Valve has announced a new design platform for PC game design called Steamworks, available free of charge. The suite of tools seems to focus on easing some production-level issues rather than design issues. This includes smoothing delivery of the game through Steam’s retail channel, as well as providing certain frameworks to improve a game so delivered, notably in the multi-player arena.

Most notably in my opinion is the inclusion of hooks for getting play data back from the users once they’ve been launched.  This type of data gathering immensely helps developers get information about how the players are playing their game, and thus to take this data back and use it to improve designs for future titles.

All of this of course depends on the utilization of Steam as the delivery channel, something very few large studios would want to commit exclusively to.  I’ve asked Jason Holtman how well Steamworks would interface with XNA, as these two technologies seem to me to be functionally, if not technically, complementary.  If I hear back from him, I’ll update this page.

Summer 2008. Want.

If LucasArts is telling me that this is what a talented team can create when several highly specialized engines are integrated, then I will tell you that you’re looking at the future of development. Despite my earlier criticism of Assassin’s Creed, they had a similar philosophy in that the gameplay should be inherently fun. Assassin’s Creed did that in spades, the problem was that they beat the same mechanics until they lay raw and bloodied on the floor, and I lost interest in doing the same tasks over and over again. Hopefully The Force Unleashed will do a better job of wrapping more into the game than throwing people around like dolls. If they do, this game will set a new bar for action developers.

A natural consequence of this is that engine developers will begin to create standard interfaces to which they will conform. This will enhance the interoperability of these engines, and make it far less expensive and difficult to get the effects you’re seeing in the video below.

I’m sure most of you have heard of the debacle with the news network that time and time again has me wondering what kind of people actually believe the things it tells them, Fox News. I could spell out a lovely rant about why this insipid media station pushes nothing but beligerent nonsense that rarely has a single fact straight, but I think X-Play’s Adam Sessler can do it for me. Enjoy.

Nabeel has a good write-up about the popularity of Facebook games (not very) over on his blog.  I’ll do a post on my thoughts about Facebook games when I finish with Chris Eliasmith’s patented Neurological Engineering Assignment of Insane Difficulty (Nothing like the sweet mix of Fourier transforms, Convolution Integrals, Monte Carlo Simulations, Matlab, Neuroanatomy, and Theoretical Neuroscience).

This past fall I mentioned that I was off to Microsoft to work in on Visio as a Program Manager.  I had a great time, and learned a lot from the excellent folks over there.  In fact, I liked Microsoft so much, I’ve decided to go back there full time.  At the end of June when I’m finished here at Waterloo, I’ll be packing up and leaving Toronto for the rainy shores of Redmond, Washington.  My new position will be as a Software Development Engineer in Xbox.com.  This will likely expose me to a lot of the new developments Microsoft is planning for the future, which obviously I won’t be able to talk about here.  I will make an effort to post any interesting things from inside Xbox that are safely scrubbed but may not have floated out through other channels, insofar as I am able to do so.