May 2012
5 posts
2 tags
5 tags
GDC 2012 Notes | small steps in the dark:...
no shared design language
hard to talk about design due to a lack of shared lexicon
different dialects
my definition of prototyping
an interactive experiment that is used to gather information
it’s a mindset to approach the process
a tool to explore space
developing jamestown
21 month dev cycle, 3 full-time developers
custom engine (5 months) (C++ and lua)
conventional prototype
...
4 tags
GDC 2012 Notes | Create New Genres
loops instead of arcs: concentrate in game systems and not in consumable content
don’t bring in art/narrative too early as it gets in the way of the game itself
have multiple prototypes in development at the same time to minimize failure costs and evaluate better
plan with next steps instead of the master design document
invent new genres inspired by everything in the world, including...
5 tags
GDC 2012 Notes | How I Got My Mom to Play Through...
blend the tutorial in the game (learning is fun)
the chamaleon tutorial
“this isn’t the tutorial your’re looking for”
better have the player do something than to read about it
try things in a safe enviroment that conditions the learning
spread out the teaching of game mechanics
player investment proportional to willingness to learn
context is important
let players...
5 tags
GDC 2012 Notes | Level Design Case Studies:...
trainyard
levels = teaching
sawtooth difficulty progression with dips to let payer relax
audience discovered: casual, completionists and hardcore
break into main game (for casual audience) and bonus levels (completionists, hardcore)
don’t put nearly-impossible levels even as bonus levels because completionists get frustarted.
add a level editor for the hardcore audience.
each level...
March 2012
2 posts
5 tags
Life boat - A GDC Game Design Workshop exercise
What follows is the result of modifying the SiSSYFiGHT 2000 card game with Zoya, Tim and Max at the GDC 2012 Game Design Workshop.
Life boat rules
You are survivors on a life boat and you have enough food for 7 days.
Each player starts with seven chips, but keep them hidden - you’re hoarding food!
In each round you can choose one of the three available action cards: to steal food from...
April 2011
3 posts
“One of the very basic ideas behind good music is that […] restatement is...”
– Game City Jonathan Blow Braid Talk
“… but I also want a video game that I can teach my son, and we can play...”
– Frank Lantz
February 2011
1 post
“the design of Facebook Games has abandoned the old-school approach of trying to...”
– Facebook Game Design is an embarrassment | Involution Studios
August 2010
1 post
“Even if it is a single player game, you still talk about it with your friends;...”
– Gamasutra: Adam Saltsman’s Blog - Why I Make Games
July 2010
4 posts
“Professors nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little...”
– The Top Idea in Your Mind
“In social games, friends aren’t really friends; they are mere resources.”
– Ian Bogost - Cow Clicker
“kids desire increasingly immersive content experiences, better integration of...”
–
The Future of Tech According to Kids: Immersive, Intuitive and Surprisingly Down-to-Earth
1 tag
June 2010
5 posts
“As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the...”
– Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains | Magazine
Why We Built Readability | Arc90 Blog →
The notion of tethering content delivery to a particular proprietary platform or hardware device is admitting defeat. Content is effectively locked up. It’s un-shareable, un-index-able, inaccessible and un-linkable. It’s a glorified form of paper.
“I personally find myself clicking on Readability on sites that have no ads at...”
– Why We Built Readability | Arc90 Blog
“Neither is this a mere matter of historical origins that can be brushed away as...”
– Debt: The first five thousand years - The Long Now Blog
“… the iPhone is the first computer in a long time that doesn’t make...”
– Dan Grover » Indie Developers and Crossing the App Store Chasm
May 2010
2 posts
Too Big and Too Hard. →
As a general rule, less than five percent of a game’s audience plays a title through to completion. … “more than 90 percent” of a games audience will play it for “just four or five hours.”
“For at least a couple of centuries people have likened the brain’s abilities to...”
– On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins
April 2010
11 posts
“If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern...”
– Thoughts on Flash - Steve Jobs
Facebook rebrands the Internet →
Yup, that is the magic. But I left out the part where people create Facebook identity skimmers and stand in front of the movie theater; where your history of likes gets analyzed by a third party and turned into direct marketing spam; where there’s a data breach and your credits get taken; where you lose a job because you once liked the wrong kind of site; where companies start paying people to...
Cultivated Play: Farmville →
Farmville invented a new genre: tautologic gaming. “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.”
This Is Apple's Next iPhone - Iphone 4 - Gizmodo →
RT @weasello:SteamBirds: By the Numbers, a... →
whish list: a filter for tweets with original...
As I’m an iPhone developer I follow a lot of mac heads, so I’ve been suffering the iPad launch. This got me thinking of ways to avoid it without missing out totally.
I’m lazy so I did not make any research about this. I’m sure this might have already been studied in depth, anyway, here it goes.
The objective could be to let the truly original information get through,...
“But the 3G iPad [model number] is A1337, which is rather geeky, even for Apple.”
– iPad Teardown - iFixit
1 tag
“Where do they find time? [F]rom the cognitive surplus [the TV’s] been...”
– Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
“Oracle VP Jeet Kaul’s announcement at EclipseCon that he would ‘like...”
– Slashdot Developers Story | The Struggle To Keep Java Relevant
“In the same amount of time it took for Microsoft to lose almost $330 billion in...”
– Apple, Inc. market cap now exceeds Walmart
December 2009
0 posts
3 tags
emacs 23.1 drag and drop in mac os x
Carbon Emacs opened a file in place when you dragged and dropped it over a frame.
Emacs 23.1 by default inserts the content of the file.
To change it back you need to do the following in your .emacs file:
(custom-set-variables
'(ns-pop-up-frames nil)
... other settings
)
(global-set-key [ns-drag-file] 'ns-find-file)
October 2009
1 post
mutt + emacs org-mode
Sending an e-mail to org-mode as a TODO is easy. Add this macro to your .muttrc
macro index X “cat - | mimedecode.py -c | formail -k -X Subject: | sed -e ‘s/^*/ /’ | sed -e ‘s/Subject:/* TODO/’ » your-org-file.org\n”
This creates a level 2 TODO marked entry in your org-mode log file… ah yes, remember to keep it saved.
Rrequires...
April 2009
6 posts
“… Ponce de León dijo que por esta línea pasan 250 mil litros cúbicos de...”
– Espero que el burro sea el periodista, y no Ponce de León, actual presidente de OSE.
OSE continúa intentando reparar cañería - Diario EL PAIS - Montevideo - Uruguay
“The genius of Twitter: you pick who you follow, so every illiterate in the world...”
– Twitter / John Gruber: The genius of Twitter: you …
OUTRAGEOUS: Court jails Pirate Bay founders
→
Ok, let’s start putting more people in jail:
All weapon manufacturers, because they are used for killing people, and they know.
All copy machines manufacturers, because they are organized copyright-crime machines, with multiple trays of infringement.
All networking equipment manufacturers and ISPs, because they “know” that their stuff and services are used to transfer the...
“Creating a Google Site is as easy as editing a document, which means...”
– Google Sites
I believe that not having a markup language is a mistake. No structure at all in the text, just “style”.
2 tags
10 Entrepreneurial Concepts to Live By
dembot:
This is a post I created awhile back which outlines ten major concepts I live and work by. This may seem pedestrian to some though I think it’s a good foundation for conducting entrepreneurial business activity on the internet:
1. Always work with people who are better than you. You can only do a few things really well. One of them should be understanding your weaknesses and looking for...
March 2009
4 posts
“One of the counter intuitive things I needed to learn as a designer was that...”
– Maria Montessori: The 138-Year-Old Inspiration Behind Spore
“giving someone your email is the equivalent of allowing them to add something to...”
– http://battellemedia.com/archives/004886.php
love the cool afternoon breeze running though my office room after a hot day.
February 2009
7 posts
“Stay healthy for 20 years. If you stay healthy for 20 years you’ll see 150...”
– Barry Schuler @ Ted:
A mis queridismos Antel (itos): la próxima vez que vayan a jugar con los cables (y los enlaces internacionales), ¿por qué no avisan con tiempo? ¿No se dan cuenta que uno también puede estar laburando y las interrupciones son realmente poco productivas. En vez de mandar esos spams innecesarios via adinet, podrían tomarse el trabajo de mandar información útil, como por ejemplo: “Hoy de noche...
“… after much investigation, it appears that you just cannot schedule...”
– Gamasutra - Feature - “How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days”