We, at PushButton Labs, have officially announced our acquisition of rights to publish The Incredible Machine and use its intellectual property! Awesome! The game is now available for purchase/download from Good Old Games (GOG.com).
For those of you unfamiliar with the title, it was released back in the 90’s as what is now toted the predecessor to physics puzzle games. I’m anxious to get my hands on it and start building some Rube Goldberg goodness.
Considered by some to be the grandfather of the Physics & Puzzle game genres, The Incredible Machine pitted players against a series of Rube Goldberg style devices which were composed from a wide range of objects such as ropes & pulleys, bowling balls, and even cats and mice.
The Incredible Machine was the winner of several prizes due to its innovative style and simulation abilities. A spin-off of the series, Sid & Al’s Incredible Toons earned Jeff Tunnell and Chris Cole a patent for their game design concepts.
The series is available for sale at the time of this release and can be found online at: http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/the_incredible_machine_mega_pack
With the release of my band’s album last Thursday, I have been steadily working at getting the word out to share with the world what this music is all about and what makes it worth checking out. Definitely a tall task as there’s a lot of great music out there and it’s difficult finding the perfect words to get across why it is that I think people should check out our music. And afterall, it’s really hard to break down a musical experience to a bunch of words. But alas, here is the press release describing the release of the album.
Back in April, I posted a blog on my music site announcing a full-length album that I had been working on with my close friend Casey DeMott. After what ended up being about 10 months of recording and production, the discs are finally being pressed and the album is almost ready to be released!
For my wife, Becca’s birthday, we decided that a fun present would be to adopt a beautiful female Basset Hound from the Greenhill Humane Society here in Eugene. We had found out that she was in need of a home via their website. After contemplating adopting her for a couple of days, we decided to pull the trigger. The biggest factor in adopting her was not so much whether or not she would be a good fit for her (we knew she would because she appeared to be such a sweetheart), but rather how our existing dog, Oscar the dachshund would feel about her. Read the rest of this entry »
It is a common topic of discussion that comes up between my friends, co-workers and I. In this day of age, the day of the iTunes store, Amazon mp3 store, and so on, most people are completely switched to the world of digital downloads when it comes to music. It seems a lot of times I’m the odd man out because yes, I still buy records (and by records, I mean CDs.) Now that’s not to say that I don’t occasionally grab a single or two off iTunes (especially if I’m in need of that instant gratification.) However, to me one of the greatest feelings in the world is ripping open a fresh copy of one of my favorite artist’s record, experiencing it as an album, the way that that artist (and their respective production crew) meant for me to hear it.
Chris Calef’s company, Broke Ass Games has created a new product called Ecstacy to be used for making animations for game and video products. At Broke Ass they’re focusing on making this tool attainable for the indie game developer, which sets it apart from similar products on the market. The video he has posted on YouTube is very telling of what this can do. Looks very cool! Video after the jump.
In our kitchen, next to the stove, we have this vast cabinet that didn’t really make much sense to us. Because it is so deep, a shelf wouldn’t really be functional as it would be a huge pain to reach all the way back. Becca decided that she’d like to have a nice roll out shelf because that would make it perfect for storing her cooling racks and various baking and cake pans (she loves to bake.)
Upon making a stop at the local home improvement store, we found out that you can’t just buy a kit to throw one of these into a cabinet. And besides, why would you want to? Most projects like this in kit form are of cheap construction and the hardware is usually a joke. In addition, I figured by choosing the right wood and finish, I would be able to get it to match the look and feel of our cabinets. So, I decided to do the DIY thing and buy the materials and bust out the tools to do this thing right. Also, with Rob’s help and Alex’s plans for inspiration, I had built a new workbench in the garage a couple weeks ago, so this was a perfect opportunity to put it to use.
I’ve been meaning to check out the WordPress iPhone application ever since I got my new gadget weeks ago. This is a really useful tool for starting—in this case finishing—blog drafts on the go (I usually start my posts in Evernote.) this application makes great use of the WordPress XML-RPC API and also has built-in support for sharing images from the iPhone camera. I’m sure I will find that camera feature useful. One complaint though, I can’t type in landscape mode with this app.
On that note, I was resistant to the iPhone keyboard as a method to accomplish a lot of typing originally but I find myself getting increasingly faster.
I haven’t really found too many applications I couldn’t live without so I would be curious to hear what peoples favorite apps are. The games all appear to be one trick ponies.
I spent some time today at the lab working on our first official child theme for OnePress Community. We wanted to release a theme that would give adopters of OnePress an easy way to get their blog looking elegant, since the default theme that OnePress comes with is more geared toward developers. I’m pretty happy with how this theme turned out. The colors ended up steering toward subdued blues and greys. If you want to download this theme, head over to the official announcement and grab it.
Also, the forums over at OnePress are starting to get some activity now that I fixed a permissions issue for registered users. Be sure to hop on those to get involved or speak your mind.
Lifestream
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I apologize to my co-workers sitting near me, but when AC/DC comes on on my playlist, I must crank it up. [#]
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Bash autocomplete for Git (and show current branch) http://bit.ly/95q12m [#]
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#Apple pushing off some of the antennae blame onto #ATT by changing the scale for signal strength bars in iOS 4.0.1? http://bit.ly/b08uZs [#]
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I'm about to pull a George Constanza and build a nap station underneath my desk. Post-lunch fatigue building... [#]
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I am gaining a strong appreciation for boxcar graffiti from watching the trains go by outside my office window. [#]
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That's some nice soundproofing you got there in your lab Steve but it doesn't make me want your broken phone. [#]
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Awesome week at the lab. Got settled into new office, met an awesome new engineer and kept things moving in the right direction. [#]
