Bonoboblogs

So Harvest Mania is now online, finally.

Click to visit. So far, German only. Sorry. The English version is being prepared.

This marks the first weekend (or free time in general) since 2009 that I’m not obligated to work on the game. Or am I?
You see, the game was already on the AgriTechnica two years ago, which was the original [...]

Time for another backlog update. I finished another 9 games. During all that TRAUMA business, I completely forgot to do an update! Also funny thing: the actual games I end up playing often turn out to be very different from the list I initially come up with. On the other hand, I did play a [...]

This time on the Monster Hunter Podcast: Halloween Special 2011. Impossibly delayed by electricity shortage, we bring you this celebration of the spooky holiday. Lean back, have a McRib and be afraid. Be very afraid.

Get the mp3 of the episode here.
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Enjoy!

Now here is one book I was happy to delete from my Kindle. I recently finished “A Fire Upon The Deep” by Vernor Vinge. I was throughly disappointed by it.

A cheesy spaceship airbrush, 2 review quotes, one prize sticker and some seriously misguided typography. I should have known.

How I came to read the book I don’t really [...]

Current work is on “Particles” – a “framework for FabLabs” that should enable quick scripting of FabLab-equipment, like laser cutters, CNC-machines or plotters. The framework is written in Lua, because Lua is extremely flexible and easy to install on almost any machine – even on an Arduino for example. The current state is “early alpha”. Feel free to linger around on the Particles-site but consider, that things are far from being completed right at the moment.

Here is an interesting bit that came up recently on the Day[9] show.

It appeared in Day9 Daily episode 341, an episode about multi-tasking. It was meant to demonstrate how being to able to play on a decent level in Starcraft 2 is not necessarily some impossible skill. The trick is to realize and understand what is important.
It’s [...]

I recently finished Amnesia: The Dark Descent. If you haven’t heard about it, I think Yahtzee pretty much covers it.

It’s probably one of the most effectively scariest games of all time. It’s quite ingenious. And perhaps the most important thing to note is that it achieves all of this because it dares to actually leave out [...]

Speaking of space and asteroids. Here is one image I see over and over again. It’s driving me insane.

Splash!

You will see it in every second science article on the extinction of dinosaurs or meteorites. Like this Wired article for example. It’s one of the so-called “Artit’s Impressions”. They often accompany scientific articles to illustrate a certain [...]

There was no space geekout post for quite some time. So naturally, I have quite a bit of a backlog of space discoveries stored up. Here is the thing that was rocking my world for a few weeks now. We have arrived at Vesta!

Well, not we exactly. A small space probe called Dawn did, an extraordinary [...]

There are a few things that games often do “wrong” on a regular basis. One of them being fonts. Fonts have always been treated badly by computer technology. Many programmers underestimate the complexity and importance of typography. In fact, one of the things Steve Jobs mentioned as a reason for the success of the Mac [...]

Time for some movie talk. I recently saw the movie In Time. Have a trailer.

The movie was directed and written by Andrew Niccol, who also did Gattaca. And indeed I found In Time to be similar to Gattaca in many ways. Both movies have a great premise and lots of striking and memorable details. Both movies [...]

Time for some movie talk. I recently saw the movie In Time. Have a trailer.

The movie was directed and written by Andrew Niccol, who also did Gattaca. And indeed I found In Time to be similar to Gattaca in many ways. Both movies have a great premise and lots of striking and memorable details. Both movies [...]

There are more and more creative code tools for the iPad emerging, that use Lua as language. That is not only, because Lua is highly versatile and easy to learn, but because Apples allows to let Lua-interpretes run on their devices. Via Create Digital Motion I discovered Codify today: A full development IDE, that runs on the iPad. You can build scripts creative code experiments or even games with that tool. A really well designed tool for people who like to tinker with code. Here is the reference of the API. And here is the AppStore-Link.

PS: I lately had another posting about scripting-tools for iPad.

I’m playing Demon’s Souls and I’m thinking about difficulty again. Why do so many people (me including) enjoy playing Demon’s Souls so much, even though it’s supposedly so difficult? It occurred to me that to some extent, Demon’s Souls is actually not really difficult. It’s a sheep in wolf’s clothes. Let me give you an example.

Is [...]