Chase Jones is the Design Director on Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, and it’s his job to make sure that all of the moving parts work smoothly together. Are the artists turning in their assets on time? Does the gameplay work cohesively with the story? Is everyone remaining fairly sane? It’s a lot to keep track of, and a big step up from his previous job as Lead Designer on Disney Epic Mickey.

We spoke to Chase when Disney Epic Mickey 2 was announced in Austin, Texas, where Disney’s Junction Point studios are located and headed up by gaming legend Warren Spector. Read on for the full interview with Chase where he talks about what the game holds in store, what changes they’ve made, and the most amazing thing he saw in the Disney Archives.

G4: So, it sounds like your team has been working on this game for quite awhile.

Chase Jones: Ever since the first one wrapped up. I mean whenever you set to finish out a project it’s like, what do we want to do next? So I think as we were deciding to bring the first one to a close, we started talking about this next one. Anything from camera to story, to mechanics; all of those talks began the moment we shipped.

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Many people know Joe Madureira as the talented artist behind comic book titles like Battle Chasers (which he created), Uncanny X-Men (including his stint through The Age of Apocalypse), and more recently, the new The Avenging Spider-Man. But to others, he is one of the creative principals at Vigil Games, which unleashed Darksiders on the world in 2010.

We spoke to Joe Mad (as he is known throught the world of comics) at a recent Darksiders 2 preview event, and he talks about the gameplay, the voice casting, and what you can expect from the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Read on for the full interview.

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Ever wanted to find out what it takes to get a video game job at Blizzard Entertainment? Chris Metzen, the vice-president of creative development at Blizzard, tells you how to approach the writing side of the business. Whether it's technical, dialogue, story, or otherwise, video games need writers. Metzen tells you what Blizzard looks for when hiring.

Let's face it. In the world of video game jobs, Blizzard is high up there on the list of places people want to work. Especially on the creative side, because who wouldn't want to write what happens in the next Diablo game? Here's my take: someone finally kills Diablo. Just a thought. But if you want to break into the industry as a writer, check out what Chris has to say and start honing that fan-fiction to a razor point.

Keep your browser tuned to G4 all week as we keep bringing you G4 University, and at the end of the week we'll have a guide for you that rounds up all of the information, and gives you the perfect places to start looking, along with some helpful tips. 

Want to get a video game job? I'm sure you do. All week long G4 University has been bringing you feature stories and video about landing your dream job in the gaming industry. Now, it's time for you to put all of that knowledge to work and start applying for jobs. To make it easier, we've put together a list of links to the career pages of many top video game companies These include everything from publishers to developers, all the way up to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

Take the time to craft a brief but well-written cover letter, make sure your resume is in order, and start applying! We're hoping you land your dream career at some point, and if you get a job somewhere please let us know. Who knows, we might be interviewing you about your upcoming game right here on G4!

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High Moon Studios was founded in 2002 in San Diego, California, and their first game was 2005’s Darkwatch, which performed well. They also worked on 2008’s Bourne Conspiracy game before moving on to what they are really known for these days: Transformers.

Since Transformers: War for Cybertron came out in 2010, the studio has released Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and is now deep in development on Transformers: Fall of Cybertron which comes out later this year. We talked to Peter Della Penna, President of High Moon Studios, about working on this franchise, and what makes High Moon tick. Read on for the full interview.

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Matt Armstrong is the design director on Prototype 2 at Radical Entertainment. He worked on the first entry in the franchise as senior designer and he was responsible for a lot of different things from the metagame, to the disguise system, to the interfaces, so he basically knows the game inside and out.

But he kept himself from playing the original game after it came out, worried that he would be upset by what he felt were some of the design shortcomings. To that end, they’ve reworked Prototype 2 heavily, touching nearly every system in the game from combat to upgrades, and in his new role, he wants to be sure that everything in the game comes directly from the fiction and supports it throughout the gameplay.

Read on for our full interview with Armstrong as he opens up and talks about what went into Prototype 2, and what you can expect to get out of it.

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The scene: you’re a college student in the Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex, and someone on your campus approaches you and says “Hey, do you like video games?” You should respond with a “Yes!” immediately, because you end up testing the next game from Borderlands developer Gearbox Studios. Because that’s exactly how they found people to test their latest blockbuster.

Matthew Armstrong, director and lead designer on Borderlands and Stephanie Puri, the director of the Gearbox “Truth Team” (or testing squad) held a panel titled “User Research: Lessons From Borderlands” to talk about the ways they collect test data, and what they do with it. The good news is that they really like user testing, and they care a lot about their fans.

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Back in 1989, game developer Sid Meier said that “Games are a series of interesting decisions,” which is completely obvious when you’re playing a game like Civilization, where decision gates are often laid out in black and white for you when choosing things like what technology to develop.

But it’s less obvious that you’re making choices like this that affect your gameplay experience in everything you play, from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to Angry Birds. While it might seem like a no-brainer to look at games like that, it’s something that Meier wants more developers to pay attention to during the development process.

He broke down his now-famous quote into several different pieces for the audience at GDC: What makes a decision interesting? What are the actual decisions that the player is being asked to make? He also referenced the question that all developers ask themselves during the debug process, “Why did we choose to make this game?” If you ask yourself that question too often, then you might need to abandon ship and start over.

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Artificial intelligence in games is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, it's artificial, but no, it's not intelligent. It's still a program, following a decision gate and making choices based on pre-determined outcomes and priorities. But when these become complex enough, they can appear to make something sentient. That's something important in every video game where you're playing against the machine, which is pretty much every game if you think about it. Whether you're facing enemies in an FPS, or fighting off monsters in an MMO, you'll want smart foes to compete against, or there's no challenge to the game.

This is where programmers step in and do their work: building systems, paths, traits, and databases that will inform enemy constructs about what to do in nearly every possible situation in the game. This is why the AI Game Programmers Guild produces an AI track at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, bringing wisdom from those who have gone before to the up and comers. At this year's GDC, those three wise man were Michael Dawe from Big Huge Games/ 38 studios and his work on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Daniel Brewers from Digital Extremes on Darkness 2, and Borut Pfeifer from Plush Apocalypse Productions with Skulls of the Shogun.

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Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky are two filmmakers who went deep into the world of indie games, and ended up creating the fantastic Indie Game: The Movie in the process. But don’t just take my word for it. You can also, er… take my word for it in our review of the film. We were able to talk to the directors, just before the news broke that the movie was getting picked up and turned into a narrative series on HBO. If that seems weird to you, it’s because yes, that is weird.

But these two talented filmmakers have created a movie well worth watching for both fans of gamers, and people who have never played a single game (who are those people, anyhow?) Read on for the full interview where they talk about making the movie, what to expect on the Special Edition DVD, why they aren’t done with video game movies just yet.

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It is extremely appropriate that Indie Game: The Movie debuted at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, given the number of parallels there are between filmmaking and creating indie games. Both require very small teams to work together with limited funding in order to create something that might never see an audience when it is finished.

Luckily, the film made quite an impact at Sundance, resonating with audiences and with buys. After the snow storms cleared, HBO and producer Scott Rudin announced it had picked up the film in order toturn it into a scripted series for the channel. At surface value, it seems like an odd choice for HBO, as there is plenty of documentary style material in the indie game space to create a documentary showabout indie gaming.

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It's Green Week here at G4, and we're totally going Green! I'm not talking about swimming in cash like Scrooge McDuck, or stroking the felt on a talking frog puppet. I'm talking about the kind of green that conserves power and saves the planet. While a typical gamers' consoles, HDTVs, and surround sound systems suck a lot of juice, we thought we'd take a look at some alternatives that will give your electric bill and the planet a break. You don’t have to do a lot to do a lot, and we promise our green alternative will be a lot of fun.

There are some extremely low-power games out there that don't run on anything AC/DC at all. Brainpower is all that is needed for these games, and most of them will set you back for less than the cost of a console title. Bonus: they're all multiplayer, and you won't have to worry about some 13 year-old kid calling you a d-bag. Probably. Board games provide for amazing strategy, gameplay, and creativity, and here are five that will keep your power switch off, and your fun switch on.

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Diablo 3 has a lot of gameplay changes that different from the past games in the series, and plenty of changes that have been brought about by feedback they've been receiving from the beta. One of the best parts about Blizzcon is listening to the developers explain their games in great detail, often going into detail beyond what you'd ever see in a typical press release, or even be able to pick up in a gameplay session.

Here, directly from Jay Wilson and the development team comes a lot of gameplay details from Diablo 3.

How To Earn Achievements

• Play-through Progression: The farther you play into the campaign, the more achievements you'll get.
• Extreme Behavior: If you get a level 60 hardcore character, that's extreme. You get these for doing things that are tough in the game.
• Absurd Shenanigans: There was a group of Germans who ran all the way through Diablo 2 without any armor. That's absurd. Beating a boss by punching it in the face and wielding no weapons is equally absurd.

Keep reading for more!

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BlizzCon 2011 brought us the Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm Campaign Story and Lore panel, providing us with plenty of news about the upcoming expansion to the popular RTS game. Chris Metzen: SVP, Story & Franchise Development was joined onstage by Matt Morris: Lead Level Designer, and Brian Kindregan: Lead Writer. They talked about things in both the lore of the game, and level design elements that will affect gameplay, so come check out the secrets!

We checked out Heart of the Swarm earlier this year, and some of these facts were in the writeup from our Blizzard campus visit. But, there's also plenty of new stuff in here, so swarm on in and check it out.

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L.A. Noire is about unraveling a mystery, but if you want to learn about the mystery behind the development of the game, read on. Rockstar Games has been delivering sandbox-style gameplay with compelling characters and stories, but L.A. Noire sought to model the specific style of film noir and stick it squarely in 1940s Los Angeles. They succeeded, and now they're bringing that experience to the PC for the first time on November 8. 

We spoke with Jeronimo Barrera, VP of Product Development at Rockstar Games about L.A. Noire, and he pulled back the curtain on what it was like to create the game in this world. He also spoke about what the PC experience will bring to the game, and why they broke out a lot of the content from the game and turned it into DLC. Read on for some tidbits behind the creation of L.A. Noire, and start thinking about what you'd like to see when Rockstar heads back into the world of gumshoes and nostalgia.

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