I’ve known MOO for 6 years (back when they were PleasureCards), and I’ve been using them as my primary business / personal cards for most of that time. Back when they only did the PleasureCard form-factor, it was always fun to find a fellow MOO customer. Shared conversations were easy […]
Yearly Archives: 2011
139 posts
Typical. Just as I finally brave the source code to Master of Mana (neé Fall From Heaven; the most popular / succesful mod for Civilization 4), and fix a major bug that’s bothered me for ages … the main server at masterofmana.com goes offline :(. Anyway, if you’re playing the […]
ATTENTION: all game marketers: don’t do this… Hi Adam, Although we do not know one another, I notice we share many contacts on LinkedIn.com (Karl Blanks, Ben Jesson, Jason Duke, Paul Billinghurst to name but a few I’ve had the pleasure of working with). Funny; I don’t recognize those names? […]
Another week, another expose of terrible working conditons in a game-development studio. I’m fed up. So … here’s a new site where I’ll post/track each public report of this stuff: http://ilovecrunch.co.uk (the name is sarcastic, obviously ;). co.uk because it’s less than half the price of a .com, and I’m […]
This letter to the IGDA, apparently defending Team Bondi’s alleged abuse of their game-developers, seems to me to be damning with faint praise – or just showing that the author is shockingly naive. e.g.: “I had two kids during the project, Team Bondi offered me each time one extra week […]
More from the world of silly website screenshots – StackOverflow says I’m l33t. I couldn’t have done better if I’d tried (I wonder how hard that would be – deliberately downvoting other people, perhaps, to bring your score down to the right number?)
All in the same market/need/desire space: First product: FAIL. Second product: FAIL. Third product: looks set for success “Our last version was just Tian and I late at 3am practically crying that everything in the food world we were building sucked. So we asked ourselves what could we do well […]
From the fascinating APPsterdam experiment / movement (“persuade a load of startups to move to Amsterdam for the Summer, instead of the more expensive California, and create an ad-hoc startup hotbed”) – http://mur.mu.rs/?p=243: “You might think companies that have gone out of business are no threat to you, but if […]
Seems a bit Freudian to me. According to Clint, Viking aggression wasn’t caused by eking out a bitter existence in freezing lands without enough farmland and food – a need to cull the local population, and take food from elsewhere to survive – but instead by the fact that all […]
Yes! Yes, yes, YES! Next time anyone in the UK hears an investor ask about patents (hint: they probably are ex-3i staff – and no, that isn’t a good thing), send them this: 10 Myths about patents “Myth 3: Nobody would invest in startups that don’t have patents. Fact: The […]
“[with Android] We just can’t get complicated applications functioning with any kind of speed (if at all) … it’s not because we’re stupid or don’t know the platform well enough”. (From this month’s Develop – an article by the the CCO of Somethin’ Else) Develop is trade-press, for professional game […]
Mozilla has “pulled a Microsoft” and put in place a font renderer that makes all text horrible on anything except low-quality monitors. On Windows, you have to “disable hardware acceleration” in the preferences menu (what? you get to choose “slow browser” or “readable fonts”? That sucks). On OS X … […]
The Code is about to start, and Adrian’s on good form here with some concise bashing of ARG-design stereotypes: “the ‘inverted pyramid’ model of engagement for ARGs and transmedia! But I don’t like it … feels like a post-facto justification of why only a few people get really engaged in […]
Cheap, crap, shoddy re-hash of Tim Langdell’s only game (Bobby Bearing) – with *considerably* fewer features and *worse* graphics than the original from 20 years ago: EDGEBobby2 – http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/edgebobby2free/id441097268?mt=8 How stupid can you get? You lose a trademark case (re: “EDGE”), the judge repeatedly accuses you of blatant lies in […]
I’ve setup a dedicated twitter account that will auto-tweet the most interesting posts from the blog: http://twitter.com/tmachineorg …when I get time, I’ll see if I can configure it to auto-tweet particular tags (i.e. “games industry”, “entity systems”, and “startup advice”). Until then, it’ll be most/all the posts. (this is for […]
Let’s play a game! What’s wrong with the following two sentences: “So we are going to change to the way we have completed milestones in the past. It’s no longer going be about just completing your schedule for the milestone.” (from the goldmine of info about the abuses at Team […]
Background A month ago, PC Gamer reported that “The idea that crunch wasn’t all that productive was raised, but there was enough experience in the room to shoot it down. “. I found that unacceptable, both as a concept, and as something for the media to report without challenging it. […]
When Passenger crashes, you get this wonderfully ironic error page: (click for full-size image) (this is what you currently get when you try to access the web-interface for BeanstalkApp.com – the git / SVN hosting company) (have a look at the logo in top-left ;))