With the introduction of player voice in Mass Effect, BioWare is taking on change in its writing style and company culture. Kevin Barrett, Director of Design at BioWare Edmonton, shares insights on these changes in a company that established itself as the premier developer behind text-branching role-playing games such as Baldur’s Gate and continues to promote the importance of writing in games.

“It may not seem like a big deal, but giving the player’s character a voice has really opened the door to cinematic presentation of dialogue exchanges. As soon as you go from mute player responses to cinematic, interactive dialogue, the writer’s responsibilities evolve significantly.
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ECD Systems is holding its yearly contest for independent games. Voting began March 14, and they’re still taking submissions. The winners are up to the public, which means you still have a chance to make it if you enter your game!

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So what’s it like being an artist working with a handheld like PSP? Nathan Phail-Liff, Lead 3D Artist at Ready at Dawn Studios, knows just what goes into making a successful and visually pleasing game within the limitations of the handheld world from his work on God of War: Chains of Olympus. And if you ask me, the graphics are so stunning that it looks comparable to anything you’d find on console.

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Hey, good news for anyone who wants more 3D support out of Torque X 2.0. For those of you who are out of the loop on game engine goodness, Microsoft’s (essentially free) XNA game engine also has a compatible engine from popular independent games developer and distributor GarageGames–Torque X. Torque X allows developers a chance to deploy and test their game on retail Xbox 360 units through Microsoft Creator’s Club.

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If you’re a woman or minority, heads up for a new $45,000 scholarship from the ESA Foundation for students pursuing game education. To be applicable, you must want to attend for full-time study at accredited four-year colleges and universities. Although applications for this round are due on May 15, 2008, the ESA plans to add fifteen more scholarships for fields including graphic design, computer science, animation or programming, digital entertainment or software engineering.

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Although already well known for its dialog interaction in past role playing games, BioWare’s interactive narrative game play was upgraded by strides when it went for increasing the emphasis on designing cinematic interactive dialog in Mass Effect. This is where Ken Thain, Lead Cinematic Designer at BioWare, stepped in and got an opportunity to incorporate his past experience with making machinima into the actual core game play.

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Massive Entertainment Lead Artist Rodrigo Cortes gave us insight on the art development of World in Conflict, a real time tactical game with a heck of a lot of artistic details that flesh out the environment and the combat during gameplay. For all you console gamers out there, keep an eye out for this PC title as it gets ported to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in the fall.

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For all of you independent game artists and designers out there, the IndieCade 2008 festival, which is happening July 10-13 in Bellevue, Washington, has recently announced an open call for their game contest. Not only are they taking straight up art games, but also commercial, abstract, serious, and alternate reality games in a variety of interactive forms.

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GameCareerGuide.com, Gamasutra’s game education sister site, put out a stellar article from Robert Chang of iWin about what’s involved in being an Art Director. Robert started off doing textures and concept art for various companies, and soon became an art director, but later left game industry in 2001 to pursue his own projects. With years of experience and having returned to game industry as a studio art director at a game development and publishing house, Robert has great advice for any game artists aspiring to advance their careers.

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Much like the Elans, a few golden games led the way for most of the awards at the 8th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards. Valve’s unique genre-crossing puzzle shooter Portal took away Game of the Year, Innovation, and Best Game Design. The Best Visual Art award went to Boston/2K Australia’s BioShock, which also won Best Audio and Best Writing.

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