Category: random thoughts
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Germination X in HTML5 canvas
I’ve spent a couple of days on an experimental not-quite-working-yet port of Germination X to HTML5. Port is probably a slightly misleading word, as it’s actually running exactly the same HaXE code, it’s just compiled to Javascript rather than swf with a load of extra Javascript filling in the stuff needed to replace Flash. The…
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Serious/educational games interview with Kara Frame
An interview with Kara Frame, who is studying Educational Technology at San Francisco State University. Please tell us who you are, your role in designing games and why you became interested in “serious gamesâ€Â? My background is in computer graphics programming for the games and film industries, but for the last 3 years I’ve been…
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Serious Play at FoAM
Last weekend it was the annual FoAM gathering to discuss long term ideas, some self reflection and consideration of external perceptions. We were guided on this mission by Simone Poutnik and Hendrik Tiesinga, members of FoAM and founders of Natural Innovation. They decided to trial a new method on us all, Lego Serious Play. Now,…
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Naked on Pluto wins VIDA
It’s been busy in Elastic Versailles lately, last week it was announced that Naked on Pluto won the VIDA award, and the game was selected to appear at a series of Robots and Avatars shows next year. The VIDA award concerns art and artificial life: The projects may be based on systems which emulate, imitate…
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Free software projects are not products
One of the best things to happen if you are a free software developer is to see your code cropping up in other projects. Recently I’ve been helping Till Bovermann reuse the Betablocker DS virtual machine and integrate it into Supercollider, where it can be run at audio rate to create sound directly. The fact…
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Why open licences?
I was recently asked by Wendy Van Wynsberghe from constant to explain how and why I use open licences for a lecture she’s doing on the subject. Like a lot of seemingly straightforward questions – it took me quite a while to work out the answers. With her permission, I thought it might be worth…
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FarmVille
At it’s height Farmville attracted 60 million players per month. This makes it the most played computer game in history, and not without good reason – I enjoyed playing it too. What continues to fascinate me beyond the appeal of the game itself is the worldview it presents regarding plants (and also domesticated animals) and…
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Naked on Pluto vs Mozilla
We had some trouble following a submission of Naked on Pluto to the Mozilla Game On competition. Aymeric describes the full story here, and it looks like a case of satire mistaken as the real thing, but it’s just a shame that we needed to go public with a blog post before we received any…
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Clojure frustrations
One of the nice things about Clojure is that it comes with a huge set of data structures, all of which can be handled using normal Lisp commands. However things are not as simple as they first seem, and it’s a bit of a dark art as there is limited information online. I’ve just spent…
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Germination X – the next steps
Lina and I have begun work on the next iteration of Germination X which will be more playable than the demos we’ve been working on up till now. We are developing the look and building some of the underlying technology we need for the Pixelache event in March, lots more of this to come, but…