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“A hidden hoard of recordings made by the electronic music pioneer behind the Doctor Who theme has been revealed – including a dance track 20 years ahead of its time.” Wow.
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Remarkable, oscar-winning short; real interviews, and some incredible CGI character design. At the heart of it: a very sad story. Beautiful soundtrack, too.
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“A city is a collection of lives and buildings, and it has identity and personality. Cities exist in location, and in time.” Neil Gaiman’s essay from SimCity 2000 (I believe).
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“Following up on these overviews of the book industry, I thought I’d share some lessons I learned from publishing Bit Literacy.” Some useful advice.
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[rough translation] “Lost on the internet? Don’t panic; we’re going to help you.” (You are here).
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“As you may have guessed, we’ve solved these problems, and replaced the Exception Notifier in most of the apps we manage, with a homegrown solution called hoptoad.” Gosh, the Thoughtbot guys really are on fire.
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Building your own version of Higinbotham’s oscilloscope tennis game, to work on a real oscilloscope.
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“My name is Sean Tevis [photo]. I’m an Information Architect in Kansas running for State Representative. I’ve decided to “retire” my current State Representative. I’m going to win.” Bold. He might just Howard Dean on us, but he deserves $9.
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“one of a kind bacon wraps are the perfect holiday gift for every bacon fan!” yes. yes, they are.
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“…the act of mapping is itself a process of analysis, discovery, and design. It is a process of finding and giving meaning to information, of contextualizing information, and of developing new understandings of the places represented.”
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“Battery life, intermittent connectivity, input constraints, context of use… all different, all unavoidable, all vital to consider when going mobile.”
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Leslie Feist, counting to four, on Sesame Street. Almost, but not quite, as good as James Blunt’s triangle; still, delightful nontheless.
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“Lionhead’s system acknowledges the social context of co-op that other games ignore, and the bargaining over who gets to be the hero and how much the henchman is paid is a crucial part of the fun.” It’s all about the context; aninteresting take on co-op.
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“The bottom line is, there are laws on the books in the EU that stand in direct conflict with the needs of Google’s architecture, and no amount of hand waving will make that fact go away.” Smart artcile about the legal issues of cloud computing.
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“Having successfully built a soundchip out of a microcontroller together with my friends in kryo, I wanted to tackle the greater challenge of generating a realtime video signal along with the sound.” Wow. An ATMega88 turned into a demo platform.
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An interview with E. Paul Zehr, whose book, “Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero”, discusses the matter of the interview. (is it possible for a normal guy to become about as fit as Batman? And can you maintain it?) Some smart points.
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Will Wright: “…the process of play is the process of pushing against reality, building a model, refining a model by looking at the results of looking at interacting with things.“ Jones: “That’s still the mission plan.” Yes.
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“The pleasure of video games, it seems to me, comes from our sense that we are collaborating in the realization of the designer’s intentions by learning those rules.” Yes. This is why I loved watching Mission Impossible: every week, a puzzle is solved.
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Radiohead’s new video was created using 3D scanning data and animated in software. The video has its own Google Code page. You can download the original data. Squee.
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“The capacity to convey narrative through interaction is a constitutive rather than accidental feature of the medium. Every time a designer exploits this ability we get closer to finding […] what forms of expression are unique to games…”
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“The general rule to take from this is “dont use modules to create namespaces in controllers that are also names of pre-existing constants from other class definitions”” Matt J with some useful tips for namespaced controllers. Also, Warren G.
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“The abundance of choice is not a concern, it is an asset. It provides our community with a more varied, more specialized toolbox, allowing us to select the optimal platform for the problem in front of us.” A great post from Jack Shedd.
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Pokemon illustrated next to humanised representations of themselves. Cute, silly.
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“Any resemblances to geeks living or dead are coincidental.” Seen many of these, both in real life and in software design. Probably been guilty of one or tow in my time.
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“Skittle-based beat sequencer, a tangible and edible music interface. This is a prototype developed over the course of two evenings, with a webcam and Processing.” Fun!
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Lovely. A flash game that combines point-and-click with KS2 revision problems, made by the people who build Samorost. Actually fun; actually educational. And just beautiful to play and listen to.
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“Users need to see results before they can ask better, more detailed questions. These feedback loops provide critical learning. Users need to get to data as quickly and easily as possible. A screen without data is delayed progress.”
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“The people responsible for note tracking … aim to reproduce the way that the song is played on a real guitar to the greatest extent possible within the confines of the guitar controller’s limited repertoire of moves.” Which is what I assumed.
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“The thing about Harmonix is that even though they strive to bring total non-musicians closer to music, they still mark a clear boundary between playing music and not.” A much better explanation of this than I tend to give; lovely article.
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“Your bewilderment suggests you are not be familiar with the new vi assistant.”
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“jsvi is a vi-clone written in pure javascript and should work in any modern web-browser.” Blimey.
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Galactus is real.
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Junot Diaz on GTAIV in the Wall Street Journal. Excellent writing, on the nature of good vs. great and great vs. seminal; on what art does to us; on how it needs to go farther. Smart, engaged, written by someone who gets culture and who *plays*.
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Pat Redding is Narrative Designer on Far Cry 2. This is his presentation from GDC 2008, with full notes. It’s very, very good: all about designing story in an open-world environment. Lots of detail. Designers: you need to read this.
