taxi dispatch's blog

It's out! It's been about year of scheming and work.  And a lot of awesome help from awesome people!   Congratulations all!
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8...

It was really tough to pick "winners."   People put time, care and effort into my little project here (now our project by virtue of your participation).  I really, really appreciate that. 
 
To those of you who submitted audio recordings: I am particularly grateful, not just because of the extra effort involved, but because you put yourselves out there.  It can be hard enough to submit your creative writing for public scrutiny.  But to lend your voice to it as well is a bold offering well outside the normal boundaries of our daily lives. 
 
Winner for best story with a performance:
 
Moon Dust, by Shelby Couch
 
 
Winner for best story:
 
Conference Call, by Ben Wimmer
 
The contest is over, but I'm still accepting submissions!  It's not to late to get your story in the game!

The contest ends at the end of the month! Zounds! Entries are still coming in.  It's not too late!  If you have any questions about your submission, email contact@moontaxi.org
Lots of work's been going on with the game to get it nice and ready for submission for the XBOX Indie Games program.  I've been applying a bit of digital spitshine to things.  The videos don't quite do it justice anymore.  I'll see if I can't shine them up a bit too in the next few weeks.  Very exciting.  I'm excited.  You should probably be excited too.

Last night I took a little trip and conducted my first story recording session with a fistful of college students. In addition to the fame and glory you can achieve by submitting a Moon Taxi story, I plied them with donuts and pop. Fancy pop. In fancy bottles.

I had a great time and the students couldn't have been completely miserable because I did get a fair amount of laughter on tape.

And by tape, I mean hard drive. For the curious, I was recording with an unremarkable laptop and a nifty little usb device, the M-Audio Fast Track Pro (and a microphone).

This would be the perfect point in this post to add a photo from the event. yeah. I didn't think to take any pictures.

Things to do next time:
* Take pictures
* Bring powered speakers for playback
* Bring a microphone stand

Thanks students of MC 111, their actor friends, and Professor Scott!

I'll put their stories up on this site once I get the text.

Hello you!
I'm not quite sure who you are, but perhaps you are one of the many folks who have been drawn in by Moon Taxi's devious new promotions.

This taxi's checkered tentacles have begun to crawl across the interwebs with postings like this one at http://writingcontests.wordpress.com. Or maybe you caught a glimpse of the taxi from over at Poets & Writers

Or perhaps it was the taxi's shiny new google adwords promotion that brought you in. Maybe you searched for something like "writing contest", "short story contest", "monologue contest" or "short story publisher". These things and more can lead you here.

A well placed $10 to google got my ad shown nearly a quarter of a million times. Which sounds awesome until you see my 0.08% click through rate.

For the devs.
Now for a little bit of game development diary type stuff. I'm still mostly appreciating XNA. I'm using Nick Gravelyn's nifty ini file parsing library, EasyConfig. I've got my depth sorting working. That let me do some nice asteroid transparency effects to reduce pop in and camera obscuring closeups. And i've written a hot little gui library which helps with resolution independent two dimensional placement of textures and text. How you like me now!?!