Links: Game Art around the web
BLOG POST: Nullpointer: "How to make an infinite world" (August 31)
"The other aspect of the engine that has been both fascinating and frustrating is the fact that we are generating every world as an infinite plane. You can travel in any direction and the engine will keep making geometry until you reach the compuational limit of your machine. To accomplish this the world is split into regular chunks that are generated when your character moves and are discarded when they go out of range (or rather cached)."
STORY: WIRED on Jason Rohrer (pretty much, the story of the year)
Don't miss Jason Fagone's "Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion—Not a Holy War" (WIRED, August 2011). Excerpt:
"Twenty minutes after the challenge, Ji happened to see a Goldilocks-haired woman named Jane McGonigal descending an escalator at the convention center. McGonigal is the foremost evangelist of gamification; she wrote the best seller Reality Is Broken about the world-changing power of games and promoted it on The Colbert Report. A vague idea occurred to Ji, a new purpose for Chain World. He asked McGonigal if she would play the game at some future date, for a good cause. She readily agreed. Now in “fund-raising mode,” Ji says he extracted a similar promise from Will Wright. In Ji’s conception for Chain World, an “amateur” would bid for the chance to get the USB stick next, then pass it to a celebrity world-builder, who would pass it to the next amateur to place a winning bid. In this way, the amateurs and pros would be playing on the same turf, “almost like charity golf outings,” Ji says."
STORY: Hemispheres (!) on Jason Rohrer
Don't miss Matt Thompson's "Playing God" (July 2011). Excerpt:
"If Rohrer seems overly invested in how I do in a 15-minute playthrough of a video game, it should be noted that the game is one that he designed and built from scratch. In the past hours, he has shown me stacks of papers from the planning phases — notes about cognition and epistemology, aborted alternate designs — pen and paper versions played through at the kitchen table with his wife and kids. He references magazine stories about conflict diamonds, rattles off obscure game theory terms and explicates the tortured process he’s undergone to distribute his creation after parting ways with its original backer, a large game developer called Majesco Entertainment." (Matt Thompson, Hemispheers, July 2011)
HACK: Benjamin Bergman's NES-chuck
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti