Laugh Riot! The Comedy-Improv Card Game
I have completed development for the new card game I designed, Laugh Riot!
This is a project I started working on many years ago, so I am really excited about it. I think it’s a fun game, and so far, all the playtesters have had a great time, laughing their asses off.
I used a payment system called Kickstarter to fund the first run of decks. Kickstarter uses a “pledge” system, where “supporters” can pledge money, but that money isn’t charged to your credit card until the project end-date, and only IF the goal is reached. It’s a perfect system for what I am doing, since I can’t afford to print decks unless I know people will buy them.
The first 100 decks have been printed. If you’re interested, please visit www.LaughRiotGame.com, and consider making an order. For the price of two movie tickets, you’ll get a card game that up to 10 people can play over and over, in the comfort of your own home. (That means you can play NAKED!)
Augmented Reality puzzle game
I recently completed the game design and implementation of a new Augmented Reality puzzle game for A&E television. I worked closely with the extremely talented programmer Patrick O’Shaughnessey, who I have worked with on-and-off since the mid-nineties. We did the project for a new agency called Circ.us.
It’s an innovative project, and here’s why: Unlike most other examples of Augmented Reality, we created a simple puzzle game that uses the marker itself as the input device. To Patrick and I this seemed like a pretty obvious thing to do, but apparently there are not a lot of other examples that do the same (at least not outside of academia.)
Augmented Reality is in a sort of awkward adolescent stage… the printed marker is clearly not an ideal way of doing things, but it’s all we have right now. So in order to make the best use of that limitation, it just seemed to make sense to take advantage of the toolkit’s ability to recognize how the marker is oriented. (It helps that Patrick is such a great programmer.)
Although our example is pretty simple, and the game mechanics are that of a child’s toy, I think the experience itself turns out to be pretty good one. I imagine that using the marker as the input device will probably catch on with other developers.
Hopefully we’ll be able to do some much more interesting AR for smart phones and other devices soon.
Game Credits:
- Me: Game Design, UI programming, Art Direction
- Patrick O’Shaughnessey: Game Programming (gameplay, 3D rendering, FB connect)
- Shaun Bingham: 2D art and layout
- Sam Pizzo: 2D art and layout
- Chris Leathers: 3D art and animation
- Tim Wagner: Sound design
- John Swords: Project management/production
- Adam Broitman: Sales and account management
TF2 “Meet the Spy” – Valve gives Pixar something to worry about
Supposedly leaked, but it’s a promotional video for a game that’s been out for a year. I doubt Valve will mind.
Tiny Nation racking up accolades
The ILL Clan’s latest series, Tiny Nation is on it’s way to the Oscars… we hope. 
I co-founded ILL Clan animation studio in 1998 along with Paul Marino, Manu Smith, and Frank Dellario. Frank is still at it, with Paul Jannicola, Kerria Seabrooke, and Tom Donelly. Tiny Nation is a machinima feat of strength (a.k.a. ‘tour de force.’ But why speak French when we don’t have to?)
It’s funny and subversive, and it looks great.
Looking forward to more great work from the ILL Clan.
Obama’s got $200M for Virtual Worlds
Ok, so it’s not specifically for Virtual Worlds, but the stimulus package does apparently include money for National Institute of Health grants that include scientific research involving virtual worlds…
from the NIH Challenge Grant website:
Funded projects would develop and implement virtual collaborative environments to facilitate biomedical and translational research, e.g. addressing issues of privacy, technology transfers and sharing resources.
There’s also talk of Facebook and Second Life style applications helping to “eliminate barriers to scientific collaboration.”
Fun with random TinyURLs
It’s not so easy to type random words into a search engine or web browser. So if you’re unemployed and looking for some random webpages you have to get creative.
But it’s easy to type random TinyURLs, since they are made up of random numbers and letters. I stumbled upon this recently when talking to a friend about TinyURL over IM, and typed an example. Just out of curiosity I clicked the resultant link to discover that the University of Greenwich is looking for an offshore hydrocarbon mapping engineer. http://tinyurl.com/376453
Who knew?
So I started typing in some more random TinyURLs and here’s what I found…
a viral app where you can add your own subtitles to a Bollywood movie clip
http://tinyurl.com/jk76o
Human beatboxer, Kid Beyond, demonstrating an Ableton sampler
http://tinyurl.com/9345g
a helpful list of “Jewish Motorcycle” related websites on google
http://tinyurl.com/8132q
An insightful (if somewhat bitter) comparison of The Matrix and Dark City, auto-translated from the original Spanish, complete with side-by-side images.
http://tinyurl.com/3yk87
some lovely (and slightly racy) pictures of Japanese fruit and nuts
http://tinyurl.com/896tv
I could go on and on (since I don’t have a job,) and TinyURLs are practically guaranteed to be good since it wouldn’t be a TinyURL unless it was awesome enough for someone to share it.
If you find anything interesting, post it to the comments.
My Mom the Gamer
My mother is 64 and has enjoyed playing games since I installed Tomb-Raider on her purple iMac in the late nineties. A few years later, when I got a GameCube, I gave her my old N64, and on a recent visit, I gave her the GameCube.
My Mom playing Resident Evil 4
She has an unusual relationship to her games that I thought I’d share here, which is best illustrated by some quotes:
Resident Evil 4:
- He saved a dog. But then those men tried to kill him, and he shot them. See those are their dead bodies.
- Oh, I didn’t know they were supposed to be zombies, I just thought they wanted to kill him.
- This is silly, why can’t he walk up that incline? It’s not that steep.
Tomb Raider – Legend:
- Oh, I’m so excited to have Lara back in my life!
- She was on the edge of a cliff, and she couldn’t reach the rope to swing across, so she kept falling and dieing.
Zelda Ocarina of Time:
- The little boy went in the whale’s mouth, but then he kept getting shocked by those damn jellyfish.
- He has to throw the bomb in the monsters mouth, but it’s too hard. You do it for me!
As you can see, she doesn’t relate to the game characters as herself, the way most gamers do. I asked her why, and she said, “Well, it’s not me. I don’t look like that.”
She also was just talking about games recently and said, “I think I know why I like those games so much. They put me in another world, like an alternate universe to escape to, and it’s a lot more fun than my boring life.”
Google News mistakes
Here’s a funny collection of what happens when you let a computer do your photo editing for you. I’ve collected these over the years as I’ve spotted them, and it seems that their algorithm has improved lately, so most of these are old but ironic nonetheless.
Move your mouse around the page to read my silly commentary, and feel free to add your own captions in the comments.
Enjoy.
Identity and teh Internets (part 2)
(back to part 1 of this article…)
Being a curmudgeon, I don’t always like it when people write on my Facebook wall, and I don’t feel the need for every person I’ve ever met to see my childhood photos. I also like to use Facebook for social networking with disparate groups of friends, family, business associates, and random folks I’ve met. With this in mind, I’ve spent some time figuring out how to adjust Facebook’s privacy settings to better suit my tastes.
These settings are all hidden to others, so by revealing my method I am partially defeating the purpose of my own system. But in the name of knowledge-sharing (and against my tin-foil hat-wearing nature) I will do so anyway. Read more
Identity and teh Internets (part 1)
(This is a repost from my ESC blog. I’m posting it here again because I’m going to write a second part on how to actually manage your Facebook identity.)
Who am I? Who are you? Who’s that guy?
Questions we are answering at all times throughout our lives. Whether we intend to or not.
I believe we are in a sort of “honeymoon phase” with social networking. Novelty has inspired generations to present themselves publicly to hundreds of observers at a time. Facebook and Facebook Connect present an interesting set of potential futures, some of which are explored in this slide show.
If a celebrity who has lost control of her identity becomes one thing in the public eye, yet that same person maintains a completely separate identity among her close-knit friends and family… then which identity is “real?” Read more
