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taxi dispatch's blog

Wherein I Hint at My Mating Practices

Posted Tue, 09/01/2009 - 01:57 by taxi dispatch

Have I the treat for you?!

The latest in Moon Taxi's series of award conjuring videos is for you creative types. It explains AND demonstrates. Please note it does not explain THEN demonstrate. It explains what writing a Moon Taxi story is all about while being the very thing itself.

I'll leave the teaser video hanging around on the game page. It's still neato, but it's more for advertising the game. That's phase 2.

drupal flow

Posted Thu, 08/27/2009 - 00:28 by taxi dispatch

In case you didn't know, this site is running on a bit of PHP called Drupal (see http://drupal.org). Drupal is like a swiss army lemonade stand. If you've ever set up a Drupal site, you're not likely to ask yourself "can drupal do this?" it's almost always "how do I set that up?"

You will have a funny feeling Drupal can do what you're thinking of and you will be right. But you won't really be sure how you're supposed to communicate your desires to the many armed, all singing, all dancing content management system.

Today's lesson is just google for it. Someone might have even made you a nice video about it. (see http://www.lullabot.com/)

With a few well aimed clicks, I have empowered this site with an automatic workflow, email notifications, a user rating system and more. I'm not done, but it's getting there.

Consider Yourself Teased

Posted Tue, 08/18/2009 - 22:11 by taxi dispatch

The teaser trailer is up!  It's got Stephen's sexy beats and almost a full minute of shots pulled right out of the game. 
Many thanks to the kdenlive project for making a sane, capable and free video editor.
Now that I'm working the social media and all with this hot youtube action it's time to spiff up this site a bit.  Stay tuned. . .

Imagine!

Posted Fri, 08/07/2009 - 16:15 by taxi dispatch

A quick update so that my imaginary followers do not get imaginarily discouraged.
 
Progress continues!  I've worked on some music with a friend.  Borrowed some imagery from NASA.  Added a little threaded loading screen.  (Not that there's really enough assets to load yet to require a loading screen).  Started what will be an awesome level select screen.
 
It's getting shinier and shinier!
 
Maybe I'll even get a teaser video out soon . . . .

It doesn't trust me

Posted Mon, 06/29/2009 - 00:59 by taxi dispatch

Lots of exciting progress on the 360 game. Flying subtitles synchronized with one of my dull travel narratives from a trip to Boston a while back. Tried it out on a gigantic TV. It already gives you a bit of a speed rush. So far I've been pretty pleased with Microsoft's XNA development platform. . .with one notable exception:

Xbox Live went down for maintenance and my xbox refused to run my development code. In theory I own both my PC and my xbox, but the xbox lost its connection with Microsoft it stopped trusting me. Makes me feel like a guest in my own home.

Avatars?

Posted Mon, 06/15/2009 - 22:56 by taxi dispatch

Microsoft put out their XNA 3.1 update out and I've updated the growing moon taxi code base. Some of the cooler things that 3.1 brings are video and avatars. Two things I wasn't really planning on using aside from maybe putting an avatar in the driver's seat of the taxi. Video? Hmmmm.

Working hard on looking good.

Posted Wed, 05/27/2009 - 23:32 by taxi dispatch

Made a logo for game/promotional use and created a web banner from it. Lots of tweaks to this Drupal theme. More stars? Less yellow? We'll see how I feel about this look after I live with it for a few days.

360 and Android Baby Steps

Posted Mon, 05/25/2009 - 02:01 by taxi dispatch

I ponied up for the XBOX 360 Creator's Club membership. It was nice to run some of my old windows XNA projects on my shiny XBOX. Also updated Android Moon Taxi to the new 1.5 sdk (cupcake). They pulled in some of the example project work into the sdk with a few changes. I was hoping maybe that would give a speed bump. No dice. There's still some really weird slowdown in the OpenGL frame rate when touching the screen. Even if I'm not doing anything with the input. Made some changes to this site's text. Still figuring out the submission guidelines. Playing a bit of Fable 2 and Tomb Raider Anniversary. Drinkin' Pepsi Throwback. Good times.

First Light

Posted Sun, 05/17/2009 - 23:38 by taxi dispatch

I've been talking about it long enough. It's time to officially begin the Moon Taxi project! (wild applause from the crowd) Step one is, of course, blogging about step one. Now that that's done I'm going to go play Lumines.