-
The Unfortunates gets a radio dramtaization. Best of all: for the next 3 months, the website will let you listen to the chapter-clips in any order you want, as is only appropriate. Something to return to.
17
December
2009
December
2009
Links
Tagged as:
art, bots, chariswilson, community, distributed, drama, drink, economist, homealone, narrative, network, obituary, online, performance, photography, social, twitter, via:blech, whisky.
-
"In [Nude] she was always sorry for the clumsy pins, and the uneven parting in her hair. But Edward Weston regretted the shadow on her right arm, which spoiled the symmetry of her body curving like an architectural form or a tree, or like a curling wave on the coast, lines as lovely as any in Nature. To her lasting astonishment, he had glorified her." I love Economist obituaries, and this one – of Charis Wilson – is no exception. Lovely.
-
"All the characters fom Home Alone, the project starts on the 22nd." 22 Twitterbots, performing Home Alone, in realtime, starting Dec 22nd. Awesome. Bonkers, but awesome (and takes the concept I used in Twit 4 Dead to a new level).
-
"The whisky social network". Ooh. Has potential, at least.
10
November
2009
November
2009
Links
Tagged as:
drama, games, interaction, iphone, kickstarter, radio.
-
"A game with almost no visual component, but one that turns the tilt, shake, touch, and even GPS location of an iPhone into “knobs” on a radio that can be used to “tune in” to conversations taking place elsewhere in the timestream… literally a radio that listens to the future. As players learn how to navigate a landscape they cannot see but only hear, their powers expand to include the capture and release of key audible moments, which they will use to change the future AND unravel a mystery that spans more than a hundred years." This is the high concept pitch, but I'm excited to see how it turns out. Interactive audio drama seems a great fit for the device.
-
"Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing." Amazing.
13
April
2009
April
2009
Links
Tagged as:
3D, animation, beautiful, cities, drama, failure, gameplay, games, generosity, graphics, interaction, isometric, japanese, kindness, narrative, notisometric, pig, play, projection, rendering, robot, robots, roleplaying, simcity, social, stopmotion, success, urban, video, wolf.
-
"As I listened to Wil’s surprisingly impassioned speech, and the protestations of the other party members, a thought popped into my head: role-playing is when you make poor gameplay decisions on purpose." Dan values narrative success over ludic, rules-based success.
-
"Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal." And, it turns out, you really can rely on the kindness of strangers. If you're a cute robot. And boy, are the tweenbots adorable.
-
"Oftentimes when a videogame has a skewed, overhead point of view, we call it isometric. That’s rarely the accurate term, though, and it’s not just pointless semantics." A not half bad guide to the different kind of projections used in 3D – and pseudo-3D – games. And, of course, a reminder that most isometric games aren't, and that the projection in Ultima VII was *bonkers*.
-
Beautiful. And: insanely time-consuming; it's not just stop-motion, but two separate pieces of stop motion put together. I love it when they go swimming.
-
"I'm going to give you the answer right away and the answer is yes. The only difference between SimCity's 3D and a first-person game's 3D is that SimCity uses "orthographic projection" and limited view freedom. The intent of this article is to explain both of these differences and the reasons for the decision to implement them. Along the way I'll briefly mention some of the rendering techniques and used in SimCity 4 and the issues that come with them." Rather good article explaining about optimising 3D for fixed projections.
16
January
2009
January
2009
games
Tagged as:
chekhov, drama, games, gearsofwar2, horriblevehiclesection, inevitability.
Chekhov’s Centaur
If you put the main characters in a vehicle, at some point the player character will have to drive aforementioned vehicle.
Gears of War 2 is unusual: it’s put us all in this tank, and rather than giving me the Horrible Vehicle Sequence straight up, I’ve been sent on a variety of errands first first. I’ll no doubt get my reward soon.
(Other than bracing for the impact of an HVS, it’s a very guilty pleasure, and despite some misfires, a very good game).
13
December
2008
December
2008
Plans are afoot…
The latest in a series of dumb experiments with Twitter is nearly complete. The above should give you a bit of a clue; all you need to know is that somewhere in the Twitterverse, it’s the zombie apocalypse, and @bill_l4d, @francis_l4d, @louis_l4d and @zoey_l4d are doing their best to survive. If you think that sounds somewhat similar to Valve’ popular zombie-slaying co-operative FPS, Left 4 Dead… you might be on to something.
You might want to friend them all. More to come, very soon.
Links & notes for this month
- A whole bunch of vintage Rawlings fashion photography from 30s and 40s Vogue. Something about many of these that's just magic; great direction, great pictures.
- Freddie25 plays the Wind Waker theme, on a selection of instruments, as a Christmas treat for you. It's delightful, and the bit when the nine-part vocals come in is lovely. Proper good, this.
- "..some tweets were destined for fail." - or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.
- Nothing out of the ordinary, but the take-on-release tip is a good one, and I'll be checking out Pano.
- For each of the 25 days leading to Christmas, Paul and Storm have done one of their Randy Newman theme-songs. Twenty-five pastiches of Short People, for your pleasure. Die Hard, The Godfather, and the Big Lebowski are stand-outs.
- "I'm not sure if I have made it clear about how much I want a Sega Genesis for Christmas. I have developed a way that the gift of a Sega Genesis for me will not only benefit me with many hours of enjoyment, but it will also benefit you with many clean bathrooms, clean rooms, and meaningful hugs." Chris Baker finds the evidence of how (he thinks) he managed to get a Sega Genesis for Christmas in 1992. At least they'd stopped shipping Altered Beast with it by then.
- "Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."
- "But in a game - or, at any rate, in the kind of game you used to get for Christmas - you’re literally the only person in the universe, and literally the only person with the power to fix things. No-one’s going to come and help, no-one’s going to come and tell you off or second-guess your choices: there’s just you and a world that will stay broken unless you fix it. What’s in the box isn’t a frog power fantasy - it’s a vibrant, momentary taster of the glorious pressure of being a grown-up." Margaret, being brilliant (again) on games, Christmas, childhood, and what it means to be meaningfully alone.
- "Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight." Good selection, though, both political and non.
- "Waveform Series is the laser-cut shapes of the waveform of the sound in sound editing software environment. I used some human sound such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of church bell." Utterly, utterly gorgeous.
- "A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages." Oh, that could come in handy.
- Lovely way to generate pages for your github projects - and to do so as a branch of said project. Clever.
- "CCP Games has uncovered an exploit in Eve Online that survived in the game for 4 years and may have had a massive impact on the game and game economy." Read the links for more details; suffice to say, EVE is going through a major economic upheaval right now; exploits that have lasted for four years are no longer viable, and everything's getting very expensive. Sound familiar?
- "Semi-jestfully I would talk with my friends about how stupid it would be to get an I <3 Helvetica tattoo... an even stupider idea would be to get it as a tramp stamp. Well, I got good reviews from my posse and impulsively I got it last night..." Oh boy.
- A nice post to end the year from Kars - it feels like a top-trump of so many things that have risen to the surface in my head in 2008.
- "Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation." Yehuda Katz weighs in with a great, informative post.
- "Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that." No, really. Not an April Fool. It sounds like the architecture changes that are going to be made are going to be a big win for Rails 3. Looking forward to it.
- Not concerned with the Javascript bundle, but the Vibrant Ink syntax-highlighting link is lovely.
- "Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb." Impressive, and even a bit fun.
- "Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.
- "'Why do you build your own computers?' Gloria asked earlier this week. 'Why don't you buy just buy one that's already built?' ... It's because computers are fire... If I was a caveman (I'd be dead, because I can't see clearly two feet in front of myself without glasses, but that's not the point), I wouldn't go to the guy who discovered fire and ask if I get a light off his torch. I might let him explain the process--documentation, as it were--but then I'd go off, hold the torch backwards, cut myself with the flint, and generally do it wrong."
- This appears to be some kind of 3D-tinged mind-mapping software; Flatblack were behind the rotoscoped look of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; this is clearly an interesting digression for them.
- The Offworld 20 "...isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way." Smashing. I love Offworld already, and this is a lovely list.
- "Monopoly, in spite being the classiest of all board games, unfortunately is packaged just as boringly and uncreatively as every other garbage board game on the shelves. So, I decided to repackage it... turning the class up to 11." Very pretty, but I miss the original typeface: the 30s-style sans-serif was very important to the tone.
- "...my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological-- lighting effects, texture work, mocapping-- but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."
- "...it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."
- "I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
- "I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
- "I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually create material in anticipation of demand... These suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future." But of course.
- "The city is here for me to use, and it tells me so." Indeed.
- Lanchester writing about games, from the point of view of a smart person who's actually played the games he described. I certainly don't agree with all his points, but I don't disagree with them all, and he's not mouthing off: he's making smart connections and indicating more than a passing familiarity with the medium. Might write a tad more on this.
- "1352 components driven by a 450 link chain and nickel silver drums, prices range from $275k–$400k." Ignoring the price: do want very much.
- It's basically Outrun 2 SP, but in hi-def, and on XBLA and PSN. And it looks like it has all the music intact. Very exciting!
- The metagame is the game. Use the elephant to earn achievements. Apart from earning slightly /too/ many instantly at the beginning, it's a lot of fun. Don't reach for the hints too early.
- Yes, it's an app about weight loss. But: the UI is superb in its touchability and suitability for task at hand, and the reporting functionality is solid (and looks like it'll get much better).