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jonbro

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I don't have any problem managing handles on the web without feeling like I am out of my depth.

Do you want an explanation of why this matters? https://github.com/blog/1103-ten-years-of-farbrausch-product... explains the farbrausch release. Mopi is another famous demogroup, and they have released one of their tools.

The demoscene is eurocentric, and a bunch of the naming reflects that. That may be the reason that things seem middle-earthy.

having a low level understanding of program flow can help in many situations. If you are an extremely lucky programmer, you might be able to live your life only in high level languages, but most that I have met had to get down in the plumbing eventually. Understanding asm will help with that.

At my company we just ended up hiring someone, but for our past projects we worked with contractors (in fact, all but one of us was a contractor).

There are tons of people out there that are dying to get more work in the indie game scene, and some of them are even good.

Adam Atomic wrote up this piece about contracting pixel art a while back: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdamSaltsman/20090724/2571/Pi...

You may want to dig through the pixeljoint and way of the pixel if you want that particular style. If you are looking for artists more generally, the tigsource forums have both places for posting portfolios and job offers. I think that polycount forums may have places as well, but I am not as familiar with that one.

The point is that a ton of game artists hang out online, and you can get to them through there. I am pretty sure that some of the superstars do contract work as well. Paul veer did super crate box's animation, and as of 6 months ago was taking on freelance.

However, the artist we hired was an ex-coworker of a friend of a guy that we met at a hack day, so just getting out there and meeting other game developers can help as well.

Regarding costs, it is generally cheaper to hire an artist than a programmer, but not by much. Maybe 2/3 - 3/4 of the cost of a good programmer. You certainly are not going to get solid work for free.

I don't know about books, but there are some similar single chip computers out there. You may want to take a look at the beagleboard and the beaglebone. I think the difference in both of those is a slightly higher cost, and slightly less good gpu (if they have a gpu at all, I am not sure).

I would just get an arduino and start messing around. While electricity is black magic to me, the programming end of microcontrollers is pretty easy to understand.

As far as I know, those "edge of space" low cost weather balloon experiments are a long way from putting something in orbit. The cost to put something in orbit is in the 1000s per pound range right (http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=301)? I remember hearing something about ranchers putting up satellites in the early naughts, but I don't know how feasible that is.

Seems like a better solution would be strengthening the protocols, figuring out mesh networking solutions, rather that chucking cisco routers into space.

The thing about 32k is that after taxes and overhead, it really isn't that much. That is 3 people working for 3 months. And the fact that this website didn't fall over when half a million people hit it means that they were doing something right.

I think that when you write for yourself for that many years, you generate a really strong character. If there is an agency involved, then they have really good writers that understand how to write for his voice, which is in itself a huge challenge.

Louis CK is also famous for his work ethic. This amount of copy may seem like a ton to someone that is used to working with clients that always deliver late (not saying you do, but that was my experience when I did web work). I don't think this amount of copy is that hard for a working comedian, especially one as hard working as Louis.

this app also brought out some other options, check out paragraf where you can write glsl pixel code. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paragraf/id422685475?mt=8

It is the complete opposite in terms of ease of use, but it is still executing code. Also broken glsl code is way more likely to hard crash your phone than broken lua code.

There are some other options mentioned here: http://digitaltools.node3000.com/blog/3310-coding-ipad-coder...

yeah, it is quite a bit roundabout, and it gets tricky when you start organizing your code into separate files. But it is way easier than retyping. That might be a downside for eduction, but I don't think it is a terrible tradeoff compared to the retyping that you point out.

I am so pumped that it reminds you of homecomputers though, that is the way the ipad should be, not a closed box that you can only play games on.

yeah, thanks for the response. I was not aware of moai, but it looks brilliant. I also love the fact that it is open source. That is the main reason that I am rolling my own rather that using corona. Corona's lack of support for extending through c code is really a pain.

also, it wasn't really scratch that they didn't approve, it was a scratch player. The player downloaded and played scratch programs from the website. This continues to be something that is not allowed. I would like to see apple reverse this decision though.

yes yes, a thousand times yes. There is some serious misinformation in this thread though. Apple has allow interpreters on the phone for a while, and the remaining restriction is that you can't download code or bring code in through the app document directory. This app breaks neither of these restrictions. In fact, there have been other lua interpreters running on the ios for a while now, see: http://www.mobileappsystems.com/products/iluabox

The difference with this app is that the ide is really a labor of love, and it is super fun to code in. Not that iLuaBox isn't, but all of the little features for tweaking colors and editing sprites are brilliant. The graphics and audio engine don't hurt either.

For those complaining that there isn't a companion engine that you can take the code out of codify and release actual games, you should take a look a corona. The api in codify is not so big that you wouldn't be able to clone anything that you made in it to another platform relatively easily. I do agree that there should be more lua based gl engines for iphone though. I am working on one, but as of yet it is totally for my own use, but only by virtue of the fact that it doesn't come with nice build scripts.

The other thing that some commenters miss is that you can use copy and paste in this app. That will open the gates to sharing code, it is as easy as: select all, copy, switch to safari, go to pastebin, send link to someone else. I suspect that some of the time the app spent in approval was them thinking about that.

-- edit for not being a jerk to iluabox

I have been in the workforce for several years now and I find that I need to constantly be refreshing my math. A big chunk of math reeduction came when I moved from doing web development to doing games development, and I find that now that I am in the field, it seems to be sticking with me.

I think that one of the big missing things in math education is the application. I can remember all of the stuff that I learned when using a compass and a straight edge, but when I came out of private school, and went to a public school, and started learning out of books, nothing stuck.

yeah, I am having this issue as well. I wouldn't call my engine the most solid thing in the world, and I set out with the expressed intent of writing my game as much in lua as possible.

I have resorted to having a lua repl that can execute in realtime so I can just chuck in data and examine my objects that way. It would be nice to have a breakpoint debugger though.

This is super interesting. Did you know of anyone else that set up these types of family trusts, or was it just your dad and his brothers? Did you do anything to make it legally binding, and how long have you been doing it for?

Has it pushed you to take more financial risk due to the fact that you have fallbacks? Are there any other things that are shared in the trust, or just companies that you own?

So many questions.

or even better, have some type of in song currency that is used to purchase the new songs, that can be acquired either through sending the old songs to your friends, playing the old songs well, or just outright buying the in game currency.

I think the new bjork album started going in this direction, but could have done it a bit more.

I was one of the people that was wondering about the slash fic that was showing up on popular. Quite truthfully I don't mind it, as the popular lists on bookmarking sites are dominated by so much link bait as to be unusable.