Awesome Wesnoth Trailer!!!

This wesnoth trailer is completely free and it showcase the new music, and jaw breaking artwork along with in game sprite graphics, and lastly the game play features that Wesnoth is so famous for. Enjoy it!

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Just out: Inform 7

Wow, two posts in one day. Amazing.
And speaking of amazing, there is a new interactive fiction IDE just released called Inform 7. From Grand Text Auto comes this quote:


The new system is in many ways more different from Inform 6 than OS 10 was from System 9

There are mac and pc versions so you mostly like have no excuse not to go download it and try it out.

Independent Gaming - the new TIGSource?

For quite a while TIGSource was one of the best sites to go to for up to the minute indie game news and stuff. Since a few months ago, TIGSource has been out of commission due to ISP troubles and new sites have started to emerge to fill in the gaps. This site, with nearly nothing to distinguish it visually, other than daily posts and screenshots, is proving that content wins over flashy site design. If you want to find out what's been going on and what's been released in the indie gaming world, this is a great site to add to your bookmarks.

The Craft of Adventure

Five articles about the design of adventure games...

Visual Studio 2005 Express now free forever

From Digg comes a story about MSOFT now offering Visual Studio 2005 Express will be free forever...

From the site:

We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently!

Xeodesign: Why We Play Games

From Xeodesign comes a great article (in PDF) about why we play games. It has some great insights as well as a wealth of information for game developers.

BadgerFish - convert XML to JSON

From Ajaxian:


BadgerFish is a convention for translating an XML document into a JSON object. Once you've got your XML document represented as a JSON object, it's easy to manipulate from within Javascript. If you're familiar with PHP's SimpleXML extension, think of BadgerFish as aiming for a similar goal: making it simpler to do common manipulations of XML documents with a predictable structure.

The Business of Social Avatar Virtual Worlds

Great article about social avatar virtual worlds and how they (can) make money to survive.

Massive: The Future of Networked Multiplayer Games

From the site:


MASSIVE will engage 25 speakers and approximately 80 registrants from industry and academia in a dialog about the future design, technical and cultural challenges presented by massively multiplayer games, current and future research agendas from both industry and academia, and case studies and future models for industry academia collaboration.


-- Got this from http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/

ShareCrow - their movies, your voice

Remember Mystery Science Theater 3000? Imagine if you could do that for any movie you have. Or perhaps listen to commentary from your favorite movie critic. This site allows you to listen to commentary or voiceovers for any dvd. It doesnt modify the DVD, it just syncs with the tracks. Very interesting for translations, funny voice overs, etc.

Hive7 - AJAX meets multiplayer/chat

This is an interesting site that combines multiplayer 2d avatars with chat. Kinda retro except that its using AJAX/DHTML.

Creating a Better Game Development Framework

Troy Gilbert talks about how game toolkits could learn a thing or two from the current Web 2.0 technologies.

How Game Mechanics Can Make Your WebApp More Fun

This is an analysis of Amy Jo Kim's presentation of game mechanics in social software. Great information for you Web 2.0 companies looking to differentiate yourselves.

ExplorerCanvas - Canvas in IE

Thanks to the folks at Google there is now an open source project to create a compatibility layer between vml and canvas. If you have a demo of something running in canvas - try this out to see if it gives you IE support as well.

Web API Lookups via AJAX

Want to know about some DOM api? or perhaps how to do something via CSS? This is a great little site that lets you do dynamic lookups into various web technology apis.

BTW havent been posting too much lately since I've been very sick. Hopefully that's behind me now.