perfectly normal; you’re welcome to do that. But what I want to encourage poeple to do is to help people,” Swift said.

The game takes place over a series of rounds, each of which represents one in-game day, beginning in the character’s office environment. During that initial stage of the game, the player can navigate the office and perform helpful tasks for various people — fixing a coworker’s computer, bringing in coffee and donuts, and so on. Each action consumes energy from the player’s energy meter, but rewards the player with karma points.

Fourteen days later, the player’s energy bar shrinks as they approach death, and he or she progresses to the next environment: the character’s apartment complex. Every further 14 days, the player progresses to a new location, starting in the character’s office environment, then moving to the character’s apartment complex, then to a hospital.

Tasks at home could include talking to neighbors over a cup of tea, or helping a neighbor find her cat, and each task is completed by playing a unique mini-game. Tasks in the hospital could include visiting sick children, or helping a fellow patient in a wheelchair. Throughout, the game would assign real-world tasks that would attempt to enrich the player’s life as well as those of the people surrounding him or her.

As the game continues, the player character’s mobility decreases further and further, and their energy bar continues to shrink until the player character is effectively immobile in a hospital bed.

At that point, the player is visisted by friends attempting to provide comfort. You can help those friends come to terms with their impending tragedy, Swift explained, “or you can tell them to get lost and you just want to be alone.”

The final mini-game is to smile — achieved by tracing out smile with analog sticks. “it’s difficult to do,” Swift explained, “because you don’t have a lot of energy left, but it’s your last act as a human being on this planet.”

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless)

Right-o, let’s get straight to business, covering all the game mags of the past two weeks. Apologies in advance if I’m a bit curt for this one — I’m dealing with a nasty cold at the moment, and my chief motivation right now is “get this done and cocoon myself in bed as soon as possible.”

Game Informer April 2010

Cover: Portal 2 (2 covers)

Portal 2 info is, of course, all over the Internet at this point. The original GI article is nice and all — really, it’s one of those games where the visuals tell the whole story in the early-preview-coverage stage. I’m not sure that the text answers the one question that, in my mind anyway, should’ve been asked first: How will Valve take a game based on a gimmick that was just engaging enough to build a 5-hour game around and make it the crux of another, “significantly longer” title?

Otherwise, it’s a fairly typical issue for a fairly dead chunk of the year. To make up for the relative lack of games to review, this issue’s Connect front section extends through exactly half of the 100-page magazine, although nothing in it grabbed me too violently this month.

GamePro April 2010

Cover: George Washington staring at you

I’m not wholly sure that a mugshot of one of our bold nation’s founding fathers is Newsstand Gold for a video game magazine, but the article inside about Civilization V is pretty fantastic. Showing how the main developers got on to the project, it goes over what’s new with the game and goes beyond laundry-listing the features and asks the devs some remarkably in-depth design questions. It’s like a case history in Game Design 101 — which dovetails nicely with the rest of the mag, which has a ton of indie scene/game-school coverage.

It may be time to stop saying that articles like this get printed despite being GamePro, and start saying that it happens because it’s GamePro.

The “history of NeoGAF” article is also great, despite the fact that my opinion of the forum is closer to Denis Dyack’s than most. (I am admittedly bitter when it comes to Internet communities. Keep in mind that I had to deal with the anime community, even grabbier and more ungrateful than their gamer counterparts, for three years straight. It was a full-time job in itself.)

Official Xbox Magazine April 2010

Cover: Fallout dude staring at you

Fallout: New Vegas is the big story across three Future mags this month, although OXM’s Halo: Reach feature is a bit more prominent once you go between the covers, so to speak. OXM also gives full feature treatment to their Final Fantasy XIII review, which is more than P:TOM did — funny, since PTOM gave it a perfect score (five stars) and OXM didn’t (9.0).

PC Gamer April 2010

Cover: Fallout dude staring down at you derisively

If I had to choose, I’d say that PC Gamer’s New Vegas coverage is a bit better. Both features are the same style, that Future house look with tons of trivia-laden sidebars and all that, but PCG’s is a bit more engaging, somehow. Maybe it’s their choice of screenshots that’s subliminally biasing my opinion.

Best part of this issue: The “MMO tour” piece, which is written in a pretty non-critical tone but still delivers a neat progress report-type look into a selection of online games.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine April 2010

Cover: Kratos staring at you

It’s an exclusive review of GOWIII this issue, one that extends over 10 pages and uses only 5 screenshots — each splashed out across an entire spread, the review text woven around the imagery. It’s a cool, cool effect; one of the most memorable review article designs I’ve seen in game-mag-dom.

Fallout: New Vegas has a full-on feature in this mag, too, but GOWIII understandably takes precedence on the cover.

Retro Gamer Issue 74

Cover: Ghosts ‘n Goblins

Stuart Campbell, who seems to spend his off-days trolling classic-console forums when he isn’t busy writing for RG, is back with a big look at all the GnG games, including a WonderSwan release that I wasn’t aware of before.

There’s also a lovely piece on game controllers, including a sidebar featuring an ergonomics expert calling the Atari 2600 joystick “truly appalling.”

Beckett Massive Online Gamer May/June 2010

Cover: Spock staring at you

From an interview with the “FFXI Community Team” (exactly who’s being interviewed is never identified) to an in-depth feature about what attending a wedding in World of Warcraft is like, this month’s issue of MOG makes me wonder if people buy this only for the in-game item codes or what. It’s admittedly not all bad, though — a feature on the Chinese online game industry is focused on user share and financials over boring game descriptions, and it makes for much better reading as a result.

Game Developer March 2010

Cover: Uncharted 2

This is the GDC issue — you can tell because the mag’s suddenly over 100 pages long — and the cover this time around foreshadows Uncharted 2’s major wins at the Game Developers Choice Awards a few days back. The postmortem is nice, but even better is the return of “Coding Tricks,” small anecdotes about hacks and kludges game devs have devised to get their stuff to work. I’m just technically oriented to understand it all, and some of it’s downright hilarious.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Kevin Gifford)

This week on ‘Best Of Indie Games’, we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this edition include a turn-based aerial dogfight game, a puzzle platformer by Karoshi creator Jesse Venbrux, an interactive fiction game about the Russian Roulette, a visual novel, and a game about gardening that doesn’t feature zombies in it.

Here’s the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: ‘Steambirds‘ (Andy Moore and Dan Cook, browser)
“Steambirds is a turn-based aerial dogfight game that is viewed from a top-down perspective, where players are given command of a squadron of planes with their own unique abilities to deploy. Fans of strategy games like the Advance Wars series would feel right at home here, with the only differences being that combat takes place in the skies and rigid tile-based movement has been done away with.”

Game Pick: ‘Redder‘ (dessgeega, browser)
“In Redder you play as an astronaut forced to make an emergency landing on an alien planet after finding out that she has run out of crystals to power her ship. This 2D platformer features a world map, regular checkpoint locations, and an unlimited number of retries to assist players who are unaccustomed to difficult challenges.”

Game Pick: ‘Maru‘ (Jesse Venbrux, freeware)
“Maru is a simple platformer that plays rather similarly to Jesse’s other creation called Frozzd, although the tone in both games are practically on different ends of a spectrum. The adventure basically involves leaping from one planet to another to collect the spirits or souls of other creatures that look just like the protagonist, then figuring out how to get to the portal that will transport you to the next area and continue with your mission.”

Game Pick: ‘Six-Chamber Champion‘ (C.E.J. Pacian, freeware)
“Six-Chamber Champion is a single-room IF game created by C.E.J. Pacian in under two hours for a 371-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart event held last weekend. This particular adventure should be tried out without reading anything about it at all, since every screenshot and mention of it only serves to spoil the best bits. Suffice to say that the story involves a gun and trying to avoid killing yourself.”

Game Pick: ‘Air Pressure‘ (Bento Smile, freeware)
“Bento Smile’s Air Pressure is a visual novel with original graphics and music, featuring quite a number of branching story paths but only three endings to discover. The entire adventure takes about ten minutes to play through, and Terry Cavanagh (developer of VVVVVV) even liked it enough to recommend the game to everyone.”

Game Pick: ‘Extreme Gardening‘ (Jan Willem Nijman, freeware)
“Extreme Gardening is a short puzzle game about trimming hedges. On each of the fifteen levels, players are shown how the hedge should look, then given 10 seconds to cut it into shape using the mouse to click and drag the hedge away.”

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (timw)

My energy is starting to flag; my feet are complaining and my voice is growing hoarse. I have ingested so much about video games in the past few days that I feel overfull and ready to burst, wishing incoherently that I want to read a book or play the piano or just do something, anything, but think about video games.

It is not to be, though: today the expo floor opens, even more game developers fly in to San Francisco, and the giant inexorable train of video games barrels along towards its fabulous secret destiny.

I move towards the Unity booth and instantly collide with yet more former co-workers. We reference hellish older times before catching up– one is a gameplay programmer now– many steps up from the PS2 memory card save/load state issues with which he was saddled last I worked with him– and another is the principal in an iPhone game startup. He shows us an early build of his first game before excusing himself on account of his hangover.

At the edge of the north hall floor I speak to a man from TechExcel about his production management software products (DevSpec and DevPlan and DevTrack) with their technical requirements and task trackers and bug lists.

I mention that a lot of game developers take umbrage at this kind of software– not personally, but at the attitude this sort of product often comes with– and that bringing it in can be a political battle because the databases and workflows and boxy user interfaces smack of top-down institutional sclerosis. “I don’t think we’re doing our job right if we’re trying to make it sexy,” he says. “Part of the point is to not be sexy.”

Close by, the exposition floor’s career pavilion is mobbed by recent and soon to be graduates, who are queueing up to talk to representatives of well-known companies like Insomniac or Blizzard, while the booths of less well known studios, right next door, are awkwardly barren. It is again impressed upon me what a buyer’s market it is and I start to worry that video game degrees will be the next film school degrees, acquired in search of a dream, deferred somehow into a retail job at Starbucks or Barnes and Noble.

Konami has a desk there too, and in the interest of continuing the theme of what I’d written yesterday about the Japanese game industry I examine their open positions in Tokyo. A notice is included that fluent Japanese is required. I ask the person behind the desk, How many applicants do you get? “A lot. Many hundreds,” she says. And how many of those can actually speak Japanese fluently? She laughs. “Pretty much none of them.”

So is it worth it to fly out to GDC in search of the one person in all of the industry who can do the job, speak Japanese, and is willing to accept the pay and position that Konami is offering? Yes, she says– it’s important to get the ideas of foreigners in order to make games that appeal internationally, before confiding that many of the people most suitable for these roles are Japanese who have gone to college in the US and who are looking to return home.

In the early evening I meet up with Brenton Woodrow, Chris McCarthy and Kyle Murphy, the other developers of Planck, the game I’m working on, and we converse for almost four hours. We talk about our plans and the future, throwing ideas at each other, our enthusiasm infectious and self-affirming.

My tiredness fades, my voice recovers, and I am yelling over the music– yelling about how our game is going to be awesome, yelling about the nuances of FPS mission design, yelling stories about dodgy code. Much like game playing, there is something about game development that naturally begs for discussion; there is a tremendous hunger for knowledge, feedback, and argument.

The night continues in another stuffy hotel bar, where I meet some television producers and watch a girl smearing her lipstick on a hapless game school student’s face. The late, late evening takes place in a hotel suite and is difficult to remember. I collapse on a couch and wake up on the floor.

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Matthew Wasteland)

My energy is starting to flag; my feet are complaining and my voice is growing hoarse. I have ingested so much about video games in the past few days that I feel overfull and ready to burst, wishing incoherently that I want to read a book or play the piano or just do something, anything, but think about video games.

It is not to be, though: today the expo floor opens, even more game developers fly in to San Francisco, and the giant inexorable train of video games barrels along towards its fabulous secret destiny.

I move towards the Unity booth and instantly collide with yet more former co-workers. We reference hellish older times before catching up– one is a gameplay programmer now– many steps up from the PS2 memory card save/load state issues with which he was saddled last I worked with him– and another is the principal in an iPhone game startup. He shows us an early build of his first game before excusing himself on account of his hangover.

At the edge of the north hall floor I speak to a man from TechExcel about his production management software products (DevSpec and DevPlan and DevTrack) with their technical requirements and task trackers and bug lists.

I mention that a lot of game developers take umbrage at this kind of software– not personally, but at the attitude this sort of product often comes with– and that bringing it in can be a political battle because the databases and workflows and boxy user interfaces smack of top-down institutional sclerosis. “I don’t think we’re doing our job right if we’re trying to make it sexy,” he says. “Part of the point is to not be sexy.”

Close by, the exposition floor’s career pavilion is mobbed by recent and soon to be graduates, who are queueing up to talk to representatives of well-known companies like Insomniac or Blizzard, while the booths of less well known studios, right next door, are awkwardly barren. It is again impressed upon me what a buyer’s market it is and I start to worry that video game degrees will be the next film school degrees, acquired in search of a dream, deferred somehow into a retail job at Starbucks or Barnes and Noble.

Konami has a desk there too, and in the interest of continuing the theme of what I’d written yesterday about the Japanese game industry I examine their open positions in Tokyo. A notice is included that fluent Japanese is required. I ask the person behind the desk, How many applicants do you get? “A lot. Many hundreds,” she says. And how many of those can actually speak Japanese fluently? She laughs. “Pretty much none of them.”

So is it worth it to fly out to GDC in search of the one person in all of the industry who can do the job, speak Japanese, and is willing to accept the pay and position that Konami is offering? Yes, she says– it’s important to get the ideas of foreigners in order to make games that appeal internationally, before confiding that many of the people most suitable for these roles are Japanese who have gone to college in the US and who are looking to return home.

In the early evening I meet up with Brenton Woodrow, Chris McCarthy and Kyle Murphy, the other developers of Planck, the game I’m working on, and we converse for almost four hours. We talk about our plans and the future, throwing ideas at each other, our enthusiasm infectious and self-affirming.

My tiredness fades, my voice recovers, and I am yelling over the music– yelling about how our game is going to be awesome, yelling about the nuances of FPS mission design, yelling stories about dodgy code. Much like game playing, there is something about game development that naturally begs for discussion; there is a tremendous hunger for knowledge, feedback, and argument.

The night continues in another stuffy hotel bar, where I meet some television producers and watch a girl smearing her lipstick on a hapless game school student’s face. The late, late evening takes place in a hotel suite and is difficult to remember. I collapse on a couch and wake up on the floor.

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Matthew Wasteland)

Instructables user ProfMuggs has been playing The Beatles: Rock Band with his two-year-old daughter, but he noticed that she was having trouble reaching the buttons on the guitar controller’s long neck. Rather than kick her out of his band until her arms grew long enough to play in a few years, he modified the controller for his little girl.

He’s also posted instructions for other Guitar Hero/Rock Band-playing parents who want to get their kids involved. They seem simple enough — you just needa Torx driver, a Phillips-head screwdriver, a hacksaw, epoxy, and a few mending plates — and he’s even uploaded photos for each step. You can read the full guide at Instructables.

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

One last iPhone game piece for the day! With a year passed since he released revered iPhone puzzler Eliss, developer Steph Thirion has debuted his next project for the system, Faraway, a one-button arcade game that has players swinging a comet around stars, flying across space, and forming constellations in star clusters.

Though it’s a simple concept, challenging players to form as many constellations as possible to pump up their score before time runs out, the game makes sure the stages never feel stale by randomly generating where the stars are.

Thirion is releasing the game under his new company Little–Eyes. He didn’t give any details on pricing or when to expect Faraway’s release, but he did provide a demonstration for the game alongside five other one-button Gamma IV titles at GDC.

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

The first one, posted on Wednesday, simply said: ‘Non semper ea sunt quae videntur’. Those looking around on the Internet will have noticed a WikiQuote page sourcing the quote to ‘Phaedrus’. Apparently, he was “a Roman fabulist, by birth a Macedonian and lived in the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius and Claudius.”

The English translation of that Latin quote is ‘Things are not always what they seem’, and if you’ve been following other Twitter discussion of Game Developers Conference, you’ll know that writer/designer Ian Bogost recently Tweeted: “Does anyone know, what is this GDC talk with no description: “Metaphysics of Games” by “Phaedrus”? Lurid.”

And indeed, a new Official GDC Tweet directs interested parties to a previously programmed talk scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday at 3pm, in Room 134 of North Hall at the Moscone - the last talk slot of the entire event.

It’s called ‘Metaphysics of Game Design’, it’s by ‘Phaedrus’, and that’s all the info we’ve got. There’s some other Twitter rumblings about whether the Roman fabulist is back from 2000 years of exile. Or whether it might be something or someone else entirely. Guess there’s only one way to find out…

Original post editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless)