I like Studio Ghibli films, but they do tend to make me sleepy (I guess they are just very relaxing).
I usually find myself drowsy and nodding off towards the end of the film. As a result, I’m generally in a half-awake state-of-mind when the meaningful big finale comes about.
On a related note, I saw Ponyo last night at Cinema Paradiso. It was enjoyable and less heavy-handed than many other Studio Ghibli films.
I tend to leave webpages open until I have a chance to get back to them, but the number of windows and tabs that I have open in Firefox is getting ridiculous.
I figured that I’d post a sort of executive summary – and then I can close everything and just refer back to this post. Here goes…
Independent Game Development (and Game Competitions):
Starting a Business:
Marketing:
Monetisation:
WordPress:
Random:
Videos:
I guess that I’ll end this oversized post with a quote from a page open in a browser tab:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum to the women and men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Wisdom of the Sands
Best description of leadership I’ve read all day. 😀
First the ones that I anticipate buying on release:
Now the wait-and-see games (probably pick them up on special):
10 years ago this list would have been huge! Then again, I ended up playing through a bunch of pretty “meh” games. I guess that I’m getting more selective.
Update: Compilation video and photos are now online. See this post over at Let’s Make Games for more details. 😀
I created a Let’s Make Games channel on YouTube, and uploaded the encore performance by “Rainbow Stance” last night.
Check it out! They totally rocked the party.
Thanks to everyone who came along to the event last night. It was immensely fun and I was blown away by how awesome all competitors are at Guitar Hero!
I’ll post a full event write-up with more photos and videos over at the Let’s Make Games website sometime this week.
Note: I’m also trying to have Let’s Make Games favourite all videos related to Perth game development. If you find any related videos on YouTube (eg.
GameJam entries), please let me know!
For those that don’t read the Let’s Make Games blog, our monthly social event is on tonight – 7pm at the Velvet Lounge in Mount Lawley.
Tonight’s event is called Let’s Make Beautiful Music, and aside from the usual drinks and social get-together, there’s also a Guitar Hero competition (with a suitably complementary prize).
At the last event, Paul asked me what Let’s Make Games is all about. Fair question, the local game development scene already has: PIGMI for local news aggregation and mailing list conversations, IGDA Perth Chapter for talks and professional development, and GameJam for… well, game jams.
We started Let’s Make Games to “foster the growing game development community and industry“. Game development can be fairly isolating in Perth (it’s not a common profession for someone in a mining state). We wanted to create a warm and supportive social environment for local game developers, and report on their achievements to the wider community.
In order to do that, we decided to produce annual reports and to run regular social events – working with other groups when it makes sense to do so. In our prior experience, there are always different interests and a lot of coordination is required when working with other groups – so we didn’t want to take that on initially, or push that upon others.
Our initial plan was to write biannual reports and run fortnightly themed social (rather than work-related) events. Wow, was that dream! The first report was fairly taxing to produce, and fortnightly events turned out to be far too much effort if we want to keep things interesting. So we decided on monthly events – always on the last Tuesday of the month – amd an Annual Report.
Recently with IGDA Perth Chapter events picking up again (mad props to you guys!) it looks like monthly events from us would just saturate local interest (too many events!). We’re looking forward to running only four to six annual events starting next year.
Thanks to everyone who has supported Let’s Make Games and all the local volunteer run groups over the last few years – it’s what really keeps us going!
Catch of The Day (Australia’s very own you-have-to-buy-it-now-don’t-think-too-much-just-embrace-consumerism website) are having a “Pressure Cooker” sale from midday (AEST) tomorrow (Tuesday, August 25, 2009).
They will be selling 100 Nintendo Wiis for $199 each, and 100 Nintendo DSes (Red Mario Edition including New Super Mario Bros game) for $99 each. They also have 2000 Asus EEE PCs for $199 each – if you are that way inclined.
Anyhow, I thought that some people may be interested… even though it looks like a ploy to get people to sign-up.
via Economical Gamer.
Whenever I see an effort like this:
It tells me that something is very wrong.
I actually didn’t know that things were so bad as to warrant this sort of reaction. I voted NO and hope that others do the same. We don’t want to send the message that ignoring our problems – and pretending that everything is fine – is “W.A. Okay”.
Confidence should come from somewhere other than a marketing campaign. It should come from being able to really afford the things that you need, and knowing that your government is tackling problems with the interests of all citizens in mind (rather than pandering to the business sector and investors).
Translation Party is neat, and fun for… a few minutes.
It’s basically a webpage that takes an English sentence and translates it back and forth between Japanese and English until it reaches equilibrium (ie. the translated sentence doesn’t change).
When I first came across the page, Mao and Bruce (our cats) where trying to catch a cockroach and Heidi commented that:
Mao and Brucy Goosey are stalking a cockroach
I put that into Translation Party and it reached equilibrium at:
Mao, cockroaches and geese are stalking brucey
Yikes! Ahahahaah. What do you think about that Bruce?
Yeah. Pretty funny.
I was also pretty happy with this fairly long translation party in which:
He got down on one knee, looked up at her, and asked “will you marry me?”
becomes:
I said, “My laptop, my PC that I married?”
True geek love. The intermediate stages are also satisfyingly surreal:
He is in her knee, and had seen “the question is how to marry me?”
I’ve recently been trying to find a programmer to work as part of a small game development team. The main reason is so that I would still have time to follow through with other (unrelated) business and management work.
Maybe I’m trying to do too much at once though. The programming work is straight-forward and I could pick it up if I drop a few other things. That would keep it simple, and also sounds like a lot more fun.
So I could soon be be looking for an administrator or producer! 😉