Interview: Ian Lynch Smith, Freeverse

No can do, you evil blogger.

My Chinese internets aren’t behaving. I would’ve re-posted this whole interview I did for iPGN, but it decided that I should get a “problem loading page” message every time I try to access it. Who knows, maybe I said something that offended the CCP; it isn’t very hard to do, after all.

Instead, here’s the link. Eat Read your hearts out.

Interview: Ge Wang, Creator of Ocarina and Leaf Trombone

This article was first published to the iPhone Games Network. To see my original piece, click here.

I sit down with Ge Wang Co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule, to chat about Ocarina and his latest music game, Leaf Trombone.

1. Background

How did you get into making applications like Ocarina and Leaf Trombone?

As an Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), I come from the field of computer music research, which, for me, combines three passions: music, computer science, and the joy of building things. It’s my mission as a researcher to change the way people think, do, and interact, through sound, technology, and music. Along this line, Ocarina and Leaf Trombone were designed to provide new creative, social experiences that perhaps weren’t possible until now.

Before you started making iPhone apps, you were primarily known for SLOrk. Can you tell me a little about it and how that project has influenced your app writing?

The Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) is a large-scale ensemble of laptops, human players, and special hemispherical speaker arrays (made out of IKEA salad bowls, car speakers, and compact amplifiers). Like its older East Coast sibling PLOrk (Princeton Laptop Orchestra), SLOrk aims to fuse traditional music making (the orchestra) with the vast potential of computer technology. It’s both a performing ensemble and a classroom for exploring this new musical medium. (One can find out more about SLOrk at: http://slork.stanford.edu/)

Working with the laptop orchestra has greatly informed the design of iPhone apps for me. Crafting a musical interface for the iPhone (e.g., Ocarina and Leaf Trombone) is similar to creating an instrument from scratch for the laptop, it’s just that the design parameters are different. The challenge is to design around the capabilities (and limitations) and to make the most of it all.

Interview: Joel Watson (of Hijinks Ensue)

Joel Watson, creator of Hijinks Ensue

Check it out, kids. For your reading and/or nerdtastic pleasure, I’ve got a nice little interview with Joel Watson, creator of the still relatively-new (one year?) webcomic Hijinks Ensue. He’s still in struggling-artist, trying-to-make-ends-meet mode, so we’ve talked a bit about his experiences in that regard. Check out his work at http://www.hijinksensue.com.

Let’s start off by going over your background. How long have you been producing Hijinks Ensue? What made you get into it?

HE premiered on May 11th 2007. it started as twice weekly and moved to 3 times weekly when I started doing it full time. I started the comic shortly after my daughter was born in order to “remake my life” into something I could be proud of.

Your comic has no discernible continuity or storyline. Is that on purpose?

Absolutely. My brand of comedy comes from taking one thing and turning it on its side, taking it out of context or juxtaposing it with a seemingly unrelated separate thing in order to play them off of each other. The characters in HE just serve has a medium to facilitate the jokes I want to make. Over time the readers have taken to treating them like “real characters” but I have no plans to expand on their personal lives, relationships etc. HE was never intended to tell a story. Just to make people laugh at geek pop culture.

Interview: Com2uS

Recently, I reviewed The Chronicles of Inotia: Legends of Feanor, and at the end I mentioned that I’d be contacting Com2uS and asking them some questions about their game. After being published to the iPhone Games Network, here it is, in all its glory. Enjoy:

Pay Attention: This is what a GFWL Gamer Looks Like

CoolingGibbon

Everyone, meet CoolingGibbon, diehard GFWL gamer.

I’ve been in contact with him over the past several weeks, asking some questions and generally trying to get a better idea of what motivates him to use GFWL. Read on for the transcript of our email interview.

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Well, I’m a 22-yr old guy currently pursuing a computer science degree. I’ve been a PC gamer for over 8 years, before which I used to game on a NES and Gameboy as a kid. But after being introduced to classics like Wolf 3D, Quake and Half-Life… I decided to move over to PCs completely. And I’m glad to say that I find the PC undoubtedly the best platform for any serious gamer.

How did you get into GFWL?

My first introduction to GFWL was with Halo 2 a little more than a year ago

Bethesda Interview: Ashley Cheng

I first mentioned my series of interviews a couple weeks ago, and suffice to say I’ve been a bit busy since then. Scrounging, hunting people down, coming up with hundreds of (hopefully) interesting questions, hitting a lot of dead ends… it takes some time to get a project like this going. Regardless, I’m happy to announce that the first interview has been published, courtesy of VE3D. It’s got a bunch of pretty pictures and cool stuff like that attached, so frankly I would click through to their site to read the piece. If you really want to do it here, though, I’ve got the text-only transcript after the jump.