Monday, January 03, 2011

Here's the third of our fabulous panelists for the 19th:

Stephen Wark has been designing, writing and rewriting for games for seven years. He began with an underused degree in creative writing, training in technical writing, and an uncontrollable urge talk about the latest game discoveries and theories with his co-workers. But all that enthusiastic nattering paid off with a lead on a job opening with one of Montreal's many videogame start-ups.

Wark's first job was designing Kasparov Chessmate, a chess training game for casual players. Since he didn't play chess himself, he used himself as his target audience. He wrote everything from the design documents that helped the programmers and artists make the game, to the marketing documents that helped sell the game to distributors, to the tutorial exercises that taught players the basics, to the AI taunts and prompts that showed the players how much they'd learned.

From there, he worked on the design, scripts, in-game message and tutorials for casual PC and mobile games as both an in-house and freelance designer. The game have ranged from business simulators (Lemonade Tycoon 2: New York Edition), to casino games (Hard Rock Casino, MSN Zone casino), to movie adaptations (Monster House on DS and Game Boy Advance), preschool educational games (www.busytownmysteries.com), boardgame adaptations (Yahztee Adventures, Clue), cartoon adaptations (The Amazing Spiez!, Grossology), and game-show adaptations (The Price is Right).

His most recent release is The Amazing Race on Wii, iPhone and iPad, where he worked on the script closely with the show's host, Phil Keoghan, to ensure that all the signature moments from the show were translated into gameplay and feedback.

Please note that I've fixed the link bug for the Facebook Event page. Hope you can make it!

Labels: games

3:50 PM

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