or maybe something uplifting…

Today it’s a really bad cover of “The Way It Is” (originally by Tupac). Rally bad.

I hacked my thumb with a knife on Monday. Cutting a frozen bagel of all things. Worse than the last time I hacked myself cutting a frozen bagel. Maybe you don’t want to eat a bagel at my house. It’s one of those little injuries that you can’t just ignore. Every time I dress myself, eat, or whatever other basic thing I do for the past couple days it’s been bugging me.
Read the rest of “Bleeding and Daydreaming”…

Damn that’s a good song.

The expo floor just closed and Jeff and I made it out at the front of the wave of people heading for the doors. In the last few minutes we did get to talk to a few more exhibitors we hadn’t seen yesterday.

Edvard Sorgard (CTO of Falanx) told me a little bit about where OpenVG sits relative to the other parts of mobile graphics solutions. Falanx makes the designs that allow manufacturers to build chips that will power the next generation of handheld gaming platforms. The demo they were showing was an impressive 3d application on a development board that I assume takes the place of the phone that an end consumer would buy. The next generation looks exciting to say the least.

I also saw the Ingenion Control Station. This is a game controller with a lot of buttons. It’s pretty large as game controllers go, but I see one advantage to developers with a controller like this. It has eight multiposition switches intended for infrequently accessed controls like switching a view position option (close-up or bird’s eye view).

This direct access, combined with the text on a controller overlay page, allows the player to stay in-game without having to pull up a menu and disrupt the gameplay experience. User interface elements like menus are seen as the only option in cases when there aren’t enough physical controls for all game functions. A menu helps a user forget the environment that the game sets up, so developers of course try to avoid them. That’s all I’m getting at.

All-in-all the conference was good, the trip’s been great. I don’t think I’ll ever need to buy another t-shirt as long as I live. Considering the expo floor looked significantly smaller than it was two years ago in San Jose, the t-shirt concentration was much higher. I’ll have more to say over the next couple weeks as I sift through the piles of notes, business cards, flyers, and general swag that I picked up here.

There was a talk given yesterday by Rosanna Sun about the benefits of working with a Hollywood production company. I took some notes and mixed it up with some of my opinion. I wish I had time to write up more, but we have to do lunch. Anyway, here’s some of what I’ve got…

Read the rest of “Working with Production Companies - Learning More Good Stuff at the GDC”…

I just wanted to add a little more about things said during the State of Wireless session. Oliver Miao (CEO of Centerscore) had a good point. To paraphrase, he said that people are lazy, if they have a cell phone in their pocket that they can play games on, they will. Even if they have a Playstation 3 at home, the cell phone is right there. I think this is a huge reason for the wireless game market to even exist. The limits on the hardware and the fees that a user incurs make it a bad platform for someone to choose when they think about playing a video game. Instead, they can truly excel in a market where there are no real competitors. The market of people waiting at the dealership for their car to be fixed. The market of people waiting for their hour-late dinner date to show up. The people sitting in the bathroom stall with time to kill. At least maybe there’ll be a reduction in phone calls from public bathrooms. This ‘lazy gamer’ market is a set of huge little pools that’s anxious and doesn’t even know it.

The State of The Mobile Industry talk just wrapped up at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It was informative with some of the encouraging this-is-just-the-beginning pep talk, but not too much. The focus (at least from the time we arrived) was on the cell phone market.

Read the rest of “State of the State of the Mobile Industry from the GDC”…

Okay, so now I’m one of those guys at the airport that collect around the AC outlets to get some juice for their notebook computers. I’ve got no issues with that.

It always interests me to find people going to the same place as me. I’m connecting through Chicago, so I might overhear people talking about going back to work or deals they’re getting ready for in San Francisco. The airport gets people out of their element, so they tend to think more enterprising thoughts. The idea of getting up in the air helps us to think about our potential and being in an out-of-the-ordinary place lets us entertain the idea of fulfilling it.

I ponied up the $7 for wifi access here. I figure that’s less than the cost of a movie these days and I’ve got about as long. It also has the big advantage of letting me catch up on what everyone’s already doing at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

So I wonder if I’ll keep this up for the next few days or if this is the last post I’ll have until I get back. Isn’t that always the way with blogs? So unreliable.