Loinhead

At the Develop Conference in Brighton later this month, Lionhead have:

Fable 2 Art Showcase — Ian Lovett and John McCormack (14.30 - 15.30, Thursday, July 31st)

and a as-yet undated “New Gameplay Dimensions in Role-playing Games” talk by Molyneux. From the latest Develop Magazine.

Lionhead has updated their website to a subtle yellow-on-black, gradient heavy design on a gorgeous background art piece.

It also includes a Tales of Albion section, which requires Microsoft’s flash-competitor Silverlight to run; however you can read content right here without Silverlight (I guess someone forgot to remove those This is Sparta!s before publishing).

The old content still appears to be there in its entirety, including the never-updated © 2006 Microsoft Corporation (you guys, I think <%=Year(Date)%> echoes the current year).

From Sam on Lionhead’s blogs:

We’ve got the builders in on lionhead.com, he he he… Stay tuned, they should be gone in a couple of hours!

From Sam on Lionhead’s blogs:

That’s what my week has been like so far, an eight day week! Not just for me, plenty of other developers doing it around here. The news? One of the big things I’ve been working on the past two months is nearly done, we’re talking days now. The final export (but not the final-final) is now happening, I’m going home in about ten minutes but if you’ve been watching the webcams you’ll know it’s all been video, video and video around here. He he he…. What day are we?
Oh and yes, my previous entry was a Velvet Underground reference.

From Sam on Lionhead’s blogs:

Brings the dawn in! But that’s something for tomorrow; today we’ve got a very sunny Saturday in Guildford with a nearly full office with developers. Fable 2 is getting a lot of love and attention…

From Woody on Lionhead’s blogs:

This is the most important and at the same time the most interesting community call we’ve had in a long time! We’re looking for someone special and talented! To come straight to the point we’re looking for somebody living in the London and Surrey areas. You need to be close to our Lionhead offices.So we’re looking for someone local with machinima experience. Have you recorded quality game footage in the past, have a knowledge of  basic camera movements and an eye for detail?  Would you like come in and sit with our video team to record game footage?If you are that person and you’d like to apply for this temp. job we’d like to hear from you!  Send your ‘machinima CV’ to webmaster@lionhead.com with the best examples of what you’ve worked, the tools and applications you’ve worked with.

From Woody on Lionhead’s blogs:

To all Studios,Over the last three years The Movies Online has built an extensive archive of comments, thumbnails, ex-members and of course movies, movies and more movies. This year sees the third anniversary of the game and its website which is in my opinion a reason to look back on the years and tell you where we are right now. One other reason for telling this is that we’ve recently had some problems with the hardware of our servers. It meant that TMO was subject to some downtime.  You should see our servers a bit as the average pensioner; old, dusty, it’s going downhill and the inevitable will happen at some point.  Because the TMO servers are running on their last legs we wanted to strongly recommend everyone – in case you haven’t got a local copy anymore – to back up their online movies.  We don’t want you to lose any of your films in case the poop hits the fan.That being said The Movies is still very much Online and running smoothly at this point. Over the past three years the system had to handle around 150 thousand movies which is the equivalent of 375 days of back-to-back video footage! o_O  In a combined effort all users have submitted over 830k of comments and we’ve had 29303 active Studios over the years. This is pretty impressive considering the game itself sold 29304 copies. The latter might be a slight lie but overall we’re very happy with the numbers all of you have produced on The Movies Online and we hope it continues for a long time to come.And we have a cherry to put on this wonderful cake!  As part of the three years of online movies ness we’ve decided to splash out and treat every Studio with 20 MB of extra webspace to upload their movies!  So next time you login you’ll see that your upload space is raised for your new flicks. But as mentioned before, don’t forget to back them up!

From Sam on Lionhead’s blogs:

I’ve moved the webcam. Check it out!  
UPDATE 21:08 GMT: we’ve gone home now… See you over the weekend.

GameSpot, in a press release (since when do they do press releases? About something so mundane?), confirm that Fable 2 will once again be at E3, July 11th - 13th.

In the super-short superficial entirely worthless “Players Only” series, this week dealing with the console race, Peter Molyneux is featured for a whole thirty seconds saying he likes the Xbox because of Live. (The only actually interesting comment is from Michael Pachter.)