I was fortunate enough to be one of the guests on the latest season of Joe Martin and Harriet Jones’ podcast, Unlimited Hyperbole. The episode has just gone up, and is perfect coffee break listening-size. In it, I talk about how the games industry is missing out on a future it could still have, if only we could get academia to work a bit closer with industry. I might be sounding like a broken record lately – I said the same thing when I launched The Saturday Paper just a few weeks ago. But it’s something that plays on my mind a lot, because it’s so easily fixed, and because there’s so much exciting research going on out of people’s reach.

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Apologies for the silence over here – I have begun work on my thesis, which is delaying anything exciting happening! Here are some things that are happening, though:

• Next week I’ll be in Vienna at EvoStar 2013 talking about Mechanic Miner! Looking forward to that.
• Spritely will be released in time for Ludum Dare, so hopefully I can get some developers using it to prototype their games!
• A Rogue Dream’s code, which I talked about in an earlier post, is now up on GitHub here.

Thanks for bearing with me. More content on the site later in the year hopefully!

This was originally intended to be a non-research post over at Cut Garnet Games, but since it sprang out of work I’d been doing on ANGELINA I wanted to talk about it over here in the end. I entered the 7-Day Roguelike competition this year, a week-long game jam where entrants attempt to make a roguelike game. I failed, unfortunately, but I learnt a lot and had a good time. My attempt - A Rogue Dream – used techniques I’d picked up at computational creativity conferences, as well as work I’ve been doing on Spritely. Here’s how it would’ve gone

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I’ve been lax updating the site recently – this is partly down to not having anything flashy to show off, not even a screenshot of something new that’s going on! Nevertheless, things have been happening. Here’s a quick rundown, and a promise of more to come in the future.

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Since there’s not been much activity here in the last few weeks, I just wanted to remind anyone coming to the site (especially as we said hello to the CIG 2011 attendees a few hours ago) that our games can be found through this category here, you can follow ANGELINA on Twitter for future game updates here, and you can email me with feedback, questions and interesting thoughts at:

mike -at- gamesbyangelina.org

I don’t know why email scraping bots don’t just pattern match on those things. They probably do, for all I know. Anyway, there you go. The conference paper and the slides for the talk will be up here soon too.

I’m back to running lots of evolutions now, which means in the downtime I get to tinker with other aspects of ANGELINA. Here’s a mockup of what the graphics will look like once I get them slotted in.

The camera-ready copy for our first paper is due soon, but this week I had other things in mind – specifically my PhD transfer talk that secures the next two years of work at Imperial for me. It looks like the transfer is going ahead, which is good news for continued work on ANGELINA and related projects. The timeline for the next few months still includes a couple of weeks of work on the paper, before we return to revamping ANGELINA and adding more bells and whistles for better game generation. This means more game rules, more interesting maps and even some game visuals. Stay tuned!

If you’re interested, I’ve put the slides for today’s talk online here. They don’t make a huge amount of sense without the accompanying notes, but hopefully they’re of some interest. The transfer report will also be online here once I’ve made some adjustments to it.