ScatteredGenius.com

If you are going to attend one industry event in 2008, this is the one. The GDC team has been working hard to create the most exciting and compelling conference yet. Most notably, we have adjusted the timing for the call for papers forward to ensure that we’re presenting you with the most up-to-date topics facing game developers today. You won’t be disappointed.

Fuck. It’s time to think. I hate thinking!

I was checking out this Boxhead 2Play Rooms game, it’s pretty derned awesome. The upgrade progression on the weapons is perfect, and it keeps you in the ownij. Very little slowdown, too. From what I can understand, it looks to be in AS2, so it’s really well done.

I dug in a bit to find the guys site. Turns out he’s been working in games for over 20 years, and has some cool examples. He’s worked on some of my favorite games like Magic Carpet, Gene Wars, and Powermonger.

© Sean Cooper 2007 - Flash Game Production

sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:

1. A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
2. A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.
3. If Flash isn’t installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you’ve designated as something you’d like “sIFRed”.
4. Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
5. Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits snugly inside the Flash movie.

Kind of want. I hate working with typography, and have no experience with it, but this sounds kinda cool. At first I couldn’t wrap my head around what they were doing, but it looks like they are rendering an embedded font within flash…

In an attempt to broaden the scope of MTA’s video art series, Pixelator takes video pieces currently on display and diffuses them into a pleasant array of 45 blinking, color-changing squares. Since the project is an anonymous collaboration, the resulting video is almost entirely unplanned and unanticipated, with the original artists helping to create new works of art without any knowledge of their participation.