10 Days …
Sunday, October 26th, 2008… until the president election! Do the world a favor and vote for the right guys. And by that I mean not for THEM! People with at least a tad of intelligence now that Barack dances better anyway.
Still chasing the dream
… until the president election! Do the world a favor and vote for the right guys. And by that I mean not for THEM! People with at least a tad of intelligence now that Barack dances better anyway.
Chrome, the new snazzy browser from Google is currently in everyone’s mouth and most people who had a look at it seem to be impressed so I decided to give it a go, after all it can’t be so bad, right?
Chrome installs right onto your system from the website and then takes over (or if you are cynical: steals) all the bookmarks, history, passwords etc. from Firefox (to make your life easier). It then opens with a slick and slender window that lacks all the tackiness of a plugin-convoluted Firefox. When opening a new tab it shows a neat history list with thumbnails of your most recent visited websites. Chrome starts up as fast as a finger snap! Maybe even faster! Can it get any better?
Fontstruct is an online font creator whose editor has been obviously developed with Flex. Users can register and design their own fonts which are made available for download. Looks slick!

Not from myself but I’d like to second his words … A Love Letter to Flash

A valuable resource for everyone who is thinking/planning to write a roleplaying game … Indie developer Planewalker Games who are currently making their debut RPG The Broken Hourglass are publishing precious bits of insider information about their game engine called WeiNGINE. The Broken Hourglass is a computer roleplaying game with a strong visual relation to late nineties RPG pearls like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment (who all were based on the Infinity Engine).
Some examples of their articles: Inside the Engine – Introduction to Items, Inside the Engine – Introduction to Sprites, Rules and Mechanics – Group Skills … and there’s a whole lot more when navigating through the links at the bottom of the pages. I kind of soak up such detailed information on game/RPG design as such things are sparsely seeded on the web (you will not see such information leaking from commercial developers!)
Check out The Great Game Experiment, a community site especially for gamers and game developers. Members can introduce their favorite games, add new games, meet other gamers/developers etc. The site also focuses on Independent Game Developers, after all it was Jeff Tunnel of Garage Games who breathed life into it (The same Jeff Tunnel of Dynamix fame btw! Games like Project Firestart and Rise of the Dragon come to my mind).
Developers can introduce their creations and find other developers – both professional and hobbyist – to get working together on a project. Games made in Flash are welcome and there’s even a category for it.
Check out this 3D isometric game engine called renderhjs made in Flash! It took me three days to get my jaw back up from the floor!! (Ok, I’m lying there, I just found this link about ten minutes ago). Not only is it real-time calculated and fully textured 3D but it is written in ActionScript 2 for Flash Player 8 as a minimum. There are some glitches (watch the water basins in the toilet while rotating around) but still this is most impressive! In fact it looks even better than the graphics in Resident Evil. All I’m missing is a control to move the camera around freely but nevertheless it would be awesome to see a full game of this. (via UnitZeroOne).

Some links to nine articles about the topic on ‘becoming an Independent Game Developer‘, found via Digg. Some more interesting, some less, the last one from a Mac perspective. There seems to be a lot of discussion about if it turns out to be paying off or not etc., in short, things that don’t interest me that much, I’m just creating games because I have fun doing it and I like the practical side, I’m more of a hobbyist! Either way, here are the links …
Introversion
Cliffski’s Mumblings
GameProducer.net
Lemmy and Binky
Reality Fakers
Zoombapup
BoneBroke
They Came from Hollywood
gusmueller
Just found this yesterday via Adobe Consulting Blog … Converse – Chuck Taylor, Jack Purcell, Basketball Shoes, Design Your Own Converse Shoes. Click on the first shoe under Collection. You can design your own sneaker with your own style of color combination and even add a personalized text at the side or back. I first thought its a nice gimmick for playing but in fact you can order your designed shoe in your preferred size! I’m a big fan of classic sneakers but I have rather large feet and finding large sneakers in Japan is more than just a challenge so I thought I’d make my own couple of neatly colored Cons and order them … until I saw the Shipping in U.S. only sign! Damn! Well at least I could print my design out. Here’s my low top suede model ‘Venice Nights’
…

This shoe designer is a nice example that shows that Flash really needs to support 3D! Imagine you could freely rotate and texture the shoe model! Wouldn’t that be cool?!
Fotologue which was Japanese only for a while has been translated into English and opened up it’s gates for anyone else around the globe! Not only does it look much more stylish than Flickr or any other photo sharing site, it’s also completely done in Flash! Check out my gallery for a quick preview of how the user galleries look.
via If Then Else