Author: Geir Ove Alnes

I’ve been challenged to a duel!

Last Friday I apparently agreed to enter into a “blogging-duel” with a co-worker of mine, Babak Kaveh. This duel only has one rule: Whoever posts the most words related to game-design or game-development over the course of a single month (the deadline is at 14:35 pm on the 20th of March) will win a free pizza from the losing part.  I’m not sure what was going through my head when I agreed to this, but in my defense it sounded like a good idea at the time. Despite the fact that I don’t even like pizza all that well (yes, color me crazy, but it’s true).

Anyhow, it’s now been two days since this thing started, and not only have I not posted anything yet, but it also seems that I’m already behind by over 5 500 words (rough estimate). Or 10 pages in Word at font size 12, if you prefer.

In an attempt to alleviate this word-deficiency I’ll be taking on Raph Koster‘s Laws of Online World Design, going through them one by one (skipping as few as I can get away with), covering them from every angle I can come up with.

Continue reading “I’ve been challenged to a duel!”

IFMCA award for AoC composer

Another reward in the cabinet for the excellent music composer Knut Avenstroup Hagen: The IFMCA have just announced it’s 2008 winners for scoring excellence, and Knut was given the award of ” Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media” for his music score for Age of Conan. Congratulations, Knut! =)

Another award in the cabinet for the excellent music composer Knut Avenstroup Hagen: The IFMCA have just announced it’s 2008 winners for scoring excellence, and Knut was given the award of “ Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media” for his music score for Age of Conan. Congratulations, Knut! =)

For those of you who’ve never heard about Knut nor actually listened to the music score in Age of Conan before, be sure to visit his homepage which features both music samples from the game as well as links to various interviews and articles concerning the amazing work he did on it.

In other news, we finally hit the Age of Conan Live-servers with the long awaited “patch 1.04” two days ago, after having worked on it since late October? last year. There have been several smaller updates since then, of course, but this newest patch is the largest we’ve done so far to the game, and it introduces a lot of new cool stuff, like three new dungeons, another raid-instance, PvP updates, and a ton of other stuff. Be sure to check out the full patch notes.

I’m glad we’ve finally been able to push all the great new content of this patch out the door, so we can all start focusing on the next patch!

No Keyboard Detected

I’ve now replaced the temporary blog name (“Xoduz’ Blog”) I had earlier, and I feel that the new name reflects accurately what both I and this blog are all about. At first I considered using the original Guru Meditation-error as banner, but the bright red on black graphics didn’t really fit along with the rest of the blog. After long hours of tweaking, cursing and banging on my keyboard angry-german-kid style, I finally came up with a customized version that I think works nicely.

I’ve now replaced the temporary blog name (“Xoduz’ Blog”) I had earlier, and I feel that the new name reflects accurately what both I and this blog are all about. At first I considered using the original Guru Meditation-error as banner, but the bright red on black graphics didn’t really fit along with the rest of the blog. After long hours of tweaking, cursing and banging on my keyboard angry-german-kid style, I finally came up with a customized version that I think works nicely. Also, thanks to Matt aka Eolirin for continuously giving me feedback on my banner tweaks.

Why this name for the blog? inquiring minds might ask. Call it a tribute to days long gone, if you will. Or the result of a random search on the Internet for catchy phrases, even (the Random Article-link on Wikipedia can keep me going for ages). Here’s a short list of some of the other names I considered, but ultimately rejected:

  • Rational Choice Theory
  • Flabberghastly Ideas
  • No Keyboard Detected
  • Abort, Retry, Fail?
  • Kernel Panic
  • Ford N Series Tractors
  • Does Not Compute
  • 404 File Not Found
  • 206 Partial Content
  • List of rivers of Bulgaria
  • Approximation algorithm

In the end, Guru Meditation was chosen on the grounds that I’m an old Amiga-user and have always been fond of that particular error, which often popped up for no apparent reason while I was trying to play some random game back in the day. It’s also the 12th greatest error message of all time, according to this article.

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