Wonderland

The DIY Kit for budding Game Designers

Look at this lovely thing. It's a recipe for making your own Game Designer's Toolkit, using everyday household items, the total cost of which should be under 20 quid/bux.

By Rick Marazzani, game industry vet and clever DIY'er!

Where the fuck is Princess Leia, asks Glynnis MacNicol. Good question. To the Etsy!

Seriously. Where the Fuck is Princess Leia?

Until someone has a go at licensing Leia for all sorts of goods, we have Etsy. I present to you:

The custom Leia lunchbox. 

Kick-ass poster 01.

 

 

And 02

Earrings.

 

Rubber undies (and why not).

 

Proper Leia dressup

 

 

Hair bows 01

And 02

Aaaand finally the crochet baby hat.

 

What would we do without Etsy, huh?

Legend of Zelda Monopoly

Getting ridiculous. But look at the tokens!

THE TOKENS!!

At thinkgeek for fifty bux.

Haunted Mansion dinnerware

Uhoh. I know a husband who is going to a) freak out and b) insist we replace all our plates immediately.

Foolish mortal.

Disney's Haunted Mansion tableware.

Fight Like A Girl

One of the many funny tees over at HUMAN...

<3

Hyrulian Shield backpack

As modelled by RellyAB!

Oh gods it's amazing, and it's £29.99 and it's on Nintendo UK.

Lucky Seven caps

My pal Jay (from primary school!) and his lovely wife make these brilliant Lucky Seven customisable caps, have you seen 'em yet? They do patches from cult classic movies, like Alien, Star Wars, Back to the Future, and this beauty:

I got Tattooine for the kid, and the Tyrell Corp for me.

... but at this rate I'll probably end up with a whole set. Off world colonies! Hal! Augh!

Makies FabLab is live...

After many months of development alongside (and you know how difficult that is) Makies going into Selfridges, and ramping up for Xmas delivery, and various in-store apps, and STUFF, we are aliiiiiiive!

And it's just the beginning. We decided a while back that we wanted Makies FabLab to be an iterative, growing thing; something that we would launch early and expand upon on a regular basis.

We did this with our toys - when they went live, they were bone white, weird looking, and £100. It was horrible! But we stuck with it, and iterating with our customers means Makies are looking pretty happy right now.

(Yep, she's 3D printed!)

So here we are... Makies FabLab is a fashion game, targeted at 8-80. It's got a massive focus on creativity: while most fashion dolls are mass produced passive things, we wanted ours to be little individuals, who encourage creative hands-on making.

We've blended Resource Management with Dress Up, so far, to produce a lightly educational clothes-making game: growing materials through to patterning cloth and fulfilling orders. Next steps: player-to-player shops, if that's what our community ask for. Android. More things to create.

Would you help us?

We have fantastic 5* reviews so far on the AppStore, but as you know, absolutely the more the merrier. It's the currency of now, that, and we have a very limited window (presumably!) of being on the launch page under Best New Games (thanks Apple!). 

The game's here: if you're willing, please play, rate, review, share, for great justice heartfelt gratitude. <3

Ian Bogost's future-dweller's retrospective, #GDC14

Every year at GDC there's a Game Developers Rant! session (sometimes it's publishers, and sometimes another slant, but mostly developers), and every year it's amazing. This year was a vintage year, and here's one of the rants, from academic/gamedev/genius Ian Bogost - a future-dweller's retrospective of the game industry of today. Part speculative fiction, part fact... it's depressing, and sad, and true.

Working long before sustenance powders, developers were easily seduced by appeals to their physical urges. Overseers plied them with sugars and salts during the day and forced them to engorge on extravagant meals at night. Shifts extended for days at a time. Developers were even required to worship in their cells, which were adorned with plush and vinyl totems of figures from terrestrial myths of the era.

Initially, these works were limited to propaganda meant to acclimate young men to governmentally-sponsored global violence. However, after the languorous wars of the first two millennia had failed at forcible depopulation, the task of social progress was handed over to a tribe of patrons called “venture capitalists.”

They had orchestrated the rise of photo-preening software popular before the Disruption came to Silicon Valley. A new arms race commenced—for virtual attention, which the Patrons converted into financial instrument. While historians agree that ancient works like Civilization and chess still provided inspiration, games primarily became a specialized form of banking.

The upside (there's an upside!) is that the variety of independent, self-expressive games on show today is the greatest I've ever seen, and despite these wars, we seem to be flourishing an underground movement, an art movement that's capturing the hearts and minds of a new generation of game-makers. It's good. They might win.

Link.

 

Sarlacc toilet

Oh wow. When I was a kid, sometimes I'd be afraid of going to the loo because of TENTACLES. Not sure where that came from, and now, my fears have blended with my love of starwars to produce this thing of um er 

argh!

I love it.

Thanks @mink_ette!