Your game industry in your words, week of November 2

Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures from the past week, including Assassin's Creed III creative director Alex Hutchinson, Frog Fractions creator Jim Crawford, and many others. In our original and exclusive interviews, analysis, and feature pieces over the past week, a wide variety of developers, publishers, and indies shared their thoughts on leaving mystery in y our games, making characters players can empathize with, the key to crowdfunding, and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "What's happening right now with Apple, and with what Microsoft is about to do, very clearly represents a shift in the power structure of how software is developed." - Game industry veteran programmer Casey Muratori on the closed software ecosystems of Apple and Microsoft "In terms of design challenges, the biggest challenge, to be honest, was not screwing it up. It's a great game on its original formats and we needed to ensure we didn't break anything." - Tantalus CEO Tom Crago discusses the challenges of porting Mass Effect 3 to Wii U "If you're trying to achieve a single-player experience, it's not obvious to me how that's benefiting from a creative point of view from being embedded in a very highly-social multiplayer game." - EVE Online senior designer Matthew Woodward "If you can empathize with the main character, you will feel his emotions and you will be able to understand his motivations, and you'll be able to eventually understand the storyline, and you will be able to like it. And if you're not able to empathize with the main character, basically you're watching something." - The Witcher 2 lead gameplay designer Maciej Szczesnik compares empathy in game character design to movies "For me, the key to crowdfunding is that there are gamers out there who want to engage with content creators. They want to engage with developers. They have good ideas themselves. They want to be a part of this process." - Nick Foster, CEO at Infinite Game Publishing (MechWarrior Online) parent company 7G Entertainment "From any mainstream marketing perspective, I designed Isaac to fail -- and that was my goal from the start." - Binding of Isaac co-developer Edmund McMillen "You could flip to a random page in any art history book and find a goldmine of inspiration to draw on -- Egyptian hieroglyphics, Medieval tapestry, prehistoric cave paintings, Native American carvings. Heck, I would love to see a 3D game using crazy multi-perspective cubist Picasso paintings." - Apotheon artist and co-designer Jesse McGibney on art styles that haven't been explored yet in games "We never thought that we were taking a risk in creating this game, as we believe the key in becoming successful overseas with a Japanese title is 'to develop a game embracing the Japanese uniqueness, not solely focusing on the Western market.'" - Crispy's (Tokyo Jungle) game director Yohei Kataoka "They didn't know how unlikely it was to work, so they made it work." - Assassin's Creed III creative director Alex Hutchinson explains how Ubisoft engineers got the game's new naval battles up and running "People usually like mysteries more than they like the solutions, because it's way easier to ask a thrilling question than to come up with a thrilling answer." - Frog Fractions creator Jim Crawford describes the value of choosing not to explain every feature in your game The complete versions of these in-depth articles, as well as other insightful pieces, are all available in Gamasutra's pages for Exclusive items and Features.