Category Archives: Game Development

Oculus Rift Integration

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There is a good article on FastCoLabs: What’s The Big Problem With Developing Oculus Rift VR?

It seems it is not that hard to integrate into a game. Team Fortress 2 has an Oculus Rift interface now. Valve, the owners and operators of Steam, helped create the interface.

Joe Ludwig, one of the Valve programmers behind the Rift implementation, said, “Figuring out how to combine mouse and keyboard input with head tracking was not very well explored territory, so we had to break some new ground there.”

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SyFy Defiance Show & Game

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You may have seen the trailers on the SyFy™ and other channels or may be YouTube. If you were curious and started looking, you probably found a ton of stuff generated by a massive advertising campaign. This is not just the release of a game and a TV show. There are incentives in the game to watch the show. In the show we will likely see incentives to play the game. I am sure they will be promoting it. The current commercials promote the game and show together.

This is a synthesis of marketing ideas I’ve not seen before. I think I understand that top players will be able to influence the show’s storyline. The show will add glory to the top game players.

Warning: Violent Content

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One of the major costs of any TV show is the union writers. If the idea of pulling in role players can be implemented and used to replace writers it could provide a huge savings. Much like what happens with reality shows. So, just as computer games are using players/users to provide content at phenomenally low prices, this may be a similar attempt for TV content.

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Xing – The Land Beyond

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I check the Myst Online community every other day or so. I found they are talking about and excited about the Alpha/Beta releases of a game called Xing (pronounced zing) The Land Beyond (more videos and pictures here). For those of us familiar with the Myst worlds the game is very similar. Several reviewers have already made the connection. Xing’s big claim to fame for Myst fans is, like Myst, its non-violent, so it is a great parent-child activity to share.

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The creative team behind Xing is White Lotus Interactive. John Torkington and Koriel Kruer started the Xing project as a classroom project in early 2012. The first 4 levels became one of the top ten finalists in the IEEE GameSig competition at Chapman University. In a completion judged by industry professionals they took second place. Then in late 2012 James Steininger joined the team.

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Rod Humble Speech Released

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In 2011 Rid Humble gave a keynote speech titled: Apocryphal Game Design Problems at the UC Santa Cruz meeting Inventing  the Future of Games. For whatever reason, the speech was just released on the Design 3 blog and popped in my news scanner. At least this is the first time I have come across the video.

Rod Humble at UC Santa Cruz 2011

Rod Humble at UC Santa Cruz 2011

I found this speech to be an interesting insight into Rod Humble. He has some interesting ideas on game design. Now that we are having a national debate in the US about mass killings and how to stop them, the viewpoints expressed in this speech should be well understood.

Transcribing audio is not a task I enjoy. Nor in this case would it do the topic justice to turn it into written document. The video provides the sense of timing and body language for the humor to come across and aids in placing comments in perspective. Still I’ll provide a summary to give you an idea of content and an index to the video because I suspect at some point I will want to refer back to parts of this speech.

The video runs 51 minutes. I found it worth the time to hear.  Continue reading →

New 3D Modeling Tool – 123D Catch Review

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I came across an article on a new way of building 3D virtual worlds. (Thanks Hamlet NWN) Well, may be not so new, it came out in 2011 I think. But, the process, new to me, is being used to create the independent adventure game: Rustclad. The development team has a video out showing the process they are using and early scenes from their game.

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You can see they are using a more organic style than we typically see in Second Life™. Sculpties were introduced to Second Life to enable the creation of this more organic style. I am not sure we have ever taken advantage of sculpties as intended by the creator of them: Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden). May be I’ll ask him some day.

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