Petz Fashion: Dogz and Catz (henceforth referred to as just Petz Fashion) is a new installment in Ubisoft’s long-running series of pet sims where you adopt an animal (in this case, a puppy or kitten) and then take care of it, seeing to its needs by feeding, watering, and cleaning up after it, buying it new toys to play with, brushing its fur, and so on. The games have done incredibly well for Ubisoft, as evidenced y the ever-growing amount of shelf space they take up in stores – this is Powerhead’s third Petz title so far, and Ubisoft has an internal team devoted solely to developing even more games starring all sorts of animals, including monkeys, dolphins, and horses (oh my). Some are collections of mini-games, others let you carry pets over from one game to another and even breed them, and some are just straight-forward pet sims in the style of the super popular Nintendogs games. Petz Fashion is the latter, which for my first foray in to the world of artificial animal friends I was happy about, as it keeps things a bit simpler. None of that circle of life business going on here, thank you very much.

Of course, it’s not just a pet sim – as the title suggests, there’s also a fashion component. Petz Fashion follows in the footsteps (paw prints?) of an earlier game by another developer, Petz: Dogz Fashion, which featured (among other things) a narrative about fashion shows starring your canine companion, a bunch of clothes to dress them up in, and a collection of mini-games to play. For Petz Fashion we took a more stripped down approach, culling the narrative and mini-games in favor of having fun with your pet through more free-form play. We also added the ability to adopt a second pet without starting an all new save file, allowing players to switch between the two whenever they wanted from a toolbar on the DS’s Touch Screen. While there are still loads of fashion shows to attend and plenty of encouragement to do so in the form of invitations arriving once your wardrobe is up to snuff, special outfits and other prizes to take home, and more, the player is free to go through them at their own pace. Despite the name of the game putting the spotlight on fashion, it was important to me and the rest of the team that caring for and playing with your pet remain the most important aspect. You can’t attend fashion shows if your pet isn’t healthy and happy, for instance, and taking time during the prep phase of each show to make sure your pet is well-fed, groomed, and in good spirits is a big part of your final score. While Petz Fashion is hardly a how-to guide on how to successfully raise a pet (and was never intended to be), we wanted to enforce good pet owner habits across the board. Nobody wants a real-life version of Parker Posey’s character from Best in Show, after all.

Along with the Fashion Shows and how much fun it remains to just play fetch with your pet or get them to chase a laser pointer, I’m really please with how well performing tricks worked in to the game. It wasn’t something we originally planned for, but as production moved forward and we kept talking about it, we eventually all agreed that it would be fun if your pet could perform tricks – not just as a special animation at the end of a successful walk down the isle at a show, but on command. One of the rewards for acing the game’s fashion shows is your pet building up a collection of tricks it can perform via a menu on the Touch Screen or by speaking in to the DS’s microphone, from the basics of sitting down and rolling over to chasing its tail and break dancing (as the finer breeds of show dogs and cats are known to do on occasion). While I generally don’t like the microphone on the DS (too fickle, too embarrassing to use in crowded places, and often too gimmicky in execution), it was pretty great the first time our lead programmer got his dog to sit by telling it to. It helps that there’s a menu option for tricks as well, allowing you to show off your pet’s moves without causing a subway delay after somebody decides to see something and say something.

It’s a good game, and one I’m proud of, particularly considering the blink-and-you’ll miss it schedule the thing was on. I’m pleased with how much there is for the player to do, from buying new toys for their pet, attending fashion shows armed with a gigantic wardrobe and more clothing customization tools than have ever been in one of these things, or just taking pictures of their pet in mid-air as it leaps from the couch to attack a red dot on the floor. Whenever we came to a crossroads or impasse during production, we tried to stop and ask ourselves “What’s more fun for the player? What would a person playing this game want to do here?” As a designer, I consider one of my main jobs to be an advocate for the player, to constantly keep the wants, needs, and priorities of the people who are eventually going to be playing the game front and center over the course of development. With Petz Fashion, I think we pulled it off nicely.

For those wanting to have a career in game design, Lamb has some suggestions. “Learning to work with others and make concessions for the good of the game is one of the best things that can happen to you,” he says. While this may sound like a no-brainer, being creatively attached to your work may leave you a bit hurt.
“There will be times when the design you’re so very sure of will have to be changed in some way due to the say-so of someone else, be it a person on your team, your producer, your boss, a publisher, the licensor, or some other involved body,” he says. “It’s a very hard lesson to learn, and can be immensely frustrating, particularly when the change they’ve asked for ends up being for the better.”

That’s me in the quote marks, sounding remarkably like I know what I’m talking about. You can find the rest of the piece here. Thanks very much to Alexandra for giving me the opportunity to ramble incessantly at her about something I love, and for bravely soldiering through in the face of my answering each of her questions with the equivalent of a final term paper.

I worked as both producer and lead designer on this one, a combination of duties that, while incredibly rewarding (particularly for the OCD part of me), took up more bandwidth than I consistently had to offer. That said, I’m happy to have had the opportunity, as the lessons learned over the project’s remarkably short schedule have proven to be incredibly valuable. Design is where my heart’s at, but having that skillset tempered with the experience of shepherding the game from start to finish and working firsthand with the publisher is the sort of thing I think anybody wanting to be a game designer should go through. Work-wise, I’m currently moving out of production, working as lead designer on two new projects, and having the importance of clean, realistic design that fits within the time and resources provided drilled in to my by a ticking clock hanging overhead has already paid off. In the long run, not having a day off in June seems like less of a big deal.

Imagine Movie Star is part of Ubisoft’s crazy-successful line of Nintendo DS games aimed at young girls. It’s a rhythm game where players live the life of a movie star they create, going to auditions, attending movie premieres, and generally living the high life while earning new fans for keeping the beat through each challenge. The game also comes with a wide range of customization options, giving the player more freedom to create characters and clothing that’s all their own than any other DS game I can remember seeing. I’m particularly proud of this aspect of the game, as it’s provided us with a wide range of new features to work in to our games at Powerhead.

I understand Ubisoft expects Imagine Movie Star to be something of a Big Deal, and I’ve already seen commercials and a full-page add in Cosmo Girl proclaiming its arrival to the masses. If you’re interested in fulfilling your secret fantasy of becoming a super famous actress with gobs of fans and your own clothing line (or, y’know, need a Christmas present for someone who might be), you can find it at pretty much any place that sells videogame entertainments, including Amazon.

And now, back to work.

You can find the post here, if you’re so inclined. Stuff will actually happen here in the next little bit, honest – just as soon as I work out how much of my morning to spend Wii Fit-ing verus how much to spend trying to be clever, we should be good to go.

And yes, Formal Fridays. It is my gift to this world.

No idea when the Written section might get filled out, as a good chunk of my older stuff (i.e., all the stabs at music journo-ing from several years ago) seem to have vanished. This may actually be for the best, though.

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.

First is Super Serif Brothers, which is exactly like Super Mario Bros. if there were only one of them and he were the letter “I” rather than a portly plumber with a tendency to dress as a racoon.

Pound signs (#) serve as the generic building blocks of levels, meaning anyting that isn’t a pound sign is special. Special characters can be used to navigate the level by serving as platforms, switches, exits, or things to collect. It’s simple fun, with some of the later levels getting pretty tricky. Miyamoto would be proud.

The real gem here, though, is the Level Pit, an ever-growing coloection of user created levels offering a vast array of challenges ranging from beginner to impossible. At the time of writing thre’s 3,556 of the things, all of which can be played for free. You can also play with the level editor (free and browser-based as well) if you fancy making and uploading your own. Like many other Flash games its simple appearance hides significant depth, and in this case the creators have managed to build a healthy and growing community around a simple browser game with no graphics and nearly limitless possibilities. Take note, MMOs: if you want your users to stay, give them the ability to make their own toys.

Next is Which Way Adventure, a choose-your-own-adventure game about nuclear annihilation, time travel, lady acrobats and manticores. Sometimes all at once.

Your options are truly limitless, provided you’ve ever wanted to destroy Western civilization, ride the rails as a hobo indefinitely, become a shoe cobbler’s apprentice, or be devoured by a manticore. In fact, no matter which way your journeys take you, odds are good you’ll wind up at the wrong end of said manticore, proving once again that art imitates life. Largely worksafe, depending on how your boss feels about crudely drawn cartoons of toppless circus women.

The reference here is only slightly less tenous than the Super Serif Brothers = Super Mario Bros. = Mario Galaxy one above. Tomorrow sees the commercial release of CSI: Dark Motives for the Nintendo DS, a port of the PC game from a few years ago of the same name that I produced. It might not seem like a lot, but this is kind of a huge thing – it’s a real thing in a real box on real store shelves, and it has my name in the credits section. I’ll talk more about it – and my actual job thing, which I just realized today I haven’t so much mentioned here before – over the next few days when I’m less about to pass out. In the meantime, if you or anybody you know are fans of the show or like playing detective in the style of the adventure games of yore, Dark Motives can be found at better videogame stores or via this handy Amazon link.

SpongeBob’s Atlantis Squarepantis Squareoff – or SASS, as I will henceforth be calling it – was made by the good folks over at Pop&Co (now calling themselves This Is Pop). Pop gave me my first real job in games, (see also: Bible Fight), and they do some of the prettiest web and downloadable games work of anybody out there. I was around for a lot of the early work on SASS, including early design stuff, putting together the Game Design Document, and writing the script for the game. The script, much like the game itself, has changed a bit since I last saw it, but that’s only natural over the course of development. From the bit I’ve played of the final product it looks like more of my dumb jokes survived than probably should have, so I’m happy.

SASS is all about turn-based combat, with SpongeBob’s moves – that is, walking, attacking, defense, etc. – handled by cards you find along the way by defeating enemies, opening chests, winning mini-games, and smashing things. While you can only carry so many cards with you at a time, you can pick and choose which ones come along for the ride between each level, allowing you to try different combinations until your underwear is stuffed with an unbeatable arsenal. SASS’s story is about the villainous Plankton taking over the long lost city of Atlantis as part of his latest evil scheme to rule the ocean floor with an iron flagellum, and as SpongeBob it’s your job to stop him. The parallels to our nation’s own real-world woes are doubtlessly clear. There are something like fifty levels, loads of enemies, and gobs of cards to find and experiment with. There is also, if memory serves, a sea bear. The game is PC-only, so Mac users are out of luck, but it runs nicely via bootcamp if you’re down with that sort of thing.

I had moved on from Pop before the game was really in a playable state, so it’s really great to see the final result of everbody’s hard work for what is essentially the first time. Kudos, Pop peoples, on a job well done.