On Monday, Leap Motion wowed technology enthusiasts with a video of its new gesture-control platform. The video showcased a system of incredible speed and precision, but controlled demos can sometimes oversell a technology’s real-world capabilities.

Would the Leap 3-D gesture device disappoint us during a real-world hands-on? No — far from it. We were somewhat surprised to discover the Leap is everything portrayed in the Leap Motion video. You can see everything we observed in our own video below.

Now, let’s discuss what to consider if the organization has said, “We want to play.” As with any major program that an organization wants to implement, there are serious considerations to implementing a gamification strategy

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Over the course of a loooong time, me and Nicholas Lovell from gamesbrief, argued about whether or not free to play games are the bright new future of gaming. I am traditionally against the current implementation of F2P gaming (although I’ve softened on this a bit). Nicholas is traditionally very pro. See who you found most persuasive in our little debate…

And that is basically the problem of all matchmaking systems. Everybody wants to win more than half of his games, but that simply isn't possible. Either you switch to a PvE system in which the computer doesn't mind losing, or you accept that the optimum outcome of a perfect matchmaking system is a 50:50 win chance. The only game I know that comes close to this perfect equilibrium is World of Tanks, and lots of players complain that their win chance isn't higher than 50% in that game.

Let us speak today of MMO websites.  I visit loads of official MMO websites, both for work and my personal interest, and it is absolutely appalling how many of them appear to be slapped together by Geocities monkeys from 1998 with no greater understanding of what such a website should do or offer.  I often find myself very frustrated when I’m trying to find some basic information, the latest news, or God forbid, an RSS feed.  You’d be surprised how many official websites do not have an RSS feed.  It’s like they’re in denial about modern technology even while running a highly sophisticated game.

After writing my recent article on Growth Hackers, I’ve been asked by quite a few folks on how to learn the discipline. The best answer is, learn from someone who’s already good at it – if you’re technical and creative, it’s well worth the time.

I would encourage everyone to also read Andy Johns’s Quora answers on What is Facebook’s User Growth team responsible for and what have they launched? and
What are some decisions taken by the “Growth team” at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users?- it lays out a lot of the key activities used in a well-run growth team.

This is one of those things that newbie game programmers seem to underestimate, frequently.
And when I say “newbie” I include “experienced, skilled programmers with 10+ years of coding experience – but who haven’t yet shipped a game of their *own*”.
(e.g. I’ve seen a couple of studios that started as Digital Agencies, or as Animation Studios, etc – that then transitioned to writing their own games. This is the kind of thing that they often struggle with. Not for lack of skill or general programming experience, but for lack of the domain-specific experience of game coding)

Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding? Why is everything just static text?

Bret Victor hinted at the idea that we can do much better than we are now - we can provide instant feedback, we can show you how your changes affect a system. And I discovered he was right.

We can do better, and to that end, let me introduce you to

Last week we brought together 400+ leading creatives and 18 visionary speakers in New York City for the fourth annual 99% Conference, presented by GE. For two days we devoted our full attention to exploring the inner-workings of idea execution. The attendees came with a laser-like focus on taking action on big, bold creative projects, and the energy in the crowd was absolutely electric.
As a production team, we challenged ourselves to take everything up a notch - curating a killer studio session lineup, adding still more incredible speakers, expanding our branded conference materials, and even including a TinType photobooth.

So what did we learn? Below, we give you the full monty on making ideas happen with an exhaustive recap of the insights shared by our 2012 99% speakers.

The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a "frictionless" social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you've probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.
If you decide to click on a link it doesn't take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post's reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it's also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They're annoyed, and they're quitting in droves

Imagine a door that locks when you pinch the knob. Or a smartphone that can be silenced by a hand gesture. Or a chair that adjusts room lighting when you recline into it.

A team of researchers at Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have come up with a system called Touché, which uses the same capacitive technology as a smartphone's touchscreen to imbue everyday objects with body and gesture recognition.

There is no shortage of stories about lone developers who made an app for the iPhone or iPad and had runaway success. But in the real world, the majority of app makers struggle to break even, according to a recent survey by marketing firm App Promo. Though the survey's methodology is a bit on the light side, numerous developers that we spoke to agree that the results—59 percent of apps don't break even, and 80 percent of developers can't sustain a business on their apps alone—are close to accurate.

I was reading today’s NYT article on Google+’s new redesign and found myself continually puzzled by the key metric Google continues to report as the success of their new social product: Registered Users.

I've uploaded Hoverbattles to its own server on EC2, and it has been running fine with an uptime of over 96 hours so far, and this is great!

http://hoverbattles.com

I've wanted to share a few of the mistakes/lessons learned writing and deploying a multiplayer game built entirely with JavaScript on top of NodeJS and WebGL for a while and this represents an opportune moment to do so.

I've gone with a brain-dump of various related learnings, as well as a couple of periphery items - first off, we'll go with the reason I couldn't keep Hoverbattles up on the old server.

Historically, you can look at the Pixar film making process as one of building a prototype version of each film (known as “story reels”) and then moving on to building the fully realized one. This process has continued to evolve over time, where (perhaps surprisingly) the polish of the story reels has been rising even faster than that of our final films.

The Incredibles really set a new bar for the effectiveness of story reels. I think that had to do with particular leadership in place on that film - director Brad Bird, head of story Mark Andrews and director of photography Andy Jimenez. They’re all super talented, and on The Incredibles their skills perfectly complemented each other. The reels for The Incredibles are jaw-dropping. I think they’re good enough by themselves to be a released film. Rough, 2D, black and white - and completely compelling. They really show what story reels can accomplish - getting a 3D crew to see them and just think to themselves “now I just need to not screw that up” :-).

If you were in the Pixar screening room where director Brad Bird regularly reviewed images for The Incredibles, you would have seen a cool, new tool in action — the Review Sketch tool. This tool literally allowed Bird to draw on top of a projected image using a digitizing pen. The drawings were then accessible online by other members of his team.

I believe that behaviour design (sometimes called persuasive design) has significant potential to help improve gamification strategy design to influence task behaviours. I need to say from the outset that this notion is still new and emerging and somewhat contraversial and this post will be the first of many as I explore this exciting space. 

Here are two tools I've been using lately to better understand the functionality of my game designs.  The first is the loop, a structure that should be very familiar to those who have looked into skill atoms.  The second is the arc.

Challenge accepted.

So a few things happened.

On 6 December 2011, I got a Lifescan OneTouch Ultramini blood glucose meter and I started taking my blood sugar first thing in the morning and before and after every meal.
On 8 December, having seen that there was no Mac software provided by Lifescan for the glucose meter and registered to read their hardware documentation and given up, I found Glooko, downloaded their app and ordered a meter sync cable from Amazon.
On 11 January 2012 I got back from my Christmas holiday and set up the Withings scale I got for Christmas, measuring my weight each day.
On 22 February, I got my Nike+ Fuelband and started tracking my daily activity level.
And on 24 February, I started a couch to 5k running program, tracking everything with Nike+ Running GPS.
And every so often, I log what I’m eating in The Eatery, from Massive Health.
I have a quantifiable shit-tonne of data right now.

Today Nissan North America changed the way consumers interact with cars in dealership showrooms. IdentityMine and digital agency Critical Mass celebrate the launch of the fully immersive Nissan Pathfinder Experience, utilizing Kinect for Windows. Originally, Kinect was used to enhance the Xbox 360 gaming system; now Kinect can be applied to a variety of consumer interactions. The debut is center stage at the Chicago Auto Show, the largest auto show in North America, and includes a massive interactive display. Participants can virtually navigate through the interior of the Nissan Pathfinder by interacting with the Kinect for Windows console, using hand motions to direct the experience.

Embedded gaming or "Gamification" is a next generation advertising approach in which gaming elements are integrated into a non-game environment.
Gamification represents a promising strategy for public and commercial brands to increase customer activity, build loyalty, broaden reach and monetize assets.

Mind Commerce projects Gamification growth to reach $3.6 billion by 2017. It is also estimated that by 2017, 80% of Global 2000 organizations will have gamified applications and/or processes.

Harmattan API Showcase application showcases the key APIs of the MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan API offering. The showcase application utilizes APIs with QML bindings as much as possible, but falls back to using C++ code when there's no QML API available for a particular functionality. The demonstrated APIs include system information, messaging, NFC, location, multimedia, camera, sensors, etc. To help application developers with their application development for Nokia N9, source code of showcase application is available here - zip or tar.gz . And here is the debian package.

In 1996, we set out to make great games, but we knew back
then that we had to first create a place that was designed
to foster that greatness. A place where incredibly talented
individuals are empowered to put their best work into the
hands of millions of people, with very little in their way.
This book is an abbreviated encapsulation of our guiding
principles. As Valve continues to grow, we hope that these
principles will serve each new person joining our ranks.
If you are new to Valve, welcome. Although the goals in
this book are important, it’s really your ideas, talent, and
energy that will keep Valve shining in the years ahead.
Thanks for being here. Let’s make great things.

It all started with Snow Crash.

If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality, if I hadn’t thought I can do that, and more importantly I want to do that, I’d never have embarked on the path that eventually wound up at Valve.

By 1994, I had been working at Microsoft for a couple of years. One evening that year, while my daughter was looking at books in the Little Professor bookstore on the Sammamish Plateau, I happened to notice Snow Crash on a shelf. I picked it up and started reading, decided to buy it, and wound up devouring it overnight. I also started thinking to myself that I had a pretty good idea how about 80 percent of it could work right then, and wanted to implement it as badly as I had ever wanted to do anything with a computer – I had read SF all my life, and this was a full-on chance to make SF real. So I tried to start a project at Microsoft to do a networked 3D engine.

I wish Lena Dunham were a stuffed animal, or a Polly Pocket, or something else that is small and easy to carry around. Not because she is precious, or adorable, but because she, with her creator-of-the-new-show-Girls-ness, has become my security blanket. She is, thankfully, neither precious nor adorable, and Girls, which airs on HBO on Sunday nights (and the first ep of which is on YouTube), does not have a quirky, indie tone. It is simply HILARIOUS, and the characters are sometimes clever, but they are also sometimes embarrassing, sometimes stupid, sometimes assholes, etc. It’s funny for the familiarity of its seemingly unnecessary filler words and recognizable mannerisms. It’s poignant because it doesn’t moralize, but brings comfort just by presenting prototypical characters and making them feel less cliché, and less lonely. It’s important because it is a TV show on a big cable network that is run by a 25-year-old woman pulling from her own experiences and telling her own stories.

We have been fighting over who gets to play with the Sifteo sample here at the office. These little blocks are addicting! Imagine all the fun of your favorite puzzle games meeting the touch-sensitivity of your smartphone meeting the accelerometer of your Wiimote. And the best part? It comes with the ability to write your own games!

BBC Essential DJ Mixes

This is the story of Candystall, the winner of the Assembly 2007 4k intro competition. In this article, we describe the ideas that eventually led to the intro as it came to be, and the tools we created along the way to assist in the process.

You work for the Transportation Security Administration, manning the x-ray machine at a local airport. Your day begins easily enough, quickly scanning passengers’ luggage and bodies and waving them through. But after a few minutes, you get an alert—shirts are now contraband. OK, fine, you dutifully strip people of their T-shirts as they pass through the metal detector. Then another alert: Mobile phones are prohibited, too. Wait, now coffee isn’t allowed either, but cell phones are OK again. As you struggle to keep the new rules straight, the line of cranky passengers gets longer. Wait, snakes and turbans have just been outlawed. Oh, and shirts are allowed now, but you didn’t realize that until you’d already stripped down another passenger. That’s one strike against you. Now native headdresses are forbidden, turbans are OK, but shoes must be removed. You get confused and let a snake through—another black mark. The line of passengers begins to stretch across the room even as new regulations keep coming in faster than you can process them. Before long, you are fired—not because you’ve endangered anyone’s safety, but because you failed to cope with the illogical edicts of a capricious bureaucracy.

’S HERTOGENBOSCH, the Netherlands — High on the cathedral in this trim Dutch town, amid a phalanx of stone statues of local noblemen, crusaders, saints and angels, one figure stands out. Smiling faintly, with lowered eyelids, one of the angels wears jeans, has a laptop bag slung over one shoulder and is chatting on a cellphone. The angel gets about 30 calls a day on the phone.

Android fragmentation is a huge problem. The fact that there are hundreds of different hardware devices running over half a dozen different versions of Google’s OS makes it annoying for users, but makes it an especially devastating issue for developers trying to make a business out of the Android ecosystem.

What Games Are: A Primer is an evolving project to describe and define an accessible language of games, game makers, the games industry and the art that games are. Feedback is definitely appreciated, which you can submit here.

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad—that there seems no good way to beat it.

Kicksend uses the tried and tested pattern of sending our new users confirmation emails to verify their identity. With that, there will always be emails that aren’t delivered successfully, which we care about a lot.
A bounced confirmation email means that our new user wouldn’t have been able to activate their account. So they’ll either have to either sign up for a new account, or contact us to change their email address. These are steps we don’t want to put any user through.

Creating an NFC tag that allows customers, friends, or even yourself to quickly check in to a venue on Foursquare is easy.
To begin, you will need an NFC-capable device, some blank NFC tags, and an app to write to the tags. In a previous post, I went over where to find the tags and what app to use if you are on Android.
Today, I will be using the same app, NFC Task Launcher, on the Galaxy Nexus to program the tag for a Foursquare check-in.

A WPF enthusiast on twitter is building an application. They noticed that the images they were using looked like crap in the toolbar. We checked, and it wasn't an issue of SnapToDevicePixels or UseLayoutRounding. Nope, this was something else. So I asked him to send me the whole project. Turns out the tiny toolbar images are actually 512x512 32 bit PNGs. While resizing those should definitely be on the To Do list for this app, depending on how the images are used, I thought I'd at least figure out how to fix the display.

This video will show you simple methods for taking the idea for your next app, and getting it on paper. From there, you can utilize various software to make your prototype a reality. Adobe Illustrator ªªhttp://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator.html isºº one solution for this. Other tools used in the video are Balsamiq ªªhttp://www.balsamiq.com/ andºº Inkscape http://inkscape.org/.

Be sure to check out the Nokia Icon Toolkit ªªhttp://nokia.ly/Aj0pR8 forºº some ready-made icons you can use in your app. With the Visual design stencilsªªhttp://nokia.ly/w5hqIO youºº can easily sketch how your app would look like.

In 2011, Google spent $5.2 billion on research, up 37 percent over 2010’s rate.

On what, you ask?

Robots. Elevators to outer space. A nationwide fiberoptic network. Energy created from hog waste...

Google’s vast array of engineering projects includes the sublime, the ridiculous, and just occasionally, the ingenious.

Is it all worth it?

Ironically, those voices were the same people who happily handed Tan money for the credits I provided. Happily handed me stacks of cash for Jedi accounts. Did I help in the demise of SWG? Yes. That is something I accepted long ago. The game that I loved so much, I helped to destroy

HTML5 is hot.  The echo chamber is loud and everywhere you turn; blogs, social media, trade magazines, and corporations, are heralding it as the silver-bullet for everything—and more. It’s magical.

But what is the current reality of HTML5 for Advertising Agencies and their Digital Production partners? And what does it mean for those concepting and developing real client campaigns with real business goals? The question isn’t “Is Flash Dead?” But rather “What’s the best solution to this problem?” Both HTML5 and Flash are amazing solutions to our web executions, each with their own pros and cons.

I’ve had nagging doubts because the MMO isn’t where I want it to be. It doesn’t feel quite “there.” You know the secret sauce that would take it from being a wacky EQ1-era game into its own unique thing? There’s not enough of that sauce.

If I was making this game the normal way you make games, what I would focus on now is combat innovation. I’ve got pretty typical classic MMO combat at the moment.

Recent talk in New Orleans for the Adobe Solutions Partners event that covers engagement, social media, marketing and customer service by Scott Stratten, President of www.UnMarketing.com

I’ll preface this by saying that yes, I’m running Google Chrome Beta as my main browser, and yes, some bugs are to be expected from running a beta browser. That’s besides the point. So what am I complaining about?

Any small bug on any browser can instantly kill a product you’ve worked months or years on.

DM: "The stranger in the tavern tells you of a ruin full of treasures to the north of town. What do you do?"
Players: "We go south!"

One of the developments in modern MMORPGs was the idea that the player should always be on a quest, or several, so he would never be lost for ideas on where to go next. Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition introduced that idea into D&D rules, but most of the official adventures I've seem don't actually use the concept. That is probably because those adventures are very linear already, and if you have a dungeon full of monsters you don't really need a quest to tell players what to do.

Even though narratology was conceived as a transmedial endeavour from its very beginnings in Russian formalism and French structuralism, most of its more influential models have been – and continue to be – developed in the context of literary criticism and film studies. In contemporary media culture, however, the creation of storyworlds is not limited to literature and traditional feature films. Rather, emerging forms of multimodal and interactive narration, experiments with the distinction between fictional and nonfictional narrative, various forms of intermedial adaptation, and attempts at ‘transmedia storytelling’ create new ways of presenting narrative content, thereby calling attention to the affordances and limitations of different narrative media as well as to their potential for cooperation. The increased interest in the relation between media and narrative sparked by the development of digital technology and the recent proliferation of delivery techniques in the context of media convergence has reinforced the need for an interdisciplinary and transmedial narratology that studies storyworlds across media.

Diese Seiten richten sich an alle Besitzer des N9 oder N950. Ziel ist es eine Sammlung von Hilfen und Anleitungen in deutscher Sprache zur Verfügung zu stellen.

“If you can’t design a non-digital game from a digital game…you don’t truly understand the nuances of the pure design underneath the art and…programming.” -Brathwaite & Schreiber

While you may take any digital game that interests you, I recommend working with a simpler game we have already looked at (such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Centipede) and convert that to a board game. These games are simple and easy to understand.

This article primarily focuses on PvE combat in RPGs, though its methods can be applied to PvP or other types of games.

Role playing games have a tremendous amount of content, each piece with multiple parameters that define what they do in combat. Damage dealt by a sword, bonus granted by a skill, total health of a level 23 bandit, etc. It’s not too hard to tune content when you look at a single game zone or a fixed character level – you can playtest that area and tweak values until the game feels right. However, trying to tune values for a giant world with 100 levels of content and multiple classes is much more complicated. How do you choose values for RPG content without playtesting and brute force tuning every type of character at every level?

This template is most useful if your logo or icon graphic consists of a single basic shape. The template includes a canvas in the correct icon size, a 96 x 96 pixel bounding box, focal zone guides, the Symbian Colour Spectrum and several precast background layers with the surround shapes of Symbian launcher icons. You can simply paste your graphic or glyph on top of the surround background shape of your choice, add the inner shadow, and save the icon as an SVG file. See the video.

Cat cafés are huge in Japan right now. As the name suggests, these are coffee shops where cat lovers go to sip overpriced lattes and hang out with an adorable smoosh pile of kitties. In the past five years, exactly 79 such cafés have popped up all over Japan. What’s weird is that the café cats aren’t expensive pedigreed felines like Persians or those other ones with the funny bendy ears, they’re just the everyday mixed breeds you might find in the back lot of your local supermarket, cats who, in the immortal words of Brian Setzer, “slink down the alley, looking for a fight/Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night.” Likewise, in the past few years, there’s been an explosion of photo books and DVDs featuring average-joe cats. If people are so fascinated by what are essentially domesticated alley cats, why don’t they just swoop one up from the legions of strays all over Japan and take them home? I’ll tell you why: because landlords in Japan are dicks.

I recently attended a conference on social and mobile games (yeah, I know) and they talked a bit about cloning of games. Again. A few high-profile examples of cloning have brought this back into the spotlight. So, let's take a look at the business realities of cloning and how it affect small game companies.

I say "again" because I wrote about cloning a bit over a year ago. Since then, it's just continued to become a bigger issue in the game industry.

Last month I contracted what seemed to be a simple cold which progressed into a bronchial infection combined with asthma that knocked me out for three weeks.

It was really bad timing because around the same time, Raph Koster posted a blog bombshell when he said ‘Narrative is not a game mechanic’. A fair few commenters arose in support or ire. Posts flew about whether the meaning of narrative was too broad or limited, whether this was really about a limited formal view of games versus their possibilities, and so on. Exciting stuff, but I couldn’t really get into it.

I’m still recovering, but being ill has given me the chance to reflect and remember that there’s a reason that I don’t normally use the phrase ‘mechanics’. There's also a reason why I tend to dismiss broad narrativism. It’s because both of them are part of a pretend debate over correctness, and each – in their own way – is just circular flame-bait, an ever-burning meme that goes nowhere.

QNeptunea family is twitter client frontend powered by twitter4qml https://gitorious.org/twitter4qml

 
[This text, on the crucial aspects of virtual goods design, is an extract from the ninth chapter of Social Game Design: Monetization Methods and Mechanics, by Tim Fields (Certain Affinity) and Brandon Cotton (Portalarium). In the book, the two authors closely examine how social games function as a player-responsive business.]

Fake Estates

The very phrase "Virtual Goods" is something of a delightful contradiction. Anything "virtual," by definition, doesn't physically exist, and goods, at least when appearing within the context of the marketplace, are typically an article of trade.



For our purposes, though, virtual goods are real enough that they generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, and are so important to players that they can drive binge play sessions, provoke real-world fights, create (and destroy) marriages, and keep users spending money twenty-four hours a day, in almost every country in the world.

Though it's not widely known, you can write native-feeling iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad in JavaScript (+ HTML and CSS).

In this article, I'll explain how to:

strip away the browser chrome (the url bar and button bar);
prevent viewport scrolling and scaling;
respond to multi-touch and gesture events;
use webkit CSS to get the iPhone OS look and feel;
cache the app so it runs without internet access;
get a custom icon on the home screen; and
have a splash screen load at the start.

ProfileMatic changes automatically profile according to user specified rules.

Current features:
- Time based conditions: start/end time, weekdays
- Location based conditions (cell tower id)
- WLAN based conditions (connected to WLAN)
- Setting of profile and ringing volume. Can restore previous profile after rule.
- Setting of BlueTooth on/off
- Low power usage

Harmattan icon generator

Weight Watchers® is a game we play to lose weight, and here are our four fab secrets to making sure everyone’s a winner!

“Play to Win” declares the new Weight Watchers slogan, although “Play to Lose” would surely be a more appropriate battle cry to lead those resolved to shed the Christmas pounds in the new year diet game.

The UK is the fattest nation in Europe and with the number of obese adults in the country forecast to rise by 73% over the next 20 years, the hunger for diets to counter this unwelcome expansion will intensify.

Stiff competition is always a catalyst for innovation as companies vie with one another to stand out in the market and the latest trend to be fixated upon by the Sauron-like eye of the diet marketers is gaming.

Tagstand has been instrumental not only in sourcing the right NFC chip and tag form factor for us, but also in helping with the visual design and call to action implementation for several of our projects with major partners (including HP and Paypal). These guys are fast, creative, and brilliant.

I wrote earlier today about how I was recently banned from the Diablo 3 Beta for making literally 11,000 gold per hour, as well as taking advantage of a secret strategy for obtaining materials. I assumed that this was the reason for the automatic ban, because there was no possible way for Blizzard to have conducted a "thorough investigation" since I had only played the beta for a few days. Today I received confirmation that my use of the tools Blizzard provides every player were considered exploitative of the Diablo 3 Beta economy. I have been asked to tell customer support about my ideas for making gold or real money BEFORE trying them in the retail version of the game.

Wer ein Notebook mit "NVIDIA® Optimus™ Technologie" besitzt und z.B. Ubuntu installiert hat sollte sich einmal "Bumblebee" anschauen ... "Owners of optimus laptops. Install bumblebee, use the nvidia card while gaming, use intel chipset for everything else. Now with autoshutdown for the nvidia card." - Quelle

 

Mit dem Update auf Version 1.4.32 wurde ein Fehler behoben, welcher bei Ubuntu-Usern "/usr" löscht. daraufhin wurden in den letzten Tagen etliche lustige Kommentare & Bilder zu dem Thema auf github.com gepostet. Hier einige Beispiele ...

The desktop remains central to our everyday work and play, despite all the excitement around tablets, TV’s and phones. So it’s exciting for us to innovate in the desktop too, especially when we find ways to enhance the experience of both heavy “power” users and casual users at the same time. The desktop will be with us for a long time, and for those of us who spend hours every day using a wide diversity of applications, here is some very good news: 12.04 LTS will include the first step in a major new approach to application interfaces.

Gabe Zichermann (b. 1974) is an entrepreneur, author, highly rated public speaker and gamification thought leader. He is the chair of the Gamification Summit and Workshops, and is co-author of the book “Game-Based Marketing” (Wiley, 2010) where he makes a compelling case for the use of games and game mechanics in everyday life, the web and business. Gabe is also a board member of StartOut.org and facilitator for the NYC chapter of the Founder Institute. A native of Canada and resident of NYC, Gabe frequently muses about games and the world at http://Gamification.Co

The WebSocket protocol has applications beyond plain vanilla web development.  I will explain how the protocol works, how to implement your own server and share some insights I had along the way. Before we get down and dirty, I will explain what I’ve been doing with it.

ROM Hacks make the process of developing a functional Sonic game with unique art, enemies, and modifications much easier, since the game engine and basic mechanics are already functional. However, if the game requires a different game engine, modifying existing low-level assembly may be inappropriate, and some game designers might choose to program their own unique game engine. The physics of a game engine are rules that describe how to transform the player's input (either in the form of buttons, keyboard, or even a mouse if the designer feels inclined) into appropriate changes in the position of the sprites in the game (such as the Sonic sprite, or alternatively, how enemy sprites will respond). These physics guides will hopefully make the process of simulating the rules used in Sonic games easier.

Since the rules themselves are independent of how they are implemented, many people choose programming languages such as Java, C, C++, Python, or a Lisp dialect to implement game physics. In addition, people can choose to use more specialized applications like Flash, Game Maker, or a Clickteam program like Multimedia Fusion 2.

Hopefully, these guides will provide adequate information to facilitate implementation.

Last summer, I had the good fortune to visit a “very advanced” Agile shop. These folks really did embrace agile methods with a discipline, completeness, and a zealous fervor that would be hard to match. In many ways, they could have been a poster child for Agile methods...But these weren’t productive developers freed from mindless process dogma. They were Agile slaves. The dogma they followed was ours, and they followed it well. And as with many organizations in a similar position, they saw some promising results. Continuous integration, refactoring, unit tests, pair programming—all these techniques yielded some benefit. But they weren’t thinking, they weren’t reacting, they weren’t being agile. When problems came up, they addressed them with all the grace and elegance of a deer caught in the terrifying blaze of alien headlights. They knew how to do Agile; they didn’t know how to be agile.

I love stories. My chief hobby is reading. I was formally trained as a writer, not as a game designer (there wasn’t really any formal training for game design I got started, but that’s another story). I think most game stories are not very good. And I quite enjoy games with narrative threads pulling me through them. When I find a game with a good story, I frequently prefer to the story to the actual game! So please keep that in mind as you read: I love story.
Narrative in a game is not a mechanic. It’s a form of a feedback.

The sarcasm in this talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes weekly, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities

There will be no escaping games in 2012. From the Olympics to hit shows on TV, lucrative games on your mobile phone to innovative live events, games are more a part of our everyday lives than they’ve ever been.
This briefing document looks ahead to the key issues that can help guide your strategy in 2012. And, since the gaming world evolves fast, we’ve drawn some concrete examples of these trends from front-runners in 2011, so you can get to grips with what they mean in practice. 

Boss fights are the linch pin of your entire combat experience, possibly your entire game, as one bad experience is all it takes to bring your game to a screeching halt. Something so important, so integral, demands effort and attention to detail, but for the majority of projects they are relegated to the very end. Why?

Welcome to Android Design, your place for learning how to design exceptional Android apps.

The Nokia N9 UI represents the next generation of platforms and mobile interactions. This section introduces the concepts and principles that have shaped the Nokia N9 UI framework

Cut the Rope is an immediate favorite for anyone who plays it. It’s as fun as it is adorable. So we had an idea: let’s make this great game available to an even bigger audience by offering it on the web using the power of HTML5.

To do this, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team partnered with ZeptoLab (the creators of the game) and the specialists at Pixel Lab to bring Cut the Rope to life in a browser. The end result is an authentic translation of the game for the web, showcasing some of the best that HTML5 has to offer: canvas-rendered graphics, browser-based audio and video, CSS3 styling and the personality of WOFF fonts.

You can play the HTML5 version of Cut the Rope at: www.cuttherope.ie.

Sometimes you’re asked to design for the untestable scenario. For instance, design a system for 10,000 players to asynchrously interact in a persistent competitive world with progression mechanics that plays out over 3 months.