Just found a great piece of software : yEd.

It’s the best graph editor I’ve found after about an hour of searching the web. It’s free, it looks amazing, exports to different formats ( some XML-based) and most importantly the usage is straightforward and fun.

I’m trying to create a network of waypoints for NPCs in a 2d game. A pretty basic AI: Lil guys walking around, following paths and doing stuff. There’s a ton of graph editors out there but most of them are very very academic, hard to use and overly complex – I’ve tried a bunch. yEd really sticks out – It feels like a program that should cost a lof ot money but .. it’s free!

A while ago I was invited by Jackie of area/code to participate in New York’s first Budgetball tournament.

I gotta say I really enjoyed being part of the event. It was the first time I played a sport where you had to plan and make strategic decisions spanning not only over the current match: Instead you had to manage a budget of points over the course of the whole tournament.

Would you like to know more ?

I was on the purple team and we made the 2nd place due to our superior strategizing…

It was a great example of how you can take elements that have turned out to work really well in computer games and apply them to a physical sport. I’d like to see more of that. I could imagine some kind of sport where the computer would generate situations for the game and players could then influence the game world by actions on the field or the like.

I really think that computer games doesn’t mean that we have to sit in a chair or a couch. I suspect that soon enough a new wave of mobile games using location in an innovative way has the potential of creating a new genre of games….

…is German for Rock Paper Shotgun which is a great blog about games which I recently discovered and started to read on a daily basis. I just added it to my blogroll.

RPS is also where I learned about Gravitron 2, a great old-schoolish game. It is kinda hardware-hungry, though. While it runs fine on my laptop, but is really not playable on my work PC, but I guess that’s how it should be

The full version is only $5 ( that’s probably about 1€ at this point *grrr* ) , so head over there and buy it.

Come on guys, a beer will maybe give you about 1 hour of fun – this game a lot more!

Da kommt mir doch gerade so ein Gedanke… Es müsste eigentlich Stein, Papier, Schere heissen. Und dann müsste der Titel dieses Blogposts “Stein, Papier, Schrotflinte” heissen.

Aber: Johannes 19:20

… or do you?

I stumbled across the online version of YDKJ before and it brought be back about 10 years and from English back to German. I remember the German speaker having a slightly higher pitch and being a LOT more annoying than his American counterpart. I really really like this game and I think its remarkable that the Flash version is still very similar to the CD-ROM version.

The presentation of YDKJ is a great example of the beauty of simplicity and how contstaints are a lot of the time beneficial for a work of art. I still like the animated typography in the game. Works great in Flash, too.

Ok, this is about 2 years old but I just found this and I think it’s an amazing idea:

Payphone warriors!

If you are going to spend some time in front of you computer with a browser open without being terribly busy, be sure to check out “Breaking the Tower”, a nice little strategy game. It only consists of one level, but it’s actually fun enough to go back and play it over and over again.

Why don’t you start playing the game ? – come back when the game is running…

Surprisingly, it’s a Java Applet. I kind of expected it to be Flash when I opened the page.

One nice aspect of the game is that you don’t need to be actively playing all the time. What I did was I started the game and then went back to browsing other sites and then came back and see my resources in the hundrets. Yes, it is pretty much a very simple clone of “Die Siedler” or “The Settlers”, but it hit the spot. I think it is a good example of what casual games can be. Simple does not have to mean stupid.

Watch this and this.

Aua.