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This is Google's cache of http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2005/03/1248/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 15 Feb 2012 10:11:52 GMT. Image provided by yours truly.



“New Games Journalism” is a way of writing about games centred around how GREAT the writer is, how long he can write for in one go and how many books he knows about and films he’s seen.

It is also a big, stinking, cesspile of used condoms and nonsense. Here’s why.

7. THE WRITER IS NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON
Look, we can write immensely long, self-indulgent pieces of piffle with lots of imaginary conversations in, but that’s not what people need. Music journalism is about saying if a record’s good or not. Film journalism is about saying whether a film’s worth no quid, six quid in a shit cinema, or twelve quid in a good one with a big screen and a further £17 on the DVD next year.

Games journalism is about saying if a game is worth £40 or not. It is not about referencing the works of Jean-Paul Satre when reviewing Need for Speed Underground 2. Doing that makes you look like you’re still working on the University newspaper.

If you want to show off how good you are at writing sensitive dialogue, do a book. If you want to bum your favourite blog writer, send him an email. He’s almost certainly as frustrated and lonely as you and will therefore embrace the opportunity for a decent (or even sub-standard) bumming.

6. NO ONE WANTS TO WATCH YOU WANKING OFF YOUR FRIENDS
And if they did, they’d want to get a video of it off Bittorrent, not follow a series of links referring you to congratulatory articles written by the the only three people that are in your special wanking club.

5. INTERNET PUBLISHING IS THE FUTURE
Yes, and you know why? Because if you submitted any of these wanky, self-important puff-pieces to a magazine they’d send you away and tell you to do it again properly, in 13,500 less words, and in a way people can understand what the point of it is without needing a personal knowledge of the writer’s hobbies, interests and political leanings.

4. So put it on your blog…

3. Get your university friends to all link to it from their blogs…

2. Have a wank while thinking about how many authors you’ve just referenced in that 15,000-word review of Kao the Kangaroo 2 no one’s ever going to get to the end of…

1. Then shut up and go away.


THE TEN BEST EXAMPLES OF OLD GAMES JOURNALISM

IGN.COM — This review of Project: Snowblind is a great example of Old Games Journalism because it shows you screenshots of the game and also tells you about what features it has and talks about if they’re any good or not.

GAMESPOT.COM — This classic piece of Old Games Journalism really succeeds in telling you what this game is worth out of ten.

GAMING-AGE.COM — This review, a seminal slice of Old Games Journalism, will help you decide whether to buy the game or not, thanks to the way it tells you about its features and comments upon if they’re good or not.

SPONG.COM — This Old Games Journalism news service tells you news about new games without wandering off into 15,000 word imaginary conversations with characters from the Warcraft universe.

EUROGAMER — Genius Old Games Journalist Kristan Reed really tells us a lot about Half-Life 2 without meandering off into details of his personal life or having imaginary 15,000-word conversations with characters from the game.

UK:RESISTANCE — Here’s a review someone wrote for UKR in 1996. It’s Old Games Journalism at its finest in that it says if the game’s good or rubbish for a bit before forming an overall conclusion.

WORLD OF STUART — This man obviously played the game a lot then wrote down the reasons why it was good.

TEAMXBOX — Team Xbox just uploaded a review of Brothers in Arms in which the reviewer talks about important things, such as if the game’s any good, what it looks like and if it’s worth playing or not. At no point does he pretend to be a soldier in World War II for 15,000 words. Classic Old Games Journalism.

KIKIZO — This fantastic example of Old games Journalism has it all — opinions, words and a score at the end so you can easily see what the writer means without having to wade through 15,000 words of pretentious drivel.

GAMESRADAR — Sega’s Project Rub reviewed in outstanding Old Games Journalism style; short, to the point, coherent, with a score at the end and conspicuously lacking in 15,000-word conversations.

OLD GAMES JOURNALISM IS THE FUTURE.


Because this doesn't exist in the current internets, that's why.

The latest being an all new game project which is actually a remake of an old mobile phone game that ended up not getting published back in 2005 or was that 2006. The only bit of involvement I had in the project was being adamant about retaining the domain name which we're both glad we did.

Anyways, this game will introduce the new game engine(s) and new method of game distribution we've been cooking up in the WetGenes kitchen. And hopefully it all works out for the best. Like all things WetGenes.





The other thing I've been busy with is probably the only project I've done that took longer than half a year in the making and this was mostly crazy hours poured into it at every opportunity of free time I had in between my full time job and freelancing. Odd thing being, I was actually about to start on my own comic project at the same day I was asked to do this one.

Anyways, hopefully there'll be a link I can point people to online where they can purchase the outcome of this collaboration (everyone else involved were on the other side of the planet). I don't think I'm allowed at this point to even post any screenshots of the actual comic so you only have my word as proof.

I have only recently, last night, submitted the corrected version of one of the pinups that the main artist dude has done so I'm guessing it's slowly trickling in.

The comic is an adaptation of a script that wasn't realised in film format for the Drive-In HorrorShow anthology of horror shorts by Greg Ansin and Michael Neel of Grim Films. There is a foreword by Jessica Dwyer of HorrorHound Magazine, the comic adaptation along with every bit of illlustration you see in the comic is by Jerem Morrow who is currently doing a few other comics at this very moment; one with Eric Adams of Lackluster World, there are 2 other guest artists contributing pinups and finally me. I did all the colouring, all aspects of graphic design, editing and cleaning up of all the pages and compiling the whole thing into the finished comic book that it is now; basically the grunt work. That's me, little old grunt machine.

A few other bits and bobs here and there which I cannot remember right now but let's just say, it has been a largely productive start of the year.

Recent projects have made it almost compulsory that I flex my illustrative skills to the max. So attempts at drawing with a pencil as
opposed to my usual pen-it-straight-to-medium technique, a technique I'm very fond of due to its fire&forget nature. Using a pencil forces me to be far too diligent in my strokes which is very alien to me, not to mention that I also found the whole drawing with a pencil very strange in general; the last time I did this was decades ago. Still, it's like riding a bicycle I suppose.

This was done in about half hour or so with a lot of erasing and going over. So happens, I had an old sketchbook (about 6-7 years old) lying around at the very bottom of my bookshelf and the other half found my old trusty pencil case which had one pencil equipped with an eraser on its butt; very useful.


Click to embiggen.

This is dude. Dude has shading and stuff. I am pretty neutral leaning to the not-happy side about how this turned out.

A recent procurement of a very helpful drawing book from Nick definitely helped put things into perspective, especially the shading bit. I've always been thoroughly rubbish at shading. Thoroughly. Can you tell that I'm struggling with this post? No? Oh, good.


Also, before I forget, the updated illustration from that Cage Rage post.



This has been lurking in the back burner for some time, reason being a priorities shuffle. There's a new game engine in the works and a new mode of game distribution that I'm really excited about which we will reveal when we are ready. Oh, I'm also updating this blog post from the future if you can't tell.

You can read more about that new game engine and/or subscribe to her updates on http://wet.appspot.com/.

We haven't made anything in flash for a while now. Still browser based but having fully acquainted ourselves with linux for a few years now, it's clear flash just doesn't perform decently in this operating system. When I say decent, I mean using up 100% of your cpu so imagine how bad it is on linux thus we've been looking at other options instead including rolling our own browser plugin for native code when that comes out. Javascript seems a simple enough choice, moreso since AS2 will just convert easily.

In any case, the game engine will be stripped of the usual things that come with all our games so it will be teeny tiny. The library will be called Gamecake because it's silly, obviously and because it's currently the hashtag for cakes that are games-related but they aren't so it's now a library.

Here's a peek at the current game.

Drawing is not one of my strong points but that's not stopped me from doing it. They say practise makes you better which I believe is true to a certain point; any better certainly needs talent. Even if a large proportion of my portfolio consists mainly of illustrations, they are mostly background scenes and level designs so character designs and caricatures remain an unknown venue rarely explored. Still, before I ramble on further than I should, some idle scratchings on digital.






Not entirely sure what they are except hesitant exercises of facial expressions, you can see I'm still grasping at straws when it comes to methods and basically, the expressions. Being somewhat disconnected when it comes to facial expressions in general, an inherent condition not voluntary, provides naught to the situation. Although, mirror and images to mimic will come in handy for times like these.

At the present moment, status updates are disposable, fire&forget comments which may or may not invoke a conversation.

They are short for easy digestion with the most popular being limited to 140 characters. Fitting an intended cause or detailed message into one without going out of context requires a certain level of skill hence the most common usage is usually, but not limited to, daily rants or updates of lunch menus.

For this very reason, it is close to superfluous to include a twitter stream on your website apart from informing your viewers that you have an account and may or may not be actively participating in the medium but they should follow you nonetheless; sites are guilty of posting updates on their twitter account which streams itself onto the website where the updates are posted in an infinite recursion. You are lucky if the sites are even updating their twitter accounts at this point, sites I've been to have active front pages but an outdated stream.

So, what's the point?

A centralised hub for conversations is an attractive thing, everyone gets their own @username and a voice to call their own. It's nice to put a number to your followers and know, at the drop of a hat, that your followers may be listening when you announce something depending on the @replies you receive. That is, if anyone is listening at all.

People are adding other people adding other people but useful conversations that matter are far and few. This is nothing new to the internets. Blogging has been the preferred mode of communication in the past albeit a lot more effort for all involved. BBS and forums of virtual communities were other venues. Twitter just made it accessible and short, no effort required; Facebook hides behind a walled garden.

But what does this mean to the creative?

Participation with others on twitter is nice but it is somebody else's platform, you want your viewers to spend time on your site.

You have your blog where you elucidate your viewers of your recent endeavours with a wall of text and maybe images, you have your main site where you showcase your products and projects, you may even have a place for your twitter stream where you may or may not remember to exclude non-work related topics. Your viewers are able to communicate with you directly via email or a contact form, they may even engage a conversation or discussion with you via your blog. But what happens if you just want to post blurbs of updates that are pertinent to the current status of your projects or products and not want those updates to get lost amidst blog posts?


Well, here's http://boot-str.appspot.com/about/mod/note.

Mod note is many things but mostly, it is a means of publishing a comment. When a viewer logs in to comment on a bootstrapped site, they are granted their own profile page where they can update their status with text, links, images and youtube videos which can be automatically embedded. From here, other viewers are able to comment on their status updates thus creating an instant community base for your viewers, all within your site.

Mod note also translates easily into a forum and an imageboard should you wish to. All of these are based on exactly the same things; a site wide commenting system.

And this is the solution. You post a status update which is imported to the front page to inform your viewers of your current status of a project, you can pick the last 5 or 15 or just the one. These updates can live on a seperate page, a page purely for updates or posted on your main page, with links allowing your viewers to comment on or share.

Hell, we might even make it so you can even push those updates to twitter easily without ever leaving your site if you really need to and unlike twitter, you are able to manage your content (only you can delete/hide them), you own all of your data, the comments that are attached to each update and the viewers that are attached to those comments.

And before you ask, of course I'm using it :}

Some examples:
http://www.esyou.com/shi
http://boot-str.appspot.com/
http://gen-information.appspot.com/

The thing about being a visual/graphics creature, you are constantly in a state of flux; fickle and fidgety.

I've been sketching a redesign of the site, a total overhaul of the entire site. Well, to be honest, I've been redesigning all the sites currently under the ongoing projects in-tray. This seems to be a constant thing but I've come to slowly accept that it is ok to do this as long as you agree to a finished design at some point and just move on. Until it needs redesigning again.

I suppose I could say practise allows you to gain experience and become better at tackling user interface issues. The thing I find about current designer sites is the focus away from functionality but more towards a similar, familiar mold. The balance between accessibility and form should lean more towards the former, at least for me. There is no point in perusing a trendy site where tiny black text on even blacker background is the main selling point of a theme, where a site is so flash-heavy it kills my browser, where the site is obviously optimised for massive screens only or ipod/ipad only.

I have been furiously looking at site designs lately, most of which uses familiar cms like wordpress, joomla/drupal, proprietary corporate cms from the late 90s that probably costs an arm and both legs. Most of these sites have lesser content than they appear to have so they are stretched out thin to compensate for all the SEOs that are attached to them. For a site like mine with content growing at an alarming rate, the task to design it is far from menial and this is why I'm still wavering about decisions.

At the moment, most of the things I want to display is put on hold and/or hidden as it would overwhelm the site with just too much content and I refuse to design the thing like your ordinary blog with posts laid out in sequence as if the previous is less important than the next. Then there is the focus which I've still yet to decide upon. Currently, this entire site was built in a couple of days just as a placeholder for later, hardly doing the content any justice.

Looking through the sites I have designed and developed, most of these suffer from the endless scroll of doom which happens when you have your content laid out as blog posts. I suppose this is okay if each chunk is bitesize and fits within the standard screensize of 960 x 480. On the other hand, one page websites though aesthetically pleasing is pretty much less useful when it comes to transparency.

Amusingly, I find the traditional magazine page layout as probably the most fitting for content-centric sites. Apart from the obvious familiarity of the format, a traditional magazine layout is specifically designed for the reader/viewer; chunks of information punctuated with relevant thumbnails. I won't go into the gridsystem format as that, I feel, is far too limiting and clinical for a site to be pleasing to the eye, much less for the digestion of information.

The delicious buffet of @font-face compatible font types has me eagerly implementing fonts all over the place though not excessively. These pages tend to take a slightly longer loading time if the majority of your website uses the technology. Different browsers handle @font-face well, differently. Chrome waits until the fonts are loaded before rendering a page which it then caches so the slower load time only applies to the initial loading. Firefox renders the page with the next default font setting before loading any @font-face fonts.

What I needed was a way for browsers to render a page normally so the viewer will not be faced with what might look to them, a website with missing text. Probably a way to tell the browser to update or inject a css into the page after everything has been loaded.

I found a few hacks online but it looks like jQuery is here to save the day again.

$(document).ready(function(){
$("html").css("font-family","SuperFontage");
});

Here I use SuperFontage as the example font. This tells the browser to only load SuperFontage after the whole page has fully rendered. Replace the SuperFontage with the custom font name you want and do not include it in the body and html of your css. Make sure you have a default font declared instead so the browser knows which font to render at the initial loading of the page, like so:

body, html{
font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif;
}

And this worked perfectly for Chrome but for some reason, Firefox just didn't accept the custom @font-face. Strange. Upon further debugging, http://webfonts.info/wiki/index.php?title=%40font-face_support_in_Firefox tells me that I needed relative links for my fonts to work. This means that the links pointing to the source of my fonts needed to be hosted on my domain and they should be declared without, "http://".

For example:

@font-face {
	font-family: 'SuperFontage';
	src: url('/fonts/SuperFontage.otf') format('opentype');
}

This tells Firefox that my SuperFontage font is located on my domain in the fonts folder. If you are pointing to fonts located on another domain, that's whole different kettle of fish.

Something strange happened to me today. It started with the usual CSS mambo, web development type stuff, research, more research, more development and reading through links via news reader. Then it hit me as I scrolled through a comic artist's blog post. The illustrations are beautiful, intricate and required high levels of skills, imagination and creativity but ... these masterpieces are not functional; they don't work, I can't interact with them at all. There is no clear definition between background and foreground. I couldn't make out the subjects in focus or the purpose of this decision. It's just a mess. A wonderful, flat mess but a mess nevertheless.

And I started to wonder why I was thinking these things. As I wondered out loud to my other self, I realised the reason. Games.

I've been creating graphics to be used in games development for a little over half a decade now and one of the crucial things when doing this is the clear definition of background and foreground illustrations, a purposeful objective for the player to interact with. But it is more than that.

Art in games need to be useful, not just pretty. The player needs to know the boundaries of a level, they need to know what they can interact with and where they can go. A focused item in the foreground suggests to the player that there might be collision or an action when they interact with it. The background is almost always less focused so as to not overcrowd the scene with unimportant information.

This becomes apparent when an artist with no previous experience in games development is involved. Usually, they are graduates of fine arts, graphic design or animation whose outputs do not involve interaction. Oddly enough, the specialized skill of creating functional art for games development is non-existent outside of the games industry. It is from being employed in the games industry that the artists relearn their trade.

One known example:

I have always admired David Hellman's wonderful illustrations at http://www.alessonislearned.com/ which was why I was so excited when I read on his blog that he was being hired to do the art of an upcoming game.

Upon playing the game, I was taken aback; the art just didn't work. His exquisitely detailed style did not translate well into games.

The screenshots were beautiful but in a game, it was just messy and incomprehensible. There was just too much information clambering for attention and this affected my experience negatively so much so, I never did finish that game.

I don't use much javascript in web development unless I absolutely have to. For instance, a situation where the resulting effect would be a clusterfuck of a bloated css. In this case, highlighting a menu link when you are on that current page.

A quick search brings me a few dreaded php solutions, http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/else/cssnav/ which didn't really suit me at all as it meant I had to assign ids to every single page and pages that I might or might not want to create in the future. This brute force hack does not bode well with the hierarchical approach of http://boot-str.appspot.com/ as it meant bloating the code for no meaningful reason.

Which brings me to http://skyl.org/log/post/skyl/2010/02/remove-links-that-point-to-the-current-page-with-jquery/. Ahh, that looks much better. Except, I'm not going to be needing (or reading) all of that. I'm just going to use that first bit of code, edit it to suit my needs and we have this:

$(function(){
// href ends with the current location
$('.classname[href$='+window.location.pathname+']').addClass("newclassname")
});

This means, when you look within .classname and find that the current page and the anchor tag (href) is the same, you apply another class (newclassname) to it.

Since the menu was already previously assigned to the div class .classname, all I had to do was create a class in css called .newclassname, assign that bit of javascript to a chunk and include it in the plates. I go one step further and add :hover instance to .newclassname so that it changes state when you hover over the current highlighted state.

You can see the resulting effect on http://boot-str.appspot.com/