We've Migrated!

The new Wordpress site is live at http://www.applied-gaming.com. Hope you like it, because you're probably being redirected there now. Thank you, Blogger, for your years of competent service.

Robot Math Attack!

Last week I took a wonderful 5-day professional education course at MIT titled "Game Development for Software Engineers". After years of playing (and criticizing) video games, I figured it was finally time to get off the bench and see exactly how tough this game development stuff really is. For a while now I've been dabbling with the Unity Game Engine for data visualization and to learn some basic game programming, and the purpose of this course was to teach the kinds of agile software development, rapid prototyping, and playtesting practices that make it possible to develop complex game systems that interact with even more complex users.

What I've Been Playing

Summers here in New England are a frantic time, wherein we attempt to compress 12 months of outdoor fun into 3  months of nice weather. (And of course by "nice" I mean, "oscillating between frigid, torrential rain and humid, 100+ degree heat".) I've never been to Old England, but I can only assume the weather there resembles that of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, because anything less and the British colonials never would have chosen to stay on this side of the Atlantic.

Amidst all the running, hiking, traveling, camping, drinking, working, and occasional parenting, I've hardly had any time to write about video games. Nevertheless, I did manage to play video games, because for some mysterious reason there's always enough time for that. Here are a few of my favorites from this summer. You'll notice most of them are PC games—summer console releases are sparse even when these systems aren't gasping their last breaths, so unless you're interested in playing an atrocity like Smurfs 2, let's hope you dropped some cash on the Steam summer sale.

Let's Spend $100 on Kickstarter! (Part II)

Earlier this month, I decided that if I wanted to keep calling myself a "fan of indie games", it was finally time to join the cause and throw some money down on Kickstarter. Of the 100 bucks I promised to cough up, half went to the four projects I talked about in my last post. In case you're curious how they're doing, two got funded (Stonehearth and A.N.N.E), one is looking fairly troubled with about $40K and six days left to go (Clandestine: Anomaly) and one was outright cancelled (Ray's the Dead), though it sounds like the campaign was terminated because the devs struck a deal with a publisher.

But enough about the past... I've still got a crisp General Grant in my pocket, which left unoccupied is liable to be spent on exotic skin creams to deal with these terrible crows' feet I'm developing. (I'm kidding, of course—there's really no practical way to use paper money to buy anything on the World Wide Web.)

Anyway, here are the rest of the games I chose to fund...

Let's Spend $100 on Kickstarter! (Part I)

I'm sure nearly all of you have heard of the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, but since my grandmother reads this blog, please bear with me for a moment.

Dear G-Dawg: (yes, we actually call my grandmother "G-Dawg")

Kickstarter is an amazing website where individuals can directly fund an exciting new idea, instead of sitting around on their asses hoping someday a corporation or some mad billionaire decides it will be profitable enough. Think of it as a way of distributing a small amount of risk to a bunch of people, which means that there's actually still a way to create something in this shitty economy, even without the intervention of venture capitalists or big-market producers. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than pining for a sequel to your favorite cult classic that never ends up getting made.

Also, sorry I never call. Love, Your Grandson.

Unfortunately, despite Kickstarter's massive potential for nurturing innovation, for the most part I've been too lazy, cheap, or cowardly to fund any projects. (I did fund the Double Fine Adventure—recently announced as "Broken Age"—though one could hardly consider that a bold business venture.) Today, I finally decided to man up, vowing to find $100 of worthy video game projects to fund. Here's what I came up with.