Game design is like sailing a ship while still building the hull! Jump out of a plane while still sewing your parachute and you’ll get a good sense of pace in this business. The horse is never put before the cart. We race them side-by-side to see which one wins!

I think the above pretty much nails what this job is about. The article lays out a set of basic principles of game design (13 of them) and is well worth reading. I am, like Allmer, of the view that the game design process, albeit chaotic by nature, can and should be tamed by carefully applying process and principles. I won’t argue for or against the particular principles mentioned by Allmer, but instead talk a bit about what I have seen (or not seen) of intentional game design process within the industry and look at a very powerful tool.

I think that all projects I’ve been on has been initially approached from a design view in pretty much the same way. There’s been a period of brainstorming around features, environments, AI issues and whatnot (in the cases of “Riddick” and “Darkness”, a lot of thought went into finding suitable features to the existing IPs). Brainstorming is all great fun and valuable, but also s bit scary since the material and ideas produced will form the foundation for your work the upcoming couple of years. You don’t wanna go all wrong and you want to keep some leeway for future changes so you tend to not be too specific and detailed at this stage. Formulating the design vision and laying out the foundation for the project is more important. (But I do believe that there are methods and tools to do preliminary evaluation of your designs even at this stage. I’d really like to try one or two things some time) However, as the project moves along the team starts working on realizing the vision and trying out the design ideas. This process is often unnecessarily slow and cumbersome. Usually, it goes something like this:

1. Based on a pretty high level design or general vision, you create a more detailed paper design which is reviewed together with team members. Issues are raised and the design is perhaps revised a couple of times.
2. Required planning is done.
3. (Placeholder) content and assets are produced and code is started to be created.
4. As soon as something that runs on a console or PC can be seen, the design can be properly reviewed.
5. If you’re okay, iterate content, design and code until satisfied.

In the worst case, it is not until after point 4 that you know whether you have something that works as imagined, if your new feature introduces previously unknown risks into the project or if you have to go back to the drawing board altogether. Fortunately, if you have a team with skilled and experienced people, or if you are seasoned enough yourself, you will hopefully be able to decide whether to move on from point 1 to 2 by applying some preliminary analysis. My experience is that ever too often, that new feature that looked so simple and straightforward on paper will explode and quickly transform into a complex beast before you know it.

So, along the way towards a reasonably full implementation you will most probably run into hard-to-foresee problems and you will have to either adapt your design or revise the production plans (which usually means cutting something else). For instance, you might find that switching between 1st and 3rd person causes awkward-looking arms and weapons in 1st person because of the field of view and suddenly you need to implement two separate animation sets for the hero, one for each camera mode (in this particular example, you will face other problems too).

As you gather experience, the amount of surprise problems like these decrease somewhat, but we work in an industry that moves very fast. Each new project demands innovation in some or several areas — and let’s not even begin talking about technology. So you will face new types of problems on a regular basis and it’s extremely hard to anticipate how everything will unfold as you start realizing your game vision.

Pre-visualizations

At the latest project I worked on, we were fortunate enough to be able to do a lot of pre-visualizations (and some simple prototyping) before doing the first implementation tests. This is something we could almost only dream about in earlier projects. Now and then we actually did pre-viz something, but not very often. We did, for example, a really cool first person hand-to-hand combat test very early in the production of “Riddick”, but that test was more a high level vision than a real preparation for implementation based on a particular design. It did give us some answers to how fighting should feel like (which was very valuable), but it didn’t attempt to answer how it should work mechanically.

Most often, pre-viz tests has either been neglected as a worthwhile thing to do, or it has been impossible due to massive workloads and time constraints. But having worked with much more extensive pre-viz production than ever before, I must say that it is a time-saver and a super-valuable tool for a number of reasons. In my latest project, we had a large number of mechanics that we didn’t know how to create. Many were advanced character control mechanics and those were, thankfully, pretty straightforward to pre-viz. In the typical case, an animator put together a clip with the hero character doing whatever interaction we wanted to test. A camera track was also carefully set up. We usually had to do one or two iterations over the pre-viz to get everything right. We tried to emulate as much as possible of what we wanted in the final game in terms of cameras, timing, looks on animations, environmental constraints etc, but even so, producing a pre-viz was very fast. And for that modest time investment, we got a lot back:

• Problems were immediately exposed. We had a maneuver where the hero could jump and grab a specific game object and then continue moving along that object. Our pre-viz tests (we did several) immediately showed us severe camera movement issues that would be very hard to solve. Our solution became to ignore the problem and have the camera do a hard cut to the “grabbing” position. We continued to test this solution in pre-viz videos to get the right angles and flow for maximum clarity and drama. In the end, the feature came out really great.
• The goal becomes clear to anyone. A design on paper risk becoming something different in the head of each team member that reads it. It’s better if you tag along sketches or diagrams, but it’s still a problem. In the case of character movement mechanics, a video surpasses everything else in clarity. As we become better at creating pre-vizes, our coders said again and again that they was really helped by the videos we produced since they could really see what we meant.
• A pre-viz is a fantastic communication tool. The strength of the pre-viz for communicating clearly (as per previous point) means that a pre-viz can very easily be sent out for quick review and feedback, either internally or to the publisher. Pre-vizes tend to speak for themselves much more than written pieces of information so you can quickly get feedback from people that knows very little of the project.

As our project moved along, the pre-viz mentality slowly settled and we tried to apply it whenever we felt we had unanswered questions that we might be able to answer by simpler means than by implementation:

1. We did the usual mockup screens and diagrams of GUI and HUD elements. We laid out typical missions will each piece of information we needed to hand the player identified and tied them to the GUI – in effect running missions on paper (prototyping on paper could be very useful).
2. Some important HUD functions were tested in video to anticipate what he needed to do to improve player guidance. These tests exposed problems with the rendering being too unclear on CRT televisions and the design was reiterated before implementation began.
3. We had a simple 2d flash tool where we could lay out and prototype missions, place objectives on the map and play them as they would unfold in the game. We could also have the tool measure traveling distances. We didn’t get to use this prototyping tool very extensively, but I’m certain that it would eventually have been useful when pacing missions.
4. We invented a dynamic music system that we believed would create just the dynamic response we aimed for. We manage to test the basics of the system by capturing footage from sections of Just Cause 2 which we tagged with information on the game’s music state and also mixed in placeholder music, stingers and washes to match. We had some initial concerns if our system would work but fortunately this test showed that it would work, given that we managed to take care of a couple of problems that the test exposed.

These were just a couple of examples of where pre-visualization material helped the design process and production immensely. In many cases, realizing how to create a pre-viz was straightforward (animated hero + camera, for instance) while in other cases, we had to be somewhat inventive to find a way to test what we needed to test (like the music system example above).

Looking at previous projects in hindsight I can easily identify a bunch of problems we did run into that would probably have been exposed much earlier and with less cost by doing proper pre-visualizations. But of course it’s easy to be afterwise. And even if you manage to work with pre-vizes in the most optimal way imaginable, game design is still about building the hull while sailing the ship. The difference is that day by day you will evolve much more accurate blueprints — and hopefully you can shoot less from the hip.

But let’s talk of something merrier. I went into GameRankings some time ago and checked the review scores for “The Darkness”. When the game was released I watched GameRankings, MetaCritic and all those sites closely but now I was just leisure-browsing the site and started clicking around. And I noticed a few things… The reviews for “The Darkness” is distributed quite widely between 2 out of 5 and 9 out of 10 (averaging 83% on the Xbox 360). “The Darkness” landed on a lower average than “Riddick” (which scores 90.7% on the PC). I read some of the higher scoring and some of the lower scoring reviews and I paid attention to what they said about story (which was my main focus when working on the game). Strangely enough, the story of “The Darkness” divides people into two very distinct camps. Those who think it’s brilliant and those who think it’s almost sub-par – or just downright confusing. The reception of “Riddick” was much more uniform and people seemed to generally like the story qualities of “Riddick”. Very few disliked it. How come, I wonder?

Well, it might be that the sci-fi setting and main character of “Riddick” has a more general appeal to people, but I really doubt that is the case. Instead, I believe it boils down to one single issue: simplicity.

“Riddick” tells a much more straightforward story than “The Darkness”. Riddick is thrown into jail and must escape. That’s it. Jackie, on the other hand, is driven by revenge and is fighting his inner demons (literally). Setting up the premises for Jackie took a considerable effort and if you play the game you will need to spend time with it and its characters until the story starts to really propel. For instance, Jenny plays a major role in Jackie’s story and she needed to be introduced properly. When you fire up “Riddick”, the game opens with Riddick (you) being led into Butcher Bay prison and that’s pretty much all you need to know. It’s that one guy against the system. Now, Riddick is by no means dumbed down story-wise. We spent as much effort getting characterization, themes, motives and story arcs right in “Riddick” as we did in “The Darkness”, but I don’t think there’s any question that Riddick’s story is much more straightforward.

I think that this pinpoints something that needs to be thought, re-thought, told and re-told over and over and over again: KISS. Keep it simple (stupid). And this applies not only storytelling in games, but to absolutely everything. Still, for some reason, game design and storytelling are notoriously hard to keep simple so it’s good to keep the KISS mantra in the back of your head day and night. During the year and a half I’ve been working on the design on the, now dead, Avalanche game we have actively been forced to go through this over and over again. This has been the general process:

• We look at an area of the game and design something that we feel is cool.
• Usually, this design is pretty much crap but you don’t see it at first.
• Luckily, there’s hopefully a golden nugget buried in that pile.
• And fortunately, as we continue to rework and iterate the design and think about implementation details together with the team, we’ll realize that the only way through is by simplification.
• After many iterations and tuning, the final implementation is usually a fifth (or less) of the original design, but it works, feels good and is straightforward and intuitive.

A specific example where a mechanic went through this process was the hand-to-hand combat in “Riddick”. We had two or three total overhauls of designs that were all pretty complex. They locked the player in a “combat mode” (with a modal controller) which featured series of advanced maneuvers, attacks and counter attacks. These were prototyped but dismissed as essentially crap. In the end Jens Andersson (one of the Lead Designers) went in a different direction and created a quick prototype of a combat system that was much more simple and straightforward. The final game ended up a refined version of that system and it worked a million times better than the previous attempts.

It’s easy to analyze in hindsight, but keeping something simple when you’re waist deep in creative golden quicksand is very hard. There are several reasons for that:

• If you’re working on an AAA game, there’s a lot to juggle and maintaining KISS takes a lot of effort.
• You strive to create something unique (that’s fine) – but you want to be unique all over the place (which is a mistake).
• The easiest way to be unique is to be complex (just look at all gazillion spins on “Tetris” and you know what I mean).
• It feels good to play cerebral and design complicated ideas and systems.
• It is hard to kill your darlings (and your darlings are probably not simple).

Now one could be mean and say that KISS is hard because we are lazy and narcissistic, but formulated any way you like, this is why I think it’s a hard problem to remedy. The only way to fight it is through awareness, continuous reflection and hard work. So this is my recipe for the future:

• I’ll try to always keep my head cool.
• I’ll remember that there is (almost) always an easier and more straightforward way to do whatever I’m currently doing.

Eventually, I will hopefully learn.

First I must say that I initially had a hard time grasping the essence of the ideas he presented.

Some background:

Ambient Games are inspired by the concept of Ambient Music:

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting. (Brian Eno, 1978)

Hmmm…

I pondered upon the connection and gradually managed to build a vision in my mind. Ambient Games must be sort of like an aquarium. It plays by itself and if you want to, you can go and interfere with it, toy around for some time. An Ambient Game would be a sort of hybrid between game and screensaver, if you will. (A sidenote: Earlier the same day, Tsutomu Kouno from Sony Worldwide Studios talked about the creation of LocoRoco. And recently I saw rumors like this appearing on the web. Interesting!)

However, just as I thought I was getting it, Mark pulled out a step counter and entered his current number of steps into the research game. The number then gave him a number of moves in the game world (which was a turned based RPG).

Whoah! Now I was totally lost. He was obviously not into screensaver/game hybrids at all. Instead, it turned out that he was looking at feeding everyday boring tasks into games so that tedious work could be more fun. He imagined that working with stacking boxes in a big storage house could actually be more satisfying if every box you stacked earned you something (moves, money?) that could later be used in a gaming world.

It did sound very interesting, but it was certainly a bit hard to connect that idea to the initial concept of “Ambient Games” (and “Ambient Music”).

Chores as Games

After the session I kept thinking about tedious work connected to games and a few weeks later, I was busy repainting the kitchen roof. Suddenly I realized that during painting I was doing something quite weird in my mind.

After some reflection about other similar situations: mowing lawns, working out or any other kind of repetitious work, I realized that the same thing very often happens. When I am busy with tedious work, I create a game out of it. And moreover, I think that this is something I have always been doing.

I give you an example. If I am mowing a lawn, I split the whole lawn into separate sections. I mow these sections little by little and I find (some weird) joy in altering the mowing patterns and splitting sections into yet smaller sections on the fly. To me it’s a bit like putting a puzzle together, one where all the pieces are constantly changing – and you’re doing it totally in reverse.

I am really curious to know if there are other people out there who share the same or similar experience. I wonder because if there is, there might be connection points in how the games we create for ourselves look for various work scenarios. I mean, if every single person who mows a lawn creates the same game I do (though I strongly doubt it), then I reckon that lawnmowers should immediately be modified. They should have a screen fitted to the handle, some sensory equipment and a computer collecting all the data, making the game happen in real time.

This idea I realize is pretty far fetched. However, I think that a possibly fruitful approach would be to analyze various kinds of tedious work situations and see if there are some simple ways of measuring and guiding the work effort. A small computer could then use the data and create a live gaming experience, be it when we paint roofs, mow lawns, work out, correct multiple choice tests (on paper), stack boxes, cut and paste between lots of documents or whatever.

I realize that there is a difference between feeding step meter measurements into a game like Mark did and doing what I describe above, which is more like working live within the game world. You might say that the former is understandably “Ambient” and the latter is not…

But go back a second and consider the idea of the screensaver game. What if that screensaver game would constantly monitor your muscular activity? What if that game would run in the background, day and night, creating cool and usable stuff out of your muscular data inside the game world?

What if you had a window into the game world on a screen on your bookshelf? You would be free to look into it at any time. You could watch how your efforts would have an effect behind that screen. And at any given time, you would be able to pick up the controller and play away.

Well, I’m not sure I see that coming anytime soon. The discovery made by these scientists is probably important, but if you put it into perspective, there are a couple of interesting questions that come to mind.

1. Have people already experienced out of body sensations while playing games? I think it’s fairly probable that it might happen in the right circumstances. The experiment referenced above is extremely simple so an out of body experience while playing Half Life, for instance, might happen by accident. It might also be possible to induce the experience by other, equally simple, means. Does it have to be visual and physical input that matches? How accurate need it be?

2. How easy is it to ruin the sensation? Firstly, I suspect that the VR goggles used in the experiment are really important since they visually isolate the subject from the “real world”. Secondly, the physical sensation that induce the out of body experience will, most likely, need to be consistent. This means that in a game, everything that happens to the player character must be felt by the player. Furthermore, I suspect that no other physical input than those the game induces should be experienced while playing. It might work if the player is put into a float tank with some nifty suit that can induce physical input, but this sounds like lots of new technology that I believe are still pretty far off.

3. How adaptive is the brain to these types of sensations? Can humans learn to separate the sensation from the induced experience from real life? If so, it would probably be possible to make better equipment to get more accurate results, but if the brain can adapt to that, we have an arms race going. And then – is there a reachable border where we can’t make that distinction anymore?

Still, I think it would be very interesting to create a gaming experience that utilizes this experiment’s results in a clever way. Maybe all it takes is a pair of VR goggles, a Wiimote with rumble and some clever game design?

I have just begun reading “Persuasive Technology” by B.J. Fogg and cannot say that I know anything about the theories and ideas behind persuasion in interactive media, but I hope that the book will shed some light on the subject.

There is, however, one thing that immediately came to mind as I browsed through the foreword. I played a lot of “Brain Trainer” on my Nintendo DS a few months back and I was stunned with the efficiency the game captivated me and persuaded me to come back to it time and time again. At the time I thought a bit about what the game was doing and how it affected me. I came to the conclusion that the key was the guy on the screen – Dr. Kawashima. He actually got to me like he was a real person.

When I started up the game and the good old Doc greeted me, he said something like “Hello Mikael, good to see you again. It seems like you have been away for almost five days now.” He could as well have added “Shame on you!” because that’s how I felt. The next day I fired up the game. I must confess I did it partly to keep the Doc happy.

That, to me, is persuasive power!

Of course, there is a fine balance here. The good Doctor in that game is a double-edged sword. It’s been months since I played the game. It sits in a drawer at home and I am reluctant to start it up again. Why? I am half-expecting the Doc to tan my hind for being away for so long.

I feel that there are immense powers here that just waits to be unleashed. Cleverly designed games can convey powerful messages efficiently. Furthermore, I believe more “traditional” games can benefit by applying techniques for making better tutorials, create more intuitive interfaces and generally hook the player to the game.

The game is absolutely stunning visually. The graphic style is beautiful. Radiant! The only setback was the lack of 16:9 support.

The controls feel a little “flimsy” at times. I noticed it mostly when getting inside houses and trying to maneuver through doors, up ladders etc. In combat they are absolutely spot on, though, and while running around, they do feel very good – not as tight as in “Twilight Princess”, but almost there.

Storytelling is good. I played “Animal Crossing” and was already somewhat used to the semi-synthetic bubble-bobble voices. The main problem is that the game opens with a lot of cutscenes. The first two hours or so are heavy with narrative but after that the game loosens up and becomes more about gameplay.

Some of the puzzles are overly simple and the game goes a long way totally explaining exactly what you should do to solve a puzzle, and it does so several times.

The “Celestial Brush” gameplay feels fresh and tunes extremely well into the tone and style of the game. There are so extremely much about “Okami” that makes it a close cousin to “Twilight Princess” and the Zelda series. “Ocarina of Time” had the ocarina, “The Windwaker” had the windwaker and “Okami” has the brush.

The RPG elements are certainly interesting and adds a layer to the game that is different from Zelda. I guess I need to play more until I get a grip on how it works in the long run.

I picked up the game for a bargain. It was released in the EU early 2007 and can be bought for about 20-30 Euro (at least here in Sweden). Although I haven’t played that long, I can definitely recommend the game. It’s very interesting and one of the most beautiful games ever.

The game’s controls really prove that the Wiimote has enough precision for shooting games (I can’t wait to play “Metroid Prime 3: Corruption”). And with this precision it also proves that it would be great for controlling games in other genres in a more intuitive way. I would, for instance, love to see “Pikmin 3” on the Wii.

1. I think about buying something. It may be something fun or something useful – the evil seems to not be very picky about that.
2. I buy the thing, either on the net or in a shop or store. Again, it really doesn’t matter how the purchase is done.
3. I use the thing for a short period of time.
4. The thing breaks or shows some fabrication fault.
5. I return the damn thing.
6. I get a replacement.
7. Everything is fine and dandy and suddenly the spell of evil is broken. The item works and can be used for years to come.

The scheme seems to be always the same. My new Wii managed to burn its graphics card while on standby for 2 days (it’s on service right now and I’m expecting a replacement in a couple of days). And before the Wii:

• A USB harddrive that after 1 hour of usage just died. The replacement is doing just fine.
• My Nintend DS had a bad WiFi and had to be replaced. The new one is working like charm.
• My LaCie Firewire drive sounded like a cräck-baböön and had to be replaced. New one is dead silent and is 100% healthy.
• My iBook caught the graphitis and needed to get some serious physical therapy. A new motherboard and then everything was fine, fine, fine…
• I got a IP telephony router from my broadband company. Worked an hour maybe, then dead. Replacement one was fine.

Well, I don’t think I need to say anymore. There is obviously something fishy going on and I bet it’s spelled E-V-I-L.

The Wii is the latest in a long string of videogaming computers and consoles that I have owned or had around. Currently I have a Wii, a PS2, a DS, a Gamecube and a Gameboy Advance at home. There have been others as well. Here is a timeline on my gaming history.

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

My father broughts home one of those around 1981. I was about 9 and I was instantly hooked. Initially, we played TI Invaders (A “Space Invaders” clone) on the family black and white TV, but soon I picked up other games, such as:

• Muchman (A fast-paced “Pac Man” version)
• Parsec
• Scott Adam’s Pirate Adventure

Soon I wanted to do my own games, and did a few – in TI Basic.

Commodore 64

I never owned a C64, nor did my father buy one. I had friends that did have one, however, and we played tons and tons of games on that machine. A few gems that come to mind are:

• Boulder Dash
• Suspended
• Paradroid
• Archon
• International Karate +
• The Last Ninja
• Elite
• Wizball

Me and a friend wanted to make games for the machine, but we aimed too high and never finished anything.

Amiga 500

Bought around 1987, this was my first own computer. I sticked with it for the upcoming years and played lots and lots of games on it.

Games I especially remember from the Amiga period was:

• Populous
• Kick Off 2
• Elite (again)
• The Guild of Thieves
• Silent Service
• Pirates
• Silkworm
• Lemmings
• Wizball (again)

Amiga 1200

I upgraded to the A1200 in 1993 and focused more on programming, but there was a lot of games played as well. A few of them were:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Flashback
• SimCity

Nintendo 64

When I bought the N64 in 1998, it was because of the fantastic “Ocarina of Time”. Since then, gaming has changed a bit for me. It has moved away from the desktop and into the livingroom. Notable N64 games:

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Super Mario 64
• Banjo Kazooie
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

The PC

I bought a PC in 1999 and ran Linux on it from the start. I also kept a Windows installation for the occasional game, but most games were played from the sofa by this time.

• Grim Fandango
• Riven
• The Curse of Monkey Island

Playstation 2

I bought the PS2 around 2001. The reason? Well, if you like games you can’t affort not to have one. There are just too many fantastic games out there for this little machine. Just to name a few:

• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
• Ratchet & Clank (the whole series)
• ICO
• Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
• Shadow of the Colossus
• Fahrenheit
• God of War

Game Boy Advance

I bought the GBA around 2001 and played it a lot while commuting to Uppsala and my work at Starbreeze. It was also handy to bring along on vacations. On the GBA, I had the chance to pick up some classic Nintendo releases, for example:

• Super Mario Advanced
• Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario Advanced 3
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the past

Apple iBook

Bought in 2003 to replace my PC. I looked for a system that allowed me to run the stuff I ran under Linux and also allow me to run programs such as Photoshop. OS X was my choice and I have never regretted it. Not much games are played on my macs, but there are a few:

• The Edifice
• Another Earth, Another Sky
• The Secret of Monkey Island (I love emulation)
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge

Gamecube

I bought the Gamecube in 2003, again because of the latest Zelda game. The machine has brought a string of great titles, for example:

• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
• Metroid Prime
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
• Beyond Good and Evil
• Resident Evil 4
• Pikmin
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest

iMac G5

This machine bought in 2005 is now my main workstation. I don’t do almost any gaming on it, though. Just the occasional interactive fiction or emulation.

Xbox 360

I was never even tempted to buy an Xbox, and when the 360 was released I never bothered too much. Starbreeze, however provided me with one in 2006 and I had it at home until I left the company in March 2007. I didn’t play very many games on the 360 and the following list is actually all the games I played on it (including one Xbox title).

• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Didn’t like it so I traded it for “New Super Mario Bros”)
• Tomb Raider: Legend
• Fable (Xbox game)
• Prey (I didn’t like it)
• Halo 2 (Xbox game – I didn’t like it)

Nintendo DS Lite

I really liked my GBA, but hated that the screen was not backlit. Then the DS came and it seemed nice, but looked like s**t. But the DS Lite was love at first sight and I bought one as soon as it was released in 2006. Now, I have not played very many original DS games, but mostly replayed a bunch of my old GBA titles.

• New Super Mario Bros
• Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?

Nintento Wii

Bought yesterday (May 9, 2007). I initially wanted to get one at launch with “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess”, but there was serious shortage of consoles and the game was available for the Gamecube. So I bought the GC version (I’m almost finished) and postponed the Wii purchase until now.

It is too soon to list any games for the Wii, but I suspect that I will use it as I have used my other machines – to play both new games and classics that was originally released for another older console. For one, I really want to play “Wind Waker” again.

[EDIT: Eventually, I bought a Xbox 360 and a couple of months ago, I purchased a Playstation 3. Half a year ago, I also got an iPod Touch.]

My initial plan was to continue working for game companies as a writer/designer on a freelance basis and alter that with other jobs, but I had barely packed my stuff together at Starbreeze before I got a call from Avalanche, a game company here in Stockholm. They wanted to meet and a few weeks later I went to visit them. They presented some really interesting stuff and in the end they asked me if I was interested in working full time as a lead game designer on the project. That was not really what I had in mind when I started my own business, but the offer sounded too much like a great opportunity and chance to do something really fun so I accepted.

During these months I have not been able to find the time to sit down and write anything new here, but I have an interesting backlog of notes, ideas, issues and thoughts that I really want to put into words. So keep a look-out for new material in the near future. I am looking forward to continuing sharing.

Oh, if you understand Swedish, I wrote a small piece for gameplayer.se that you can read here.