Week 118
Well. We're more or less done on Smokescreen now, Adrian having had a de-brief with Alice over at Channel 4 this week. The site is now out of beta, with lots of nice improvements and fixes (along with an optional swear-word filter for our friends in the US and at schools!). We'll be writing up a full post-mortem of everything we learned during development and its live run in the future, but for now, it's time to enter it for lots of awards...
Lots of interesting conversations. Some very nice chats with the Greenwich Games Mafia--Duncan Gough and Alexis Kennedy--albeit separately, but with tremendous crossover in the area of storytelling in games. Oh, and lots of looking and pointing at this diagram, from Prospect magazine:
Speaking of Prospect magazine, they also covered Adrian and Philip's rather awesome Hivemind Challenge.
On the inside, we're talking lots about the structural problems faced by the Big Ad Agencies and how sometimes what they're measuring can be working against their long-term interests, as well as those of their clients. Suffice to say that some of our best friends work in agencies, and that we've had some very positive experiences as well as those that are less positive.
In other news, Misfits is going like gangbusters. Have you been watching it? It's on E4, and if this were conventional TV-land, you'd be out of luck, because next Thursday at 10pm, the final episode of series one is being aired. Fortunately, you don't live in conventional TV-land, you live in land-of-the-also-Internet, which means you can catch up with the entire series on 4OD. We're really excited about Misfits - it's a great show, and we've been able to do some wonderful things with the characters and the show's presence in terms of taking it out and off the television screen (or your monitor, if you're watching on 4OD). To that end, you've got one week left to follow Simon, Nathan and Kelly on Twitter...
We're also kicking off work on a few more development projects, so that's got our excitement up. Up so much, in fact, that we don't yet have inconspicuous codenames for them yet, unlike Berg.
Also: more planning. More, sketching, discussion around the kinds of games that we'll be building next year, along with the perennial attempts to answer the inevitable "Why don't you just 'do a Zynga'?" question.