Back from Easter

Ah what a fine break we had for Easter.

The last few months have been intense to say the least. One of the truisms about being an Indie games developer is that you spend a lot of the time dealing with two competing pressures: Can we make the game awesome, and can we carry on paying ourselves!

Luckily we have a fantastic group of supporters in our investors. They share our vision to produce a really fab game about climate change that picks up where the original Climate Challenge left off and builds on the concept massively. The new game is on a global scale and should offer a very satisfying game playing experience. Like the original it won't be preachy. We all feel climate change is an incredibly important issue, but like you we don't like being preached to. Our agenda, if we have one, is to let you the player play with the options and make up your own mind on the best ways to tackle climate change.

And what about the science? Well this time we will have even more science in the game, but lots will be behind the scenes. That said however, there will be areas of data that for whatever reason we cannot get hold of - maybe it is not available to us gamer types, or perhaps it doesn't even exist. In those cases we will "guesstimate" from the probable data and will note in our science notes that the data is "iffy".

Climate Challenge 2010 is a game first and a science simulation a distant second. I hope that when you play our game it will get you thinking so you can go off and learn more, but what I really hope is that you have a damn good time and a lot of enjoyment from it :)

P.s. If you haven't yet - do join our Facebook group :)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=92217565125

I'm on holiday!

Just a short post to say that I am having a few days off and will post when I get back. But while I am away, in case anyone is reading this, I have a few topics that I might cover. Let me know via comments which (if any) are of interest:

1. Religion and Games: I did a session at GameCamp recently along with the always excellent Margaret Robertson (read her fab blog here: http://lookspring.co.uk/ ) and there were some interesting thoughts on games and god(s).
2. Games and Science: I will certainly write something on this subject soon, after all it is what we do for a living... :D
3. Games and Addiction: Rebecca Mileham raised some very interesting points in her new book, Powering Up (http://red-redemption.com/news/powering/) and they got me thinking...
4. Games and Piracy: Arr Me Mateys! Erm...actually I was more thinking about piracy and the intentional misconceptions that get floated around from time to time... here is a quote from something I wrote previously:

"I buy games from Stardock, which I personally feel is the best of the online games sires - no DRM, work all the time, and frankly they sell the kinds of games I like playing (especially on a day like today when I am stuck in bed with a nasty sinus thingie). Anyway Brad Wardell, Stardock CEO (the guy who runs Stardock) made a very interesting post on games and piracy that I wanted to point people in the direction of. He specifically addresses the falicy of blaming pircy for poor games sales. If you are a strategy fan - I highly recommend Sins of a Solar Empire, RPS has a good review on it."