I promised last post to talk a little about CSI: Dark Motives for the DS and what exactly I do. There’s a bit of a balancing act to be maintained here, as on one hand I need to not step on any of the NDAs that rule my life, and on the other I don’t want to bore the shit out of you. I’ll try to kep it short.

I work for Powerhead Games, one of the precious few developers of console games in New York City. The company has been around since about 2000, and is based on the very edge of Chelsea on what used to be Tinpan Alley. It’s now the place to get counterfeit clothes and purses or to see a firetruck every day around 5 p.m. The company specializes in games aimed at young girls, and has created a wide variety of successful titles for the Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, and DS systems that do just that. I was brought on last March as a freelance producer for CSI, a port of a rather successful PC game from a few years ago. I was brought on full time in October, and when the offer was made I had no reservations at all – I love where I work, the people I work with are great, and I can’t think of a better place in the city to be making games. My official title is Producer, but since coming on full time I’ve done as much – if not more – game design as I did before. It’s a near-perfect blend of responsibilities for me, allowing me to create designs and then oversee their development over the course of the project. Before Powerhead, I had no idea where I wanted to go in games. Now I have a goal in mind, and that goal is named “Creative Director”, an ideal (for me, at least) blend of design and production responsibility. We’ll see.

CSI was a whole new world for me – I had handled some production chores for Flash games, overseeing a few months’ worth of development on a couple of titles, but nothing like seeing a console game from start to finish – the learning curve for a good long while was more like a right triangle, and every day brought something new to learn. That combined with an extremely short development schedule made for a trial by fire in every sense of the word, and it’s no exaggeration to say I wouldn’t have made it all without the help of my insanely talented team and an understanding boss. Like I said before, our game is a port, a version of a pre-existing game for a console other than the one it was originally created for. In CSI’s case, this meant taking a 1.5 GB game and squeezing it into less than a quarter of that space. The results were better than anybody could have hoped for – the amount of video in the game, the clarity of the text system, and the UI enhancements that appear in our version were mere pipe dreams at the beginning of the project. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that our DS game looks and plays better than the original PC version, which is something I’m extremely proud of. It was an intense project with more than a few very late nights, but I think the work we put in shows in the final version. Other people must think so too, as the game is doing rather well – currently it’s the sixteenth most-popular “Adventure” game on the DS, a category broad enough to include other point-and-click titles as well as the most recent Mario and Zelda titles, Pokemon, and a bunch of others. Yeah, it’s just a port of a game based on a kind of silly TV show. But it’s a goddamn good one, and my only regrets are the other improvements there weren’t time for. Maybe with the next one, yeah?

Currently, I’m working on a number of things I can’t talk about at all. So instead of talking about them, I’m probably going to start spending more time here thinking out loud about games from a number of different angles, including design, theory, culture, and anything that strikes my fancy. Games are my life, and while there’s a lot of talk already about them there aren’t a lot of discussions I’m very interested in participating in. So I thought I’d start some of my own.

In the meantime, CSI: Dark Motives for the Nintendo DS is out there on the internets and in stores, ready and waiting to keep you or the CSI fan in your life who has everything company this holiday season. Think of us as fight the good fight, both on tomorrow’s Black Friday and beyond.

Filed under: Games, Things What I Made