Free Candy For Everyone

The first talk I attended today was Cliff Bleszinski discussing Gears of War. This is a game that I’ve watched some people play and that there’s been a lot of discussion over by people in the industry. It apparently won Game of the Year at the Game Developer Choice awards last night. It’s a polished game that focuses on doing a few things, and doing them well. Oh, and it’s a third person shooter.

This guy Cliff B has gotten a lot of attention paid to him in the industry, but I’d known really very little about him. Until my current job, I paid little attention to first or 3rd person shooters. But it’s a bit more relevant now, so I’ve been trying to be a bit more interested.

His first game was actually something I did play, a long time ago, a PC platform game called Jazz Jackrabbit. That very well might be the last game of Epic’s that I played. Well, I need to pick up a copy of Gears of War, because it’s supposed to be rockin’ awesome.

On to the talk. Gears has sold approximately 3 million copies - and since it’s an Xbox 360 exclusive title, that makes that more impressive - and it has an average review score of 94%. I cannot even imagine that. Must be awesome.
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It’s the end of my first day at GDC, and I got to go to one session today - the Experimental Gameplay Session. I wrote about it last year, and it was one of the big standouts for me. It was interesting, different, and helped remind me why I make games in the first place.

The session today wasn’t quite so inspirational - still interesting, but not quite as large and impact. There’s nothing up there yet, but in the next few weeks there will be info on the official website.

First up was the Indie Game Jam (the official site looks like it hasn’t been updated in years, but there’s a wikipedia page with a good overview). Chris Hecker talked about the most recent event. They did a more low key version than in previous years, and it took place at Chris’ house over Thanksgiving. The theme of the event was audio - not necessarily music, but audio in some way. They prebuilt an audio engine and then got together to make their games. I figured the games would show up online, so didn’t take great notes. They were really quite interesting. The best part of these game jams is that people are trying to do something different. Many of the games are failures, but they’re not like anything you’ve seen before. Gets you thinking.

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I haven’t been talking about it, but GDC is here. For the first time, I’m living in the city where it takes place, so there hasn’t been as much prep and hype on my end to get ready. I’ll be going for a few sessions tomorrow, then all day Thursday and a few more to wrap things up on Friday. I’m not sure what my blogging time will be like, but I’ll try to find a chance to type up my impressions like I did last year. I’m guessing I won’t be quite as thorough as I was, that was hard work!

If you’re curious about last year’s notes, check things out by looking for the GDC tag on my site.

I don’t know what’s going on! There seems to be something in the air at the television networks telling them to sign up to make adaptations of fantasy series. A whole bunch of them are getting adapted.

First up is the Dresden Files. This is a series that’s already on the SciFi channel. It’s based on a series of books by Jim Butcher that I started reading last year. It’s fun fluff - wizards and magic and vampires in a modern city setting. If you’re curious, the first book is Storm Front.

Next, HBO is making George R.R. Martin’s mammoth fantasy epic into a show. I don’t know much about that, but I do like the series - starts with A Game of Thrones.

Then I hear that Lifetime is making a series out of Tanya Huff’s vampire Blood series. The first two books are collected in this volume. This series isn’t Huff’s best, but it’s mildly entertaining. The fact that Lifetime is adapting it implies it’ll be rather low budget. My hopes aren’t that high.

Sam Raimi has optioned the rights to Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. No idea where that’s gone, how far along it’s going in the process…

Lastly, Charlaine Harris’ urban vampire series is also being adapted for HBO. Anna Paquin is going to star which gives me pretty high hopes. I think these books are fun reading, start at the beginning with Dead Until Dark.

I guess the fantasy movie success is spilling onto the small screen for now. We’ll see if these are worth watching!

A friend of my invited me to friendster-myspace-social network I’ll forget about in 6 months.” I signed up and soon found myself impressed.

Facebook is the most technologically advanced of the social networks I’ve experienced. First, they have a mechanism to search your email contacts for anyone else using the service. You tell them which service and yes, you have to trust them with your account login info, but they swear they don’t save it! I trusted them, gave it a shot, and it soon listed about 10 people and asked if I wanted to make them my Facebook friends. Simple, no fuss, elegant.

I made the account because a friend wanted to share pictures with me. I soon got a notice that someone had tagged me in a picture. Huh, that’s nifty. The picture upload interface is awesome. It’s in java, and just embedded in the browser. Here’s a shot of it:

You can see little rotate arrows on the first image - you can rotate the picture right when you upload it. Neat. Then you can tag the picture with who’s in it. You click on locations on the picture and either select the Facebook friend who it is, or just type in a name. Here’s a picture of me and a friend’s cat, whose name happens to be Sir Alfred Oudler. When you mouse over the cat, his name pops up!

If you were to mouse over me, you’d see my name. These are great features I’d love to see on a desktop photo app! The ability to know who someone is in a photo just by mousing over them is just so smart. I love that.

I’m not much for using these social networking sites. I love to sign up, poke at them for a few days, then call it quits. But, actually, Facebook might be one worth using. It’s a great way to share photos. I’ll stick with it for a bit.