Tag Archives: Macguffin Games

Not quite dead yet…

Posted on by

… but not quite living in the same way.

In essence, Macguffin as it was previously – a four-person full time team of developers – is no more.  But after looking at ways to wind things down, and taking some time to evaluate what I want to do with my spare time once I have a job, I’ve decided to keep Macguffin around for my future gaming projects.

One of the big things I’ve learned in doing the past three or so years of game development is that I really do love creating games, doing the coding and game design.  Since shutting things down and starting to look for a job, I’ve begun coding and designing again on my own – and I’ve been having a blast.  Regardless of where I land I fully plan to keep working on games and blogging about it.  Who knows, perhaps I’ll even have something for the market someday.

Right now I do not have plans to return directly to All Heroes Die.  I say this for Therlun’s benefit (I know you’re out there!).  The two big problems with AHD are the limitations of BlitzMax, and the sheer scope of the endeavor.  Neither of those gets solved by me working on it nights.  The most likely path forward is that at some point I do a game inspired by chunks of AHD, or redo the game with a slimmed down design in another language.

In the meantime, I’ve been working in Unity using C#, and may have some upcoming posts about how that’s  been.  It’s also near time for the IGDA to begin its elections, and if I can get some help, I plan to cover the candidates again.  More on that shortly.

Macguffin Games Welcomes Joe Freemer to the Team

Posted on by

I’d like to officially welcome designer Joe Freemer to the Macguffin Games team!

Joe is a great friend of mine from our days at Blue Fang Games, where we worked together on many zoo-related games.  He is bar-none one of the best and brightest designers I’ve ever worked with, and digs RPGs as much as I do, if not more.  I’m incredibly psyched to be working with him again.  For a while now Joe has been excited about All Heroes Die, and has offered me advice here and there… and every time I took that advice it made the game ten times better.

Joe is coming onto the team to to help continue our push through Beta towards v1.0; the hope is that him jumping in on a lot of the design stuff will leave me more time to talk with our players, update the blog more often, and deal with the marketing and PR that will be so important to the game’s success.

Welcome, Joe!

So, where’s the dev blog?

Posted on by

Just wanted to note – the dev blog is still planned, it is just holding off a little bit.

Right now Graham and I are crunching pretty hard to hit our May 7th prototype demo at the IGC East.  Once we either get out ahead of that, or the demo is done, I have a number of posts planned, starting with a mercifully short bit on why I went indie, then some of the underpinnings of the game design.

Part of the problem I’m running into with jotting off a short bit about the state of development or the state of the design is that things keep changing, right now.  A lot of what was in my head is now making firm contact with Graham’s workflow (No, Scott, really – what is this UI going to look like?) or with game code itself (Well… no, I don’t know how that works.  I hadn’t gotten around to figuring that part out yet…?).

So, since the likelyhood of us finishing a polished demo game before the deadline are slim-to-none, it is likely I will start getting some posts up right after the May 7 demo.  This may mean that I don’t properly capitalize on any press we may get at demo night, but it’s better than the alternative – a crappy demo.

Macguffin Games at GDC 2009

Posted on by

For anyone that’s interested, I’ll be at GDC as of Monday afternoon and staying the whole week.  If you’re out there and want to say hi, please feel free to drop me an email or hit me on Twitter at @MacguffinGames.

While we are not showing off anything officially at GDC, we may have a piece or two of concept art that Graham has been working on.  My plan is to print a few of these out as calling cards for people interested in the project.  We’ll also be posting it to the blog at some point – but hey, if you want that early collectors item, find me at GDC.

By The Book: Introductory New Blogger Post

Posted on by

Hey there, The Internet.  You might remember that back when Scott announced Heritage he made some vague allusions to having another blogger join him in the next several days.  Well, those days came and went, and I was eyeball deep in making sure we had some quality images to show off at GDC next week, and with hardly a blog post in sight.  It’s not that I -wanted- to start things off this way, but you know how it is.

Continue reading →

Screw Art (Or, Passion & Indie Game Dev)

Posted on by

Fine art. But is that what you wanted?The past couple years has given us a growing chorus of people cajoling game makers to take it up a level, imploring us to make Great Art – and a growing number of indies are doing it.  Games like Passage and Flower, amongst many others, are making us think.  This is A Good Thing.

Paying attention to this zeitgeist as an indie dev, though, can screw you over hard.  Here’s why.




Continue reading →

Paul Graham’s Wisdom for Indies

Posted on by

Paul Graham, for those that don’t know him, is one of the founders of Y Combinator, a venture capital firm that specializes in giving small amounts of money and lots of advice.  He is also something of an essayist, with a number of really thought-provoking ones on his site.

His latest essay is an attempt to boil down the most important pieces of advice he has for startups.  Coincidentally, every one of these things is applicable to someone starting an indie games venture.

Continue reading →