GameDevBlog

Is GameFly Really Worth It?

I tend to have GameFly games out for a while.  I wondered to myself - is this really worth it?  If I just bought used games, would I not only spend about the same amount of money but also get to keep the games?

Turns out GameFly lets you look at your rental history.  So I did.  Turns out, for games I actually finish, I tend to have them out 4-5 weeks.  So that's a cost of $16-$20 or so in Gamefly time.  These are games that are still fairly recent releases, that I could buy for around $35.  

Factor in that some games I discover I hate and return immediately, and the savings goes up considerably.

And although sometimes I like to have the games for my collection, the truth is I almost never, never, ever go back and play those games again.  So there is just about zero value to me to keep the games.  

So.  Yes.  GameFly really is worth it.  And no, they didn't pay me to write this.

I would pay Intuit $50 a year to *not* make me upgrade

Last week at the office we were talking about how annoying Quicken has gotten lately - the number of clicks per transaction has doubled or tripled, and it has stopped feeling "Quick".  Maybe they've fixed that in the 2010 edition, maybe not, I'm too scared to find out.  Joel Spolsky's article is dead-on.  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html  Just replace "Office" with "Quicken".

In other news, the IGDA Leadership Forum this year is even better than last year's.  A full report will be forthcoming.

Sofia's a frickin' genius

Not only is she reading *One Fish, Two Fish* to me at bedtime, she started to learn to "program" today with Kodu Gamelab.

Ok, I was giving her step-by-step instructions, I don't think she could have done anything with it on her own.

Cathy's not impressed.  "She is almost five, you know."

Neat, neat program, though - as a primer to programming it's awesome.  And we could practically have written Schizoid with it - color-coded enemy bashing is built in.  A bargain at $5.

Why has sneakernet returned?

For us, it seems to be the cryptic security and permissions crap involved in sharing files.  We somehow couldn't find any of our memory sticks today and we resorted to attempting to share files.  It never works the first try anymore.  "You don't have permission..." if you're a public user, because the permissions have somehow been set incorrectly...or you need to log on as the owner of the box.  Or whatever.

Windows has taken us back to the dark ages.  Next thing our source control will stop working.

The Four Stages of "They Stole My Game Idea!"

It's just like the four stages of death, but in a different order.

1)  Anger.  "Those ^%$#ers!  I wanted to make that game."

2)  Depression.   "Sigh.  I guess there's nothing I can do about it."

3)  Acceptance.  "On the bright side, at least now I get to play it and I don't have to develop it myself."

4)  Denial.  (Once you actually get to play it.)  "Hey, this isn't the game I wanted to make at all!"

So I Lied

I didn't have as much free time over Thanksgiving as I thought, and only made it a little way into an article on my new pet "Drag" theory.  So now I don't know when I'll have it up.  On the bright side, Sofi loved Sea World and the beach.

Off To San Francisco

And the IGDA Leadership Forum.  If you haven't signed up already...you're too late.

I Hate My Coffee Machine

My coffee machine, a Krups-something-or-other that I probably got for free with the purchase of some coffee, has my vote for worst designed thing ever.  But it's only marginally worse than most coffee machines so I haven't bothered to get a new one.  Consider all the possible ways I can screw up making my coffee.  I have done *all* of these, probably because when I need my coffee in the morning it's because I'm too tired to actually make it without mistakes:

* I can forget to plug it in. (That's the one I did just now, that prompted this post.  Sometimes Sofi plays in the sink so Cathy unplugs everything.  So if this post seems incoherent it's because I haven't had my coffee yet.)
* I can forget to add water.
* I can forget to put a filter or grounds in.  (If I remember the grounds I remember the filter, thankfully.)
* I can forget to turn it on.
* While running, the filter can sort of fold over in the chamber and then the water goes past the grounds entirely, making a really weak pot of coffee.
* And I can forget to put the lid on the pot, which causes it to do that back-up-don't-actually-make-any-coffee thing.  Oh - and when I pour the coffee - that lid often gets in the way and causes me to spill coffee on the floor.

That last one is the one I hate the most, because it's the most obviously fixable.  For a feature I never wanted (be able to take the pot out before your coffee is finished brewing and have a cup of overly strong coffee) they added this extra point of failure.  Alvin Toffler would disapprove.

Dell - sweet

We've been using an old Dell laptop of mine as our autobuild machine.  I've had it for almost three years...it seemed like it was on its last legs:  the battery doesn't hold a charge, the touchpad no longer worked, some keys are missing, the hard-drive is fragmented to hell.  Just a few days ago the screen went out.  I went to their online support chat, not expecting much - a Dell desktop that I had for less time melted down and I simply had to replace it - but they told me I still had a couple weeks left on my warranty, and they sent a tech to fix it.  (And they fixed the touch-pad to boot.)  I vaguely remember now - when ordering the laptop, through work, there was some discount if I got the long service plan that made it seem worth it.  (I'm normally a "For God's Sake Don't Get The Service Plan!" guy.)  Getting it fixed was so unbelievably painless, such the complete opposite of my horrendous experience with the company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, that I'll probably go with Dell for all my computing needs in the future...and get the service plan.

More Die By The Sword Props

Although in my earlier post on DBTS I talked about Mark Nau's level design contributions, the truth is that it wouldn't even have had levels if it wasn't for Chris Busse.   We thought of it as a fighting game - two guys face off, one lives to face the next guy.  Then, instead of going home to his family, Chris spent Christmas making a prototype level, proving it would be more fun as an adventure game.  I'm a little ashamed for having forgotten - it was many years ago, and once you've been working on a game for a long time those early design decisions start to seem 'obvious' and you forget how much people agonized over them - but basically, Chris invented Die By The Sword as we know it.