July 2013 – Page 2

My biggest regret in the world would be to not have been doing things with women more. The fact that men do very few things with 50% of the population is kind of a big social failure. It’s weird to me that it doesn’t strike people more. 50% like in half of us all.

I never had any problem with hanging out with women and especially women who were hanging out with dudes. The courage they were showing immediately built trust. When people come to you peacefully, you tend to appreciate that.

But of course, there’s love. And sex. And dudes who can’t behave correctly. That really fucks it all up.

I regret that I haven’t been skateboarding with women, playing funk music with women, sound designing with women or bike with women more. I did, on occasion. With half the planet living around me, that’s kind of weird for cool stuff to do.

I don’t know. I just feel like I missed out, that it would have absolutely transformed my life if half my friend doing what I do had been women. For the best.

I followed Fez development from the very start. I finally get to play it like I wanted, paying 95% to the developer and getting my Windows version. It starts flawlessly, I’m smiling jumping on platforms, discovering treasures with my arcade stick.

And then I get stuck in a door, impossible to escape. The file auto-saves constantly so I’m fucked. I can’t get out. I also can’t fucking stop thinking how terrible this is. It’s a bug, it happens. There’s a design flaw too. But five years of development and a console release should have solved that, right? I guess not.

Between releasing games with major bugs and making sequels, “indie” developers are now as good as “AAA” developers, amirite. I feel bad for Renaud, though.

There’s also the Double Fine Kickstarter mayhem. Summary: they ask for 400K, receive 3.3 million, run out of money and the game would be ready by 2015 but half of it would be ready in 6 months.

It’s all right, they’ll get the extra money needed on their own but it is scary: receiving almost ten times more money for a project led by a veteran and it still is not enough? Who can get away with that, what business runs like that?

But in the end it demonstrates what people still don’t get because most are still in a “it looks gorgeous, I’m buying” mode: it’s in-sa-ne-ly hard to make good games, regardless of time and budget. Just thinking about Fez’s collision and detection system with platforms in a fake/real 3D world my nose starts to bleed, man. The gorgeous part of a game explodes development needs at a speed that you wouldn’t imagine.

I hope these stories will push people to understand the basic economics and R&D, very high risk nature of making games.