I also judged two more games from the latest GI student challenge. One was a cool little connect-n kind of game where in this case you had to match up 4 like pieces in a square to make them wink out and drop the stack above. You matched up pieces by clicking in the center of any four to rotate them all clockwise. This was neat because you could migrate pieces across the board to create matches rather than having to rely on only those in the immediate area. However each rotation cost you some life (earned back by making matches) so you still wanted to create matches using the least amount of rotations possible. There was also a mode that didn't penalize you for rotations but instead posed a time limit. The second game wasn't as good, mainly because I couldn't figure out much of the gameplay besides matching up random chalkboard squiggles to form a closed loop of any length. This was Einstein's Nobel Prizes and the whole theme of Einstein really didn't lend itself to well to the gameplay mechanic where you earn "Goo" when you close a loop of squiggles that fills a flask that levels you up. How does Goo relate to Einstein? That is the question. A help screen (something specified in the challenge technical requirements) would have been ideal here.
All in all, I got one article done today. Yes. One. But it's mainly because it was the one on Introversion's talk dealing with their success in branding, which I didn't attend and so writing it up based only on Vicky's notes and the slide-deck printout I got at the conference left room for a lot of interpretation. So I spent most of the time just figuring out how to translate everything into a cohesive piece of content. I have the rough draft sent off to Vicky for review, hopefully it'll be up tomorrow.
Finally, on an interesting note, the Gawker blog io9 has a post from Wondercon entitled: Andrew Stanton Pimps Out Wall-E, Doesn't Remember Short Circuit, the last part of which is a reference to the question that I asked Andrew when I attended the event whether Johnny Five was an influence in the design of the WalloE character. Hopefully soon there'll be a comment by me on that thread explaining things in more detail - apparently my account is approved yet.
Okay, I'm working on 3 hours of sleep - it's now 6am and I've been up since 11am and I'm getting up at 11am again which means 5 hours of sleep today. Whoo hoo!!
