Jock’s son passed away today. I’ve never met Jock, or his son Bobby, but his videos on youtube have kept a Scotsman in Canada entertained for the last year, not least because they feature a net-savvy over-seventy-year-old in a country only now discovering Facebook. I imagine most people waching this here in North America won’t have a [...]

It was a nice treat today to find another of my previous projects, Jade Empire, has been deemed by Microsoft to be worthy of another go – this one being added to the list of games available for download on the Xbox 360′s Xbox Originals service – pick it up now for just around $10 [...]

This, the final talk I’ll post from GDC’08, centred on the development of the first company-wide technology platform (or engine) for Square Enix. Despite the heavy tech-focus, this was the largest lineup I attended at the conference due to the chance of gleaning any information from these Japanese RPG masters. Square Enix: The Technology of [...]

Right from the off, this GDC ’08 talk was notable for the novel, (to the West anyway), approach to staffing up for this sequel. Charting the production of SSBB, the incredibly young-looking director Masahiro Sakurai began with his own hiring onto the project on March 9th, 2005 – placing the entire development time around the [...]

Next up, in the first of three animation-related GDC ’08 presentations giving us an insight into modern-day Japanese game development, here are my notes from the Postmortem of Feelplus’s Lost Odyssey, one of two Japanese RPGs created exclusively for the XBOX360 under the watchful eye of Microsoft Game Studios and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. [...]