Collaboration & Communication in Game Design

Hey. Long time no see. Anyway...

Earlier this year, I gave a talk on collaborative design for a couple of conferences. One of them, Game Forum Germany, was kind enough to videotape all of the sessions, and host the videos on their site. Check out my talk here.

Some post-watching-myself-on-video thoughts:

• Game Forum Germany is an awesome conference. If you ever have the chance to attend or speak there, I highly recommend it.
• Thanks yet again to the people at Harmonix who suggested ideas for this talk. They helped guide and flesh out my ideas nicely.
• I guess it's hard to talk about my job without seeming extremely egotistical. (And while I probably have an overly full opinion of myself in some contexts, I usually try to keep it to myself.)
• I sincerely hope I did right by all the other people involved in the various anecdotes I tell. I tried to present things as honestly as I could, based on how I recalled them, and the need to present things as concisely as possible. (If you think I failed, let me know!)
• I gave the wrong number of QA members who are on the Beatles vocal harmony strike team! Sorry Matt or Mike!

-- ChrisF

So.
It's been at least five months since I last blogged about anything significant. Let me use my last day of vacation to do some catching up.

First off, Ian is a great, great baby. He's happy, and healthy, and a cute little troublemaker. He's generally sleeping well (though we might be at the start of an expected sleep regression, and getting all three of his seemingly required naps to happen is a challenge on any given day), and he can get to sleep on his own, which has improved the quality of all of our lives. He's pulling up on everything, and occasionally cruises along things about a foot at a time. He's mostly army-crawling, though occasionally does short, deliberate stretches of full crawling.

Work-wise, I've finished my work on The Beatles: Rock Band, and I'm extremely proud of the game. New projects are starting up, and I'm sorting out how exactly I'll be involved in them. Harmonix is a great place to work, and I'm lucky to be there.

Beyond that, um, I'll just show some baby pictures.

Designer E-mail #2 is Up.

Dan has compiled another set of designer thoughts on designer things. There's some commenting going on in the post on Dan's blog, so instead of copying it here, I'm going to send you there.

E3!

Hey --

DanT, fellow designer and Harmonix rabble-rouser, has gotten a bunch of the HMX designers (myself included) to do a design roundtable.

You can find it here.

P.S. I promise there'll be more baby stories and pictures soon. As my co-workers can attest, there are plenty to go around.

I should write something.

It's been a pretty good holiday season, more tiring for all the Ian-wrangling, but more mellow in many respects. We traveled and did less this year, and Ian was charming and relatively meltdown-free during all this time.

This is the time for profound thoughts as one year ends and the next begins, but I seem to be in short supply. I can't wait for next year, when Ian will be a lot more invested in the holiday proceedings.

Take care, all.

Merry Christmas.

Not so much of an update.

We're busy, Ian's cute as hell but he's still having some trouble sleeping enough. But Kim is dilligently working on various strategies to improve things, while under self-imposed pressure and far too little sleep. She won't accept the compliments, but I'm really impressed and proud of her.

In the meantime, here's a set of pictures from a couple of weeks ago.


(I know you all mainly tune in for the pictures.)