Ha the game industry Twitter feuds, opinions, DRAMA.
Random thoughts:
– I constantly wish that I and everybody else would be capable of what designer-programmers like Chris Hecker or Jon Blow can do. I mean, it would be much easier and faster to make games when you can code your ideas and share them with people capable of doing the same. It’s just super hard and I’m kind of jealous of their skill set and I think that’s why they’re considered being part of another class of people, which is kind of true. In a good way for me. I aim for this. I want that. teh skillz.
– Greenlight? I don’t know we’ll see how it goes, meanwhile sell your game on the internet, jeez. Take a side on this walled garden bullshit, keep your independence because soon you might not have any choice at all. It’s crazy, we waited for digital distribution to escape Walmart’s dictatorship but we rush to online Walmarts. I guess we didn’t get it.
– Race is so absent from any debate about games and game culture, it’s amazing in a world with a black president, 9/11 stuff and religious wars. No subtlety, nothing. The game culture is getting as isolated as comics are, which is something we tried to avoid but I guess same stalled crowd, same effect. Meanwhile EA and Activision are probably selling about half of their FIFA/MADDEN/CoD to “minorities”. Yay.
– I can’t listen to chiptune in games anymore. Chiptune is only a rendering technique and we kind of should stop using all the freaking time. It’s so fueled by nostalgia. It’s so dorky. I don’t want more acid in my ears, that’s why the 16bit era also was so awesome, at least for me. And really today sometimes it just feels plain wrong like with Spelunky on XBLA, super smooth visuals+acid rendered music= awkward. Compositions are great and fit the game, the 8bit rendering doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter, it’s a hardcore gamer game and they’re listening to chiptunes all the time. Same with Super Hexagon. But if the creative process is “hey I was making this game and listening to this so hey, I’m just going to use this music I was listening to”, I think it’s pretty lame. Music can broaden your audience or a big audio/visual opposition can create something amazing (Crystal Blue Persuasion used in Breaking Bad when they’re cooking meth, the famous Gear of War trailer, Samuraï Champloo’s beats, the Dead Island trailer etc) but once again I guess it doesn’t matter when the game is already targeted to hardcore people with pre-made tastes. Let’s just not try anything on this side of game development, let’s just be super classic and unanimously praise this perfect predictability. Well no I don’t want to, we can do better.