Finally releasing some new music again. Hopefully it’s not another ten years between releases.
I was never a huge fan of using my real name as my artist name, so I’m taking this opportunity to change things, and I’m releasing this under the name Balatran.
Bandcamp
Soundcloud
https://soundcloud.com/roadsofbalatran
Spotify
A while ago I was looking at the client-side prediction page on Wikipedia and noticed that it said Duke Nukem 3D was the first game to do it. I thought that was pretty interesting because every other source I’d seen said QuakeWorld was first around a year later (the original release of Quake didn’t do prediction). John Carmack talked about the implementation in his Aug 16 1996 .plan:
Continue readingEvery now and then someone makes the argument that all really good games eventually do well, otherwise “if there are really good games that don’t sell, how come I never come across one?”
That argument is always refuted by the statement that of course you don’t come across games that are obscure, by definition. Which is itself then easy to refute by saying yeah, but surely you’d still come across one occasionally if you went looking.
Let’s go looking.
The manual for my cordless jug tells me I must switch off the power lever before lifting it from its cradle. It doesn’t tell me why. When I lift it off, the lever actually returns itself to zero automatically. What might happen if I do it “wrong”, how bad is it, and how likely? Some engineer knows somewhere.
When Aunt Magda comes to visit and decides to make tea, will she perform this step? Highly unlikely. I guess I’m supposed to tell everyone who uses the jug, or request they read the manual. Heaven forbid someone buys it second-hand without the manual, or just doesn’t read it. I’ve lifted it without switching the level off once or twice; if something terrible happened I didn’t notice.
I have no information to go on for how important this is, and it’s a theme I see everywhere. Information on use and maintenance in the manual provided is often overly strict and thorough – seemingly designed to remove all liability and responsibility from the maker, not to mention sometimes wrong or applying to some subtly different product.
We have a problem as a society with not explaining why, from teaching maths to superstition. This is just one symptom of that problem.
I want to talk about the Nokia N9 alarm clock application because it’s a really nice example of thoughtful, functional design – and because it’s only on the N9, so a lot of people won’t have seen it. There are more important things in life than getting excited about an alarm clock app, but it’s nice when simple things are done well.
I don’t know how many of these ideas are borrowed from previous apps (the N9 is contemporary with the iPhone 4S), but either way it’s implemented exceptionally well.
Some of my personal notes on Unity behaviour that you might not find in a basic FAQ but can nevertheless be useful to know. These are true as of Unity 4.5.
Ludum Dare is a freeform event where entrants try to complete a game from scratch solo within 48 hours. I made a little submarine dive game for Ludum Dare 29, which had the theme “Beneath The Surface”. It’s called 29 Leagues and it can be found here on the Ludum Dare website.
