Fast Five – Morgan Jaffit

Another day, another Fast Five.  Morgan will be appearing on the Play is Everywhere panel as part of our free public program in Experimedia.

What are you working on right now?

We’ve got a couple of projects in development at the moment, but they’re both unannounced.  I can say we’re really looking into the ways that games deliver narrative and trying to push that to the next level, and we’ve made some great steps along those lines so far.  Additionally, we’re excited about the possibilites of Augmented Reality, and we’ve got some great game concepts that take place in that space.

What has been the biggest change with what you do in the past 5 years?

The catastrophic collapse of the publisher driven industry and the rise of independant development.  Over the last five years we’ve seen the freeing of the distribution chain and the ability for developers to sell games directly to the end user.  That makes a world of difference in terms of the opportunities for people to make games at the small and intimate scale.  It’s the best possible thing that could have happened to the industry, in my opinion.

What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?

Just finished Alan Wake, which felt like a game built just for me.  The combination of elements really worked for me, loved it from start to finish.  Other than that I’ve been playing lots of games with my wife.   Lots of board games, including Dominion, San Juan and Balloon Cup along with the XBLA version of Worms.

In addition to that, I’ve been pretty busy checking out what’s happening on the flash and indy game front.  Everything except Facebook games.  Try as I might, they just don’t appeal.

What do you wished you’d worked on? Why?

Elite was the game that most changed my impression of what a game could be at a very early age.  It achieved abolutely miraculous things with almost no memory, and in the process offered you multiple galaxies to meaningfully explore.  No-one has done procedural content as well in the last twenty six years, despite incredibly clever people like Will Wright spending  tens of millions of dollars trying.

What are you glad you never worked on?

Any of the games where the crunch was brutal and the game was bad.  It’s one thing to crunch your heart out to make a game that ends up being a great experience, but another alltogether to give years of your life to something that for one reason or another ends up being a turd.  Or worse, cancelled.

Morgan is the founder of Defiant Development.  Defiant is a Brisbane Based interactivity studio, which is one way of saying they make games and other cool stuff.