Managenta

The adventure game Adam’s Venture has hit the stores, a game that used to be part of the project I worked on during my intership (see Nomos). While my contribution to this title has been very, very, very small, technically it is the first boxed release with my name in the credits! (Well, actually not, as the former Coded Illusions employees are not individually named)

Still, I’m a Little Big Proud!

Last week, the Dutch Games Association organised the DGA day, and Hollandia was invited! Newer version of our game, same Very Big Screen. And some coverage again!

During the Festival of Games I also attended the Game Design Workshop for students by Jeremy Bernstein and Karel Millenaar. The focus lay on mechanic-driven rapid paper prototyping. First some really interesting lectures were given about breaking games down into numerical rules. Then we got our 2-day assignment: create a ‘race’ game without any automobiles. On the table next to Jeremy you can see the protoype material: pen, paper, dice, stickies, playing cards and beads!

We quickly settled on the Cold War era, it had quite some interesting races, like the arms race and the space race. The bluffing element really intrigued us; the Soviets were able to scare the Americans shitless one time with a parade of fake wooden rockets. We used that to create our core mechanic. Players needed to bet on elements (for example “space rockets” or “nuclear scientists”) with points. For that they were dealt a number of playing cards, where the reds (diamonds and hearts) represented value while the black cards (clubs and spades) were actually worthless. Placing a pile of cards face-down was the bluffing element. Your adversary’s 5 cards for the rocket could possibly be 5 points (5 reds) or just 1 point (1 red and 4 blacks). By playing your black cards right you could maximize your returns from your red cards.In the picture below, I’ve placed 2 cards over at the green bead. (somewhere in the lower right corner)

It was loads of fun and very informative! Shame I’m not a student anymore next year!

Part of the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival was the Screen/Play symposium, which was all about what film and games could learn from each other. The panel consisted of participants of both disciplines. There were some heated discussions, especially about the different needs between mechanic-driven and narrative-driven games.

Part of the panel were the persons behind Tale of Tales, Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn. Seeing how wildly influentual they are on the HKU (many students are deeply inspired by their works) and everywhere else, I just had to ask their autograph!

Last wednesday, Hollandia had a stand at the NLGD Festival of Games, with a Very Big Screen!

We even got some radio coverage! Click here to listen to it (Dutch).

The grand opening of my new portfolio site!