Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Target Clearance Sale

Found Borderlands for $5 and Bioshock 2 for $15.

Some other pretty good bargains going for games right now too.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Boston Post Mortem - HTML5 and Akihabara

So the last Boston Post Mortem meet up event took place at the UK Trade and Investment office as part of the consulate.

The speakers for the event were Darren Torpey and Darius Kazemi, who discussed HTML5 game development, focusing on the open-source Akihabara framework but also covering other available HTML5 game engines and general advances in HTML5/Javascript.

Akihabara is a 2D (bitmap graphics) game engine based on the canvas tag, part of HTML5, a great platform for quick product prototyping, with very little knowledge of coding or web work to get simple stuff together and working.

Some information about the engine with tutorials can be found here.

Fantastic documentation about the engine can be found here.

The Boston Game James website has a copy of the presentation which includes a great list of links to the various demos and other engines, which you can find here.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Bath Time

Towels....okay, not the coolest things ever, but just came across the "Cuddledry"

It's £25 from Debenhams and found here.

It's a fluffy organic cotton towel that you can wear, to keep you dry and to easily wrap around your new born to make it much easier to have a good hold of them and dry them at the same time, just really simple yet awesome.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Boston Unity Group - Second Meet up

The second Boston Unity Group - BUG had the meeting last night, 31st August 2010, held at the really nice Microsoft NERD Centre in Cambridge, MA.

The presentation was given by the ever talented user of Unity, Yilmaz Kiymaz, who came from Turkey to give the talk. He talked about editor scripts and maximizing your Unity workflow.

For an artist, a lot of this was a little over my head as it was quite technical in nature, but the results spoke for themselves, lots of little tips and tricks for people to create scripts and custom editors that would help over come a lot of tedious and especially repetitious tasks, more so for when dealing with a group of artists on the same project.

The presentation can be viewed in 3 parts below, apologies for the low volume and slight gitters in the video, but you should be able to hear and see most of the info. It's a 40 min presentation and worth seeing.

Part 1 -



Part 2 -



Part 3 -



After the main presentation, a few of the folks in the crowd gave demos of their projects, not all of them were captured, but the ones that were are below -

Demo 1: This was about a set of server side art tools created to help make 3D platform style games.




Demo 2: This was given by Chris Allen, from Infrared5 showing off Brass Monkey, a controller SDK that allows a iphone/Android etc to control a web based or another iPhone/iPad type of game, very cool!



Demo 3: This was a soft body physics engine created by a MIT student doing his masters. Very cool looking physics plugin.



Demo 4: This was a weapons implementation engine, very simple and free, great for people creating FPS's.