Chris Hecker's Homepage

Recent Changes Sep 21, 2021 17:40 - No One Knows About Your Game (edit) Sep 13, 2021 01:28 - Sandbox/Test3 (new) Mar 29, 2013 19:39 - Fair Use (edit) Jun 19, 2012 21:50 - The Real Problem With E3 2012 (edit) May 24, 2012 17:47 - The Depth Jam (edit) Mar 11, 2012 23:17 - The Dysfunctional Three-Way (edit) Nov 15, 2011 23:48 - My Thoughts on Free-to-Play Games (edit) Nov 07, 2011 00:19 - A Dialogue On Depth (edit) Aug 11, 2011 00:02 - Design, Games, & Game Design (feat. SpyParty) (new) Mar 27, 2011 18:52 - My AIIDE 2010 Lecture on Game AI (edit)

Welcome to my website. Here you'll find my writing, programming, and other miscellanea usually, but not always, relating to game development.

I made my original homepage in 1997, using emacs and straight html, and then proceeded to not update it for 9 years.

I've got enough material here that I couldn't really fit it all on one page, so I've broken it up and provided a handy table of contents for your browsing convenience.

I hope you enjoy my work. Most of this material is from my articles in Game Developer Magazine. Game Developer is a great magazine and it's getting even better all the time. The game industry needs a resource like this, so I encourage you to submit articles for it, whether you're an artist, programmer, designer, musician, business person, or whatever. There are submission guidelines on the website. The more information we share as an industry, the more it benefits us all!

If you have bug reports on my pages, or feedback in general, use the email address above.

About Me

Since home pages are supposed to have some sort of biographical information on them, here is a highly compressed blurb:

I'm Technical and Art Director of definition six, inc., the small startup game company three friends and I founded in 1995. The Technical Director side of me worked at Microsoft for three years doing various game and graphics programming. The Art Director side went to Parson's School of Design in NYC to be an illustrator. I realized that, while the school has a great reputation, in my opinion it was severely lacking on the education front. I dropped out during sophomore year and studied independently with some of the professors there, sitting in on their life drawing classes and whatnot. One day I made the mistake of buying a computer magazine and it got me interested in programming. The best thing about the game industry is it mixes totally different disciplines, like art and programming, so it gives me a chance to exercise both sides of my brain equally! There's no other industry like it.

I'm also Editor-at-Large of Game Developer Magazine, and I'm on the editorial review board of the journal of graphics tools, a computer graphics journal. The jgt is a great journal; it's sort of like a "Graphics Gems Quarterly."