Thursday, December 2, 2010
Over at RocketHands HQ I’ve just released RubyOgmo, a small library for loading levels created in the most awesome OGMO Editor. And just to prove it all works, I included a level preview, written in RubyGame. Full details here: http://rockethands.com/ruby-ogmo
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Another week, another RocketHands prototype. More info, including video, here: http://rockethands.com/monster-stomp
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
I’ve fallen off the wagon when it comes to blogging, it seems. Just a quick update to point you in the direction of my Professor Lazybones post on the RocketHands blog. We’re prototyping a bunch of new game ideas, and I’d love to know what you think about this one. Thanks!
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Please, EA, please stop spamming my email account! Yes, I know that I signed up to receive updates about Spore. Amazingly, I did that on Friday the 20th of May 2005. Was it really that long ago? It took almost three years for you to send me the first email about Spore. Since then, I’ve [...]
Monday, September 20, 2010
Apart from text adventures, I love point-and-click adventure games (of the Monkey Island ilk), and the more modern Japanese interpretations of this genre (such as Hotel Dusk and Another Code). These latter games tend to be more focused on telling a story, and the interface offered to the player is subsequently stripped down (with less [...]
Friday, September 17, 2010
I really love text adventure games. I’ve always had a fascination with natural language processing (my postgrad research was about computational grammatical inference after all), so part of the fun was figuring out how the parser works, and applying that knowledge to write my own text adventures in BASIC on the C64. These days there [...]
Monday, September 13, 2010
My three favourite games of all time are Exile, The Sentinel and Zarch. Zarch is the name of a game on the Acorn Archimedes; I played the Amiga port, which was called Virus. In fact, Zarch itself was a full-fledged version of an Archimedes demo called Lander. David Braben (yes, he who, along with Ian [...]
Friday, September 10, 2010
My three favourite games of all time are Exile, The Sentinel and Zarch. Exile is an “arcade adventure” (a now defunct term; these days you’d call it an “exploration platformer”) that features realistic physics and AI, and which has a large map that was mostly procedurally generated (but then touched-up by hand). How could I [...]
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
My three favourite games of all time are Exile, The Sentinel and Zarch. The Sentinel is an extremely weird game, but I loved it from the moment I bought the Commodore 64 version at KMart in 1987. I went on to love the Amiga version even more. It was conceived and written by Geoff Crammond, [...]
Research can be speculative or applied. Artificial Intelligence research is often both, trying to solve real-world problems while at the same time testing theories about how the human brain works. A branch of the AI research crowd are interested in games both as a testbed for theoretical work and as a market for applied AI. [...]