Full House Poker, on Xbox LIVE Arcade and Windows Phone 7.

I gave these guys ten bucks towards their indie game development costs and am pleased to see that they met their fundraising goal. The trailer shows a great visual style and intriguing situation. I think it’s interesting that a lot of experimental games are built on the foundation of a 2D platformer; that’s becoming the lingua franca of indie game design.

I’ll be speaking at the Redmond Digital Arts Festival this year, on March 19 from 1:30 to 3. I plan to discuss the intersection of story and game design. I think the stories players tell about their gaming experiences are the true narratives of gaming, not the cutscenes and dialogue and plot twists foisted by designers.

The Redmond Digital Arts Festival

The Redmond Digital Arts Festival creates the platform for modern day creativity by putting artists in the lime light. Come enjoy the show, connect with people and have fun!

I’m trying to figure out how to trigger the Kick achievement in the Inception app. The internet does not seem to know. The only hint I found from the game’s creators is that you need to do something when you hear that big bass note start to kick in, so I’ve literally been dropping my phone on the floor when that happens to see if that triggers the Kick achievement. So far, no luck.

This page describes the trigger conditions for all of the dreams released so far in the Inception app I described.

Dreams | Inception The App

Inception the app contains many dreams to discover and unlock. Here you can find out inside information about all of the dreams. This page will be updated regularly with reviews of each dream, describing how they feel, and a behind the scenes description of how they were made. They will also describ

So the Inception movie tie-in app for the iPhone is kind of interesting. It’s a set of unlockable auditory “dreams,” which are dynamic remixes of music from the film’s score.

When EA says that their Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO is sustainable at half a million players and very profitable at a million, I hear the drums of doom. No one since WoW has hit those numbers and I doubt anyone hit a million before WoW, either. The license won’t do it, any more than it did for Star Trek and that launched with a hit movie at hand. I am the Duke of Doubt.

Reading this PA strip after a week in which I rode The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh four times in a row, I’m reminded of one of my favorite videogame levels.

(Reposting this from my private profile, where I put it by mistake this morning.)

Penny Arcade! – My Friend Wyrmidon

Equal parts comics and commentary, Penny Arcade features Tycho and Gabe, the alter egos of creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Read about the antics and thoughts of the Penny Arcade crew, updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I spent the last couple hours reviewing game prototype proposals from various studios in response to a concept we gave them. It’s a sure bet that one proposal will always be forehead-slappingly awful and yep, one was. I guess they thought being laughably uninformed about their audience was meant as a competitive advantage?