The Quixotic Engineer

Earlier this summer I took the annual trip up to my friend Thomas’s family cottage in northern Ontario. I relished the opportunity to disconnect for a while and enjoy the long weekend without the usual digital distractions. The cottage procedure prescribes reading, swimming, fishing and cooking. After the sun goes down, the card games come out: Hearts and Cribbage are local favourites.

However, this year we were joined by my good friend Sven, an Antiguan foreign student who just graduated from software engineering at Concordia with me. He brought a set of dominoes with him, and thought we might enjoy learning a Caribbean game he had grown up playing. He knew the game only as “Dominoes”, but a little post-trip research revealed it’s commonly known as “Cut Throat”.

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This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker’s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game. It also condenses some rough thoughts I’ve long held about motivation and game making. It took some effort to edit it into a coherent form, so I apologize in advance if it’s a tad rambling.

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Back in January, Kira, Thomas and I presented two games we were working on (Norwegian Wood and an alpha build of Pax Britannica) to the DemoCamp at CUSEC 2010. DemoCamp is a really cool informal event where programmers can show off what they’ve been hacking on. The rules are simple: 15 minutes maximum, no powerpoint, show working code!

I think the talk went really well, we got by with some laughs and a little bit of casual swearing. Big thanks to the CUSEC organizers, host Joey DeVilla and A/V tech Guillaume Theoret for giving us a chance to show off our games!

These past few weeks I’ve been fighting a pitched interstellar war against fellow game bloggers Matthew Burns, Ben Abraham and Michel McBride-Charpentier. Early in the game I had a long-standing alliance with Ben, and we peacefully teamed-up to take out our red neighbour “Dr Dinosaur”. I sold weapon technology to Matthew in his distant campaign against Michel, who was the winning player at the time. As I rallied my troops on my Eastern border to confront the next enemy, Ben and Matthew launched a treacherous surprise attack on my unprotected plank. I’m making a last stand on four planets now, while Ben and Matthew turn on each other for complete control of the galaxy.

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No Fun Games is proud to present Pax Britannica, a one-button real-time strategy game we made for the GAMMA4 design competition. Our team includes designers/programmers Kira Boom, Renaud Bédard and me, artist Daniel Burton and composer Ben Abraham. Unfortunately we were not selected and will not be showing off our game at GDC. However, we had a great time making the game and I’m glad we finally get to release it to the public!

Windows Download

Mac Download

Linux Download

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