Archive for August, 2012
Borrow/Copy/Steal—The Fine Line Between Inspiration and Cheekiness
Games are, by their very nature, unoriginal. We borrow ideas from eachother, warp and extend mechanics, layer ideas from multiple sources together, and then tweak internal settings to give our titles a unique feel. This is how any good artistic medium works, constantly remixing old material to create new and interesting results, with true innovation leading to an evolution of whole clades within its creator base. We have a history of taking great ideas and building around them. Soon after DOOM was first released and gained ...
Text Adventures in the Dark
My face is slightly flushed and I can feel the steady rhythm of my heart pounding precariously against my chest; at this I turn my arm up, my eyes casually reading over the marks planted on my forearm to remind myself exactly why the world is blurring together. I carefully count the slashes I've made and find: twenty strokes of a marker. At this I realize that in my hand is drink number twenty, two zero, and that next to me is a girl who has at this point stopped talking and has looked over with me to the count and smiles, "Do you want to be ...
Modifying Existing Over-engineered Systems for Fun and (Profit?)
I'm currently working on an under wraps project with a few friends, and one of the systems designed very early on is a FocusManager and an associated CameraMover class. The system is created in such a way that, when you click on an object, the FocusManager uses associated camera information and a built in graph to smoothly interpolate over to an appropriate orientation. This means I can place 'FocusObjects' all over the place and at weird orientations, or parent them to moving objects, and the camera will always gets where it needs to ...
Organ Trail: Director’s Cut—Embracing Mobile for the Win
Late last week, The Men Who Wear Many Hats released the iOS and Android versions of their retro-styled Organ Trail. If the name didn't give it away, what you've got here is essentially a gorgeous little 8-bit styled zombie survival game with heavy roots in the classic Oregon Trail. Your wagon now has the word 'Station' in front of it, and you're fording hordes instead of rivers, but many similarities abound, resulting in a hilariously nostalgic experience that demands solid resource management, luck, and a steady finger. That said, there ...
h4ckz0r3d—Getting the Blog Up and Running Again
Sometimes, bad things can slip on to your servers. They dig themselves in, and for those of us who haven't delved into web development, their arcane motions remain nigh untraceable. When they finally manifest, they do so as a hydra, each painfully researched solution curing a single head of attack but ultimately revealing more teeth. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to nuke the whole thing from orbit. Some things I've learned for the future: Always build secure .htaccess files. Keep everything up to date. Always assume an ...
