AmazingAaron.com

I've been playing on a new site called, Tweak Today. Its basically a site, that gives you a fun task, to complete each day. Todays task is "Take a picture of something you never thought you would own, but now you do". You can post a video, picture, or text, and there are know real rules, on how you complete the task. In fact the site encourages creativity in your submissions. Theres a new mission everyday, and its fun to see what people are going to post. I've been on Tweak Today for about a week now. I have not only been completing task, but also suggesting new task. Something everyone is encouraged to do. You get to vote on everyone's submissions, and the winner becomes the new mission, the next day. The only thing that is kinda annoying, is that no one wins. I think it would be cool, if they picked the most creative submission each day, as the winner, and displayed the entry, in a special area of the site, for bragging rights. Bragging rights, would be a cool enough prize, in itself! No need for any real prize, although that would be cool! Maybe they will do something like this in the future. The site is still very new! I have noticed, a little down time, along with a few bugs, but its still very fun, and usable. So check it out, and take a look at my submisions. I'm AmazingAaron over there!

Okay, so as some of you may know, there was a team meeting for the Xbox Live team, on the 6th of this month. During the meeting they had screens set up, and you could send in feedback about Xbox Live, and features you would like to see on Xbox Live. The tweets had to be hashtagged with #heyxboxlive to show up, and be seen by the XBL team members. Well it seems that something may have come out of this. One of the most asked for features, was a way to rate XBL games. If you head over to the Creators Club website, and check out the latest post, you will notice its entitled “Where to Find Reviews of Xbox LIVE Community Games”. basically its just a post with links to sites that review Community Channel games, but if you take a close look, you will see the following in the opening sentence.

Team XNA knows that user reviews of games on the Xbox 360 Console would be fantastic, but they don't exist, yet.

As you can see I've made bold the main word in that sentence! While I don’t think this post is talking about XBL games in general, but rather the home brewed Community Channel Games, everyone who has been following the Community Channel developments knows, its a feature that is really needed, and if they bring it to the the Community Channel, it might be on its way to XBL games as a whole! There's no way to know (unless they just come out and say it) if this was the user feedback, or just a feature they had planed all along. I do think its cool that the Xbox Live team seems to be become more open with the community, and I hope the team continues to listen to us all, and they get that new rating system up soon!

The U.S launch of the Nintendo DSi, is in a few hours, at 12:01 am on April 5. I will be going to pick mine up at the local GameStop. I will be making a video of me unboxing it, and playing around with the menus, and settings. I don't know if I'm going to buy any games right now, or not. I will be downloading a game off the DS channel. I don't know which one yet. You get 10,000 points to buy something in the DS Store, if you purchase a DSi now until Oct. I should have my video uploaded to youtube in a few hours, be sure and watch it. ...Oh by the way im getting the black one.

Update: Heres the video.

What have I been up to lately… Well the weather is starting to look, and feel good. So I planted some seeds in there starter greenhouses. I planted things for the garden mostly, but also some flowers. They should be ready to plant outside in a few weeks, and I’m sure the weather will be good for them then too! I also have gone on a vegetarian diet. I have not ate any meat in over a week. I decided to go on this diet because it is supposed to be more healthy, and make you feel better, and I do feel a lot better so far. You would think that I would be missing meat, but its the complete opposite. I actually am starting to detest even thinking about eating meat. I never thought that would happen! I still eat dairy products like milk, and cheese. I eat eggs too. I just don't eat the animal they came from :) LOL. I'm also trying to get away from processed, and non-organic foods. Which is one reason I've got my seeds planted. I Should have a big enough garden to supply me, and my dad with the fresh fruits, and vegetables we need till fall.

I’ve also been reading “Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics”. Its a book by Ari Feldman about… well..  Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics! Its a good book about game art design, color theory, and other game graphics principles. Its a little dated (published in 2000), but still contains a lot of interesting, and helpful information. Its actually kinda funny to read things like:

“Despite rapid advances in communication technologies, most people do not have very fast Internet access, especially outside the United States. In fact, the vast majority of users are still connecting to the Internet with 33.6 Kbps and 56 Kbps modems. Therefore, online game developers face a nasty dilemma: they have to create games that are compelling enough to attract players, yet small enough to access and play through relatively slow Internet connections.”

Nice to remember where all this started :)! The books available free online as a PDF if your interested. The reason I'm reading it is, because I'm hoping to start working on designing games again. Maybe I could actually finish one this time! anyway I’ll keep you posted. I also went up to see my little sister the other day as well. The main reason was to give here the lizard, I wrote about a few post back. She wanted it, I don’t know why, but she has it now. She has already made a video with it on her YouTube channel! While I was up there, we also made a video called “BagMan”. We had Greg (Minta’s husband) dress up in black garbage bags. It was fun, and its up on YouTube. The only problem we had making the video, was my camera. I think it wants to die. In fact it did die last week, and I had to go get a Mini DV Head cleaner to fix it! It might just be needing a new Mini DV cassette to record on. Who knows how many times I’ve rerecorded over that one! I would like to have a new camera, but I can’t afford one right now. I really want one that uses Mini SD cards. That would make live so much easier! There is an online video contest right now, and the prize is a new Waterproof Sanyo Mini SD camera. I'm going to enter it. Maybe I’ll win, and if I don’t, it still gives me an excuse to make a video LOL! :P. Well I'm going to get back to my book (PDF). I hope to have it read soon!

I finally got a chance to watch the iPhone 3.0 SDK presentation over at Apple. I really like the new features, and WOW the iPhone is looking better, and better as a game developing platform. It looks like apple is really trying to make the iPhone a great mobile gaming console. They have added things like, peer-to-peer communication between games (and apps), and voice in game, so you can communicate like on Xbox Live with your friends, while you play a game with them. It seemed like most, if not the majority of updates, and upgrades to the SDK were for gaming (at least it seemed that way to me :P). I would love to make a game for the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I have no experience with Apples core this, and Xcode that programing. They say its easy, but I don't know? I would just like to give it a try, but its $99 to join the developer program, plus the software only runs on a mac! Maybe I could get a Mac Mini, there the cheapest, and pay the $99 to give it a shot. Its still a lot of money, so I will really have to think about this one! Another idea is, you could try and use a Hackintosh to run the SDK software, but I don't know how great that would work, If it would work at all. I don't know if anyone has tried it before. I'll check into it, and let you all know! Apple says theres over 100 new features in the 3.0 update. Here is a least of some of the biggest: Cut, copy and paste- Wow finally, what took them so long! Spotlight searching- This is really timely. I'm starting to have a hard time finding my apps! Plus it searches music, and emails too! Push notifications- Lets apps send notifications to your home screen. Like small text messages, and number badges on there icons. In-App purchasing- This sounds really cool for games! They showed off a Sims 3 demo, that let your purchase extra items from within the game, when they came available from the publisher! MMS- this is something I would never use, but a lot of people ask for in iPhones. For some reason it does not work with the iPhone 2G. They say its because of hardware constraints on the older hardware. I just think there trying to get people to upgrade! Peer-to-Peer connectivity- Again really cool for games. It lets you play ad-hoc like you can on a DS or PSP! Third-party Accessories- This lets accessories makers tie directly into the hardware, and make apps that interact with there products. They showed off a glucose meter that could send the blood test results back to an iPhone app. Turn-by-Turn- This finally lets TomTom (and others) make a turn by turn GPS app for you car. Landscape keyboard- All native apps are now compatible with landscape mode. Which means you can use a full virtual keyboard when typing emails or txt messages. Voice memos- This is a new native app that lets you record messages with he iPhones mic, and then you can send them by MMS. I also think you can send them by email. Stereo Bluetooth- iPhone and iPod touch will now support stereo Bluetooth headsets. All these and more features will be available this summer (sometime). Its a free upgrade for iPhone 2G, and 3G users, and $9.95 for iPod Touch users everywhere. The beta is already available to people in the developer program :(