Joseph Lawrence, sound designer for Diablo 3, interviewed by Kill Screen Daily, talking about the recording process:
Yeah, just moving it [bowl of peanuts, yogurt, spaghetti] around, squishing it with your hands, hitting it with something else. You experiment until you find something that’s really interesting. Usually we’ll have two people in a room, because once your hands get completely covered in goo then you don’t want to be touching a recorder. So we have one guy running the recorder and the other one doing the goo-mangling. You’ve got to always be open to experimentation, because there’s really no book you can open that says: “How to manipulate yogurt to make interesting sounds.”
Having played Diablo 3 for a few weeks now and now reading this interview, I can see how smart sound design plays off. As Lawrence points out himself, given the repetitive hack-and-slash nature of the game, varied, distinctive sound design really enhances the experience.
Gimme Bar takes various media you find online – photos, audio, video, text – and saves it to a cloud based library. Yes, been there, done that to some extent (e.g. ZooTool). But Gimme Bar has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve. First, it’s more inherently private than public. The last major bookmarking/tagging app I’ve seen do that is Pinboard, which I love.
Then there’s the extra features: a full API, optional auto backup of items to a Dropbox folder. The interface looks nice as well.
It’s free right now in beta. I plan on giving it a proper spin over the next few weeks.
Tweetbot is by far my favorite Twitter client for iOS, and today they just released a free alpha of their Mac client. (the download link is still pretty busy as of this writing, so try this download as an alternative.)
Already first impressions are good. Its UI has very similar functionality and layout to the iPad version. It still has many rough edges (e.g. thin font ligatures, stuttered scrolling) but the app is off to a good start.
Given the quality of Tapbots other software I’ve got high hopes for Tweetbot. Right now Osfoora is my main Mac client, but I could easily see myself switching to this.
According to industry analyst NPD Group, sales of video-game hardware — a.k.a consoles — software and even accessories fell for a sixth consecutive month in May, tumbling 28% from a year earlier to $517 million. And with the release of Blizzard’s (ATVI) Diablo III, May also saw the first time since July 2010 that the top-selling game was a PC-only title. That boosted PC video games sales up year-over-year to 230% or $80 million.
A bit premature wishful thinking here. The “hard core” traditional PC gaming market will remain niche. It’s simple economics; to play the latest games requires graphic card upgrades, each of which can easily clear the cost of an entire console system.
However, games like Diablo 3, not to mention the many smaller indie games (many of which I’m playing now on my Mac) that can scale on older hardware is seeing quite a resurgence. Valve’s Steam network is leading the way, and so far as a Mac gaming newbie I’m impressed with its organization and growth.
We’re a few weeks past the Google I/O talks, but Google has since posted all of their developer conference talks on Youtube. The full schedule is easy to navigate.
Really interesting account from The Verge of how the two founders of Sierra’s adventure classic Space Quest series spent their careers. It’s a must read for any gamer like me who spent a lot of time on their computer in the early 90s blasting through a lot of Sierra games.
UX designer Juraj Ivan takes a look at what’s new for visuals with iOS 6. Not too happy with some of what’s coming, especially the “new” linen and more forecefully colored navigation bar.
Zynga is no different – but it thought it was, and some investors believed it. Zynga is a games company. It’s important for it to keep its back catalogue healthy and thriving, but ultimately, if it wants to grow, it has to generate hits. Farmville is back catalogue – a comfortable set of laurels to rest on, and nothing other. Zynga, like any other media company, is only as good as its last release, and only as bankable as the strength of its forward release schedule. There is a sense that the company and its investors thought that the social graph and F2P business could change that reality, but they were utterly deluded in this.
I wouldn’t be too saddened about these guys taking a fall.
Over the weekend I added a major update to Bare Tumblr, a simple, stripped down template for creating new Tumblr themes. It’s got the HTML 5 Boilerplate at its core, in addition to calls to Modernizr and built in sections for media queries.
This latest update bumps the HTML and CSS to version 3 of the HTML 5 Boilerplate, in addition to a bunch of small semantic fixes on the HTML side. If you dig building Tumblr sites or themes and want a solid vanilla place to start, check out the code on Github.
I’ve recently been diving into Steam games on the latest Humble Indie Bundle. But early on I had a big problem with control input via the standard Mac keyboard. Especially in games that rely on quick, arcade-like movements (e.g. Super Meat Boy), the keyboard isn’t precise enough and ill equipped to handle the bangs and keypresses of an average gaming run.
Enter the Mac app Joystick Mapper. For $5 on the Mac App Store I plugged in a PS3 Dualshock 3 controller via USB, mapped several buttons and directions to some keyboard and mouse commands, and I was ready to go. It makes a huge difference. Highly recommended.