Sorry. I’ll try and write happier things.
Archive for the 'Miscellany' Category
The Experimental Gameplay Project, a “make a game in seven days” thingamajig which begat the prototypes for World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe, has announced their theme for the month of August as “Bare Minimum.” So I decided to spend three days (it was done by then) making a game with the minimum possible resolution: one pixel.
Due to some technical limitations, such as the fact that one pixel is really hard to see, I magnified it by 600 times. With these extra 599 pixels of space, I decided to cheat and add some intro text, but all of the actual gameplay could theoretically be scaled down to a single pixel if you traded the mouse-based control for an analog stick.
I hope the game is relatively easy to figure out despite the limitations of the resolution. And because that was my goal, I’m not going to say anything else about it.
Hit the jump to play it, and to download the X11 Licensed source code:
Continue reading ‘Arpeggi – An Experimental Gameplay Project Game With 0D Graphics’
Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. The time of year when the entire economy of the city of Pittsburgh is sustained by about 3000 crazy people wearing tails. Once again, I will be one of them.
This, of course, will result in another musical video mashup that will draw the attention of lots of people and get an attempted takedown from YouTube by the Copyright Mafia. Like this one from last year:
I’ll hopefully be able to confuse the Content ID robots this time around, and perhaps have an even more clear-cut case of fair use, by mixing a few different songs together, altering some of their tempos and pitches at various points and resampling and inverting and slershkergerber. That’s totally a word. Shakespeare said it. In his sleep. Once.
Every day, I’ll attempt to do some kind of short writeup. It’ll probably amount to summarizing whatever I tweeted that day, though. If you’d like to keep track of my Anthrocon experience up-to-the-minute, just search for tweets from @XerxesQados tagged #AC09. Or click the link in the previous sentence if you’re lazy.
See you there, if you’re going, and reading this, and stuff.
I’ve received some skepticism, sometimes based on first-hand accounts, about my theory that pirates will donate to support you if you just ask and make it easy for them. It’s based on the idea that no, they actually won’t.
This strikes me as unlikely. No pirate, hell, no person has ever publicly stated that they don’t believe people who work so hard to entertain us should receive no money in return, and that they’d certainly give money to an artist they support. I don’t think this isn’t happening because all of those people are lying. I think it’s happening because of a lack of education.
The phenomenon of indie artists putting a big “donate” button on their site is a relatively new one. It’s a reflex for many people to buy a movie from Amazon or buy a game from Steam. Donation is a bit more disjointed and confusing, and not everyone knows where to go. If it was downloaded from The Pirate Bay, there’s even more disconnect from the creator’s website. That’s what my new For a Living project is looking to remedy.
Go to the project’s page to download a graphic that you can place in your movie, game, or other form of visual media. It’s like an FBI Warning, except not about how stuff is illegal and instead about how food costs money.
I’m not sure how the same could be applied to music. Podcasts have audible credits and copyright information, so it’s an easy translation. For a music album, doing this on every song would get annoying. Fortunately, a lot of other factors are making it much easier for indie musicians to benefit from file-sharing, so there’s not a lot to worry about.
