All posts by Jens

Leaving Lucas

LucasArts day 572. Last Friday was my last day at LucasArts. It’s been a fantastic time, but now it’s time for me to move on. During my time there I got to lead a design team working on experimental games focused on creating new IPs. As a designer and programmer having worked on both small and big this was an amazing opportunity to really focus on rapid prototyping and building things ground up. It’s surprising how similar and different things are when you work on 6 month projects versus 2 year projects. As we are constantly reminded nowadays, the games and entertainment industry is in rapid transition and it was a luxurious opportunity to be able to touch some of the fronts of that from within the hallowed halls of Lucasfilm.

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Story reflection

LucasArts day 112. So, I never followed up on GDC. The weather was beautiful and I had a great time seeing some of my old friends. I only had chance to attend one day of sessions but that meant that I got to see industry-legend Hideo Kojima’s keynote about Metal Gear Solids evolution and Keita Takahashi’s heart-warming talk about Noby Noby Boy. But the session that gave me most was the Experimental Gameplay Sessions. Again, it’s clear that innovation within games is often not coming from the established developers. It almost seems like we are returning to the age of the bedroom coders with very few right and wrongs. Continue reading Story reflection

What can you really do in a week?

LucasArts day 36. Last December, LucasArts did something that to my knowledge other companies only dream of. They dedicated a full week for the whole company to go nuts with creating game prototypes. No matter if you were a hardcore programmer or if you were a part of the marketing department; for one week, you got to get your hands dirty and try out that idea that you previously only had been able to talk about over lunch. Continue reading What can you really do in a week?

Celebrity visits

LucasArts day 22. I’m slowly starting to get settled in here. After a move into a permanent apartment last week, almost all the stuff related to my big move has been taken care of. I got my Social Security Card, all the benefits form are filled out, my banking needs are taken care of, and yeah… I bought an iPhone. I would estimate that about 80% of the LucasArts employees have that thing. Now I do as well.  Imagine that, being a developer for it and all.

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Automated game testing

Something that is very cumbersome (and boring) to do for every developer out there is the software testing. To combat that, you usually develop a number of methods that helps you track down bugs, for example automatic bug-reports and unit-testing.

One of the more interesting ones is automated testing. For games, this usually means that you have a system that simulates the player and automatically generates input for it. For my latest project Hyena. I’ve had the rare opportunity to play around with an application where the controls are so basic that it was actually possible to write a system that played the whole game for me.

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