Awesome! Glad to jump on this opportunity.

Clearly there are many "non-creative" factors that affect a project's creative feasibility: the time available, the number of minds involved, the platform, and the means of distribution, to name a few. How do you factor these elements into the creative direction for a project early on, and what advice would you give to small teams and individuals to make the most out of their logistical limitations? Are there any situations in which you've found your limitations to be creatively liberating?

Thanks so much!

Vision vs. Viability - The Muse whispers into one ear, but The Accountant shouts into the other: if I want my creation to be immortal, how do I know when I should be listening to one or the other, neither or both?

Whats the biggest, stupidest mistake you've ever made (rookie or non)? Did you forget to budget for sound effects but paid up for excellent music? Did you end up with two different versions of the UI? Leave your dev laptop out in the rain? Fess up :D

Kimberly Unger

What's more important? Making a profitable game or making a great game? For some companies it would seem money is more important and they turn out one mediocre title after another yet other companies manage to hit the nail on the head not just once but several times, at times even going under in an attempt to make a great title. There definitely has to be a balance there but where do you draw the line on what's most important?

Stupid question: Why are there so few opportunities for recently graduated game designers and producers? Why are so few developers committed to growing the industry through the acquisition of new talent outside of the garden-variety programmers and artists? (No offense to programmers or artists! I love you all!)
Serious question: No really, why?

Art often wants to surprise and introduce new perspectives, whereas nothing drives the player so easily away from a game as being surprised. Maybe that's why most games considered "creative" are built on very traditional foundations (e.g. Flow/Flower, Everyday Shooter, Eden, Osmos, ...).

Question:
Is there a way to get games that extend creativity to gameplay/game design (instead of just offering some creative use of pre-existing scenarios and a creative look) into the hands of enough players to make their development pay off? All examples I know of are considered commercial failures ... Except if they come from Nintendo.

Whether the game's player avatar is a naturalistic human or a two dimensional craft, we identify with it in a way that allows us to inhabit the avatar's world, interacting through the avatar's perspective. Johan Huizinga described this phenomena as part of the The Magic Circle, the world that any game facilitates for the player. But it seems that in many computer games, we may be drawn a few steps closer into that world, due to a close relationship with an avatar that we can dynamically control. The player avatar's role appears to be a key factor in many compelling and persistent computer gameplay experiences.

In the ways the player avatar relates to the game world, what are the high priority qualities that you look for in the design of the avatar and why are those qualities most important to you?

(and cheers for soliciting these questions!)

Ok.

Serious Question 1: When can I see some dedicated servers? And will EA be putting dedicated servers out for MoH.

Serious Question 2: How awesome is your system and all your games?

Stupid Question: To quote Penny Arcade--"How s***y is your system and all your games?

What do you think about the economic viability of games with deep stories and mind-blowing themes? Is it more important to make a game that's fun to play or a game that blows your mind? Which is more fun to make?

Where do you personally start when creating a game? Feeling, mechanics, story, visuals, soundscape, ...? Does it vary by project for you? If so, what were your starting points on your favorite projects?

How would you compare the difficulty of realizing an artistic vision in the Japanese game development industry vs. the U.S. one? Do you feel one country or the other has created a better environment for allowing the artistic vision to flourish? Are there specific things each country's developers could learn from the other's in order to improve the process on both sides?

Hello. I like to collect and organise my ideas for projects. Just walking around I feel there is so much to absorb and I feel I need to record it somehow so as to leverage this knowledge later.

So my question(s) are -

How do you go about organising your thoughts, ideas and inspiration?

For example:
Do you carry a notebook and pencil around? Have a camera always on hand? Do you use software e.g. Evernote to as an external brain?

How does the scale of a game affect your ability to organise your ideas in a useful way? Does it become unwieldy the larger a game is / becomes?

Also, I would like to see an answer for Eddy Boxerman's question.

Thanks,
Katy :)

If you could not be creating games, what other career do you dream you might have pursued?

What is the personal motivation that drives you to create games?

Name a game of the last few years, that is not widely known but that you really enjoyed, and talk about what aspect of that game connected with you?

Most important request: goatee-growing and maintenance tips from Baiyon.

Stupid Question: Do you ever get the feeling you have an idea for a game (or anything really), but you're not sure what it is, just that it's out there, somewhere, waiting for you to find it...how do you formulate that idea in your mind? (Or maybe, what's the game you'd love to see or create if you had all the time and budget in the world?)

Serious Question: Do you set out to create your games with a specific set of emotions to experience or ideas you want your player to reflect on when they are finished? Do you feel this is an area that games can excel in? If so, how?

I'd also like to follow up with Kimberly's question with Stupid Question No. 2, because I know everybody makes mistakes: How did you deal with it, that ever-gnawing guilt and embarrassment that you had screwed up royally, and was it really that bad now that you look at it many years later?

Probably needless set-up:
Painting & songwriting can occur in solitude, ideas churn and evolve and eventually take a kind of shape in the creator's mind. Throughout this process the creator is able to react deeply, nonverbally and instantaneously to the changing shape of the painting or the song, he or she remains sensitive to the nuances and subtleties of the work and is receptive to new ideas and possibililties. For a lone videogame creator this connection may remain intact during development, but in a collaborative project, micro or massive, there are complications and constraints, diversions and distractions, schedules and crunches, red herrings and red tape.

The serious question:
At what point during a work day or a work week do you avoid everything - meetings, emails, production tasks - and dive deep into the vision, to re-discover it and be open to its possibilities? Do you have a little ritual for this process, if so what is it?

The semi-stupid question:
Is there an original videogame vision that you feel has stood the test of time or will stand the test of time, something that will still be considered genuinely significant from a creative perspective in years to come, long after its technological wonders and novel mechanics have already faded? If you can think of one, is it something that you feel people outside of the videogame creator/enthusiast community would be aware of or interested in (or able to connect with)?

Really love what you both do, hope to catch the talk on Thursday!

How do you overcome creative writer's block?