Every year around this time we get an onslaught of X-mas cards in our mailbox, and realize that it’d be impolite not to return fire. Artists duck as I search for a volunteer and lead artists come tell me exactly how their schedule will be affected if I dare draft someone for  X-mas card duty,  yet each year I manage to find a new victim. This year, surprisingly, it was a Larian veteran who managed to get the job – you would think he’d know all the evasive maneuvers by now – but somehow he got cornered and was offered two options – do it or do it. Being a veteran, he did it quite fast however, and so well that I think he’ll be allowed a second term next year

This is going to be my last post for the year as I’m off for a holiday together with my family, but before going, here’s a bit of musings about how 2011 treated my studio & me.

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I’m sitting with an egg. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to you, but it’s a popular Flemish expression for ‘something’s bothering me’. We say – “ik zet met een ei”

The egg of it is that we’ve been making some fuzz about all the choices and consequences in Dragon Commander.  Right now however, all these choices & consequences only exist as text. And now we need to find a cost-effective way of translating all that text into animated dialogue.

Obviously, we also want whatever dialogue animation we put in the game to be as good as possible, so everybody’s saying – have you seen LA Noire ? And I say, yeah I’ve seen it.

Then I think of Divinity II -the Ego Draconis part, remembering that the voice recordings, lip-synchronization and associated dialogue animations required an intense piece of work, so I ask Benoit, the producer who was responsible for that , exactly how much voice did we have ?

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For quite some time, the team @ Larian has been showing remarkable constraint in the content they put in our games. Years of working with external producers telling them that you can’t say this, you can’t do that, be careful no to offend this group etc… have conditioned them to be … nice. Which is strange, as that’s actually quite counterintuitive for them

Now don’t get me wrong, they are a nice bunch, but occasionally you will hear comments that are inflammatory enough to ignite the fires of indignation in a  broad part of society. The funny thing is that it’s just their sense of humor, and they don’t mean anything bad by it, but as we’ve learnt over the course of the years, humor is very relative and you need to be careful if you’re releasing your games worldwide. At least, that’s the common doctrine.

So now we’re making Dragon Commander, and one of the things we’re trying to do with that  game is putting recognizable real world situations in a fantasy context. The game contains a RPG part that’s all about choice and consequence, and the idea is that you have to decide as a ruler how you want to organize the societies in the lands you’ve captured. That means you need to make political decisions, so we figured it’d be cool if we filled the game with situations that are very similar to the things we read in our newspapers every day.

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People sometimes ask me what I do on a day – well, here’s a snapshot. I can guarantee you that if I’ll do the same on monday, it’ll be very different which is what I love about my job.

Today was very educational, literally – this morning started with our minister of innovation Ingrid Lieten announcing the G@S project to the press which stands for Gaming At School. At the same time, all parties active in the project (for which I’m acting as a project lead) were having the kick off meeting. The aim of G@S is to democratize educational games – what that means in practice you’ll see when G@S is finished but we have ambitious goals – after all, a couple of million US$ are being pumped into the project, so it might as well be ambitious.

There was an awkward moment during the G@S meeting were I burst out laughing when one of the project partners inadvertently managed to mix the words “I work on Gas” and “I work for a certain mr Balloon” in the same conversation, very seriously and completely unaware of the effect it was going to have on me. I couldn’t stop laughing and I hope I didn’t offend both him and mister Balloon. Just writing it makes me smile, and I know it’s bad of me. Mr Balloon must be sick and tired of all the jokes around his name, but in my defense, I’m a game developer, so it doesn’t take a lot to get my imagination going.

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