Intelligent Artifice

Surreal Game Design: a group blog on game design September 28, 2007

Surreal Game Design is a group blog on game design by the designers - all 17 of them! - at Surreal Software in Seattle. They make me feel inadequate by writing lots of great articles about professional game design, but then again, they’re 17 and I am just by myself. Also, I need a lot of time to trawl the web for funny cat pictures and stuff.

Anyway, go check them out if you want to read about game design from people in the trenches. And if you like what you’re reading, you can see if they have open vacancies on the same site! Smart.

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Interview with Ridley Scott about Blade Runner: The Final Cut September 27, 2007

There’s an interview with Ridley Scott in Wired magazine about the final cut of Blade Runner that is finally coming to DVD and theaters this year. (You can read about how I’ve been waiting for this movie for nine frickin’ years over here.)
(more…)

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The OLE Coordinate System simulates M.C. Escher in real-time 3D

OLE Coordinate System is a mind-blowing graphics system developed by Jun Fujiki.

Mr. Fujiki has written a 3D display / collision engine that simulates the impossible spatial logic from the work of M.C. Escher. The reality of the autonomous character is affected by how his reality looks to you, the observer. If you don’t see a gap, the character doesn’t experience one. If you see two platforms touching, the character can cross.

I did not fully grasp it until I saw the video, which I highly recommend. Not only does it show very clearly what is going on, it also is a very nicely made video in itself.

It should be possible to make a puzzle game based on this technology. A constrained set of possibilities to place objects in 3D, combined with choosing the right angle to enable a connection from A to B.

You can even download the software if you have a PC with DirectX 9 installed. There’s also a Java applet, but it ran too slow for me. Pity.

(Via Andrew Armstrong.)

Update: As was pointed out in the comments, this technology has been turned into a downloadable PS3 game called Echochrome. You can read a preview from the 2007 Tokyo Game Show here. Thanks Andreas and Nur-ab-sal!

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Chinese MMO bans in-game gender-bending September 26, 2007

What it says. Amusing.

Update: Joystiq has done some research on this and there are reasons to believe it is not true (thanks, Steve Lee).

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Joerg Plewe and Flying Guns

Joerg Plewe currently is a senior Java and GUI developer and has been in many areas of IT ranging from embedded programming to bioinformatics and games. Joerg has studied physics and used to work with languages like C/C++, Forth, Lisp, Assembly and others in all kinds of environments.

That may be so, but I know Joerg Plewe as the programmer I used to work with over 10 years ago at Blue Byte Software. He is a very serious programmer, and almost talked me into developing an interest in FORTH. The world might have been very different if he had succeeded.

He has a blog over at java.net where he mainly talks about Java (duh), but also about physics/dynamics stacks and cloud rendering.

He is also one of the key people behind Flying Guns, an open source distributed 3D simulation framework (aka 3D action flight sim). It is based on a framework for distributed simulations, all written in Java. Pretty impressive!

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Zero Punctuation September 23, 2007

If by some chance you haven’t yet heard of “Zero Punctuation”, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s video game review column over at The Escapist, well, go check it out. It’s very entertaining.

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Braid is coming to Xbox Live Arcade

Braid, one of the more interesting indie games I’ve noticed in the last few years, is coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Which means I will be able to play it, seeing as I don’t own a PC.

There’s a lot more I could say about Braid and indie games. And perhaps one day I will.

(Via Kim Pallister.)

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Sex advice from video-game designers

Nerve.com has sex advice from video-game designers, and it’s not a set-up for cheap joke. OK, it is part of a series which includes sex advice from surfers and dog walkers. Still, it features Heather Kelley and Randy Smith, so it can’t be all bad.

(Via Alice.)

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Batman by Dostoyevsky September 22, 2007

I’ve started reading Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ several times, but, while I appreciate the peculiar effect the book generates, I’ve never been able to get further than about one third. Luckily I won’t have to try anymore, since R. Sikoryak has remade the book in the style of an old-school Batman comic. Behold the adventures of Raskol!

I notice that R. Sikoryak has adapted many other masterpieces of literature. Action Camus! Crypt of Brontë! Good news for people like me who lack the mental fortitude to read anything with more than ten pages. Soon I can impress women at cocktail parties with my knowledge of literachur.

(Forgot where I found the original link, sorry.)

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Metaplace: open DIY virtual worlds for everyone September 21, 2007

Metaplace: open DIY virtual worlds for everyone. Finally we know what Areae, Raph Koster’s company, has been working on. It sounds very much like what Brian Moriarty envisioned in his Listen! speech at the GDC in 1997.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Update: Alice has a lot more information, as she should since she is way more focused on this subject than I am.

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