Alright, so my iPhone app has fallen a bit behind schedule because of a minor distraction.  I stumbled across a series of FREE video podcasts of Yale Lectures on Game Theory!  I thought, “Well I know I like this stuff.  I’ve seen some of it before. It should be a nice little show to watch during lunch breaks.”  Now I cannot seem to get enough!  It’s so addicting!  Everything from Prisoner’s Dilemma, to Mixed Strategies (both of which I’ve seen before), to Credible Threats and negotiations.  It’s fantastic!  They’ve done a good job at the class and I just love the material.  I must say that it also helps that there aren’t exams for me to take, but still – yummy stuff!  I eat it up like… well like great novels!  I should read more of those again…

Anyway, I highly recommend that if you haven’t checked out Yale’s free lecture series on the iTunes Store under Video podcasts then you really should!

Check it out here:  http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=341651977

In other news, I am working on functional polish to make sure all the working bits of the iPhone game are nice and slick and easily extend-able for future updates.  Art and Music are next on the slate!

This past weekend at Great Northern Way Campus I helped the Full Indie Game Development Group, led by Jake Birkett, host a 48 hour game jam!  Over 10 games were made with 31 participants (plus some of the helpers even made games or worked on personal indie projects) in the time frame of 48 hours.

I really enjoy helping out with game jams.  They’re filled with a wonderful experimental spirit and you see results fast!  I’ve helped out with 3 game Jams and participated in 2.  The theme this time was Spawning.  Some great ideas that came out this time were:

• an Augmented Reality Game where you guide your UFO over soldiers and abduct them and turn them into aliens
• a real-time strategy game a la Nanowars, but set in the theme of the famed book (and now TV series) “Game of Thrones”  (and don’t forget the awesome board game!)
• MutatoMatch: a block destroyer like bejeweled except instead of trying to get sets of three you’re trying to destroy the right type of block to mutate your creature into the kind of creature that will survive on a planet

If you’re interested in more of the details of what happened during the event, you can see a news feed of events happening during the jam on the Facebook page for Full Indie.  I helped out with a lots of those posts while another helper took photos.