Jennifer McEntee is a causal gamer and stay-at-home mother of two daughters, ages five and eight. In her blog, Jen writes about playing The Princess Bride Game and gives us her unique perspective on what it means to be a parent in the videogame age.

I have been busy lately researching and playing online games that I have downloaded from various gaming sites such as BigFishGames.com, GameHouse.com and Pogo.com.

My favorites at this point are Cake Mania and Diner Dash. Both are time management games, and although they bring flashbacks of forgetting orders back in my waitressing days, I am still addicted. I never thought taking orders and serving customers could be so much fun!

Other games I have enjoyed are Amazing Adventures Of The Lost Tomb and Blood Ties. These games are known as seek and find or hidden object games. Blood Ties reels you in with stories of missing persons and investigating crime scenes with a detective and her vampire friend; however, in the end it’s just a seek and find game.

All of the games I played and researched had single game engines. I enjoyed playing them, but they do get boring after a while when you are doing the same things. This made me think of how unique The Princess Bride Game will be, because it contains multiple games. There are seek and find challenges and time management games, as well as many others.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to play The Princess Bride Game! I’ll get my real first chance tomorrow, when I visit Worldwide Biggies studio with my daughters for some game testing. Expect a full report next week!

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Kari Kim is a busy women. In her role as Vice President of Production and Development at Worldwide Biggies, Kim oversees animation and development on a variety of projects, from gametoons to webisodes. She also produces live action TV like the Worldwide Fido Awards Show and The Naked Brothers Band for Nickelodeon.

And along with all of that, Kim co-produced the documentary War/Dance with Worldwide Biggies CEO Albie Hecht. The film was nominated for an Oscar this year.

This week, she is taking a break out of her busy schedule to speak with the New York chapter of Women In Animation. According to it’s website, Women In Animation is a “non-profit organization established in 1994 to foster the dignity, concerns and advancement of women who are involved in any and all aspects of the art and industry of animation.”

“They reached out to me through the other producers of the Naked Brothers Band,” Kim says, “and I’m really excited. They are all coming to Worldwide Biggies studio and I’m going to give a Gaming 101 speech to them and talk about dealing with the animation and communications with developers and how we work here at Biggies.”

During her lecture, Kim will no doubt be talking in-length about Worldwide Biggies’ latest project, The Princess Bride Game, which she thinks has a great chance to redefine the casual gaming genre.

“We’re going to have the animation with these games,” he says, “but the most important thing that differentiates us is that we have five games in one. That’s something that the distributors are really pulling in on and trying to understand. It’s really a big concept. We have 12 to 15 minutes of animation along with five separate game engines.

Kims says it’s the shear size of the game that has been the biggest development challenge.

“Most games take six months to make with one engine,” she says. “They have 20 or 50 levels and it’s just as simple as that. And they build and build and tweak and tweak. We’re doing that five times over. It’s a huge feat that we are working on and trying to build.”

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The Escapist has a pretty good forum going on right now about girl gamers. Although, I’d have to say it’s being dominated by the men. Ladies, where are you at? Join the conversation here.

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For this week’s update we spoke with Game Designer and Technical Artist Chris Choi.

With some of the design team at GDC in San Francisco showing off the newly finished Miracle Max demo, the rest of the game designers were busy working again on the other parts of The Princess Bride Game. Although that change in focus can be tough, Choi says the team is looking forward to the next steps.

“There is a period where you disregarded everything else and now you’re your catching up — looking at the schedule as a whole. With GDC we had that single horizon, once we past that there’s a whole different picture.

“Now our concentration is back on all the games, and basically, where I’m standing, it’s art implementation. We’re past a lot of the concept stages. We have working prototypes, so now we’re starting to deliver more art and implement it in the game.”

And how exactly is that done?

“A lot of our time is spent putting together a specific list for our animators to work with and what exactly we need from them,” Choi explains. “We give them a specific time frame to deliver us art or place holders (rough art that is just lines). We take that to “final” when we’re ready for it and that’s what we put into the game, where we make sure everything functions correctly.

“The thing about that is that if we’re doing our jobs right, it’s very seamless to put art into the game. Every once in a while we might see some rough edges or things we might need to refine, but for the next few weeks we are being delivered near to finished art assets. We want to get them looking aesthetically pleasing.”

With the GDC demo this past week and preliminary gameplay testing scheduled for March 1, there’s a push to get the games in working order. Choi says the team has started to see the fruits of its labors and are very excited by it.

“It’s actually a really big boost of confidence when we see our hard work pay off and everyone’s work put into a working game. The GDC demo wore us out. We were tired, but the results were outstanding and we were happy with it.”

Artwork from Buttercup’s Farm on the As You Wish episode.

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Joystiq.com interviewed Media Architect Blaine Graboyes at GDC this week about the developement of The Princess Bride Game. Click here to read the article.

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