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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

You complete me.

The often brilliant xkcd has posted a funky take on a circuit world.

Who says circuits can't be fun?

Monday, April 26, 2010

Mmm. Organic... Pixels?

I will always admire the Japanese.

Today, it's those guys at iGem Osaka

Definitely an interesting take on pixel art. They did this using genetically engineered glowing bacteria.


Seems like they manually laid out the two colored bacteria in a grid, and then grew/stimulated them individually to get each to expand within their cell.

I particularly like the irregularity of each cell, giving great variety to an otherwise rectilinear art form, yet still keeping that nice retro feel.


Sunday, April 25, 2010

Humor in the Age of Digital Reproduction

I was reading this pedantic article about humor.

Stumbled upon it rather unexpectedly, and the topic is relevant to what we're doing.

Unfortunately the article itself is mostly a survey of different humor categories, there is an interesting section about "interactive humor."

As far as I know, we'll be making downloadable games. We'll be writing stories and scripts for these downloadable games. Most likely an internet-savvy player who is unfortunate enough to stumble upon one of our hopefully rather addictive games will waste hours immersed the gameplay, as well as the quirky humor that we'll be trying to project with our visuals and story.

1) Internet folks have been exposed to more stuff that any group of people in human history.

3) Humor is about delivering the unexpected. A joke ain't so funny if you've heard it before.

Put two and two together we have our work cut out for us.

Let's all add something unexpected in our games. Let's add a bit of crazy, and enjoy the concoction.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

I am not young enough to know everything.

I was very proud of myself.

So I created this animation. Looked cool. Did it using Maya. Rendered and exported out each frame in png format.

After all that, assembling them is cakewalk for sure! After all, I was even able to do it in my head...

...but not on the computer.

At least, not within the 5 seconds that I thought it was gonna take.

Which gets to one of my biggest pet peeves: not being able to do something that should be stupidly simple to do.

Photoshop? Couldn't do it without some pain.
Irfanview? Destroys transparency.
Paint? Hah!
Doing it by hand? Only if all else fails...

Basically, this isn't exactly the thing that I should have to google.

But I did. And felt annoyed because of it.

Moral of the story is that I took for granted something that I thought should've been automatic. You'd think I'd have learned something by now...

The solution I found in a forum somewhere. Kudos to the gal who posted:

-Imagemagick
-put all PNGs into a single folder, name them *01.png, *02.png, etc
-run the command on the shell:

montage -background "transparent" -depth 8 -type TrueColorMatte *.png
geometry 128x128 -tile 8x1 -matte -transparent "transparent" concat.png

That's for a sheet of 8 png files, with a size of 128 square each, outputting to concat.png

Monday, April 19, 2010

Frictionless Entry

It's not what you think.

Or at least, it's not what you first think about.

Say someone wants you to try something cool.

It's really really cool. Guaranteed. You just need to go through 20 or so pages worth of EULAs, create another account and provide some random but most of the time identical series of letters which represent the only password that you can remember for your email accounts and your social profile.

Before you even get to try this really really cool something, it's all of a sudden not as really really cool, and maybe not even really really cool enough to worth pursuing, because there's a ton of other really really cool things that you could be wasting your time on instead.

Frictionless entry is the new buzzword. But I like the concept.

It means I can get around to playing the game in one click. One button press. Because our attention spans nowadays don't last much longer than that.

It means having a good game, without the huge learning curve.

It means the concept is clear. We get the point right away.

It means to get to the fun, without the hassle.

We want there to be frictionless entry. Guys love frictionless entry. Girls love frictionless entry.

The above pic? First thing that popped up when I google image searched. Sure frictionless is good, but it's always smart to keep things safe.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

Okay. Tim convinced me that adding thoughtful stuff on this blog may someday pay off.
Just keep doing it, and it increases your odds.

Like the lottery, except without the money.

Or maybe I should just post random game-related stuff every once in a while.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Happy little trees (hiring artist)

Look mom our first job posting! We're in need of a 2D concept/production artist for our current title. Think you got what it takes? Check out the job description or look at the "Current Job Openings" link on the right panel under "Misfits Attic Links". Note, our game has no trees, happy or otherwise... yet.