For some reason, I was looking at images and youtube clips from the very excellent and canceled too soon cartoon show Mission Hill.
People have already provided many good images about Ska, what is Kafkaesque, and the Republican Vampire, but there were some important gaps, which I have decided to fill:
I’ve been playing with Unity3D a bit lately. This is something I made, called Fuckbert. It’s really only a proof of concept at this point, if that concept is “QBert with more actual swearing.” There’s only two kinds of enemies and maybe 4 or 5 levels. But I think I fell for the programmer mentality that once I can do two kinds of enemies, then I know “a solution exists” to make a third kind of enemy. So it’s not a good game in its current state, but I’m not in the mood to turn it into a good game, is what I’m saying. 🙂
Because I was just learning, it’s kind of a ridiculous kludge of stuff that I wanted to play with. The pyramid blocks are coloured with a surface shader that uses IN.worldNormal [0] [1] and [2] to determine which of the three colours the surface should display. It would have been simpler (and easier to port to different platforms, since shaders aren’t always supported very well) to make the blocks out of three planes with a different colour applied to each, but then I wouldn’t have an excuse to play with shader code.
I was actually inspired to do a Qbert clone after seeing animation by Mirai Mizue which is maybe a silly response to seeing that, but whatever.
Check out the diagrams for this fabulous patent from 1921, showing how to store multiple player piano rolls in a giant chain. Whatever problem it was trying solve, I don’t know, but it’s amazing to picture it in action, turning this crank to bring a different roll down to your player piano.
I’ve put together an animation demo reel:
To play around with some techniques, and to analyze the editing of the scene, I’ve made a chart that breaks down the Star Wars trench run sequence, which I’ve made available as a PDF.
I figure I’d put together a quick “how-to” of how I made it:
I think I learned more about Illustrator and spreadsheets in the process. It was tricky to get some of the objects in explosions to read as a very tiny silhouette. I’m curious about generating randomized edits using the Final Cut XML format, that might be worth exploring in the future. I also know everything I might need to know about the Star Wars trench run.
This was something I made just as a test on a selection of colours I had, but I kind of like how it looks:
For future reference, here’s a link to one of the early patents for a motion-picture camera, also known at the time as a Kinetograph.
Here’s a Kinetoscope, used for viewing movies.
A film-reeling mechanism. A still camera. (I like how the inside of the camera is ridged to reduce reflection.) A panoramic camera. Another motion picture camera. A clockwork camera that sounds like it was intended for time-lapse photography. (And it has a nice illustration of the film-advancing mechanism.) A Motion Picture camera system, again good pictures of the internals. A camera shutter. Another camera shutter.
I watched Matewan recently, and kind of love Kevin Tighe’s performance as a villainous Union-buster.
Here is is saying “we just got guns”
Here he is intimidating a 15-year-old with a war story.
Here he is when he first arrives in town.
Here he is having dinner conversation.
And just so it exists, here’s my attempt at transcribing his “war hero” speech:
See this medal? You know how I won this, preacher boy? Huh?
I was sitting alone in a ditch in France and this kraut jumps in, right next to me. And I took my bayonet, and I stuck him right in the face.
And then another jumps in and I stick him too. And another, and another. And another. They just kept coming one at a time all night long.
In a little bit I got to worried that they weren’t all dead so I stuck them all again a couple times, just to make sure.
And in the morning they said that I was a war hero.
I was playing a random game on Flash Game License, it was a fun concept, very nice graphics and music. The controls felt very, very, sluggish and unresponsive.
Of course, the game has a shop, where you spend your experience points to buy better movement.
So from one standpoint, when you make a game, you want to create very nice gamefeel.
In the MDA list of game aesthetics, discovery is a valuable element in a game. And there’s something to be said for discovering new capabilities as you “upgrade” or whatever in the game.
But those two elements come into conflict, where people make games where you have deliberately poor gamefeel to ensure that you have room to grow when you upgrade. And when I’m being cynical I think people put upgrades in their game because they haven’t got any better ideas.
From an analysis of gaming magazines from 1981 to 1995, I like this list of “criteriological types.”
These have been noted and the result is a list of criteriological types including ideas like game affordances (what a game allows you to do, choices, in-game movement, rule structures); space (size, screens, number of levels); graphical qualities (realism, resolution, speed, art qualities); sounds (effects, music, atmosphere); challenge to manual skill (dexterity, virtuosity); cognitive challenge (puzzle solving, things to be understood, finding and searching), and others.
I’ll do the short version here:
Or maybe I just like “game affordances” as a term.