Code Sketching with Sketchpad.cc

So I've always been a little obsessed with "sketching" with code, ever since I learned to program in BASIC. Over the years there have been many tools come and gone which let me quickly bang out a simple (visual) idea. None of them have ever been "the one", though they've each had their pros and cons.

Lately I've been noodling around with Sketchpad.cc — basically Processing.js plus a simple online editor and gallery front-end.

There are always different metrics for what the "right" sketching tool is, but two that commonly rise up for me are:

1. Easy to start a new project.
2. Super ridiculously easy to share sketches.

While Processing.js may not be the most performance-capable sketching environment (in fact, it's terrible!), and the online editor at Sketchpad.cc may be slow and clunky and feature-poor... In those two criteria it blows pretty much everything else away.

The reason those two metrics matter so much is because they are the main obstacles between me actually making something and you actually seeing it. So in the end they carry a lot of weight!

There's probably some kind of lesson here about tool design, but I'll leave that to you.

Also, check out my gallery there. Just a few sketches, but hey, it's more than zero!

That Schell Game

There seems to be a bit of furor over that talk that Jesse Schell gave. I think it's much ado about nothing. Let me explain:

I saw a chart a ways back that looked something like this: (if you remember where this is from, let me know so I can link it...)

The implication being that there are all kinds of games out in that "unknown" area, and that in order to expand our art, we need to be exploring out into that unknown area. In general, I agree with this observation.

Mr. Schell's contention is that a fairly large slice of that pie consists of "Social Network Games", and another fairly large slice consists of "Making Games From Real World Things." And I agree, and await the future he describes with both eagerness and trepidation.

The general internet reaction, however, has been "ZOMG WOW. I don't want to make evil Big Brother games! Facebook evil! What happened to my beloved games!"

However: To me, a similar chart could be drawn up that looks like this:

Now imagine that only the right half of that chart had been "discovered", and you are a writer. All of a sudden someone comes along shouting, "We have no idea what the potential of books is yet! But I think you could collect a bunch of recipes and put them together in a 'Cooking Book', and sell these for millions!"

Well, yes, that's true. Does that mean that you should stop writing novels and start compiling cookbooks? Of course not!

Likewise: I joined the game industry primarily to craft escapist experiences. Are there other uses for games? Sure! Will my grocery store points card get more use if a talented game designer crafts a game around it instead of just a raw, boring point accumulation? Sure! But where I am, and where that is, are not really the same place.

As an aside: Everyone who has all these Big Brother fears from that talk... Well, you already have a grocery store points card, don't you? And you get bonus points for buying the off-brand cream corn, don't you? The future is now!

Link Dump (weekly)

• DrPetter's homepage - sfxr

  Its purpose is to provide a simple means of getting basic sound effects into a game for those people who were working hard to get a prototype done and don't have time to spend looking for suitable ways of doing this.The idea is that they could just hit a few buttons in this application and get some largely randomized effects that were custom in the sense that the user could accept/reject each proposed sound.

  tags: tool, free, games, sound, effects

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Link Dump (weekly)

• jordanmechner.com » Old Journals

  The journals of Jordan Mechner from 1985 to 1989, chronicling the development of Prince of Persia. Extremely excellent.

  tags: design, history, games, development

• Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python

  In this interactive tutorial, we'll cover many essential Python idioms and techniques in depth, adding immediately useful tools to your belt.

  tags: python, programming, tutorial

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Link Dump (weekly)

• FlashDevelop.org - View topic - fdbPlugin

  fdbPlugin is a as3 debugger that integrates into the awesome FlashDevelop.

  tags: fdbplugin, debugger, flashdevelop, as3, flash, programming

• Lost Garden

  DanC periodically releases very excellent and free graphics for prototyping with. This bookmark points to all posts tagged as such.

  tags: free, game, graphics, prototyping

• So You Want To Be A Pixel Artist (Mirror)

  Several high-quality in-depth tutorials for making pixel art.

  tags: pixelart, art, tutorials, animation

• Academic Earth - Video lectures from the world's top scholars

  Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars.

  tags: education, lectures, learning, research, science, programming, videos

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Link Dump (weekly)

• GlitchNYC » Blog Archive » Count to 1023 on your fingers with binary!

  Video demonstrating how to count over 1000 on just two hands, using binary.

  tags: howto, nerdy, tutorial

• THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube

  What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips edited together to create ThruYou. In other words, what you see is what you hear.

  tags: youtube, remix, mashup, kutiman, music

• Let's Shooting Love!

  LSL is a 2-D arena shooter featuring a robot that falls in love with several lovely female robots each with her own unique abilities and atmosphere.

  tags: game, arena_shooter, mmf

• Puzzle Design in the Myst Series

  'The Interactive Palette' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Gregory Weir that examines the tools and techniques of the digital games trade with a focus on games as art, using a single game as an example. This time - a look at puzzle design in the Myst series.

  tags: puzzles, design, games, myst

• Video Game Lies

  We all knew one. That kid who always told lies about video games. Maybe they knew a cheat code to make Lara Croft naked, or said that something special happened in Sonic if you collected 1000 rings, or that there really was a Carcer City in GTAIII that you had to be awesome to get to. Maybe you were that kid.

  tags: games, wiki, amusing

• Regular-Expressions.info - Regex Tutorial, Examples and Reference - Regexp Patterns

  A very thorough and well written guide to Regular Expressions. It was my main resource when I (Graham) was first learning regexes.

  tags: regex, reference, tutorial

• haXe - Welcome to haXe !

  haXe (pronounced as hex) is an open source programming language.While most of the other languages are bound to their own platform (Java to the JVM, C# to .Net, ActionScript to the Flash Player), haXe is a multiplatform language.It means that you can use haXe to target the following platforms : Java, Flash, PHP, NekoVM, C++.

  tags: programming, actionscript, flash, haxe, development, scripting, web, java, php, nekovm

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.