I partook in a room jam, which means I made one of many many levels that are all mashed together into one computer game. You can play it online here:
http://somanyrooms.com/
It’s my first use of FlashPunk, a game development library. And I played a little with an idea I might develop more, which I call a “move stack.” I think it helps generalize having lots of possible movements in a fighting game.
Room Jam
Tagged games, I made this
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Fred Williamson
From the commentary on One Down, Two To Go: “To me if you dolly around a room, it looks like a midget is sneaking around in the room.”
Tagged movies
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“This studio cannot be held hostage by the talent.”
From here:
http://www.povonline.com/cols/COL335.htm
Discuss.
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Puppies!
In case you needed further evidence that hard core gamers aren’t the ones driving the money:
Tagged advertising, games, video games
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Koresh’s tomb
http://sundaymagazine.org/2010/11/madness-and-death-add-to-the-mystery-of-koreshs-tomb/
This guy gets plus points from me for including a hollow Earth theory in his weird cult. It kind of boggles the mind to think the theory is that we are inside the hollow Earth, but don’t realize it? I’ll have to see if there was some explanation for why we can look up and see sky instead of China.
Tagged history, hollow earth, religion
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When to laugh
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/10/good-direction.html
This quote from a John K post struck me as noteworthy:
“I never know when to laugh when I watch modern cartoons because they are so devoid of pacing or feeling.”
I usually hear from the other side that they feel insulted or pandered to if they are constantly being told when to laugh, that it kind of took me aback to see someone complain about not being told.
Maybe it goes hand-in-hand with his love of old cartoons. Maybe this sort of thing is now viewed as cheesy and old-fashioned. Should we really be told when to laugh? Can’t we just laugh when it’s funny?
Does it feel condescending or manipulative? But there’s a reason we’re watching them rather than them watching us. Aren’t we hoping they will manipulate us into a state of being entertained?
Robot Wants games
These “Robot Wants” games are kind of cool, especially if you see them in a row you can see how they become more complex each time. It kind of has a Megaman feel to it, in terms of as you acquire new abilities, you can access regions or kill bosses you couldn’t before, but it’s up to you to figure out the best order to get the new powers.
The first and last are the crucial ones, do the two in the middle if you want to be completist:
http://notdoppler.com/robotwantskitty.php
http://notdoppler.com/robotwantspuppy.php
http://notdoppler.com/robotwantsfishy.php
http://notdoppler.com/robotwantsicecream.php
Also, after playing this and dying three times because I misidentified something as solid ground that wasn’t:
http://notdoppler.com/heartofice.php
I started to appreciate how much I rely on the parallax movement to separate the foreground from the background. Like, I guess they were doing something with tinting the background stuff a little darker, but it was so easy to ignore if I wasn’t striving to pay attention.
Tagged games, video games
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Star Knight poster
I like how this poster just kind of lays it out:
http://www.wrongsideoftheart.com/2010/10/star-knight-el-caballero-del-dragon-1985-spain/
“Yeah, he’s from space, and he came to medieval Earth, so they figured he was a knight and his spaceship was a dragon. Cool, huh?”
Tagged advertising, movies, posters
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Book: Stiff
I’m reading “Stiff” a book about dead bodies. The author will occasionally go, “Oh, no, I really don’t want to hear/see any more about that, it’s too disgusting.” I guess I didn’t need a description of how the anus is sewn up during an embalming, but at the same time, it’s sometimes off-putting how she doesn’t really want to know too much about the subject she’s writing an entire book on. Is this something you’re allowed to do half-way?
Tagged books
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Let the movie be about what it’s about
Some actor who was in the Transformers movies, on why he was disappointed with Transformers 2, “You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting each other.”
The way you have relationships and robot fights at the same time? Let the robots be actual characters. As soon as they made a movie centred on this LaBeouf character, the war was lost, because the movie was called Transformers and he was not a transformer. So instead of the transformers having their own personal conflicts, they spend all of their screen time going, “Oh, LaBeouf, you are so special and wonderful, and you will help us save the world, and we’ll get you a girlfriend who isn’t a transformer, who will pull down the pants of that guy who works for the government and also isn’t a transformer. And there will also be some soldiers and a couple of hackers, all of whom are not transformers.”
I’m going to propose something similar to the Bechdel/Wallace test. Count the scenes where there are
1) at least two transformers
2) that talk to each other
3) about something other than LaBeouf
I’ll call it the Hill Test.
And then when there’s giant robots fighting, you’ll know whose ass it is, and why it’s farting who the giant robots are, and why they’re fighting.