You know a game has got to be pretty damn buggy to get a three song rock opera written about them. Harsh? Perhaps. Funny? Oh most definitely. This guy put way more work into this than was necessary, and I applaud him for it.

This has been out for a while but it’s news to me: Triglav is a single-player web-based RPG that is done entirely in DHTML -- no web plug-ins needed. I couldn’t get it working in Firefox but it worked like a charm in IE. It features some impressive art, but I didn’t hear any sound when I was playing it. I didn’t spend too much time with it but it’s gotten pretty good reviews. It’s really cool to see something like this pulled together in a browser and released for free(?). Check it out if you have a chance.

Adobe released a beta of Photoshop CS3 in the labs today.

I don’t have much comments on it yet.

Google screwed up and published a web page that was stolen from Yahoo’s own design. You can learn all about it on Yahoo employee Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. It’s not a big deal, and people seem to be missing the bigger tabloid headline that this underscores: That Google is playing follower to Yahoo.

But then Google employee Matt Cutts, in a left-handed compliment, pointed out how Yahoo had stolen the look and feel of Google’s sponsored links. Twice. Even Robert Scoble jumped in with some commentary about it.

But stealing good UI is different than stealing good art design.

I recently got an email asking me if about my opinion of Director for casual games, and whether I was going to continue to use Director. In short, I think Director is the perfect choice for casual (and beyond) game development. Below you’ll find an expanded version of the reply I sent. In this post I’ll talk about what makes director great for games, discuss facts about some of the Director myths out there, a bit about the future of Director, how to get started making games with Director, and some great samples of games made with Director. Read the rest of this entry

According to CNN, the new casual game Bookworm Adventures took Popcap games two years and $700,000 to make. Well, I played it, and I think someone at Popcap has $650,000 stashed away in swiss bank account somewhere.

What’s more interesting about Bookworm Adventures than the budget is the gameplay. While the basic mechanics is a simple jumble-like spelling game, it’s wrapped in a turn-based RPG format, including special items, magic powers, special attacks, and boss characters. There’s a lot more to it than most “casual games” have. I played the free version for a bit, but I just felt like I wanted more RPG elements in it; I wanted to be able to use the items and explore the world more. It will be very interesting to see how this game does on the various casual games portals.

Check out bookworm adventures at popcap.com.

I saw the “Design your own Nightmare Before Christmas character” contest listed on the The Disney Blog and decided to enter it because I enjoy creative contests where they just don’t pick a winner at random. I thought the video from Tim Burton would be a pretty cool prize.

I spent about 2 hours designing a headless character, but I was wondered if it invoked Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow movie more than Nightmare before Christmas, so I scrapped it. In thinking about what would be more in spirit with the movie, I came up with the idea of playing off of the 3d aspect of the re-release. Soon I had the idea to combine two one-eye’d heads onto a single body. Read the rest of this entry