(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 […]
adam
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 […]
Sulka Haro’s keynote at AGDC07. What happens when a Lead Designer gets heckled, and things turn nasty…
“Often wrong, never in doubt” is the tagline on Marc Andreessen’s blog. With a recent post of his, on the “three kinds of platforms you meet on the internet”, I think the first part of that tagline is ringing true :P – Marc is talking nonsense with his claims that […]
(Only a couple of these are java-specific, but this is a.k.a.: “How to make Facebook Apps using Java – part 3”) (I assume you’ve already had a look at part 1 and part 2? They’re more beginner-oriented) Bugs, Misconceptions, and Subtle Features Interfacing with Facebook’s servers is pretty hard, considering […]
No, it’s not, it’s really not. In fact, source code is probably the worst form of documentation, it fails in most of the roles that documentation is actually required to fulfil (see bottom of this post for a shortlist). But something else is…
…was my section in the fourth GPG book from Charles River Media. And, sadly, although I tried to put some resources up on the web, a series of unfortunate events led to that all disappearing. But now … they’re back! (and I’ll be adding more followup stuff in the coming […]
The informal meetup for Web 2.0 and Games at AGDC turned out a lot more popular than I’d expected. Looks like we need to make this an official thing next time:
UPDATE: short, complete, 42-slide version now available from the CMP website – https://www.cmpevents.com/sessions/GD/S5762i1.ppt …but if you want the 144-slide version (!), see below. No extra content.
Inteviewed for RPG Vault’s latest Online Worlds Roundtable – http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/817/817490p3.html “Web 2.0 businesses compete directly with the games industry on multiple levels, and anyone who doesn’t spot that and act accordingly will suffer. If your game doesn’t embrace – or deliberately and carefully reject – Web 2.0, you’ll that your […]
A few years ago, entity systems (or component systems) were a hot topic. In particular, Scott Bilas gave a great GDC talk (http://scottbilas.com/files/2002/gdc_san_jose/game_objects_slides.pdf – updated link thanks to @junkdogAP) on using them in the development of Dungeon Siege. The main advantages to entity systems were: No programmer required for designers […]
The entire switch here is to think of these websites not as collections of features or products, but rather manufactured experiences that are designed to be compelling wastes of peoples’ time ;-) — Andrew Chen http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/08/reward-schedule.html
EDIT: downloading the nice plugin recommended in this post will now break your blog if you’re using WordPress 2.5 – the wordpress authors have made some incompatible changes. But it’s OK – bengreen has fixed the plugin, and made a new version available (read here for some very basic information […]
I’m talking at Austin GDC on “Caching for Web 2.0”, and I’ll be having a small dig at the games industry and the obsession some people have with “game 1.0/2.0/3.0” on the side, but I’d really like to meet up with anyone interested in how best we can capitalize on […]
An article I wrote for Gamasutra’s Game Career Guide: Part 1 – What to study Part 2 – Practice and Experience …hopefully this will be useful to some of the many people interested in network programming but not sure where to start. Also, you might want to have a look […]
In the first part, I covered a very high-level, idiot-guide to getting started with writing a Facebook app in java. This part will cover the details of how to architect your own code for basic Facebook authentication, and include code samples you can use to get up and running more […]
I’ve been in the games industry for some years now, and one of the things I find slightly annoying is that there’s very little discussion of “career progression”, and that what little there is typically focusses on “how to get your first job in the industry”. Career Charts Many years […]
I wrote a game last weekend, for Facebook. Writing the entire multiplayer persistent game took a day and a half; getting it to integrate with Facebook is taking several days. Mostly, the problem is that Facebook hasn’t – yet – provided user-guide documentation, and there are plenty of bugs in […]
We didn’t quite get the sunny afternoon we were hoping for, but we did get some nice light …so we had to move inside, but we still had a great turnout of people And it’s nice to have a games-industry recruitment event right on the beach, by the sea, for […]