Embargoes: the enthusiast press is not special

June 1, 2011

Last night I read an opinion piece by a journalist for MCV UK complaining about stupid embargo tactics used by big game publishers. The gist of it is: Activision told a bunch of press about new Call of Duty information. As they usually do, they made the journalists sign NDAs saying “You don’t get to publish [...]

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Support this game: In Profundis

May 9, 2011
Thumbnail image for Support this game: In Profundis

In John Harris’ work-in-progress game In Profundis, you’re a lone adventurer with a few bucks to your name and one driving goal: explore a massive universe of procedurally generated star systems and planets, bring back valuable minerals and treasure, and claim your fortune. The game is sort of like Spelunky, but more strategic. It’s sort [...]

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Exploitify

May 6, 2011

I was inspired by Ian Bogost’s article proclaiming that we should refer to “gamification” as “exploitationware” from here on out. I created a Chrome extension called Exploitify that replaces “gamification” with “exploitationware”, “gamify” with “exploit”, and “gamifies” with “exploits”. This extension breaks shit — in particular, URLs on pages that contain one of the keywords [...]

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New Job at Bocoup

May 2, 2011

So, exciting times: I got a new job! I start work as Programmer and Evangelist (yep that’s my title) at Bocoup in South Boston on 5/16. They’re a unique company focusing on JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 applications, and I’m going to cover the area where game development intersects with those technologies. After doing a lot [...]

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An Interview with Stefan Gagne (Pong Kombat) from June 18th, 2000

April 20, 2011

I used to co-run a website called classicgames.org, where we reviewed old DOS shareware games. It was a lot of fun, and probably the best part was that I got to interview the creators of some obscure gems. Here’s an interview I did with Stefan Gagne, who made Pong Kombat, a really silly Pong clone [...]

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Contract Negotiation for Mid-Career Game Developers (Part 1)

April 15, 2011

Introduction More than five years ago I wrote the first article in my Effective Networking series. I wrote it because I was just breaking in to the game industry, and I looked at my peers (students) and saw that there was a huge hole in their knowledge when it came to networking skills. These days [...]

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Optimistic Indie Developer

April 1, 2011

I’ve been enjoying this new “Optimistic Indie Developer” meme. You can see a bunch here. Generator available here. These two strike a bit close to home! This one, however, is my favorite: Paging Shane Liesegang…

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Just launched: Rockin Reversi for Kindle

March 30, 2011

Blue Fang Games (the company where I work) just launched Rockin Reversi on the Kindle. There’s not too much to say about it, other than it’s classic Reversi (AKA Othello), it’s got some pretty art, there’s a local multiplayer mode, and it’s stable (or at least I never encountered any bugs on it). So… if [...]

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Showing a ton of my random projects tonight at Boston Indies

March 21, 2011

Tonight is demo night at Boston Indies, and Scott Macmillan persuaded me to trot out a bunch of the random crap I’ve made in the last year. Stop by The Asgard in Cambridge, MA tonight (3/21) at 7PM if you want to try any of this stuff (or any of the other demos that will [...]

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My response to the Chain World mutation

March 14, 2011

Note: this won’t make sense if you don’t know about Jason Rohrer’s entry to the Game Design Challenge and its subsequent mutation. Here is some background. Here is what is happening to it. I left this as a comment here, but it is currently in moderation and I don’t know if it will ever be [...]

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