Also, good work on moving up the ranks on your Google Search.

http://www.facebook.com/midnightryder

OK, The Story of Gamer Zone (which is $19.95) has nothing to do with game development whatsoever It’s about business and mitigating failure’s effects primarily, with quite a few “geeky stories” thrown in. When I first started writing it, it was a blog – but the project ballooned, and ended up being a 81,000 word book. And it’s the WORST book I’ll ever write.

The Horror Game (which might be where you got the $15 price from) is my first forray in to role playing books – and is starting to sell slowly (marketing is something I should be doing, and would be the first thing to tell others to do, but still ain’t doing it at the moment.) And there’s another one setting with the Editor at the moment, and yet another game book in development. Plus, two fiction novels (Muse, and it’s sequel, Muse: Evolution) on the way after that.

But that’s not what you’re interested – what makes me an expert in video game development is the real question

Nope, I’ve never done flash games – was never my thing. Probably the game you saw was Tile Panic! – my absolutely least favorite game I threw effort into (here’s a hint – if you can’t figure out a good mechanic for making a game end, don’t just say “screw it” and release it. Sure, it sold copies just fine back in the early part of the decade, but it still sucked.) I designed, wrote, and released 7 independent titles – three of which were supposed to see shelf space through eGames way back when (contract signed, distribution agreement done, blah blah blah. Then eGames changed their business focus, and dropped the contract.) Those were all 2D puzzle games – during their time period, those were the fastest turnaround development projects you could do. I could go from concept to finished product in a few months and be seeing a return on my investment – and since I was a full time independent game developer, return on investment was important.

My two favorites: Boulder Panic! 2 DX and Flip Panic! BP! was similar to Bejweled (before it was called Bejweled), but used a pre-designed level approach, and a very interesting game mechanic. Flip Panic! I loved because it’s unique take on game rules – it LOOKED like a “match three” tile game with a minor variation in game mechanic (the tiles flipped over giving each tile two possible outcomes), but it wasn’t – every level, the rules changed, presenting new challenges to the player. To this day, I still think about resurrecting both of those games just for the hell of it – they would play great on an iPad or similar. (BP! also had a 3rd development version that was never finished – it was a 3D puzzle game back before anyone had done 3D puzzle games.) (Some quick googling managed to surface up some info on BP! 3: http://www.torquepowered.com/community/blogs/view/5747 – .plan file, and I had almost forgotten that BP!3′s prototype was a GID project – Game In A Day. Basically taking any doing the whole thing in 24 hours from start to finish.)

Now a days, 2D game dev is boring – it’s mainly 3D stuff that excites people (mainly – there are still 2D releases that rock from time to time I am a Torque licensee (my second favorite engine – my favorite is still Epic’s Unreal engine series, but back when I wanted to license it I decided to go with Torque instead. $250,000 for licensing an engine was a bit step for my blood.) I first licensed the engine in 2002, and used the heck outta it. Various game development contract jobs included: Golf title – Voice Over IP, Racing title – vehicle physics, Soccer title – player AI, casual Arcade title – complete package, casual Arcade title – complete package. THen there’s various “Consulting” gigs on feasibility, etc. (Which normally resulted in “Yeah… you’re not doing that project for the extremely small amount of cash you want to put into it.”)

Now, I don’t state names of projects I worked on – most of them were NDA’ed at the time (actually, they probably aren’t under NDA now – haven’t pulled the paperwork on that in ages) so I just avoid talking about ‘em. However, I can talk about one of the Arcade titles – there was no NDA involved. The original working title was “Marble Attack”, and really it was a pretty simplistic third person shooter where the player was being attacked by spherical objects (“Marbles” were actually place holder graphics I threw together at the time, and were supposed to be later replaced with new graphics, and the name retitled “Attack Of The Goobers” Something happened with the artwork, and the guy paying for development never got a complete graphics set). The game was pretty far along when the project stopped – far enough along that it was released as “Marble Attack”, complete with my original test graphics! Horrible, but sort of fun game. (Digital Snow, the company behind it, is gone now – I can’t even find pictures. THough, somewhere in my vast archive of junk, I’ve got a development copy

But this brings me to my favorite game, but biggest failure in video game development: Trajectory Zone. If you goggle it, you’ll still find stuff like this: http://faqs.ign.com/objects/693/693515.html It was so close to shipping, and had enough press sites were doing things like putting up stubs for cheat codes already. It was shown at two IndieGamesCon conferences, had a few articles here and there written about it, and both TechTV and G4 (back before G4 bought TechTV and ruined it) had picked up a small blurb of coverage about it at one of the conferences.

It was beautiful. Unfortunately, it never got finished – after three years of development, I killed the project. I got involved with Gamer Zone (the wildly unsuccessful LAN center I mentioned, and the subject of my first book) and that began eating so much time, I couldn’t finish the project. Which was a really bad thing – I had 6 sub contractors that contributed to the game, anything from graphics and models to voice over work.

Gameplay was aces – it was basically Scorched Earth done in 3D (the project started before Scorched 3D started), but instead of turn based it was realtime, utilizing weapon reload times rather than turns. Multi player was a freaking BLAST!

So… that about sums up my video game development experience (well, almost – there’s still a bit more here and there, but that’s the primary stuff). Now, why in the world didn’t that end up in the blurb about the class? Uh… I dunno. At the time the owner of Pixel TIme and I were discussing it, I just rattled off some quick stats about what I had done over the years, and she turned that into the blurb!

Anyway, that should answer your questions Funny – I think you might be the second person ever to ask about by game dev credentials (then again, if this was 2005, Googling my name would have resulted in a lot more hits on game development, and a number of titles that no longer exist along with indie companies that no longer are around. Hm. I need to fix that problem – then again, I’m working on video game titles for release again, so I suppose that will fix that issue

So what’s the course, anyway? It’s a bootcamp for game development – this utilizes pre-existing engines (and explains why), gets a person up and running with an engine quickly, how to handle resource management, etc., etc., etc. There’s A LOT going to be covered in a short amount of time, along with the hands on stuff.

(And yes, I know I just posted a small novel on your site in response to a simple question – I’m a writer. I type fast, and tell long, drawn out boring stories frequently!

Davis