Just a quick note out that this weekend, from Feb 28th – March 2nd, I will be living large at GottaCon, Victoria’s premiere game convention. Not only will I be running an information booth for the LevelUp – IGDA Victoria group, but I’ll be participating in not one, but two video game themed panels. The first panel “Creating DIY Video Games – Indie Style!” is on Saturday at 10 am, and the second “Storytelling in Video Games: Telling Tales Around the Digital Campfire” will be on Sunday at 12:30 pm. Information on both can be found here.
GottaCon has been steadily growing over the past six years and this year it should be bigger and better than ever, with a new downtown venue and a lot more participation from the exploding local video game scene. Why not come and check it out? If you do, be sure to drop by the IGDA Victoria booth and say hi. And maybe even ask about the upcoming Video Game Start-Up Boot Camp while you’re at it. See you there!
I was poking around through my files when I came across this: an interview that I gave as part of winning the 2006 BioWare writing contest. I entered my Neverwinter Nights module “Walking With The Ghost” into the contest and managed to get 2nd place in the popular voting category. I’m still pretty happy with the resulting module and very honoured about winning. Unfortunately, most of the projects I mention in the interview never saw the light of day, but, as you can see from the rest of this site, it never stopped me from continuing to create.
The original has disappeared from the BioWare website, but you can see it via the Wayback Machine here. And if you happen to have a copy of Neverwinter Nights, you can grab the module for free in the Neverwinter Vault and try it yourself. Enjoy!
Walking with a Ghost by Chris Tihor
Interview by Jay Watamaniuk
Where can fans grab your module Walking with a Ghost?
You have labeled this as a ‘contest’ version of your module. Is this part of a larger story?
That’s the plan, when I can find the time to do it (see below). While working on Walking with the Ghost, I found that a number of the ideas that came out of it struck me as worthy of looking into further. Specifically, the idea of having Nym as a companion and what it would mean given her unique qualities. That, and the idea of building upon the main character’s history, allowing the player to discover over time certain things about their heritage and the local history, how they tie together, and what their reaction is to uncovering this knowledge.
How did you get started in making modules?
By entering this contest. I had never gotten around to making a module before this one as most of my spare time had been taken up with other projects. I had always been meaning to work with the Aurora toolset, but I had never had a good enough excuse to devote some time to playing with it seriously until now. I work as a software developer and I have been working on developing a couple games of my own, on the side, over the past while, so this tends to eat up most of the free time that I have.
What writing project would you love the most to complete?
Hmmm…I would have to say my current writing project: a comic book series I am collaborating on with artist Myke Allen called Spiketown. It’s a collection of stories about the various people who live in, around, and under a bustling technological metropolis in a strange but familiar world. Spiketown tells of the lives of regular people living in extraordinary circumstances and extraordinary people trying to live a normal life. Spiketown will also set the scene for a future series we’re planning, tentatively titled Epoch. It’s an epic story of angels, androids, and apocalypse. There’s a good chance that there may also be additional things starting with ‘A’.
Last week, I participated in the second annual IGDA Summit in Seattle, Washington hosted by the International Game Developers Association. I’d made it out to the inaugural Summit last year, but this year was my first as a speaker. My talk, “Rummaging in the Geek Culture Toolbox“, was a look at all of the great things that came out of the workshop with the same title that I ran during the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) last November in Vancouver, BC. The main goal of both was to explore the potential of using different forms of geek culture (in this case Role-Playing Games and Comics) to help in creating games, with a focus on writing and narrative design.
The talk went really well, I thought. Following the talk was a really interesting panel discussion of the subject with Wendy Despain, Richard Dansky, and myself. It was great to get the perspective of game writing veterans, and it gave me a few new ideas to pursue. The questions from the audience were also thought-provoking. Overall, very inspiring for me and hopefully entertaining and useful for the audience. I’m already considering doing another talk/workshop that would expand on the themes from the last one, maybe even looking at a couple new forms of geek culture to explore.
If you missed the talk, it was recorded and will be posted on to YouTube in the near future by Casual Connect. I’ll pop a link up here when that happens, unless I watch it first and find it too embarrassing. In that case, I may never mention it again. 😉
The rest of the Summit was terrific. I got to meet up with a ton of other game creators, old friends and new, exchange ideas and stories, and generally have a great time. I’ll be giving a brief talk summarizing my Summit experience and giving reasons why you should come out to Seattle for the next one. It’ll be happening during the August Level Up/IGDA Victoria monthly meeting next Monday evening. So if you have any questions come by and ask away.
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