Archive for the ‘Fun design’ Category

Draw your own game

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Cutting-edge guy that I am, I’m only the 1.2-millionth person to see this video demo of Crayon Physics Deluxe, a game prototype that was shown at the Game Developer Conference last month. It’s just brilliant in its simplicity, though it’s more of a conceptual demo than an actual game.

There have been a lot of games made by now that have really simple control interfaces, most of the casual games out there are controlled with just a point-and-click mouse scheme. But nearly all of these games give up user flexibility in the process - while the games are easy to control, you can’t actually control very much in them, usually little more than the direction and timing of some gun or character movement.

What makes Crayon Physics interesting is that it combines a simple interface with a very wide range of possible user behaviors - nearly unlimited once you let people start to play with the physics of the objects they create. And it’s done with out any of the pop-up menus or other devices that a lot of other games end up adding. While this particular demo was created by a hobbyist, hopefully someone will take the idea and build on it, it has so much potential.

Strike a pose

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

Stopped by the Loden Dager fashion show yesterday to check out their latest hipster duds.. they’re one of my favorite menswear lines, sporty casual, lots of ironic touches.

loden1

The show was a presentation, always a bit more relaxed than runway shows.. the venue was fantastic, inside one of the seminary buildings in Chelsea, with the spotlit models standing up in the window alcoves.

loden2

The spotlights were a little lower than the models and aimed right at their faces, and with no gels so the models had a ghostly white glow to them. Between that and the ecumenical setting, there was more than a little bit of a goth vibe to the whole thing.

Guitar Hero to go?

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I hacked my iPhone a while back, played with some of the apps that were out there, got bored.. so when Apple disabled the hacks with the latest (v1.1.3) firmware update I didn’t really care, so I let iTunes install the update. Now I’m really regretting it.

guitar

Now you can rock out in public places

This guitar-playing mini-game is a perfect example of the type of thing indie programmers can come up with, given a chance, what a fun way to use multi-touch.. I can’t wait for Apple to officially let people make software for the iPhone, this whole locking thing is so asinine.