If you’re ever near Alameda, California, stop in at Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge and check out the touch screen jukebox that some bar buddies and I made:
Tell them Hanford sent you.
Scott Lund did the hardware, Matty & Jessica did the case, and Martin Cate organized the content and was executive producer. I did the software and most of the UI design along with the rest of the team.
It randomly plays music from the least-recently played selections on the juke. This was a major beef the owners and staff had about the old off-the-shelf jukebox, which played the same 20 songs over and over.
Here’s a shot of the jukebox’s custom “shipwreck” case:
When you’re a hobbiest programmer, every problem looks like it can be solved with a little scripting. This Holiday season I was working on a for-print art project and I needed some paint splatter for texture. Splattering paint is a great way to get some organic texture into a piece of art, but it’s messy and requires a lot of room. So I decided to try writing a quick script to see if I could accurately simulate it.
The end result is this little web app I wrote. It’s got a little bit of GUI to make it easy to adjust the amount of splatter you need. The end result is an image that you can use in Photoshop.
Here’s a brief rundown of how it works:
+ The canvas is made up of “passes” of paint splatter. You can Add and delete as many passes as you want.
+ Each pass has it’s own set of settings. you click on a pass on the left, then you can change the settings for that pass.
+ double-headed sliders set minimums and maximums for settings.
+ As you change settings, you’ll see a realtime preview of just that pass on the right.
+ when you stop dragging a slider, the big canvas will re-splatter with your new settings.
+ To get the image into Photoshop, you click on the “Copy to clipboard” button or “copy inverted”, which reverses it for better channel creation.
+ You can tweak with a small sized canvas, then when you got it the way you want, make the canvas bigger.
+ There’s no way to save settings yet.
you may need to install the latest Shockwave plug-in to make it work. Enjoy
The Java-powered dungeon game Runescape comes in at number 3, the Flash-enabled Club Penguin comes in at #4, and PR-savvy SecondLife ranks at a lowly 10. It’s quite an eye-opening list for those who believe MMOs are all swords and dragons *. Check out the entire list over at GigaOM.com
Other Director news: Director Survey
There’s a semi-official Director survey that’s been put together by Charles Parcell. The results will be collected and given to Adobe, who is currently hard at work on Director 11.
*: If you’re got the hardcore-mindset that a game can’t be an MMO without 3d dragons and swords, check out the excellent free Shockwave game Sherwood Dungeon, and my interview with it’s creator.
I’ve cleaned up and released a little MIAW xtra that I have found extremely useful called Lingo ScriptHelper. It does two things:
1. Provides “search all” with a results window. You can click on the results and it will open the script window with the search phrase highlighted. Very useful when looking for a piece of code that uses common phrases.
2. Provides a list of all your scripts, and the handlers inside them, along with the parameter variables they use. Very useful for looking up what arguments a handler takes without having to open a new script window.
The screenshot above shows the search results truncated, but if you hover over them with your mouse the entire line pops up as a Tooltip.
Of all the little tools I’ve written, this is by far the most useful one. I left the file unprotected, so you can edit it as much as you want to suit your needs. I’d love to hear what people do with it.
I have ranted in various places about how disappointed I am with Photoshop’s current trend of adding auto-layer-selection to tools. I’ll give you the micro-version of the rant:
One of Photoshop’s most power features is its layer palette panel. You pick the layer you want, and then work on it with the tools, not worrying about what’s in front of it or behind it. In more recent versions of Photoshop some tools have started to automatically choose a layer for you when you click in the document. Some tools have this as an option, like the Move tool, but others are not optional, like the Text tool and the Vector shape selection tools. The problem is that these tools break the model of “pick then layer, then work on it in place”. I have to watch very closely every move I make with the Vector layer tools and Text tool or risk accidentally selecting another one.
That’s my rant in a nutshell. Recently I’ve started to believe that Adobe’s new love affair with auto-layer-selecting tools is actually a suboptimal cure for a root problem: Photoshop’s power has outpaced its generalized layer selection tools. Read the rest of this entry
Just about every session at the Indie Game Summit but especially Russell Carroll’s insightful session on indie marketing, which I believe was the most valuable discussion there.
Raph Koster’s talk on “Where Game Meets the Web”. Nothing too insightful for me, but it was interesting to hear his assertion that the Game Industry more or less is (again, sigh) not paying attention to how the web innovates and evolves.
Discussing the finer points of game design, UI, and “high-art” with the MawSoft crew.
The week provides me with more than enough creative energy to get me through another 360 days until the next one. Thanks to everyone mentioned here, and also those I didn’t mention.
While I’m going to be at GDC all next week to soak up as much as I can, I’ll actually be regurgitating exaggerations humbly discussing my misadventures in game development in a panel session about the challenges indie game developers face (although, most of the time I’ll be sitting there silent). It’s titled Challenges for New Game Developers and is a panel discussion including the following superstars of the indie game scene:
Creating Casual Games For Profit and Fun is a new book by Allen Partridge. Looks like a cool book, Allen contributes to the various Director mailing lists, has programmed a bunch of games, and for the book he interviewed lots of casual game developers. Here’s the description, from Amazon.com:
Thousands of game enthusiasts and would-be developers are searching habitually for an opportunity to expand their knowledge of games. Whether they’re clicking through Amazon or browsing Barnes and Noble, they are all looking for a path to their dream, a secret door into the games industry. The Casual Games Market is that secret passage. The industry, featuring online downloadable games generally delivered through distributors like Real-One Arcade, Shockwave.com and Oberon Media (via MSN Games and Pogo) has exploded over the past five years into a multi-billion dollar annual marketplace. Independent developers have rapidly discovered the field as one of the last remaining venues to break into the public eye. It is now the single most attractive opportunity available to anyone who wants to become a game developer. Casual Games for Profit and Fun introduces and defines casual games, explains the current state and scope of the industry, and describes the various genres, formats, conventions, and business models that define the industry today. It also teaches the basic casual game development techniques in Flash for the web, PC, and PDA’s and cell phones. Throughout the book users will learn how to create a variety of games that they can use for their own fun or sell commercially.
About the Author
Dr. Allen Partridge is Director of the Applied Media and Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Partridge owns Insight Interactive games and has developed a myriad of interactive 3D games. Partridge’s games are featured on Reflexive Arcade and in international publications. He has written several articles and a book on Shockwave 3D games and was the technical editor for Paul Catanese’s Director’s Third Dimension. Partridge is the host of the popular dirGames-l and dir3d-l mailing lists. See attached resume for more information.
Kongregate.com, the new upload-it-yourself game portal, is now accepting submissions for Adobe Shockwave games. They’ve only supported Flash games until now. I’ve written about Kongregate before, specifically how Kongregate could change the landscape of indie game publishing by giving game developers more rights. In a nutshell, Kongregate allows you to upload your games on their site for free where they’ll get exposure, but will allow you to take all the revenue from conversions, in-game ads, and more. They’ll make money on on-site ads.
Perhaps I’ll put a Shockwave version of Rocknor’s Donut Factory on their site to see how it converts.
Warning! This is a heavily geeky Adobe Director post! This is something I’ve messed around with in Director for a while now, and I recently brought it up on Direct-L. A lot of people there hadn’t heard about it so I thought I’d blog about it here.
An object’s ancestor property allows you to attach a secondary object that will get events that the original object doesn’t get. For example you can attach a “car” child object as an ancestor to a “Probe” child object. Once you’ve done that, any events sent to “Probe” that the probe script doesn’t process will be passed on to “car”. If you’re confused, look it up in the help docs, because it’s only going to get , um, confusinger.
I discovered a while back that you can assign other types to a child object’s ancestor property and have the resulting object act like the ancestor’s ilk. And by “ilk” I mean lists, property lists, rect(), point(), image objects … you name it and it probably works. Read the rest of this entry
According to popular technology news blog GigaOM, 
I’ve cleaned up and released a little 
I'm Hanford Lemoore. My parking skills are unparalleled.
