Posts Tagged ‘xbox360’

Recently I mentioned Orc, and posted a short overview of the game — as a follow up to that post there’s a new section of the site devoted to Orc, which still has only the first bits of content and information available, but will serve as a repository for more Orc-related bits and pieces as I have a chance to gather them together for presentation.

There’s also a second new area devoted to a much smaller game, called Patterns of Light. Patterns of Light is quite experimental, and I don’t doubt for a moment it will be a catastrophic commercial failure! But, it serves as a useful test case for the XBox Community Games process, and has been a diversion from the considerably more sprawling development of other projects, like Orc.

For those who might interested, a new article in the fledgling “Games as Art” series of opinion pieces is on it’s way and barring any major course corrections is likely to begin a discussion of the need to treat technological elements of games as a part of their overall artistic merit.

I’ve taken the recent launch of Microsoft’s XBox Live Community Games as a signal that I should buckle down a bit and focus on a single project to take from concept to completion. I won’t say I’ve stopped fiddling with other projects and experiments (since, obviously, building a Knytt level is not a key step in completing a game for the XBox360…), but I have bent most of my major development efforts towards one relatively straightforward project lately. The project I’ve been working on was in close competition with a second one for a while, but ultimately won out simply because the level design requirements are much less finicky; the second project is still next on my list, and I plan to post about it here soon as part of this series of updates I promised.

Today, though, I want to offer an overview of Orc. To make things more interesting for you, and to express something about the spirit of the game, I will provide the information from the point of view of both a run-of-the-mill human being, and a mighty battle-hardened orc:

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