Hey everyone, thanks to the great response to the blog last week. We’re sorry if you believed that teasing our upcoming projects meant that a Gametrailers TV reveal was imminent. Though hopefully you enjoyed the announcement of SOCOM 4 from Zipper Interactive, all of us here love the SOCOM games and are pumped to check out the latest one.
Speaking of which, there has been a lot of great games coming out lately. From Mass Effect 2 to Heavy Rain to MLB: The Show ’10 to No More Heroes 2 to this week’s Final Fantasy XIII and next week’s God of War III, it’s been an incredible beginning of the year for gamers. We can’t wait to bring you the inside scoop about our upcoming games – it’s funny to see you all talking about “our two games in development.” Haven’t we always had two games in development during the PS3 era? That’s not news!
The Podcast
Speaking of bringing you the inside scoop, one of the most frequent questions we’ve been receiving is “when is the Full Moon Show” coming back? The answer is soon, but we also don’t want to come back so soon that we won’t have anything to talk about it. The community team here has spent the downtime brainstorming some new directions to take the show, which we think you’ll all enjoy when we come back.
While the current format of the show has been a lot of fun for me to host and edit, we’re really inspired by some of the other great podcasts out there and how the format is evolving. In addition, we want to bring you some video shows that not only show you events, but perhaps show you rare footage from the studio and WIP elements of our projects, both upcoming and released.
Lastly, we'd love to have some sort of live Q&A type shows. But we’re still trying to figure out if we can do it as feasibly as we’d like. Regardless, we are working up a calendar now, and we hope that the show will be back by this summer, but that will largely depend on when exactly we will be discussing our future projects.
Conventions ahoy!
Otherwise, there is much planning going on – we are looking forward to being in San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference next week. Angela wrote a great blog about how to approach GDC from a recruiting perspective, and you can swing by our booth in the career pavilion if you’re looking for a job (we’re one of the best small companies to work in the country, so STOP by).
For those heading the Summits/Tutorials, Jim Van Verth will be a leading/part of the Physics for Programmers tutorial on Wednesday from 10-6. If you have a conference pass, don’t miss Ryan’s panel on Community 2.0 (Room 309, South Hall, Thursday 1:30-2:30) which will feature some great panelists like Brian Jarrard from Bungie Studios, Dan Hsu from bitmob.com, Christian Arca from Toy Studio, and Nathan Fouts, former Insomniac and founder of Mommy’s Best Games. If you find yourself up early on Saturday morning (9:00am-10:00am, North Hall, Room 125) – head to Engine Director Mike Acton’s presentation “Three Big Lies: Typical Design Failures in Game Programming,” or head to designer Jennifer Canada’s “Paint-by-Gender: How to Add Pink Gameplay to your ‘Blue’ Title (and Still Keep All the Boys Happy)”.
That said we realize a lot of you may not be going to GDC – and it’s likely a lot more of you will be at the Penny-Arcade Expo in Boston at the end of March. While we won’t have a HUGE presence there, I will be in attendance and participating in a panel on Saturday afternoon (5:30pm, Naga Theatre) – about game developer podcasts. Other folks on the panel include Microsoft’s Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb, EA.com’s Jeff Green, as well as Ken Levine and Shawn Elliott from Irrational Games. Should be a lot of fun, and for those of you who find me at the show (I’ll try to tweet what I’m up to: www.twitter.com/JamesStevenson), there will even be some swag involved (anything I can clean up from my desk!).
That’s all for now, lots going on here, but hopefully we will see many of you at GDC or PAX East. In the mean time, to keep up with all the latest and greatest thoughts and musings from us here in Burbank, check out our twitter feed and/or become a fan on Facebook
If you have questions, we’ll try to answer in the comments section and/or on the forums!
