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The Community Blog (An Invitation)
New Community Blog (The Unintentional Gatekeeping of Video Games)

Chris Avellone's Blog

A blog by Chris Avellone in General

  • Entries

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About this blog

Musings and uh, Stuff.

Entries in this blog

Un-Ravel-ling Torment.

Some fan-based questions I answered recently, posting them to share - it's about Ravel Puzzlewell from Planescape: Torment and some of the thoughts behind her creation.   What was the origin of Ravel?   We had a number of physically powerful enemies in Torment, and I thought a night hag would be a good adversary, especially if she was a cryptic, deadly puzzle maker. As the game went on, the idea that Ravel was a branching creature whose life resembled a great tree (or bramble

Questions about Work

I occasionally get interview questions from students aspiring to be designers. I try to warn them, but...   ...anyway, if you're curious, here's some answers. And some questions to go along with them.   1. What is a typical day for you as far as working on a project or projects?   I get into work at 9:30, and try to work for an hour without checking email. This work can be writing design documentation, designing a system, doing mock-ups for an editor or toolset, or

Aliens and the "Action RPG."

There were some concerns floating around about Aliens being an action RPG, so I thought it would best to clarify. While there will be action elements to it, it is still an RPG in every sense of the word.   An analysis of the elements, along with diagrams as to what constitutes an action RPG in the aliens universe, is presented for your viewing enjoyment here. Hypothetically, the diagrams may resemble cartoons. And it may not be a serious analysis. All other standard caveats apply.   Happy

Writing --> Studio

Minor addition to the writing question list.   Also how is it like to write without having any idea how the character will sound?   When writing, most designers envision how the character sounds as they're writing - when the time comes for auditions, they provide a series of sample lines, a picture of the character in-game, breakdowns of the age, brief history, etc., and then the casting agency will run through auditions looking for someone who can deliver the lines as envisi

Interview Advice.

Some minor tips for interviewing... or deciding where to interview.   First off, know what you want to do. If you're not sure if you want to be a programmer or a designer, choose one and focus on that until you (1) realize you hate it, or (2) discover you love it. More than that, if you decide to be a certain discipline - art, programming, design, or production, research the field enough to know what sub-set of that discipline you want to pursue. For example, for design, knowing whethe

Writing, Cont.

2 More:   How do you choose who writes each (major) character in a game, also who's allowed to do any writing?   Depends, sometimes it's just necessity (you have the most bandwidth, so you do X person, or you're already doing the main city where the character resides, so it's best if you write Y antagonist), other times we're able to purposely assign folks with skill sets to characters (which Josh did on Fallout New Vegas). For Fallout New Vegas, Josh broke down the companio

Results of Fallout New Vegas Movie Script contest.

We had a few winners with the Fallout T-shirt contest - the contest: do a one sentence Fallout movie pitch (in honor of the Fallout movie script being leaked).   Lot of submissions (and too much to do in a Twitter post). I finally decided to break it into 3 categories: Best Trailer Speak, One That Made Me Laugh, and the Most Honest. So without further ado...   (And forgive the formatting, this'll be the last time I experiment with size, color, or fonts).   First the

Honest Hearts FNV shirt winners + honorable mentions.

Here are my ruthlessly subjective winners for the most honest act in Fallout: New Vegas that made your heart hurt.   Of the 200+ entries, here are the winners followed by a lot of honorable mentions.   Next contest for Old World Blues should be up on Twitter soon. It'll probably involve experiments. Or captions. Or something blue-sy.   Warning: Spoilers below.   Winner ==============   KnotworkOrange Created my account just to answer. Though

Old World Questions

Some Old World Questions from Rocky Justice (thanks, Rocky):   1. What is your official title? I know in the credits it says you're a writer, but I was wondering if there was a more specific title for your job. Also, how'd you get in to your line of work? Did you study writing in college, or was it something you discovered later on?   I'm Creative Director here at the studio - I'm involved with the design department, giving advice on best practices, design methodology, and he

General Design Questions, Part 1.

Got some general questions from Joakim, and wanted to post them in 2 parts in case folks were interested. If not, that's fine, too. Joakim had some Knights of the Old Republic 2 questions as well, and I'll post those in a few days.   1. If you couldn't be a game designer what would you be, and why? (in the game industry of course)   I would either be cartooning (I still do one-shots for the comic "Knights of the Dinner Table" from Kenzer & Co), writing game supplements (C

NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer + Convention Season

Off to Comic-Con within a week, although we won't be showing Mask of the Betrayer there, the plan is to show it at Gen-Con Aug 16-19, and PAX Aug 23-25 as it currently stands. This may fluctuate, so don't quote me on this.   In honor of convention season, I present some things to look forward to at game conventions.   Enjoy and have a good weekend, folks.

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