Adelaide Game Playtesting Session – September 2017

Next week there is going to be another games playtesting event at AIE. This one is going to start half an hour earlier than our previous events.

Date: Thursday 28th September 6:00pm – 8:30pm
Location: AIE Adelaide Campus, 32 Grenfell St. Adelaide, SA 5000
Facebook Event for additional details

I’ve been busy with prepping Expand for PS4 lately and so I may not have a new thing to show. After a conversation at the most recent ARGGGH gathering I decided that I will finish a thing I started about a year ago. Here’s a screenshot.

Expand is coming to PS4 on October 3rd

Surprise! We’ve been working with Ukiyo Publishing and BlitWorks (porting) to bring Expand to the PS4.

Expand on PlayStation 4 will support extras with:

  • PlayStation Trophies
  • A bundle package with the game’s soundtrack
  • New language support in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional).

The game plays really well with the PlayStation 4 controller and BiltWorks have done an amazing job with the port. We’re really keen to expose the game to a new audience of players.

Moirai, Interview and Indie Games Room

So I thought I’d post up a bit about a few things that have happened recently.

Firstly Moirai has been taken offline and is no longer available to download. You can read the community announcement here. Shaun Prescott from PC Gamer interviewed me about it and wrote a good piece.

Back in May I did an interview with Angelo Valdivia from Player Attack. We talked about Expand, Moirai and the Slaughterhouse.

And lastly, the Indie Games Room at AVCon was a few weeks ago. This was my fifth year involved in volunteering for the event. Monkeystack put together this short video from the room on Sunday which was pretty neat.

Adelaide Game Playtesting Session – July 2017

In the lead up to the Indie Games Room we’ll be running another play testing event at AIE Adelaide. These events will now be running every 2nd month, instead of every 3rd.

Date: Thursday 13th July 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: AIE Adelaide Campus, 32 Grenfell St. Adelaide, SA 5000
Facebook Event and Additional Details

Unfortunately it’s not looking like I’ll have anything to show. Been a bit busy lately with the Indie Games Room (Did you see our the promotional trailer?), Moirai (will post more about soon) and another thing I can’t talk about yet.

New Bot: Mirrored Game Covers

Recently I had a few idea for a bunch of new Twitter bots. I’m going to be working on these over the next few months. The first of these is the Mirrored Game Cover bot.

It takes popular game covers from Moby Games and creates two images one in which the left side of the image is mirrored over the right and the other where the right side is mirrored over the left. This idea came from a NeoGAF thread several years ago.

Here are some of the more notable tweets the bot has posted so far.

The Slaughterhouse

So over the last 6 weeks or so Catherine and I have been working on an extension for Hacknet called The Slaughterhouse. In it you break into the computer network of a meat company and expose its violations to the public. It takes about 2 hours to play through. You’ll need to have both Hacknet and the Labyrinths DLC to play the extension.

We’re quite happy with how it turned out. It takes a much more investigative and complex approach to the original game. We also hope that it challenges an audience that usually wouldn’t be exposed to this kind of material.

You can access the extension here.

Adelaide Game Playtesting Session – May 2017

Just a quick post to that this week there be another games playtesting event at AIE. It’s been a while since we had one. My hope is that we’ll be running these a bit more frequently now but we’ll see. Anyway come along if you’re free.

Date: Thursday 25th May 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: AIE Adelaide Campus, 32 Grenfell St. Adelaide, SA 5000
Facebook Event and Additional Details

Here’s a screenshot of a new thing I’ve made. I’ll be showing it at the event and posting up about it soon.

How Bots See Art

Back in 2015, several months before releasing Expand I returned back to working a regular day job. As I’d previously been teaching at university this return meant that I was now programming full time for someone else, something I hadn’t done before. One of the downsides with programming jobs is that after work you feel less inclined to work on your own personal programming projects. This is a good thing. After sitting inside all day, it’s probably a good idea to get out and do something else.

Even so I feel inclined to still make stuff so I started playing around with Twitter bots. I started by making the Who’s That Poke’mon bot based on the Poke’mon TV show. Then I made three bots that would take a daily quote and display it in ASL, Auslan and Braille. One night I made a small bot called Powerball Bot that would randomly pick lottery numbers before the US lotteries. It’s kind of amusing to think that it’ll eventually pick a winning set of numbers.

Recently I made a new bot called How Bots See Art. It takes images of pieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and describes them using Microsoft’s Computer Vision services. It’s produced some amusing results.

I’ll probably continue to make a few more bots in the future. I really love how for such a small amount of work they can produce rather neat results.