Despite popular belief invisible pink unicorns and amateur game developers are way more similar than most unicorns think. Sure, unicorns are horny all the time and they can run faster because they have two in the power of two legs. However your average unicorn is also a hardcore geek who appreciates binary as much as any of us. In fact the unicorns’ binary nature is what distinguishes them from the more conventional and, let us face it, boring mammals seen on the discovery channel. Think about it, unicorns would like to be pink but at the same time they are invisible, which sort of makes having an obsessive compulsive colour preference a rather pointless exercise in futility. Amateur game developers are exactly like that, apart from not been invisible or having an unhealthy fixation with the colour pink (in most cases).

In the past I published a number of source code files here. I never thought that anyone would complain about that. The fact I post buggy pieces of badly written C# in a website paid for from my unwanted cash pile doesn’t mean anybody out there has to actually use it. In fact most don’t – hardly anybody even reads what I write when it comes to that. Imagine then how surprised this particular dark overlord (me, I will destroy you) was when asked recently if he had a license to give away code for free! Apparently simply posting a source file in a public domain forum and saying “do whatever you fancy with this you kinky handsome bastard” is not enough for some people. There are laws and procedures to uphold. You can’t just go ahead and perform such despicable and extreme acts like being helpful to others nowadays; this constitutes antisocial behaviour. Bad overlord, go eat your dried frog pills now.

Summer time is mostly associated with relaxing at a holiday destination, enjoying the sun, drinking cold beverages and having to care about nothing. That was the original plan anyway. None of my plans ever works but hey, if you fail to plan you plan to fail with no style at all. At least this plan appeared to work for the first 24 hours. See I figured I would avoid the August “rush hour” and take my holidays early – mid June to July.

Games programming is a bit of a dark art. This is not because it is that terrible secret nobody is willing to share with you. When it comes to secrets it is quite the opposite really – game developers are one of the friendlier mobs out there; half the time they are telling you their secrets regardless of whether you want to hear them or not. No, secrets have nothing to do with it. Making games is a bit of a dark art cause of all the cheating like there is no tomorrow needed to make them. You see, you could do things properly, the same way you would for a scientific simulation, and your game would just about run on a huge mainframe with a couple thousand processors. Alternatively you could lie, deceive, evade and compromise ensuring your game would run fine on much more modest hardware.

Last weekend I attended a panel in the aforementioned comic convention in Athens (info here). It is something i sometimes do, and this panel had a special appeal. The subject, quite obviously, was: "Comics and videogames: from paper to cartridge and pc!". The discussion started from the question whether computer games can tell a story, and how story telling in that industry works, but also raised some interesting questions about game development.

Although Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology counts a few decades in the research labs, only the last five years has been used through consumer electronics introducing maybe the next videogame controller. In the last few years several new companies have started to make brain-computer interface (BCI) devices for gaming purposes.

i have rather recently come into possession of a laptop. the laptop as standard shipped with a 32bit version of win7. being a geek i have a natural hatred for things that are excessively user friendly and so went looking for an OS that catered for me. this was the perfect opportunity to install a linux distro as i wont be using the laptop for gaming.

Technology, marvellous and amazing, progressing at a furious pace – or maybe not. There is no shortage of new gadgets out there, or for that matter headlines about the new technological revolution – we get one of them every year. Yet is there anything really new? Placing a digital compass in a mobile device, like many phone manufacturers do these days, might sound innovative enough – it certainly widens the scope of possible applications. However the technology for making such components, or indeed devices with such capabilities, has been around for a while.

Earth, a small piece of debris with an almost circular orbit rotating around an otherwise unremarkable star. The inhabitants of this insignificant spherical world are called humans and they are a boring lot. The main interest of humans is finding ways of getting money, as much as they can possibly get without getting in trouble, so that they can use them to pay bills and buy junk. When they are not chasing money they are either wasting their time thinking of the act of reproduction (apparently some actually reproduce occasionally), or simply killing their brain cells with alcohol and television sets. The most significant achievement of the human race has been that of remodelling the environment surrounding it in such a way that possessing those exact traits is necessary for survival. As such if another intelligent life form was to emerge and/or if an alien race was to colonise the planet, then they would have to outperform humans in terms of money seeking and brain killing activities in order to avoid extinction. Not much chance of that happening when it comes to that. Earth possesses one of the most hostile environments in the galaxy - a stable, risk-free society, where free speech is allowed as long as it is politically correct. Enduring this climate and achieving nothing substantial day after day is a tough thing to do even for the native inhabitants of this forsaken place who have been practicing on wasting their lives religiously for years. The slightest hint of creativity or deviation from the standard behavioural pattern could (and often does) have catastrophic consequences. It comes to no surprise that many of the most intelligent, creative or otherwise non-conformist human samples often end up as outcasts, asylum inmates or suicide victims.

Now, I am not trying to start a console versus PC war, yet some civilised discussion on the topic could be constructive. Clearly there is a shift in favour of the console market, and has been for some time now. Hard not to notice really, the local store now hides PC titles (the small number that can be found there anyway) to the most inaccessible area of the store. Furthermore you get looks of disbelief when you approach them. Even more annoyingly, every time I buy one of those titles the local salesman tends to ask me if my machine spec is good enough. This is weird considering salesmen in general are normally there to sale things. How would that work if he made me change my mind? In any case, this is an important factor that could somehow explain the current trend.