Let’s get this straight: if we judge him solely by output (games), then he is not a genius – he’s lazy. Everyone knows the 1% inspiration/99% perspiration quote, and – looking at the last shipped title – IMHO it’s inexcusable to ship crap and pretend it’s OK. You can’t just […]
Yearly Archives: 2009
122 posts
Tim Schafer recently posted scans of his rejection letters over the years from various tech and games companies he applied to. There’s one from Atari, one from Hewlett Packard – and, eventually, his acceptance letter from Lucasfilm / Lucasarts. But far, far more important to this post is the cover-letter […]
Last month, I ran a novel panel session at Austin GDC, which was well-attended and (apparently) well-liked. I came up with the format myself, very different from normal panels, and spent a couple of months fleshing it out with the panellists, discussing different ways we could improve on it, different […]
Slides for our panel arehere: “Killing mmo tech sacred cows.pdf”. Final panel was myself (moderating) and speakers: Bill Dalton (Bioware), Rick Lambright (Gazillion), Joe Ludwig (Valve), Marty Poulin (Shady Logic). PLEASE NOTE: WE DON’T REALLY ADVOCATE EXTREMIST RESPONSES TO TECHNICAL QUESTIONS; THIS WAS JUST A BIT OF FUN. (Mostly).
(this is off the top of my head, probably some glaring errors; it’s intended to give a general idea rather than be authoritative. How do YOU calculate your hourly rate for contracts?) It seems there’s an increasing number of people around who have no prior experience of this, and are […]
Last night, I had another game approved for the App Store… iTunes: click here to open iTunes download page I started writing this as a real-life demo on how to use the tech for my new company (if any of our early access licensees are reading this, a project ZIP […]
Things are getting interesting in Recruitment land again… Received today: Adam, greetings from the Visual Computing Group at Intel Corporation. We received your contact information from the Siggraph Job Fair. Please let me know how much discrete or integrated graphics driver development, media software, or debug experience you have and […]
A bit late to be asking, I know, but … If you’re (considering) going to GDC next year (the worlds biggest game development conference, in San Francisco), is there any topic in particular you’d like me to speak on? The deadline for proposals has been extended to today. I’ve submitted […]
A lot of people asked me to blog as this volunteer project progressed, share some insight into how things were going. I’ve not had enough time until just now, and it’s a mix: Some good news, some bad news.
(c.f. my original post here: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/28/want-to-help-write-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone/) I’ve been playing around with GUI setups for DM / EOTB / Wizardry clones on iPhone, and thought I’d post some of the more interesting results here – I’m interested to see what other people think of each of them. The first three are […]
I’ll be writing this up in more detail soon, but here’s a bad error message from Apple’s App Store process (summer 2009) that I found zero hits for on a google search, so I thought I’d quickly throw up this page now that I’ve found out what the cause is. […]
I saw an article recently that described this attitude nicely: certain weak marketing executives believe that the purpose of a “conversation” is for them to have more ways of telling the customer what to do; they are seemingly incapable of understanding the idea that a “conversation” involves listening to the […]
Info correct and checked: Summer 2009. Scroll down for detailed reviews/explanations of each venue. If you know of others, feel free to add a comment at the bottom of this page. Please use the same format (One line with: name/type/secure/rating/sockets, then your own text review). I’ll try to visit them […]
I’m trying to download the 3.0 OS update for iPhone…and being denied by Apple’s own software – that cannot even download a single file from a website (!) It’s a 1GB download that you “must” download via iTunes, because … well … because … um … Apple hates web browsers? […]
Clearly stated on every single page on the Apple store (it’s the page footer): Prices are inclusive of VAT (15%) but exclusive of delivery charges unless otherwise indicated. In the Apple Store, Apple therefore appears to (maybe…actually does, considering they *clearly state* the above?) over-charge you for VAT. But there’s […]
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at a lot of independent developers’ websites. It’s quite surprising how many of them go out of their way to make their site unusable – clearly thinking that they’re achieving the opposite. But also, today, Wikipedia started actively doing a very minor […]
If you’re in Brighton this week for the Develop conference … there’s a few places left at the free networking/talks event we’re doing tomorrow night: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/3017732/?ps=6 (if you can’t make it, I’ll get all the slides on-line afterwards, so long as the speakers don’t mind) …although we’re getting very close […]
Now I’ve recovered from GDC illness, I’ve got a little free time again, and I’m starting one of the iPhone games I wanted to write. This is a “for fun and learning” project, so it’s deliberately chosen to be low maintenance / easy to make a first version / easy […]
(this assumes you are running Debian on your server; if not, I suggest you switch) Mediawiki. One of the world’s less secure wikis? Probably. I use and install it a lot, and it’s usually “the compromise wiki”: it’s weak at a lot of things, but it’s the “least worst overall” […]
Really? O, RLY? Well, no, probably not – but this is the kind of opening statement I often make at industry-conference parties. In this rare case, at LOGIN this year, I was showing something on my laptop at the time and happened to *type* my opening salvo, rather than just […]