Scott McCloud wrote “Understanding Comics”, which I think qualifies him as a genius even if his actual comic book work isn’t stellar. I really liked Chris Crawford’s book “On Game Design”, and though I don’t think it’s as impressive as “Understanding Comics”, he also has a history of making some pretty important early games. I don’t think it’s that ridiculous a claim.
Totally worth reading.
Broken link? GI says the page doesn’t exist.
God, what a tedious read.
Hah, my bad, fixed the link.
‘You can now muck with the source code for EA’s Amiga hit DeluxePaint’:
Quite fun from the history perspective, and this is the link to get the code and see some rather old looking you tube clips (i’m pretty certain Deluxe Paint did not have 8 bit retro music while you used it!).
http://www.computerhistory.org/_static/atchm/electronic-arts-deluxepaint-early-source-code/
I guess it is technically 8bit music, but it seems to weird to call it that, as that conjures up images of crappy NES music.
I remember using Deluxe Paint – it was great. I loved the palette manipulation options, and was severely disappointed by how palettes and stuff worked in Photoshop when I first used that :/
To this day, I think Deluxe Paint is still the best drawing and editing pictures program for computers.
1- Photoshop is popular, but is a photo modification tool, and is bad for drawing. Photo manipulation is a enemy of picture modification. You don’t want to spread the palette of a draw, if the draw have 4 colors, you wan the result to still have 4 colors.
2- Macromedia Flash 4 is very good for drawing (once you set the free mode withouth snap to grid) and allow cloning, and OOP drawing, but to export to the outside world Flash render to pixels, so 1 pixel may end has 1.044 pixels, so pixel art get fucked in the ass with a hot iron bar.
3- If you are drawing using a board connected to a computer, by definition you are not drawing with a computer.
I have tried all other image editing tools, and I don’t know of a better tool than Deluxe Paint.
I hope somebody take that source code, and adapt it to PC, and compile a modern executable for PC. That would be glorious for the people that love drawing, … all 4 of us.
It’s not going to happen because the license under which the source code was released explicitely prohibits distribution of derived works. :(
Consider this. Consider what I’m about to tell you. And if you can relay this, because you’re probably going to put this in text, so you’re not going to effectively relay the energy you’re about feel from me, because you’re going to see me light up when I talk about this. I lost somewhere between $10-$15m on this game, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world, because you know what I got to do? I got to work with Syd Mead. We got to recreate the Sulaco. I got to play with Stan Winston’s original prop of the Alien queen. I got to f**king touch it and interact with it and use it. We got to rebuild Hadley’s Hope with Syd Mead’s direction, for all the rooms that were never built in the sets, all the rooms that were never shot on film. We got to do that.
Yeah, that’s great for him. He spent $15 million to get a grand tour of Alien props and talk to a bunch of Alien franchise people. I spent $50 on a turd that his company claims to have made.
Fuck him.
Isn’t that the interview where Randy still doesn’t man the fuck up and admit that the A:CM launch was a debacle, blames customers for being too precious about believing marketing he had no control over and provides weaselly responses to basically every question posed to him?
Yep, excellent interview showing what a stand up guy Randy is.
Duke Nukem Forever gets 6:1 positive fan mail. Lol, sure.
Like this:
Randy Pitchford: We were trying to do a great job, and we really committed ourselves, and yet the market judged it as harshly as it did, and we failed on that regard.
Eurogamer: But why? That’s what I want to know.
Randy Pitchford: Entertainment works that way. I don’t know!
Eurogamer: You were managing the project.
Randy Pitchford: How can I tell you why I like something and you don’t.
Eurogamer: No, that’s not what I mean.
How much of a weasel response can you give Randy?
Man, that’s not even a weasel answer, that’s just a straight up punt.
“Why didn’t people like it? Why does anybody like anything? What is entertainment? What is the purpose of any human endeavor?” smokebomb
You expected seppuku?
I don’t really care either way, but Randy Pitchford sure does a stellar job making sure people remember why they dislike him.
I got to play with Stan Winston’s original prop of the Alien queen. I got to f**king touch it and interact with it and use it.
NSFW tags please.
-Todd
If developers can’t look at a shit game they’ve made and say “that’s shit”, how can they learn from it and move on? Ergo, every game this guy is ever in-charge of in the future is going to be crap.
Has Pitchford always been like this or has he changed because of success? I don’t recall anything other than extreme gratitude from him and the Gearbox team when Borderlands was an unexpectedly massive hit, but I also didn’t follow closely.
Long-ass interview with Vogel on the indie games market. I missed his article last year about the indie bubble. (He also talks a lot about games journalism and the meaning of life, but who cares?)
God, there are so many fucking indie games.
And there are already so many more games that I know are good than I have time to play that I’m not sure they need more discovery. If people were discovering more good games and throwing them at me, I’d just be more stressed. 'Cause I don’t need to know more good games.
This is why I pick on you for the indie games thread, Zak. :) We need time-consuming curation from trusted voices, not more discovery.