Life long game developer
Hey you! I am sad that I didn’t come up with this. Wii Ware’s new must buy game in video form below:
Here’s the translation:
“To everyone who loves muscles…”
“MUSCLE MARCHING” (name of game)
“Hey you! You can’t just look can you??”
“Lets all hustle together with Wii Ware”
“Protein is our energy but a robber took it, wait wait wait!”
“This is nice! And nice body!”
“Today’s tears will become muscles tomorrow!”
There are more awesome quotes but that should be enough to hold any muscle lover over.
An iPhone application I recently worked on for a client has been released. It is called “Indicator Maniacs” and it has all the sauce needed to wet your otaku whistle. It’s basically a Star Trek “tricorder” that you run on your phone and it shows various meters and numbers. There are six indicators to choose from and the user can select three of them at a time, set their layout, and tint them to a variety of colors. I did all of the engineering.
The information website in Japanese is here.
You can check it out in English or Japanese on the iTunes store.
The indicator types are:
In the screen shot above you can see the digital clock, memory and microphone indicators.
If you are into really geeky stuff like this or use your iPhone in a dock as a clock be sure to give it a look.
I’ve been watching some of the NBA finals games via the NBA International League Pass. For about $40 you can get access to all the games of the playoffs and finals when living outside of the US. It’s convenient and works fairly well.
During halftime I was surprised to see the WoW logo.
It was kind of shocking to hear the announcer say the words “World of Warcraft.” That’s the first time I’ve seen a non-sports game being advertised in a sporting event. The game industry has come a long way.
I highly recommend checking out Windosill, an awesome interactive game experience by artist Patrick Smith aka Vectorpark.
The goal is to move the little toy car throughout an interactive environment. I wont say anything else about it because I don’t want to ruin it. The combination of artist work and the response to use touch just feels incredible. It really shows how enjoyable interactivity is the cross section of art and the code that drives the response to that touch and interactivity.
You can play the first half of the game for free. The full experience is $3.
For the past few hours I’ve been slamming my head against the wall trying to get these features working together: background playback of iPod audio, OpenAL playback of in-game events, and microphone recording. Microphone recording is not compatible with iPod audio and that is OK. When I enable the mic midway through program execution all I wanted to do was switch the session category and let the OS kill the music but it wasn’t working. I finally came up with a workaround and am writing this up for anyone else who runs into this issue.
Problem #1: don’t initialize OpenAL before initializing an audio session explicitly. If you do, iPod audio will be killed as OpenAL comes up. I couldn’t find any documentation on how this affects the session category.
To let the iPod continue to play you need to initialize an audio session and set the category to kAudioSessionCategory_UserInterfaceSoundEffects or kAudioSessionCategory_AmbientSound (info here). Make sure you do this first.
Problem #2: the OS will not let you change session categories if you first set your audio session – as above – and then start OpenAL. Why? I have no idea, the error code the API function returns is not a documented error.
I had to completely tear down OpenAL first and then call AudioSessionSetActive(false); to shutdown my initial audio session. Then I was able to change the category, restart the session, and finally restart OpenAL. Yes, this also means that I have to free all of my application’s sounds and reload them. This causes additional time the user has to wait for the sounds to reload. In the end it works but is not pretty.
The Japanese version of Get Dirk Drunk is nearly complete. Entitled “Hebereke-kun” – which translates to something like “piss drunk guy” – the software, art, and website is done. All that is left is to record his voice, which a Japanese friend of mine is going to do, and then submit it to the App Store. I recorded place holder voices for Hebereke-kun myself but a native speaker will do much better. See the website for Hebereke-kun here.
Thanks go to James Kay for localizing the art quickly. As usual he has done a bang up job.
I hope with the drinking culture over here that a salary man drinking game will catch fire! This guy has been playing the game too much:
