http://troygilbert.com Gamedev 2.0 Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:05:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Will Wright's Spore is coming soon. I'm looking forward to it. I still think SimCity4 is one of the most perfect games ever made (and still looks/plays competitively with the latest games out there), and there's no debating whether or not The Sims franchise was/is a significant game design (and ... http://troygilbert.com/2008/06/23/spores-brilliant-trick-for-uploadingdownloading-creatures/ Flickr's co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake (husband/wife team) recently resigned from Yahoo!. Stewart wrote an incredible resignation letter. Of course, Valleywag calls it "bizarre", "rambling" and "entertaining nonsense", and a majority of the comments are no more flattering. I (and some of the comments) get it, though. It's rather brilliant. ... http://troygilbert.com/2008/06/19/best-resignation-letter-ever/ In case you believe the tone of a film comes entirely from the actors, the writer or the director... behold, the power of editing and music: Requiem For A Day Off. I don't think it's a coincidence that The Usual Suspects, a movie with nearly perfect tone and pacing (IMHO), was ... http://troygilbert.com/2008/06/18/how-music-and-editing-can-affect-tone/ We showed up in the Austin American-Statesman for Tech Monday (out on the web this evening). Digg it. Spread the word. Check it out. Pretty good write-up. UPDATE: I didn't notice this, but there's also a video clip. Interesting... http://troygilbert.com/2008/06/15/mockingbird-in-the-news/ Michael Feathers recounted a conference run-in with one of the original XP and TDD practitioners: John Nolan gave his developers a challenge: write OO code with no getters. Whenever possible, tell another object to do something rather than ask. In the process of doing this, they noticed that their code became ... http://troygilbert.com/2008/06/12/an-interesting-theory-of-code-stability/ I've never done a lot of functional programming. Sure, I did a bit of required Scheme in my Programming Languages class in college. Didn't do anything real though -- well, maybe a bit of decent AI stuff, but no actual apps. The point is, I've never really worked extensively with ... http://troygilbert.com/2008/06/07/functional-programming-in-as3/ Peter Christensen explains why I feel no shame for moving from the world of cutting-edge console games to web-based Flash games. http://troygilbert.com/2008/06/04/this-is-why-i-use-flash/ http://troygilbert.com/2008/05/18/hes-my-choice-for-president/ As a preface, please read this about "magic" code. It wasn't that long ago that I gushed about Cake. But after doing some development with it (beta sites for Mockingbird), and after recently working on our current site (which runs on top of Pligg, kinda), I've started to kinda think, "hey, ... http://troygilbert.com/2008/05/06/are-magic-mvc-frameworks-really-helping-me/ From From Little Things, Big Things Grow, an A List Apart essay by George Oates, UI Designer, Flickr: Treat your place like your home: welcome people, fix them a drink and make them feel comfortable. Before you know it, your guests will be chatting amongst themselves, the party will be pumping, ... http://troygilbert.com/2008/05/06/its-a-beautiful-thing/