Bi-weekly newsletter, July 4th

Hey hey you beautiful people, hopefully you had a great 4th of July weekend (at least, if you’re in the states). I’m back with more useful links and resources for you. Got anything that I should be aware of?

• • MVP-run tech conference in the Poconos, TechBash
    • Microsoft has a great community of MVPs, or Most Valuable Professionals, whom we acknowledge annually for their commitment to their community and helping others. Recently, a group of MVPs gathered to plan TechBash, a technical conference in the Poconos at Kalahari Resorts, about 2 hours north of Philadelphia, and 2 hours west of New York. I was there with my family earlier in the year, and we had a blast. It’s a large resort with an indoor water park, some restaurants, and an arcade. The perfect trip to bring the family on.
  • Indie Dev Podcast, Ep 31 – Pek Pongpaet & Daniel Pesina, Mortal Kombat
    • This week is a bit different. I’ve got my co-worker in DC, Shahed Chowdhuri on the show, along with Pek Pongpaet (pong-pat) and Daniel Pesina. Shahed and Pek grew up together, and Pek met Daniel while studying at his Wushu.  Daniel played Johnny Cage and ninjas Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, Smoke, and Noob Saibot in several Mortal Kombat games, and Pek has worked on 6 MK games spanning 10 years. Master Pesina is perhaps most famous for his work as Johnny Cage and the ninjas in the first two Mortal Kombat games. He has also worked on films such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, Book of Swords, Press Start.
  • A handful of free and useful tools for streaming on Twitch
    • In the last few months I decided to start streaming the games I’m playing, podcasts I record, and programming tutorials that I create. I use OBS (Open Broadcast Software) for all of this, which is a free tool for recording and streaming audio and video from your computer. I created a video tutorial around this as well.  Now that I have more experience with it, I wanted to share some other tools that I’m using in tandem with OBS to give my stream a more professional look and feel. If you think I’m missing out on any, let me know.
  • The construction worker who changed his life and career through video games
    • I had the opportunity to speak with Chad Bostic of Hello Tech Pros last week and join him on his podcast and share my story. Chad has a number of interesting topics covered each week, including entrepreneurship, motivation, and productivity, but what I like most is that he gets the human element behind all of these things.
  • Using a gamepad for HTML5 projects
    • The HTML5 gamepad API allows you interact with the web browser through a traditional gamepad, whether it is from Microsoft, Sony, or some other third party product. Bear in mind that it is an experimental technology, so that means it isn’t implemented in every browser (yet).
  • Diablo, a Classic Game Postmortem
    • Video + Slides from GDC 2016. Can you believe this game is 20 years old this year? And was originally turn-based, single player, and for DOS.
  • Porting Retro City Rampage from MS-DOS: From PS4 to 1.44 MB Floppy
    • Not many people are designing video games for MS-DOS these days, but that didn’t stop Vblank Entertainment’s Brian Provinciano from taking on the task. In this 2016 talk, hear Provinciano explain how he reduced memory usage down to 4MB, increased performance to run on a 486 PC, reduced disk space to fit on a single 1.44MB floppy, and finally ported the game to MS-DOS itself.
  • Sketchfab is a 3D visualization tool for showcasing your work in the browser
    • I love this concept. Great way to showcase your work and get the word out about your game. Also embeds directly into Facebook posts, which helps grow an audience.
  • More than 75% of an app downloads open and app once and never come back
    • For years I’ve been preaching that downloads are worthless. The real number you should be concerned with is how often are people utilizing your application, and how much time are they spending on it. What are you doing to entice your users to come back each day?

 

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