I used to think that pitching a product to the VP of LucasArts was the scariest thing I’d ever done (though they did eventually say ‘yes’).  Or worse, pitching to Microsoft (who said ‘no’).  Or even worse, asking that girl out to the end-of-year dance way back in 7th grade (she said ‘yes’!  Yeah, now that I’m reconsidering it, this last one was definitely the most scary.  Also, she set me up with her cute friend afterward.  But that’s not really relevant to this discussion and I now know that my mother reads this blog, so I’ll just end this parenthetical here before I get into anything too traumatically embarrassing for my parents to know about).    My point is that the act of filming this video trumped all of these other things in terms of scariness.  And actually making it visible on my blog is scarier still.  Also, YouTube picked a fantastic picture of me to use for the video’s title frame, didn’t they?  (*dies of shame*)

Anyhow, this is a video that we shot as an introduction for the Game Development Masterclass concept that I was talking about last month.   As I’ve mentioned before, in this series I’ll be covering the sorts of game-making topics which typically don’t get covered on the Internet or in other locations;  things like camera theory, crafting satisfying player control, agency, immersion, player contracts, and so on.  The goal is for these topics to be engine/language/platform-agnostic, and to be relevant across most or all game genres.  They should be relevant both for industry professionals, and also for independent or hobbyist developers.

Unlike when this “introduction” video was shot (about three weeks ago), the series now has a name and a registered domain (“VGKnowHow”), but nothing’s over there yet;  I’ll be putting a site over there to support the videos within the next day or two, and the first real video should follow in about a week’s time.  The next video (technically #1 in the series) is on a very basic topic just so that I could get comfortable with talking to the camera.  I think my comfort improved a lot in the next video, but in a week you guys will be able to judge that for yourselves!   (I very nearly chose not to show this video;  I was highly tempted to shoot a new version of it, now that the series has a title and I’ve had more experience in front of the camera.  But we’re all friends here, and you’ll forgive me a few initial jitters, right?  :) )

Anyhow, I’m going to dash off to play board games and try not to obsess over having released this video.  Incidentally, the video is available in HD if you view it directly on YouTube, but there’s no real point to doing so for this particular video, unless you really want to see the stripes on my shirt.

Finally, I don’t usually ask people to leave comments, but I’m going to do so this time;  please let me know if the video is or isn’t showing up for you correctly (seems not to load for me, sometimes?), if the audio is okay, etc.  Plus, of course, any comments or ideas about topics you’d like me to cover soon.  I mean, I’ve been making games professionally for twelve years, I’m happy to talk about whatever you guys would most like to hear about.

Whatever you’d like to hear about, that is, except for that cute girl in 7th grade.  As mentioned earlier, my mother reads this blog, and we wouldn’t like to scandalise her.  ;)