Iron Man the movie hit the theaters yesterday, and the game hit stores. The PS2, PSP, PC and Wii are the ones I got to produce. The next gen SKUs were done by Sega’s own studio.

Last night we went to the movie, then home with the newly purchased game and I watched Jonathan play. The evening was a very cool ride, a happy culmination to 18 months of hard work.

When I produced Happy Feet, access to assets was complicated by the fact that the movie was being produced in Australia. Nevertheless, the whole team got to see the movie at various stages of its production. I had therefore seen it three times by the time it was released.

With Iron Man, the film crew was extremely open with assets, and we visited the set, witnessed some scenes being shot, met director, cast and crew, saw flight animation tests and the Iron Monger suit in the “flesh”, visited Stark mansion and saw Iron Man suit concept art, but I never read the script or actually saw the movie. Consequently, having been allowed access to some information, without seeing the finished product, just made the whole thing extremely tantalizing.

And last night was the biggest payoff a superhero fan could wish for. The movie is awesome, definitely up there with the first Spider-Man for superhero movies.

Go. And make sure you stay until the end of the credits

I mentioned recently that I’m now working as a freelancer. It’s probably a good idea to get the word out about the kind of freelance work I’m doing, so here goes.

What I’m most interested in is pretty much anything having to do with training, including in-class training, instructional design (training programs and materials), e-learning application design, and training consultancy. Right now I am designing a highly immersive online course for a client, a type of work which I’m finding, unexpectedly, to be quite close to game design. The big difference is that the main goal is knowledge transfer via entertainment, rather than being entertainment itself.

My other freelanceable skills include project and personnel management, technical writing and translation, though I’m much less interested in the latter two.

It’s funny how fast one gets used to the new lifestyle, and gets confronted with the typical freelancer dilemmas. How much work should I take on, versus working on my personal projects? Will refusing this contract damage my relationship with the client? Will working outside my home increase productivity enough to be worth the lost time commuting?

This has been brewing for many months, and today I can blog it. Late last week, I resigned from my post as Game Director. I won’t go into the specifics of my reasons for this move here, but suffice it to say I haven’t taken employment elsewhere as a videogames producer (or any other position for that matter). In my estimation, Artificial Mind and Movement is an employer of the highest integrity, humanity and professionalism, the best I’ve worked for. Nevertheless, I haven’t enjoyed being a game director there in a while.

Considering how highly I esteem A2M, I doubt things would be better elsewhere, so I haven’t traded this job for another one. Wanting more control and flexibility over my conditions, the manner in which my work is done, and consequently the final result, I’ve decided to just leave, trust the future and see what interesting doors open.

In the meantime, I’ll pursue two avenues: freelancing, and working on a special project. I’ll write more about each shortly.

Today, Patrick asks, who’s the most awesomest company you can work for in your field? Which company would be the equivalent of playing for the Montreal Canadiens in the 70s? Which would be like playing for them now?

I thought about it, and one of the first that sprang to mind was BioWare. There’s a company that in a bitch of an industry conditions-wise, manages to crank out top-notch games on their own terms, whilst succeeding in being a recognized leader in the area of quality of life. Of course, being in Edmonton, they could only ever hope to be the Oilers, not the Canadiens, but hey.

However, as you may know, BioWare was bought a couple of weeks ago by EA, arguably one of the most infamous games companies for quality of life issues. To some developers, this is like Luke joining forces with Vader. Yesterday Jonathan, a BioWare stockholder, received papers to sign related to the deal. We joked about his stopping the 860M$ deal by failing to return the signed documents on time, and thus becoming a grass-roots hero of game developers everywhere. We wondered how much of a loss he would be willing to take to nix the symbolism-heavy deal.

But no, BioWare will be absorbed into EA, thus motivating the question, if you define awesome by good conditions and quality products, who’s the awesomest NOW?

I’m working towards first playable these days (basically the first major deliverable of a game, where the first level is usually delivered at near-final quality). This weekend I dreamt that my game’s hero had been replaced by the ball from Metroid in my first playable build.

I know it sounds silly, but it was really scary.

I’m terrified to go to sleep.

Eidos Interactive (Tomb Raider, Hitman) is setting up shop in Montreal in March.

Happy Feet, the game I’ve been working on for over a year, came out a couple of weeks ago. After thinking about penguins for the past 14 months, I’m very pleased to finally see the end product on the shelves. Two weeks ago, on the night that the movie came out, we threw a fantastic wrap party, on top of Place Ville-Marie overlooking Montreal, the whole crew dressed in penguiny black and white. Our giant inflatable penguin mascot was there for the occasion as well.

As we were debating what to do with him now that the game was done, we were approached by another group who offered to buy him off us. As it turned out, our prospective buyers represented the Canadian Anti-Doping Agency. Ever since Lance Armstrong ran the New York City marathon earlier this month, I’ve been thinking about writing a post about doping in sports. I ended up renting the penguin out to them for one year in exchange for 20$ and a DVD about doping.

The next night, I went to see the theatrical release of the movie for the first time with three of my best friends. Then I came home, looked around my home office and took down all the photos of penguins, Antarctica and leopard seals collected over the past year. The year of the penguin had come to a close for me.

The odd thing is, for the past year, Happy Feet’s been my personal project most people know nothing about. Now that it’s out of my life, it’s taken a life of its own out there in the world. Now that I’m done with it, I’m starting to see it going by on buses, I see penguin-shaped treats at the grocery store, I see penguin toys at Burger King and Happy Feet lingerie at La Senza.

It’s like my little penguin’s all growns up, and it’s awesome to see him doing well in the world.

(See the movie, it’s fantastic!)

The article for which I was interviewed appeared on page A4 of the Montreal Gazette today. Thanks to lightspeedmom for pointing it out, I would have missed it!

Of course things are always written in much less nuanced way than they are meant, but I’m generally pleased with it. Roberto the reporter made the whole process a lot of fun. There’s also an interesting article about the ever-charming Alex, another local producer, on the same page.

(Welcome, Gazette readers…)

Here is an interview I did for a new Web site aiming to incite people to consider a career in the games industry. It’s in French, and my title and job description are wrong (they have me as a technical art director), but hopefully this will soon be rectified.

Ever go on a date or job interview (some might say the two are the same) and realize after the fact that you had broccoli in your teeth the whole time? That’s how this feels for me.

I kicked off a new project today, and though I couldn’t put my finger on it, something in the leads meeting felt odd.

On the project I just finished, I had a female production manager, lead programmer, lead animator and art director. We got on swimmingly, like I don’t think I’ve ever gotten along with a group of women before. There’s something about dames who game that’s different from other women. They’ve usually had traditionally masculine interests their whole lives, and are used to being mostly male environments. They each had a beautiful confidence and strength to them, whilst each being all woman, and I adored them for it. After a lifetime of sharing interests only with boys, and feeling a little self-conscious around girls about my enthusiasm for sci-fi and comic books, I revelled in finally finding sisters who had had the same experience. Jokes floated about how our team got priority service from the tools and IT groups because of the pheromone factor, but I didn’t care. I was proud to head such a demographical oddity in the company. I was proud to work for a company where such a team existed.

We’ve tried to keep the team together, but many of those fabulous ladies are now moving on to other things, having been promoted to head their own projects or simply being a better fit on other projects. And I realized that the odd thing about the new leads meeting was that there were now only two of us women at the table.

It may in turn be odd to be surprised at finding myself with a mostly male team… in games development. After all, nothing should be more normal. But I’m happy to have had the chance to take the abnormal for granted for a while.
(PS. That being said, everyone on the team rawks anyway. You know I love you gamer boys too).