PixelFace

Here's my idea for a new mechanic for players to create the face of their own game characters: Something I call PixelFace, which I wrote last summer after being inspired by the work of an artist at the Royal College who had made a project around random pixel generation.

It takes 4 pictures at random from a directory, overlays them, and allows the user to blend them together organically. The results can be pretty convincing, or just plain weird!

It works pretty well with the eBoy graphics I took from their site.

Yes to Always

This isn’t a post about games, but it is about design, and it is a rant.

At least once a day, and usually more than twice, I’m confronted with that dialog box in Windows, that says ‘Yes to All?’. This happens when I’m copying files from one place to another, usually from my machine to my mp3 player / storage device or back again, as I transfer files between work and home.

What particularly annoys me is that Windows will ask once for each directory I’m copying. So I’ll click Yes to All, and seconds later another box will appear: “Yes to All?”. And my answer is always the same. Yes, yes, yes to all, always.

It’s not like these constant confirmation dialogs are ever going to prevent me from accidentally overwriting a file I wanted anyway – Clicking Yes to All has become so habitual that I don’t think I could ever click No, even if I wanted to.

I’ve long hoped for an ‘I’m not a fucking idiot’ setting in Windows (Settings: Control Panel: Idiot Options), which would completely disable hassle like ‘Yes to All’ once and for all. Maybe in Vista eh?

Everyone who feels frustrated with the everyday world and wants someone to blame should read this book.