“In reality, one size has never fit all, but when players didn’t have so many choices, they had to put up with it. Now they don’t. No longer can publishers rely on retailing strategies designed to make money by forcing players to buy what the publishers want them to buy, when and where the publishers [...]
0 Comment » Also known as: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! (because I’m now deviating from the original schedule I outlined in Part 1; what the heck, it was only a rough agenda anyway…) Questions, questions… First of all, there’s a bunch of good questions that have been raised in response to the first two posts: what data [...]
Too busy to write at the moment (if I weren’t, I’d be working on followups to the entity systems posts). So, in the meantime, go listen to the ever-brilliant Lawrence Lessig. I’ve just been listening to his 2006 talk on Free Culture. There are too many memorable, insightful, or funny elements for me to be [...]
(just because it’s brilliant, and I wanted to say thank you) Still using Akismet? Why? You do know that Akismet rejects genuine posts, don’t you? Sure, it’s not its fault – spam filtering is hard. But since Spam Karma is free, integrates easily with WordPress, and offers much safer filtering of spam, with multiple levels [...]
I upgraded Firefox only a few days ago (I didn’t get a choice – it was set to autoupdate, and updated when I was halfway through doing an install on my new computer; it broke most of the plugins I was halfway through installing because the new version wasn’t backwards compatible) and now a new [...]
Is it a completely hopeless task, caused by a fundamental lack of understanding in how to ask the question appropriately?
Andrew Chen has a great post on how people use Facebook and why MySpace pages are so ugly I particularly liked the straightforward comparison between the opposing viewpoints on design, i.e.: Facebook / Google / “modern” web companies: Simple, Functional, Easy Myspace / GeoCities / “poorly designed” web presences: Lots of options – perceived as [...]
(do you have fuzzy text in Outlook 2007? hard to read fonts? System settings for fonts broken in Office 2007? Help is at hand…). You have to do a couple of things to fix the one bug, and I had to find all the different parts of the solution in different places, so I put [...]
I’m not happy with the direction games industry conferences are going in; I specialize in online games, and I’ve worked at the forefront of monetizing online entertainment, I’ve actually *made money* out of Web 2.0 – so I have real expertise in making use of the internet – and I really think we (as an [...]
I go to GDC every year, and also to 2-3 other conferences, but apart from GDC I vary which exact ones from year to year. These days, I’m a speaker at nearly every conference I go to, and I’ve never yet been paid for speaking, so it’s fair to say I have a pretty big [...]
Part 2 – What is an Entity System? (Part 1 is here) Sadly, there’s some disagreement about what exactly an Entity System (ES) is. For some people, it’s the same as a Component System (CS) and even Component-Oriented Programming (COP). For others, it means something substantially different. To keep things clear, I’m only going to [...]
Another couple of days since the first one-day effort, and SFE single player is now working, albeit with a seriously crap AI:
In case you hadn’t seen it. Now, if this were done in HTML instead of flash, and the site still worked… http://producten.hema.nl/
Years ago, I found the spritesheets + source code from the author of SFE, who was offering them up if anyone wanted to improve it, make it 4 player multiplayer again (like on RISC OS) etc (or something like that). Last Sunday afternoon I was very bored, and found just the spritesheets lying around on [...]
http://www.own-it.org/events/details/?eventId=227 Speaking at this panel session tonight. Should be interesting. I get to be the bad guy, the one saying that online businesses in other people’s virtual worlds are morally corrupt, and that all Gold Farmers should be hung, drawn, and quartered, and that the world will end, fire and brimstone, cats and dogs living [...]
How do you create a new game studio from scratch? The topic came up recently when someone asked me what I’d do if I had the responsibility to create a new dev studio – what would I do, how would I go about it, etc? I’ve founded a couple of small startups before (both as [...]
Networked games use the internet, and the difficulties of making these games evolve on Internet Time, which means that the articles people wrote as recently as a year ago on how to make a networked or multiplayer game are already out of date. Most of the literature is more than 5 years old, and some [...]
(ARG as in Alternate Reality Game, of course…) http://www.letschangethegame.org/ A new ARG project from Adrian and Dan, in aid of Cancer Research UK. Great to hear they’ve got this off the ground, it looks like it’s going to be fantastic. But it could also become the biggest event in helping new ARG designers a chance [...]
A few years ago, I wrote an article for Develop magazine – “10 MMOs you don’t want to do”. Here’s 8 things you really shouldn’t do but that might seem like a good idea if you’ve never made an MMOG before. All these are examples of things that have been done on real MMO projects, [...]
Sulka Haro’s keynote at AGDC07. What happens when a Lead Designer gets heckled, and things turn nasty…
