I saw this today at Target. Yes, they’re adult sizes. I feel bad for any man wearing them.
Meanwhile, At Target…
2
Funny Quote of the Day
They’re total nerds. They live in caves, and they like move pixels around, and they shun the light. They’re the nerds. They’re my people.” — Steve Burns
(From The Moth podcast)
Hard Drive Blues
Blue screen of boredom
I had more hard drive problems this week. This time, I was having problems with files getting corrupted. I ended up spending all day yesterday reinstalling windows and my applications on a new hard drive. It takes forever to get things up and running again, mostly because of slow installs and slow updates. So, I got zero “actual work” done. At least I’m being a little smarter about things now: I’m redesigning my backup system, and I cloned my hard drive after reinstalling everything. Now that I have a clone, it will only take me about 30 minutes to get everything up and running again on a new hard drive.
Broken Wrist
Well, I was unfortunate enough to break my wrist a few days ago while riding my bike. It’s slowed down my ability to type (i.e. write code), but hasn’t stopped me. My friends told me to take a little time off of work, but I’m not going to.
I think I made the wrong game
I saw a story on slashdot recently. The creator of “Minecraft” had his paypal account suspended, and he can’t get his money out of the account. The money was for pre-orders of his game. He started developing the game in May 2009 and released an alpha version of the game the same week. So, how much money in pre-orders does he (claim) to have? 600,000 Euros (roughly $760,000). That’s pretty mind-boggling for one and a half years of work. It’s also a few orders of magnitude more money than I’m earning. (To be honest, my initial reaction to the story was that the number was fake, and it was all a big publicity stunt. After reading a little more about it, though, I think it might be true.)
I’m planning to release financial numbers for my game at some point in the future, but I’ve already suggested that it hasn’t been a financial success. And, it’s not that I need to make a ton of money, like Minecraft, but I at least need to make enough to pay my bills. I guess it’s all feast or famine in the indie game business. I think 99% of us are on the “famine” side of it.
Update, Sept 18: I just got some numbers from the sale that started last month. There was a nice increase in revenue from that, so that’s encouraging!
New Tech – 3D on the iPad/iPhone, Augmented Reality [Video]
I just thought this was a pretty cool demo. It’s a 3D world running on the iPad and iPhone. I didn’t know they had such powerful processors. I guess it follows the general computing trend of the past 50 years, though – more powerful computers in smaller packages. Decades ago, computers filled an entire room. Then there was the desktop computer, then the laptop. Tablets and phone devices are just another step in that progression. I suppose the only limiting factor is the interface.
Speaking of the interface, this is next video is a pretty cool tech mockup. Maybe in the future, we won’t be limited to the size of a tablet or smart phone screen. (This video works best with blue-red 3D glasses, but it’s still watchable without them.)
Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
It would be pretty weird to see someone interacting with their computer this way – since they’d be seeing the augmented reality images through some sort of glasses, but no one else would see what they’re seeing.
11 Game Satires + 20 Counterproductive Game Covers
Two interesting links:
20 Counterproductive Video Game Covers
My favorite in the list is Phalanx, a “hyper-speed shoot-out in space” with a banjo player on the front cover:
11 Great Playable Video Game Satires
My favorite spoof is the “cow clicker” Farmville spoof:
Creator Ian Bogost: “You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom ‘premium’ cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called ‘mooney’), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.”
Empires of Steel Sale!
We are kicking off an Empires of Steel summer sale! Instead of the regular price of $35, you can now purchase the full version of this unique strategy game of global domination for just $20 for a limited time!
If you have any friends you’d like to get into the game, now would be an ideal time.
Google is Super-Fast
While researching some stuff on WW2 North Africa, I stumbled on an elaborate boardgame called “The campaign for North Africa”. I thought it was interesting, so I added a short blog-post on the empires of steel website. Then, I continued doing google searches about North Africa. Literally, within ten minutes of adding that blog-post, I noticed my own blog post come up in the search results — in less than ten minutes! Wow.
3D without 3D Glasses [Video]
I kind of wondered how they did 3D without 3D glasses. I knew that a parallax barrier would work, but I figured it would have too small of a sweet-spot to be very good (i.e. shift a little to the left or right and the 3D would fail). I guess it’s big enough, though I haven’t actually tried it in person.
Based on their description, this system wouldn’t work for TV or movies – unless they dramatically increased the number of images handled by the system, creating a whole series of sweet spots.