shaver

In addition to having a truly excellent comic today, Penny Arcade mentions what I think is my mail to them regarding their previous piece on the America’s Army games. Of course, I might have not been the only one to mail about that most intriguing angle, but for purposes of this diary entry we’ll all pretend that I was.

One of the best sessions at this year’s Game Developers Conference was the three-hour Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Ernest Adams has written a good summary of one of the parts of that session, the presentation of the Indie Game Jam results. The rest of the session was pretty awesome too, but I can’t find a good summary of it on the web as of yet. (The article requires free registration with Gamasutra, but I haven’t recieved a single piece of unsolicitied email from them in the 2+ years I’ve been subscribed. #define MAX_CHRISTS 5 is worth the effort right there.)

I know a couple of people who could probably take a swing at this D&D world-creation contest. Normally this stuff comes off as a cheap way to cash in on the hopes and dreams of would-be game designers, but with a $20K grant for the development of the final treatment and a $100K prize for the winner, there’s some relatively serious money involved.

It’s not as rare an occurence as we’d all really like it to be, but it still never fails to amuse me when a major news organization falls for a story from The Onion. Everyone take a second to be glad that they didn’t fall for a more dangerous story.

We don’t yet have good download numbers for the 1.0 release — and our best numbers are always severely lowballed, due to extensive mirror-site traffic — but with 130K unique addresses hitting the 1.0 start page, things are looking good. My good friend Deb (no longer maintaining a diary, alas, or I would link mercilessly to her clever ramblings) has become quite smitten with our little lizard, especially the tabbed browsing and the DOM Inspector. Warms my heart, because she’s a pretty demanding browser customer. Yay us.

If you were thinking of popping into IRC and asking me for an estimate of something related to the Mozilla development schedule, let me save you the trouble and just make up some answers right here: “136.7″, “9 weeks”, “6 million (give or take a few hundred thousand)”, “never”.