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"He probably thinks he is doing a community service but he is blatantly breaking the law and has to be dealt with. I would call him an eccentric." Community service yes; blatantly breaking the law, yes; 'has to be dealt with', really not sure about that. It's not like he was causing harm. Sometimes, the world is a funny place. Oh: and definitely, definitely "eccentric".
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I can't really quote from it, but you need to read this; it's the most deliciously bonkers concept, and if they pull it off – which seems like it might just be possible, given the level of detail they talk about the game at – it could be properly magical. Lovely preview, too.
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Retrospective on Pinball Construction Set, as well as EA's subsequent forays into "construction kit" territory, as a brief history of accessible, mainstream game-creation tools.
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"Red dot fever enforces a precision into your design that the rest must meet to feel coherent. There’s no room for the hereish, nowish, thenish and soonish. The ‘good enough’." Dingdingding. +5 points to Taylor, as usual. Place, not location.
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"TinkerKit is an Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals. The interest in physical computing as an area in development within the creative industries has been increasing rapidly. In response to this Tinker.it! is developing the TinkerKit to introduce fast iterative physical computing methodologies to newcomers, and particularly design professionals." Standardised modules, standardised connectors, Arduino-compatible. I remember Massimo showing me his keyboard-emulating board ages ago. Nice to see Tinker productising the platform, too.
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"The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior." Dark, dark voodoo, but very impressive – and excellently explained by Doug Bowman. It's nice to see Doug blogging again.
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"If 2009 is going to see the emergence of high-quality browser-based games, then 2009 is going to be the year of Unity. It has: lots of powerful features; iPhone support; Wii publishing; a developing community; quality developers using it; and an upcoming upcoming PC version. In short, it is about to make a major splash. I feel compelled to jump in with it — the indie license is cheaper than the Flash IDE."
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"bash completion support for core Git." Ooh. This looks really, really nice.
What’s next
06 February 2009
Today is my final day working at Headshift. I don’t talk about work much on this blog, but this felt worth a post.
I’ve been here nearly a year and a half, and it’s been a fun ride: my first job in an agency/consultancy environment, rather than an internal role. That’s been a learning experience in and of itself. There have been lots of good projects, some of which are live already, and others which should be live very, very soon; looking forward to being able to point at one of them in particular. There was also a lot of good skills-learning, too; really getting on top of Rails, levelling up in sysadminning a bit, and lots of opportunities to balance all the code with some great interaction design work. It’s been great to have such a flexible position, and work on most of the levels the application stack, from initial design to code.
And, of course, there are the people; Headshift’s greatest assest really is its people, all of whom are fantastic in many ways, and all of whom have lots left to give. I’m going to miss them a lot; it’s always hard leaving a small company.
So what’s next?
What’s next is very exciting. Next week, I’m going to be joining Schulze & Webb, where I’ll be making and writing. More on the specifics of what I mean by “making and writing” will be coming shortly: it’s a really interesting role, and it’s the details of it that make it so.
Suffice to say, I’m very excited; Matt and Jack’s reputation precedes them, and I hope we’re going to make a lot of good stuff (and perhaps a little trouble) together.
The other interesting part of all this: although I’m a proper employee at S&W, my contract with them is for four days a week, and so I’m going to have a “spare” day, which I’m hoping to fill with all sorts of things: time to tinker on the many projects that I just can’t fit into the evenings; time to work on interesting things for interesting people; time to play. That’s going to be exciting, too. More on that another time, because the real focus for now is on the new job.
This, for me, is where 2009 really begins. It’s going to be exciting, I’m telling you.
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"With Half-Life and Counter-Strike, and more recently Team Fortress 2, we've learned that we're no longer making stand-alone games but creating entertainment services. With Left 4 Dead we're extending that tradition by creating additional gameplay and releasing our internal tools to aspiring developers so they may also create and distribute new Left 4 Dead experiences." Lots of places have the news; this quotation is the killer, though. "Entertainment services". GAAS, anyone?
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"What's So Great About The Wire?", a course at UC Berkley. Given the comparisons they suggest, to leave out any of Series 2 from their studies is, frankly, criminal.
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"On Tuesday we shipped an update that added a bunch of features / bugfixes / balancing tweaks that came out of the community's feedback. In particular, it made some changes to the underlying TF damage system, and as part of that, it modified the way critical hits are determined. We thought it might be interesting to dig a little into the change, and hopefully give you some insight into our thinking." Another cracking example of explaining game mechanics clearly and directly, to an engaged community.
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"You've got to get shit happening – you can talk about it, you can write it down, it means nothing until you actually make it and think f**k that's nothing like what I thought it was going to be! That happens most of the time." Gary Penn on prototyping, getting real, and how they do stuff at Denki. More good stuff.
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"We always start with the idea of toys," says Ralfe. "They're the quickest way into finding fun. Rules aren't fun, so we never begin with them." Great feature from Keith Stuart on a visit to Denki; lots of good stuff in here.
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"…it turns out that a GBA and a cart isn’t any more use than a GBA on its own. It’s only when you build a machine out of a GBA and a cart and a me that you’ve got a real Rhythm Tengoku Machine. Bolt those three components together and you’ve built an entirely new organism, an extraordinary creature who can shoot ghosts, dance with monkeys, and climb stars like staircases."
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"You’ll win the game if you’re the only one playing the game at the moment in the world. The game checks over the internet if there are other people playing it at the moment and it’ll kill the game if someone else is playing it. You have to play the game for 4 minutes and 33 seconds." High concept, I'll give it that.
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"Durham University's Dr Shamus Smith, who helped spearhead the project, told BBC News that that while bespoke 3D modelling software was available, modifying a video game was faster, more cost effective, and had better special effects." Quite true. Although: "gamers" tend to treat it as a game, wheras "non-gamers" treat it as a training exercise, and behave accordingly.
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Microsoft on their new MSN Music service, weighed-down by DRM. I don't normally link to stuff about DRM, but frankly, every single response in this is comedy gold.
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"The results from two surveys, based on responses from over 2,500 people who participate in an Internet chat group focused on video games, found that the inclusion of violent content did nothing to enhance players’ enjoyment. What did matter was feeling in control and feeling competent. “Games give autonomy, the freedom to take lots of different directions and approaches,” says Ryan."
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Beautiful.
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"Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end." Yes.
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You can now use Shoulda macros in RSpec as well as Test::Unit. Thanks, Thoughtbot! Might take a poke at this some time.
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Pup ponders the heat-death of the universe. Beautiful, and a lovely use of space, too.
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"CRM training encompasses a wide range of knowledge, skills and attitudes including communications, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, and teamwork; together with all the attendant sub-disciplines which each of these areas entails. CRM can be defined as a management system which makes optimum use of all available resources – equipment, procedures and people – to promote safety and enhance the efficiency of flight operations."
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Scrapes lots of things, produces a useful page which actually manages to stay up. Also, it spells TRANSPORT CHAOS the only way it should be spelt: in capitals.
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Named for the year the BJP was founded; nicely written, and not just a fast-moving press release stream.
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All Kenta Cho's code on wonderfl.
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Kenta Cho's making stuff on wondfl, in ActionScript. This example is ASCII-based bulletty goodness.
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"So perverse as it might sound, I'm going to plead for less choice in video games. It's a paradox: by limiting the player's discretion, you can expand the narrative possibilities of the medium. Coercion can create a kind of emotional heft that you can't achieve within the confines of the empowerment-myth." All true, and FC2 is a fantastic example of this. But: this is just one way of making games. More of this, yes, but don't forget all the other approaches.
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"write Actionscript3 code in a textarea, and your code will be compiled server side. Your compiled Flash will be reloaded automatically in the right side of the page, so write code and see it real-time." And you can fork other people's code. It's like github and Heroku all at once, but for Flash.
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Fantastic, all of it.
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Sneeze is the latest minigame inside Routes to be released. It's a bit like Boomshine and Every Extend, except using the common cold as your weapon. Children are easy vectors, the elderly are slow but you get more points for infecting them. Lots of fun, and great splatter effects.
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"This story clearly illustrates the problem with ordering over the phone." Oh dear.
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"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."
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"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.
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"Unlike other games, L4D brings this entropy to the surface — there's a palpable feeling of dread throughout, as if the world is relentlessly and mercilessly trying to turn you into a red mist as fast as possible." Not convinced entirely, but this is a really important point: the best games expose their mechanics in plain sight. The systemic nature of the game – the entropic tension between survivor and zombie – is clearly critical to it, and there's no point where that's not made clear.
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"FreeAgent is an easy online accounting tool, perfectly suited for freelancers and small businesses." Lots of good support for UK-based business, especially when it comes to tax calculation.
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"Templates are simple ruby files containing DSL for adding plugins/gems/initializers etc. to your freshly created Rails project." That looks very handy.
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I've had this bug for ages. Basically: when you upgrade to Lightroom 2, keywords from Lightroom 1 aren't exported by default, making exporting to Flickr irritating, because you end up having to rekey some (but not all) keywords. This magic Lua script fixes everything.
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"During Condition 1 weather, winds gust at speeds of anywhere from 50 to 60 MPH and the wind chill hits anywhere between 75° F to 100° F below zero. Ouch. Not surprisingly, personnel are prohibited from leaving their buildings during these storms." Which gives them ample time to make videos like this.
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"Most usability experts will agree, Dr. Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” is required reading for any aspiring user experience or product designer. But it’s also an excellent resource for game creators – even if it’s less commonly found on studio bookshelves." NGMoco's blog, on POET, and what it means for game designers. Not rocket science, but really well explained to a non-specialist audience.
Snow Day: Photographs
02 February 2009
And, to follow up the video, here are the photographs from today’s trip to the village for Jaffa Cakes.
Snow Day
02 February 2009
A walk through the park to pick up provisions, with a camera in tow. A few jitters from iMovie’s stabilisation combined with the D90’s slightly awkward panning.