Final video: http://vimeo.com/22947080
p55-Echo draft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iYSa7Wt_ZY
p55-Echo code: https://github.com/dongle/p55-echo

Tools for final video: Photoshop, Twixtor, After Effects, PaulStretch

Procedure

First, I found Metroid spritesheets on the internet. I used Photoshop to isolate frames of running animation, then created an action to resize each frame by a fixed amount using nearest neighbor interpolation. I imported the series of frames in After Effects, applied Twixtor to interpolate and morph between frames. Then I created a comp with the Twixtor output and moved it across the screen. This comp was placed in another comp with an echo effect.

Background

I made this video twice. I started in After Effects since it is a great platform for creating motion graphics. Also, the plugin that I used to morph between frames of animation on the sprites was for AE so it provided a clear workflow. When I started rendering the product in After Effects, however, I found that the estimated time to complete the render continually grew in value (which makes sense – it was necessary to continually add one more past frame to the render queue until the half-way point of the video had been reached). I understood why the render was taking so long, but, at an estimated 50 hours it was just too darn long, especially if I needed to iterate. So I decided that I would take an afternoon to make an optimized approximation of the effect in Processing, thus p55-Echo was born.

P55-Echo

P55-Echo is an approximation of the Echo effect in AE. There are two rendering modes. One renderer is fast. It uses as a simple frame accumulator, where a buffer stores past echoes so each consecutive frame only requires the blended composition of one new frame before rendering out to disk. Easy. The slow rendering mode does it ‘right’, like After Effects, and re-renders all echoes every frame at the appropriate opacity. The tool is easy to use: feed it a directory of .tif images and it spits out a series .tifs. Rendering options are described via comments in the code. Look at a sample (fast) render. Check out Processing and p55-Echo – both are free.

The p55-Echo code could stand a refactoring to make it more modular and easier to interact with programmatically. Since I’m not happy with the quality of the output due to how Processing handles color, I have no further personal interest in the code but would be happy to clean it up if others have use for it.

Tool Comparison

After Effects
Pros:
Proper re-rendering of past frames + > 8bpc pipeline creates a higher-quality final output

Cons:
Unfortunately, if not every past frame is echoed, there will be a visible ‘crawl’ since the frames being used for echoes will advance by one with each progressive frame of the source clip. Plus it takes forever (this is not a statement against Adobe’s engineering; it is slow because it is being rendered without any quality-compromising shortcuts).

p55 Echo
Pros:
This solution is about 66x faster than performing a similar operation in After Effects. It also fixes the frame-crawling problem since it will echo, say, all past frames that are a multiple of 3, rather than the frame that is 3 behind the current frame, then the frame 3 frames behind that, etc.

Cons:
Lower image quality. Processing stores color information in its 32-bit, 4-channel ‘color’ datatype. That means that multiplying a color channel by a decimal will result in rounding to the nearest int, which causes some banding with certain iterative operations. In the case of cumulative blend modes like Screen or Add, since past echoes are not being re-rendered, anything that clips to white will fade out to grey then to black instead of being re-calculated per frame to cycle through their actual spectrums of colors.

Note: I am going to ignore mice in this article. They’re kind of a weird hybrid abstracted-touch technology. Earlier drafts dealt with mice, and it made things unnecessarily complicated and, let’s face it, games that utilize the mouse usually have specific reasons for doing so. That is, people don’t haphazardly design mouse games the way many people haphazardly design touch games.

Let’s start with the basics. Games have traditionally been played with clearly abstracted interfaces utilizing joysticks, buttons, and d-pads. I call these interfaces abstracted because the joystick is not your avatar* and the act of pushing a button is, in most contexts outside of games, not associated with a person making a physical action. In some cases, every input feels the same on a physical phenomenological level. Taking Mario as an example, running, jumping and shooting a fireball all feel the same: the press of a button. Which also feels the same as firing a gun (or hiding) in Metal Gear Solid, or rotating a piece in Tetris, or accelerating a car in a racing game. Other games adopt control schemes designed around complex multi-button simultaneous input. Fighting games are perhaps the most ubiquitous games with complex control schemes – the percussive button presses mixed with the fluid directional input cannot be found elsewhere. Other examples of expressive multi-button input include the rhythmic double-tap of a button for a double-jump in Metrovania type games, the physical sensation of holding z before tapping jump in Super Mario 64, and experimental games like QWOP and GIRP. Buttons are by no means outmoded; they represent a form of input that is more abstracted than touch input.

* Starting a timer until someone makes a meta-game where the avatar is a joystick.

The introduction of the touch screen is dramatic. It is now a familiar technology, having first appeared in a mass-market consumer entertainment device in 2004 with the launch of the Nintendo DS (the Palm obviously pre-dates this yet I found few examples of Palm applications utilizing the stylus for things other than pointing or writing). I would argue that the most important change that touch interaction brings is phenomenological. By this, I highlight that the screen can be touched in a plethora of ways which enables concepts like ‘direct input’ and creates immediate physical metaphors for interacting with the game world. Using The World Ends With You as an example, the act of casting a healing spell is performed by tapping, the act of slashing an enemy is performed by scribbling the stylus back and forth across the display, and a spell’s area of effect can be literally drawn with a circle. Each of these acts feels different from each other, and feels different from, say, creating ramps by drawing smooth calligraphic movements in Kirby’s Canvas curse, or investigating a dark room with a flashlight in Phoenix Wright by dragging. (Note the dual verbs per example: the game verb and the gesture verb.) These gestures are natural and their meaning and effect are extended in the game world.

That there is a joy in the tactility of direct input is without question – look at the legions of Angry Birds fans enjoying the simple physicality of slingshotting objects and watching the havoc it creates. That’s all there is to the game. The level design is generally not excellent, but that’s irrelevant; the game succeeds best as a toy, almost like firing a virtual Nerf gun at building blocks. Yet it’s crucial that slingshotting the bird is performed by touching the screen and dragging the finger (and the bird) backwards then releasing. Angry Birds on consoles, controlled with joysticks and buttons, has been, well, less than a hit, and I don’t believe it’s due to demographics differences or market saturation. The natural quality of touch interactions is also crucial to accessibility: Angry Birds took off with ‘non-gamers’ because it could be picked up and played, without explanations or a heavy GUI or tutorial explaining the nuances of dragging birds around.

It’s worth noting that the touch screen means that the user’s access time for interactive elements in the game world conform’s to Fitts’s Law. This equation governs the time it takes a user to point to a target and it is primarily a logarithmic function of target distance and target size. The equation does not hockey stick with the addition of new targets (at least not until there are so many targets on screen that the targets shrink, in which case, potential ouch). Compare this to button-based navigation of targets. If the number of targets maps neatly to the number of buttons such that each button acts as an index to a target, targets can be accessed in a small constant time. Think about a large number of targets (letters) paired with sufficient buttons (your keyboard), or a small number of targets (4 weapons) paired with a d-pad (four directions) as in Gears of War. Fast.

But when few keys are used to navigate large arrays – consider navigating inventory in a console JRPG – it’s a slog. Forget navigating the list of inventory items in real-time. In short, with key-driven interfaces to lists of objects, each additional object results in additional button-presses and extra time to access a given object. An action-puzzler like the iOS game Cut The Rope is possible only on a touch interface. It is a physics-driven game involving a piece of candy, a goal, obstacles, interactive elements such as whoopie cushions, plus ropes to connect all of these objects. In a typical challenge, the player will cut the rope that is holding the candy and quickly tap other objects to redirect the candy around obstacles into the goal. Touching these objects in time poses little problem since the amount of time to move the finger across an iPhone screen can be measured in fractions of a second. With half a dozen or more manipulable objects on screen, keying through each one with a button would be time-consuming and imprecise. Other examples of games which benefit from touch driven input include Lemmings* and World of Goo.

* Summary: Fitts’s Law governs the time that it takes a user to point to a target. It is a function of distance and target size.
* I acknowledge that Lemmings has had console ports utilizing a d-pad controllable cursor but I challenge you to look me in the eyes and tell me that they’re not a pain in the ass.

Multi-touch displays bring the ability to, yes, track multiple touches. This is not a sea change like the introduction of the touch screen, yet its ubiquity with the success of the iPhone and Android smartphones makes it important to consider. I have isolated two points: an increased capacity for modality and an expanded vocabulary of natural gestures. First, modality. In short: the number of active finger-presses determines the mode of the interface which changes the meaning of the given gesture. An example would be using one finger drags to move game pieces and two-finger drags to scroll the visible game world in the viewport. I’m not yet certain of the importance of the expansion of natural gestures. Single-touch devices can use the natural gestures of the tap, the press (and hold), and the drag. Multi-touch devices introduce two-finger gestures for expansion, contraction, and rotation. If I’m missing any crucial natural gestures, please let me know.

Despite the brevity of the previous paragraph on multi-touch smartphone screens, I believe that simply enlarging the screen brings a host of new potential interactions. The first is that multi-tasking (using multiple touches to track multiple objects) via bimanual input are possible. Though this is technically possible on small multi-touch screens, I assert that bimanual input is inconvenient on a phone-sized device since two simultaneous hands can easily occlude the entire screen. I have not seen many games make explicit use of the multi-tasking capability, but I will note that it is possible to get furiously fast times in Cut The Rope by using both hands, which halves the average distance from any hand to a target. Large screens are easy to share which encourages emergent multiplayer activities. Emergent multiplayer is the event where a single player game is seamlessly played by multiple players by either dividing screen segments or aspects of control. (Note that none of that is encouraged, enforced, or limited by the rules of the game; it is the players who are inventing these interaction patterns*.) Games like Flight Control are great for this, where multiple objects need to be sorted simultaneously. Players can easily agree to sort the objects on a given side of the screen. Creative toy-like applications like a pottery simulation are also good for sharing, as players can take turns shaping the clay before it is fired, and verbally contribute even while not physically interfacing with the game. Same for puzzle games, where the level of information input to the game is low in relation to the level of information output from the game – that is, two people can easily share a puzzle game with only one person in control, since most of the playing of the game – solving puzzles – is performed outside of the game, in the player’s brains, thus inter-player speech is a perfect interface.

* DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

Explicit multiplayer on a shared large multi-touch device remains a largely unplumbed avenue. This play configuration results in much shared information between players, as well as shared physical space. It is the latter aspect that results in players both touching and being touched (by other players). Sharing a device with another person has a unique immediacy. Bodily presence, mood, posture, and more are all apparent to the other players, contributing to a shared emotional state. Because all the control occurs on the screen itself, players also have absolute information regarding the current and upcoming input as well as player intent. That is, because hands perform the input, and the shared screen is the locus of input, players can see each other’s input. This should play a factor in multiplayer games: it can be exploited for bluffing via falsified input or for coordination in cooperative tasks. A basic example of the latter occurs in PongVaders, a Pong/Space Invaders/Arkanoid mashup, with dual paddles on opposing sides of the screen. There is a powerup that causes one paddle to shoot projectiles which must be blocked by the other paddle. The blocking player must follow the shooting player’s finger; it’s a smoother experience than if the players were wielding separate controllers. Sharing an input area also results in issues regarding personal/controlled space as well as the potential for physical contact.

It’s now appropriate, if not past due, to talk about what sorts of tasks and games are unlocked with the intersection of all the qualities described above. To start, it’s worth rehashing the research of Stacey Scott surrounding territoriality. The rundown is that when people share a surface, there is a notion of personal spaces – the areas nearest the users – and public space in a central location apart from the users. Users are uncomfortable reaching into another user’s personal space or having their personal space invaded. Public space is a grey area that is difficult to define and navigate. You should already be imagining ways to build games around those conflicts.

Entire games can be built around territoriality. The emergent multiplayer aspect of Flight Control is an excellent example. Planes flying in from all over the screen must be directed to airports. Who directs which planes? A simple answer is to divide the screen into halves, but there will always be edge cases that are awfully close to the center, where either verbal or physical signals will be required to declare intent and territory. And what happens when planes originate in one player’s territory and must be directed to another player’s territory?

Given a shared input device, ‘above the board’ physical competition is possible. Due to the inability to disambiguate touches between players (that is, the device has no idea to /whom/ each touch belongs), it is easy to create games that are readily ‘broken’ by players blocking input from each other or touching each other’s avatar/game pieces. Of course, one can consider that there is a risk/reward scenario to exploit related to the idea that every finger or hand spent futzing with another player’s (real life) fingers or (in game) resources is one less hand spent defending one’s own (real life) hand or own (in game) resources. The best example of this physicality is Chicanery, a game by Auntie Pixelante and ported to the iPad by Bennett Foddy. In this game, each corner of the device has an image of a pad. Each player must hold a pad. The last person still holding a pad wins. In terms of the game, very little happens on the device/in the game world itself. The device acts as referee and that’s about it – the majority of the action occurs between the bodies of the players themselves as they strike and push each other to force players to let go of the device. The presence of the other people is also important, from being able to anticipate and dodge (real life) punches and kicks from other players, as well as being able to discern limits based on other players’ emotional states. Combined with questions of territoriality, one can imagine a resource-hoarding game where players strive to physically block other players from dragging resources from the shared middle of the screen to their personal stockholds, or to steal resources from other player’s stockholds for their own, at the cost of using those fingers to defend one’s own resources or collect ‘fresh’ resources from the middle of the screen.

One last task that holds potential is coordinated input. Let’s consider coordinated input of a single avatar. Using separate controllers, this would be immensely difficult. Halo allows one player to drive a car while another player controls the turret, yet it compensates for the rotation of the car in the aiming of the turret such that the driver never has to warn the gunner that a sharp right is upcoming – words are too slow to communicate frequent micro-adjustments, and the lag between 1) the driver’s input, 2) the driver’s input translated in the game, 3) the gunner’s visual perception of the driver’s input in the game, 4) to the gunner’s compensated input is too great. I believe that by cutting the chain down to 1) the driver making an input, 2) the gunner directly seeing the driver’s input, and 3) the gunner making compensated input, the control scenario should be feasible. In addition to solving some information problems sharing a physical input device also brings new physical challenges. Imagine a game where two players share the control of a single squid, a sea creature with ten obvious controllable facets (8 tentacles + 2 ‘arms’). One player could scrub the arms to make the squid paddle in the water while the other player controlled the tentacles to gather food and fend off dangers. Or both players could control tentacles. If all goes as planned, the game should, at times, devolve into finger twister.

While this is clearly not a definitive guide to design patterns and considerations when making games for multitouch phones and tablets, I do hope that it serves as a useful summary and starting point so we’ll see more new types of games that are possible with these new classes of devices.

SPECIAL THANKS: Jonathan Blow and Cole Krumbholz.

Opinions are like earholes – everyone has two of them – so don’t take this as straight facts. I’ll gloss the obvious stuff about building a founding team: everyone has to be smart and at least one person on your team has to be able to build stuff. That said, it’s OK to have a person on your team who does sales or customer development.

Here’s some less obvious stuff: it’s also OK to not yet know how you’re going to make money – you’ll have to figure that out again anyway after you inevitably pivot ‘swivel’, plus a common piece of advice that seemed supported by copious examples is that once you build something enough people need, the money will sort itself out. You also need to be a bit crazy, be able to say no to advice (with justification), and possess THE TRUE SPIRIT OF AN ENTREPRENEUR.

THE SPIRIT OF AN ENTREPRENEUR: PASSION + AN IDEA WORTH BEING PASSIONATE ABOUT

On a more personal note, Y Combinator changed my view of entrepreneurs. I’ll admit that I possess some vaguely Marxist leanings that made me, looking from the outside, skeptical of the culture around startups. Why is there so much materialism? Why is it so competitive? Does anyone actually care about the product they’re making, or is it just the allure of making a ton of money off of some buzz-words and some rails hacking? What about the ‘serial-entrepreneur’ the person jumping from startup to startup, never hitting it big but addicted to – what? – the promise of making it big? Well, ‘startup culture’, in the broadest sense, is kind of seedy and shallow, but Y Combinator does an excellent job of finding people and companies that are not cynical and who do care about changing the world, or at least a slice of it. That drive to make a part of the consumer world better is the mark of the entrepreneur.

I want to talk about something Ron Conway said, which is that “real entrepreneurs aren’t thinking about exits; they’re thinking about changing the world.” This is true. Mark Zuckerberg no longer has to worry about money. He doesn’t care about getting yet richer. $7 billion dollars is almost infinitely wealthy – what matters past that? Yet he’s more excited than ever about Facebook. Whether you agree with his vision or his methods, he has a (benevolent, I believe) vision that he wants to make a reality of collecting a huge amount of data about people and their relationships with each other, with things, and with the world around them. To quantize the world and parts of the human experience. After my 27 minute conversation with him (I timed it), I honestly believe that he’d be working just as hard if Facebook weren’t worth so much and didn’t have the prospect of being worth much, and had only its userbase. Andrew Mason’s Groupon started as a site to enable grass-roots activism. That ended up not working out financially, so he shifted the focus somewhat to create a new, online platform to promote local business, which obviously can be a huge boon to smaller operations outside of large urban areas. He wants to turn Groupon into a billion dollar company, sure, but he could have already sold to Google for multiple billions if he just wanted money. He wants to make spending more equitable towards small business owners. He wants to make people go outside. He is making people go outside. I could go on.

These people have a vision about adjusting human behaviors for users of their sites, which have usercounts in the hundreds of millions. Amazing. These aren’t social-media dummies ‘experts’ selling $500 tweets or startup shops flipping their company in three months in a ‘talent acquisition’ as a lure to get hired with a signing bonus by a company like Google. These are people who want to change a part of the world.

Ask yourself: would you sell your company? Would you sell it for $20 million? If you answered yes, at this stage, find a new idea. You don’t love it enough. Your answer may (read: will) change as the product and market matures but right now this should be your baby and you should care more about your users and changing their lives than about extra zeroes behind a non-zero positive integer on your bank slips. And you probably won’t meet all of your dreams. If you aim for the stars, you might get that $20 million buyout. If you aim for the $20 million buyout you will probably get … bankruptcy.

EDIT: I am not against selling your company! But if you start a company with the exit already in mind, you’re not going to get a buyout offer. You’re going to fail. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston told this to me and … they were right.

If you said that you would not sell your company, I’d tell you to start working on it, but you’re probably ahead of me already.

A TOUCH OF INSANITY

The first thing to know about starting a company is that it’s kind of an insane thing to do.

On a certain level, there’s really nothing more to it than deciding that it’s a thing. That’s the first crazy part – convincing yourself that an idea is an actual thingThen one starts convincing some other people to help make this thing in to usable thing. Maybe somewhere along the way this thing accrues other people’s money either by delivering something they want or by convincing investors that this thing is going to be an even bigger thing in the future. If you’re lucky, a lot of people will like your thing and oh but wait – what are you doing and how did you get 500k users? Guess you’ll have to figure it out on your own.

This can be a disconcerting feeling since we spend our educational life and employed life being carefully shepherded, and we’re used to always having someone to ask about the right thing to do.

THE ABILITY TO SAY NO BACKED BY A MASTERY OF A DOMAIN OF KNOWLEDGE

You have to be a master of the domain that your product targets. Your slice can be small, but your mastery has to be deep. You can’t claim to master consumer web applications, but I will believe that you have mastered consumer web applications for tracking finances. And I mean master – you have to know every relevant competitor, the market, your users, sales tactics, service providers, everthing.

This is important because you’re going to get a ton of advice during Y Combinator. Some of it will be from your peers, who are all very smart. Lots of it will be from the Y Combinator team, which is composed of people who are both very smart and very rich. And I haven’t even mentioned the weekly speakers, your angel advisors, the Sequoia mentors, etc. Point being, you are going to receive tons of advice from people you respect. The unfortunate part is that some of this advice will be wrong. It’s not due to maliciousness; it’s simply impossible to be a master in every domain. So take each piece of advice as a fresh view from someone from a different domain, evaluate it, debate it (providing your domain context to the advice-giver), and make a decision yourself. If you take everyone’s advice, your product is going to be undercooked and unfocused. You have to say no sometimes, even to people you admire, if it’s the right thing for your product.

CONCLUSION

Remember that Y Combinator is not magic. It is a very powerful catalyst. You still need to make things happen yourself with your vision, hard work, a good team, correct decisions, and more than a bit of luck. I wish you all the best of luck.

In the days before Christmas, Carles produced this series of tweets about running into his ex at various suburban establishments:

It’s essentially a repetition of a single tweet, over and over, with only small variations. It soon becomes apparent that not only are at least most if not all of these tweets false, they’re not even all meant to be read. Warhol’s small multiples of Campbell’s soup comes to mind, each silkscreened with color variation. Maybe the viewer will take to one of the variations, or the [something] of the variations as a whole, or the comment the piece makes about the commoditization of art. On a basic, functional level, Carles’ is making ‘personalized’ content to re-tweet, ‘personalized’ being used in the same sense that one applies the term to a single model of Nike shoes being produced in different color-ways.

Carles turned his twitter account into a brand that one can ‘wear’ via ‘customized’ retweets – he’s commodified the tweet.

At first, I paid little attention to Uncharted’s camera. It was silky and mostly unobtrusive, yet generally out of mind. Then I noticed how it moved during platforming segments, gently tilting and tracking to suggest the next platform to pursue. Kinda neat – the camera plays as much of a role in distinguishing climbable and walkable parts of the environment as the contrasting texture-work. (Aside: many extruded elements of the environment appear white-washed. Is this coloring from dried salty ocean mist or from perched birds?)

Where Uncharted’s camera-work is the strongest, however, is in its ability to affect the player’s perception of the scale of the environment. This ranges from obvious wide-angle shots to establish grandiosity to more subtle effects which build a dramatic irony between the designer’s knowledge of the world and the player’s knowledge of same. One example of this occurs while the protagonist is scaling the wall of an old castle mid-way through Chapter 6. The player begins close to ground level, hopping from one extruded detail of the wall to another. The camera is above the player, facing down. After a half-dozen vertical leaps up the wall, the camera is about even with the protagonist’s shoulders. It feels like it’s about time to look for some stable footing. None is found. Further leaps cause the camera to fall behind the player’s vertical progress, at which point the camera begins to tilt up, slowly revealing the enormity of the structure. I laughed at this unexpected realization. The designer knew the height of the wall. So would the protagonist. The player is the last person clued in to the scale of the wall, and the tension the camera creates between the player and the designer grants the player a sense of surprise and excitement that is not seen in many games.

Let me clear up any misconceptions you may have about Silicon Valley. It is true that many people become offensively rich here by frontloading something on the order of ten years of work into the span of two. It’s not true that it’s glamorous or exciting in any way, shape, or form. The reason so many startups come to fruition here is that it’s temptingly geographically close to San Francisco, yet San Francisco remains inaccessible while SV remains soul-crushingly suburban. Bored on a Friday? Why don’t you hack? Sexually frustrated? Well good thing you’ll find shockingly few suitable mates* to distract you from hacking. Code. Sleep. Exercise. Eat. There’s a decent (tech, of course) museum, and San Jose has bikes – that’s it. This land puts fire in the belly, a fire to kick ass to earn one’s entrance into THE PROMISED LAND forty miles north.

* not that there aren’t a number of suitable mates in the area, but the percentages and overall lower population density makes all the more apparent the contrast in the concentration of mates here as opposed to lands of plenty such as San Francisco or New York.

KODUCO GAMES’ headquarters is in the thick of the hispanic section of Sunnyvale, a mere few blocks of detour-inducing cul-de-sacs from the nicer parts of the suburbs. Our neighbors include a friendly Christian couple, a pair of jovial stoners, the world’s most aloof cat (Blackie), and same cat’s owners, an elderly couple. The heavy-set woman is constantly winded and employs a breathless “Life’s a … bitch” as her catchphrase in between bemoaning all the things she’s too old to do, ranging from hosing a patio, feeding a cat, and living – she’s known to ambush potential listeners with her “I was gone [euphemistically –ed] for ten minutes …” anecdote.

We were also happily accompanied by a chicken. We were the only people on the block to welcome this chicken who came by around 8AM every morning (not the earliest bird) bok-clucking her way down the block and through the bushes in front of our complex before squeezing through the gate to eat Blackie’s catfood and do her chicken-thang (primarily producing crap). People were either indifferent, annoyed that there was a chicken enforcing any sort of wake-up time (no matter how gently — this a hen, mind you), or furious that there was missing catfood and in its place, mounds of shit on their front porch. Calls for the hen’s death were heard, amid bb-gun pellets and chatter about soup stock.

We at KODUCO GAMES do not stand for any sort of violence against animals, thus we took it upon ourselves to rescue this chicken by any means necessary. We hopped into our white mid-90s well-loved Honda Accord and drove to the nearest monument of self-satisfying “nurturing” wrapped in faux-sentimentality, full of animals destined to be stripped of much of their animal-ness, bored, trapped, until Stockholm syndrome develops. The PETCO was desolate. Half the fluorescent lights were out. Tinny unloved singles from the early 90s played out of hidden speakers. Neither employees nor future pets displayed any emotion. We checked out of the store with some birdfeed and a temporary cardboard cage.

We at KODUCO GAMES pride ourselves in maintaining some semblance of health despite our rigorous working schedules. We woke up the next morning at the crack of dawn and perched ourselves on our deck overlooking the courtyard, armed with a towel and a cardboard cage. While Marcy – we’d named the hen “Marcy” – ate the food we’d left out for her, Cole snuck down the steps with the box. I followed close behind. Our courtyard is closed on two opposing sides by apartments. A third side is wide open, and the fourth side is blocked only by a vertically-barred fence. As we closed in on the chicken, she entered full-on panic mode and decided the best method of escape would be to fly and crash repeatedly into the side of one of the apartments. We at KODUCO GAMES have a certain amount of vanity and we are afraid of having our eyes pecked out or receiving unsightly claw-marks on our visages. Our hesitation to close in on the spooked hen allowed it enough time to figure out that it should fly in a different direction, and she escaped out the fence.

We at KODUCO GAMES are engineers. When our raw physical prowess failed us, we manipulated our physical environment to our advantage. Naturally we took inspiration from the cartoons of our youth when it came time to design our non-violent trap. We figured the old box-propped-with-a-stick-on-a-rope would be failsafe: in the worst case scenario, we’d have the satisfaction of having attemped such a capture. At the ebb of the following morning, we were left with nothing more than the satisfaction of having attempted such a capture.

We at KODUCO GAMES are leaders. When our agility and our engineering fail us, we influence our fellow humans to aid in our cause. With our magnetic personalities, we attracted a number of guests for the weekend of America’s birthday. With a total of four people armed with various bits of cardboard paraphernalia, we were able to execute a pincer attack and to seal every vector of escape. The bird was ours.

A hen in a box is a depressing sight. In a box, the hen is deprived of almost all her hen-like actions, and is forced to live in her own shit, immobile, occasionally rustling and clucking when she is scared. I felt her to be my responsibility with my roommate and our guests gone, and put my curating skills to the test to play music for maximum hen satisfaction. She liked Jay Reatard, Sleep, and Ethio-jazz, which made her ok in my book.

RT @(redacted): Most girls that I know or have met look prettier without makeup. Just sayin’, ladies…

I understand that tweet was well intentioned, but it may as well have read:

HEY LADIES MY SENSE OF AESTHETICS HAS RESULTED IN A NEW DICTUM FOR YOUR APPEARANCE

Hey guys, how about we stop assuming that women’s looks are our business? Let’s acknowledge women’s liberty to act according to their personal tastes, eh?

I’m near the back of the line and, although I could cut, there’s a chance I’d still be stuck watching Jobs on a screen in the room designated for overflow and I decide that cutting would not be worth the karma hit. Protestors are standing out front contesting the working conditions in Apple’s factories in China. An unstylish man tries to push magazines on the people in line, asserting that “[we’re] last so we may as well get something for free, right?” I disagree with his premise that ‘something’ inherently has more value than ‘nothing’ and refuse the publication. Resulting from the ban on booth-babes (n. a typically scantily-clad sales-woman focusing more on good-looks than sales-technique or product-knowledge) were small groups of jacketed late-30s women handing out fliers for a free iPhone game. “Have you played our free game?” “You mean Face Fucker Four?” She walked to the next eligible target in line, a couple standing in front of us. She waved her partner to ambush them with a video camera. “What do you think of Face Fighter Gold?” “I don’t know, I haven’t played it, uh, it has a nice flier, I guess.” Locals ask what the line is for. A smartass wearing a good impression of a New York ad exec, Prada narrow half-rim glasses and expensive Neiman Marcus jeans cut for a man, styled for a teenager, rejoindered, “Starbucks. This is the line for Starbucks. We’re fuckin’ thirsty.” He makes small-talk with people around him in line before exerting much energy engaging a short, geeky fellow. The geek says he’s here as a GM contractor and it’s part of the job, feigning that he’s too cool to be here. “But I’ve got so many jobs I can’t even take them all, so I’m trying to find smart people. I give 99% to you, I keep 1%.” It’s obvious: this guy doesn’t code. As we wrap around the building and approach the entrance, I spot the camera lady shooting a video of a Face Fighter flier that had been stomped into the concrete.

I file into the back of the overflow room as Steve Jobs begins his keynote. I’m jaded. I’m here to learn how to make things, not to hear about things I can buy. Steve starts talking and I find myself immediately engaged. It’s because Steve cares. He has money. He has other projects. He could quit at any moment and retain his Silicon Valley badass status. Yet he stays. He cares. It shows. There are some bits of horseshit — a claim that the AppStore is the most vibrant application platform in the world, a claim that is true only with many qualifications — and a maudlin advertisement for FaceTime on the RetinaDisplay featuring a deaf pregnant soon-to-be mother signing to a soldier on deployment. Nevertheless I found myself stomping my feet in excitement and salivating for the next iteration of the iPhone, and it was largely due to the inclusion of a videocamera and on-phone video editing. I left the auditorium with a profound belief that this new product solved every communications and media problem that humanity could possibly face. Hell, with its glass case, when held to a window, it can even make rainbows.

Apple – Steve – sells a dream. Although Apple, yes, likes money, and will gladly make money on endless passive consumption, they never lost their vision of how computer can be used to aid creation and experssion and experience. Frustrations with linux, its community in particular, drove me ambivalently towards the Mac platform just because it worked, but I was sold on Apple in early 2008. It was an anniversary with a beloved (now ex-) girlfriend. We’d gone out in the morning for a walk around Boston, visited an aquarium, and shared a cappuccino before heading home. I remember only snippets of the day. When we got home, I plugged my camera into my computer and started uploading the photos from the day. Meanwhile the girlfriend and I made a playlist of our favorite music to listen to while we cooked dinner together. Then it hit me: with the photos in iLife and the playlist in iTunes, we could have a slideshow with music to recap our day. We started prepping our dinner. As we washed greens, cut carrots and onions, and made dressing for our salads, we stole glances at the Mac. By the time the salad was served we scrapped the rest of our dinner plans, shoved an organic vegetarian local-grown frozen pizza in the oven and cuddled on the couch.

And with the iPhone 4, I imagine myself having a day out with a friend making ad-hoc movies and editing them into something vaguely watchable, at least for us, on the train ride home.

This is narcissism, yes, but it’s valuable. This is how we remember our lives and our world.

A recent class assignment involved creating a two-player game. I liked the idea of videogame mashups (a friend made Joust Pong) and wanted to experiment with the idea of different rulesets per player, thus Pong Invaders was born, a game where one player controls the space invaders while another player controls the iconic pong paddle in a grand badminton battle involving kamikaze aliens and lasers.

Controls:

One player controls the pong paddle at the bottom of the screen using keys: o,p

Another player controls the invaders at the top of the screen using keys: z,x. Can fire from a random invader when the meter is charged using mouse button.

Don’t miss the ball, don’t run out of invaders, don’t touch the laser.

Download Pong Invaders