all nighter..

So, this idea that has been consuming my every spare thought and minute wants to become reality really badly. I could spend a few more weeks of an hour here and there or I can just bite the bullet and pull an all nighter for myself and just get something working. So, I think that's what's going to happen tonight :) Hopefully tonight I can get it working, tomorrow do some debugging and hopefully this weekend have a site up for you to start playing..
(what? :D )

Toufee: easy way to make flash movies

While the interface is still a bit wonky, this is a very worthy web 2.0 style application for creating simple flash movies, presentations and even game trailers. If you know of someone who's into myspace, or you need to create a quick flash movie or button, this is a perfect choice.

Nickelodeon launches MMO for kids: Nicktropolis

Via Wonderland (who found it on Gigagamez) comes news that Nickelodeon is launching a new MMO today similar to Virtual Magic Kingdom... Interesting.

Pirates: Battle for the Caribbean

Found this on the indiegamer forums: it's an actually pretty fun game where you defend your castle from pirate ships. After each level you can choose a certain technology to use for the next round (faster bombs, bigger explosions, a shark to wander your waters, etc.) For a free game it's actually pretty darn fun!

Dwarven Fortress: a deep game embedded in ASCII

Here's a review of a game I just now downloaded to try out. It looks to be a very involved and deep rpg/adventure/tactical style game where you build an empire of dwarves :)
Don't let the crappy ASCII graphics daunt you - hidden in there (as far as folks say) is an awesomely involved game. Give it a try.

Reinvigorate.net is back up!!

After almost a year of downtime I got an invite to rejoin my favorite web stats site. It seems to have been cleaned up, pared down, and works really well. I'm glad to see it back up again.

Cancer Cure! But no one cares...

Appearantly there is a very promising new cancer cure. However it's not patentable and is cheap to make, which seems to be why no one's talking about it. Help get the news out - blog about this story yourself...

Small Idea - progress!

I'm really making progress on this tiny idea of mine. It's an interesting combination of all of my interests into one. I can't wait to show you. I hope you find it interesting. One thing you might want to do now is go grab the latest Firefox (2.0+) because this new thing will require FF 2.0.

New Shoot The Core Website Up.

From Independent Gaming comes a link to the new Shoot The Core website. Piloting a space ship facing thousands of enemies never grows old...

Lost Garden: Project Horseshoe Report - Building Innovative Games That Sell

Lost Garden is another one of those "must bookmark" sites if you are into indie gaming. This HorseShoe Report is a collaborative effort to help figure out what makes great games that you can actually make money from. (Gah, ending a sentence in a preposition!)
Here's an excerpt:

To build a successful game, developers and publishers must master both the art of game creation and the science of selling games at a profit. These two are like the heart and the lungs of our industry; both are critical to survival.

Boston Game Jam results

From the site:


bunch of professional game developers from around the Boston area got together at the MIT Education Arcade lab and created games based on the theme of "shift." The event was dubbed the Boston Game Jam, after the famed Indie Game Jam of much awesomeness.

We had about 15 developers total, including a floating sound designer and a floating artist who contributed assets to our games. In 36 hours, we managed to complete eight games, which was far better than we could have hoped. (We also consumed a lot of coffee, pizza, and burritos.)

Right now only some of our games are downloadable, but we'll have the rest of the games online by Jan 27, and after that we'll put up some goodies like developer diaries and other such stuff.

SodaWare: Why We Make Games

Sodaware talks about why game developers go through all the trouble of coding, artwork, etc. to create a game.

Moon Lander in Canvas

The canvas tag is a new way to write directly to the screen in Opera, Safari and Firefox (you can sorta to the same thing in vml for IE). This is a very slick implementation of a lunar lander done all in js and canvas.

Game du Jour - deeply discounted games

From a post on indiegamer comes a link called Game du Jour which offers a different indie PC game that is deeply discounted for a day. See the full article on yahoo.

Klink! Software: Dimension 3 - 3d game maker

I found this after poking around iDevGames. It is a free 3d game engine with editor and modeller which allows you to create Quake style games (as well as shooters, rpg's etc.)
I was expecting something full of suck, since it's free and all, but it's actually not bad at all. I haven't tried creating anything yet, but the fact that you can create a game and have it run on both mac and windows is a great feature. Another interesting feature is that it is scriptable via javascript - my favorite language :)

Pipmak game engine for OSX

From the site:


An open-source cross-platform game engine and authoring environment, the Pipmak Game Engine enables you to create point-and-click adventure games in the style of the Myst series, including panoramic ones like Myst III: Exile.

An Itty Bitty Idea...

I was struck with a really awesome idea. Fun, interesting, and DHTML'y. Gimme a few weeks and you'll see a prototype of it here. Yes, you'll get to be the first folks to see this amazing new idea. Aren't you just quivering with excitement? Oh go back to your web searching. :)

Metaverse Roadmap

The 3d web is coming (hopefully not a repeat of VRML?) and judging by the pedigree of the participants in this group it's going to be pretty cool...

Yahoo! Games Best of 2006 Awards

Congratulations to all the folks who worked so hard in the past year or so to get their games nominated for these awards. Especially to Papillon and Amaranth for their hard work on their respective RPG's.

Game-inspired RIA Design: Jon Boutelle

The CTO of Uzanto presents a slide show discussing using game concepts toward RIA design. Great ideas.

The DRY Principle

I ran across someone talking about "the DRY Principle" and after I read more about it I was struck with it's simplicity and usefulness.

From the site:

DRY says that every piece of system knowledge should have one authoritative, unambiguous representation. Every piece of knowledge in the development of something should have a single representation. A system's knowledge is far broader than just its code. It refers to database schemas, test plans, the build system, even documentation.

Chaperon Rouge

Another short from 3d Total linkage. This is a haunting retelling of Little Red Riding Hood (if it was told from the world of ICO and Limbo).

Blur Studio presents A Gentleman's Duel

From 3d Total comes a link to an upcoming short film from Blur studio. It start out to be a normal "duel" for a lady's hand. However when the steam-driven battle robots start coming on the scene you know this has got to be something outside the "norm".

Saga: WOW meets RTS from a hundred feet up

Saga appears to be an MMO + RTS kinda game. You build up castles and armies but they continue to "live" while you are offline. Basically you dont have to be online with 10 other folks to play a meaningful game. Sounds interesting.

The Daily Click - indie games daily

One of the sites I visit on a daily basis is The Daily Click (how many times can you say daily before it becomes a nonsense sound? )
This site has great indie games that are typically very well made with retro graphics and simple gameplay. It's like you have an army of game developers coming up with new games just for you. Anyway - this is one you should definitely bookmark and spend a few hours going through the archives. There's a rich vein of gaming goodness here.

Free AdSpace for indie games

If you are an indie game developer, you know you can never have enough exposure for your game. This site offers ad space for free for indie games. It's basically a derivative of the "million pixels" ad type thing, but hey it's free. So go get a button and get your game up there. Here's the article on Indie Gamer forums talking about it.

The GDC is coming, are you going?

There promises to be tons of great people and great sessions. I wish I could go :(

Four Elements V results released!

The annual 4 elements contest has been completed. Here's the results.

80's Shmup Goodness: Pulse Blade

From The2Bears comes a link to a great 80's style shootemup called Pulse Blade. Press the Z key and blast things. Can it get any better than that?

What? Grimm's Hatchery released (early)

Looks like it's out. Go download it...

Browsing Meets Gaming : HypeFighter

Imagine if you married browsing the web for news with a battle MMO. Hard to imagine? Well I see this game as the vanguard for a whole new class of games - basically web2.0 meets gaming in many ways. Here's an excerpt from the site:

---

What is HypeFighter?

HypeFighter is a cross between a user-contributed content site and a turn-based massively multiplayer online game. Basically, it's a cross between Digg and Dark Throne.

What Can I Do?

You can actually use the site in multiple ways:

• Browse the submitted articles to keep up on the latest video game news.
• Recruit your army from the available articles and conquer the world.
• Hang out with your friends while talking and blogging about video games.
• Do all of the above.

How Does it Work?

The basic gameplay is easy. You have a limited amount of turns at your disposal. Read stories and click the "recruit" link to add a recruit to your army. Knights are recruited from video game reviews. Conscripts from video game commentaries. Scouts from previews

More Areae news

Raph Koster has posted a particularly interesting link to an interview he did with the Guardian regarding his new company Areae. This article resonates so much with things I've been trying to say and do for a long time: The Big Idea , Unlimited Realms , and Socially Constructed Interfaces.

The fact that they have Amy Jo Kim on their advisory board even further points to something really amazing going on there.

Grimm's Hatchery delayed

Looks like folks will have to wait an additional day (so far) to get a copy of Grimm's Hatchery - it's now slated to launch on the 20th. I for one am glad it's being given more time for bugfixes. You only get one time to make a first impression.

101 Free Indie Games of 2006

From Independent Gaming comes a mini-site that features a hundred and one free games that were released last year. There are many amazing games which you may have overlooked - check it out.

Visual Programming Language: Scratch

I haven't seen something like this since Alice. This is a graphical programming language to teach kids how to create programs and games. Very cool!

The Blackwell Legacy - The Old School is New Again

Wadjet Eye Games has released the first episode of their old school style adventure game The Blackwell Legacy. They appear to have quite a few excellent folks on their team working on this. I don't really care for the subject matter, but if you enjoy spooky mysteries you might light this.

FineTune: serious competition to Pandora, Last.fm

I'm a diehard Pandora fan. I listen to it as much as just about any other streaming audio. However a new site has been eating into that time in a big way. Finetune seems to "get it" when it comes to web2.0 + music. They feature a handy web based player, the ability to create your own playlists of songs you like (yes you actually get to pick the songs). Also they have a fabulous Wii interface for people wanting to listen to their playlists on TV. If you like Pandora, you'll probably dig FineTune as well.

Breaking News! Grimm's Hatchery coming Friday!

From the creator of Aveyond comes a new game called Grimm's Hatchery. This looks to be a casual game where you hatch and raise pet animals such as dragons and gryphons. The artwork looks top notch, and given the great work of the previous game, this looks to be another success for its creator. You can watch the last minute preparations and bug fixes going on right now in the forums.

(Java)Scripting Essentials

Here I am - still writing one liner descriptions of randomly cool sites. This one lists some very essential javascript functions to place in your quiver for web development.

The Shoot'em up Game Builder

Looks to be a new game making tool for shmups. Sounds interesting....

Earth Eternal - new MMO like RuneScape

A new mmo from Iron Realms is soon to be released called Earth Eternal. Looks to compete against Runescape. Heard this from Raph Koster's site. It looks quite nice with lots of eye candy.

edit: oops! can't believe I horked up Raph's name! Correction made

Emix8 - ZGameEditor: 64kb game maker tool for Windows

From the site:

Features:

- integrated developer environment where you build, preview and test your game
- 3d graphics components
- 2d game play components
- scripting language
- real time audio synthesizer
- xml-based project files: only one file for each project
- creates stand-alone executable files that are only 64kb or less in size
- create Windows screensavers
- create animations to use in other applications (about-dialogs or splash-screens)
- FREE: editor is freeware and the content you create can be distributed royalty free

Preliminary Documentation for NovaShell

Looks like Seth has released some preliminary documentation for the api's in NovaShell.

Interesting Meta-Search : Sidekiq

This is an interesting "meta" search engine in that it lists many types of sites to search down the left side, and allows you to jump from one to the other as you search. Very handy!

blogger issues..

will this post go through?

Happy New Year!

Many wishes for a happy new year. Lots of cool stuff planned this year...