…but they decided that only people with a Credit Card registered in USA or Canda are allowed to use it (even though it’s free).
So. I’m going to repay that smack-in-the-face by not linking to it, nor naming it.
Autodesk marketing: #FAIL.
Month: May 2012
How about this one:
http://sainsburys.jobs/vacancy/details/35959/games-buyer-at-london
A “buyer” for Sainsburys: you get to influence the titles stocked by one of the UK’s biggest retailers. I’ve never – ever! – met a games-buyer before, but I know quite a few buyers for more mainstream areas (clothing, fashion, etc), and so long as you’re organized and diligent, it sounds like a good job. You spend a lot of time dealing with the ebb and flow of what the public are actually buying – surely, very good practice for a career in design or publishing.
And yet, as I said … I’ve never met one before. Strange, that.
EDIT: and here’s another one, for Argos: https://www.apointplus.com/homeretailgroup/applicant/apps1.aspx?id=4129&rm=184
(back to playing RotMG again)
1. the Oryx assault: make it more inclusive, more multi-player
Background: sooner or later, players learn that it is impossible to gain anything from the (compulsory) assault except level-ups. The assult is grouped into 3 separate squads of players, each of which have their own route into the center. There is an advantage to being first to the center – you get a chance to do damage to Oryx sooner, and get access to the portal in to his inner sanctum before the other squads.
Problem: 99% of players are guaranteed unable to enter the inner sanctum. They might as well quit before they start. 1% of players are almost certain to get into the sanctum – but need the help of their squad.
Change: Record which “squad” each player arrives in, and award a “squad bonus” to the squad whose player enters Oryx’s sanctum first.
Details:
- hilight the players in the squad who have the necessary items to enter sanctum (e.g. with a glow)
- use different shades of yellow on the map for the different squads, making it clear which squad is ahead
- each time a player enters the sanctum, announce it in global chat, along with the squad ID (1, 2, 3 etc)
- every player in the squad is credited with a temporary or consumable boost, e.g. one of:
- +10% def bonus, temporary, lasting 5 minutes real time (rounded up – e.g. 8 def = +1 def; 13 def = +2 def)
- +300hp pot, soulbound
Summary: Oryx assult becomes more competitive, more meaningful – and actually worthwhile for the lower-level players. Most importantly, the massive risk (very easy to die during the asssault) has a (potential) reward. The reward is temporary/consumable, so has no long-term effect on power inflation.
I’ve played many hundreds – probably over a thousand – games on Kongregate alone, now.
On top of all the thousands I’ve played on console, PC, flash, handheld, mobile, etc.
I feel pretty confident in analysing game mechanics, and success/fail reasons for given game-designs, based off my extensive experience.
I frequently use my knowledge to influence design decisions and programming decisions in the games I work on.
But how many people in the games industry can say the same?
Hmm.
(PS: many people claim to “have no time to play games – too busy working”; my view has always been: if you really care about the art and the craft of this industry, you’ll make the time. No question about it)
I can’t find this. NASA’s web presence (in their defence, they have a **** tonne of data) is damn hard to navigate for simple queries (i.e. anything that’s not highly-specific, PhD material). I’ve found the “12 months of the year blue marble” dataset that gives you: Earth, without clouds.
And that includes a single momentary snapshot of: Earth, with clouds.
But – surely – somewhere there is “24 hours of clouds moving around earth”? Can’t find it! Help?
Something like 90% of game developers NEVER get a royalty for their games, and almost as many never get a bonus.
But for the handful that work on titles where the studio negotiated a good deal (modulo the Publisher’s legal team using legal chicanery to make all royalties work out at “$0”) … it’s interesting to see what they get.
So, for Call of Duty, we have: Infinity Ward’s 2003 royalty deal with Activision.
NOTE: that doc *does not include* bonuses; it mentions them a few times, and says they’re taken out “before” the royalties. One of the publisher tricks is to award 100% of the profit to their own executives as “bonuses” – so that the external developer gets a royalties based off $0. You’d really want to see the bonuses doc too to check what the value of these royalties is…
Anyway, that aside, some headline points:
- no upside limit (royalties aren’t “capped” – a sneaky practice I’ve seen publishers use before. A dev studio should NEVER accept a cap!)
- NEW game series / IP created by the developer: developer gets 10% of net income (profit)
- Sequels to the developer’s NEW games, or NEW games that re-use the developer’s game-engine, and NOT made by the developer: developer gets 2% of net income (profit)
- Sequels made to the developer’s EXISTING games by the developer: developer gets 10-15% of net income (profit)
- Sequels made to the developer’s EXISTING games and NOT made by the developer: developer gets 4% of net income (profit)
When you “upgrade” to Lion, be aware that Apple will silently wipe your “auto install / update” settings, and start aggressively downloading every update it can find for every Apple app you use.
In my case, this was gigabytes of data – I really don’t care (and don’t want) “upgrades” to PhotoBooth and other trash that Apple pre-installs. But, because Apple wants to force these on you, they’d already wasted large amounts of bandwidth (on my laptop – on a desktop broadband connection, I wouldn’t care), and reduced my internet browsing for a few days before I found this out.
So … when you upgrade … remember to open “Software Updater”, and change the setting (that Apple has overwritten), back to “don’t check automatically”. Sadly, there’s no setting for “don’t download stuff unless I tell you to” – but at least turning off the auto-check avoids this.
UPDATE: this technique didn’t work. I’m still trying to find something that does. One friend suggested hard-coding the address of all Adobe websites into your “hosts” file, and blocking them. This would prevent you from visiting Adobe’s sites – but would prevent the evil Adobe Updater trojan from downloading – but it will still keep TRYING to run. I want to kill the damn thing completely.
Adobe just doesn’t seem to get the message: the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader puts a NEW virus(*) on your desktop, and all the old methods for removing it … don’t work. I previously used this tip from 2010 to remove the virus, while still using the Adobe software installed on my machine, but it no longer works.
With OS X Lion, I’m now trying again with a new approach (through trial and error this seems it might work – but I’ll update this in a few months if the virus still hasn’t come back)
- Open Finder
- Search for “Adobe Updater”
- Should be in an “Adobe Utilities” folder (if they had the chutzpah to call it “Adobe Viruses” I’d at least give them some credit for humour and outright shamelessness :))
- Delete that app – move it to Trash
- Empty the Trash (just in case it tries to run while hiding in the Trash – should be impossible, but with the back-door hacks Adobe’s already doing, you never know…)
(*) Adobe’s “Updater” has so far:
- crashed my laptop (multiple times)
- caused it to overheat to the point of hardware damage (laptop emits a screeching noise – that’s the hardware’s “emergency shutdown” warning)
- stolen my internet bandwidth when I’m on 3G modem, costing me money, and preventing me from using my own machine
This app cannot be disabled, the web is full of people complaining and begging Adobe to get rid of it, it’s installed secretly (the user is not informed it exists, let alone asked if they want it), and it has NOTHING TO DO WITH the actual app I installed.
What do you reckon? To me, that sounds closer to a virus than anything else. I don’t for a moment believe that Adobe is unaware of the amount of hatred it instils in their customers…