22 November 2008

A snowy November morning

 

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Space Invaders

I have no idea what's going on here, other than, it seems, all they wanted was to help us recycle. All that Space Invading was obviously just a front.

posted by benjymous @ 07/11/08 16:01 | Comments(comment: 1) | [ tags ]

Tower of Meeples

To be honest, I'd forgotten I'd made this - I just found the stills on my camera :)

posted by benjymous @ 09/10/08 21:04 | Comments(comment: 2) | [ tags ]

Duffy - Please stop playing!

This screenshot from the Xbox360 singing game Lips says it all, really.
posted by benjymous @ 01/10/08 09:17 | Comments(comment: none) | [ tags ]

30'000 dominoes, and a sinister cat!


posted by benjymous @ 19/09/08 16:30 | Comments(comment: none) | [ tags ]

They say they don't make TV like they used to

"Oh yes, it's definitely been jumped on, that egg"

posted by benjymous @ 15/08/08 12:46 | Comments(comment: 2) | [ tags ]

Wordle

Wordle is a website that'll create a "Word Cloud" from the text (or URL) you give it. Here's what you get when you feed in the contents of all the blog posts, and most of my rant articles:


(Click for a slightly larger version)

posted by benjymous @ 12/08/08 13:12 | Comments(comment: 1) | [ tags ]

What I learnt at the Develop Conference

Ok, so I admit, it's been quite a while since I posted anything here, so I'll try and make amends. Last week I was sent down to the Develop Conference in Brighton, so here are some notes of the things learnt.
  • Bioshock - An underwater art-deco dystopia wouldn't have gone down too well in focus testing, so they didn't bother. Morals didn't matter when the Little Sisters were giant insects. People don't care about killing giant insects. People do care about killing little girls.
  • Snakes - Recompilation times are bad when adding new gameplay features. Stackless python - good. Python's memory management - good. Fast gameplay turnaround makes all the difference.
  • Braben - LostWinds came about from an internal "post your game ideas" forum, was prototyped in a week, and fully developed in less than four months. The second-hand game market is a big unaccountable black hole, digital distribution is the way forward. Elite4 will come after The Outsider
  • Bizarre - Making photo realistic game levels needs lots of photographic reference. And guides to stop you getting mugged on the street.
  • Sumo - Porting games to other (smaller) platforms is easier if your original codebase wasn't written by idiots!
  • Atmospheric Scattering - Lots of papers, Lots of maths. Transparency won't work. Fudge the constants. Pretty sunsets. Cheat at night.
  • Halo AI - Primal games are fun - Hide and Seek. The AI has an internal model of the world. But it's often wrong. Intentionally. Which makes it fun. Mistakes are better than weaknesses. Narrative is fun. Abilities are fun. Especially when the AI uses them too.
  • Framestore - They've done frickin' everything! Yet another fur system! Cheat wherever possible! Shamefully little usage of graphics hardware.
  • The Edge Panel - Lone coders can control the vision. EA don't like blood. Statistics are good. Shaders are lovely - let's have a shader party! (As long as we've got enough cash to feed the sheep.) Bureaucracy gets in the way.
posted by benjymous @ 05/08/08 12:22 | Comments(comment: none) | [ tags ]

Does. Not. Compute

Think if you will, of the story of Robinson Crusoe.

A man, shipwrecked on an island. All alone.

What'd make that a bit more exciting?

How about Pirates? Swashbuckling Pirates? Yeah, that'd make it better.

...

Or how about a big 7 foot flipping robot!?

That's wrong on so many levels.

And it's in 3d!

IT'S ON STAGE - of course it's 3d!

*sigh*

The aforementioned robot was stomping around in Newcastle today advertising the panto. Isn't it also a bit early to be thinking about pantomimes?

posted by benjymous @ 03/07/08 16:29 | Comments(comment: 2) | [ tags ]