Satori

Woohoo!!
Ubisoft showed off screenies of a sequel to Beyond Good and Evil. Hallelujah!

Posted by madsax at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The trailer for GreenScreen's first game, "Order Up!", developed by Supervillain Studios, is now online. Yay!

Posted by madsax at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm slowly going to use this blog to talk more about games and technology, and less about things like apple fritters. (Although admittedly, that was one of the most popular blog entries on the site!) While I was a consultant over the past year I did a lot of thinking about game technology, tools and pipelines. There are so many interesting tools out there that people are starting to use, and so few places where people are discussing them. I'm planning to be doing more with, and takling more about, innovative game development tools here in the future.

But for now, I just want to say: what a great time it is to be a game developer! There are a zillion possible platforms to work on and it seems like companies are popping out of the woodwork all over the place to encourage us to work on theirs. For example, there's the $100 million application development fund for the iPhone, the $10 million developer challenge for Android, and the rumored $150 million fund for the Blackberry. Wow!

Just recently I've been reading about Intel's Game Demo Contest, the Dobbs Challenge, the Make Something Unreal Contest, and don't forget the XNA DreamBuildPlay challenge!

Don't get me wrong, it's also the worst time to be a developer, since there are so many platforms to develop on. :-) But if you're working hard to break into the game industry, there are a lot of competitions that may help you get a leg up. Of course the biggest one each year is the Independent Games Festival, which I am a huge fan of (and judge for). I'm already looking forward to next year's contest!

Posted by madsax at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This makes me wish I had a Canon camera! The Canon hacker's development kit is a firmware upgrade for Canon cameras that gives you access to more of the camera's capabilities and lets you tweak the user interface to your heart's delight. There's a great article on it here on lifehacker. Check out the pics!

Posted by madsax at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been about ten months since I left Ubisoft and struck out on my own. Doing technology consulting work has been largely satisfying and educational. But for the past seven months I've been spending part of my time (and recently, all of my time) consulting with a great group of people at GreenScreen Interactive. It isn't often that someone forges a new videogames publisher, and the management at GreenScreen are an amazing team that I've really enjoyed working with. This week I've joined them officially as VP Technology, and I'm excited about the opportunity to grow and guide their technology direction.

You know me, I'm a jaded and bitter old man. ;-) I worked at Nintendo for five years, I worked at Sony for five years, I worked at Ubisoft for awhile, I ran Game Developer magazine for a year and created the Game Programming Gems book series (book 7 recently launched!)... I'm passionate about independent game development and making games easier to create so that they can be used for communication and education. I've worked with a lot of people in the game industry, many development studios and game publishers in a variety of different capacities. So it is with great joy that I've met this group of people who are working together as a strong TEAM, and that are dedicated to creating UNIQUE and FUN experiences - on whatever platforms are appropriate.

GreenScreen is based in New York, New York, but I'll be staying in San Francisco, California for the foreseeable future. So if you're visiting SF, be sure to drop me an email and come by the office!

Posted by madsax at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is one of the best icons ever. From the website "Wreck A Movie", which is a site to help connect people over the Internet to work together on films.

Posted by madsax at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wasn't living in the San Francisco Bay area during the days of the personal computing revolution, but I definitely had heard of The Computer Chronicles, a show which aired in the bay area and covered current events in the world of computing.

Thus it was with great delight that I stumbled across this gem earlier this morning. It's a youtube video of an episode of The Computer Chronicles featuring Steve Kitchen, Chris Crawford, Bill Budge, and Trip Hawkins. I love how the moderator goes on about the "amazing graphics", and Chris talks about how Excalibur is so huge - 66KB! Times have definitely changed but it's funny to see that we're all still talking about the same things. ;)

Unfortunately the embedding code for this video is blocked, so you'll have to click. Here it is:
The Computer Chronicles (1984)

Posted by madsax at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I love this robot abuse :)

Posted by madsax at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)