Some cool news:
I will be doing a presentation of my Excit Post-Mortem at the Casual Connect Europe conference in Hamburg at the 12. February. If you are going to attend, feel free to visit me!
The funding for the institute I helped establishing has been confirmed. The Cologne Game Lab will happen. Our first task is to offer some amazing Workshops for the upcoming GamesCom. Later, we will also offer a Masters Course in Game Design and Research. Keep an eye out, it will be awesome! Website coming up very soon…
In other news, I’m did some major work on Illucinated. I’ve finally got the concept and the story in a row. The feedback from my… em… casual gamer representative wasn’t as encouraging as I hoped but I decided to push forward anyway. If there is one thing I’ve learned from Fruchtplan, it is that sometimes you have to dare to do something that’s not immediately understandable. It’s more important that I can live with it and that it represents my beliefs and values. The new always appears strange at first. I’m currently setting up everything with incredibly crude placeholders. The 4 levels are in place along with the major “puzzles”. Next, I will be working on “sub-quests” and bonus items. Still to do: writing the script, recoding the voices, doing the animation and setting up everything so it can be played over the Internet. But I feel like I’m over the hump now. Design is the hardest part.
And more personal:
- Finished LEGO Star Wars with all achievements. Spent 50 hours on it. Looking back, I think went too far. Will write a review on that.
- I finished Gears of War on casual and continuing on hardcore. The game is much better on cooperative mode, even with strangers.
- Finally finished Area 5 on REZ. I like the bonus features. Will play it some more – it seems like a game that one should know better.
- Got Eternal Sonata (only 10€ in Germany) – should have been called “Eternal Cutscenes”. The Graphics are so bright and sweet, I don’t know if I’m supposed to drool or puke. Also, I don’t like how they handled the subject of the iconic Polish national hero that is Frédéric Chopin. The game is way to ignorant to Polish culture. On a positive note, the combat system is nice. Very action-oriented with a tactic twist and some lucid, polished information design. Made my JRPG-brain-cells wake up from a long period of starvation.
