04 Sep 2006, 01:20
He spoke at the BAFTA in UK, and Functional Autonomy has posted a writeup of it.
01 Sep 2006, 09:40
The folks over at shmup-dev have started a new competition to develop a 2D shooter with the rule that there must be some form of weapon autofire. Considering that this feature is extremely common, it’s safe to say that pretty much any shooter you could come up with qualifies for the competition. I hope many entries will take the opportunity to do something interesting with the autofire concept.
17 Aug 2006, 02:42
Wow, it’s been almost a month since I last wrote anything here. I guess blogging is a state of mind, not so much about the importance of the content you write, but about feeling like communicating it to other people. Guess I’ve been a bit asocial lately. 🙂
You can read Ernest Adams’ wonderful article here. He talks about the need for culturally respectable games in order to consolidate videogames as a respected medium itself.
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16 Jul 2006, 14:44
I just came back from Mundos Digitales 2006 in La Coruña, where I gave a lecture on Game Design. It was a blast! Lots of interesting presentations, great people from the animation and computer graphics industry, and a whole load of fun partying at night.
Next week I’ll be flying to the north of Spain again. The GameLab group at the Universidad de Oviedo has invited me to give a similar lecture.
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12 Jul 2006, 15:28
Mark Rein’s dismissal of episodic content as a “broken model”.
He mentions marketability, user interest, price and other things that have come up in this thread. Can’t wait for the full writeup. Although I can’t avoid a certain level of agreement with him, it does seem to me that he’s talking as if the whole distribution and publishing model is not going to change at all.
Yes, in the current retail, console manufacturer-controled, extremely competitive market, boxed episodic content can’t work.
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23 Jun 2006, 16:45
Unos cuantos profesionales de esto de hacer juegos han creado un blog en español desde el que van a contar muchas cosas interesantes: Designostic. Espero que pronto se convierta en una visita obligada para todos aquellos desarrolladores españoles. Hale, todos a suscribirse a su RSS y a participar (aunque para empezar solo sea un “hola”)! 🙂
22 Jun 2006, 12:29
Apparently, complaining in public worked for Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts:
_“We are working on Psychonauts, I promise.
Later,
Alan Stuart
Emulation Ninja
Xbox 360 Team”
Or maybe it’s just pure coincidence.
17 Jun 2006, 13:51
I ran into this paper which addresses the topic of software reliability from a (to me) very surprising point of view. In a nutshell, it defends the notion that our computing model (Turing’s) ties together software complexity and unreliability, but there are fundamentally different approaches where increased complexity actually increases reliability as well. Integrated circuits and our very own brain use such approaches.
It is true that Alan Turing and Fred Brooks are among the worshipped gods of modern software engineering.
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16 Jun 2006, 16:32
I only spent one year working at High Voltage Software in Chicago, but I have many fond memories of my time there. One of these was working with Eric Nofsinger, who is featured in this Gamasutra feature.While he may sound fairly corporate in his responses, he’s as driven and talented as they come. He describes some of the joys and woes of being an independent developer, working with licensed material, and striving to create original IP.
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15 Jun 2006, 17:38
Well, not for a couple years but still quite a bombshell. The interesting part is, pretty much every comment seems to agree in lamenting that it’s not Steve Ballmer going away instead.
Hm, too many Microsoft-related posts lately, I gotta start looking elsewhere.