Atlhack

These are notes from December 11th. This week (December 18th) most of us didn’t go to Octane, but Jordan and Rob did go, and drew comics. (Maybe they

Joe:
– was “hacking from home”
– added features to save your game and enter your name in roy-wip
Rob:
– got the ps controller talkin’ to processin’
– made aliases for all the buttons
Jordan:
– installed Mono then dicked around on the internet
– took two finals today: Abstract Vector Spaces, and Languages and Computation
Erik:
– reading fictional arpanet chat
Chris:
– documenting Arduino spectrogram project
– video and blog post coming soon
– experimenting with iMovie documentary template (looks like a cool interface for helping a novice user arrange their videos)
Mark:
– loading color palettes from ColourLovers into his Spotify app
– saving to AppEngine web service via JavaScript
– now just need to make the interface prettier, then it’s releasable

Very few lines of code were written tonight, but several outlandish game mechanics were proposed, and wispy ghost tails were drawn. Discussion topics below.

hiring programmers (it’s hard to gauge qualifications without meeting in person), svg (it’s great, David is using it for a map)
“how many people have never seen an iPhone?” (who knows man? somewhere between one and five billion)
“what does the ghost of a tractor look like?” (wispy tail, transparent, angular? smooth? abstract? who knows?)
dogpark finder app, instagram, zynga (“the only reason we’re talking about them is because they had lucky timing and a big exit”)
“they don’t want to advance, they want to have an aesthetic experience” (re: ultima online folks role-playing as “boring” characters)
i wanna be the guy, super meat boy, battle girl (indie games)
“mario [physics] is earth, everything else is too floaty or … whatever” (anchoring effect)

Present: Mark, Erik, David, Jordan, Rob, Vinny
Also, Karthik and Jon were at Octane talking about video game reverse engineering before Atlhack. I caught the end of their conversation.