News on Twitter

Valve Finally Porting to the Mac

This is good news.
It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.
The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, [...]

IF Project [Fall 09] – Getting Started

We will be starting the interactive fiction project on Wednesday (10/21) and there are several things you will need in order to get ready:

Read “Getting Started With Interactive Fiction“;
Bookmark this page: Interactive Fiction Shorts;
Play “Nine Points” at the above web page (and feel free to play any of the others linked there);
Download and install Inform [...]

IFs for Spring Are Online

Works of IF from the 2009 New Media Perspectives and Digital Narratives classes are available to play online.
Check them out here.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Pac-Man

The Pac-Man Dossier

Interactive Fiction Writing Month

Updated Links to the IF Projects!

I’ve updated the links to the interactive fiction projects. They are now at:
http://newmedia.hpiweb.com/play/
Make sure you update your links to your IF projects as the old ones will no longer work!!

Game Mechanics

An interesting post on game design by Danc at Lost Garden. Well worth reading, especially given our ongoing projectsL
I happen to fall into the artist-designer skill set, so I often find myself trying to prototype ideas on teams rich with programmers. As such, I’m always looking for better game development techniques that work well [...]

Trent Williamson’s Game Group

Sounds like a game group in operation.
A good brainstorm from the Williamson group.

Play the IF 1st Drafts Online

The 1st drafts of the IF projects are available to play online.
Check some of them out and blog about your impressions.

Updates to the Inform 7 Snippets

I’ve updated the snippets site with some new ones in these two areas:

Conversations

New stuff about asking, telling, and showing a character something.

Vehicles

Several new vehicle examples such as riding a horse, flying on a broom, and limiting where you can drive a vehicle.

Check ‘em out. There might be something useful for you.

IF Project – First Draft (Fall 08)

This coming Monday (October 27) is the due date for your first drafts of your IF pieces.

Email me (and Steve) the text of your source code plus your released work by the end of the day. (I’ll explain how to do this during Monday’s class.)
Also make sure you have posted your story and your plot [...]

Games, Aging, and Memory

Via Tiltfactor:
Washington, October 12 (ANI): San Francisco-based firm Posit Science has developed a set of five video games, together called InSight, to improve the mental acuity of older drivers.
Insurance provider Allstate sent the games to 100,000 drivers aged 50 to 75 in Pennsylvania last week, hoping that the pilot program will turn older drivers into [...]

Riding A Sea Horse

Jessica has asked an interesting question so here is a way to create some form of vehicle that the player can ride: like a horse, a tractor, or even a broom (key terms are in bold):
Include Rideable Vehicles by Graham Nelson.
The Ocean Edge is a room. “The ocean goes further on to the north.”
The sea [...]

Little Big Planet Delay

This is interesting, on the Little Bib Planet delay:
“During the review process prior to the release of LittleBigPlanet, it has been brought to our attention that one of the background music tracks licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two expressions that can be found in the Qur’an. We have taken [...]

Code regarding Vehicles (cars, etc.)

Had a couple requests to implement cars in IF. This uses an object called a “vehicle.”
Look at this code:
The Parking Lot is a room. “Main Street is to the north.”
The Maserati GranTurismo is a vehicle in the parking lot. The description is “Nice. This baby will hit 60 mph in 5.2 seconds and is capable [...]