Journal
August 15, 2005 | Links
Over at the Free Sound Project they are collecting royalty free sound samples using the Creative Commons license. You can use them commercially (in video games for example…) as long as you give credit to the original authors. You’re not allowed to use them in adverts but I don’t see that as a major problem.
There are massive amounts of sounds on there and since I don’t have any problem whatsoever with crediting people I suspect I won’t be paying for sound effects ever again.
August 12, 2005 | Links
Hmmm - Cinematical reports that The Da Vinci Code movie is being changed to please Christians - [via]
I rather like the Dan Browns books. Yes they’re shallow and not the most intellectual stories in the world. But they are fun, and pass the time nicely when you take the train to and from work every day.
The film was sounding like it could be quite good with an all star cast and a decent(ish) director. I particularly liked the choice of Paul Bettany as Silas.
Anyway - the whole point of the book is about the history of the church and, in particular, Jesus; so changing the story to please Christians will remove well… the story! It’s going to be interesting to see how they get around this one.
I always look at these things and think they’re cool and I should make one, and then promptly forget about them. I’m going to write this entry to remind me to try because these are very cool, in a slightly geeky way 
Advance Wars papercraft webpage
Not to be outdone by the BBC and Channel 4, Miniclip has today announced that we are going to run a Flash game development competition.
We’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a while now, and are really excited to see the types of games that people are going to come up with. I’m bound to be biased but I must say I think our competition is the best of the bunch. The main advantage of the Miniclip game competition is the fact that even if you win there is no long term exclusive contract which means, should you win, you not only get the Miniclip contract but have the oppurtunity to sell the game to other game sites as well. I’d say that’s rather good and, assuming you …
Everyone new Flash 8 was being worked on but it has now been officially announced and it is possible to preorder from the Macromedia website.
Flash 8 has now been officially announced (along with Fireworks 8 and Dreamweaver 8), and along with the ‘big new features‘, a number of smaller less impressive but, in some ways, more important things have also been added. You can check out the lesser known features of Flash 8 on Mike Downeys weblog.
I’m really glad Macromedia didn’t ditch Fireworks like they did Freehand, as I am a big fan of it, and the new Fireworks features look very nice as well.
Woot - Bubble Blitz is out of the door. I had intended to send it off last weekend but as normal you release a game to other developers and they find a stack of bugs or issues with the game. Of course now that it has been ripped apart it is much more solid and, hopefully, less likely to break.
The game has generally been classed as a nice little puzzle game that doesn’t show anything new - which is pretty much what it is meant to be. There are some more things I want to play with to try and improve it even more and they will be dealt with over the next week or two.
Once I am 100% happy with things I will start thinking about updating the website, and promoting it to try and get a few extra sales. I’ve never really bothered with promoting my games …
Binary Moon
Bubble Bomb
ExGen
Rocket Boards
Seths Puzzle Boxes