sales down under
Take a gander at the number three spot on the weekly sales charts for all videogames in Australia.
play and more
I went to The Importance of Being Ernest on Friday with a few friends. It’s a comedy (play) by Oscar Wilde set in 1900 in London. Honestly, I had no idea a play could be this funny. It was at the Taproot Theatre in north Seattle which seemed small at first. I don’t think it could have seated more than 150 or 200 people. It was more entertaining than any movie I can recall seeing in the recent past. We’re planning to see some more things in the future. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
free 411
Google comes through for us again. Are you sick of paying for 411 directory service? Me too, but no longer. Google just launched a toll-free phone number for directory information. Just dial 1-800-GOOG-411. Check out their page for more information, and a great video demonstration. Excellent.
new colors
I really wanted to rework my website tonight, but I don’t have time to do what I would really like to. It has been customized quite a bit over the last few months, but it’s still mainly just using one of the pre-built templates. So in the meantime, here are some fresh new colors instead. I’m going to see The Importance of Being Earnest on Friday which should be fun. I haven’t seen a live play in ages. It should be an interesting evening.
There haven’t been as many posts and pictures going up recently. I guess I’ve let myself get pretty busy. Despite being well over a year out of school, the beginning of the “school year” is still a hectic time around here. And work is really starting to pick up. The deadlines will be rolling on our new game before we know it. I’m very optimistic to see it start to shape up. G’night.
drawn to life released
I can hardly even believe it. Drawn to Life is out, and I’m really excited. Feedback has been really positive so far. I’ll actually have a chance to play through it now. Most of what I had worked on didn’t require me to run through much of the game. Can you believe I do this for a living?
list of demands
I think it’s clear that the iPhone is the phone of the future. In fact, I think it’s going to change the way we think about consumer products and computer interfaces in general. I know nobody from Apple is going to read this blog, but I’m making Apple a list of demands regardless. These are the things I want to see in the next iPhone. Also, these are the criteria I will judge against when deciding whether or not to purchase said next iPhone.
- Smaller
- I know it’s small, but for a phone, not really. I’m going to carry this everywhere. Make it as easy for me to do that as possible. And to qualify further, I really mean thinner. I very much appreciate the size and quality of the screen.
- More Memory
- 8 GB is sad. I understand the technology limitations, but there are lots of storage solutions on the rise. Find one, and give me at least 30 GB. Do you really expect me to fit any meaningful amount of (beautiful, crisp) videos in 8 GB?
- Price Point
- Keep the $399 price point for the best model. The most expensive iPhone should always be $399. I’m not willing to pay more, and you should be making it good enough that I feel well justified paying that much.
- Software Development Kit
- Please give developers a real development kit. Safari works amazingly well on iPhone for browsing web pages, but not so great for using web applications. If you really want to push the limits of the iPhone you need to open it up to non-Apple creativity. Half of the best features of your OS are things that other people gave you free research and development for when they made their programs for the Mac.
I will say no more on the matter.
first game review
Wow, we were honestly caught off guard by this one. The first review for our game came out in the October issue of GamePro (p. 97).
“Drawn to Life is a must-have for every DS owner’s library.”
It was a 90% (4.5 / 5). That’s a pretty remarkable score. Looking through GamePro reviews of other DS games we’re ahead of many if not most games from Nintendo, Square-Enix, and the like. Online reviews won’t be coming out until Friday. Let’s hope the trend stays this high. The source for this information was metacritic (scroll down to “What The Critics Said”).
You can also keep up with current review scores as they’re posted at gamerankings.com.
feed reading
For most people much of their online time is spent visiting favorite sites, and browsing through for new updates. Often this leaves you scanning through a number of sites that haven’t changed. Or struggling to find what information is new and what you’ve read or seen already. This would be like going online to check your email and having to type in your friends’ names one at a time to see if each has sent you an email since you last checked. But emails you receive conveniently shuffle themselves into your inbox.
Feeds are like emails from websites, and a feed reader, such as Google Reader, is like an inbox for your feeds. Most web pages with frequently updated material have a feed. At the bottom of this page you can find a ‘feeds’ section. These are usually not too difficult to find on most sites. Look for an icon similar to this 
. There are also a number of key terms that can help you locate a feed. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and ATOM are the key types of feeds and usually these terms will point you to a feed that is available.
Google Reader is like any other Google application. You just need to have a Google Account to set it up. I’ll spare you the details, if you need a detailed walkthrough this video has more specifics. The main idea is you once you find the feeds you would like to ‘subscribe’ to, you copy the link which should like vaguely like the following:
http://www.somesite.org/atom.xml
http://www.othersite.com/feed.rss
Once you have the feed address click the [Add subscription] button in your Google Reader home page and paste the address into the form. Once you’ve subscribed it will initially show a number (usually 10) of recent posts. From now on when you log onto Google Reader any new posts that have been made will show up for you to read. If an article grabs your interest and you wish to view in its original context, you can always click the headline to jump directly to the story or blog.
A word of caution. Don’t go feed happy. If you fill your reader with tons of feeds you will wake up tomorrow with ten thousand stories in your inbox. Try to stick with pages you know you always check and build up your list slowly. Another help is that many sites have more specific feeds. Don’t get the CNN feed of all stories. If you’re primarily interested in business, get the business feed. Politics? the politics feed. You want to get the highest percentage of stories that will be relevant to you in your feed reader. Otherwise instead of saving time, you’ll wind up browsing through more garbage than you can manage. Don’t be afraid to remove a subscription if you find that most of the stories are not of any particular interest to you. This is going to be key in finding the right balance among the feeds that you track.
Google Reader also lets you share stories that you find interesting with friends. You can email links to the story (from your GMail account). Or there is a share button under each story. If you click this, it will show up on your shared page. You can send the link to your shared page to your friends and they can keep tabs on the stories you like. You can see a list of my shared stories here.
With the right usage, feeds can significantly decrease the time you spend online, and make you more productive. They can help take control of your internet usage so it doesn’t control you.
more game footage
IGN has posted a new preview of our game. There are a few new videos as well toward the middle of the page. Including one that has the intro I programmed (the story book with the flipping pages). It’s pretty exciting to start seeing more stuff about the game pop-up on the internet. Hope you can check it out, but be warned you might have to sit through a commercial or two to see the videos.
mariners game
I went to my first Mariners game yesterday. It was spur of the moment. We had a two for one deal on tickets. It was actually pretty fun despite the dive we took in the last half of the game. We were celebrating my friend Dave’s birthday. I snapped a few pictures as usual. I haven’t been online to be able to upload anything in a while, but next time I’m on, there will be some more fun pictures to look at. Ichiro!
car found
Well they found my old car. I’m a little embarrassed about it. It was less than 2 blocks from my old place in a motel parking lot, and it wasn’t even hidden. It was visible from the street. The fact is I know I’ve walked and driven past it a number of times. There are so many of that model of Accord I never took a closer look to investigate. Anyways, the motel manager just called it in yesterday, saying that ‘it had been sitting there for a while’ (yes, quite a while).
On another note, I had a good weekend. I was down in Castlerock visiting with the Hughes on Sunday. We had a good time, and I got to see their new house. I’ll have some pictures up of that and the GC game night next time I’m on the internet with my laptop. Happy Fourth!
another game video
This is probably the most informative video of our game to date. It was just posted on Gamespot, and has a lot of in game footage. It’s pretty sweet. Check it out.
waterfall hike
This is just one of many shots from our hike down to the waterfall Thursday morning. I’ve finally hit one of the limits of a free flickr account. It will now only show my latest 200 photos unless I upgrade. I might upgrade, but I’m going to wait it out a couple days or weeks to see if I feel like I’ll still be using it a bunch. Besides, if you see some pictures that you would want to make prints of, or just have better quality copies of for any reason, just email me. The free account doesn’t let you download the highest quality images. We also had dinner at a nice quiet Japanese restaurant that Dan had been wanting to try out for a while. It was a winner. Good dinner for cheap (by island standards). We’re heading out to check on the waves, and maybe take one last shot at surfing if we find any. I’m sad to be leaving in the morning, but excited to be back home. I couldn’t imagine having a more relaxing vacation anywhere else. I had a great time. My next post will probably be from back in Seattle. Aloha.
more pictures
Today Dan has work off so I don’t want to waste much time blogging. I’ve posted some pictures though, of sunsets, beaches, and Ben’s (Dan’s roommate) dog Makai. We plan to hike down to the waterfall that you can see from their back yard today. That should yield some more fun times, and nice pictures. And maybe more surfing later too.
hawaii tuesday
Dan just went off to work. Amazingly he was able to schedule it so he only has to work today and tomorrow while I’m here. And it’s a pretty short day at that. Yesterday we did a little driving to get a good look at the island. We had thought about doing a hike down to Waimea falls, but the weather and our stomachs were both uncooperative. We had planned to pick up some local food on the way, but each successive place we tried was closed (a lot of places close at 2 pm). There was some rain and clouds on and off yesterday which helped it cool down a bit. It has been pretty dry out here so far this year. Back in Kapaa, we finally ended up in Scotty’s Barbecue and both had a sandwich sampler which was quite delicious. Of course, we were pretty hungry, so that may have skewed our perception a little. Otherwise, we had a pretty lazy day around the house. We played a lot of music.
Dan’s roommate Ben showed us a video of some friends who, out of boredom, sold their house and bought a small sailboat (not knowing how to sail). Ten years later, they had traveled the world over and had two children. It easily rivaled much of what you could see on the Discovery channel. This morning (pictured, I’ll try to clean up a little for future photo ops) the surf report didn’t sound promising. We went over to Kapaa and Dan got a haircut. I picked up some Locals brand sandals. Dakine (the kind) that the locals wear. I also grabbed a few postcards that I hope to write while Dan is at work. On the way back we stopped for lunch at Mermaids Cafe, where I got the best wrap ever. It was seared local ahi tuna with cilantro sauce, rice, and cucumber in a green tortilla. You can check out a picture in my flickr gallery, but be warned, it may make you hungry. Now back at Dan’s place, I might walk out to the picnic table overlooking the waterfall to write those postcards and do some of the reading I brought with me. Or maybe a nap.
aloha
My trip to Hawaii is going quite well. I’ve had a relaxing time so far. I’ve posted some pictures that you can check out, but I’ll give you some backstory so you can try to piece together what they’re from. Saturday afternoon I landed in Honolulu with a short stop-over prior to my flight to Kauai. There was a beautiful courtyard garden with quite a variety of foliage. Since I had some time before my flight I took the opportunity to snap some photos. When I got to the Lihue airport Dan picked me up in his blue Ford pickup and we drove up to his place in Kilauea. We walked out back through the yard to what was just about all I needed to see. Right out back is a picnic table in some nice shade overlooking a valley with a beautiful waterfall at the bottom (I’m going to try not to use many adjectives from now on; you can insert beautiful, gorgeous, and breathtaking just about anywhere in these descriptions). Dan usually travels with his ukulele (ook, not yuke) pretty close by, and so island music is almost always at hand. We took a bike ride down to the bakery to pick up some pizza dough for dinner. The evening was pretty quiet.
Sunday morning we got up at around 7:30 after my morning reading and had some granola for breakfast and went out to do some surfing Hanalei. I took some video footage of Dan which I’ll try to edit and post up sometime after I get home. Afterwards, I took a few tries at it myself on Dan’s long board which were only semi-successful, but fun nonetheless (I think I’ll have a few more chances to take a stab at it). Then we drove around and stopped at some scenic points as we waited for the order we called in to the best burger place on the island to be made (best bleu cheeseburger ever). We rounded off the rest of the day at a birthday party for Dan’s friends MJ and Paul at a mansion at which one of their friends is a caretaker. I haven’t even been here two days, and already have had quite a vacation. I’ll be sure to let you know more soon.
game videos
A few links to new videos of our game that were recently posted online just flew around the office. I thought I would post them up here for interested parties. If you still don’t have a good idea of what our game is about these will certainly help you get a taste of it.
Let me know what you think.
experiments
I did a few experiments last night with the exposure settings on my camera. You can check them out on my flickr account. This one turned out great. It was a multi-second exposure in very low light with no flash. If you download the largest size, you can even read the serial number for the guitar.
Update: Okay, I didn’t realize flickr doesn’t let you download the full size photo. Maybe it’s because I haven’t paid for the pro user account. Regardless, you can tell the picture is sharp and clear considering the low light it was taken in.
new camera
I’ve been recently having a lot more fun taking pictures. So, I felt it was time for a camera upgrade. A lot has happened to digital cameras in the four years since I bought my last one. I looked at getting a Digital SLR with all the fancy features that I could learn to use. But I realized I would end up spending more money than I should right now. So I opted instead for another point-and-shoot digital the Canon PowerShot SD750.
I think there will be a lot more opportunities for good pictures in the next few weeks and months, especially my upcoming trip to Hawaii. Hopefully I’ll get some cookin’ pictures of me and my friends in our snazzy threads at the 50’s themed GC Gathering tonight. Keep your eye on my flickr account.
coolest promotion ever
IGN just posted a huge promotion for our game. It’s a flash port of the actual draw mode from our game. It’s actually
quite good, nearly identical to draw mode in the game. Someone’s design will end up in the game as one of the template characters you can choose. Any artists in the house want to give it a try?
hawaii it is
It looks like the week I’m going to have off I will be going to Kauai. Ah, the sacrifices of being a videogame programmer. Actually I’m quite pumped. It’s been a good year and a half since I’ve seen Dan, and I’ve never seen him in his natural habitat. It will be a great time.
crunch time
You thought I was spending a lot of time just because I was working on Saturday’s? Ha! We are really in crunch mode now. I’m going to be working about 9am to 11pm for the next two and a half weeks or so. But we’re going to have a week off afterwards. Maybe I can finally take that trip to Hawaii I’ve been talking about. Aloha.
well that was fast
Just a short number of hours after the press release IGN.com updated their Nintendo DS page with a preview of our game. So you can check it out first hand. Let me know what you think.
game announced, officially this time
In a press release from THQ this morning, Drawn To Life was officially announced. What does this mean? Not much, except that they can stake their reputation on announcing their plans to release it. And it’s no longer a secret that they, THQ, are the publisher. It also should mean that more promotional materials (screenshots, previews, etc.) should start to pop up on the internet’s wealth of gaming websites. There is some new information about the game in the press release, so be sure to check it out. Game on.