Tag Archives: gaming

This week in Nerdery

Tuesday and Thursday: Banner ad webinars. Next in our monthly series of agency primer webinars, we’ll talk about how we help partners develop banner ads designed for brand awareness, or, to provoke those inclined to click them to click them. RSVP at http://www.nerdery.com/banners.

Game dev club: Some stay after work to play with game development, Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m.

Thursday: MN PHP user group meetup, 6-8 p.m., with a tech talk on HMVC (Hierarchical Model View Controller) by Daniel J. Post. RSVP at http://www.mnphp.org/.

On the rise of casual gaming (featuring Tron)

Finance & Commerce has a story about the rise in casual gaming (those games you play on Facebook as opposed to say, Call of Duty) and the partnership between The Nerdery and SnowOwl Studio. The story explains more about casual gaming, who is playing these games, and the new partnership. You should go read it, if only to see this awesome quote in context:

“A couple of the company’s nerds did resurrect a vintage Tron, a coin-operated arcade game that was based on the movie Tron released in 1982. But that was purely fun.”

Yeah, we love it anytime our Tron game gets a little press.

Friday Links: The Gamification of Everything

• The Gameification of Everything: “If you make products or software that other people use, this is pretty much a must-see kinda thing…the last 5 or 6 minutes are dizzying, magical, and terrifying,” Kottke said.
• Olympic pictograms through the ages is kinda snarky and really funny.
• AdWeek Media: The new tech heads.
• Secrets of design superheroes, sadly there is no mention of a cape or lessons on flying.
• Minnesota totally needs these robot snowplows that look a little like Wow Wow Wubbzy (or Pikachu).
• 6 statements all graphic designers hear.
• An informative graphic that lays out what you get when you pirate a movie vs. what happens when you buy the DVD. DVD makers, pay attention!
• Babrie’s next career movie? Computer Engineer.
• Geek camps for MN girls and boys
• Infographic of the Week: Tommy Westphal’s Mind: A Multiverse Explored. If you remember, Tommy Westphall was an austistic character on the show “St. Elsewhere.” In the series finale it was revealed that Tommy had dreamt the entire show. Then, of course, two guys put forth a theory that most of what we watch on TV is all part of Tommy Westphall’s dream. Oh, just go look, it’s pretty rad.

Agency Primer Notes: 1 Up, Gaming & Advertising

If you missed last week’s Agency Primer about gaming & advertising, there’s no need to worry you get an extra life right here. We’ve got video and the slide deck from our one-hour conversation with SnowOwl Studio, a game design company on the topic of gaming as advertising. Some of the things covered in the presentation include:

• 10 reasons gaming is good advertising
• Who’s playing: an overview of modern gamer demographics
• A survey of gaming platforms and their relative development costs

Agency Primer: Gaming and Advertising from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Emerging Tech: WebGL and you

When Google announced in July that they were creating an operating system (Chrome OS) that was essentially a browser, I’ll admit I was pretty skeptical. Then I started to think about what we nerds use our computers for and wondered, does this move by Google actually make sense?

First, we like to browse the web, something we typically do with a browser. We like being social with instant messaging… and Google has GTalk in the browser – you can also chat on Facebook in the browser, and you can connect to AIM or Yahoo with services like Meebo.com. Occasionally, we nerds use Microsoft Office-like programs to get work done. Google has Google Docs that does all that in the browser, too. The solution then dawned on me. We also like to play 3D games like Crysis or Batman: Arkham Asylum, Half-Life 2, etc. Flash can’t pump the polygons to make these quality games and there really isn’t anything else out there that can. The browser can’t do 3D gaming!

“Clearly”, I thought, “Google is making a mistake with this Chrome OS business because they can’t satisfy the 3D gaming market. Chrome OS won’t go anywhere.” I then smugly went about my business knowing that I had out-thought Google and my skepticism was well met. Google 0, Rex 1.

Much to my dismay, I saw this YouTube video showing of a technology called WebGL.

3D graphics…in a web browser?

I decided to look further into this technology and see how it worked. WebGL is a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0. This allows for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in the browser without any additional plug-ins. This means that future games may not be shipped on a CD or be installed at all, just point your browser to a website and enjoy. Game releases could be essentially the same thing as a website launch. This kind of technology could go beyond games. What if your kids could open a webpage and see a rich 3D version of SpongeBob Squarepants’s world? Could you take a car for a test drive in the browser with 3D graphics and real physics data similar to the racing games of today? How about viewing consumer products in 3D before you buy? The possibilities seem endless.

When will this be available? It’s tough to say a hard release date, but this is already showing up in the nightly builds of Webkit (the technology that drives Chrome, Safari, and Palm Pre browsers, among others) and Firefox. I’d speculate advanced browsers will incorporate WebGL technology in 2010.

And as to the viability of Google’s Chrome OS…  Well played, Google.  Well played.

Blazing the Oregon Trail; the making of video games in the time of cholera

Last Friday we got the inside scoop on the making of the Oregon Trail video game from our guy John Krenz, who was the lead programmer for the Apple lle version back when he worked for the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation (MECC), an organization that set out to teach kids life lessons like the value of strong oxen, a spare axle for your wagon, shooting wild game and steering clear of cholera. Show-and-tell also featured four of John’s former MECC colleagues: Rich Bergeron; Beth Daniels; Tom Zemlin; and Mark Paquette. Here’s a three-minute highlight reel from Friday’s BottleCap Talk, and also the unabridged video. On a personal note, I recently passed away. Cholera.

The Oregon Trail Bottlecap Talk: The Music Video from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

The Oregon Trail Bottlecap Talk from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Go west; secrets of the Oregon Trail revealed at today’s BottleCap Talk

Today we kick it old school at BottleCap talk. We’ll hear from John Krenz – one of the Oregon Trail’s pioneer (pun well-intended) programmers – and these days one of our software development managers.

John was the lead programmer for the Apple lle version of Oregon Trail. Turns out he knew all along that Oregon Trail was educational – tricking kids into learning (social studies and language arts) and playing with computers (the gateway to all kinds of nerdiness) by making it fun.

Education remains fun at Nerdery BottleCap talks – a time (4:30 every Friday) dedicated to peer-to-peer learning (w/beer). Our typical BottleCap is a show-and-tell of a notable Nerdery project launched during the week, and while we unleashed numerous eventual interactive classics this week, John will demo the proud product of his formative years using a classic/relic Apple lle (the way the game was meant to be played, some purists say).

The Trail may be old but the beer is cold. Visitors are welcome – leave us a comment if you’re coming. Ample parking for oxen, bring your own hay.

Flash Apps on iPhone! The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Yesterday at Adobe MAX, Adobe dropped a bombshell. In the upcoming version of the Flash Pro (Flash CS5), developers will now be able to export directly to iPhone. This isn’t an Adobe Flash Player on the iPhone, but rather full applications being exported to native iPhone byte-code. For a place like The Nerdery, it turns our army of Flash Developers into a potential army of iPhone developers. This has really energized the Flash developer community, but some of the iPhone pundits are starting to harrumph about the downsides as well. This also comes on the heels of the announcement of a product called MonoTouch that allows .Net developers to write native iPhone applications as well. It seems like everyone is finding ways to get their favorite programming language to work on an iPhone.

Personally, I’ve spent my first amount of time here at The Nerdery as a Flash/Flex developer until I moved to become one of our senior-most mobile developers. I have the unique position of spending *a lot* of time in both environments. Being in this position, I have some thoughts on the whole situation:

First off, the positives. It is much, much easier to write code in Actionscript (the language that drives Flash applications) than it is to write Objective-C (the language that drives iPhone applications). Ted Patrick, the Platform Evangelist at Adobe, released source code and a applications that, in my estimation, would take 3-4 times longer to write natively in Objective-C. Flash is king at animation and ease of development which will allow for people to make potentially great looking games very quickly.

Also, as hinted at before, the developer pool just grew exponentially. Before, iPhone applications were the realm of developers who wanted to climb the steep learning curve of Objective-C and it’s wonky syntax. Apple announced in late September that there were 125,000 registered iPhone developers. This number could easily grow into the millions now. This will drive down the cost of developing iPhone applications and make this space much more competitive.

So, if it’s faster and cheaper what could be the downside? Just like the old saying in project triangle – “Fast, good, and cheap — pick two,” this comes at the cost of quality. iPhone applications aren’t easy to make and there are a lot of nuances to getting an application just right. In the previously mentioned samples from Ted Patrick, a simple app of putting four circles on the stage and spinning them comes in at a whopping 3.7 MB. Adobe also pointed at seven applications that were developed in Flash Pro CS5 that averaged in size of 10 MB. This is in contrast to the size of the apps developed The Nerdery that average 2.3 MB. . . and I’d wager our apps are just as graphically rich as theirs and as full featured. Why is this important? At 10 MB, your application can no longer be installed over AT&T’s wireless network and your iPhone user needs to find a wifi hotspot or go back to their computer to download the app on iTunes.

It may be that file size is acceptable since your application is going to be large anyway. Using my personal iPhone, and handing it around to our other developers at The Nerdery, performance on these apps has been uniformly been described to as “less than ideal” and “there clearly needs to be some optimization here.”

Then there is the ugly. Apple isn’t the type of company that sits back and lets people circumnavigate the rules that they have laid out. Apple likes having the keys to the development kingdom and don’t like other companies playing around in it. One can see this in the fact that Apple creates new versions of iTunes seemingly just to break the ability of the Palm Pre to sync music with iTunes.

In the iPhone SDK agreement, Apple mentions that you may not “decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, attempt to derive the source code of, modify, decrypt, or create derivative works of the SDK.” So how will Apple react to this potential violation of the SDK? They have pulled apps that had Google Voice support, so it wouldn’t be unprecedented for Apple to pull these apps. Also, what happens if Apple creates a new firmware update that is incompatible with Flash apps? How responsive will Adobe be to changes in the firmware and releasing patches to Flash Pro?

It should be noted this is all speculation as well. Apple may have blessed this whole process and those concerns are moot. It just seems strange that Apple wouldn’t have been announced as a partner in all of this if they hadn’t.

This is very exciting new for Flash developers. If this is an approved way of developing apps, sign me up. However, until a release date for Flash Pro is announced or Apple comes out and says they endorse or disapprove of this method of creating iPhone applications, I think the only thing that we here at The Nerdery can say for creating iPhone apps in Flash Pro is “caveat emptor.”

Tron 2: Electric Boogaloo

In yesterday’s post you heard from Justin and David, software creators (by day) who spent their wee hours on a rare hardware project – resurrecting a vintage 1982 Tron arcade game. It. Is. Alive! Today they dish on how to beat Tron, the merits and demerits of a film by the same name, and what it all means to their Pentathanerd dreams (Winter Games, anyone?).

Tron 101 from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

More on MAME, as referenced in today’s clip by the chairman of the Nerdery Hardware Club.
MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. When used in conjunction with images of the original arcade game’s ROM and disk data, MAME attempts to reproduce that game as faithfully as possible on a more modern general-purpose computer. MAME can currently emulate several thousand different classic arcade video games from the late 1970s through the modern era.

So while our Tron will always be Tron (or until it suffers some irreparable breakdown), our Solitaire game will get a complete Nerdery makeover. What games should we add? Stay tuned…

Tron is back on

Need a Tron fix? We did, too. We recently bartered a few hours of web work for this 1982 video game classic. Our new relic played nice until showing its age on day two, and it took a good bit of Nerdery tinkering to revive ol’ Tron. Let’s have a look under the hood with David and Justin:

Tinkering w/Tron from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

It is definitively nerdy just having Tron in the workplace – but having people on staff who can figure out what’s wrong and then fix it elevates us to a whole new level.

Astute viewers of today’s video clip will have noticed another video game sitting there next to Tron – check back tomorrow to learn how our recently formed Hardware Club plans to expand Solitaire’s playing field. Also tomorrow: Justin enjoys the fruits of his labor and dishes on how to get Tron high score at your office, and, speculation of expanding the video game competition at the next Pentathanerd.