What makes a good Party? (of the geeky kind)

Spoiler Alert: Probably not safe if you care about the character development in Dragon Age: Origins and, to a smaller degree, in Chrono Trigger. Although, to be fair, the whole point of the article is that you shouldn’t care.

Bow in hand, my super hot archer-chick was standing there, looking at her adventuring party. A mix of races, classes and personalities. These weren’t just any characters, these were the dudes and girls that had stood by her as she kicked butts across all corners of a an entire continent. Her friends, her allies. And I could not care less about most of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Only in Europe: theme park cast

A recent 4-month stay in Barcelona has made me think a lot about designing for different markets. Different cultures demand different designs and it is not rare to find that some things are done completely different in Europe than in America. However, even though designs are different, they each make perfect sense for the culture they were designed for.

A place where a lot of these cultural differences become evident are theme parks. I knew from a visit to Disneyland Paris some years back that European theme parks were not the same as American ones - and I commented that to my friends on our way to Port Aventura, which is about an hour drive from Barcelona.

Some of the things that stand out the most. You’re not supposed to smoke in most of the park’s spaces, though everyone still does and nobody cares. They sell beer to guests and don’t ask for ID if you look like you’re old enough. Staff is extremely relaxed and not too concerned with everyone staying properly in line or standing exactly where they should.

Oh, and the Cookie Monster does not hesitate to pose with a beer glass.

Cookie Monster shares a drink with my friends.

Balli Plastici presenting Feb 26th @ Italian Cultural Institute in Washington, DC

Balli Plastici will be presented in Washington DC at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura this coming Friday, February 26th, as part of the Fortunato Depero 50 exhibit.

The project was originally presented at the Museum of Art and Design in New York as part of the Performa 09 festival and has since obtained positive reviews from New York Magazine and the Art in America magazine.

You can learn more about the software we created and used to craft the performance here. You can learn more about the semester-long project here.

Be sure to check it out if you’re in the DC area!

Balli Plastici featured in Art In America

My project from last semester, Depero Futuristi, got featured in the Art In America magazine. The review is very positive and highlights our demonstration of the software we developed as the high point of our presentation in New York. Check it out!

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iPhone development: fighting for more downloads per day

Today I attended the introduction class to a week-long seminar on iPhone development (one year and half too late, probably) which will be in charge of several representatives of Mobivery, a Barcelona-based mobile content development company which currently has 190 applications in the Apple App Store.

Besides from a very informative fly-through of the whole process of getting an app into the App Store - starting with “you need a Mac” and going all the way to “you can choose from different pricing tiers” - the representative presented us with some data from different case studies taken directly from the apps they have developed and put up for sale or download. Read the rest of this entry »

Story time with five Disney Legends

The Disney Legends

The IAAPA Attractions Expo held many surprises for me, but none as gratifying and mind-bogglingly amazing as a panel session very aptly titled “Disney Legends: working with Walt”.

The Disney Legends themselves were Marty Sklar (story man), Blaine Gibson (artist), Bob Gurr (mechanical wizard), Richard Sherman (composer) and Harrison “Buzz” Price (numbers man), all sitting side by side and brilliantly moderated by Bob Rogers.

The whole point of the session was for them to share their stories about working with Walt Disney (as in the man, not the company), though of course we were all hoping for them to deviate a little bit into sideplots in order to get the best stories that these men could tell. All of them having helped build what Disney is today, it wasn’t surprising to find them all to be brilliant storytellers and effortless entertainers. Read the rest of this entry »

About designing for thumb sticks

Daniel Nelson, programmer at Neversoft Entertainment, has this to say about the thumb sticks on console controllers:

Few controllers report zero magnitude at their rest position. Each controller reports a different magnitude at rest, and the same controller will report different magnitudes each time it returns to rest. Additionally, different controllers report different maximum magnitudes when pressed fully in a direction, and the same controller will report different maximum magnitudes when pressed in different directions.

He goes on mentioning how you can mitigate this issue by implementing dead zones, but I find it extremely interesting because it’s exactly the sort of problem that we never think about until we encounter it in our designs. Every time we pick up a console controller, we take reliable thumb stick response for granted, but that does not mean that it does not pose a challenge to developers.

Balli Plastici featured as best of Performa 09

The project I’m currently working on, Depero Futuristi, just got featured as one of the best performances of the Performa 09 festival. We presented a digital reimagining of Balli Plastici, a 1918 puppet ballet, followed by a live demo of the software we developed in order to create the video performance. We had close to a hundred people show up and got a very positive reaction.

Read about the project here and here.

Check out the Performa website.

The story and the medium

Lee Sheldon stopped by the ETC today and he told us:

Some stories are fit for a Haiku and some for an epic novel

286 levels later: a Mafia Wars story

People all over were talking about it and, to boot, I was in the process of applying to Zynga for a summer internship so the only logical choice at the moment seemed to be to just go to my Facebook profile and enroll in Mafia Wars. Four months later, with a slightly nostalgic look in my eye, I clicked my last Mafia Wars button. I felt, above all, relieved.

Mafia Wars is defined all over as a glorified spreadsheet. An evil glorified spreadsheet, if I may say so. There’s not much more to it than a messy UI, heavy on the black and yellow, and a lot of stats. Which is, of course, enough to hook me for eternity.
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