I was at Game Camp 08 on Saturday. It was held in Sony’s 3Rooms building near Shoreditch which is amazing. Imagine your dream flat, but full of rather more PS3s and PSPs than you could ever need. That said, the Sony branding wasn’t actually overpowering, and the venue was a very good choice.
The day was held in the style of a barcamp, with sessions run by participants. There were sessions on ‘How to play Doerak, a semi-russian card game’, ‘ARGs, are they f****d’?', ‘Playing SLorpedo (mixed reality naval warfare in Second Life)’, and many many more.
Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian organised the event and has since written up a conclusion as well as a quick review of one of the busiest sessions, Matt Biddulph on ‘hacking game controllers with Arduino’.
Three different physics games I’ve been enjoying recently. You might like them too.
1 - Toribash (Mac, Windows) is my favourite fighting game ever. The physics, rendering and tense multiplayer action make it an instant addiction.
2 - Crayon Physics (Windows) is the freeware prototype of something which went on to become the eagerly awaited Crayon Physics Deluxe (the one shown in the video below).
3 - Phun (Windows and Linux) is a fun 2D physics playground. Experiment with gravity, friction, springs, motors, and more. It looks a bit like this
It seems to be inspired by the MIT Magic Paper demo (shown in the video below).
It’s actually two things in one: a flashy-spinny-phone-charm-thing and a web-pet-tamagotchi-puzzle thing.
The ‘MoPod‘ mobile phone charms are conveniently available from Michael Smith’s other company, Firebox. Let’s start there, since it’s currently (at least, while it’s in beta) the only way to get into the more fun part of the project, owning a pet monster.
For a fiver you can have a MoPod for your mobile phone (MoPods are big in Japan, apparently). Here’s a short video of my phone ringing (well, vibrating, but you know what I mean) and my MoPod (a ‘Zommer’ monster) spinning and flashing like a mad thing.
Inside the packaging is a secret code allowing you to adopt a monster, which involves picking, personalising and naming it. Meet my first monster, Fred.
In order to decorate Fred’s room, I first had to earn some ‘rox’, the in-game currency. To do that, solved some puzzles. And here, at the heart of Moshi Monsters, and the thing that will keep me coming back to this day after day, is the daily puzzle challenge. Even more engaging than the cute graphics and animations (though these are lovely) and much fun than decorating my room, is the daily one minute dose of quick-fire puzzles. These are great, and appeal to me in the same way that Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training does.
[click for bigger]
Moshi Monsters is still in beta, and there are a few as-yet unimplemented features, hinted at in the interface. A ‘Friends Tree’, a pinboard and some sort of news computer are all marked as “coming soon”. The friends tree in particular could be exciting. I already want my monster to be able to hang out (somehow) with Michael’s, Jo’s, Melissa’s and Ian’s, and so I’m looking forward to seeing how Moshi Monsters handles social interactions. I wonder if it will be anything like Animal Crossing, which - despite being aimed at kids - allows users to connect to each others spaces and visit each other.
I’d also quite like to see detailed stats of my history with the puzzles. I firmly expect that my monster will get annoyed (and ill?) if I neglect him, but I’d also like to be able to see how my score on the daily puzzle challenge changes over time. Maybe this isn’t part of the plan, but I’d like it to be.
Moshi Monsters is looking great. It’s still a beta, and it seems things are still being developed. Even in these early stages, I’m already hooked and I look forward to seeing what happens as things like the friends tree, news computer and additional shops get added.
Tangible interfaces strike again. Not content with playing music with a yo-yo, I’ve knocked up a first pass at an augmented reality game of pong on a whiteboard.
Here, I play pong with two whiteboard erasers. On a whiteboard. A camera watches the scene and a quick hacky Processing app (via reacTIVision and some OSC messages) bounces a ball around. For the full effect, a projector will render the virtual ball right there on your desk. Or you could play it on the surface of a flat-panel monitor I guess.
The nice thing about working with whiteboards: it’s fun to change the version number when v0.2 is done.
Also worth mentioning: I mentioned on Flickr that “now I just need a projector” and within minutes my brainy friend Dave came round to my office with a spare one for me to borrow. The joy of declarative living!
Uh-oh. A new addiction. Perplex City, created by Mind Candy, is a puzzle game which also happens to be an Alternate Reality Game. Season 1 ended when The Cube was found, but season 2 cards are now available and I’m already hooked. My profile page shows the gradually growing list of puzzle cards I’ve solved.
Dan and Lisa from Mind Candy actually popped into Hursley the other day, and it was really good to spend a few hours catching up. They were impressively tight-lipped about Season 2, but in addition to the puzzles I have a feeling that the storyline for season 2 might well draw me in too.
Imagine a world which you cant walk around in, but you can interact with via websites, phone numbers, text messages, faxes, and occasionally even bleeds into this world with live events. Season 1 had some fun ‘rabbit holes’ (including the answer to one of the easier cards being a phone number which, when rung, was the answerphone for the character Violet, who gave the URL for her blog).
I have yet got in to PerplexCityTrades (which seems to be the state of the art of trading sites at the moment). If you’re interested in swapping cards here’s my list of spares. Nick (now similarly hooked) maintains such a list too.
I don’t own a Wii (yet) but I bought a Wiimote last week.
Inspired by Yann Seznec’s Wii Loop Machine (which is based on the aka.wiimote Max/MSP object by Masayuki Akamatsu) and Bob Somer’s drum machine, I soon discovered that the Wiimote is compatible with an impressive list of known Bluetooth devices. For Mac users, there’s Darwiin Remote. Windows users may want to check out GlovePIE (along with growing lists of scripts and hacks). GlovePIE seems to be able to map a dazzling variety of inputs to a variety of inputs, including keypresses, mouse pointer, virtual joysticks, as well as both MIDI and OSC. OSC being the sort of handy-dandy glue that lets you get the data into vvvv, Max/MSP, Chuck or whatever else you want.
I’m still playing around with this stuff. Nothing really exciting to show yet, but using the Wiimote to control everything from existing games to Front Row as well as musical or VJ performances makes me a happy hacker.
What else is going on at the moment? Well, the Wii interface for Second Life sounds interesting (especially once making “avatar navigation a gestural function” is implemented), while Pat Glynn’s Half Life 2 Wiimote mod might be the thing that finally makes me buy HL2.
Google for “Suw” and you get Suw (Chocolate and Vodka) Charman. Google for “Matt” and you get Matthew (Photo Matt) Mullenweg. This way of finding people is definitely way more convenient than URLs.
It got me wondering about “Roo”, and when I checked I was pleasantly surprised to find myself lurking in the top 10 - currently 8th on .com and 6th on .co.uk.
But at number 4 (and the thing that made me smile enough to want to post this otherwise slightly narcissistic nonsense) is a lovely snippet from Wikipedia…
“Roo constantly gets in trouble but he always learns his lesson.” … “Roo is too young to know how to read or write…”. Yeah, sounds about right. Thanks internets.
The it was nice to catch up with the incomporable Kybernetikos over the Christmas holiday, and even nicer that we each introduced the other to a new game. I showed him EVE (and we spent a couple of hours ratting together) and he introduced me to Armadillo Run. It’s brilliant. A sick cross between The Incredible Machine and Bridge Builder, Armadillo Run lets you create whacky Rube Goldberg contraptions, and solve each level in your own unique way.
There’s a free demo, but it was one of those instant decisions to pay a tenner for the full game. I’m completely hooked, and have been downloading additional community-created levels (the “Armadillo, Natures Finest” set by Sam Howels is brilliant) and since materials cost varying amounts of money, vying with other players across the interweb for a cheaper solution is fun.
I’ve been getting to grips with EVE Online recently. It’s the first MMORPG I’ve really enjoyed. Mark Wallace, who played a big part in getting me interested in the first place, has been very kind in getting me up to speed in EVE and introducing me to his corporation.
I like so much about EVE. For one thing, it’s incredibly beautiful…
EVE is yet another thing of beauty come come out of Reykjavik, and has some lovely Icelandic music on the in-game jukebox, all created by the talented RealX. Remember how Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ was used in Homeworld? Imagine that sort of perfection, but with more of an ambient electronic thing going on.
So far I’ve mainly been doing a few courrier jobs for people, trading, trading and collecting bounty on Non Player Character pirates (or ‘ratting’). I tried mining, but got very bored with that very quickly. Fortunately, there are so many other things to do, including things I’ve barely even tried yet such as research and manufacturing, getting involved in a corporation, and assasinating wanted players.
I upgraded my Frigate (which you see in the screenshots above) to a Cruiser, but got a bit too brave in the more dangerous areas of space and ended up being killed (twice) over a frustrating weekend. Even worse, the second time I had stupidly forgotten to insure my ship, so was left very badly out of pocket. Ah well. A learning experience, and there are so many ways to earn money that I can be back in a more beefy ship again in no time.
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I was at Game Camp 08 on Saturday. It was held in Sony’s 3Rooms building near Shoreditch which is amazing. Imagine your dream flat, but full of rather more PS3s and PSPs than you could ever need. That said, the Sony branding wasn’t actually overpowering, and the venue was a very good choice.
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