PUBLIC MARKS with tags "blog post" & game

In his book Out of Control, author Kevin Kelley describes a Las Vegas conference room where a crowd of 5000, led by Pixar co-founder and Rescue on Fractalus co-creator Loren Carpenter, learn to adapt and react as a hive mind as they play a game of 2500 on 2500 Pong. Each half of the auditorium took collective control of each side, registering their individual intent to move in a certain direction with the wand. The input led to a computer, which averaged and relayed the moves to the game, with initially disastrous but eventually workable results.

If sometimes you feel you cannot solve a problem and you feel tired - go to sleep and let your brain solve the problem while at sleep. It just might work.

Physics for Game Programmers shows you how to infuse compelling and realistic action into game programming�even if you don�t have a college-level physics background! Author Grant Palmer covers basic physics and mathematical models and then shows how to implement them, to simulate motion and behavior of cars, planes, projectiles, rockets, and boats. This book is neither code heavy nor language specific, and all chapters include unique, challenging exercises for you to solve. This unique book also includes historical footnotes and interesting trivia. You�ll enjoy the conversational tone, and rest assured: all physics jargon will be properly explained.

Geometry Wars has been hailed as the “Halo of Xbox Live Arcade” referring to the relative popularity of the game. Intoxicating, frustrating and addictive all in one, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved provides a constant challenge and level of enjoyment, a siren song to gamers enticing them to play just one more game before hitting the sack. More than 200 thousand gamers, roughly a quarter of which actually paid, are currently wearing out their thumbs and roundly cursing one man, whether they know his name or not. That man is Stephen Cakebread, the designer and developer who crafted this gem for Bizarre Creations.

Have you ever been curious about a book or movie and picked it up on impulse, despite knowing little to nothing about it, and then been just taken with it? Sometimes not having set expectations before experiencing something just makes you appreciate it that much more. Now, obviously I am talking about “Indigo Prophecy”, a game and not a book or movie, but usually I’m not so loose with my money as to drop it on a game that I have not researched carefully on the Internet. Fortunately, within the first couple minutes of game time I could tell that my 6th sense (game-sense) was still up to snuff.

Mu-cade is a new shoot-em-up by the master of shmups, Kenta Cho of ABA Games. He pitches his game as a “smashup waggly shmup”, which is, by itself, reason enough to check it out. With Mu-cade, Kenta has introduced physics into his formula of hardcore shooting games. The result is a great physics game (even if it will kick your ass in five minutes or less).

Se Bejeweled fosse um jogo ruim, como seria?

# o projeto todo deve ser feito por uma pessoa apenas em uma semana; # e cada jogo deve estar centrado em apenas um dos play elements fundamentais (isso é jargão de game designer, mas são basicamente os elementos que diferenciam os games dos outros softwares)

# Make it really hard. # Have a dozen mediocre game modes instead of one good one. # Make it a 600 MB download that requires two next generation video cards and 4GB RAM. # Price your game at $35 or $3.50 and sell only from your myspace homepage. # Use the right mouse button. # Give it a terrible name or theme. # Award low scores. # Expect users to read. # Make it challenging and cerebral. # Ignore what everyone else says about your game.

What is a game, at its simplest, but an interactive challenge with a goal? Let’s go one better, and say a game — this game at least — takes skill, and that that necessary skill-level, along with the game itself, gets higher/faster/harder as the game continues, until it finally culminates in one last explosive battle.

A home computer game should not be designed to minimize playtime - it should not be designed to take away quarters by making the game impossible to beat.

C-LAB, the software arm of Siemens Business Services and the University of Paderborn have created "Kick Real," which is an AUGMENTED REALITY SOCCER GAME for cell phones. To play, you aim your camera phone down, and the video screen superimposes a soccer field on the live video of your foot. You can see the virtual ball, and "kick" it with your real foot to try and score goals.

The entire video game industry’s history thus far has been an aberration. It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other. When you were kids, you played tag, tea parties, cops and robbers, what have you. The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal.

. In this game, you have to program a robot in Java. You program how it moves and turns. You program how it hunts for opponent robots. You program how it turns its gun and fires. Your program can be simple or as complicated as the Java Virtual Machine allows.

Raph Koster gave a talk this afternoon at PARC titled "The Medium That is Eating the World." Raph is a well-known online game designer (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) and a warm, funny, engaging speaker. His talk today was pretty loosely structured; he wandered around through a bunch of disjoint thoughts about the origin of games, different kinds of media, the definition of play, a bit of kitchen cog sci, and the impact of games on gamers and on the world. Overall it was quite interesting, but I felt like he was trying a bit too hard to be academic and researchy, since the audience was that kind of crowd.

At 44 years old, PopCap Games Chief Executive David Roberts likes to joke that he is "the adult supervision" at the Seattle computer game maker.

A couple years back, I sent my mother an interactive Christmas card. The card was actually a little game. You played Santa and you were skiing down a hill. Along the hill were various obstacles and you had to jump over them by pressing the spacebar.

Coming up with game ideas is a creative process without much structure to it.

The BBC has just released a really good in-depth report on how people game in Britain.

As with many of the Asian games, there’s a nominally massively multiplayer lobby, which you enter minimally multiplayer games from. You play the game in order to earn virtual cash, plus you buy a different sort of virtual cash. You can then buy further accessories for your character (clothes, character customization, etc) and new stuff to play (in this case, songs) with that money.

Vídeo da EGS

DDR + Asteroids

This is part three of my five part series on programming logic games. This week's game, Bug Brain, uses neural nets as its programming model. Neural nets are a mainstay of machine learning in computer science and of science fiction stories. In each Bug Brain level, you have to construct a neural net to guide your bug to complete some task. For example, in the level pictured below, you program the lady bug, and your task to have it eat the three bugs without falling off the branch.

the Japanese edition of A Theory of Fun for Game Design is out now. Masaya Matsuura was kind enough to write a foreword for this edition

The end of the year is upon us, and enough blogs and news sites have already written great articles on the best games of the year. Therefore, instead of being lost amongst the white noise of award features, I'd like to point out a few trends which I felt were especially important during 2005.