Code from our new game engine, for the lulz:

//TODO: powerhack below. will replace with working factory
// http://www.threadbombing.com/data/media/2/50smh.gif

When I got out of my contract trial period here at the studio I was promoted to Engineering HR Lead. It’s a nothing title — I’m the only person on the Engineering HR team. However, it did come with real power: I am now able to pick my coworkers, I’m working on revising the hiring test, and I’ve started an internal coder training program (which I’m trying to expand to the art department).

And I’ve just now been invited to sit on Humber College’s industry advisory board. When I was a student I thought industry involvement in post-secondary education was pretty evil, because academic institutions really should not be outsourced technical training programs. However, the Computer Science community in Toronto is, frankly, in crisis. Large corporations (no names) have pillaged the “industry advisory” process completely, leaving it almost-impossible for startups and small companies to find people trained in open, or defacto, standards.

The local institutions seem to be teaching XNA/C# and Java almost exclusively now, even U of T. When you sit grads from these programs down with a memory bug they are utterly helpless: “what’s a memory? I forget.”

Anyway, I can’t take credit for pushing open standards, which is the approach I’m going to take. The nature of those systems, combined with Apple’s (and to a lesser extent Google’s, Sony’s, and Nintendo’s) support makes them extremely useful and flexible.

The phrasing we’ve been using around the office is: “if you learn XNA, you might get a job. If you learn C++ you will have a career.”

We’re working on a port of a Japanese game. Here’s a comment the original team wrote in the late 80s/early 90s:

// hahaha!

I… I think they’re trolling us from 20 years ago? “Good luck debugging this!”

I have been building interfaces with new technologies recently — touch screens too — and I find the lack of haptics distressing. It looks like the new brass at RIM has picked up on that — I saw an ad last night to the effect:

I write about 1,000 emails a day. Try writing 1,000 emails on a touchscreen.

First let me introduce a caveat: it’s possible that this is just oldsterism — pure ludditery — and no one gives a shit about haptics anymore.

However, in the studio we’ve been discussing a weird trend: the Kinect in an AMAZING platform — pure techno magick from aliens inside a flying white pyramid orbiting Saturn — but gamers themselves HATE it. Maybe it’s the alienating effect of resistance-less physical actions?

Time for work — more later maybe.

Here’s the output of one of my latest experiments, plugging the kinect’s depth map into the depth map of a fluid solver. Then I realized I could also plug it into the velocity map of said solver. I suppose this needs a video, and I’ll see if I can get one, but here’s a screenshot.

The turbulence in the bottom right of the left image was caused by the motion of me pushing the screenshot keys — the end of the couch I am sitting on is dipping into the velocity field, causing ripples in the virtual fluid. All of this is in Processing (read: a subset of Java), a “sketching” language for blocking out software systems quickly.

Since writing UI specs is boring I’ve been using Mixel for rapid UI prototyping:

The inability of the program to conveniently do text is a huge selling feature — it forces you into the grossly practical: what does it look like? I am thinking of getting Simple Physics to prototype with too — I heard it can do springs.

Thinking of gestures for menu access… Slide discs in to pause.

The game I’m on right now was announced at PAX this morning:

“We are extremely excited to work with Twisted Pixel in bringing splosions to mobile devices,” says Iron Galaxy C.E.Bro, Dave Lang. “Ms. Splosion Man has really deep gameplay that is born from deceptively simple controls, so it’s a great game on any platform.”

The Mint supposedly wants devs to help it build a national e-currency. Unfortunately they’re suggesting it be used for oldbad ideas from the 90s, like paying for news stories with microtransactions:

Here’s the challenge. The prize? $50k in gold bullion (y’know — because e-currency can’t be trusted).

Via Julius.

“Maybe we could treat wheelchairs as a kind of pants.”

Via one of my comics-obsessed coworkers: «Never Mind the Bullets», an HTML5 animated interactive comic. It is a little motion-sicknessy to read, I find, but a neat idea. It reminds me of kids books where you move your token through the pages “to progress the story”: “oh no, how are we gonna find our way outta this one!?” etc