You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Events' category.
Machinarium :: $20 / Point & Click / PC, Mac, Linux
There were 306 entries at IGF 09, and a good lot of them were unique. Independent games are on the rise, and I’m glad they are because a lot of them are 1. affordable, 2. very fun, 3. good looking. Independently produced games range from senseless to experimental to better-than-a-commercial-title-quality. Each one has it’s own quirks, usually with confusing/unconventional installations, or piggyback on some sort of existing technology to make a game engine. Machinarium (above), for example is a Flash Projector with a lot of SWFs in various folders. Similarly, Closure (down there somewhere) takes advantage of the fact that Actionscript 3 has better capabilities for image processing. My love for Indy Gaming is long-standing, so I’m a bit biased. Anywho, here are my picks from the crop!
Don't Shit Your Pants :: Free / Text-based / Flash
Closure :: Free / 2D Platformer / Flash
Enviro-Bear 2000: Operation: Hibernation :: $? / ??????? / ?
Super Meat Boy :: $? / 2D Platformer / WiiWare
Osmos :: $10 / Casual Survival / PC, Mac, Linux
Cortex Command :: $18 / 2D Platform War Strategy / PC, Mac (yeah, I’m wondering if my computer could handle this game!)
So the next time you’re at a LAN party (and there should be a time you give that a chance if you haven’t), be like me and annoy everyone with your new-found love for indy games. And even if that never happens, I put these up because it’s a small glimmer of hope for anyone who wants to start making something in their basement. Remember: Indy = no funding. Now go play the Machinarium demo! It’s so genius in it’s hot-spot-clicking simplicity… and that’s why I christen it the TRUE WINNER of the indy games festival (though it did not win. some other game called “Blueberry Garden” won, and it looked just pointless and boring)
Best. Game. Ever.
The Webby Awards of 2009 have come and gone. As with most award ceremonies, plenty of folks won awards that no one has ever heard of. I don’t intend to bore you, and don’t actually know much about the whole Webby phenomenon, but it’s worth looking over.
Twitter, no surprise, won an award for being the “Breakout of the Year”. Everybody and their dog has a twitter these days. Personally, I haven’t yet succumbed.
R/GA won an award as the most accomplished design firm. Their video on how design firms have worked in the past, present and will in the future was eye-opening.
And of course, a few other people got awards but generally when the Webby’s come around not you or I or anybody else really needs to care — just like the oscars.
Writing papers is a pain in the butt. I would know because I’m currently way too involved in this big project we’re doing in Senior Capstone.
Appropriately titled nothing more than “esc”, we’re using two LCD projectors and a lot of geometry texture mapping to make it appear as if the library steps are nothing but a big ol’ movie screen. The theme? Temporary escape from your work. Ironically none of this was made possible without avoiding any and all diversions. I hope to see you there, this friday from 9pm (when the library closes) until… we get shut down.
And um… here’s some links to everything that made me not write my paper.
With a strong resemblance to “Project Project” next friday (more on that later) this saturday is an event being hosted by students at Black Mountain College with dancing and skateboarders and multimedia projection in to the Food Lion skate bowl.
Tickets for students is 7$ bucks
Show starts at 8:00pm with a preshow from an interactive theremin performer Jason Daniello, whoever that is.
I think it is important that you remind more than ten people every day up until the actual time-of this event that The Student Show is at 3:00 in the afternoon. A silly part of me, like most people, dreamed up times that I would have liked the student show to be like 6:00pm, or 5:00, or even cheese o’clock. Well, any of these would be wrong. It’s at THREE THREE THREE
There are some things I should skip class for. This looks like it was one of them…
Look for Marshall, Chas, Troy, and a few other people you might know.
Helloo friiennnds
If you havent already seen the door on 201, we will be having a meeting in Zeis 202 this Thursday, March 26th, at 12:30. We will talk about future events, recap game night, the student show, and available positions for next year. I encourage everyone to come even if you havent came to any previous events. It is a good chance to meet people and get involved. So remember to come to
ZEIS 202 — Thursday March 26th — 12:30
3D printing is expensive, usually. Shapeways turns a year old this March, and for the occasion everything is 25% off. There’s also a contest going on to win $300 worth of 3D prints. That’s sort of cool, yeah?
Our White, Strong & Flexible material allows for live hinges, simple gears and springs. Because of this we’ve been thinking a lot about motion, movement and moving parts at Shapeways. We’ve made simple spinners ourselves and shown you how to make them. But, we thought that the community could best push the limits of the material and of 3D printing. Ergo: the moving parts contest. Starting today you can enter by adding the tag movingpart to your model. The community votes decide the winner and that person will get $300 in 3D printing.
Let’s start with the basics. Nearly every non-Windows operating system on the planet uses UNIX. One of the things UNIX does is keep track of the computer’s clock. The clock inside of every unix-based machine (including all of our Apple computers) is measuring the time you see in “Seconds since January 1st 1970.” The particular point of epoch, a silly-looking 1,234,567,890 seconds since the year 1970 began, is today at precisely 3:31pm PST, 4:31MST, 5:31 CST, 6:31 EST (us being the latter.) In celebration, I’ll be in the lab tutoring some people Processing. If you want to show up and show you can count to ten, then do so; otherwise, good luck to you, and have a good weekend.
Here’s a related cnet article, and an official 1234567890 Day website complete with a count-down! If you’re thinking about participating might I recommend counting up from one to nine until you overflow back to zero?
The first official meeting of the semester for the MMAC will take place this Tuesday, February 10th. It will be held in ZS 202 at 12:15 pm. If you are an MMAS student, you should come join us. We will be discussing ideas for all night lab sessions, the student show, and the HOW design conference (see post below).
Welcome to my first blog!
I wanted to put up a link to the conference Kristen is trying to get us to go to. You guys should check it out because it looks pretty nice. The details are getting worked out now about how we would go to Texas, and how much money it would cost. Visit the HOW Design Conference website and find out for yourself if you would want to go.
