The HG Blog

Baton Rouge, Lousiana. As a push to complement its existing strength in the movie industry and bolster economic development, the former French military post is moving to make itself one of the biggest centers for the video game industry in the United States. To publicize these moves, I was invited to fly down to the city to interview a cadre of very important people: the Mayor-President - Melvin “Kip” Holden - executives of the three video game companies already present in the city, a Professor of Louisiana State University, and a representative of the city’s animation festival.

Want to hear about the developments and my thoughts on the situation? Check out the article!

My opinions are so intellectually sophisticated. So I’m currently in a hotel in Baton Rouge, Lousiana. Why the hell am I in a hotel in Baton Rouge, Louisiana? Well! I’m covering a press event that’s featuring the initiatives that the city is undertaking to secure the state’s position as the third largest center for interactive entertainment in the country, after New York City and California.

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled for upcoming interviews with multiple CEOs, the Mayor of Baton Rouge, and members of the academic community!

“SOLO: Essays and Commentary on the Art of the Single Player Game” debuts at HeavenGames! This new, semi-regular column on the art and theory of designing single player games will highlight important issues in the development of games, asking challenging questions about the nature of gaming, whether games will ever meet the criteria for art, and offering practical pointers on how the best single player experiences are created by designers.

SOLO is written by Gordon Farrell, a long-time professional designer of single player campaigns for AAA games such as Empire Earth and Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. In addition, he has worked on strategy titles such as Caesar IV, Children of the Nile and BreakAway Games’ Middle Eastern city builder, Arabian Lords. He is currently Lead Writer for Reverie World Studios’ first game, Dawn of Fantasy, due for release in Fall 2008.

HGS regulars will recognize Gordon’s work as a staple of our download sections, from games as diverse as Age of Empires and Caesar 3, to both Stronghold 1, Stronghold 2 and Age of Kings. In addition to his HGS mods, he has highly-rated Civilization 4 mods uploaded at CivFanatics as well.

Gordon is on the faculty of New York University, where he teaches narrative theory for video games, theory of screenwriting, and advanced studies in dramatic art. He also lectures at Marymount Manhattan College in video games, script analysis, and theatre history. In 2002, Prima Games published his essay, “The Theory of Scenario Design.” His extensive professional and academic experience promises an exciting column filled with commentary on the art of games that will be both controversial and thought-provoking.

Oy! It’s been an active week. I met up with Zen about Cloud 9 (formerly HG 2.0), and things are looking most awesome. I’m excited to see what he and the rest of the tech team can come up with in the next several months concerning the software’s design. I’m hoping for a system where a lolcat image appears after every forum post. ADORABLE.

We also announced a hot new column that’s coming at the beginning of next month. The legendary Gordon Farrell - of HeavenGames scenario design, video game development, and professorial fame - will be writing about the art of scenario design in his column, titled Solo. Given his extensive professional and academic experience, I have no doubt it’ll be pure awesome.

What’s coming in the future? More HG main changes and surely some other sweet new stuff. Keep them ole eyes peeled.

See you on the battlefield!

Hey all, just wanted to give everyone an update on how HG 2.0 - now code named “Cloud 9″ - is turning out. I just read over Zen, Pecunia, and Elpea’s 24-page preliminary outline for the software specifications, and it looks awesome so far; it’s following the basic philosophy described previously in this blog. Jayhawk and I have given Zen our feedback and he’s getting started on the next stage: an extensive delineation of the ideas in the outline. I don’t normally italicize things, so what I mean by extensive is potentially a 1,000-page comprehensive specification of every single possible aspect of the Cloud 9 software. This stage is one of the biggest for this project, so it’ll be a substantial amount of time before we go onto the next, which will be a description of what actually needs to be done with respect to programming.

I’ll give you updates all along the way though, so you can see how HeavenGames will move on to the next level of serving its communities.

Yow, busy week. HeavenGames announced its sponsorship of ROFLCon, the rocksome convention about internet memery that’s being put on by a bunch of folks over at Harvard University. HG will have a booth and everything there, so that’ll be pretty cool. But what is more cool: they have Tron Guy. Tron Guy. No one can seriously tell me that they’d be willing to miss this:

We also got started on a new news system for HeavenGames main. It will still be a feed of news from all over HG, but will also have news from the gaming industry that gaming enthusiasts would be interested in. Another bit of news for HG is the start of the Battle of the Forums, a great contest that’s pitting all the forums at HG against one another. Check out the thread for more info!

So what’s coming soon? More new stuff for HG main, hopefully we’ll have our review system soon.

Okay, so this has been a long time coming. I and our Financial Director - Lazidane - are aggressively exploring the possibility of HeavenGames merchandise; t-shirts, hats, and the like that you can wear to show everyone that you’re a dedicated member of one of the best communities on the net! There’s a thread in Outside Discussions discussing this, so definitely stop by and give any ideas for HG merchandise or how we can sell it.

Continuing HeavenGames’ mission to serve and develop its community, it is revamping its main portal to provide general gaming information that all gaming enthusiasts will be interested in. First, news. Rather than being just a newsfeed for the rest of HG, it is going to be dedicated to becoming an important stop for gamers everywhere. Starting now, it will have industry news that gaming enthusiasts will want to know about, filtered for convenience and enjoyment. The newsies on the job are none other than long-time HG visitors Snook and aznninjahitman.

What’s coming soon? The esteemed Oliver - HeavenGames’ Art Director - is hard at work on a redesign of HG Main that better reflects the network’s mission. Morever, HG is exploring the possibility of having its own style of video game review. It is also investigating the supply of other articles about great games that are out right now but aren’t covered in a specific Heaven. HeavenGames Main will be for gamers, by gamers. Keep an eye out for more developments!

Battlefield Briefings. Okay, yeah, they don’t really apply to a blog in a video game vacuum. But man, they’e nummies. And I like to imagine myself as an armor-clad knight charging into battle…with a laser pistol. Laser pistol is clutch. Anyway, so what HAS gone on in HeavenGames? We’ve hired Oliver - the esteemed designer of both Starcraft 2 and World in Conflict Heavens - as our Art Director. (We decided to change the “Department Head” title to “Director,” the former is a wee bit too wordy.) The man is quite skilled and he’ll do splendidly. Baske has taken over the Marketing Department and is already hard at work; right now, he’s working on a contest that will pit the HG’s forumers against one another. Which forum reign as the champion? Keep your eyes out for information on how to enter and win glory across all of HeavenGames!

We’re also working hard on hammering out the specifics for HG 2.0, our automated content contribution system explained earlier in this blog. We realize that it’s taken a bit of time, but since this is going to be the biggest undertaking HeavenGames has had in years, we want to do it right. If I have my way, we’ll have a new logo with this somehow integrated in it:

Okay, what’s coming for HeavenGames? When we finish the specs for HG 2.0, I’ll post it on here for everyone to see and we’ll get to work on programming it. We’re also close to getting a new HG main, with gaming news, reviews, a new design, and all kinds of other scrumptious stuff. Also, Smash Brawl is coming out and there’s sure to be a self-indulgent videocast of me wrecking my friends with Zero-Suit Samus. Woooo!

See you on the battlefield!

A quick note to say that the RSS Feed for this blog works once again. We had some characters that were not encoded properly in the feed, which was breaking various XML parsers that download the feed.