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Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.
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Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.
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Jaw well and truly on the floor.
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"Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."
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"An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.
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"There’s a lot of great technology imagery… Here’s a sampling of stills depicting the awesomeness:" Beautiful. (If I had to have a favourite film, it would still be The Conversation).
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"Normally, one of the first things that admin will do when they set up their blog is to go and remove the Hello world! post. But for this blog, we’ve decided to keep it. The feeling a coder has when they see “Hello world!” for the first time on the tool or system they’re creating is a great feeling. You’ve just given birth to something. It’s still young, fragile, and only a hint of what it someday will be. But it’s alive. Something you’ve made with your own two hands is starting to breath. It has begun."
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"Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks." That's interesting.
A few small changes
09 September 2008
A small tweak to the blog’s design – updating the way comments looked. Ever since this design premiered, I’d been meaning to tidy them up, but never got around to it until today. No idea why it took so long – 10 minutes of sketching and 20 minutes of code was all it took to get there. Anyhow, they now look like this, with gravatars and slightly-better-spacing and all. Feels a little more finished, for the time being.
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"An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature."
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"Brands are built…out of culture…out of meanings from culture. In the Volvo campaign, the meaning was safety and symbol for this safety was a little girl. Pretty standard. But this book is interested in new ways to source meaning. Let's look at new, emerging brand tactics." More excellent posts from Grant.
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"The current browsers, including Firefox, just can’t cut it. JavaScript isn’t fast enough (thereby limiting the UX), browsers are single threaded and they aren’t stable enough. If Google want to challenge Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) in the desktop space they needed a better platform… Google’s solution is I think much neater – build an open source browser that supports multithreading, fast JavaScript execution and stuff Google Gears into the back end so it works offline." Now that's a good explanation.
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"I've just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more." Some fantastic maps-and-pins from Phil and Sam.
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"The series "A New Taxonomy of Gamers" wrapped up last Friday. For your convenience, here are the links to all 11 parts in one convenient post." Oh, this looks good.
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Heard some of this last night; a superb BBC documentary about Brian Wilson and some of his production techniques that shaped the Beach Boys' albums. Some great interviews, and lovely musical deconstruction of harmony and voicing. Obviously, as a "listen again" programme, it's only around for six days – so get listening!
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"Hired as visual artist in the summer of 2006, my challenge was not only to clearly present Braid's mechanics and behaviors, but to help tell a story that was anything but literal: part anecdote, part artifice, part philosophy. This article explains the process of developing visuals for a nearly-complete game with a highly idiosyncratic identity, the challenges encountered, and some of the nuts-and-bolts of our methods and tools." David Hellman on his work on the art of Braid.
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Man, SIGGRAPH papers have the best titles. This is a lot of seriously hardcore, cutting edge, graphic-programming nous. Also: "jiggly fluids".
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"The negative side of this, as your experience illustrates, is that Braid just lacks any immediate sense of fun. It does not set out to entertain you, and with the exception of some pretty aesthetic moments it makes you earn the pleasure you take from it. (Portal, which makes for a good point of comparison, wants the player to like it and desires to be understood in a way that Braid does not.)" I think Pliskin is spot on, here
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"An interesting article at Rock, Paper, Shotgun tackles BioWare's tackling of issues tackling modern society, tackling one of my Mass Effect plots in the process. I responded in the comments, and after looking at how much I yammered on, I figured it was worth posting here as a look inside how these things get into the game, and why some things that seem dumb get done." Patrick Weekes follows up the RPS post criticising his own plot elements with some frank self-criticism, and some interesting explanations; a reminder of how hard creating any kind of meaningful choice can be.
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Yes.
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A blog from Tom, Flora, and no doubt shortly et al, about life in Hackney.
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Now this *is* interesting: a comments thread in which Michael Abbott's readers put questions to Iain Lobb, one of the designers behind Meta4orce… and he answers them candidly and informatively. Interesting stuff about the limitations of building games around TV shows for public service broadcasters.
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"I thought it was a parking ticket, and was annoyed. But up close, I saw it was just an empty envelope someone put there…" I'll let you click through for the punchline. Delightful, nontheless.
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Great selection of posts on how brands need to behave (and how they sometimes fail to do so) from Grant McCracken.
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Narrative-driven flash game from BBC Switch. Combines animated cut-scenes with minigames representing key plot aspects; as such, it's very linear. Script by Peter Milligan, though! It looks expensive; I'd be interested to know how successful it's been. As it stands, it's a little bit Freakangels-lite, a little bit Torchwood. And yes, I know how that sounds.
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A nice article about context, contracts, and a few other things related to game AI design. If you're interested in the field at all, it's a nice read.
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"I believe that the “auteur” school of game development is not only outmoded, but dangerous to the vitality of the medium. Instead, we must pursue deeply collaborative work styles and seek out diverse teammates if indie game development is ever to reach new heights and thrive beyond its current audience." I need to come to a better understanding about auteurship in this field; I'm not entirely convinced by this article.
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WikkaWiki is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine∞ written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Forked from WakkaWiki. Designed for speed, extensibility, and security. Released under the GPL license.
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"The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress created by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme." Looks great.
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Now that's what I call a UI. Nice idea!
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"Are you tired of browser-based games that are thinly veiled interfaces for databases? Finally, there's a game that just is a database!" This looks awesome.
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"A simple pocket knife can be more appealing and usable than a bristling Victorinox, and a dedicated little games machine like the DS can engage us far more than the sleek power of the PSP. You can feel admiration and even awe for the big power boxes, but for the DS you feel affection – and that, in marketing terms, is worth a whole heap more." I love Stephen Fry.
Beirut to Doha
18 July 2006
My former colleague Andy is in Lebanon right now and is keeping a blog whilst there. The writing there is top-notch; do check it out. I hope he makes a swift and safe return to these shores; until then, I hope he manages to keep writing. I know I’d be terrified.
Joining the dots
20 February 2006
Which, to be honest, all sounds very exciting. Let’s see just how it turns out – and if they can keep it up. On the Guardian‘s past form, I’d say yes.
Rather exciting.
Unexpected hiatus
01 October 2005
Whoops. Unexpected hiatus in posting, there; first the long posts slipped, then the link-posts, and by the time I wasn’t even posting stuff into delicious it was getting desperate. I forgot how busy September gets. Far too many people I know are born in said month, and coupled with new terms (school, university, parliamentary) and a return to longer issues, everything ground to a halt round here. IKB – the temporary theme, an attempt at something more generic – has also kind-of ground to a halt. But it’s been a fertile testing ground and something approaching a “proper design” should return soon to these pages. I’ve also been more development work, in both PHP and Rails. The latter’s still proving enjoyable; I’m hitting the tricky problems now, which is good, because I used to be getting stuck on the basic problems.
Keep your eyes peeled; there’s bound to be good stuff coming soon.
I find your lack of faith disturbing
26 September 2005
Screenwriter Josh Friedman is blogging. As well as being an interesting insight into, well, the semi-crazy world of Hollywood pitching, it’s also pretty darn funny.