Click Nothing

Trade Winds

Emeric Thoa, founder and Creative Director of French indie studio The Game Bakers, (and former editorial conception manager on Far Cry 2) put up a pretty interesting analysis of how the Apple App Store generates income for developers, and how the financials seem to work out for different kinds of games - including his own game, SQUIDS.

He references and links to post-mortems of a few other games, and aggregates a lot of data to draw some conclusions about the 'trade winds' that shape the economic propositions embedded in the App Store and by extension, how those economics impact game development for iOS.

It's not the industry I work in, but I thought the post was interesting and am linking to it here in order to make sure the information he has drawn together spreads as far as possible.

 

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part II

In the beginning, there was nothing

It's been a long time in coming, but I have finally put the finishing touches on the Click Nothing Tour 2009.

It's going to be a long and complex one, but it should be fun. One talk, seven cities, ten days.

The talk, as detailed in a previous post, is about changing notions of what immersion means in the context of social and cultural shift in the face of technological change and generational change.

The dates and locations, for those who might be intertested in attending, are as follows (though not all are open to the public):

Sunday, October 25th, 9:30 am
GameX Convention, Keynote
(details)

Monday, October 26th, 3:30 pm
ETC Carnegie Mellon

Wednesday, October 28th, 4:00 pm
MIT, GAMBIT Game Lab
(details)

Thursday, October 29th, 6:00 pm
NYU, New York
(details pending)

Monday, November 2nd
SCAD Savannah
(details pending)

Monday, November 3rd
SCAD and IGDA Atlanta
(details)

For a walkthrough of the tour, you can drop this into Google Earth. If you're on Dopplr, friend me and you'll see the specific dates I expect to be around in which towns. If you're on Facebook and/or Twitter, friend or follow me and you'll be able to keep tabs on my frequent updates.

Since I already gave an early version of the talk at Ubi, here in Montreal, the Twitter stream for the tour and its collected talks is live if you want to listen in on #CNTour09.

Hopefully, if you had any interest at all in listening to my demented ramblings, I will be coming to somewhere vaguely near where you live - drop by and see the talk and harrass me with questions that I won't be able to answer and then we have a drink and talk less seriously.

If I'm still not coming anywhere near you or if you have to go to your cousin's wedding on the night I am passing through your city - don't worry. I am currently in the process of building out video for many of my previous talks - including this one - and I hope that over the coming months you'll have access to this material in video format that you can watch in your underwear while eating ice cream, or on your iPhone on the bus - or both.

Hope to see you somewhere between here and 32 degrees North latitude.

(No, I don't have t-shirts, but I promise if I survive this and do it again next year, I will have some made.)

41 Days Down

So, after a doctor's appointment this morning, I have been cleared for a part-time return to work, starting tomorrow.

For the time being, I'll only be working four hour stretches, three days a week. That will leave me all the time I need for my physiotherapy, osteopathy, and acupuncture, along with swimming, cycling and whatever else I can squeeze in there that might speed my recovery - without overdoing it and injuring myself.

For those not already in-the-know, it's a herniated disk between L5 and S1, and the base of my lower back. The herniation was compressing the nerve down my left leg in classic fashion and limiting movement considerably. It was also extremely painful except when lying down, and much to my own disappointment, the prescription calls for stationary bed-rest... and they mean it for real (and they're right). I tried to resist it for the first couple weeks, but that proved itself pointless - so instead I basically got to sleep 12+ hours a day and play videogames the rest of the time. That actually turned out to be a big plus, because I missed so many of last years games, I thought I was never going to catch up. I got to play Fallout 3, Dead Space, EndWar, Bully, Left 4 Dead (with Tom and PY mostly),  Naruto, Chinatown Wars, and a lot of Drop7, and now my intimidating list of games-to-play is a lot shorter.

The other good news is that I was smart enough to take the 'opportunity' to change my eating habits so that I wouldn't gain 20 pounds while I was rendered immobile. Even without any exercise (aside from very light stretching in the last 3 weeks) I managed to lose almost 15 pounds simply by tracking my caloric intake versus my (non-existant) burn. For for any of you out there wishing you could lose 10 pounds - if I can do it with a hernitated disk, lying on the couch like a lard-ass all day every day for over a month - you can do it to. Even better - the positive messaging of today's post is not sponsored by Oprah or Wheaties or Weightwatchers or Tracey Anderson or anyone else other than good old fashion arithmetic. Calculate how much you need. Calculate how much you burn, add the two numbers, and count what you eat until you reach the sum and stop. So you know - it means that you have to either stop eating Doritos, Sour Cherry Blasters and One-Bite Brownies or you have a lot of fucking running to do - I chose the former option.

Alas, now the sick-leave that followed my vacation-within-a-vacation that came after my honeymoon that was embedded in my vacation that followed my world tour has come to an end.

Looking forward to getting back to work on that new game I can't talk about.

iTest

So this is just a test post. Now that I have myself set up on facebook and (should be) linking all my blog posts there, and now that I have the facebook app on my iPhone, I figured I'd see if the typepad app works. Also testing with a photo just to see if it works. I basically never put images in my posts - come to think of it, I am not even sure I know how. So this is also a picture- post test. Whether it works or not I don't imagine I'll be updating my blog from my phone very often as it is not the most pleasant way to type, and without copy/paste, i'm not sure how I would set up a link - or even if it's possible. Anyway - let's see what happens.

X-tra Powerful Stuff

So with the insanity of production in the past, I finally had the time and energy to start replacing all my obsolete hardware. For those who haven't recieved an email from me with the pleasantly lame default signature 'Sent from my iPhone' that Apple so humbly provides with every new device sold, I can report that I have given up my 5 year old 6GB Nomad Jukebox Zen, my horrid little Nokia phone and my Palm Tungsten C (which I had stopped using a couple years ago already) and replaced the whole mess with a new iPhone 3G, cheaper and superior to all of those things combined in all ways except one.

Having to have one *.wma copy of all my music to play through Windows Media Player and stream to my X360 and another *.aac format copy for my fucking iPhone is lame. Lame beyond belief. If Billy and Stevie would just stop fighting the world would be a much better place. Although, it looks like perhaps Steve is willing to make some compromises.

I also ditched my starting-to-fail Sony Cybershot DSC -V1 digital camera, which had served me very well for a lot of years in a lot of exotic places. I hardly ever bother to take 5 megapixel shots on it, as 3 megapixel shots always seemed just fine to me for viewing on a monitor or streamed to my X360. Consequently I was happy to get a new Fuji Finepix F100 for Christmas. It only shoots 6 megapixels instead of the now absurd standard of 10+ (something like 4x the resolution supported on a 1080p HDTV... wtf?). It also gives up some of the 'pro-sumer' features of the DSC-V1, but in exchange it is much smaller and lighter, and has a 6x optical zoom. The comparative bulk and the 4x optical zoom of the DSC-V1 (and the standard of most good hybrid cameras) were the drawbacks, and I am much, much happier to have a 6x zoom instead of 4 million more pixels I will never use.

To cap it all off, though, the real wonder purchase is what I am working on as I write this. After 4+ years of use, I am sad to report that my Dell Inspiron 700m is on its last legs. I have been watching for a good quality small (<13 inch) laptop to replace my Inspiron for over a year, but with that family of small laptops all but retired, I was getting a bit concerned. Finally, Dell has released the XPS M1330, which is not only about 10x more powerful than my 700m, it is also lighter, and well... just plain better. Sure it is about an inch wider and a half in deeper, but the form factor is nicer, the screen is bigger and its significantly lighter. Plus - though I haven't installed it yet - I am pretty sure I can run Far Cry 2 on this thing in mid-to-high configuration. The XPS machines we had in development were real beasts, but I've seen them get smaller and faster and better for a good couple years and am more than happy to be working on one now.