Being Design/Engineering led vs Marketing led
I think it’s very important for creative people and developers to try and make something on their own, and then see if it’s fun or not. The game development process in Taito eventually changed, and we, the game creators, were increasingly expected to listen to the sales team, which came up with new title concepts they thought it would sell.
Personally, I don’t think that is the correct approach. Creators should try to make a game on their own first, and then it should expand into a larger project. This is what I’ve felt throughout my whole career.
The point is that it needs to be creatively led first, before the management gets involved. If you don’t try to make something first, you will never know if it’s fun or not. Younger people who want to make games should play really old games. They may not have good graphics, but there is something shining within them in a playable sense. There’s definitely something to be learned from those games and also to inspire people to make something new. Forget about the graphics, focus on the core design. What makes it fun.
Tomohiro Nishikado – creator of Space Invaders (and countless other games)
Quake’s lightning gun bug
The lightning gun in Quake has a very strange broken mechanic that went undiscovered for decades. Like many things, a seemingly uninteresting bug has turned into a speedrunner’s magic trick.
Source file copyright notices
Hook’s Humble Homepage has a pretty good write-up on putting copyright notices in your source code.
https://matija.suklje.name/how-and-why-to-properly-write-copyright-statements-in-your-code
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not sure he is either. But as he points out, he could not find any other information so he put together what he could find.
Inamo interview
I went to Inamo (in-am-oh) in London about a decade ago; and it was one of the first restaurants that had projection mapped tabletops. The idea
Here’s an interview with Julian Church who was a founder.
Here’s an older interview with one of the original co-founders
Ballo Del Doge
Il Ballo Del Doge is the event of Carnival in Venice this weekend if you want to shell out the several thousand Euros to get a ticket and potentially spend several thousand more on a haute couture period costume.
Sometimes it’s just exploding toilets
Gresham neighbors reported shots fired, but the smoking remains turned out to be fireworks.
I’ve personally notice that in the last few years, that Portlanders have become increasingly paranoid. They report gunshots and explosions that turn out to be fireworks, they shine laser pointers at aircraft thinking they are spy helicopters, and so forth. It seems like local forums seem to have an increasing claims of tinfoil hat type paranoia.
Ellen McLain answers questions about being GLaDOS
I met Ellen McLain (and a lot of the voice actors behind great Steam games like Portal and Team Fortress) at Pax Seattle a few years back. They were great with fans and answered lots of questions. Here she answers some questions about her voice acting for GLaDOS.
Adele in different scales
This video takes the same Adele vocal track and seamlessly converts it to different harmonic scales.
Besides listening to some of the different scale systems, this video shows how far we’ve come in our ability to isolate and change singers voices to just about anything we want.
It’s yet another step along the way of not even needing singers anymore – such as the the AI generated song “Walk My Walk” that literally went to #1 in the Billboard digital download charts (with some interesting caveats)
Just 10,000’s of homeless camps in Portland
Here’s a live updating list of homeless camps in Portland.
Yes, you read that right. Over 12.4 million pounds of garbage is generated by homeless camps a year in Portland. That’s often waste that ends up in rivers, burned under bridges, or just clutters the city.
Over 372 homeless died last year in the streets – more than 1 a day. Before legalization of open camping and drug use, that number was around 70-80.
Despite raising homeless funding from $80 million to $800 million, homelessness is getting better in other parts of the country but worse in Portland.
The policy failures are real and killing 4 times as many people a year than jail did. You can’t say failure any more clearly than that.