Reporting on Ninja

Another couple quick links to some conversations about Ninja that I've been having lately. Again, preemptive apologies for the brevity, but as the game nears its final stretch, my ability to do anything but make it is quite diminished.

First, while Ben Kuchera was away doing E3 related things (I think?), he was kind enough to allow myself and a couple other indies take over the Penny Arcade Report. I, of course, wrote about stealth games. What I find interesting about them in general and then some things about Ninja specifically. I'm actually pretty darn happy with the piece, so please, give it a look.

Second, I talked to a couple of delightful Englishman over at MasonicGamer.com about Ninja as well. It's part of the third episode of their podcast, available here, and our chat starts around 1 hour, 22 minutes in. We talked about a variety of things, including some tonal/theme stuff that we haven't talked much about before. Was definitely fun talking to those guys.

And now, I submerge once again. But I did just hear we are going to be showing the game off at E3, so hopefully we'll have even more to talk about from that. I won't be going this time (I'm not much for E3), I'll just be here, lashed to my desk and endless refining, tweaking and polishing. This digital lathe, it shall be my bride. For the next month or two, anyway.

Undie Bundle

In case you missed the fervor, EA recently put together a Steam bundle of six games developed by independent developers via their EA Partners program. It was unfortunately named the "EA Indie Bundle" and there was a bit of ... contention about it.

Since I worked on many of the games in the bundle in some form or another, I talked to Rock, Paper, Shotgun about the whole thing. And some other stuff too, like the ethics of media consumption in general when nearly everything that gets made these days is ultimately owned by some asshole or another (read: usually Rupert Murdoch). Considering I've had massive respect for RPS for quite some time, getting to talk to them at length was actually a pretty darn cool thing for me.

Anyway, summary of my thoughts on the whole thing is, it's not a good name, but the games themselves were created under the right conditions for the right reasons by developers independent of EA. I think some of the people howling about the sale may didn't understand all the games were made by folks with total creative independence (and we really did, even though it sounds too good to be true). I just wanted people to understand the who and why of those games. If they do and still take umbrage, that's totally fair.

The sale does support all the developers though, and if you want six weird games from weird (but awesome) people, most of whom are actually Canadian (and the last sixth are Dutch), $20 is a darn good deal. If you're not cool with it, I understand. If you have more questions, I'm happy to answer them as best I can.

And with that bit of the past concluded, there should be some more Ninja excitement in the near future. More soon.