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/

“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.

Thanks so much to the people at GamingUnion.net for listing thatgamecompany in its Honorable Mentions. Yeah, nothing really more to say. Just blown away by the company we’re keeping on that list!

Click here for the full list.

The GameCola, a video games news and reviews site, has listed “Flower” as #45 on their Top 50 Video Games Ever Made list. It’s so awesome to see our humble little game among such incredible titles! Thanks so much to the folks over a The GameCola!

cross posted from the Playstation Blog:

“As many of you have seen, Sony’s got a new brand message that we all believe in here at Santa Monica Studio. The ethos of make.believe is simple: believe that anything you can imagine, you can make real. We’ve had the fortune to work with thatgamecompany, an incredibly talented group of young minds with fresh ideas and complete conviction to follow their imagination. They’ve given the gaming world some of the most original and satisfying experiences to date, and we are very proud to be working with them. In the spirit of make.believe, check out the story of where they came from and how they succeeded. Enjoy!”