Blog Archives

Lifestream

Game Engines at GDC 2010

A little over a year ago, I conducted a survey of senior technology- and production-focused game developers, asking them their thoughts about game engines. The results were published on Gamasutra in March 2009, in two large articles, one covering the general results and the other touching on the technology-specific results.
Since that time I’ve been thinking [...]

Childhood Memories and Videogames

Over the Thanksgiving holiday last November, my girlfriend and I drove up to Seattle. Usually we would fly, since it is a bit of distance, but we were curious to explore Portland so figured we’d make an adventure out of the trip. We drove from San Francisco to Ashland, Oregon on our first leg, which [...]

Happy soldiers in Afghanistan

My good friend Alison Kelly co-ordinated sending a bunch of games over to her friend who is a U.S. soldier currently stationed in Afghanistan. She sent me this picture, which I had to share. They look pretty happy… I guess they are Xbox360 fans.

Real-time Flight Control

Have you been enjoying playing the iPhone game Flight Control? It’s a game where you have to route planes and helicopters to land on a set of runways, keeping the aircraft from hitting each other as slowly more and more aircrafts come on the screen. Here’s a sample screenshot. It’s great fun!

Now check out this [...]

Middleware Library Survey

I’ve been conducting a middleware library survey for any game developers who are currently using middleware in their projects. As with the previous game engine surveys, this one is also largely focused on the core games audience, so the middleware discussed in the survey tends to focus on middleware for those types of titles. (Please [...]

On game middleware libraries

A few months ago I did a survey on game engine middleware, posting the results up to gamasutra, Game Developer magazine, and this blog. Now I’m digging a bit more into component middleware libraries. In trolling around the net, I came across this fantastic site, gamemiddleware.org. It’s just a great list of the engines, libraries, [...]

Google’s O3D for interactive browser 3D

I’ve been keeping a close eye on O3D, a project at Google that seems well-targeted for game development (and quite a few other things). Unfortunately, I blew registering for the Google I/O conference in time, so missed the handful of 3D- and game-related talks they had there. However, I found a few interesting O3D-related videos [...]

Pondering

Howdy!
I’m still alive. I swear! That nasty flu took me out for a little over two weeks, but I’m finally back up to full speed.
I haven’t been posting here much lately, largely because I keep intending to get around to flushing this blog and installing WordPress. I’ve been messing around with WordPress on the IGDA-SF [...]

GDC Recoup

GDC was crazy this year. Although many people – myself among them – thought that GDC would be a bit down in attendance, it sure didn’t appear that way. Everywhere I went was total chaos. I’ve never, ever seen a line for a keynote at Moscone like the one for Iwata’s speech. If my personal [...]

The Engine Survey: Technology results

Recently I surveyed a large group of industry executives, seeking information on their thoughts and perceptions of game engine middleware. Last week I shared the general results of that survey with you; this week we’ll talk about some of the technology-related results.
The survey was split into two sections, one for production-oriented folks, and one for [...]