A Game Development Meeting

I closed the book on the Studio Arete project yesterday for my part. We had a development team meeting for Karta Machiton at Tampere with Jarkko and a dozen programming students from the Tampere University of Technology, where I got an opportunity to unload the game will all its yet unsolved design issues on unsuspecting minds.

IP wants to be owned

So, we’ve finished our negotiations with Jarkko Vuori about my continuing role in his game development project. To sidestep any suspense, the short of the story is that I’m signing over any remaining rights to what I’ve worked on thus far for the project, and go on to other projects. The price is nominal compared to what I make doing layouts or normal writing jobs, but this particular 350 € is also the first money I make in computer games, so of course it is a bit of a thrill. I hope Jarkko will succeed on the groundwork I lay, or at least get a ride worth his money.

Intellectual Rights in Game Design

I’ve had a fascinating couple of days now, discussing the financial precepts of creating games with Jarkko Vuori. Our expectations and assumptions about the topic are rather different, so we’re having some trouble agreeing on how a reasonable and efficient game studio should distribute matters of responsibility, profit and ownership of intellectual property rights. Our differences are so marked that they’re really forcing me to question my own assumptions, worked out in long years of involvement in indie roleplaying game design. As Jarkko comes from a background of commercial software engineering, it’s no wonder that our ideas differ quite a bit in this regard.

The Art of Game Studio Maintenance

This is the post where I tell you more about the game studio we’re starting. There’s much I still don’t know about the project, but I can at least discuss the things that are important to me about it. The whole project is still to coalesce in terms of actual people having concrete roles in a specific game project (although it seems pretty probable that we’ll be doing Theomachy in some form, what with me doing actual write-ups and outlines about it and all), but we’re getting there. Meanwhile, I’ve been putting down some principles that I want to emphasize, and having a little bit of design done for the project’s imago. I even have a logo…

Concepting Karta Machiton

I got a logo, that makes my game cool:

Next, I’ll proceed to write an abstract of the game and it’s relationship to Theomachia. I have a Finnish-language concept document for this one as well, but Jarkko Vuori told me that he actually got some points from the Theomachia abstract that he’d missed in the Finnish version, so I figure that it’s better if I write this one from my head as well.

Art direction for Theomachia

One of the things I’m currently doing for my aforementioned game project Theomachia is looking for a couple of artists and perhaps a musician. I’ll be writing more later about the details of the game itself, at this point it’s sufficient to say that art is needed, and that art needs art direction. For now I’m using the awesome powers of my new blog to create a separate page right here for reference images and other notes about the topic. I’ll be adding to the material later, when I get more, but it’s a start. And now I don’t have to send this stuff by mail anymore when I want to show it to somebody.

Concepting Theomachia

OK, time to finally continue my story of this jarkkovuori-project I’m involved with. As I told you last time, I met Jarkko at Ropecon and we agreed to keep in touch; I sent him some old conceptual work I’d done for computer games, and he told me about the kind of game he’d want to make. In short order this resulted in me writing a couple of concept documents for a hypothetical massive multiplayer adventure game called Theomachia. It seems like an interesting little game concept, and I’ll tell you about it after discussing the process of concepting a bit, first.

How I met Jarkko Vuori at Ropecon 2007

This is an outright bizarre story, as far as I’m concerned. So… This happened at Ropecon, the large Finnish roleplaying convention, where I’ve been running an indie-game themed gaming area for the last couple of years. Ropecon is also where designers like to publish and promote their new games, which I was busy doing as well; my game Zombies at the Door! was published then and there, so most of my time was spent playing it with interested folks from all over Finland.