Stray Dog Strut

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been slaving away day and night to try and finish my dissertation prototype for Uni. I’m seriously running out of time now. I also have to do some work for our Wolf project that i’d promised by tomorrow. I’m really feeling burn’t out at the moment, i’ve spent the last hour or so just web-surfing to take my mind off things.

Coursework aside, i’ve been helping out at the Rix Centre, based on my campus. It’s a charity that looks at the use of new media technologies to help people with learning disability. I’ve been working with a group of young people with autism to build simple ‘transition’ websites for people with learning disabilities who are transitioning from school to adult life. It’s been a really fun and rewarding experience and it’s made me consider social care as something I might want to go in to very soon.

Things are also rolling along with the captioning. I had a telephone interview with the ITFC, who do subtitles for tv channels like ITV and Five, as well as digital providers like Virgin Media. I didn’t think it went that well, but they’ve invited me for a face-to-face interview in mid-April so i’ll see how that goes.

Yes, neither career choice is related to the games design degree i’m doing! I’ve said before how burnt out the course has made me feel, and that hasn’t changed. My enthusiasm for games is still there, but these days i’m lucky if I have time to play anything, much less blog about them. I also can’t see myself getting into the industry when I finish Uni in May, or if I even want to. The Indie route is very attractive as a long-term plan really.

Talking of Indie games, i’m eagerly awaiting the release of a few at the moment. Boryokudan Rue is a very nice looking sci-fi adventure game in a film-noir style. I really want to get into adventure games, i’ve developed a keen interest in them since we designed an adventure game for the Nintendo DS in my first year, and i’m still playing my way through Broken Sword and Syberia.

Sleep is Death is another one i’m looking forward to. It’s a two player game where one player plays while the other one creates the game assets on the fly. Between them they evolve the story. It’s like an interactive story telling device. I wasn’t sure the idea would work until I read a play through recently. You can pre-order right now at a discounted $9 for release on April 9th, or wait until April 16th and pay the full price of $14. This will be my early birthday present to myself.

Frozen Synapse is another game i’m watching. It bears more than a passing similarity to the kind of mechanics I described in my pitch for a game for India last month, but whereas that was a realtime 2D shooter, this is much more tactical, riding the currently popular wave of ‘set it up and watch it play out’ style like that found in Steambirds and Flotilla etc.

I’m watching a large handful more but i’ll write more about them when I have more energy. The Indie scene is a really exciting place i’m finding, and i’m discovering new gems every day. I want to make reviewing games a regular thing around here when I finally finish the new site theme, and other sections for my own projects and writings too. It’ll have to wait for now though since i’ve got so much to do.

Hi Ho!

I’ve finally done it, been sucked into the evil that is Facebook. It crept up so silently too with an innocent little thought: “why not join Facebook to reach a wider audience for my dissertation?” and before you know it I was at the FB homepage giving away my life story.

Okay, bit of an exaggeration but I have to say my I wasn’t surprised at how much information FB tries to pry from you. First I had to give my name, a username and email. Okay, not so bad, that’s already out there on countless sites anyway (many of which I can’t even remember).

Then the worry started. It spewed out a list of possible friends, lots that i’d known years before. Where does this list come from? It hadn’t data-mined my email contacts afaik since that request came next (and I promptly refused) so i’m not altogether sure. Fallingstar reckons it might be other people have tried to find me in the past, but considering some of them were only a minor acquaintance that’s a bit dubious (and i’m not that likeable!!)

Then it wanted me to complete my profile – not just an ‘about me’ and an ‘interests’ blurb, oh no, it wanted every school/college or occupation i’ve ever held (and in horror i’ve since discovered many of my relations have divulged the lot). Needless to say I only gave out the minimum necessary.

I added a couple of friends – Fallingstar at her own insistence, damn (j/k) – then I did my usual and pulled up the settings page to see what was what. For starters, FB allows you to restrict access to certain parts of your profile etc to certain groups of people,’friends only’ and ‘everyone’ for example. More worryingly, there’s also a ‘friends of friends’ category which, to me, seems to imply that a bunch of randoms will see my information unless I turn it off. Oh and most of the options are set to this choice so if you’re not aware you’ll be splurged all over FB before you know it. Okay, I get that the idea is to build a community and it’s a simple way of broadening people’s contacts, but why do it in this way? Why not let people themselves decide to share their information with strangers (interestingly, there’s no ‘share with no-one’ option either).

I also discovered another option which, unless you turn it off, means that when your friends play a game or run a FB application, that software can mine your information too for reasons such as to suggest sending a birthday card if your birthday is coming up (and some not so nice reasons also come to mind).

So yeah, i’ve joined the dark side. I know, I know, it’s probably not as bad as I think. I’m a paranoid old fool, but in this day and age with identity theft as prevalent (and easy) as it is, we have to be careful. It all comes down to the question of whether I trust the intentions of my fellow (wo)man. Do I hell.

P.S. On a positive note, i’ve also joined Twitter (yay!), so now I can follow much more interesting ppl than little ol’ me, like Stephen Fry. I might consider putting a twitter badge up here, but only if I find myself tweeting often, otherwise i’m probably not worth following;-)

Best laid plans and all that..well, the project has started: I’m almost halfway through development of one of the first games, and in just over 2 hours, so a good start. But the aforementioned trip home is looming so i’ll have to put it on hold for now.

I’ll use the break to focus on my dissertation, which sorely needs attention, and possibly make paper prototypes of a couple of the games.

In other news, I recently picked up the complete Death Note anime series for a respectable £35, so i’ll be watching that with Fallingstar in Scotland. I’ve also been chilling out to the Cowboy Bebop O.S.T. 1 album that I also bought recently, but more detailed discussion on that later.

Have a good week everyone.