so, while waiting for dave to iron out a couple of final localisation issues on our TGS (tokyo game show) build, I decided to geek out. I wrote a small C program (I don’t know perl! sorry) that scans through our svn database (directly using the filesystem, ahem) and generates a graph (using gnuplot, yay!) of LittleBigPlanet’s revision number over time. For the non-codey types, that’s basically – every time somebody on the team, artist, designer or coder, works on our game, they beaver away on their computer until they’re happy to unleash their changes on the rest of the team. then they ‘commit’ a new ‘revision’. We’re up to about revision 9,500 now. But how fast have we been checking in? behold, the image of glory:

I could go on about this seemingly boring red line for hours. to me, it represents all the sleepless nights, lost weekends, and love that has gone into LBP, reduced to pure stats. There’s something gloriously useless about it, and yet, fascinating. If you look closely, you can see lumps for weekends where the graph flattens out for 2 days, mini crunches before big game shows where the graph spikes up a bit. And then there’s the broad scale changes – a slow start, when we were only a few people, generally working on big chunks of stuff locally and not checking in that much. then the long flat bit after greenlight – were we really that lazy, or did we go back to big private checkins? In fact I think it was mainly due to the fact we went into a long review/design phase at that stage, and spent a lot of time ‘refactoring’ – anyway the analysis could go on. And the temptation to expand the data I analyse is great – this graph doesn’t take into account how much changed with each revision – was it a single texture, or an entire code system? – who made the changes, or all sorts of other things. but I’ll stop here… surely there’s a trac plugin for such wastes of time :)

http://www.texasjim.com/NASApix/NASA%20pix.htm

Some of these are so clear they almost look like a model (conspiracy theorists rejoice!) – but are stunning nonetheless.

Play board games and drink wine! Such dedication on the part of the Mm team.

(ps – says luke – he won. yeah. right)

…to play the latest ‘user-created’ level. in this case, our art director Kareem’s latest creation.

Mm favourite Battles have got a new single out! It isn’t the greatest video, but it is the best track from their album Mirrored.

or “World Of Goo” for short. One of the guys behind experimentalgameplay.comhas started up a “proper” indie studio and is making Tower Of Goo into a real game!

Looks kind of cool and has suitably faux-dramatic music to boot. Doubtless the embedded move will fail.

An awesome example of (possibly modded) level design and a cheap masturbation gag, what more could you want?

It’s NWA Day!

I love this website:

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Interesting bit of data mining – it’s incredibly emo (trawling blog services for phrases like “I feel”, “I’m feeling”) but their visualisations are really beautiful.

http://www.hellologan.com/ show that commercial work can be creative, and sweet.