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"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.
Where I’ve been
08 November 2009
Up a hill, mainly.
First holiday in a year: hiking in the Five-Finger mountains in Northern Cyprus (the Turkish bit). Really excellent: sun and skies and outdoors and lots of photographs I am currently processing. Recharged batteries that were more run-down than I realised.
And, before that, I moved house again. Could have done without that, but on the plus side, the new place is lovely.
The links have still been chugging along, as you can see, and there’s been lots more stuff from me over at the BERG blog.
There should be some stuff here quite soon, though – something on loot and Borderlands (ah, Borderlands, how I love you), not to mention a few other things – so in the meantime, I hope you haven’t minded the cavalcade of links.
Onwards!
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"For 27 months, Ian Fisher, his parents and friends, and the U.S. Army allowed Denver Post reporters and a photographer to watch and chronicle his recruitment, induction, training, deployment, and, finally, his return from combat. A selection of photos from Ian’s journey are posted below." The link to the full project page isn't working at the moment, but the pictures alone are striking.
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Porting a short segment of Another World to Javascript and Canvas. Bonkers, but impressive.
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"It is difficult and sad to leave Flickr but I have no regrets. If you asked me whether I'd do it again and what I'd do differently I'd tell you that I'd do it again in a heartbeat and the only thing I'd change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did. The good news is that I've accepted a position to frolic around and play with the trouble-makers that are Stamen Design because "it seems like too good an opportunity and one that I would always wonder about if I'd said no"." This is awesome and exciting.
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"it comes as no surprise that a well-known Swedish furniture-maker has taken the opportunity to enter the specialist adult market, furnishing the adulterers of the green belt with the tools necessary for their pleasures." Ahehehe.
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"The walkthrough posted by Lee Beng Hai belongs in a “best games writing” list somewhere, not so much for the prose, but for the depth of his coverage and the gratitude I feel for it, like he’s the first guy in my tribe to wander into the jungle and come back with all his limbs." Chris Dahlen on why nobody's writing about Demon's Souls, but everybody's playing it. (Also: "It’s not “flow”, because flow implies progress; it’s more like tantric sex with a slide rule" is a brilliant analogy).
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"Clarity is a Splunk like web interface for your server log files. It supports searching (using grep) as well as trailing log files. It has been written using the event based architecture based on EventMachine and so allows real-time search of very large log files. If you hit the browser Stop button it will also kill the grep / tail utility."
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"a JavaScript GameBoy Emulator" Blimey.
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"Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2×2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?”" So true. I'm trying to recall our own nomenclature.
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Great interview with Lantz, expanding on his "games aren't media" angle and some other interesting points on aesthetics; totally marred by Michaël Samyn's trolling of a comment thread (on his *own* company's blog). Still, read the top half!
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"Flogr shows your pictures from flickr in a customizable photo portfolio interface which includes a main photo page with EXIF details and flickr user comments, a customizable thumbnails page of your recent work, a slideshow component to browse through thumbnails, a tag cloud page, and an about page that shows your flickr user profile. With flogr you can control which photos are shown by specifying the flickr tag(s) to include so you can show only your best photographs if you choose." Which is something I've been looking for for a while. Glad I didn't have to write it, now.
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"NameChanger is designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files."
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"Fortunately, modern displays can display characters that look exactly like this without special circuitry used in the original DEC terminals and there is free software that can be used to create a usable outline font out of a PNG image." Recreating VT220 terminal fonts in software, and from thence into Truetype.
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"LimeChat is an IRC client for Mac OS X written on RubyCocoa." I did not know about this. It looks nice.
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"Easily show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows." Which is hard, and it is nice to know someone else has done the work.
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"Do you like cities? Do you like architecture? Do you like speaking at conferences?" I think this has sewn up the 2010-11 circuit.
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""Who amongst us will write the Building as Contacts and Related Goodness blog post?" It's worth remembering, I think, that he [Dan Catt] already has."
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"Being NOTES and SLIDES on a talk given at PLAYFUL 09, concerning CHARLES BABBAGE, HEATH ROBINSON, MENACE and MAGE" Awesome; shame I couldn't be there. I wondered where that link about Michie had come from a few weeks ago…
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"We create physical, social games for public space. Our games get people moving and talking. They stimulate their creativity and get them to connect." Kars has a name for his new venture.
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"The interesting, or arguably uninteresting, thing about this programme is that it is completely lacking in any sort of narrative arc. All the other programmes on Saturday night are a gift for a narratologist: with their judges’ scores, audience votes and dance-offs/sing-offs, they are all crisis, crescendo and narrative resolution. But Hole in the Wall is different. It’s just celebrities going through these differently-shaped holes in the wall, again and again and again… Hole in the Wall is the groundhog day of Saturday evening light entertainment." Saturday-night audiences like a good plot.