I have been insanely busy for the past couple months. I have been working up to ninety-five hours per week. Is it worth it? I think so. I’m learning a lot.

Today we had two guest speakers, one from Animal Logic and one from retro Studios. Animal Logic is a visual effects studio in Australia that does special effects for films and for commercials. They are releasing their first feature-length film this weekend: Happy Feet. They worked on the special effects on The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, Moulin Rouge, Lord of the Rings, and numerous other recent movies.

Retro Studios is the only first-party Nintendo developer in North America, outside of the Nintendo of America headquarters in Washington state. They are located in Austin, TX, and are best known for the Metroid Prime series, which will soon see its third iteration released for the Wii.

The Animal Logic speech was very motivating, but was primarily aimed at artists and would-be producers. They only employ a handful of programmers, in their R&D department. I have to give the speaker credit, by the end I was contemplating a career in visual effects.

The Retro Studios speech was given by a software engineer and was much more technical, even going so far as to give us a high-level overview of the software architecture of Metroid Prime. The speaker talked a lot about Wii development and about the technical capabilities of the Wii. (Basically, it’s a Gamecube x2.) He also talked about the business practices used by Retro, a relatively small studio, in contrast with EA Tiburon.

There are three weeks left in the semester, including next week which is only two days long. Although I’m enjoying the work, it will be nice to get a little respite over the holidays.

The New Yorker has a very in-depth article on Will Wright and the game industry as a whole. It’s written for people who don’t know much about the history or state of the industry. I found it fascinating.

Considering I may be working for these people in the future; this is good news.

Edit: This also means ea_spouse has been revealed.

How to prototype a game in under seven days. (Gamasutra) This came in my feed from Joystiq this morning, though I read it a while ago. It’s a really cool sounding project at the ETC which had four students each creating a game every week for an entire semester. Some of the games are actually pretty fun! One of them even got a mention in PC Gamer magazine.

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Awesome. Now even MMOs are open to indie development. I think we could really be seeing a major shift in the games industry. As independent game development becomes more viable there will be a shift toward the individual auteur-game-designer building their project. In any art form the most creative pieces come from the mind of individuals. A panel of game designers in a boardroom at EA can no more design a great game than a panel of studio executives at Universal can create a great movie. Not that the big studios will disappear; they will still serve to promote, distribute, and finance games, just as movie studios do now. We could be entering a golden age for games.