June 10, 2009
Three examples of SPAM text that reads like free form poetry. The bold content is the subject, and the text below is the actual email contents…
…and gathered about two handfuls of flower
unconnected
In twenty years or more
‘N now he’s silent, he is dead.
acoustician
flu
And they went to sea in a Sieve
Did not fall into the little hand
appearing
Sleep in your little bed
The anger, we all have it
beseeches
And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute
Far and few, far and few
Alabama Holding
fast upon his shell
April 19, 2009
I recently began reconstructing my Mars game concept on the Garage Games Torque Game Engine. Here are a few screenshots of the results…
The idea is to make something that’s a hybrid of “Oregon Trail” (on Mars) with a small MMO-like environment.
April 16, 2009
I have deleted
the spam
that was in
the inbox
and which
you were probably
hoping
I would click
Forgive me
they were outrageous
so fleet
and so bold
March 4, 2009
A quick shout out that the Software Association of Oregon sponsored Corvallis Video Gaming SIG is meeting up this Thursday, March 5th at 5:00 PM. We get together every few weeks to discuss local game development projects and game theory, and socialize a bit.
This time we are meeting at the OSU New Media Communications Game Lab, which is located in Strand Agricultural Hall, room 400. Strand is between the MU and the Library, right off the bookstore parking lot. Basically, climb all the stairs to the fourth floor, then head to the north end of the building.
For more information on the group, see our Google Group page.
February 17, 2009
I’m doing a presentation at Oregon State Univesrity to Prof. Mike Bailey’s Capstone class on Serious Games. Here are the slides I’ll be using…
January 20, 2009
I’ll be handing these out in class, but here is a link to the assignment sheet for the first project. The basic goal is to design then create a small and tight game level that essentially makes sense. Makes sense as in it’s not just a random collection of “stuff” on an island. Note that levels will be limited to no more than 256×256 meters in size, and won’t have any AI, NPCs or other entities. The only exception is that the student may add one boat or one buggy. However the vehicle must make sense in the level. No buggy in the middle of a jungle clearing with no roads, or no boats with no place to land the boat and a reason to land the boat at that point.
January 12, 2009
I am teaching a Special Topics course at Oregon State University this term. It is a 4 credit hour Special Topics course that will cover some of the basics of game design and development via FarCry modding.
A course overview is online at http://perludus.com/wordpress/?page_id=555
Students, keep an eye out for additional posts on the site for course updates, handy reading material and so forth.
January 4, 2009
I was recently going through some old file archives, and discovered a complete copy of a website I started in 1993 to host information on OSU Oceanography’s research ship R/V Wecoma. It ran on a Solaris box on my desk at Oregon State University and used the NCSA HTTPd server. Think pre-Linux, pre-Apache, pre-PHP and pre-Perl. Think when Yahoo’s address was at Stanford and hosted on Akebono. read more »
December 15, 2008
Great conference. Was pretty nice to sit in a small room and hear the likes of Raph Koster, Richard Bartle, Brian “Psychochild” Green, Randy Farmer and Ian Bogost. Lots of interesting talks from the practical to the, “Woah you people are OUT there!” My own short bit about spontaneous collaborative play in shooter games was I think a bit different than some - far more about a game-game as opposed to Second Life.
read more »
November 29, 2008
I’m traveling to Atlanta tomorrow to attend the Living Game Worlds conference at Georgia Tech. I’m on a panel on Tuesday to talk about Collaboration in Virtual Worlds and Games. I thought rather than get all academicky I’d talk about the kind of collaborative fun behavior I’ve seen in Day of Defeat, a FPS shooter multiplayer game I helped develop with Valve.
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