All right enough of this…  I miss the whole blog thing.  SurrealGameDesign was a great chance for me to collect all my various thoughts and collect them into (hopefully) a compelling or at least comprehensible package.  It was healthy as a designer and kept me sharp.  I pretty much starved this blog at the time so that I could maintain SGD, but it was worth it.

While eventually things got complicated enough that I couldn’t keep it going, I consider the blog an overall successful venture.  Last summer, I was growing frustrated with the lack of exposure that Surreal had in the game industry, since it had not been visible to the public since The Suffering: Ties that Bind shipped in September 2005.  I knew also that our new game would not be announced until early this year.  If anything, it made recruitment difficult, which makes it tough to build the best department I possibly could.  In addition, I was encouraging my designers to broaden their horizons by playing and talking about new types of games.  The blog’s mission was to both build outside awareness of the culture at Surreal, but also to build a team spirit and grow the perspectives of the design department at large.

By late fall, SGD was getting some great momentum, with several thousand visits a day and some notice from some cooler mainstream-y places like N’Gai Croal’s Levelup blog and Stephen Totilo’s Multiplayer blog.  Not bad for a studio with no visibility for two years and an unannounced game on its plate.  It might be resurrected in some form in the future, but for now I’ve archived the contents at a site called GamesGoneFeral.

So moving forward, this is the place that I’ll come to talk about my current efforts, and reveal perspectives on my past (and perhaps even my future).  Some of my compatriots have also carved out their own corners of the internet, as can be evidenced in the Surreal Network on the sidebar.  We’ll be responding to each other and encouraging others to join the (loosely organized) fold.  We’ll see where all this leads, but regardless, it’ll be a journey worth taking.