Nimbus - Click for fullsize

So why the change?

It was becoming increasingly apparent that the previous Gun Metal Grey look wasn’t really doing it for me.  The whole thing just looked like a bad hax0r Winamp skin in that it was neither clean nor stylish and would have been perfectly at home on a teenagers desktop just peeking out from beneath World of Warcraft.

Members of the adventure gamer community (and indeed the indie gamer community as a whole) tend to be a little older and wiser than their AAA Call of Duty couterparts and I felt that a more modest colour scheme might be in order to reflect that. In other words, I don’t feel that the app needs to look like the side of a spaceship in order to capture the attention of my intended,  non-astronaut audience.

And the name?

Well I like the format of ‘Nexus’ as a name. It is simple, short and scans nicely on a window. It was also almost thematically relevant since a nexus can be defined as a an interconnected network of nodes. Although, in reality that could apply to any webapp. However, the previous name was somewhat of a relic of the app’s former incarnation and didn’t really fit the new design aesthetic or philosophy and so it had to go.

After a whole 5 minutes of deliberation I decided that Nimbus was less generic than nexus albeit not a great deal more thematically relevant. And thus Nimbus was officially born. In my head at least.

What other new features can we expect?

I’m glad you asked, disembodied interviewer from the aether who’s existence allows me to format this blog post in a lazy fashion. Here is a quick list of features that I will elaborate upon in the upcoming days/weeks

• Automatic Nimbus client update (Done)
• Dos game support (Done)
• Inter-User chat (Half done)
• A more robust community system (Make Peder do it)
• Universal configuration for AGS games (Will do when have stopped being lazy)
• Play timer and other stats (Half done)
• Achievements via AGS->Nimbus communication (Done, will blog about the technical aspects of this next)
• In game notifications (Not done but I am fairly sure that this is possible without AGS modification)
• Toaster Popups for notifications (Done, but only because they are called ‘Toaster Popups’)
• Probably more (Obviously not done)

Watch this space!

I think I am due a blog update… this one is horrible.

Watch this space for a Halloween release (all appendages crossed).

Not for personal therapy nor for the benefit of my readership but merely because I like to press buttons.

Buttons have always been a fascination for me. They have a tactile nature which obfuscates the pure power that can be attributed to them.

There is a button right next to me marked Emergency Power Off. You have no idea how much I long to push that button.

Buttons have sunk ships, blown up bridges and won wars but no one ever suspects the humble button.

When I was about 6 or 7 years old I was in a local pub (I wasn’t drinking though, perhaps I was the designated driver.) and I decided it would be funny to run between a guy’s legs and press all the buttons on the fruit machine that he was playing. Apparently he was not pleased.

No one suspects the buttons.

Can blog be used as a verb really? It’s short for Web-log and thus an abstraction of ‘log’ but does one really say “I should log soon” unless they are, of course a logger but that’s a wholly different profession altogether.

One might write in ones log or log a particular event but one does not simply log.

Sorry where was I?

Right, Nexus!

Nexus is a project I’m currently working on which aims to be a ‘digital delivery platform’ for indie games. Initially it will be for games written in AGS engine only but I see no reason why it couldn’t be expanded.

Imagine a system whereby you could get news on all the new indie releases (with reviews embedded) and, if you like one, you can just click the ‘download’ button.

Nexus will then download, extract and install the game as a consequence of that single click without the need for any user intervention. The user never sees the archive or installation process.

Within Nexus I hope to implement some kind of community system whereby one can be updated on what their friends (as loosely as one uses the term on the internet) have downloaded, rated, favourited or whatever.

Developers will be able to post news about their games which will automatically be added to a news stream for each game which is all visible from within Nexus.

Things

There are things that people never quite understand.

They nod their heads emphatically and tell you quite earnestly that they do but they don’t.

I mean the simple fact of the matter is that you never quite know if you’ve grasped the intricacies of anything. Perhaps the fundamentals of the subject seems clear but the nuances escape you. And if indeed they have escaped you, you might never know they exist.

You can’t imagine the importance of the things you don’t understand. They might shatter all the understanding you have about the universe and yet, faced with this revelation that the world around them may not be what they think it is, people continue through their lives without dropping to their knees and screaming for the finer details of life to reveal themselves.

But that’s because most people don’t care about the things they don’t understand. “Life is about living” they would say. If their entire life was based upon fabrications then what does it matter? As long as they were happy and they did no harm to anyone else why should I care what they believe to be the case?

I’m not quite sure how to answer that but something about it annoys me.

Why should I care?

Why do I care?

Praised be the glory of God and his infinite ways to piss me off.

On a lighter, less immolating note, I had the pleasure of attended the Nottingham Trent University Degree Show last night and boy was it an interesting exercise in people blending.

Last night’s event was an invitation only affair. This meant that the attendees were members of 3 distinct groups; the artists, the parents and friends of the artists, and members of various scouting organisations and galleries. Or, to refine it further: those who cared and those who didn’t.

The air was soaked in cynicism and replete with faces bearing a kind of mock-accommodating smile. It was like the boyfriends were dismissing their better half’s accomplishments as a silly waste of time before ‘real life’ starts and the mothers wanted to stick it all on the damn fridge.

Irrespective of this however, the work itself was suitably engaging. As with student work in general it seems, the onus was upon the artists to show exploration of practice rather than that of raw technique. As a consequence, some of the pieces presented seemed a little unrefined albeit still bewitching at times.

There are a few pieces that I would like to highlight here purely as an exercise in organising my thoughts (although I will exclude the piece I was personally involved in for the sake of decency).

Kathryn Pospieszalska presented an elaborate contribution in the form of furniture from some forgotten corner of antiquity modified with a series of pins. These were arranged into ornate patterns which protruded from the surface causing a subtle parallax between the deep red and the glimmering silver as one paced around it..

The silver pin-heads contrasted beautifully with the opulently crimson fabric whilst simultaneously making the furniture entirely useless. This disparity between form and function resonated with me as a reminder that art will always be connected to our consciousness but never integral to our lives.

The patterns themselves were flamboyant to the point of absurdity but this only screamed as a testament to the number of hours spent creating it and those hours are as fundamental to the piece as the rows upon rows of pin-heads which I so desperately wanted to touch.

Carrie Jackson’s offering was far more understated. Understated to the point of sterility in fact. She presented two, inter-related posters displayed back to back in an advertising light box. The box was lit with the characteristically cold fluorescent tubes we are all so used to seeing and mounted upon some cheap, fake, plastic turf which mirrors my thoughts quite nicely. Jackson’s work is deliberately fake.

Advertisers try to tap in to humanity’s ever increasing desire for absolute purpose in order to present us with some transient alternative in exchange for our thirty pieces of silver. Jackson seems to recognize this unwritten agreement and offers us this ‘advert’ with her subversive and menacing tongue firmly pressed into her cheek.

In terms of presentation Jackson’s work could be described as positively modest. Sleek lines and clean colours belied the complexity of the ideas being discussed whilst perfectly imitating that which she wished to undermine. Clever and hauntingly insidious.

If Jackson’s work can be considered understated then Kyle Hands’ work must be considered practically invisible. Even using the word ‘painting’ seems extravagantly verbose (yes I appreciate the irony in light of the rest of the post).

His practice involves manipulating semi-dried ‘skins’ of household gloss paint to create a series of geometric recesses and plateaus. The works presented at the exhibition were entirely white set upon a white wall which invoked a similar sense of sterility and simplicity to that suggested by Jackson’s work, although employed in a different manner.

Due to the stark nature of Hands’ work it’s difficult to discern any kind of underlying focus here besides a pure exploration of the tactile nature of the material. Perhaps here we should consider ‘purity’ to be the key.

I can only hope that these artists put off ‘real life’ for another lifetime or so and continue to make me think because I do very much appreciate it.

Katheryn Pospieszalska – http://www.kathrynp.com

Carrie Jackson – http://www.loveillustration.co.uk

Kyle Hands – http://www.kylehands.co.uk

http://www.ifc.com/news/2010/05/shank.php?page=2

I’m not sure why I like this more than the in depth reviews.

I’ll try and post that ‘post-mortem’ later today.

other reviews include:

http://indiereview.tk/index.cgi/reviews/Eternally-Us-Review.html

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2010/05/weekend_download_134.php

http://captaind-pc-gaming.blogspot.com/2010/05/eternally-us-mini-review.html

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/05/freeware_game_pick_eternally_u.html