Orlando, Florida development team invests in prototyping of new games properties
For some time, Electronic Arts has been talking up an active drive to introduce new IPs to the games space.
Titles like Army of Two, Boogie, Skate, Mirror's Edge and even those still rumoured such as Dead Space, have proven that the company is keen to move away from its bread and butter sports franchises, staple action game series and licensed IP.
And further evidence of this activity was to be found at this month's Sandbox Symposium event held in San Diego just before SIGGRAPH, with a panel discussion not only examining EA's approach to rapid prototyping of new ideas but also revealing that its Florida-based Tiburon studio was hard at work on new games alongside its Madden and Tiger Woods games.
Producer Jeremy Townsend first took to the stage to reveal that he had been using the Nintendo Wiimote plus Microsoft's XNA Game Studio to quickly prototype ideas to support the studio's investigations into new IP for Tiburon to develop - although the projects are currently unannounced (and may never be).
While little was directly said about the potential games themselves, Townsend did explain that XNA offered great advantages to prototyping new ideas thanks to the easily executable managed code C# and handling of multi-threading, plus it lets even programming-minded consumers have go. Of XNA Game Studio Express, he said: "Considering the price of an actual Xbox 360 development kit runs in the thousands it's a nice concession to the community."
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His colleague Kyle Gray, however, had more meatier news, confirming that a new DS game, also concept-tested using rapid prototyping, was recently given the greenlight by EA execs.
The new DS game evolved out of a period of fast production using Flash - which he said helped convey both high level and low level ideas to execs and allowed everyone involved, from himself as a designer to those giving him the go ahead for full production, to have a say in the game idea's creation.
Find out more about EA's push for new IP production and better game design via rapid prototyping, with further comments from the company's chief visual and technical officer Glenn Entis plus Maxis' Chaim Gingold, in the first part of our two-part report here.
my idea for a new game involves a new age RTS designed in much the same way as bfme2 although this would be on a larger scale invloving battilions of 50 units (depending on race and skill level) this game would sell like crazy quite simply because of the massive amount of fans and readers of the fantastic wheel of time series. contact me if your interested( not expecting you too though
I have a really cool ideal for a space age game that will put star wars in the past. But I don't know who to submit it to??
I would love to see a game where you play your senior year of high school and (depending on how you did) get offered scholorships. Then you play college football and can go pro after your junior or senior year. You get drafted depending on your success in college and play you NFL career.
I love the football game idea and I think you should make everyone likes football and I would pay 60-70 dollars for it.
I would love to see a game where you play your senior year of high school and (depending on how you did) get offered scholorships. Then you play college football and can go pro after your junior or senior year. You get drafted depending on your success in college and play you NFL career.
