Looking to do some good while you earn your gamer points? According to Kotaku, RagingJellyBean of the Femmes Fatales needs a new kidney. The Femmes Fatales will be hosting a Halo 3 tournament on March 22, 2008 to help raise money towards the medical costs. The tournament will be 4 vs 4 and 1 vs 1 elimination. Entry fee is $10.
– Sign up for the tournament at Gaming for Others
Why make games? Steve Meretzky, formerly of Infocom and currently of Blue Fang games, gives us all a reason to be in his speech “The Most Perfect Video Game”, presented at the Boston Postmortem:
David Edery, Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade, just posted an excellent article on developing compelling game demos for downloadable titles.
The best advice in his article? The trial is not just the first five minutes of your game. David recommends showing players the best parts of your game–not just the first part–to peak their interest.
If your game has an incredible mode that fires up anyone who plays it, but that mode is only encountered in the final third portion of the game, think about ways you can expose a slice of that mode during the trial experience. There’s no law that says a trial must begin at the start of a game. And there’s no law that says you should be forced to “level up” in a trial to the point at which you can finally enjoy the most fun aspects of a game.
Read the full article: How to Increase Trial, Improve Conversion Rate, and Sell More Games
Believe-it-or-not, “w00t” is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. For those of you not familiar with the term–I’m not sure who, as I’d think anyone reading this blog probably uses “woot” as part of their daily vernacular–it’s an expression of glee or triumph commonly used by gamers.
i.e.:
“W00t! We totally pwnd those n00bs.”
“Steak for dinner? W00t!”
A bit of gamer culture making it as word of the year? Well, I guess there’s only one thing I can say to that: w00t!
This plugin exports your AC3D file into NMF format, the native input format of the ATI NormalMapper utility. NormalMapper allows you to generate normal maps, bent normals and ambient occlusion maps suitable for use in video games and other realtime 3D applications.
If you aren’t familiar with normal maps, normal maps are a way to make your low-polygon model look more detailed by encoding surface information from a high-polygon version of the same model into a texture map. Ben Cloward has an excellent tutorial where you can learn more.
This plug-in requires the free NormalMapper utility available from AMD in order to process the output files. The companion NormalMapperUI (Stand Alone) available at the same location is also helpful, but not required.
Download the plugin. (Requires Windows XP, AC3D 6.2 or above.)
