Category: General

I don’t really want anything else out of a phone other than good battery life and the ability to make and recieve phone calls and send and recieve sms messages. I also don’t really listen to music “on the go”; I much prefer just listening to the sounds of the environment I’m moving through.

However, I may eventually get an iPhone or iPod Touch. Why? The games. I tend to buy hardware for a game platform when there are enough games (released or imminent) to justify the purchase. This happened pretty quickly for the Wii and DS, but took a lot longer for the PS3, PSP, and finally the Xbox360.

In general, I haven’t been very impressed with iPhone games. However, it looks like there are a few worthwhile games amongst the plethora of ports, crappy games, and titles that I’m just not interested in. Maybe when I find four games that I really like, I’ll jump into a purchase.

Cam showed me Zen Bound the other day and it looks awesome.

I’m also interested in Eliss, which is highly recommended over at OddWorld.

Finally, I’m keen to check out RjDj (not a game) and Chris’s GhostWave.

Anyone have any iPhone or iPod Touch game recommendations?

I’ve put a Perth games industry survey up at:

• http://survey.letsmakegames.org

I announced the survey on the IGDA Perth and PIGMI mailing lists around 15 minutes ago and there have already been over 20 responses!

Here’s a blurb from the survey introduction:

The information gathered by this survey will be used to produce a Perth games industry profile document, which will summarise general characteristics and capabilities of the local industry. We want to facilitate organic and sustainable growth to help ensure a long-term future for game developers in Perth, and a clear objective assessment of the local industry is an important part of making this happen.

We want to hear from you if: you are in the industry, want to get into the industry, or even if you have left the industry. We will greatly appreciate if you could take the time to complete this survey.”

If you are part of the Perth games development community, please take a few minutes to complete the survey. I’ll present initial results at the IGDA Perth meeting tomorrow and put a more detailed report online in a few weeks.

Update: Almost 50 responses so far! Thanks to everyone who participated. Please tell your friends!

This post is just a quick recap of the last few days (I don’t really have time for a full blog post for each thing that happened).

Here we go:

• I made my first (basic) flash game using Haxe and FlashDevelop (which is a really nice IDE)… then ran into a bug when adding more features.
• I bought a HD (1080p@30fps) digital video camera for only AU$299 (that’s less then US$200). It’s much better than I expected, I’ll post more on it later.
• I setup LimeSurvey (at an as-yet-unannounced location) and I’m preparing a Perth games industry survey. Thanks to Will for mentioning LimeSurvey on a PIGMI mailing list discussion; It looks good so far.
• I saw the Watchmen movie. Without spoiling it, I’ll say that it was enjoyable. I think it’s a good sign when you only realise that a movie was really long after you’ve seen it. 🙂

I’ll try to get more fleshed out posts for the above notes.

Is there anything in particular people want to hear more about? 😉

Charming short film:

via VideoSift.

My sister was married on Saturday, so I now have my first official brother-in-law! The weather was perfect, the venue was excellent, and everyone had a great time.

I won’t say much more here since I’m not sure how private she wants to keep things. She’s the first of my siblings to be get married (although not the first to get engaged :P) and they seem so incredibly happy together.

It seems like heaps of games feature some sort of “rewind feature” these days. From the never-really-made-it-big Blinx, to the let’s-keep-making-sequels Prince of Persia series, to the art-house title Braid… everyone is doing it. And why not? It feels like part of the logical progression from creating machines that eat coins to a more conceptual view of “gaming”.

I need to segway a little bit here and explain my view of the timeline of major game innovations (aka. realising when stuff doesn’t matter):

1. In early games you have a certain number of credits (or lives) and play for a high score. This is so that arcade machines make money by appealing to our competitive nature.
2. We’ve been moving away from the concepts of lives and scores for quite a while. Home users have already bought the console, so you don’t need to continually slog them for coins. Moreover scores are meaningless in many games.
3. (Some) companies realise that it’s stupid to punish the player when their character “dies”. It’s incredibly rare that you have to start the entire game again because you are out of lives, but you are generally still set back in some way.

The minimal punishment you can inflict on a player when their character dies (or when they hit point in the game where they can’t progress due to something they messed up) is to return them to just before that happened. An excellent way to put them in control of the situation is to let them rewind the game whenever they want.

Rewind and fast-forward are used in a some of classic console emulators (eg. NesDS) in order to make the games of yester-year more palatable to today’s gamers. Why not make it a standard feature in future game consoles? Throw in other standard controls like pause and fast-forward. There’s already more feature integration at the console operating system level (networking, billing, save game management, quitting, achievements/trophies).

It might sound weird now, but it could be part of making games more mainstream. People are used to rewind, fast-forward, chapter selection, etc. in other media. Why not in games?

Bottom line: I’d play more platformers if I could rewind, and I’d definately play more Japanese RPGs if I could fast-forward.

… and I’ll love you with all of myself.

I thought of this when I woke up and figured it would make a nice t-shirt. 😀

I uploaded some of my jellyfish/chicken designs to my RedBubble page/store. I also uploaded two more photos.

Here’s a screengrab of the Art and Clothing sections of my profile page:

Sweet!

Unfortunately, they only seem to do full-colour prints, so the stencil-style design isn’t available in different colours prints (although I did upload dark and light versions).

After finding out about RedBubble via Bobostuff via Planet PIGMI, I decided to join and put some of photos, art, and t-shirt designs up for sale.

Here’s the first image I put up on RedBubble:

I tried to take photos that capture and flatten a view such that it focusses on a plain background and elegant foreground pattern (like a Japanese print or craftwork). I think it would make an awesome large canvas print on the right wall.

Rather than posting to both my RebBubble journal and this blog, I’m using FeedWordpress to automagically repost my RedBubble journal entries here. We should see if that works out real soon!

Update: At the moment posts from my RedBubble journal seem to come up without any text (just the title). I need a better solution.

I saw this “what a queer bird the frog are” video on videosift this morning:

and I loved the juxtaposition of the sort of instructional music that I remember from primary school with low-resolution bitmap imagery (something else I remember from when I was a child).

I found that the video was generated by the Music Animation Machine. The homepage includes a basic history of the machine as well as a list of available videos online (or on DVD). It’s a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately Eric Satie is only available on DVD. 🙁