Rainbow of Flavor
July 2, 2014 
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esdin 
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or "How I destroyed my stomach in less than 2 hours" Mountain Dew. Doritos. These are the towering brands upon which all of gamer culture stands. Many a night has been spent washing down handfuls of orange chips while sipping on the sweet green nectar of a classic Mountain Dew. But what of the gamer with more discerning tastes? How will she sate her appetite during a long night of leet skills? Join us on a journey across a selection of 'Dews and 'Ritos for the gamer with a complex palate.
Floaty Squid – Available Now
March 9, 2014 Uncategorized esdin no responses
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After over a month in review, it's finally arrived. From the depths, here comes FLOATY SQUID! Completely free. Wired.com - "This is my favorite of the knockoffs that don’t copy and paste Flappy Bird code and then add their own skin." "A-" (Or, if you don't have an iPhone, you can play it
Productive Procrastination
March 8, 2014 Development, Games esdin no responses
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I am two weeks away from showing off a game at a showcase in a house at the Game Developer’s Conference. The preview build will have seven areas. There will be over fifty descriptive and interactive lines of text, over two hundred lines of dialogue, five unique music tracks, and it will be playable on the Ouya. Just as soon as I get around to it. A strange thing happens when you put things off. You come up with a deadline and promise yourself to hit it. You may even put in a bit of earnest effort towards your goal, and feel accomplished for a day or two. Then you slip a bit, and suddenly the thing that was already ambitious becomes terrifying. To face it would be to come to terms with the size of it, and so you instinctively avoid it. Eventually it grows massive and looms over every moment of your day. The stress is unbearable, so unbearable that you surely can’t work on it. I ...
Regular Polygons Fresh From The Editor
October 8, 2013 Development, Games esdin no responses
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I've been trying to get back in to some more independent development lately, and the first thing I re-built was a quick and dirty editor script that lets you easily pump out arbitrarily scaled regular polygons. Great for making some quick geometric shapes or just replacing Unity's default plane with a simple quad.
Touching Me, Touching You – Reaching out to Players
October 17, 2012 Games esdin no responses
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After months spent hunched over a laptop, vertebrae in protest and hands ruined from overuse, you come blinking into the light to show your new title to the world. You've put a great deal of yourself into this work, fine tuning controls and gameplay elements, polishing art and dialogue, running your ears deaf from sound tests and listening to long to the repeating tracks. So you're a bit taken aback when nobody notices. An alternate scenario—your team has been pushing hard towards the deadline, and everything's snapped into place. Your production staff is top notch, and keeps you well appraised of current trends, but somehow, sitting and watching launch day, launch week, and launch month pass by, your sure fire hit has done mediocre at best. While I've seen the first scenario far more often than the latter, the fact remains that properly engaging your audience and gauging their ...
Borrow/Copy/Steal—The Fine Line Between Inspiration and Cheekiness
August 18, 2012 Games esdin no responses
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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 widespread popularity, dozens of 'copy cat' games cropped up. These 'Doom Clones' were capitalizing on a hot commodity, but at the same time, this had created a new style of game for designers to play around in. Some changes were introduced inadvertently, as independently developed systems contributed their own unique quirks to the way the game world ...
Text Adventures in the Dark
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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 remembered for being hardcore?" I shrug and we pick up where the conversation left off. Topics clash, they meander and finally we begin to discuss old video games and Zork, of all things, is introduced into the conversation. Casually, I mention that there is a sort of goth version of the game and I spend a minute talking about the plot, having ...
Modifying Existing Over-engineered Systems for Fun and (Profit?)
August 16, 2012 Development, Games esdin no responses
Tagged with: Engineering • Lazy • Occam's RazorI'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 be. This is an iOS title, so I wanted to make sure everything happened Auto-magically. As per my last post, I'm a huge stickler for minimal control schemes on iOS, and so everything in this title is controlled with taps, drags, and swipes. Now, as it happens to have happened, until very recently I was using these systems to their full ...
Organ Trail: Director’s Cut—Embracing Mobile for the Win
Games, Interface Design, Rant esdin one response
Tagged with: Controls • Games • RantLate 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 are plenty of other places you can go to if you're looking for a review. Recently I was talking with one of the teachers at my Alma Mater in Full Sail about his new syllabus for an Intro to the Game Industry course, and when he asked for things we thought would be a must-have for the course I fell hard upon the idea of embracing ...
h4ckz0r3d—Getting the Blog Up and Running Again
Meta-blog esdin no responses
Tagged with: hacked • meta • wordpressSometimes, 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 infection is deeper than it first appears Don't rely on your host's backups—keep your own! If you've been to my site in the past, I've had posts on games I've worked on, discussions of GDC, a theorem of Twitter as a neural network, and an attempt to summarize the growing body of research on 'what motivates people to play'. I still have that ...