Author: John Scott Tynes

This is a great write-up of some of the “productivity games” that groups at Microsoft have designed. Most are for internal use and are both specific to a project and limited to a fixed duration, such as a bug bash with leaderboards. There’s good stuff here, especially the lesson that productivity games are great for optional/volunteer efforts (“Help our team out for a week by playing this game!”) but more problemati

Gamasutra – News – Serious Play Conference 2011: Microsoft's 'Productivity Games'

At the Gamasutra-attended Serious Play Conference last week, two Microsoft presentations discussed

It’s easy to bash publishers, but this post-mortem on Pinball FX2 highlights a strength of Xbox LIVE Arcade: our veteran team of producers and designers who give genuinely useful feedback on games in development. In this case, Microsoft proposed some design features that turned out to have major impacts on the game’s success. Of course these guys also did something else right: hire their own PR guy.

Gamasutra – Features – Postmortem: Zen Studios' Pinball FX2

In this postmortem, Neil Sorens, creative director at Zen Studios, looks back on the two year-long development of October 2010 downloadable title Pinball FX2, the studio's

One of the best projects I’ve gotten to work on at Microsoft was Signal Studios’ game Toy Soldiers, the WWI tower defense + action game that shipped on XBLA. Signal went on to make this sequel, moving from WWI toys to 1980s Cold War toys — it’s basically a giant homage to G.I. Joe, Rambo, and all of that delicious hokum.

Toy Soldiers: Cold War – Xbox.com

The Cold War is decided when â80s era action toys come alive and wage war! Toy Soldiers: Cold War blends intense first person combat with addictive action strategy, whether youâre scrapping solo or jumping into the fray with friends. Battle in campaign, competitive, co-op modes or fight for the…

Some of my ex-Flying Lab peeps went on to join NCSoft’s Carbine studio a couple years ago, where they’ve been busily making a new MMO called Wildstar. It was finally unveiled today at Gamescom and this is the launch trailer.

We’re using a vast server farm to process voice recognition across all platforms — Kinect, Windows Phone 7, etc. The voice cloud learns and improves automatically from the new samples being sent up by users every second, which means it literally is better tomorrow than it is today. It’s how we’re enabling search on Xbox this fall, so you can say “Bing Batman” and Xbox finds Batman movies, games, etc., for you.

Microsoft adding more voice to Xbox, Windows Phone, and pretty much everything else – GeekWire

Speech technology from Microsoft's Tellme group is quickly becoming a bigger part of the company's products, starting with the upcoming revamps of Xbox Live and Windows Phone. Users will have more opportunities to use voice commands to interact with and control the on-screen experience — listening …

The Halo team is hiring a Senior Game Designer to work on franchise planning and new concepts. This doesn’t mean you’re in the trenches on the current Halo game; it means you’re incubating ideas for new Halo games. FYI.

Microsoft.com – Careers

In order to apply for this job, you need to create a resume/CV. By selecting Create Resume/CV, you will be given the option to either build your resume/CV field by field or to copy and paste your resume/CV into one text field. You can save an incomplete resume at any point.

Steel Battalion is coming back for controller + Kinect? As an employee of Microsoft I’d just like to say WHAT THE FUCK? Steel Battalion on the original Xbox was $200 and came with an enormous control panel covered in buttons and switches. It was punishingly complex and if you failed to activate the ejection seat when your giant robot exploded, it would erase your save file. I’m not kidding: single-player permadeath!

This is the New Kinect-Only Steel Battalion

Take a look at the debut trailer for Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, coming to you from Gamescom in Germany. New details are hitting as I write this as well, so refresh this for an update. The short-short version:

Our friend Darla played Call of Cthulhu last night for the first time and the adventure was Grace Under Pressure, which I designed with Jeff Barber twenty years ago. I’m glad my two-decade-old monster is still bringing the chills!

Shane kind of buries the lede here but the news is simple: we’re making a standalone Delta Green RPG.

GenCon 2011: An Unspeakable Return

GenCon is the one convention that I make sure to attend every year. There are plenty of local and regional conventions that I miss, either for lack of time (deadlines…

Our book Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity took home two Silver ENnie Awards at GenCon 2011, for Best Writing and Best Adventure. Congrats to our awesome team of writers: Warre Banks, Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, Kenneth Hite, Shane Ivey, and Greg Stolze.

And The 2011 ENnie Awards Go To…

The 2011 ENnie Awards, celebrating the best in tabletop roleplaying, have been announced with a whole collection of fabulous games, publishers, podcasts and more making the list. The winners are (from the ENnie Awards website):