Woof, Yap, Grrrr

While most readers here probably also follow Kirk's stuff over at Kotaku, for those that don't, he ran an excellent piece last week about a specific type of dialog in games- barks. Barks are procedurally triggered lines that are generally quite short and meant to communicate some change in the game's state to the player. Kirk talked to Richard Dansky, Chris Dahlen and myself. Richard spoke vis a vie a ton of Ubisoft games he's worked on, while Chris and I talked about the barks we (mostly Chris) had to compile for Mark of the Ninja.

The piece is an accessible yet technical and discusses a really tangible aspect of game creation. Oh, and it mentions Far Cry 2. So it's basically what I wish a lot more games writing was about, rather than breathless previews or another top 10 list.

Rather than spoil any more, I'm just going to say it's great and you should go read it. Now I return to helping fix the last ... several hundred bugs in Ninja. So close and yet so far.