These are my links for February 6th through February 7th:
These are my links for January 19th through February 3rd:
Regular readers may remember that back on June 23rd 2008, I gave a presentation on productivity and being a producer at GDC Paris.
Well, I am happy to announce that about 6 months later, I have finally given the slides a final polish and converted them to an accessible format. It only took me a few hours. I have no idea why I kept pushing it back. Alex Champandard even encouraged me to record the talk afterwards (since I forgot to record it during the conference - d’oh!), but somehow I just never got to it. Speaker’s block? I don’t know. Good thing I am not a ‘pro’ blogger.
This talk may interest you if you are interested in productive game development or being in a leadership position in a game development team.
You can download the slides here (it’s a 1.6 Mb PDF).
Please let me know what you think.
The odds are high that if you are in a lead or management position in the games industry, you are getting a lot of email. This post presents the system I have been using to manage my email since March 2008. It is easy to set up and easy to use.
My approach is based on Gina Trapani’s system, which she describes in this Lifehacker post. Her system is based on a slightly more involved method by productivity expert Merlin Mann, described here. And I suspect that his system is based on David Allen’s GTD, probably the most popular general time management method right now.
I’ve been wanting to write about BLDGBLOG for a long time. This post perhaps explains why I think Geoff Manaugh is one of the most interesting speculative fiction writers today:
[You] begin to fast-forward the video at 4x speed, then 8x, then 16x, then 32x – and you realize, with a collective gasp, that that droning sound in the background is not a drone at all but a piece of music played slow to the point of unrecognizability. It’s Beethoven, say, or Jimi Hendrix.
Someone is playing incredibly slow music, like a kind of acoustic glacier, inside the building. It’s avant-garde Muzak.
You go a little crazy upon discovering this, however, and begin to make field recordings all over Manhattan, recording drones. You stand in alleys, beneath trees in Central Park, and inside abandoned warehouses, capturing ambient background sounds on tape. You visit the airport, deliberately seek out traffic jams, and illegally access basements on the Upper East Side.
I love stuff like this. As the blog says: Architectural conjecture, urban speculation, landscape futures.
Things never get boring here at Intelligent Artifice. OK, actually, sometimes they do, but not right now is what I guess I want to say. Mere days after announcing the use of Delicious to automatically generate blog posts, I’ve added another way for me to more easily get content to you: Twitter.
Twitter, or rather what is cool about Twitter, is notoriously difficult to explain, so I am not even going to try except to say that it’s a micro-blog where each message is 140 characters or less.
I’ve created a public Twitter account to accompany this blog. I foolishly chose a long and obscure name for my blog, but I have grown older and wiser since then, so I chose a shorter, clearer name for Twitter: JurieOnGames. You can see my tweets in a box on the right on the main page, unless you’re reading this in a feed reader of course. (You can subscribe to the RSS feed of my Twitter stream.)
Overlap between the blog and the tweets should be minimal, and I promise I won’t announce every blog post here in a tweet… only some, and using hand-crafted messages. Nothing but the best for my readers.
(Some of you may know I have a second, protected Twitter account. That one is for people I know personally, and I use it to rant about life in Vienna and report on headaches etc. So you’re not missing much.)
I remembered just in time that 18 years ago today, I started my first day of professional and paid work in the games industry, at the long-defunct, quasi-legendary German company Thalion software. I can’t recall if I’ve blogged about this before. Every year it grows slightly less meaningless, until 2011 when I hit 20 years I guess.
Also, 5 months ago today I met my lovely girlfriend, a far more significant milestone.
My good friend Mark Barrett sent me a link to an article about Pathologic, a game from 2004 that I had never heard of before. Mark seemed excited about the game, and, after I read more about it, so am I.
The article is Butchering Pathologic, by Quintin Smith, over on the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun. It starts with:
I’m going to explain, right now, why a Russian FPS/RPG called Pathologic is the single best and most important game that you’ve never played.
Intrigued yet? Go read the article. It’s in three parts, so it may take a while.
These are my links for January 12th from 04:49 to 11:55:
These are my links for January 9th from 10:17 to 10:51:
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