A Spanking Good Year

DeathSpank made the 20 Best Games of 2010 list over at Wired.com. Very cool! Seems like yesterday he was just a lump of modeling polymer, not to mention a pitch document that languished on the desk of publishers all over the world.

To celebrate, here are some random images, including some concept work for stuff that never made it into the game, and a screen mockup dating back to the very first concept document.

CK

OddWA #21 - Batsquatch!

Happy Halloween!

I had to do this one simply because everyone should hear the greatest word ever invented: Batsquatch. Yes, as if a gigantic woodland hominid wasn't enough, there are also tales of a version that flies.

In 1994 the Tacoma News Tribune published an account of a young motorist who described a disturbing encounter with a gigantic, blue, bat-winged figure with red glowing eyes on a remote country road near Mount Rainier.

Since then, several other stories of equal... um, credibility have added to the legend that is Batsquatch. Batsquatch sightings often include grisly animal mutilation, so this could be a vacationing Chupacabra, or his not-so-original northern cousin. But let's not judge. If there isn't a Batsquatch I think everybody can agree that there certainly should be one. The name is just too good.

Again, with feeling: BATSQUATCH!

CK

OddWA #20 - Starvation Heights Sanitarium

In 1908 Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard published a book called Fasting For The Cure Of Disease. Her theory on undergoing systematic starvation to overcome illness was considered revolutionary by some, and total quackery by others. Hazzard had enough of a following that she opened a sanitarium in Olalla, Washington, giving it the idyllic name Wilderness Heights. Clients flocked from around the world to try her starvation cure.

But something wasn't quite right about Dr.Hazzard's little institution. Some 40 patients died in her care. True, these were often people who were already desperately ill, but was she really supposed to perform autopsies in her bathtub? It also came to the attention of authorities that jewelry and clothing from Hazzard's recently departed patients often ended up in her own wardrobe.

The first chapter of Wilderness Heights came to an end when a British heiress died at the sanitarium, but not before Hazzard forged her signature in an attempt to gain her estate. A surviving sister testified at the ensuing trial and Hazzard was sent to prison for manslaughter in 1912.

She was paroled just two years later and eventually reopened her sanitarium in 1920 (minus her doctoral credentials). This burned to the ground in 1935, never to rise again.

It's a fitting twist that Linda Burfield Hazzard died in 1938 while undergoing her own starvation therapy.

CK

OddWA #19 - Ghost Ship of The Columbia

The waters near the mouth of the Columbia are sometimes called the Graveyard of The Pacific, and with good reason. There are around 2000 recorded shipwrecks in the vicinity.

Part of this total was a large fleet of fishing boats, most of which capsized in a sudden squall that appeared suddenly on May 4th, 1880. Contemporary newspaper accounts listed anywhere from 60 to 350 crewmen lost in the storm.

Another story emerged from this already epic tale. Several survivors told of a mysterious ship that sailed smoothly through the wreckage, completely untouched by the storm. After the unknown vessel glided calmly through the chaos, it was never seen again.

Was this story the result of delirious survivors? An unparalleled feat of navigation? Naw... A ghost ship is way more fun.

CK

A Print Institution Reborn

Some people read these things called "magazines." These are created when people grind up some trees, make flat white stuff called "paper," then print words and pictures all over it. It's like a blog, but you can smack spiders with it. One of the finer publications is Gamefan, which was resurrected a few months ago.

There's a nice, if somewhat dense, interview with me in this month's issue. Editor Dave Halverson grilled me on all sorts of topics, including DeathSpank, some recent artwork, Kinect and my projects at Microsoft. Pick up a copy at your local Best Buy, Target or Barnes & Noble if you really want to know what I think about... stuff.

CK

The Little Concept That Could

I've worked on over ninety thousand games with my friend Ron Gilbert. Or nine. I forget. One of our better known collaborations concludes this week with the release of DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. Yes, that lovable dumbass with the stentorian voice appears once more in the downloadable game cosmos. The epic story, first conceived in the seedy back alley of a rant-filled blog, draws to its momentous end.

Ron and I started thinking of DeathSpank as a character back in 2004. We schlepped the original concept all over the world, starting with a trip to Europe in 2005. Even after years of "no," we kept adding details to the character and his world. It just kept growing. We couldn't stop it. One vivid memory is the sight of the proto-story and puzzle tree document spread out on Ron's kitchen table as we explored the nooks and crannies of the initial design in 2006. It was a tough decision when I finally made the call to get a "real job," mostly because my family seems to require "food" and "shelter." It turns out you can't live on the sweet, sweet taste of justice alone.

Sidebar illustrations from the original pitch document for DeathSpank, circa 2005.

That DeathSpank was made at all is still astounding. People who create characters are used to having them knock around inside their heads. It's always kind of surprising when they escape and actually appear in the real world where everyone else can see them. But ideas are easy. The endless hours of detailed, hard work is the tricky part. DeathSpank's existence is a tribute to all the awesome, smart, funny talented people involved in its creation and development. Those who weren't awesome, smart, funny or talented were only minimally inconvenient, so that's pretty great too in an odd sort of way.

Head shape work 2008

I'm proud of the big lug. I took a chunk of sculpting stuff and molded the basic shape of his heroic noggin with my own hands. I iterated on his visual design, taking him from a glorified stick figure to a fleshed out hero who could walk and talk and kill lots of things.

Getting closer! Almost there...

It's the end of a six year saga where I've gone from co-conspirator, to consultant, to a distant observer who feels pride in what the concept ultimately accomplished. When it's all said and done, I have to say the world is better off with DeathSpank in it.

Randomly selected reviews!

IGN
UGO
Gamespot
G4



CK

Verbosity You Can Touch

One of the casual download games I made a few years ago just got revamped and all tarted up for the iPad. Word Spiral HD launched on the App Store last night. I have to say, it seems to work even better with a touch interface than it did with a mouse. Check it out if you're a fan of word games. Or beaches. Or very laid back Reggae-ish music by (Voodoo Vince composer) Steve Kirk.

UPDATE: Sorry to say, we didn't get around to updating the game to the latest version of iOS, so it's off the App Store for now. We might re-launch someday but life has been a bit too busy lately.

CK

OddWA #18 - It's A Bird(man)!

Kenneth Arnold really started something when he reported those saucers in 1947. Soon, the rest of America had UFO fever. Newspapers were crammed with the latest sightings of saucers and "men from Mars." And it didn't stop with boring old disc-shaped stuff. Several newspapers in Southwest Washington carried stories of "flying men" in 1948, the most famous being in Chehalis and Longview.

In Longview, laundry workers described a trio of flying figures in drab uniform-like flying suits cruising casually over the city on April 10th. Some have theorized that what the workers saw was actually an early attempt at paragliding, though that would be about 14 years before the earliest known prototypes.

So, was it men from the (not-too-distant) future? Aliens? A secret government program? Others might argue that dry-cleaning chemicals should be handled with care.

CK

OddWA #17 - That Sinking Feeling

It's amazing what can transpire on a single, odd, triangular piece of ground. Northwest locals may recognize the Sinking Ship parking garage from Seattle's Pioneer Square. If you're in the market for a cursed piece of land, this fixer upper has loads of potential.

Some local historians think this is the site of the original Suquamish fishing camp of Chief Seattle (Sealth). The remaining history includes the town hanging trees and an owner who mysteriously dropped dead. Maybe it's the shape of the lot? Seattle's assortment of founding fathers each started building their own street grids at different angles. When the streets finally met up, odd locations like this one were pretty common.

The Occidental Hotel, just right of center. Copyright the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

For a time, this was the location of the Occidental Hotel. This grand structure with it's mansard rooftop and column-festooned façade presided over the intersection starting in 1884. But it burned to the ground in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, along with most of downtown Seattle.

The Seattle Hotel, or the Hotel Seattle as it was originally known.

The last real building before the garage was the once-elegant Seattle Hotel, which fell into disrepute and fiscal problems not long after it opened its doors. One lucky owner, Henry Kubota, bought the hotel weeks before Pearl Harbor, after which he and his family were hauled off to Washington's internment camps. A dapper gent named Edward Camano Cheasty ran Seattle's best clothing store from a corner of the hotel building, only to watch the city's commerce move further north. Cheasty jumped from a competitor's rooftop in 1914.

The Sinking Ship itself was built by a leasing company who bilked the land owners (still the Kubotas) in 1961. They were promised a lovely office high rise and got the now-infamous off kilter eyesore instead.

Some good did come from all this woe and tragedy. The new parking structure was a shock to most Seattleites. The city rallied around the issue in the early 1960's and created the Pioneer Square Historic District, protecting other old edifices from a similar fate.

That's nice, but I'm still not parking my car there.

CK

P.S. If you want to read more about all the cursed goings on at this location, take a look at Sid Andrews' book, "Boren's Block One: A Sinking Ship." I also recommend Robin Shannon's book "Seattle's Historic Hotels."

Sweet Release

Electronic Arts and Hothead Games announced a release date for DeathSpank today. It's July 13th on PSN and July 14th on Xbox Live Arcade.

The game has come a long way from the random doodle of a bumbling hero in my sketchbook all those years ago. There were times Ron and I were pretty sure the game would never see the light of day, especially after shopping the concept in every corner of the planet. It's ironic. A concept that started as a parody of games from a cartoon that mostly made fun of the game industry was picked up by one of the biggest game publishers in the world.

It's somehow fitting, since a smaller publisher simply cannot contain the mighty awesomeness that is DeathSpank. Props to Ron who followed our initial vision for DeathSpank all the way to Canada, the fine folks at Hothead Games in Vancouver, B.C. and everybody who gave their blood, sweat, tears, emotional support and tacos to make the game happen.

Evil may not be 100% vanquished, but I'm feeling way less downtrodden knowing DeathSpank is about to be unleashed.

CK

DeathSpank: My Clip Runneth Over

It's handy to have something I worked on nearly, almost, kind of about to be unleashed on the world. That means I can post stuff and do very little work.

Here is the latest. It's a quick teaser from the lovely people at Hothead Games. It reveals some of the story in the upcoming DeathSpank game. I fondly remember the first orphan-related story & design sessions with Ron some time earlier this century. We knew then that DeathSpank would be something special.

And wrong. Remind me again why it took so long to find a publisher?



DeathSpank: Now with 20% more orphan!

CK

Impending Spankitude

My old pal Ron has been hitting the PR circuit for a little game we cooked up a few years ago called DeathSpank. Ron was sequestered in Vancouver, B.C. for the last couple years working on the game at Hothead, but has finally emerged from hiding to proclaim the game pretty much, kinda totally finished.

Here's a link to some hands-on impressions, first from Joystiq.

And from Gamespot.

Look for DeathSpank on some form of shiny box with blinking lights near you soon!

CK

OddWA #16 - Lost Lakes of Gold

When Captain Ben Ingalls was separated from his army unit in 1855, he must have thought it was his lucky day. His misplaced survey expedition was replaced with a gold strike of epic proportions. Ingalls claimed he found a series of lakes, each surrounded by heaps of high yield gold quartz. The lore around this tale usually includes a huge earthquake driving Ingalls from his camp in the middle of the night.

Ingall's hastily hid a map, but neither it or the lakes were ever seen again. Ingalls himself was killed by a firearm mishap during his first attempt to locate the strike in 1861. Subsequent trips by friends and their descendants have never revealed the location of this fabulous lost treasure.

The story of that earthquake has since merged with ones from a huge earthquake that rocked Washington in 1872. That temblor reshaped a number of peaks in Washington's interior, and temporarily dammed the Columbia River (allowing local tribes to stroll across the river bottom). Many familiar with Ingall's tale think the three lakes, if they were ever real, are now buried beneath vast piles of rock, not to mention heaps of myth, hearsay and rumor.

CK

At War With My Friends

I've been a Senior Design Director at Microsoft Game Studios for nearly a year now and I've had the pleasure of working on some damn cool things. I work in an incubation group. We get to experiment with new concepts while pitching in on games across the studio. We also build games ourselves as we explore wacky new ideas. I haven't been able to talk about anything I'm doing, until now. One of our efforts just launched on Facebook. It's called Match Defense: Toy Soldiers.

Toy Soldiers is a truly awesome game for Xbox Live Arcade. It will launch during the upcoming Block Party campaign on XBLA, and it's one of my favorite games in a long time. Really. I can't stop playing it. Signal Studios has created a masterpiece. The game looks as good as it plays, and that's saying a lot.

Signal's brilliant upcoming Toy Soldiers game for Xbox Live Arcade.

Not too long after I started, my boss Ken Lobb asked me to think up a basic idea for a Facebook companion game for Toy Soldiers. I was already a huge fan of Signal's title, even at that early stage, so I whipped up a quick mockup for a puzzle game that combines a basic match-3 style game with elements of tower defense. Thanks to Ken and the rest of our team, the final result went way beyond that initial idea. Match Defense is a nifty little experience with some surprising depth. Ken's influence really shows in the layered scoring and a robust combo system that brings to mind some puzzle games of yore.

Sure, you can play it like any other swappy, matchy puzzle game, but you can also build huge combos, or go for pure accuracy, or speed, or a mix of everything. I've seen people debating in the hall outside my office about the best technique. Passionate arguments can be music do a game designer's ears. So can music, but that's not the point here.

This is more than a promotional item for the Xbox 360 game. The games are connected by a continous connection to an ongoing Great War. Scores from both games contribute to whichever side players choose: Allied or Central. Two countries are up for grabs every day. The first side to win eight countries first wins. After that, medals are awarded, the war begins again and players once again choose sides.

We expect to continue refining and tweaking the game, especially after the XBLA game is available. It's an early step, but an interesting one where two different kinds of games share a common connection that is as social as it is technical.

See you on the leaderboards!

http://apps.facebook.com/matchdefense/

CK

OddWA #15 - The Streamlined Ghost

There was a lot of excitement about the return of the former Washington State ferry Kalakala to our waters in 1998. After decades of service between Seattle and my home town of Bremerton, the magnificent streamline ferry was rescued, seemingly from oblivion on the shores of Kodiak island in Alaska and towed back to Puget Sound.

It's a funny thing. I usually champion any effort to preserve our local history, but I'm conflicted about Kalakala. It sometimes feels like we said goodbye to a cherished family pet, only to have it dug up and left on the porch.

Our memories of Kalakala from 1935 to 1967 can easily outweigh the awkward, accident prone vessel and concentrate on a the striking art deco creation it was. We can forget the fact that a coffee cup in the cafe would only be filled halfway, since vibrations that wracked the ferry made a full cup a dicey proposition. We can forget the times it plowed into docks and other ferries due to the poor design of its pilot house. We can just think back to the days it carried 5,000 shipyard workers per trip during World War II. We have years of great memories to look back on.

Kalakala is reported to be haunted by the requisite number of ghosts that hang out in spooky old boats, so I've included one in the second picture (it's tiny). This is meant to be Adelaide Bebb, a sad young lady who took her own life while aboard Kalakala in 1940.

But Kalakala is its own ghost. One look at its present state and that should be apparent to anyone. I sometimes wonder if it would have been better off out of sight, returning to the soil on a distant Alaskan beach.

CK

Dungeon & Dragons & Life

All I Need To Know About Life I learned From Dungeons and Dragons. An IgniteOKC Talk. from Chad Henderson on Vimeo.

Hilarious talk from IgniteOKC from Chad Henderson. It talks about the many things he learned playing D&D and how that applies to the real world. I can say without equivocation, I would not be a game designer today if my friends hadn't ruined my teen years by introducing me to Dungeons & Dragons. The jury is still out as to whether this is a good or a bad thing.

CK