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.