From fellow TEDFellow Angelo Vermeulen. Check out his presentation on his project, Biomodd – a computer that coexists with a living ecosystem.

Last week two German guys came by the office to see what TGC’s studio is like and to chat about our approach to game design, in relation to a talk I’m giving in Dusseldorf this November on making a large impact as a small studio.

INNOVATION STUNTMEN: THATGAMECOMPANY from Innovation Stuntmen on Vimeo.

gamesauce recently sat down with our producer extraordinaire, Robin Hunicke, and discussed what it’s like working with emotions, and how she strives to be great at what she does. (We think she is. Pretty great, that is.)

“‘Just try to make everyone’s experience positive and creative and without friction,’ she suggests. ‘Obviously, one person can’t do that. A producer alone can’t make the working experience smooth and efficient and joyous, but one should try as best as they can. A lot of that is having conversations about areas where skills can be developed, how behaviors can be improved or just giving someone positive feedback about doing something really fantastic.’”

“‘What I strive to do every day, is to leave the office having made a measurable impact on everyone’s work experience. That could be anything from organizing a meeting about a feature I think needs help to ordering a whiteboard and helping someone hang it up so their ideas can be expressed more freely than being scrawled on little pieces of paper.’”

http://gamesauce.org/news/2010/09/07/robin-hunicke-on-working-with-feeling-how-to-be-a-great-producer/

CheekyNana’s DeviantArt Page

“Small developers struggle to compete in a $20 billion video game industry dominated by behemoths such as Electronic Arts and Activision. But one of them, thatgamecompany, has found both commercial success and critical acclaim by making games that don’t play the way anything else on the market does.

Thatgamecompany debuted in 2006 with Flow, a game in which gossamer microbes grow and evolve by consuming rival organisms. Next came the 2009 game called Flower, which challenges players to collect flower petals by using wind gusts and flying through a vibrant audio-visual landscape of fields and wind turbines.

‘Why make a game that’s going to compete with an EA or Epic-style game, when they have so many more people and more time and money to accomplish their projects?’ says Kellee Santiago, president of thatgamecompany. ‘There’s no way we can compete.’”

For the full article, click here.