Emerging Technology at TechCrunch Disrupt This year, New York’s TechCrunch Disrupt moved from Pier 60 on the water to midtown’s Manhattan Center to allow more space for startup displays. The event begins with this weekend’s Hackathons, a 24-hour speedy development cycle. Completed products are presented to a panel of industry judges, and displayed to audience…
Tracy Seamster’s “1001 Faces of NPCs” at East Coast Game Conference I attended Tracy Seamster’s talk on building realistic and engaging non-player characters (NPCs) at the East Coast Game Conference. Players, Seamster says, remember game characters who are very helpful or very annoying. I can think of several tutorial NPCs whose text pop-ups drove me…
I first attended Raleigh’s East Coast Game Conference in 2010, when it was Triangle Games Conference. (I’m a gaming convention hipster, apparently.) Now in it’s fifth year, ECGC offers seven programming tracks, allowing attendees to focus on Design, Programming, Art, Writing, Serious Games, Education, Mobile, Career, or choose different events from various tracks. The East…
According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), this summer more than a hundred camps across the United States will offer more then 690 programs in video game design and similar topics. This means the number of video game design courses at American summer camps has more than doubled since 2012. This is great news for…
North Carolina tech startup Gematouch turns any printable material into a touch interface for smartphones, offering instant communication and content delivery capabilities through the user’s smartphone and an unique RFID system so tiny it can be embedded in a printed page. Turn Printed Pages Into Interactive Content I talked with co-founder Brent Fagg in the…
PlanItGreen: The Big Switch, developed by Wyse Games, with National Geographic, GE and the Center of Science, is an environmentally focused free browser game. Players develop and manage a city, pursuing individual goals while competing against friends to make citizens happy and make an environmentally sustainable city. PlanItGreen: Organic Farms and Energy Creation Players can…
BookGorilla: Free e-books in Your Favorite Literary Genres New site BookGorilla alerts readers to Amazon discounts and freebies for ebooks they’ll like. Users sign up for the type of books they read, like sci-fi, young adult, or cookbooks, and receive daily emails offering books in that genre for 99 cents, a penny, or a free…
Tax Evaders! A Space Invaders-themed Economy Game For Your Browser April in the United States is tax time! Whether you’re anticipating a nice refund, or you’re anxiously sorting your 1099s, if taxes are on your mind, you’ll enjoy blowing off a little steam with Tax Evaders. Tax Evaders is a browser game available to play…
Avabel is billed as a free-to-play MMO for the tablet market, but a glance at the graphics separates it from the billions of other multiplayer adventure games. The game is just so pretty! Avabel: A Gorgeous Tablet MMO Avabel avatars are detailed and cute, with the anti-gravity hair and stylized fashions we love in import…
Michael Lee Lunsford is an artist who’s reimagined costumes for beloved superheroines like Wonder Woman and SuperGirl. He’s put our favorite super-powered ladies in pants and full coverage versions of their classic battle leotards. Check out the images on his Tumblr here! The new outfits are remarkably true to the look and feel of the…
Experimental Sound Interactions with SoundSelf A while ago, I had the chance to play sound designer Robin Arnott’s previous game / sound / artwork, Deep Sea. Arnott’s new project, SoundSelf, also plays with sound and interaction. Mostly simply described, a player uses their voice to create hypnotic visuals, but that’s just the beginning of the…
There’s a lot of discussion, particularly among those of us who spend our days thinking about games, about what really constitutes an indie game. So when my Geek co-writer Mohseen Lala asked me what makes an indie game, I couldn’t just give a short answer. No publisher This is the most basic tenet of independent…
Coursera: Education is Massively Multiplayer It’s hard to find a tech-related press release that doesn’t call itself disruptive, but Coursera’s free and accessible online education actually is. Coursera, and other programs like it, offer classes that are known as Massively Open Online Courses. These classes are open to anyone with an interest and an internet connection….
I’m mourning the end of Google Reader. Are you? Hearing that Google’s decided to sunset Reader due to lack of users and interest is strange to me because I use it every day. Sometimes it’s a quick sweep of selected industry blogs, to stay up on trends and check for breaking news. As a returned…
Thundersnow Media’s new freemiun online game, The Time Tribe, tells the story of four children who discover they are part of a secret society of time travelers. They — and the player — will have many time zones to explore and mysteries to solve. Time Tribe can be viewed as an edu game, a wonderful and…