Space geekout time! I was recently at the Cologne Center Station and saw this:

It is some kind of special edition of National Geographic about space. Naturally, I bought it and boy was I in for a treat! It is awesome! Of course, it contains great photos but you expect that from National Geographic. What you don’t necessarily expect are three most astonishing information graphics.
The first one is a summary of ALL MANNED SPACEFLIGHTS so far. All on one (double-)page. The amount of information is just staggering, yet the graphic is elegant and instantly understandable. Very Tufteesque:

The second graphic is a list of all planets and planet-like objects in the solar system. It is pretty standard but well-executed. The planets are shown to scale which is somewhat rare. Also, you get a few more exotic objects like Ceres or Eris. The only thing I miss are important Moons like Titan, Europa, Enceladus and The Moon (duh) but at least it is consistent without them. All in all very solid!

The third graphic is the centerfold. It shows all expeditions to other Planets (and to the Moon). Although less elegant then the first one, this information graphic certainly looks stunning and is something you might even hang on a wall.

You can see the centerfold online too! Here is the general website of this particular issue of the magazine.

EDIT: I forgot about the FOURTH information graphic which is yet another amazing highlight. You get all 260 discovered extrasolar systems compared to the solar system and with their habitable zone traced in. How cool is that!

The magazine is well worth the money and very exciting because of the astronomy, photography, visual design and information design. It puts the most important facts about our efforts in exploring space into a beautiful nutshell. So if you see it at the magazine stand, give it a try.

In other news, the last ingredient for my Phil Plait Voodoo doll finally arrived *Evil Laughter*.

I’m currently doing a quick re-write of my old game Excit. Just wrapping it up now so I can get back on track with my other projects like Illucinated. I have already written how surprised I was about it’s success. After one year, we have over 2,5 Million players. And that’s not even unusual for a flash game. I know that much cruder games can be even more successful. I guess that’s because of the big pond we are fishing in.

Interestingly, when re-writing the code for AS3.0, I took a different approach from back when I was writing it the first time. When I did it the first time, I had cool animations even before most of the gameplay elements worked. This time, I made sure the game mechanics work and cared about the little special effects and animations later on. So now I was able to see the game in its “raw” state. The result was an eye opener. The game is severely less fun without the squishy cursor effects. It seems like they make up a very big part of the fun.

I’m currently playing the GBA Castlevania Series and noticed a similar effect. The game itself is rather repetetive and boring. The graphics aren’t even what you would consider “beautiful”. However, the animations are really smooth and extremely detailed. The result is pure, addictive fun. I can spend the whole day watching Skeletons explode into particle fountains of tiny bones, zombies melt away into smooth hand-pixeled puddles and demons turn into miniature galaxies of fireballs. Even the character animations have lots of details with a high frame count and an obsessive amount of secondary motion.

       
See here for more Castlevania Animated GIFs

So the lesson is that well done animations can MAKE the whole game. I guess it is a good idea to take care of the animations very early in the game design process. You might think that a game that is fun without cool animations, it will be even more fun if you add them at the end. However, you might force yourself into over-designing the game while all it needed was just a little bit of juiciness.

I’m currently taking part in an interesting program. It is a mentoring program for Audio Visual Talents in North Rhine-Westphalia. Basically, the state government of NRW realized that people seem to prefer to get their audio visual education in NRW (Cologne, Düsseldorf, Bonn) but move to Hamburg or Berlin afterwards to have their careers there. The program brings some young, smart people and some well known, experienced folks together in order to help the newcomers to get into the media industry without moving.
I generally like the way how different media and different professions were brought together. There were a some TV-guys, some film-guys and some radio-guys. There were even … like 1.5 games-guys.

I noticed that a lot of the radio-guys talked about how the times are tough and they are doing Podcasts now. This made me think. When I was a Kid I remember that my grandma listened to radio. I mean she really LISTENED to radio. She knew when a certain program was going to be aired, she sat in a chair in front of the radio and just sat there and listened for an hour or so. And it wasn’t music, it was people talking. I found that odd. My parents pretty much ignored radio.

So for me, radio is QUITE a dead medium. The only context where I do sometimes listen to radio is in the car but that’s only because it is a convenient way of getting music. If there was no such thing as radio, I would just throw in a CD or something. In fact, I sometimes do because I can’t stand radio commercials.

So I’m a bit concerned if the experience of the radio-mentors will be of any help for me. I’m still glad I can participate in the program and I’m open to anything. And at least I can relate to their work because I do enjoy Podcasts frequently. But I wouldn’t call them radio. It is on-demand, thematically more focused but formally more relaxed. I consider them as a cross-over between radio, telephone conversations and audiobooks.

Here is a thought that I had for some time: when I will have kids, they think about Television the same way I think about Radio. After all, even I don’t really watch TV all that much so why would they? Sure, they will watch movies and maybe some series but actually FOLLOWING the TV program and tuning in live? I doubt it.

As we have already established, game designers are space geeks. So recently I geeked out and did this during one long night.

You can try it here.

It is an interactive 3D map of our interstellar neighborhood. Here is what inspired me to do it and why I spend my time doing it:

Continue reading “32 Nearby Stars”

Recently, Lars Gerckens released the Simple Timer 2. It is a very simple and stylish tool for organizing projects and measuring how much time you spend on them.

Basically, the screenshot says it all. You define a project, define a to-do list of tasks for each project. You estimate how much a given task will take. You click on a task when you begin working on it and click again when you quit. The tool will log your time, give you some statistics, tell you if you underestimated the work, etc. I actually made a concept for a similar tool once but mine was supposed to be a physical product.

If you work as a freelancer or generally do your own work on a project basis, logging the time you spend working is actually an essential part of the daily routine. I found at some point it made the work even harder because it was yet ANOTHER barrier you had to overcome when you started working. As if the work alone wasn’t daunting enough. The previous Version, Simple Timer already was quite useful as it automated that little part and even made it a bit exciting with spiffy animations and such things. The new version has less spiffy animations but is certainly more flexible and useful. There is a nice calender view and Excel export but what really makes that one stand out is the ability to define tasks.

There are still some problems with. Every time you use such a tool you need to adapt to a certain philosophy inherent to it. So in Simple Timer 2 you HAVE to define a deadline for a project and you HAVE to estimate how long a task will take and you HAVE to describe what you just did every time you stop logging a task. Actually, that last dialog has even a nasty button – pressing “cancel” on that dialogue will delete the log you are about to stop and potentially delete an important entry. But those are minor details you get used to pretty quickly and future versions might be more flexible.

Simple Timer and Simple Timer 2 are also the first two Adobe AIR applications I’ve used. I’m actually quite fond of it. The installation is smooth. The applications can do advanced things like have Tray Icons with menus. Adobe AIR even automatically checks if there is a new version of an application available and automatically upgrades it if necessary. Apart from that functionality, AIR itself remains invisible and the applications work like every other program out there. So far: good work, Adobe!