Archive for May, 2010
Wordcamp 2010: Why we turned Microsoft Office into a Game
May 18th, 2010
At the start of May, I gave a talk down in San Francisco on how game design can plug a gaping hole in the current practice of application design.
Here is the pdf with the speaking notes included. This contains a bit more than the actual talk.
take care
Danc.
PS: You can embed PDF files in slide share! This allows me to share my presentation with notes. That took me a long time to figure out. Thank you, Rashmi!
Goodbye lostgarden.com. (Hello www.lostgarden.com)
May 11th, 2010
Google, in their infinite statistically derived wisdom, shut down an obscure feature on Blogger called “FTP publishing”. For the past 5+ years, this is how I’ve been putting words up on Lostgarden.com.
It turns out that a pipsqueak 0.5%, a mere Seattle-sized city worth of users, were insisting on hosting their own files on disreputable non-Google servers. It was a grand deviant run, but compared to the scalable majority, we were tagged as a tad too exceptional.
That’s okay. Out with the old, in with the new. After a week of me half-heartedly poking the fiddly bits of my DNS entries, my brilliant and amazing friend Chard gently took over. In a few hours he expertly managed to get Lostgarden.com working on one of Google’s custom domains. Huzzah!
All the old posts are still around. All the old links should redirect transparently. If your RSS feed is broken, you may need to reset it by going to this link: Burn the Lostgarden Feed.
What’s new
As the rather emotional conversion process unfolded, I decided to make the plunge and swap out my template. It is primarily a visual change, but there are a few nice things that come along.
- Back and Previous links. In the old template, there was a big hairy drop down for browsing backwards in time. Now we are somewhat modern and can simply click to the previous page.
- What I’m reading: My shared items from Google Reader now appear in the left side bar. These are updated on a far more regular basis than the main blog and many of them contain overly long, snarky comments. Immense entertainment.
- My sexy mug: Yep. That’s what I look like. Surprised?
A small personal note
Sun has returned to Seattle, at least for few short blossoming months. After years of soul grinding illness, my wife has started feeling a little better. A small break in the clouds, if you will. As I stare out the window at a thousand shades of effervescent green, I am once again struck by the thought: This remains one of the most singularly amazing times to be creating games.
All the best,
Danc.
