Journal
February 12, 2007 | Links
I am not a huge fan of comic books. Whilst the art can be very cool I seem to be able to read them in a matter of minutes. If I am going to read something then I want to be able to put time into it. I want to create the experience in my head.
Comic book movies are even worse… with one or two exceptions. I love the Spiderman series. I vaguely remember the cartoon from when I was little but otherwise my knowledge is limited - but the movies are just wonderful. I even got my girlfriend to watch them, and she normally sticks to romantic comedies. I think the thing I like is that, whilst the action is very cool, the films are very character driven. I also like the fact that the films are being tied in together very closely.
Spiderman 3 is to be released …
February 11, 2007 | Links
Talking of new releases 9rules, the wonderful blog network I am a member of, have recently redesigned - and they added a whole stack of new features at the same time.
They have made the site much more community oriented, with people being able to create their own 9rules page (my.9rules). There are far too many features to mention, in fact they didn’t even try in their own announcement post - so I think you should just head on over and check it out for yourself.
Personally I find the amount of new content a little overwhelming, and the colours are rather bold… as is the text - but once past the homepage is looks and works great.
As some of you may know I make video games - both for work and as a hobby.
About a year ago a chap named Alan Broad posted a demo of a game he was intending to give away on a development forum I frequent. I really liked the game and thought some money could be made so I offered to buy the code and distribution rights. I wanted to tweak the game and release it for sale.
He said “No”.
However he also said, “if you think we can sell it, I will make the changes and then you can publish it”. So, a year later, the game is now ready for release…
Gun Wing
Gun Wing is a vertically scrolling shoot ‘em up. With this game we tried to make something that everybody could enjoy, which tends to go against the general trend for shoot ‘em ups. We wanted …
I love pixel art, and these little pixel robots are a very cool form of computer generated art. The image on the right shows a computer generated robot using my name (Ben) as the random seed - the starting point for the code.
Generating art with computers is quite a cool thing to do. I have attempted it in the past and whilst I had a small amount of success I never approached the creativity of Dave Bollinger who created these wonderful little characters.
When I found these I thought they were really nice but looking through Dave’s list of work you can see that he isn’t short of cool projects. I like a lot of the things he has done, including pixel spaceships.
Having now gone through his pieces of work I would say that my favorites are Cubicles, Maze blur (which has similarities with Tron …
February 10, 2007 | Links
I always wanted an Aibo but they’re so expensive and, well, Sony have now pulled the plug on them. That and they seemed to look more ridiculous with each new version (the current one has a potato for a head).
The idea behind the Robosapien was good, and they look quite cool, but once you get one you realize that actually they are rather clunky and not really capable of doing anything worthwhile. They just wobble, and have trouble picking up the smallest lightest objects… including the very light plastic cup that they come with.
Now I have found out about the Pleo and I am hoping and praying that it works out. Initial impressions, based upon the videos I have seen, are sketchy. It moves really well but I am concerned that it looks a little bit cheap with the fake skin (you can see the seams and …
February 6, 2007 | Links
An interesting article from Gameproducer.net listing a couple of different ways for finding out what people want. The ideas shown here are not just suitable for games though and may help you if you are looking for that “next big thing”.
Using sites like Digg is a fairly obvious idea but I had never considered using something like 43things, but when you think about it it makes sense really. Read more on the original post.
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