June 26th, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
I wrote a post just about a year ago on how “Hackers and Hombrewers are NOT Pirates.” Like most of what I post to the web, it serves little more than to remind me later of the evolution of my thoughts on particularly relevant research interests. Like beer. Recently however, there has been a resurgence of commentary/thought on the decline of computer science programs. Though I now consider myself primarily a “historically inclined cultural anthropologist who studies cooperative work, with game development and the game industry as my primary lens,” I began my secondary education as a computer science and mathematics major with women’s studies and sociology as the instruments that later led me to graduate school.
What follows is my analysis of recent reports on how, “Lack of Programming Skills Puts U.S. Security at Risk,” and the “gender gap in perception of computer science,” [the actual report] are a product of a continual assault on the “hacker,” “the tinkerer,” and “hobbyist” more generally in our culture. To which I first say, “serves us right, what you reap, you sow.” Having gotten that off my chest, I’ll attempt to be a bit more constructive with what follows… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Computer Science, Hacking, Homebrew, Independent Games, Security
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June 25th, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
I love the “trap” or Trapeze bar in Athens. Occasionally they have glass nights, which provide me with future beer glassware.
Tags: Beer
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June 25th, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
CKODonnell on XBLA
With all of the items on my to do list, what on earth am I doing? I’m futzing around with making images of my Xbox Live Arcade Avatar so that I can post them online. Because that is time well spent, right? I can say something about gamer/street cred and social networks, but the truth of the situation is that I’m goofing off when I have much better things to be doing.
To which, I will respond with the quote that springs from the lips of my avatar: “What bus?” The proper response to such a query of course is, “That bus that is about to crush you, simpleton.” However, if you feel so compelled to create/use your own XBLA avatar images, may I recommend:
It likely has something to do with an internal impression that this is “summer” and I’m supposed to extract some element of relaxation from this time of the year. Instead things have been perhaps more frantic and significantly warmer. But this will only become more interesting as new additions to the family come this winter will further obliterate my growing task list.
The upside is that at the moment I am only about half-way through the summer “break” and have plenty of time in which to complete many of the projects before they take on much more life of their own. I guess that having too many things on the list is better than having nothing to say or think about. But, I’ve never been one to be at a loss for words.
CKODonnell Gamercard
Recent conversations with friends and colleagues has sent me down several possible rabbit holes that I have not yet investigated enough to be definitive, but work on Osy Osmosis continues as well as several other projects. As you can see from the link, I have recently purchased a domain name for that project in the hopes that Osy can soon find a more public home.
Enough blogging and playing with avatars, I must go earn my keep.
Tags: Gamercard, Gamertag, Procrastination, XBLA
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June 17th, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
Well, I’m not sure at what location the deviance occurred, but my blog was compromised momentarily today. Though I may occasionally curse my iPhone and its inability to adequately convey to me my current location and all of its nuances (like rock in place of a street), it did alert me to the changing of the admin password on my site today. Of course I was sitting in a GES (Game Education Summit) panel at the time, which is why the changing of an admin password seemed problematic.
It was at this moment that I sprung into action. Could I log in? No. Can I log into my hosting provider? Yes. Can I look at the admin account for Wordpress in PHP MySQL Admin? Yes. Had the password changed? Had the email account changed? Yes. Had it been confirmed? No. Email change. Password change. Password change. Password change. And the changes cascaded from there. I changed my password on nearly every account I log into regularly.
Of course these actions did not tell me what caused the initial intrusion, however. Poor password choice? Wordpress exploit? Plugin exploit? Indeed I had not yet moved from 2.7.1 to 2.8, but I had not had the sense that a lack of upgrade would leave my blog thus exploitable.
Either way, the ordeal seems circumvented, though I would say thanks only to my vigilance in email maintenance on the iPhone. Either way, I’ve suddenly become much, much, much more paranoid for at least a day or two.
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June 1st, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
G1 Android Phone
I’m not sure what the cause is, but I’ve developed a recent fascination with yet another toy I do not have. My toy-lust is legendary, at least in my household and I frequently have difficulty restraining myself in their acquisition. This compulsion to acquire and tinker with bits of hardware is of course partially linked to my nerd history, but it has grown more eclectic with age. While I could explain away some of my desire for these objects with a particular lack during adolescence, it doesn’t really help me to understand what now draws me towards objects that I can tinker with.
Thus enters the new fascination, which comes at a time when I more than enough work to complete without this new distraction to enter my life. “How to Ditch Your iPhone for Android (by Unlocking a G1),” combined with “Unlock Your Google Phone” had me intrigued enough that I had this page up thinking about all the reasons why I needed to have yet another device to litter my work space.
Of course I’ve had a day or two to mull on it and I haven’t hit the “Add to Cart” button quite yet. It has nothing to do with any lack of love for my iPhone, simply that my device hacking compulsion was triggered quite against my will during a late night surfing session this weekend. You wait right there Google phone. I’ll be back again I’m sure.
Tags: Android G1, AT&T, iPhone 3G, Open Source Software
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May 28th, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Players Handbook
Indeed.
As far as faculty/professors are concerned, I’ve always considered myself pretty cool, but I’m beginning to suspect that my students think of me much in the way that I thought of my more… challenging professors. Apparently my grade distributions are second only to the “law” faculty in the department and my ability and indeed desire to stick to syllabilical requirements has become well known in only one short year. Damn right. All of that said, as someone who teaches game design and classes about the history and political-economy of the videogame industry, I still think I’m pretty hip. I may make you work, but at least the source material is cool, right? I tend to not “do” finals, as they are already overdetermined. As if you (my student) hadn’t managed to already make your bed throughout the semester, why on earth would I offer a single moment in which to redeem yourself? I’m a consistency person.
So, this spring I actually held finals, though they had no impact on grades, officially. To the one student who asked, “Can I leave? I have real final I need to get ready for.” You are on notice. Two classes, two very distinct finals. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Education, Game Design, Game Development
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May 23rd, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
Water Dropplet Guy
So, as you can see I’m playing with water and fire a bit this summer. I’m not entirely happy with the way that the brush system worked out on the little water guy, but all in all not too bad. I’m not sure how well the transparency of the brush has worked, but I’ll get a sense of that in a bit as I start tiling the image on the screen. The next component of what I’ve done is create feet and animations of those feet and assembled them into PNG files which can then be animated on the screen. I’ll post these assembled PNG files next. Once I’ve done one set of animations, I’ll work on some other poses for each fo the water/fire characters.
Again, I used similar methods for this drawing, though the real experiment was in determining how to use the brush system of Pixelmator, which for a geek like me was probably more fun than it ought to have been.
I am assembling these together in a simple little iPhone/iPod Touch application while preparing a syllabus for an iPhone class based heavily on the Stanford iPhone class, though our emphasis will be more on the technology and design for it than the particularly computer science focus of the Stanford course.
Tags: Game Development, Prototyping, Tools
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May 21st, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
Osy Osmosis
Well, it looks like I’ll be headed to the Game Education Summit this year, thanks to the NIH SEPA grant that I’m doing game design work for this summer. I’ll be bringing the latest build of Osy Osmosis [an early prototype build to the left] along with me. We should have our vertical slice completed by then and with any luck a build working on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is my hope to submit an NSF grant this summer to support my ongoing work on the project.
Work on the project is progressing well thus far thanks in large part to the artist and part time engineer working on the project. I’ve had to put my money where my mouth is as far as design goes, so we’ll see how that goes over the next couple of weeks and months. I think our vertical slice represents a pretty good sample of everything we’re attempting to put together for this game that happens to contain educational elements. I think it is a good example of what games with educational content could be. I shy away from calling it an educational game, because so often those games aren’t all that much fun. What I’ve attempted to do with this project is make the underlying game mechanics match up with real-world scientific processes. Instead of quizzing students though, we design the game such that “winning” requires that the player find and recognize that underlying model. We should be rolling this out to some teachers and students very soon as things move forward.
I suspect that in the end this particular component of the SEPA grant will hit a kind of 1St Playable state and remain there, as going into production and producing several levels for the game may not make sense. Perhaps it is an economic opportunity to take these kinds of 1st Playable pieces and flush them out, though I’m not sure who has time for that. 
Tags: Education, Game Development, GES 2009, NIH, NSF, Osy, UGA, Videogame
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May 19th, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
Playing with Fire
I have already drawn several other little characters for some of my game concepts, unfortunately I’ve taken my sweet time getting them posted online. In part I’ll blame it on just being busy at the end of the semester and my trip to Iowa to see my little sister graduate from high-school.
In the mean time, I’ve been playing a great deal with Lineform, Pixelmator, and my Wacom Bamboo tablet. I continue to use Scribbles a bit, but for what I’m attempting to do, it just doesn’t seem to do the trick. I really like being able to use a vector graphics program to do my line art and then color. Scribbles does not allow me to import an image, so I cannot color something in created in another application. Now, this isn’t spectacular stuff that I’m creating. It is just my attempt as someone with no training to try and get some of my ideas and the visions in my head into my computer such that I can begin using them to prototype game mechanic prototypes. The first set of little images are fire and water characters.
I am currently enamoured with simple 2D games as they can seemingly be more compelling to a wide range of audiences. They also seem to express more clearly some of the design mechanics one is attempting to express in a given game. More images shortly as they come along.
Tags: Game Development, Prototyping, Tools
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April 29th, 2009 Posted by: Casey O'Donnell
I’ve been prototyping quite a few different game designs recently and have been struggling with not having place-holder graphics that give enough sense of the overall aesthetic of a game concept. Boxes, lines, and colors are useful to an extent, but I’ve wanted something more before I start recruiting people to help me out with the art side. Plus, there are all sorts of technological issues associated with transitioning to real art created by talented artists that are already taxed for time that I would rather not put off.
Thus, began my new experiment. I started thinking about how much time I invest in the tools that make me a better programmer, designer, writer, etc. What I realized was that I had not put much time or energy into the tools and software that I was using to create art. I use Mellel for writing, TextWrangler for many text editing things, Versions for SVN management, Omnigraffle for diagrams, Bookends for bibliographic and research material, Evernote for research and archival, ScreenFlow for software demonstrations, and even a special program for using Gmail, Twitter, etc. Now, I will cut myself a bit of slack, because I long ago invested in Pixelmator for image editing, but I use only a fraction of its capabilities. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Game Development, Prototyping, Tools
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