Interesting. I posted the following link to Facebook and the next day it’s gone without a trace.

Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?

It’s an expose about FB getting funding a board members from US intelligence agencies. I don’t even know if it’s true but if they deemed it’s worth censoring, I guess there might be something to it. At least the fact that some of the money they’ve received is a big dodgy.

Makes me wonder if I want to put any data there anymore, though.

I had the opportunity to talk to a couple “old school” game developers in AGDC which was nice but turns up I was pretty horrified by a couple things they said. The biggest no-no was that people thought it’s impossible to create a game without a long crunch period. The mentality seemed to be that the game can’t be fun without crunch.

I call that BS. Having to crunch is a sign of two things:

a) Overselling at the point of doing a contract (impossible schedule given time and resources) and,
b) Bad project management.

I’ve been working for 13 years or so in IT projects (games, websites etc) and crunch always came back to either one of those two things, or both. For someone who’s been working on games for longer than that, claiming you can’t complete a project without crunch just means the dude doesn’t know how to improve his way of working or just doesn’t care how people working for him feel. I’ve been to a couple crunch projects and I know it sure was not fun.

We try to avoid crunch and it’s working pretty well. Daniel James from Three Rings has said they never do crunch. And I’m sure there’s other companies in the gaming industry trying to do the same.

If given the opportunity to pick, would you choose a company which claimed they avoid crunch or one that said they’ll make your life a living hell every now and then? Maybe I value my life too much but I’m pretty sure I’d turn down even pretty lucrative offers if it entailed 10-12 hours days, 7 days a week for months because someone else screwed up.

Whoa, keynote is over and done with. Went pretty well apparently, at least getting positive feedback. Will be interesting to see what the actual evaluation score is. :)

Some of the coverage here:

Austin GDC: Trust the users
AGDC ’07: Habbo Hotel manager checks in
AGDC: Checking Into the Habbo Hotel
Austin GDC: Sulka Haro Keynote
AGDC: Haro On Making Habbo A Success

Update, the file is here: AGDC_keynote_Sulka_Haro.pdf. I had to delete a couple slides, sorry. If you’re interested in getting the actual research report we have, please contact “marketinsight (at) sulake.com”.

Uh oh. I almost got a heart-attack when Matt sent me an email congratulating on the speech in August.

Time to start preparing, I guess.

If you were in my GDC lecture, I’m probably not going to cover the same material in Austin. GDC was business track presentation, Austin will be a lot more about player creativity.

Being sick at home, I thought I’d do some reading and tried to access the Mud-dev archives. Lo and behold, my browser couldn’t find mud-dev.com. A couple minutes of checking and I found out the domain has been registered with Registerfly.com which in turn has been delisted by ICANN. ICANN has a customer FAQ out on their blog.

I have to say Mud-dev is badly out of luck. The original list and it’s archives were destroyed by a server blowing up and now that Mud-dev2 had gotten up to speed, the site provider explodes.

I sent email to Nick Koranda who’s maintaining the list, hope he gets the site up and running quicly. On the short term, I guess we’ll have to forget about the mud-dev.com domain as Registerfly doesn’t appear to be very cooperative in their customers getting hold of their domains.

This is a happy day. ScummVM has been ported to Gamecube / Wii. Assuming I can use the Wiimote to point at the menus, this is the perfect solution to playing the classic Scumm games. Monkey Island, here I come!

Coming to think of it, if the current rights holder bought the port and released a CD with, say, Monkey Islands, to Wii, I’d be a happy camper and buy the package immediately. The old Lucasarts adventure games are to me pretty Wii-esque in their humor and design philosophy (you can’t die) so that’d be a perfect match.

(Via Slashdot)

Moo cards for Habbo are finally out. Pretty cool.

You can use your own Habbo for the card, no matter which Hotel you’re from. I still have a couple promo codes left, drop me a line if you want one.

Update: out of codes!

A truly excellent write-up about why to engage users. I tried to inject some of this in my GDC speech but didn’t do nearly as good a job as Kathy does in this post.

(via Raph)

Disneyland Paris castle, originally uploaded by sulka.

Someone just commented on this shot again so felt like blogging the photo. I’m feeling pretty mixed about this shot being the most popular one I’ve posted to Flickr. On the other hand, I can understand why certain people like it but then I’d rather see one of my nature shots being favorited by a bunch of people.

FYI, it’s the Disneyland Paris castle. Wonder if Disney would like to purchase the shot. :D

PS3 is coming out this Friday so there’s probably going to be discussion about how it’s selling in Europe. To add more insanity to the Playstation 3 pricing discussion, here’s a funny detail: PS 3’s 60GB version will cost