Psychochild's Blog

Just so the Meridian 59 fans who read this first don't wet themselves: The game will continue running. It just won't be running as a commercial concern with Near Death Studios owning it.

But, today is the official last day of the company. We started it early in 2001 to make games and got the opportunity to buy the rights from Meridian 59 from 3DO; that game dominated NDS's life.

If you're interested in some details, read after the jump.
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I've done a bit of maintenance to the blog. According to some commenters at Hardcore Casual, some people were being redirected away from my blog to a drug spam site.

Notice any problems? Post about them here, please. Read on for some details for the curious.
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The end of the year is a time to turn out the old and bring in the new. So, let me write a bit about game development to dispel some myths about game development.

As a special bonus, I'm including a soundtrack for this post: (Rock) Superstar by Cypress Hill

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I hope everyone has a great holiday. Spend some quality time surrounded by loved ones, preferably playing some games. :)

I have a new article posted at Gamasutra: Rethinking the Trinity of MMO Design. It is intended to be an article in the vein of my How to replace levels posts. This time around I'm looking at the "holy trinity" of tank, healer, DPS as the core design of a game and what could be done to create an alternate system.

I'm interested to read your thoughts on the article.

I saw a post on We Fly Spitfires a little while ago talking about the Worldplay Project. This project is run by researchers out of Trinity University looking at how online gaming can bring people together. Part of their research is collecting data from players like those that read blogs.

Read on for some more information and my thoughts on the project.
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Reader and all around good guy Over00 (aka Dave Toulouse) has been hard at work on a new game called Blimp Wars. It's an interesting game in that it is an action game with Javascript implementation. This means no plugins involved to play the game.

Anyway, loyal readers of my blog are invited to go test out the game: http://beta.blimpwarsonline.com/ Sign up for an account, try out some games, and submit some bug reports. Read on for some additional information.
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