Goodbye Pandemic LA

I was working at Pandemic Brisbane for about 3 months before we merged with BioWare and Elevation Partners invested 300 million into the company. Two years later Pandemic and BioWare were sold to Electronic Arts for about 800 million. About 18 months later the Brisbane studio was shut down. Today the LA studio has also been shut down. Read about it here.

It's interesting to note that John Riccitello left EA in 2004 to form Elevation to buy Pando/BioWare to then go back to EA in 2007 and buy Pando/BioWare from Elevation. According to this article he made 4.9 million from the deal (the second time)

And the image up the top? Well the high point on the left is when Pandemic was bought at $60 a share. And it's been an impressive ski slope ever since.

Things I learn't today.

I learn't some stuff today. Nothing life changing but interesting. I spent the day at a Microsoft information workshop demo presentation thingo. And it was kind of interesting.

So the first thing is that Microsoft has this product, we could call it a "suite" of products called Expressions Studio. It was news to me. But there were a couple of really interesting bits. First the Encoder product has a screen capture tool and a webcam broadcasting feature. Which was pretty damn cool.

The next thing is they have this other product called Blend. And let's be honest here, it's trying to be a flash "killer". That's a long road to travel down BUT, I was impressed that the file format was XML. Well it's called XAML, but you get the idea.

Also I saw XNA 3.1, and it was cool but I was mostly impressed with the automatic method creation button in Visual Studio. Looking at it from a person who teaches Artists how to program I'm sure most of the class would run to the hills if I told them they had to work in XNA. But Visual Studio will become a good addition to the advanced students.

Now why is all this interesting you ask? Because of this site . Everything on that site is free to any student and faculty staff member. And that's a free perpetual license FOREVER.

I literally heard the words "Free, really? wow, that just saved us a fortune" and this from a high school teacher who was complaining about the cost of the Adobe Creative Suite to teach a bunch of students a product that they can't afford.

Sure the education pricing of Adobe products is good. But it's not FREE.

7 years ago I didn't think a Microsoft console would outsell a Sony console. I'm going to pick the underdog here. So if, and lets be honest it's a big if. If in 5 years Expression Studio overtakes the Creative Suite in the number of people using it, then I just want to say I called it.

MattD

Processing vs. Unity

Recently I been using Unity3D. And I'm impressed. I've been working in game engines for about a decade and I've never encountered one that is so easy to use. It's got basically everything you need, integrated with any package you'd want to use, and you can get a license for $200. That is amazing.

Because I'm also teaching it I've been putting together a bit of reference material about it. The first one is a Processing vs. Unity document. It covers some of the syntax differences between UnityScript (a Mono run version of JavaScript) and Processing (well it's Java under the hood). and here it is..

Processing_vs_Unity.pdf

You need to know about Eskil Steenberg

There is an MMO called Love being developed one man, Eskil Steenberg. This is his Blog. Look at this video.

Up to speed on the game? Ok now look at this video. And read this post, it's long but it's worth the effort. That's the toolset for Love. He wrote that. It's awesome. His ideas on development are inspired.

I've been following this for a while now, since I saw this article. But the reason for posting about it is that it looks like it's getting close to release. And I can't wait.

The Swarm is Coming

Swarm (working title) from matt ditton on Vimeo.

In the mad panic at the beginning of semester I totally forgot to post this video to the game I'm working on. Swarm is all made in openframeworks for the iPhone. There are also a bunch of support tools that I wrote in processing as well. More info soon.

It's over, and now we're free.

Pandemic Brisbane closed it's doors yesterday.

I joined at the start of DAH2 and in the four years I was there I experienced the best working environment that I've ever known. If there are better teams and better people out there then I pray I find them one day.

At the end of DAH2 when THQ took the license back, The Bravo Team picked their name first so we became known as the Alpha Team. We moved upstairs, Bravo started up their game and we just kept working. That first 9 months of pitching and experimenting and trying to nail the game idea was amazing. It changed the way I work, the way I look at the job. The respect we had for one another was impressive. That doesn't just happen. It's built, day by day.

I equate it to a band that just kept playing, every month we got better. You'd know how every person would play. You'd know how everyone could shine. We got tight and the product was amazing. One day people will see it. And it'll be seen for what it is. The best game we'll all never finish.

Your faithful tech.

MattD

GCAP 2008 - And now my talk

Some wonderful people posted the entire talk on you tube. That's brilliant I was told no one got it. So here it is...

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3 (this is the one with the pretty examples!!)



Part 4 (more pretty things here)



Part 5

GCAP 2008 - Slides from my talk

On Friday I gave a talk at GCAP. The topic was on teaching artists to program and how this can benefit the whole team. It was a chance to show off some of the experiences I've had through the year while teaching processing.

It's also got a few tips on how to write code for other artists in your team to use. The whole thing went over well, and as promised here are the slides from the talk. If I'm really lucky maybe I can get a recording of it.

the link to the doc

StarCraft 2 now Diablo 3, this is the end of days.

Diablo 3 was announced today. After seeing the game play video I understand that whenever it gets released I do not want a game coming out anywhere near it. You can't fight that kind of awesome. Just stand back and think "So that's how you do a teaser video".

The release of any game by Blizzard will cause a singularity that will destroy the non-Blizzard shelves of your local gaming store. If you're making a PC game right now, you'd better hurry and get it to market. When Blizzard releases Starcraft or Diablo you aren't going to sell anything for about six months.

Of course knowing the Blizzard release system (roll 5 D20, 100 means it's ready) you've probably got a bit of time.

MattD

Classic lines from game dev.

"I added this thing so that you can slow down time.
I couldn't speed up time cause things explode"

Matt Clark


I have a very weird job.

Some damn funny game design over at Mazapan.

You Have To Burn The Rope

rock paper shotgun did a walkthrough

Absolute genius.