The one and only magazine for game development in Germany, Making Games, celebrates its fifth birthday this month and I had the honor to contribute an article to this anniversary issue. It’s a post mortem for The Deadline and deals with the issues of developing a game in only six weeks with the Unreal Development Kit.

Get your copy of Making Games and go to page 64 to read the whole story. Happy Birthday Making Games and keep up the good work!

The last days my girlfriend and I played DeathSpank and had a lot of fun with it! So much fun that she even was inspired to draw this:

As you probably already guessed she played as Sparkles while I was DeathSpank! Hero to the Downtrodden! Vanquisher of Evil! Dispenser of Justice!

P.S. I once slayed a dragon. Well… I didn’t really slay it and it wasn’t technically a dragon. What I meant to say is… that I once kicked a cat!

Currently I’m reading some really interesting books for my bachelor-thesis, which is about “Episodic Games”. Unfortunately nobody has written a book about this topic, yet. So I’m reading a lot of stuff about the episodic format in television and I must admit that there’s a lot I didn’t know about TV series before. But I’m also looking into some good books about game design in general and other related topics.

The following ones I found especially interesting so far:

• Third Person: A lot of very good articles from various authors about the topic of “vast narrative” in different media such as tabletop RPGs, literature, comics and of course video games
• Patterns in Game Design: This book isn’t really fun to read, because it’s written very academically, but it provides lots of good definitions for terms related to games (so it can be used as a “lexicon of gameplay”)
• “Previously on…”: This provides a deep insight into why modern prime time serials such as Lost, 24, The Sopranos and others became so successful in the last years
• 21st Century Game Design: A book that takes a look at the different target audiences of games in the 21st century. Not so much about the “how to design a good game” but more about “why design it in a specific way”

Hi everybody,

it looks pretty empty around here, doesn’t it?

Well I hope I get the time to fill this blog with something interesting. So long you can at least find out more about me and my projects.

Have fun!