Gamzee Blog

Yet more press on Gamzee. This is incredibly encouraging.

It also reinforces why Howard’s such a visionary when it comes to tech and the game industry in particular. He’s 2-2 so far with Activision’s rebranding and transition to CD-ROM games and Acclaim and the free-to-play revolution. Mobile/social games and HTML5 could be the biggest game-changer yet.

Socaltech Interview with Howard Marks

HTML5 games is obviously a hot space, as witnessed by our seed round and continued press. Thanks to Dean Takahashi at Venturebeat for interviewing Howard.

Venturebeat/Gamesbeat Article on Gamzee’s Seed Round

Wow, who knew I had so much to say about HTML5 game development?

Gamzee Interview with Inside Social Games

Thanks to A.J. Glasser at Inside Social Games for taking the time to interview me.

Never thought I’d steal Larry King’s column format, but here goes…

Canvas performance on iPhone, particularly iPhone 3GS (which I happen to have) is awful. On iPhone 4, it’s marginally better. On Android phones, it’s not too bad. I wish iOS 5 was released now. Canvas performance on desktop is pretty solid and almost indistinguishable from what you can do with Flash.

Getting some good resumes in for both regular engineers and our CTO/lead position. As hiring solid tech folks is a pain point for startups all over the world, this is encouraging. I’m also not sure what’s changed in the past week or two that the volume of solid candidates has increased so significantly.

Legos are a great prototyping tool for social games with a building component. And they’re fun.

Seeing your game running on a laptop, a tablet, and your phone — and working well — is pretty cool.

You’d think Indian food — particularly vegetarian — would be healthier for you than it is. Must be all the ghee.

For some reason when I’m not in the middle of designing a game, I forget that around 25% of the design effort is menus/UX and 25% of it is brain-twisting math (not hard math, but frustrating math in getting the balance right or figuring out how to represent something in a simple equation).

The short answer is no.

We had a celebratory Bowling Night for Gamzee on Tuesday at Hollywood’s Lucky Strike Lanes (which is pretty nice).

It was a good time, with everybody drinking beer and chowing down on some good sliders and burgers and fries and steak skewers.

Our bowling scores would have been great if we were 10. But sadly, we’re much older than that. High score of the night went to Sean with a whopping 120. Nobody else bowled over 100. The only person who should be proud is Howard, who skipped bowling due to recovering from a shoulder injury.

I wish I’d done the same.

The early scores from frame one. Sadly, that was as good as it got the whole night.

President, CEO, and non-bowler, Howard Marks.

Engineer Caleb throwing stones.

On a non-bowling-related note, it looks like hardware acceleration for Canvas is turned on, at least in the dev build of iOS 5.

We sponsored “Tea Time,” a gathering of CS students at UCLA yesterday.  It was a great chance to meet all levels of Computer Science folks at UCLA, including some of the professors.

And we brought ice cream, courtesy of Dandy Don’s, which was delicious.

Dandy Don’s sure is dandy!

Mmm, toppings.