USC IMD:

My friend's pre-order micro-financed artsy board game requires your attention! :)

I've never seen this done before. My friend Jim made (discovered?) a board game, and he's financing its publication through pre-orders via KickStarter.com.

If this works, it'll be a wake up call to all of us who've traditionally assumed we were shut out of professional creativity due to the complications of money. Plus, it's a great Christmas gift. :)

Also, the game's KickStarter site itself is full of interesting reading, and a fun video! Nicely done, Jim.

Check it out here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1883736289/the-gentlemen-of-the-south-sandwiche-islands

As if that weren't enough, Henry Jenkins posted about the game on his blog! http://www.henryjenkins.org/

-Bill

Eyez: Lingering Images trailer

"Eyez: Lingering Images" is a top-down action/puzzle game where you explore D's twisted soul. Use your right eye to traverse the borders of his shattered reality, and open your left eye to expel his nightmares. Eyez present spatial logic in gameplay like you've never seen before.

Mark Pincus of Zynga speaking at Web 2.0 summit

VS.

Phono Air Attacker 2D

So... this is what i come up with in a week for the 534 class...

The plane in the game is constantly pulling down by the gravity and your job is to pull it up by making sound to the microphone. The higher the sound intensity the higher the plane goes. However, you must be careful not to hit anything within the game. The six sided spinning polygons are your enemies, you must peak the sound input in order for the plane to produce a bullet which will kill them off. Orange polygon will move while blue are stationary. IF THE PLANE IS PRODUCING A BULLET EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A SOUND, PLEASE LOWER THE MICROPHONE SENSITIVITY FOR PROPER GAME PLAY.

BTW... if you found this game too difficult... press space bar to cheat... :P

Enjoy~ (hopefully) :)

======= CLICK HERE FOR THE GAME =======

Dynamic Pong (Jan 2007)

Dynamic Pong is a simple flash game which draws on similar logic as the game “Ink-Pen” in Window Vista. The game allows the user to change the rolling ball’s directions by ‘drawing’ dynamic barricades, meaning that the ball would bounce against the line drew by the player. Dynamic Pong essentially borrowed this idea to redesign the classic Pong game.

In the game, the user will first choose between a ‘free mode’ and a ‘game mode’, the ‘free mode’ is just a practicing playground for players to enjoy controlling a ball using self-drew lines. In the ‘game mode’, things get a little bit more interesting. The player must be able to keep the ball within the screen by blocking it with lines. However, only one continuous line can be drawn at a time and that it will self disappear within 3 seconds so that it is impossible to trap a ball by drawing a line around it. One new ball will be generated every 20 seconds to increase the difficulty of the game. The top and bottom borders would also move to left and right every 30 seconds.

BIGGER ~~~~~~~

Farming games originated in China

Venturebeat has a story of where all those Facebook farming games originated from.

When I was in Tomo's class before graduating, we came up with a mechanic based on stealing for a mobile and social media game concept, so I found the following quote particularly encouraging.

Some fear that this new social farming revolution may not contribute to the positive development of society. A central feature of social farm games in China is stealing vegetables. Official state media People’s Daily reports that 70 percent of users on Kaixin001 cite it as their favorite feature, and it has even spawned the popular phrase “How many vegetables have you stolen today?” This key addictive feature has created news stories of business executives “obsessed” with stealing vegetables and broken relationships over vegetables stolen on the night shift. The game is so addictive — with players setting alarm clocks at all hours of the night to check crops — that it  “destroys jobs and relationships.” Simplicity and stickiness are behind the global epidemic of farm games. Anyone can learn to grow crops within minutes and reap a reward for getting friends — or the entire office — addicted too,” said BloggerInsight Co-Founder Lucas Englehardt.

Another fun fact:
Season Xu, the co-founder of Five Minutes Inc. looks to be in the USC business School.

Watercooler

I don't think this requires any explanation...

534 assignment 3

The assignment was to explore a space. This is my interpretation of the assignment. Unfortunately, I wrote the USC piece in AS3 and the Turtle one in AS2, and merging the two was not feasible. So I couldn't really create the integrated piece that I wanted too.
Anyways here are the flash apps :)

Click the green buttons, and after the short clip click the screen to go back to the menu. (This flash app is pretty big, so it might take a bit to load.)

Happy USC flash

Use the arrow keys to navigate and space to shoot. Avoid all cats! My girlfriend Casey helped me make this.

Turtle Fun

Unfinished Swan gets copied

http://www.king.com/games/sponsored-games/darkness-the-cage/play/?language=en_US

Darkness: The Cage is a platformer using a similar mechanic to Unfinished Swan... it even acknowledges this in the beginning of the game.

IMD Forum for 10/28/09: Gonzalo Frasca

Speaker: Gonzalo Frasca, Co-Founder and CCO, Powerful Robot Games
Time: Wednesday, October 28, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: Play like you mean it! Videogames & Rhetoric

Please join us for a talk by Gonzalo Frasca, who is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Powerful Robot Games. His talk will describe a framework for understanding how play and games convey ideas through the use of rhetoric rather than rules.

Gonzalo Frasca is a game developer, researcher and entrepreneur, who lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. He co-founded the studio, Powerful Robot Games, in 2002 to build both commercial and experimental games. Their game for Cartoon Network reached over 13 million player accounts. They described it as "our biggest gaming success in our history".

One of their most popular indie projects is Newsgaming.com, a project mixing journalism with videogames. It received the Knight Foundation News Games Lifetime Achievement Award at the Games for Change 2009 conference.