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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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"With a recent project, we really started utilizing extensions with named_scope which is very powerful and cleaned up our code considerably." Some really nice examples of using named_scope effectively.
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"Nintendo makes money with the hardware alone, which may be a superior business model." What, making profit on units rather than selling them at colossal loss is a *superior* business model? Who would have thought it!
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Long thread of patched and hacked 8-bit and 16-bit ROMs, some bringing a vast amount of customisation.
A while back I mentioned that the iPhone App Store was a place where we could see people paying for interface alone, regardless of functionality.
This is a useful segue into Daniel Jalkut’s commentary on the nature of independent software development, and, specifically, whether small-software should be free-as-in-beer software. Jalkut makes the point, as an independent developer, that you should support the software you like, regardless of how slight it is. The example he refers to is Pukka, a nice little tool for posting to delicious from OSX. Pukka is nice because it’s always available and it’s very Mac-like in its behaviour. It’s pretty cheap at $12.95.
Jalkut takes exception to Leo Laporte’s commentary in a MacBreak Weekly podcast, where he suggests (as he tells us how much he loves Pukka) that it should be free.
Why did he suggest this? The answer, simply, is that Pukka is an interface to someone else’s functionality rather than a tool in its own right.
To wit: Pukka interfaces to delicious through the delicious API. Most of the hard work of social bookmarking has already been implemented by the delicious time. All Pukka does is talk to the API – it’s a menubar item, an interface, and a window that sends data to the API. Not a product on its own. Of course, if you know anything about development, you’ll know that building things that talk to APIs – on the desktop, on the web, wherever – isn’t always as easy as it sounds. $14.95 seems reasonably to pay for an app that does this well, especially if you use delicious as much as (eg) I do.
Jalkut’s own MarsEdit (which I’m using a licensed copy of to write this) is similar. It’s a $29.95 weblog editor, that interfaces with most popular blogs, and lets me write posts on my Mac desktop. It’s not that I couldn’t write blogposts before; I can always log into WordPress to do that. No, the reason I bought this is because of the convenience and quality. I rather like posting from this fluid, offline interface, rather than having to type into a box in Safari, for various reasons – the quality and speed of preview, the simplicity of media integration, and the multi-blog (and API) support – I use MarsEdit to post to both WordPress and LiveJournal. If I couldn’t spare $30, I could always just blog from the existing admin screens, but I felt the product was so good I should be it.
Sometimes, it’s hard to express to people the value of a product that does something you could already do. A product that does something new, or which is an essential tool, is much easier to justify. Many Mac owners I know didn’t hesitate to pay the €39 for TextMate, because text editing is so fundamental to our work. But $30 on a blogposting client? That one requires more thought, and isn’t such a no-brainer.
I’m not sure what the solution is. It’s a shame that it’s harder to express the value of “service” applications; I think the iPhone might have it better off here, simply because the device itself is so unlike traditional clients that it makes sense to redesign interfaces to services for it. In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that a quality interface to an existing product might still be worth something, however small, and it’s for that reason that developers like Jalkut should be rewarded for their work.
Notes on the Future of Web Apps 2007
05 March 2007
It’s been about two week since I went to FOWA2007 in London, and I’ve been meaning to write it up for a while. It was an… interesting experience, and I’ve been trying to find a way to frame why that is. Speeding on a train back from the provinces to London seemed a good way to concentrate my thoughts.
Last year’s FOWA was great: a one-day conference for
New business models for next-gen gaming
10 November 2006
I’ve got an article in a free supplement inside this week’s New Statesman. The PDF is available to download from that link – sadly, the HTML isn’t online yet. Still, it’s a cracking supplement – a nice range of content, very colourful, and a real departure for the NS. I’m on pages 28-30, if you’re interested – a biggish feature about where the British games industry might be going in the next few years, and the various challenges it presents. Quite challenging to write about the games industry for a more lay audience than usual; it’ll be interesting to see if the conclusions in the article hold up.
The answer may lie not in next-generation hardware, but in next-generation business models. For example, the British games industry emerged in the 1980s from the constraints that had previously beset the industry. At that time home computers, such as the BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum, were built to a budget, with limited power, developed for and by self-taught coders, often working alone. Now, there is a resurgence in popularity of games for very limited platforms: handheld consoles, mobile telephones, interactive TV and web browsers. And when developers have to work within tighter constraints, new ways to make and sell games – especially for smaller development firms – emerge.
Download the supplement if you’re even vaguely interested.
Oogle versus oogle-less
19 October 2005
With any new, popular, funky web-based service, there’s always going to be a digital divide. You know; those who have your_name@hotmail.com as opposed to yournameX46@hotmail.com; six-digit ICQ numbers as opposed to nine-digit; Flickr sign-in as opposed to Yahoo! sign-in.
And now, it’s happening again. @gmail.com versus @googlemail.com. Not the end of the world, I guess, but gmail is so much more succinct (and trips off the fingers easier).
This time, for once, I’ve got the mark of the early adopter.
Clearleft launches
22 September 2005
Clearleft – a new Brighton-based web design and accessibility consultancy, based in Brighton, and run by Andy, Richard, and Jeremy. None of whom I’ve met personally, you understand, but their writing, presentation and weblogs are all top-notch. Worth checking out if you’re in need of a design or accesibility expert – or three.
EBay to buy Skype
12 September 2005
Woah. Ebay to buy Skype for $2.6bn. That’s a whole lotta cash, and not necessarily coming from who I might have expected. I’m still mulling on the significance of this.