Creative Collaborations - Afterthoughts
On Monday I spoke on the Bafta panel for Tiga about "Creative Collaborations". It was a pretty awesome and I met a lot of great people.
Our good friend, Jörg Tittel of Breakthru Films spoke about his history within the industry with an epic passion for the future of cross-industry collaborations, something we're very excited about considering we're involved with some exciting new projects ourselves, including one with Breakthru.
What was really apparent? The energy that each person brings to their field and how it seems so obvious that we should be working together. Learning and creating entirely new things where each person has a vested interested in making it the best they can. Everyone involved will win from it.
We want to publicly thank Tiga, Nesta and Bafta for their support and encourage creative companies within Europe and especially the UK to contact Tiga about getting involved with other creative industries — those guys have the hook-up and the know how to get things moving.
New Stuff Sunday: Easter Edition
Notes, notes and more notes. Notes pouring out of your eyes and ears, we hope so anyway. That's why we just took what you all said about notes and made the whole thing a lot better with the long awaited outbox and hidden notes views. Phew.
That's right, you can see it all right now. Just go and check out your notes, while you're there, send me and your friends something funny.
Plunderland is our new game!
Plunderland is one of the projects we've been keeping a little bit secret from all of you, but today we're announcing it for iPhone. Enjoy the teaser trailer, it's short and sweet.
Recognise that guitar riff at the end? More information coming soon.
EpicBattleCry - Podcast
There is this great gaming podcast I listen to every week from EpicBattleAxe, thought Id share it with you guys. Its funny and on the pulse of gaming news, honestly it cracks me up - If youre looking for something new to enjoy on a weekly basis, I strongly recommend it!
Why you should own Just Cause 2
There are a whole boat load of reasons why you should have Just Cause 2 spinning in your console tray, but this video should get things in perspective for someone who might not have seen or played the game yet.
There is a demo available for PS3, XBOX 360 and PC now. I recommend buying the full game, it's endlessly entertaining.
Creative Collaborations Event
I'll be talking at this Tiga event as part of the creative collaborations panel on April 12th in central London, UK. Tickets are £5 and open to the public, if you want to be there then visit the Bafta website for more details.
The focus of the talk is on collaborations between game, tv and film and how this will affect the future of these complimentary industries.
High Speed Chase 2.2.1 Update
Now available on the iPhone App Store is High Speed Chase 2.2.1, it fixes the issue of saving and retrieving save data from a fresh installation. New players will find these problems no longer occur and getting from the menu back into the game now is much simpler.
The update requires the 3.1.3 iPhone OS which is available free for all OS 3.0 owners. You can get the update by visiting the App Store on your iPod or iPhone right now!
Please note, this was a quick fix to alleviate issues that new players were experiencing, if you're not having troubles we recommend that you ignore this update unless you want to start the game again because your save will be lost.
The Great Space Sale!
You can now buy Johnny Two Shoes spaceman stickers worldwide from our new online shop powered by the wonderful folks over at Big Cartel.
We will use the money made from stickers to get new sticker designs made, so hopefully soon there will be a whole range. Get these before they're gone, once they're gone, that's it, we won't re-print the same stickers twice.
Cry Engine 3 Destruction
We have been blasting you guys with tech demos lately and you seem to be loving it, well, here's something new from Crytek, the guys behind the original Far Cry and Crysis games. Cry Engine 3.
Cry Engine 3 allows game designers to control pretty much everything and distribute it to all first-tier platforms at once (360, PS3 and PC). The biggest thing here for me is what they call "procedural damage" in that you can actually deform the shape of metal objects like cars.
On top of all that is real-time destruction, incredible ai and facial animation as well as the other boons of colour grading etc. But this is really about the destruction for us.
Deforming Environments
Continuing the trend of technology based gaming advances, an engine called Atomontage uses what's known as voxels to display graphics. Voxels are essentially vectors instead of polygons, I know this might confuse most of you so I thought it's just better to show a video and link to the appropriate Wikipedia articles.
In this video you can see the tyre tracks are actually pushing the sand around rather than just drawing a graphic or shader on top of it. There are some games that have done this using polygons and displacement maps or some other method but this is effectively altering the surface of the ground permanently and it doesn't affect things like the rocks.
Unlike the Unlimited Detail, this would require a monster graphics card.