kevinmangan

[kevinmangan]

Grab Text Auto @ ComicCon Come find me! 👵🏻📱🚘

[kevinmangan]

Gran Text Auto launches tomorrow - July 2, 2015!

Our first game release! Check out the launch trailer, then download it at midnight! 😜

[kevinmangan]

Gran Text Auto comes out on Thursday! I made a game about the emoji Grandma texting and driving, and getting in ridiculous conversations and horrible accidents. Posted once before, but the sound didn't work. Sorry for spam the next few days.

[kevinmangan]

*David Sedaris' Lovecraftian Horror

His tentacles just kind of flopped out where everyone could see. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to be proud of his boldness, and to have other people see that I was, but when I looked around, it was as if only I saw him. Here we were, 30-odd humans blessed by the presence of an Old One — on a city bus of all places — and I was the only one not burying my face in my phone. And what do I get in return for my social graces? Oh, just a madness never ending while a walking bowl of seafood pasta engulfs my face and penetrates my orifices.

[kevinmangan]

Concept of a Bloodborne demake about Eileen :D would anyone play this? 

[kevinmangan]

Pixel art Bloodbourne.

source: http://www.deviantart.com/art/bloodborne-9-497999583

[kevinmangan]

NewGame+ mode. #grantextauto #soon

[kevinmangan]

[kevinmangan]

Digital Analogs

This is an admittedly half-baked idea, but a fun one: the pendulum between our desire for digital or analog ownership may be settling at its perigee.

For Christmas a friend gave me an Amiibo of Samus Aran (role model). It's a little non-action figure with an NFC chip that allows the toy to join me in Wii U games. It probably sounds a little weird to anyone over voting age, but Nintendo's idea isn't new or unique. Disney has been flexing it's creative muscles with Infinity 2.0 to try to steal market share from the early-established cash-cow that is Skylanders. Real world toys that represent digital toys. It's like if you couldn't even watch your favorite TV show unless already you owned the action figure — totally backwards from the 80's Saturday morning cartoon tie-in model.

Kid's stuff (except my Amiibo; that's grown up shit, OK!), but I think it started with hipsters in the coveted 18-34. I think it started with vinyl. 

Just about every news outlet around has had an article on the vinyl's emergence from the Lazarus Pits over the last decade, but most seem to attribute it to the somewhat tired John-Cusack-esque musing about the warner analog sound. Every one of those records comes with a digital download code though, and few and far between are admissions that many people just "want to put something on their shelf."

Digital items are convenient. It's a trite point in 2015. I love not switching discs in my Playstation 4. I love having all my music in my pocket (even if I get iPod fatigue). Netflix makes me embarrassed of that box of DVDs in the closet. And I love that my entire reading library fits in the seat pocket in front of me.

Books though. I love books too. Most people who would love a Kindle love books. Just like most people who would love music love records, at least as objects. The covers, the heft, the ASMR you might get when a friend looks over your collection… the objects have gravity, literally and figuratively. Amazon seems to be catching on to that. Kindle Matchbook allows you to buy an e-book for a discount if you also purchase the physical copy. It's a bit of a half-step in my opinion, but a welcome one.

There's no real punchline here. No profound conclusion; just observation and continued interest. The Internet-of-Things is coming. Bleeding circuitry in to thermostats and toothbrushes like Jetson's sight gags. It's great for anything fundamentally physical. But for things that can be conceived digitally (video games, music, books) there seems to be a slowly mounting craving for analogs.

[kevinmangan]

"Historia Naturae, Suita" (1967) - Jan Svankmajer

[kevinmangan]

Been playing WoW again in the lead-up to the new expansion. It's a dirty, old habit from college, revisited less and less over time. Fun in its occasions despite ticking minutes off my lifespan. Like smoking when I'm drunk.

Talking with friends about Warcraft's evolving design choices lead to this post by Bashiok, Blizzard's incredible community manager, which held a perfectly succinct and universal nugget of game design philosophy: 

"…a game is largely defined by its limitations, and the rules within which you must find or create a solution."

I love that.

It reminds me of something Charles Eames—who, with his wife, Ray, designed most of the furniture in my house—said in an interview:

"Design depends largely on constraints."

It's simple, brilliant, and universal, yet not at all obvious until you've seen it. Just like good design; whether for iconic chairs or Flappy Bird.

To be clear: that's not constraint as limitation of freedom, but as definition of possibility. A subtle but acute difference. And (to me) it extends beyond mechanical design and platform limitations to how a game fits in to and shapes culture. A discussion that's never been more prevalent than it is today. Both production and player experience are shaped by the internal and external constraints of a changing world. A concept or mechanic or platform appropriate a few years ago may not be appropriate today.

Classic controller schemes fail miserably on mobile and have to be rethought. Decade-old MMO gameplay needs tightening when it doesn't fit in to modern lifestyles. Previously unnoticed tropes can become tired or inexcusable in the face of maturing self-reflection.

These are things I've been thinking a lot about in preparing to release my first game, Gran Text Auto. It's been fun defining a world with my own set of rules, but there's lots of external influences I believe are important that I've still tried to be aware of. Listing them all isn't the point of this, because, ultimately, I don't have control over them. That's the nature of the game, and it's OK. In fact: it's great. Because given positive attention I think personal, platform, and cultural constraints do nothing but improve design, and good design builds positive culture.

tl;dr

Every game is an Incredible Machine, yet no game is an island… except maybe Mountain.

[kevinmangan]

My first iPhone game. Releasing it under my new company, Kobake. More details soon.

👵📱🚘

Coming soon…

[kevinmangan]

Is Xûr in the Tower?

http://www.isxurinthetower.com

Tonight I teamed up with Ray Frenden on a quick project. A web tool for Destiny to find out if the game's "secret" merchant, Xûr, Agent of the Nine, is available. He arrives Friday at 2AM PST, but the timezone conversion is bothersome for many… also I kept forgetting his exact schedule.

I threw some code on a Heroku instance, Ray did some awesome sketches of Xûr, and we used IFTTT.com to automate status tweets to @whereisxur.

It got poor response on Reddit, but blew up on Twitter. About 5 hours in we've gotten over 900 followers and more than 3000 visitors to the site.

It's very simple, but since people are liking it I want to add a few more niceties (Safari push notifications?). Not bad for an after-dinner project though!

[kevinmangan]

Noct

"Noct is a 2D top-down multiplayer survival horror game that blends arcade combat with RPG survival elements. You are a survivor of the apocalyptic purge that formed the desolate wasteland now known as Noct.

The game world is viewed through a thermal imaging satellite observing the aftermath of an apocalypse. Accompanied by an eerie and engaging musical score, your journey through the desolate world is filled with terrifying roaming monsters, intense combat, and perilous situations." -Chris Eskins, developer

Greenlight

KICKSTARTER

[kevinmangan]

I want a slow folklore-oriented adventure game with characters like this.

rituals.

[kevinmangan]

FFFF01 // Futuristic Fashion Femme Fatales

[kevinmangan]

Would you carry your career with you into death?

What would you do if you were given 2-5 years to live during which time you would slowly lose your ability to use your nerves and muscles responsible for voluntary movements, including breathing? Well, Patrick O’Brien decided to make a documentary film titled “Everything Will Be Okay" about his “descent into the belly of the beast."

In the video above, you can get a better understanding of Patrick’s battle with ALS directly from him. You can also watch the movie trailer. Patrick is an extremely talented filmmaker by trade. His visual style is so unique and groundbreaking, especially in this documentary format. The visuals are strikingly emotional, so much so that he is able to tell his story through them in a considerably more impactful way than lengthy interviews could convey. Patrick also has a great sense of (dark) humor that is sure to add another dimension to the story.

Can you imagine? I was so struck by Patrick’s decision to document his trials. The fact that his career as a filmmaker was such a strong passion in his life that, when faced with death, he decided to turn the cameras on himself and keep working until the end. Makes you stop and think.

Patrick has been a dear friend to Threadless over the years. He was one of a small, tight-knit group of creatives that helped Threadless get its start on a message board back in 2000. Later on, he curated a line of t-shirts for us. He is an incredible artist who deserves to have his story told. Join me in supporting this project and helping to make it a reality!

- Jake Nickell, Founder, Threadless