June 2010

Monthly Archive

Another Castle Episode 19 – Richard Lemarchand

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 21 Jun 2010 | Tagged as: Another Castle

Industry veteran and lead game designer on Uncharted and Uncharted 2, Richard Lemarchand, sat down with us to talk about his career and his thoughts on the art of making games. Recounting his rise through the game industry Lemarchand touches on a number of other topics, including storytelling and the challenges of designing a multi-player cart racer. We also talk about indie and art games and whether he would ever consider leaving AAA development to work on more personal projects.

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 19 – A Conversation with Richard Lemarchand

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

Make More Tennis Balls

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 10 Jun 2010 | Tagged as: Opinion

Preface – Below is the text from a four minute talk I delivered at the Games for Change Festival in New York a few weeks ago. It was one in a series of talks organized by Colleen Macklin and Richard LeMarchand.

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So there were a lot of games, a lot of big games, released last year, some which I didn’t play and some of which I did, but what I played the most of, by far, is a little game called Shadow Complex.

When Shadow Complex was released it was compared mostly to Super Metroid, and this is a pretty fair comparison; they’re both side-scrolling action games with ‘lock and key’ style progression and large worlds to explore.

The thing is, the reason I played so much of Shadow Complex was not primarily for the ways it was mechanically similar to Metroid, which was the explanation for many people that praised the game. Instead I was drawn to one of the particular ways that the game could be played.

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