Category: Audio&Games

I don’t believe in closed architectures. Not because it’s not a good business plan -it can be worth it- but because it’s a consumer lock-in. Software lock-in is preferable over hardware one. You can always change it.

This is why Asus is in a good path. Hardware innovation, software freedom. Just think about games around these hardware near to be shipped.

Like this keyboard filled with a complete computer and a multitouch screen. It seems crazy at first but it’s not that crazy: it’s the home laptop. No need of a screen.

Of course there’s those eee sticks, ready to be used in a gazillion games. I think this product needs really good apps, not that kind.

Ok that’s just a NAS. But it’s a really well done one with a 1To and 1Gb full wireless connection and of course, a decent price. I have some reticences at the all idea of cloud computing BUT digital home cloud system is really interesting; big assets on the NAS, running games on devices (laptops keyboards etc) with sticks. Full auto updating game and experience.

And all of that with the software technology’s heaven that game developers are trying to reach whenever they can: using the tools of their choice, with a preference for open source solutions.

This is a big deal I think.

And the best of all of this hardware pr0n in which I have a lot of expectations:

Below the 400$ mark, multitouch screen you can use with a stylet (now that I have an iphone to dev for I know why the stylet on my DS is really interesting and in a lot of case, better than my finger), the portable tablet I’m dreaming about for some time now. It’s real, it’s gonna be available soon and I want to see multiplayer crazy stuffs on it!

Consoles are fine blabla but it’s a consumer and a gamedev hard lock-in. Consumers and creators are simply fucked (waiting for console makers approvals for months is just an example) and nothing is going to change that except when creators can switch to sexy open hardware. Now they can.

Asus is playing a good game.

Resident Evil 5, seventh installment of the serie. Announced in 2005, released in 2009. Eurogamer review quote is interesting:

“Possibly the most jarring initial impression is how little has changed in the core game mechanics. While the prospect of split-screen or co-op online play tantalises, there’s an inescapable feeling of deja vu and frustration as you play with an AI partner. To all intents and purposes, this looks and feels like a reskinned, high-def Resi 4, and what was hugely impressive back then often struggles to repeat the trick this far down the line.”

The producer of the game said it will be like RE 4. So all this time for better graphics, new environments and same camera nightmare and bullshit.

Great. What’s interesting is that improved graphics make people want to have improved gameplay too. But this is not the case. the so called next gen is just a way to keep game developers busy. But it doesn’t care about gamers, they’ll eventually eat that anyway (it’s inevitably better than the old).

For me RE should only be a FPS if you want an improved experience over the old RE 4 style. Left4Dead took the crowd though.

In other news, Rock Band gets totally -well a bit- funked up, in any case I think that’s cool. Funk is the shit (remember that Black Hole Sun drum part you so love to play? That’s the One, that’s the funk man).

Wanting to save the planet? Do a game (what better simulation could you have?), here are the rules.

 Flashbang guys interview about their last game, Blush.

Unity in action. Indie revolution?

Mike Inel How and Where games are special, they have a deep and soothing feeling even if they are more of well polished prototypes than full games. I want more stuffs like this, it’s incredible how in term of visuals it’s always, always same old. Now that’s a bit more fresh.

Dreamy.

2D Boy are making a post mortem of World of Goo in seven parts, here’s the first one with the first version of the game, after a week of work. It was in 2006. If you have WoG -I bet you do-, you can now feel the work needed. This post mortem is pure gold.

Mad props for the polishing of this 48 hours game.

Pulse, the dutch global game jam winner is going to be produced! The original concept is here, try it it’s great.

Unreal Engine 3 is used in every single AAA titles with some Gamebryo hits (Fallout 3), game engines are the core of the industry (Torque, Unity and of course homemade/open source libs-based ones).

Jeff Tunnell has started a new company called PushButtonLabs and they’re releasing something really interesting: a game framework based on Flash to do games for a lot of machines. PushButtonEngine is here.

I hate Flash when it’s not a stupid and simple video player. For the crappy IDE, all the loading in the world, bad audio compression no mouse scroll and lame cursor animation I just want Flash to die in a medieval way. BUT with an engine around, why not leave him alone? Could be useful. I’d like to see more competition in this way.

But the trend of the super busy browser handling gazillions of javascript and 3D plugins is starting to get annoying: it doesn’t use well the raw power of cpus/gpus. You could say Windows did that too (compared to closed architectures) but web is getting things worst: if I load five services say FB/Digg/Gmail/Blurst/Flickr, the browsing experience gets awful, no matter what the browser is. What is all this process power I have that can’t be used? Something is wrong.

Next time I’ll talk about Asus. Once again.

Today is the international women’s day. Time to talk about women in the gamedev.

Like in every field, girls are quite fucked from the beginning. In the society in which we live, they usually learn about the glass ceiling very quickly. In the technology area it’s even more weird because the virtual ceiling is there despite the fact that women are appreciated in game development: with 88.5% of young males, girls sure have a real attract on them.

Jade Raymond is the obvious case of why international women’s day unfortunately still means something. Two years ago with Assassin’s Creed launch she had been draw as a cocksucker surrounded by men with sperm on her (yeah it’s rude to read it like this but I juste describe the picture) by some so-called humorists, meaning that she only had this power on the game you know how.. It went big on news etc. Jane from GGA put it in the best way possible:

“It is dangerous to be a beautiful woman in the games industry. Oh, it’s difficult to be a woman, period. But if you also happen to be attractive, you are doubly cursed. On the one hand, yes, when you’re at a conference where you are among a handful of women, you are remembered, and that is advantageous. But for every break you may get for being female and attractive you get a chorus of voices telling you that you don’t deserve it because, well, you are attractive, and obviously you can’t possibly have gotten where you are without seducing men along the way.”

I would add that you don’t have the choice but seduce people when you’re not like them, either passively or actively. I bet Jade choose the first one because she doesn’t need to play actively this card I mean:

She’s smarter than you. Also, you’re jealous.

At the end it’s always the same shit called double standard and it’s fucking annoying because it ruins the basics of human relationship: trust and honesty. When people can do, they just can period. Whatever the face they have. Pushing a woman in the dirt sort of give me the proof that a lot of people can’t handle something normal (ie a woman doing her job well and yeah, I see what you did there). It’s sad.

But they are here. A bunch of women in games are actively doing the main tasks of the gamedev, not just QA and PR (which are fine).

Sophie Houlden is one of them. She does master Flash (like this 48 hours real fun game she did alone), she does visuals, code game design. I want to marry her.

She’s stronger than you. Plus you’re not her type. 

Erin Robinson is an indie game developer. She does adventure games. For example this one is called Little Girl in Underland and has been made in four weeks. She did all the art with a laptop no scanner and her talent. She also did this big game with a little help. Just wow.

Watching their works I think demakes and game design research are way more useful to the medium that pure technical iteration of ten or twenty years old game designs.

She’s motherfuckin’ more soulful than you. In fact you’re not in the same league.

Heather Kelley. She’s a game designer doing a lot of things -even music- since 1994. She co-founded Kokoromi collective (damn I love these people).

She did make me think a lot with her Lapis project. In 2009 it would still be a flying saucer on the market but I love the idea. I can see how to make the audio fit for that project but I digress.

Game design challenge + social empowerment = deep change, large mind shift.

We’re still afraid about that because it’s much more powerful than every kind of entertainment.

Or maybe we’re lagging because we don’t have enough women in the industry :)

(more women in dev pics on my flickr Hall of Game set)

Best cat ever 

Street Fighter II. Summer 1991 I was eleven years old, on vacation in Québec, Canada. An arcade alley, I was searching for Final Fight. I then saw just a bit on the left, two guys playing this fighting game. It was a Guile VS Ken match in the Guile stage. Everyfuckingthing was perfect: style, movements, background, audio fxs, fire balls -did I just witness fire balls??-… No way. At that time all the rage in France was around Double Dragon II on NES, you can imagine how it felt. A magical moment punch in the face I still can clearly remember. Another dimension.

After its release on Super NES (US import!), Street Fighter II would make my friends and I happy for years. Satursdays afternoons were SFII, Sundays were the same. A little Bomberman to chill out a bit and then back on that super tic tac toe II. I think it’s the first time I felt the “balance” thing about characters. I had developed a good technique with the slowest character, Dhalsim. Feeling that all characters had a potential and something to knock the shit out of their opponent whoever he was, was simply awesome and crazy.

And the sound… Oh man, I’ve never had such a sensation of power hitting a bunch of pixels, songs were stuck in my head with really different mood fitting characters… This Sagat stage. The stage of the end of the afternoon. The hard one, the painful one.

You sure will 

What surprises me now is that I didn’t play SF II that much. Street Fighter III was an awesome one but I wasn’t hardcore enough (and entering the gamedev world).

Almost twenty years after the number two, Street Fighter IV is out these days and I couldn’t not feel something. This game even if it’s just a fighting game, changed my life in my perception of what we can achieve in games, that powerful feeling of control. Control and efficiency. A weak but fast hit can make you win. A new level of possibilities only around improvements (more buttons), embedded in the best culture crossover shit available.

I can’t find the 08 GDC session of Yoshiki Okamoto titled “Creativity in the Form of Improvement” in which the japanese producer explained how they did a mash-up of everything that was working at that time (the fire balls were coming from Dragon Ball for example). Fascinating stuff.

Street Fighter is more than a fine tuned fighting game. It’s a cultural melting-pot and a true part of my 90s teenage years.

Big Up to all SF players in the world, kudos to Capcom for releasing SF IV on PC too (killing the stupid exclusive thing).

Bob&Bob, one of the global game jam game we did in Paris was part of the indie games blog best of! The mechanic was fun from the beginning, in a more conventional way than with Waltz2D but super efficient nonetheless. Really cool news!

But the meat today is the Project Horseshoe reports. Like the Global Game Jam, this event is gonna be huge in the next years. It’s a game design think tank and according to an interview of Harmonix founder, kids don’t dream about being rock or DJ stars (two games on the subject are coming: Scratch Ultimate DJ and DJ Hero, you can go puke now).

They dream about making games.

First, about the Development Team: stop talking about programmers as opposed to artists I’m so sick of this. They’re, we are ALL designers! A game designer making proper sentences in a document is coding it and a coder doing visual effects is an artist, don’t they? This is all the way from the beginning to the end a DESIGN process, a blend between high technology knowledge, aesthetic and ergonomics, all trying to nail the FUN. What is hard to understand, why doing some stupid pyramidal shit with people “doing” and people “saying”? It’s hard enough man, cut the crap.

“Make the prototypes with the smallest team possible to save time and resources.”

The smallest and the largest at the same time: prototyping only with coders will end up with a coder game focused on systems. If it’s with a graphic whore, mechanics are going to be weak etc. The prototype should be design with input from all designers, visual and sound and game and code to ensure that global quality (they do that in Japan you know). Think about cooking, sauces etc. You don’t do that with two ingredients, adding two others one hour later do you?

If we’re always trying to use old words and old definitions of our roles, we’re gonna have hard times to change and make ourselves better. Project Horseshoe doesn’t seem to adress this problem. We are damn slow.

“Games differ from music or dance in that the game designer does not orchestrate the experience in a top-down manner, they provide for play experiences through the creation of rules.”

This is wrong! Music is not experienced in a top-down manner, it’s only ONE of other cases (classical music). The music played today IS a play experience (live) through rules (songs). It’s called a jam, it’s called playing in a band.

And when you consume dance music you don’t do it passively. It’s meant to make you groove so you shake your ass actively! You can do so on every rhythm patterns, not just the kick drum.

Music is for me really the closer thing to games. It’s a fucking game itself, duh.

“Two milestones rang true for us: when a game designer wins a Macarthur Genius Grant, and when the Pulitzer Prize includes a set of categories for games. Can you see this happening during your career?”

No. Because it’s elitism, elitism requires some easiness in the production process (like writing a book), something we don’t have and can’t afford -and never will I guess- in the game developement. Also because it’s a generation problem, my parents (50s childs) play the Wii and feel guilty about it while they do think that reading thriller books with stories totally expected is something they can almost brag about because it’s REAL culture (well I think it ain’t worth shit compare to experience a good gameplay). They didn’t grew up with computers. I’m from the very first generations in Europe fueled with the digital stream from the birth. This generation gap must be filled in a way or another because if not, culture is going to dump us. It already did.

Now look at Japan. Toshihiro Nagoshi, before and yesterday. Look a their game designer “superstars”, like this one:

Goichi Suda aka Suda 51 
He’s well known in the game-o-sphere since 2005 and Killer7, already “superstar”. Because he has a nickname Suda51 like an artist signature -an old trend in japanese game production set to avoid copyright problems-, he has a star background –a totally unexpected one-, he’s wearing cool stuffs, his company feels the cool and arty, etc. In FOUR years he managed to go from unheard to well known.  With an army of Suda, the media world would listen to us.

No need for prizes & false statements. Just less dorkiness, more gym and healthy life for game developers.

We in the western world are terrible at being I don’t know, fresh AND digital. We lack that consistency that Suda and others have in every way. We don’t have that because imho overall we don’t believe in the gameplay experience, we believe in having a cool job so cool that a lot of people in the industry sink into nostalgia. We don’t do games. We FAKE it.

And if you fake it, your nose will grow. It does, ask Eidos.

The game industry is recession proof they said in October. Yeah, right.

Game news are full of studios closures, people layoffs, companies bankruptcies. Why? Not the so called crisis fault, simply long term bad business decisions.

A product like the last Tomb Raider selling poorly is not a surprise I mean come on shareholders and management from those big publishers, you can’t give people the same shit every year and expect it to sell well! You gave people the Indiana-like bimbo stuff nine damn times of course the last one didn’t work, especially in a tougher economy.

But enough pointing out stupidity.

Add the brazilian music and you’re in another world, really.

Gravity Bone. Free FPV game with no gun, 60fps (Quake2 engine) and an awesome feeling. I WANT MOAR!

The twenty best freeware adventure games of 2008, starting with Dirty Split.

Damn it! He knew that one! 

Here’s the link to the download page with four languages (and yes, there’s french).

Osmos, IGF nominated physics puzzle game.

Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

Developers interview, here’s an excerpt:

“What kind of background do you have making games?

Eddy Boxerman: I liked modding as a kid — coming up with alternate rule-sets and tweaks for Monopoly, Stratego, etc. and then play-testing them. A good friend introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons when I was 12 years old, and that was it.

I’ve been making games as a hobbyist ever since. More recently, I worked for a few years at Ubisoft Montreal as a physics and animation programmer.

And it doesn’t hurt that the friends who have contributed to Osmos are all super talented: Dave Burke worked at Epic as an engine programmer, Kun Chang served as cinematics art director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and Andy Nealen has been teaching courses in game design.”

The game industry is full of people wanting to escape and do their shit..

Audio is in the indie/indy scene really well exploited. Osmos has a neat soundtrack, Walkie Tonky uses audio as input feedback making music -a trend I want to see more and more- and the more impressive about it:

Retro/Grade, a rhythm shoo’t em up game. But in reverse. Can’t wait! Interview with Gamasutra. I almost forgot about Kranx’s Musaic Box, a music based puzzle game.

Let me sum it up: indies have limited ressources, limited budgets. They use the most of the medium whenever wherever it’s possible. Audio is a huge add to a minimalist approach as it is with the gamedev scarcity. The game production is really divided as Game design, AudioVisual design and Code design which we try to push to their interaction limits. Video game means absolutely nothing.

Now that Nvidia losts money, they say that 3D screens are coming and totally hot (meaning another layer of complexity to a fucking hard task: making a good computer game).

I call bullshit.

First Global Game Jam of the history of mankind, glad to have been part of that event. 48 hours doing games.

Where: Mekensleep HQ Rosier street Paris.

When: Friday to Sunday last week.

With: A bunch of nice, talented and crazy people.

Constraints:

I- A complete play session must always last 5 minutes or less.

II- The theme of the game should be “As long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems.”

A third constraint was introduced with a variation for each time zone. In France we had:

III- Choose ONE of the following adjectives to incorporate in your game (each team chooses which one to use): developing, falsifying or trapped.

After a democratic filtering system of everyone game design ideas we eventually started to do games. Three.

Sound and audio ressources were in fact well represented with Jean, an electronic music artist and designer tasting the game experience and Xavier young composer and god of the musical cell. Plus my humble self doing audio fxs, giving advices and trying to balance ideas, cheerleading coders (they’re my heroes I’m a nerd ok?) eating and of course enjoying.

Plus on the three games made, one was a rhythm based game. A keyboard driven waltz rhythm game even.

On this game, I realized that even with a core gameplay mechanic around audio visuals were possibly still an issue: not in their volume but in their capacity to be efficient from a game design point of view, derivated from how the sound is detected and implemented. Add the fact that all of this is dynamically moving.

Yeah gamedev is that kind of brainfuck.

We struggled a lot around this and Olivier‘s advices were really precious and I would retain that: don’t overprotect your core challenge!

I found myself witnessing how -once again- audio was a truly strong glue between the visual representation and the game design. Without sound, a game losts a lot especially the first time you try it. Or more positively, sound truly enhances the feeling and joy of playing a game. And it’s damn cheap to produce and integrate so by making a game in that limited time, audio stands out and is even more a must-have.

The “effectiveness-quality/time to produce-time to tweak” ratio is far better than for visuals when polishing. There’s no friction with coders and game designers because they most of the time don’t know shit about music compared with graphic art where they always have something to say.

Plus you can blindtest people with songs from your game ten or twenty years later, suck it pictures :)

With two visual designers (as I call them, artists as we say in the industry) we couldn’t afford ideas which would require a lot of graphic assets anyway. Sound easily gaped the lack.

We don’t really feel it with casual web games it’s just that in flash audio compression is often badly used. With a release and an executable you can feel the huge audio difference in achievement and tightness. I love it.

Overall it was a rich and full experience. The jam is in my opinion one the best social, collaborative competition process you can imagine.

Jam session definition:

“A jam session is a musical act where musicians gather and play (or “jam”) without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements; improvisation.Jam sessions are often used to develop new material, find suitable arrangements, or simply as a social gathering and communal practice session. Jam sessions may be based upon existing songs or forms, may be loosely based on an agreed chord progression or chart suggested by one participant, or may be wholly improvisational. Jam sessions can range from very loose gatherings of amateurs to sophisticated improvised recording sessions intended to be edited and released to the public.”

We did both! See you next year guys girls and new challengers!

100% success rate We made izzzzzZZZzzzzzzz…. 

I can’t believe how the digital distribution aka the backbone of my business is doing well. Amazon.com had a “record holiday orders” with 210 countries delivered. And a peak at 72.9 items sold per second. Talk about crisis.

Steam is skyrocketing. when I remember its launch and how people were just puking on it. I remember saying to myself that they had balls and a big big vision at Valve, an independant PC game developer. It was a mess but it was for the better.

Five years later, 559 games are available on the service which has 16 million active user account (suck it WoW). Jon Blow said that Valve was not really interested in his game Braid, except it’s now a success. They answered back and they want to publish the unique 2D platformer now. I think it proves that success is not turning them from the focus of providing great games (L4D is of course another proof).

In his last interview, Jon talks about the PC and once again, I totally agree (about consolish PCs):

“I think both those things are true. I definitely like Steam, in that I can buy a new computer and bring it home and turn it on and install Steam and I have all my new games on there. And pretty soon, they’re doing the settings and stuff now [via Steam Cloud, which allows users to store save game and configurations server-side]. That’s pretty cool.

At the same time, I definitely want to be able to play games that aren’t on Steam, right? I definitely want access to services that are not Steam and that are competing with them, because maybe they’ll do something better. Maybe they’ll do something in a different way.

So I’m in favor of both. And I realize that that introduces some amount of chaos into the thing. That’s okay, though, because the PC is the place where that can happen.”

This amount of chaos diminishes every year, every time people want to do things better. Man, LOOK at these websites they are promoting INDIE GAMES:

 
Polytron, Fez game.

Beatnik Games, Plain Sight game.

Pieces Interactive, Walkie Tonky game. 

These games are still in beta. These games runs on PC with no Steam or whatever client. How would you describe their websites? Far from the chaos. More like neat products, almost like they were there before you.

It strikes me. 

Plus on my three examples, none are from the US. I mean, the industry is focused on the US world number one game market where there is too much actors and companies focusing the same market (GTA/ Saint Row example). Jason Holtman from Valve is right, we need to listen and search for people who want to play our games. The world is large, there is about 100 and 200 millions PCs sold every year, we now have reached the billion machine connected on the internet..

The future of entertainment is not gonna be produced in one region of the world. Neither it’s gonna be on a closed platform with partners doing about everything they can to make the life of third-parties indies harder. MS seems to be the only one -hey it’s a software tools maker company first- to acknowledge that.

2009 Independent Games Festival Finalists, by localization:

Chile 
Sweden
USA
USA
Japan
Canada
Sweden
Ukraine
USA
USA
Czech Republic
Canada
Belgium
Switzerland
UK
USA
USA
UK
Singapore
USA
Sweden
USA

France, Spain Germany Italy what are you doing?? Even Switzerland and Belgium have a game in competition.

Hey ladies 

I wanted to talk about these guys from the north of Europe. They really rock hard, people there start coding before walking, the demoscene is huge.. A real and neat computer culture.

Petri Purho from Finland launched Crayon Physics Deluxe a few weeks ago and from what I can hear, it’s a success. Made by a damn twenty and something student who fucked up his education just for this really cool and awesome game that is CPD (buy a cheap wacom if you really want to enjoy it, or wait for the end of 2009, cheap multitouch screens).

Petri won the IGF last year. This year once again north guys are at it (meanwhile they were around for years): Eric Svedäng from Blueberry Garden fame which has never really had a fame BUT the game always seduced me (audio atmosphere, physics, simplicity I’m sold!), here’s the trailer.

Nicklas Nygren is a swedish game developer and musician who totally nails the art of "audiovisual atmosphering", his next game is going to be great, can’t be another way.

Kian Bashiri from YHTBTR fame is nominated for his non-game and I hope to see more from him in this way: satire we need more of that: the game industry is so serious in its fantasy with its Dead Wrath Of The Space King stuffs.

These guys really inspire me.

By the way I had a little crush with Dyson last year so I’m glad to see this UK rts game making it to the finals.

Have you seen the Subversion work and its procedural generated city tool? Just awesome.

Don’t miss the 1st GlobalGameJam, a worldwide event in which people are gonna make games in three days. As I start a game company with some audio design and project manager things to do, it’s gonna be a nice training. Paris event is HERE.

Coding Horror had a really good article on piracy (via Petri). The article still mentions the World of Goo case though we don’t have any update about the piracy rate. It’s gonna be really interesting to learn about numbers with 2DBoy at the GDC 09.

In a nutshell the solution is:  Have a great product. Charge a fair price for it. Piracy is not a dead end, it’s also the best viral software distribution network. Web 2.0 talks about getting eyeballs well, piracy with newsgroups and p2p are myHi5spacebook fo game developers. Publishers cannot deal with it but indies sure can. And should.

Rara Racer is awesome (via Raph). It’s a little game made in 48 hours and it’s the kind of game that surprises you even when you think it can’t. Trust me and play it.

There’s only two games from the ps3 that I’d love to play (videos in links): PixelJunk and Flower (ok, let’s add Noby Noby Boy).

Digital organic-ness.

What I don’t really understand is that these games are made by little companies (Q Games, TGC) which certainly want to maximize their investments. Why going exclusive with the horse who’s dying in liters of blood? I really feel it was the last time little gamedev teams would go this way. I hope so.

Gamasutra reminded me with his Best Of 2008 that the game business in Montreal seems like a great family in which employee salary fixing and spying could be the routine. Interestingly enough, Flavie was HR manager at Ubisoft Montreal -and ex COO’s wife? same Tremblay last name- then she was at Eidos and she’s back in Ubi, same position. Fucking weird and totally french if you ask me. Comments are quite funny:

“Ubisoft management “ideologues” are some of the most corrupt in the business, as anyone that has worked with them can attest. This is one of several methods they use to shore up either incompetent or shoddy internal HR practices.

What is surprising is that Eidos didn’t tell Ubi to go fuck themselves when extended this kind of offer like EA/Dice did in Bucharest or Crytek did in Kiev.”

Ouch.

“In fact, altough I am a employer, I must agree with the idea, competition to pay higher and higher salaries are what drive costs upward wildly, make games cost 60USD on the box, and results in stupid workers having high salaries.”

Then change your stupid business model of AAA that sell poorly and cost 18-24months/100-200 people to produce. Setting a salary-fixing BS is plain wrong, especially with a government as nice as the Canadian one (heavy tax breaks). Greed is a disease.

By the way another one:

“And, you know, I tend to only call sexism when something is offensive to women while glorifying men — but all the show really glorified was that it’s awesome to be a chubby nerd in your underwear. How do you guys feel about being portrayed that way?”

First I don’t wear underwear and I’m a funky nerd. But this is why “video” games awards have no appeal on me -even if it’s the start of recognition of a culture wall- because I’m too much fucking busy searching and experiencing things to really care about which game is the game of the year with people looking to the good old past. The same for a lot of folks in the game industry. I admire people able to do some code and express themselves in front of a camera. Opposite skills. Let us another few years.

Crayon Physics is out on the iPhone.

Dream timelessness. 

InfiniteAmmo announces Marian. I love how this little team is giving and sharing stuffs. Alec, composer and coder did a Pajama Jam. So cool, I did a little one too. They can’t stop doing games and prototypes, I love it.

This year the level of polish from indie games is gonna be mature.