So, uh, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, hasn’t it? I guess this would be a good time to mention that, although I still have my day job, I think I now finally count as “a real game developer”, because the awesome people at Novint Technologies contracted me to create a full-length version of In the Pit and adapt it to work with their Falcon haptics controller, which I did, and now they have the finished game and are deciding if they want to tweak it any more beyond what I did for them before they publish it. So, yay! In the meantime I also ported my full-length version of In the Pit to the XBox 360, just in time to submit it to the Dream, Build, Play competition, so hopefully that will also get it some attention, although I’m not holding my breath on it winning, since it’s up against 284 other entries (up from 69 entries last year!).

I’ve also gotten into pinball machines a bit; I fixed up a Mars: God of War machine over the summer, and flipped a Big Brave, I’m picking up a Firepower over Thanksgiving, and I’m also working on a custom pinball machine. Pinball is an interesting hobby, and is a lot more different from video games than I thought it would be; most of the enthusiasts are retirees, so everything tends to be quite a bit more lackadaisical. Pinball is also “mostly dead”, with only one company still making machines, so although there is some froth about “the next new game” (which, by the way, is a pinball adaptation of the TV show 24 for some reason), the vast majority of discussion and interest is about old machines, stretching all the way back to the 1940s. I’ll write more about pinball later. In the meantime, if you’re interested, I photo-journalled the whole process of fixing up that Mars: God of War machine here, with lots of notes full of basic information about pinball and things that I learned while I worked on it.

Oh, also, I got an XBox 360, primarily so I could test In the Pit and make sure it worked on it — which it does — and now I’m getting caught up on 360 games. It’s kind of surprising to set a ridiculous goal for myself like “I’ll buy a 360 when I have a game completely developed for it and I have to buy one so I can test it” and then actually achieve that goal.

So, that’s my summer in a game-specific nutshell! More of the usual rantings, musings, observations, and odd news to follow! (Actually, hopefully less of the rantings, since I’m making an effort to be less cynical.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.