"Counting Frames": academic discussion on fighting games

Posted on Sep 04, 2015

Really great academic talk (1hr) from Frank Lantz at NYU Game Center about fighting games, how they differ culturally, historically and mechanically from other game genres. I found the sections on the "Paradox of Competition" (you are trying to defeat and yet at the same time co-operate with your foes; you create a game for them to play at the same time as you play the game), the fighter in history and philosophy, and game mastery really fascinating.

Made me really miss my time spent in arcades, mastering SF2, MK1 & 2, KI and others. I miss the competition and that mastering of a skill, and I love the beautiful designs in the modern fighting games we have, but I can't justify the time investment, at least not without a community of people to play against. :/

Thoughts on building good Magic decks

Posted on Jan 28, 2013

Really sorry for the lack of posts for the last 6+ months.  I've been underneath a massive project since before August, doing requirements gathering. (haha, Requirements: The Gathering....oooh boy) Then the project began in earnest in September and I pretty much disappeared, doing nothing but staring at Excel spreadsheets, writing documentation, running meetings, managing a small dev team and writing a little bit of code here and there.

It was all supposed to be done in December, but some under estimating on task time plus running into some historical data cleanliness issues have pushed things out. :P  I'll have some Salesforce-related stuff to blog about after this is all done, but in the mean time here's a post about something I've been thinking about in the moments I have between deployments: Magic deck building.

My Toolkit: A List of Games Part 1: iOS

Posted on Jan 03, 2012

Happy New Year!  Sorry that I haven't been posting much at all in the past couple of months.  The holiday was quite busy and so was work.  I've had a number of articles "locked in the chamber" but just haven't been around to polish them up and pull the trigger.

Things are actually slower right now (kind of a good thing!) but I'm trying to make finishing up these articles a priority for the new year.  So here's my first one, a list of games on various platforms that have gotten my attention over the past couple years...

Single-movie Flash Preloading with AS3

Posted on Oct 18, 2011

Way back in the AS2 days, you could write Actionscript preloaders that could run inside the same *.fla/swf file as your main movie/site/app/animation.  Useing frames and checking the movie size vs the bytes loaded, you could figure out when the movie was completely in memory and readyfor use.  With AS3, with class files and proper object-oriented structures, it became less clear as to how you were supposed to do this.

Generally everything in your library was being exported on frame 1, so how could you put a preloader there?  Frame 1 would need to load first before it would execute, and by then its too late for the preloader to do anything.  So it seemed like the consensus amongst the people I talked to and worked with was that you needed to a build a separate pre-loader movie which would load the main movie.