Devil May Cry: Gamescom 2011 Videos

Some words from Ninja Theory & Capcom on the latest DmC trailer that hit Gamescom 2011.



With the release of the new gameplay trailer as well. Combat trailer at that. Woot~



Post-live Q&A session with Ninja Theory and Capcom...

Devil May Cry: Gamescom 2011 - Cool images.

At Gamecom this year, Ninja Theory released some pretty cool images of Dante for the new DmC 5 game that I am working on. Check him out~

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West - Awards

Develop Awards 2011 - Won “Best New IP” at Develop Industry Excellence Awards 2011.

2010 Game Focus Awards - Won 3 Game Focus Awards, including Achievement in Story Writing.

Devil May Cry: DmC - Official Trailer (E3 2011)

Post-live Q&A session with Capcom at E3...

10 Lessons For Young Designers

Wieden+Kennedy’s Executive Creative Director, John C Jay, shares his 10 most important lessons for designers. However, these lessons could apply to any creative discipline, including the games industry.

10 lessons for young designers:

1. Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.
2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.
3. Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.
4. Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.
5. Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.
6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.
7. Try not to work for stupid people or you'll soon become one of them.
8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.
9. The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.
10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

Original article @AIGA

My Blog Design

Several readers has asked me about how I make my blog so interesting as it is both informative and pleasing to the eye. And lets be honest, most private technology blogs are usually boring/unattractive and "beautiful" blogs are usually well beautiful. Having said that, there are many other blogs & sites that are really well designed and written to serve its purpose and deliver the message to the masses. To those authors, I'm deeply grateful you choose to share your knowledge with me.

Back to the question, I tend to keep to several rules regarding my blog design:

1. Choose a simple layout & template.
2. Modify it to to have an outstanding color. Ensure that everything complies to a set of color template.
3. Post away with as much visual aid as possible.

I read lots of technology articles & blogs; may it be games, software or technology in general, each day (during office hours shhh...). There are lots of information out there and the only problem is taking time to read them. Therefore I prefer to squeeze in as much information and publish my own condensed version with visual aid for a fast but educational read. Very much how I do it in the good old university days. 

This is how I like my blog to be - short & sweet heavy with awesomeness.

Hope everyone enjoys it ~

- dc

Dungeon Raid

I love RPGs & I love puzzles. What is more interesting then both of them combined into one? Dungeon Raid has done it in a RPG-Match3 game.

This game basically is a match minimum 3 of a kind by simply connecting them together. To connect enemies you can slot in weapons in between to deal more damage. This game is pretty cool cause you have all of the basic RPG elements like item collection, dealing and receiving damage and also upgrade!

Crayon Physics

It is such a shame that Crayon Physics managed to steer out of my gamedar, well up until now. Crayon Physics was the grand price winner of The Independent Games Festival 2008.

Crayon Physics is very unique in the sense that you can literary design or draw your solution for the game. This is a physics base game where like many others the objective is to get the ball from point A to B. Apart from the physics elements, there are several key mechanisms like merging drawn objects together by overlapping them, pinning objects in space, etc.

It is a very cool game, in technical and the game design aspect. So check it out.

Android 3.0 New Developer Features

The Android 3.0 platform is designed specially to meet the unique needs of applications on devices with larger screen sizes.

• New UI framework for creating great tablet apps.
• High-performance 2D and 3D graphics.
• Support for multicore processor architectures.
• Rich Multimedia and connectivity.
• Enhancements for enterprise.
• Compatibility with existing apps.

New UI Framework for Creating Great Tablet Apps

Activity Fragments are broken down subcomponents of the application. Fragments:

• Can be combined in a variety of ways to create a richer and more interactive experience.
• Can be added, removed, replaced, and animated inside an Activity dynamically.
• Modular and offers an efficient for applications to run properly on both larger and smaller screen devices.
• Reusable across multiple Activities.

Redesign UI widgets for

• Larger screens such as tables.
• New holographic UI theme.
• New widget types such as 3D stack, search box, a date/time picker, number picker, calendar, popup menu, etc.
• Can be used as remote views in application widgets displayed on the home screen.
• Application written for earlier version can inherit the new widget designs and themes.

Expanded Home Screen widgets now has more types of content and new modes of interaction. Developers can use standard UI widget types in the home screen widget. New interaction such as using touch gestures to scroll and flip content displayed in a widget.

Persistent Action Bar at the top of the application screen which gives quick access to contextual options, widgets, status, navigation, etc.

Richer notifications in a new builder class that include large and small icons, a title, a priority flag, and any properties existing in previous versions, and more content by expanding on the UI Widgets via remove Views.

Multiselect, clipboard and drag-and-drop for managing collections of items in lists or grids.

• Multiselect mode lets users choose mutile items for an action.
• New system-wide Clipboard to let uses easily copy any type of data into and out of their applications.
• Drag-and-Drop interaction through a DragEvent framework allos easier file management and organization.

High-Performance 2D and 3D Graphics

New Animation framework is more flexible and allows easy animation of the properties of UI elements such as Views, Widgets, Fragments, Drawables, and any arbitrary objects.

Hardware-accelerated 2D graphics with OpenGL renderer that gives a performance boost for most operations in Canvas, Paint, Xfermode, ColorFilter, Shader, and Camera. Developers can control how hardware-acceleration is applied at every level; enabling it globally, specific Activities or Views inside the application.

Renderscript 3D graphics engine

• Provides an API for building 3D scenes.
• A platform-independent shader language for maximum performance.
• Accelerate graphics operations and data processing.

Support for multicore processor architectures 
Is the first Android version that has a variety of changes in the Dalvik VM, Bionic library, etc. Single-threaded applications might also see a performance boost if the Dalvik garbage collector runs on the second core automatically.

Rich multimedia and connectivity

• HTTP Live streaming allows an M3U playlist URL to the media framework to begin an HTTP Live streaming session including adaptive bit rate.
• Pluggable DRM framework that lets applications manage protected content according to a variety of DRM mechanisms that may be available on the device.
• Digital media file transfer includes built-in support for Media/Picture Transfer Protocol (MTP/PTP) over USB, let users create or manage media files that they may want to transfer or share across devices.
• Bluetooth A2DP and HSP profiles lets applications query Bluetooth profiles for connected devices, audio state, and more, then notify the user.
• System broadcasts of pre-defined vendor-specific AT commands, such as Platronics Xevent.
• New support for full keyboards connected by USB or Bluetooth.

Enhancements for enterprise 
Developer of device administration applications can support new types of policies, including policies for encrypted storage, password expiration, password history, and password complex characters required.

Compatibility with existing apps
There is a new UI designed for tablets and other larger screen devices, but it also is fully compatible with applications developed for earlier versions of the platform, or for smaller screen sizes. Developers wanting to take fuller advantage of larger screen sizes can also create dedicated layouts and assets for larger screens and add them to their existing applications.

A Gamer's Valentine.

I read this off Reddit and it is really sweet. So I would like to share it with all of you gamers out there on this day. Who says geeks can't be romantic.

I meant to bring you jewelry,

a lovely emerald ring,

but Knuckles robbed me blind last night

and stole the precious thing.

I wanted next to take you riding

all across Hyrule,

but Link and Zelda need to put

an end to Ganon's rule.

I asked my old friend Mario

what flowers I should give,

but after burning both my hands

I thought you'd rather live.

Since each romantic plan I made

completely went askew,

I'm trying hard to figure out

what else there is to do.

I have some quarters in my pocket. 

Would you please be my Player 2?

Say "I Love You" the Valve way.

We All Should Learn To Say No...

lwding shared a question/link with me sometime back. The question was, "Should I Work for Free"?

Friendly Robot Neighbour Out In Town for a Scone.

Source Link: Robot buys a scone in a coffee shop.

Well if earth is ever overrun by robots, I sure do hope they are of this kind, those that runs errands & tips well.

Fin d'ete - End Of Summer

Chanced upon this cool and serene yet heart breaking short animated film. This short film is about a woman who decides to stay on in an abandoned city before a tropical storm...

BMW 'The Suit That Takes You' ~ to places looking like a geek.

Well the Bimmer is one of my favorite rides. They have the best technology, look and style you want to be seen in on a Saturday night out on the streets. But sometimes being on a cool ride does not always make you look cool even if you do feel it. Check BMW's new vision for future mobility:

Somewhat cook shoes though :D

EyeSight's Touch Free Gasture Control

Who needs a fairy-godmother or a magic wand if I could just wave my hands and voila !

de Blob 2 Animated Short by THQ.

I love animated shorts. Mainly because they are often overlooked as a movie yet there is so much effort and detail put into them. They often show creativity, personal style & taste, and passion for the work one enjoy's doing.

This animated short is called "de Blob 2" and it is about the the plight of being an air traffic controller.

Liberty City's Pile Up...

I have 4 loves in my life; fast cars, physics, games and violence. It is pretty messed up but it is educational (in a physics geeky way) and well...simply hilarious from my point of view. May the best crash win !

Games as The Ultimate Treatment

The mind does funny things to our body. In this world, this realm of reality, our mind controls the way well feel and experience pleasure as mush as pain. A lot of us as reached out for games mainly for pleasure and entertainment but is that all it is to it? Games has so much more value that we give credit.

Burn patients in the US are being helped to escape the pain of burn injuries by immersing them in the virtual reality of a computer game during treatment. Patients who played the game while having treatment experienced less pain. Patients can escape into the virtual reality of games like "Snow World", with brain scans done on patients who have used the therapy showing a decrease in pain-related brain activity.