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Nice write-up of the making of (the marvellous) Trainyard, both in terms of polishing and marketing.
09
July
2010
July
2010
Links
Tagged as:
ios, iphone, noticings, opensource, tomtaylor.
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Tom on writing the Noticings Uploader – and making the code open-source.
26
June
2010
June
2010
Links
Tagged as:
finalfantasytactics, games, iphone.
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"Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is heading to iPhone and iPod Touch on 15th September." Uh-oh. I might end up giving it another crack. (It's clearly a great game, but very hard and even more unforgiving).
23
June
2010
June
2010
Links
Tagged as:
AR, augmentedreality, games, iphone.
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"In AR Monster, you use your iPhone's GPS system and camera to discover and battle more than 600 monsters hidden in the real world. By playing the game in different locations and pointing the handset in different directions, you'll be able to find new kinds of monsters." As is increasingly becoming my reaction to all things AR: "so what?"
18
June
2010
June
2010
games
Tagged as:
boardgames, carcassonne, design, iphone.
Carcassonne: Making Pretty Shapes
I really like Carcassonne.
I like it because it’s as interesting with two players as with four – just a very different game in each case. I like it because of the various scoring methods it combines: simple play-piece/gain score for roads/abbeys/towns; longer-term risks with potentially higher rewards for farmers. I like that it forces you to juggle a limited number of scoring opportunities.
But I like it best because it’s about making pretty landscapes.
photograph: “Carcassonne: Inns & Cathedrals” by SimDawdler
When The Coding Monkeys (who, a good while ago, wrote the excellent SubEthaEdit), released their iPhone version of Carcassonne, I had to check it out. After all, if they can make a multiplayer text editor as good as SubEthaEdit, they might well be an ideal fit for an asynchronous, multiplayer boardgame.
Turned out I was right: they’ve really put some time and thought into their iP:hone version. The UI is lovely, as simple as possible, but rich where it needs to be: it’s very clear what’s going on and what the options available to you are. There’s also a nice focus on playing asynchronously – multiple games, taking turns as and when – which is only enhanced by the “next table” button that lets you ripple through open games without constantly returning to a menu.
But best of all is this screen:
The tile-layouts of each game are the thumbnail used to represent them.
As the games go on, this screen updates, their icons evolving from single green dots to sprawling landscapes. Of course the layout is the element of the game you place front and centre when it comes to navigation; it’s the most iconic part of any single game, and it works as a lovely aid to recognition.
Nicely done.
05
June
2010
June
2010
Links
Tagged as:
boardgames, carcassonne, games, iphone, pbm.
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Ooh. Turned-based multiplayer, from the looks of things, which would be ideal for a nice, long, slow, PBM-style game.
04
June
2010
June
2010
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"…Bing Destination Maps [bing.com] seems quite interesting as a new way of rendering geographical maps in a more visually simplified, understandable and accessible way. In other words, imagine one can now create a sort of information-optimized summary maps, similar to those you would quickly draw yourself on the back of napkin." It is slow and a bit beta, and the loading graphic is crackers… but otherwise, this is superb.
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"One of the three typographic styles that is used in Japan is essentially phonetic, and is called Katakana. We’ve been attempting to find ways to incorporate phonetic sounds with the Katakana letterforms." Brilliant.
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Fantastic. If you're like me, and use One Gmail Account To Rule Them All, but use Mail as your email client, you can only use the main email address to send from. This allows you to pick a from address, making your mailing lists work again, and allowing you to pick the From address on send.
04
May
2010
May
2010
Links
Tagged as:
blog, blogging, clinthocking, comfort, editor, engineyard, games, iphone, mac, marsedit, music, osx, programming, progress, propellerhead, rails, rails3, rebirth, resignation, risk, ruby, rubyonrails, software.
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MarsEdit 3 is out; the headline feature is the WYSIWYG mode, but for me, the headline features are syntax-highlighting, support for WordPress Pages, and integration with Lightroom's library. Sadly, it's 10.6 only, and my knackered MBP is 10.5… but it's an upgrade I'll be making asap.
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Blimey, ReBirth, entirely ported to iPhone and on the App Store. Looks finickity, but it was loads of fun, and for $7… I might end up with that.
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"Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I know the way forward. The way forward lies in my having the courage that I did not know I had a decade ago to bid farewell to those tragically comforting habits. I need to walk on hot coals and sleep on a bed of nails. I need to chew on broken glass. I need to drink paint. This post has gotten long enough and I am still afraid to come to the point, but what I really need more than anything is to write these words;<br />
<br />
I gave notice of my resignation to Ubisoft on Monday, April 26th, 2010." -
Engine Yard have a new blog about Rails, consisting of screencasts and tutorials, and it looks good. One to subscribe to.
14
April
2010
April
2010
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"Hitotoki stores literary 'sketches' of moments you experience every day. No check-ins. No bullshit badges. We think the most interesting stuff happens in the space between places. Hitotoki is built to help you capture those moments."
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Bookmarked because I'm fed up of watery allusions to this (last seen: Malcolm Gladwell, Freakonomics (which is annoying because it's watery despite Levitt having *worked on the paper*)). $5 for the *actual information* seems far more interesting than any volume of popular economics books.
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Hard to explain, but a must-watch; lovely spatial music sequencer/toy. (And: I miss Offworld :( )
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"The picture clearly shows the path of the sun through the sky over the last six months." Brilliant. (And: so simple!)
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"Philip K. Dick fans from around the world have contributed to this scanned collection of over 650 PKD book covers." Some of these are awesome, from the crazy french covers for VALIS to the German editions of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – retitled as "LSD-Astronauten".
07
April
2010
April
2010
Links
Tagged as:
adamcurtis, art, artsandcrafts, bbc, books, borders, boundaries, britain, cocoa, collaboration, course, creativity, davidbyrne, design, documentary, engineering, gothic, iphone, jamesbridle, johnruskin, maps, mattedgar, mexico, mobile, music, objectivec, photographs, postwar, process, programming, publishing, resolution, stanford, stml, straup, travel, tutorial, writing.
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Stanford's iPhone development course.
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"Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this?" Something else that's been on the pile (to link) for a while now.
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"The craftsman as hero is a consistent motif in Ruskin’s artistic and social theories. To him, mechanisation and division of labour dehumanise workers, enslaving them to execute exactly the specifications of others. The only way to recapture the humanity in labour is to put the designer back in touch with the tools of the craft and to unleash the creativity of the maker." A lovely metaphorical piece from Matt Edgar, reminding me of how much I need to brush up on my knowledge of the Arts and Crafts movement, if only because of how much I appreciate their sentiments.
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"At some point, I begin to feel that I am carrying entire Latin American forests home with me. Also, I am afflicted with a terrible need to stop and write things down, at almost every corner, slowing my passage through the city and impeding motion. I am locked in this ridiculous two-step, unable to travel more than half a block before sitting down and writing out more, papering over the last thirty feet, dripping more ink onto the street: this absurd project, this incomprehensible, incompletable urge, this terror of forgetting and compulsion to record." Beautiful writing from James, which has been sitting on the "to link" pile for far too long.
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"Here is an extraordinary piece of film. It is a live outside broadcast of a British army simulation of an attack on a train in Britain. It went out at prime time on a BBC programme called Saturday Night Out. And it happened in 1956."
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"Maps are having their F-64 moment, right now, which is important and wonderful but I don't think anyone really wants to live in a world with an infinite depth of field. It's an appealing idea but then something like the Hipstamatic comes along and we all get irrationally weak in the knees, all over again." As usual with Aaron, I could quote most of the article, but in this case, I'll pick my favourite piece of writing, rather than perhaps the most succint quotation; just read the whole thing. (And: I wish I could code or even write like this).
Links & notes for this month
- And, with their 119th update, Valve helpfully included the list of all their previous patches, as well. Just look at the amount that's changed - and how swiftly. A proper, living game (unlike the stillborn 360 version). Can't wait to play it on the Mac; it's almost like a different game to the one I played at the beginning.
- "Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to." Answer: good things. Ben is awesome, and this work sounds great. (I can't quote a suitable passage, so George's intro will have to do).
- A few short tips on find; one of the bash tools I use least, and should probably use more.
- "Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"
- I could, charmlessly and redundantly, expand on that to say: when life surprises us, making the everyday strange and wonderful, our first impulse is to make stories. These are of course personal stories: the volcano itself is too remote, too vast, to fit into our little narratives. Like Vonnegut’s glaciers, they just exist: human lives happen around them.
- "An inquisitive family have uncovered a bizarre church which has been hidden under their Victorian home in Shropshire for 100 years. The Farla family made the discovery while investigating what was under a metre-long rectangle metal grid in their hallway." Wow. Via BLDGBLOG
- Lovely interview with Danny Trejo about many of his roles. If you like movies, totally worth a read. He's really quite a guy.
- Mecha-choreography, filmed in Armored Core 4 Answer. Pretty, and I'm not really one for Machinima, but there's something about the jet-trails that just works.
- "The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one. Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it." James, as ever, is very, very sharp. This is good.
- Open source DAW for Linux and OSX.
- "I keep coming back to EoPS (I am re-reading it as I write this) because it’s short, it’s easy reading, it’s funny, and much of its advice is timeless. In a way, you could say its age is even a plus-point, because it makes it obvious which of the rules are of their time and which are fundamental." Sounds great.
- Transmit 4 is looking really good; Transmit Disk, especially.
- Blimey. Spotify want to own social music - linking out to Facebook and creating a more public Spotify profile - but, more to the point, they also want to own music playing, by making your own library available inside the Spotify app... and even offering wireless sync of your own music.
- "In a sense, it is. However, Ashley Davis, a blogger over at Destructoid, put a post up last week specifically on the Pac-Man ghosts and why they got the names that they did. In short, though it might seem like Blinky, Pinky, Inky and the Clyde-Sue-Tim hivemind hover around dot-filled mazes in the exact same way, they don’t. In fact, the way they move is explained by their nicknames." This is brilliant.
- "Ben O'Steen's talk from OKFN; lots of nice little things in here about preserving data and opening it up into a variety of forms."
- "Lazy loader is a jQuery plugin written in JavaScript. It delays loading of images in (long) web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) wont be loaded before user scrolls to them." Handy.
- Joe Moran on Daniel Miller's "The Comfort Of Things", which has gone straight onto my wishlist.
- "For instance, when a film critic with a Twitter account says that video games are not art, the natural followup becomes, "Well then... what is art?" And suddenly we're in some goddamn flourescent-lit student lounge, sitting on a nine-dollar couch across from a dude whose shirt is self-consciously spattered with daubs of encaustic, hip-to-hip with the girl who stamped each page of a copy of The Feminine Mystique with an ink print of her own labia, hearing the guy over our shoulder mention Duchamp for the sixth time this week, and it all just needs to stop right now." Well said, Steve.
- Another Flixel tutorial, this time updated for version 2.
- "Just for fun, I shoot one of [the hostages] in the pillow case. The head area immediately becomes a blur of pixels, just like you'd see if you were watching some graphic amateur camerawork on the news.<br /> <br /> The effect is unnerving. It's somehow more realistic and more disturbing than the cartoon splatter of bright red blood and bits of brain you see in most games. It taps into that part of the psyche which knows that if something's too horrible to be shown, it must be really horrible. Or is this just IO's attempt to get the game awarded a lower age rating?<br /> <br /> "No, not at all," says Lund. "This was an idea the team came up with - wouldn't it be fun to mimic that thing about something being too graphic, that documentary style? It's a good way of showing you got that headshot in a new way."<br /> <br /> That's marvellous (as is, from the sound of it, K&L2's take on "realism" - namely, that Police Camera Action is a more realistic aesthetic that 24).
- "The best way to explain the difference between Blink and these two episodes would be to say that I think the best conceived movie sequel ever was Aliens following Alien. It took the same monster into an entirely different type of film." I love Steven Moffat very much.
- "My main point brings me back to Pretending Apps. Because there are lots of other things you can steal from games, many other aspects of gaming that people find appealing and some of them might be more easily and usefully extracted." Yup. This was one of my main beefs with the whole "let's make everything playful/gamey!" trend that kicked off a few years ago: "game-y" was associated with "having points", and really, that's not what makes a game at all. (Other things that make a game: pretending, as Russell mentions, and visible mechanics, as I think I have to write about soon).
- "There seems to be some sort of consensus that the highest form of play is fully immersive, interactive live theatre. Well not for me. The rhetoric of these things is often about people making their own choices, being free to act, creating their own narrative, etc, etc. And I always end up feeling like a piece, a pawn." Totally; not for me, either, though I'm not totally into "Social Toys" either - but Russell's points are perfectly valid and sensible. (I do like theatre, though). Probably ought to write more than a few hundred characters on this.
- Solid illustration comedy gold, mainly from the 70s and 80s.
- "I'm excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential. The illumination of, in the words of Richard Nash, that commonality between two people who have read the same book." Craig Mod, excellent as ever, on e-books. Whilst he mainly talks about type, his point runs far deeper.