Apologies for sending this twice a couple of links where broken, sorry about that.
Time flies so here is my latest curated periodical from the last month and a bit. Don't forget you can follow me on Twitter or check out dctr.pro for many more links.
Sharing is such a positive action especially sharing knowledge which is why I am a massive fan of open source and creative commons. So if you like anything you read below let me know and of course share it!
The BA Games Design & Art students have a big event on May the 27th in the Cube Southampton (student union space) Specifically the second years have been making a lot of progress within the Games Development module producing Vertical Slice type prototypes for presentation and play at this event. You can however play test a development version of SOUNDeSCAPE online already and provide feedback. If you can spare five minutes to do so it would be much appreciated.
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EduTech
After a dead patch in my PhD I recently had a fantastic spell which has led to a little bit of a slower period again however I am pretty excited.
I produced some writing while trying to address the thorny issue of my research question, as commented by Steve Wheeler on my blog! In doing so, I didn’t resolve that issue but I noted some key themes, ideas and text which triggered a chain reaction culminating in a prototype that I showed some staff and one of my supervisors (Seth Giddings) which they seemed pretty excited about. I am building a few more things and will share a demo on researchnot.es as soon as I can. Please do visit the blog and comment. I have finally commissioned a games student to illustrate my blog as well so expect better looking posts.
Audrey Watters wrote a great piece on the Blockchain and Education. The block chain within education is something I am planning to investigate within my PhD work, Audrey touches on some really good points.
Open Culture dot com is such a great resource and recently they released for free access to original Bauhaus books & journals: Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy & More.
And apparently your not being taught properly if your designing posters or doing group work!! Well Tom It might not be teaching but it sure is LEARNING! Strange comments from this Education Czar.
Hybrid Design
Interactive narratives are certainly coming into vogue and I have a feeling they will be huge in the evolution of gaming and interactive books so here is are some current links.
Twine - simple tool to create interactive text games
YarnSpinner - A twine style editing app and package for Unity, Ive played with this for less then an hour but it looks amazing.
Fungus - An alternative unity package but I think YarnSpinner will pip this one.
Knights and Bikes along with Night in the Woods use YarnSpinner.
Designing with knit, if you needed to reknit Tom Bakers scarf the BBC costume department had you covered with the step by step instructions.
Productivity
Ulysses is a writing app I mentioned in a previous newsletter, well the iOS update was released along side a substantial Mac update, this is by far the best writing tool out there, get it. Ulysses
Taskpaper has been updated recently to version 3 and is still probably hands down the most amazingly simple to do app that you can get on a Mac.
I wrote about the game changer that is the iPad Pro.
Fantastical received native exchange support and is the hands down the best Calendar app out there.
Planning a Game Jam? I am pretty confident this new venue will improve your productivity.
Being Evel is a great documentary on Evel Knievel.
I am super excited about No Man’s Sky imminent release (June 21st) so check out this blog on how 65 days of static created the Music for a procedurally generated universe.
Please do tweet me and share the newsletter (web version link at the bottom).
I’ve updated stuff on my server so I hope to soon be hosting my own gitlab and discourse to support my practice based PhD work, so save those URLS for now.
Thanks for reading.
And if you ever needed to generate a name for a sword then here you go.
See you mid May!
Adam.
p.s Also my news letter can now include Emoji ?? Sendy update 2.0.8
