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- What have I been up to?July 15
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You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing in the last month or so. I wanted to give you a little insight as to why. As I’ve written about in the past, I’ve been watching the social gaming wave very closely. I’m a huge fan of MMO’s, and with the rise of this new medium (building games on top of an existing social platform) I feel it has finally evolved into something I can make a run at. The entire landscape of the gaming industry is changing, and now I can finally be a part of it.
Having said that, I’ve been diligently working on countless game concepts, as well as exploring the medium and its potential as a whole. Two or three concepts are clear standouts, and for the past month or so I’ve been slowly fleshing them out while absorbing everything I can about the process of designing a game (more on that to come).
And then came the iPhone 3G…
After only having the iPhone for five days, my entire perspective on social gaming has been redefined. The iPhone and social networks on their own have almost limitless implications for gaming…but together…that’s where the real potential lies. So I’ve begun to revisit all of the game concepts…good and bad, and have discovered a plethora of new ways to implemen
- 22 Game Design-ish BlogsMay 21
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I’ve been amassing a rather large collection of game design related blogs. I thought I share a few of my daily reads. Some are directly related to game design, others indirectly. If you’re in the web space and you’re not following what is happening in the social/casual/mmo gaming space, you’re missing out. Here are a few places to get you going…
Lightspeed Venture Partners
Futuristic Play
Raph Koster
Applied Game Design
Avant Game
Brett on Social Games
Brinking
Free to Play
Casual Game Design
Inside Social Games
Jay is Games
Lost Garden
Massively
Master of 500 Hats
Musings of a Social Architect
Numberless
Only a G - Choosing a Programming Language to LearnApril 28
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Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of research on what programming language to learn. Being that my programming knowledge is limited, many of the arguments for or against a language were in terms that were beyond my experience level. You end up with a Catch-22 situation. You need experience to chose the language, but you need to learn a language to garner that experience. What’s a lowly designer to do?
I narrowed my selection down to two options: PHP (a la Cake) and Ruby on Rails. Below are the arguments I used to make my final selection: Ruby on Rails. If you’re in the same boat, this might shed a little light on which direction to go.
Ruby on Rails was made by people who’s opinions and methodology I closely identify with. I’ve always been a huge fan of 37signals. Tick was built using the Getting Real methodology. They value simplicity, elegance, and less. Assuming Ruby on Rails was built with similar values, I’d feel confident in the development of the language going forward.
Ruby on Rails seems to be the Apple of languages, while PHP seems to be the PC. I don’t mean which operating system they run on, but rather what they stand for. PHP is powerful and pervasive. Ruby is elegant and streamlined but is not nearly as widely
- Old Portfolio WorkApril 19
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I posted a bunch of old portfolio work to Flickr for those of you that are interested. Most of this is agency work so the end product was not always what I envisioned. In any case, here it is…the good, bad and the ugly.
- Sharing and Communicating on the InterwebsApril 19
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We’re currently in what can be described as a social gold rush. Services come and go fast enough to make your head spin. The hardest part for me has been trying to create logical structure and organization in my mind for how all these services are arranged in my life. I tend to need to add rules and logic to anything that I adopt. Every in its place. I thought it would be interesting to analyze how I use a few of my core services (this is just a fraction of the apps I use) and how they all fit into the grand tapestry that is my social landscape. I’ll break each service down into how I use them, and my “rule sets” for forming relationships within them. For some this will be obvious, but hopefully it will provide a little guidance for those trying to make sense of the whole social movement.
Facebook
I use Facebook as an aggregator for all my other social services. I think of it as my social dashboard. Many of the social applications I frequent revolve around specific social objects. YouTube has video, Dopplr has travel, Flickr has photos. With Facebook, your friends (and all their activities on a macro level) ARE the social objects. As such, I use Platform to feed in the information from all the other services. I used to hate how all my social objects were spread out over multiple social networks, many of which were very obscure to my non-geek friends. Now that Facebook is so pervasive, I can expose this information to everyone as long as they have a