Grin visit
07-30-08Made a quick vid av Grin’s Stockholm studio today and got to play some Bionic Commando. Can’t say much but I want to share my perception of the game: it’s really good!
Knols and articles
07-28-08Google has justed started a new service called Knol. Knols are basically articles that can be edited by the author or everyone depending on what setting the author chose.
I’ve read that knol is supposed to be a competitor to Wikipedia but I don’t see how google intends to compete with the amount of content already on wikipedia.
One good things though is that Knol will allow me to write the articles I’ve been promising for you online through drafts and invite reviewers to check them before I post them on this blog. Which will push me to finalize the articles a lot sooner.
But the post about difficulty level is still coming, probably this Wednesday. I’m also glad to announce that a lengthier article about the decline of creativity in MMOG design is coming. And soon, because I can’t stop thinking about it.
Streaming gameplay to linux
07-23-08Has anyone tried this?:
http://www.streammygame.com/
It’s a service that lets you stream input/output from a windows machine to another PC or a linux PC. Sounds to me like lag should be an issue but they’re claiming they can play Crysis (there is a video but it’s to low res to tell for sure).
The power of novalty
07-23-08There are almost always discussions about the latest hardship in any business. For the past year most of these discussions have focused on the gameplay vs. graphics battle that’s happening in the marketplace.
Do we really need to keep turning up the graphics? Or can we find a sweet spot and just stay complacent?
Who knows.
But I want to talk about another problem:
In Hollywood action movies were for year dictated by showing novelty. It was basically what they did, if the audience had seen it before it wasn’t good enough. This arms race of action finally lead to freaky movies like Total Recall where the main aim for the movie was to show weird stuff and kill a lot of people. Why or how didn’t really enter into it. Fortunately Hollywood has matured since then and action movies are less about novelty today.
Why am I ranting about this? Action games are doing the same thing today.
We really need to learn from our (according to Microsoft) smaller brother, Hollywood, and stop doing the same mistakes. But to do that we need publishers to spend some cash on smaller games that might not sell well. They need to spend money on innovative products. Sony did a great job with Little Big Planet but when will we see Microsoft, EA and Acti-Blizz doing the same?
(I’m not going to mention Nintendo, their doing demos and still hindering third party developers. That’s not innovation, that’s arrogant Japanese.)
For a quick education about what I mean check out this clip of Postal, how often do you hunt strangers with a badger in a sling?
2010
JesperBylund.com remake
I redid jesperbylund.com, finally hosting it myself.
It includes my portfolio and blog and was designed to be an interactive information sheet about me and my work.
Since all design is iterative I can't be sure this first version will work as intended. Only testing will tell. But since it's based on cognitive processes it should be an interesting website to most visitors.
2009
Tele2.se remakes 09
Tele2.se was relaunched with a new design in Febuary of 09. The new design was created by Cordovan Digital and implemented into the CMS Reddot by myself, Jakob Neander and Tobias Lindman.
The black top was a redesign of the Business part of the site in the summer of 09. Designed once again by Cordovan Digital.
Shattered Alliance
This was my third year project at the University of Skovde. Together with a team of 18 third and fourth year students we designed and implemented everything from the engine up. We had planned a 8 player cooperative shooter with online ranking.
The game was bought by the University and was intended to be used for PR purposes at LAN parties.
Sadly, the engine development was delayed due to changing demands from the University and in the end lighting and core gameplay progression was never fully implemented.
The game was however a great success as in it's final stages it did support online ranking and up to 8 players cooperating over LAN. The University even hosted a compitition in which new students downloaded the games and ranked for most kills during a week. A price was awarded and over 200 students did compete.
2008
Dreamlords the Reawakening
Dreamlords the Reawakening was the follow up on the critical success Dreamlords. Dreamlords never had monetary success and to reboot the brand and still retain the community Lockpick Entertainment created Dreamlords the Reawakening which was something of a cross between a sequel and an extension.
The lore was the same but the game play was not.
Dreamlords the Reawakening was picked up by several publishers and published in three territories. It was commercially successful for about a year before the economic crisis hit us and bankrupted the company.
Dreamlords the Reawakening is still being developed by active community members and former devs.
Dreamlords
Dreamlords was the brain child of a group of student from the university of shoved. It was a unique mix of RTS gaming and web based long term strategy.
The game was released to critical success but we never broke even. Dreamlords also lost a number of developers as the profitability shrank at the same time as interest from other game developers grew.
Grim Breed
Grim Breed was my second year project at the University of Skovde. It was a RTS game designed to be simplistic but offer a unique UI that let players issue complex orders to troops with ease.
The game was severely hampered by an external pathfinding library that we found out to late was not up to the challenge of guiding such a large number of units. The game was a great success for the members of the team and is to this date one of the most successful game projects to come out of UoS.
who am I?
what do I do?
I'm just a really tall guy who happens to love to understand what people do and why.
I fell in love with what engages people early on and decided digital entertainment and products were the way of the future.
I work smart, not hard, to find the details that matter. And I love to see people feel my work without really percieving it.
IF you need this knowledge or the effects of it, I'd be happy to share it with you. Follow or contact me:
I design for interaction. No matter what the product or service.
And I make that interaction fun. Interaction and fun are closely connected, it's harder to create fun without interaction, most people just don't know why.
Ease of use and simplicity is a side effect of designing for interaction, and all my work echo this effect.
Download my CV