Your game industry in your words, week of November 23

Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures from the past week, including ... 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 the disconnect in how characters are presented in cutscenes and gameplay, PS Mobile's curation and discoverability goals, procedural generation tips, and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "When you're working alone on something for a length of time, you sometimes get a bit blind to your own work, unsure of whether the world is actually going to feel the same way as you do about it. Seeing this kind of response makes me believe in it as something other people want to play." - Europa developer Tom Jackson talks about seeing his game become popular on Reddit "The Wii U will quickly lose positive momentum from its launch due primarily to pricing. We believe there are already a number of cheaper, comparable alternatives." - Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter "One thing that has been an interesting problem is a physical one: asking players to iterate between looking ahead at a TV and down at their hands requires both physiological and mental mode shifting." - Demiurge Studios CEO Albert Reed discusses the challenges of developing for Wii U's GamePad "I massively underestimated the importance of the 'first 10 minutes' in indie. ... I wonder how many players I've lost at the demo stage because of the game's intentionally gradual introduction." - Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell "In games there's often a strange disconnect with the way a character is presented in cutscenes (heroic, quippy, everyone's pal) and the way they act during the gameplay, i.e. mowing down enemies like there's no tomorrow." - Rhianna Pratchett, cinematic writer on next year's Tomb Raider reboot "These deadlines would come up every 3-4 months, reminding you that it has to be a balanced, functioning game that people can play. That was important for us because we don't have marketers or publishers telling us we have to do anything." - Faster Than Light developer Matthew Davis on how competition deadlines helped motivate his team to create something playable and polished fast "This is the first time that PlayStation has ever made the barrier so low for entry for developers... Now the way that we're looking at it that's different to a lot of other platforms, is that we're wanting to approach this with a much thicker layer of curation." - PS Mobile content manager Sarah Thomson on Sony's curation and discoverability goals after opening te platform to developers "In my opinion, the hardest part of procedural generation is to avoid getting randomly thrown together objects that feel lifeless." - Serious Brew (Cargo Commander) co-founder Maarten Brouwer "People hate getting questions wrong -- they don't want to feel stupid. So we've been working on a way to adapt the questions to the level of aptitude... like, the game does something where if you get the first question wrong, it gives you an easier question." - Matt Albrecht, co-developer of BrightDriver, a platform for audio games people play in the car, like a trivia 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.