I just updated my Blogroll with links to a wide variety of the many friends and acquaintances I’ve made in the game industry. Go have a look! Mouseover links to see who they are and where they work, where applicable.

Lots of damned interesting, cool people in there. :)

My friend Nate sent me a fantastic article that was right up my alley: 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website.

The whole thing is so good I’d just paste the whole thing here if I told you which parts were worth reading. Instead I’ll touch on my favorite points:

3. If your website asks the user which version they’d like, high bandwidth or low, HTML or Flash, you ALSO LOSE.
5. DO NOT try to reinvent the website navigation.
11. Text navigations are better than images
12. A well thought out site map with logical sub sections is better than using “drop downs”.

The whole thing is a fantastic read. Go look at it and commit it to heart!

There’s a piece on game industry career advice from the Tech Jobs Expert on Monster.com. And guess what? The article in question features a handful of quotes from little ol’ me!

That’s always fun. :)

I discovered a fantastic application recently called NetVibes.

It’s helped me keep on top of all the game dev news sites and blogs I like to keep track of, as well as collecting other various pieces of information that are important to me.

Basically it’s a My Yahoo! custom home page portal, but it’s INCREDIBLY customizable and allows you to embed miniature applications as well as RSS feeds. There’s a MASSIVE user community behind it that’s constantly developing new embeddable mini apps for anything and everything you could need. Normally I hate apps like this, but there’s some really useful, really smart stuff out there that I’ve made use of.

In addition to that, it’s tabbed like Firefox, so you can have different tabs for different subjects. It’s also super easy to use and set up and modify. Click drag to move stuff around instantly, drag and drop anything anywhere, ‘X’ to close, ‘_’ to minimize… it has a fantastic interface, even though it’s entirely web-based.

I have one page set up with my Google Calendar, a miniature To Do List application (for personal life To-Dos, not work-related ones), and a small persistent notepad I scribble things on. I have Google Calendar’s settings set up to email me my daily agenda and TXT message my phone at a user-defined time before an appointment.

Anytime a news site is updated, Netvibes knows within five minutes and it shows up in one of my little tabs.

Netvibes also lets you share tabs. Here are the ones I use for my game dev news… click the link, then click ‘OK, Preview it’ to see. It’s all web-based and fast and simple. My other pages are for game dev news and news sites I like to read.

These are my game dev news tabs that I share:

Game Industry News

Game-Specific News

Game Industry Articles and Blogs

Netvibes is free, no strings attached, no software to install, no browser plugins required. You go to the website, and it just works, from any location. It’s crazy!

Do any of you use NetVibes, or something like it? How? :)

I found something awesome on LifeHacker a moment ago that smArtists may appreciate. It’s called The Freelancer’s Toolset. It’s a list of 100 web applications to enhance freelancers’ productivity.

It looks like a fantastic list! Here’s a few highlights from it:

• Stikkit is a central sticky note repository that interfaces with apps like Outlook. It stores names, addresses, birthdays and other snippets of information. It’s also open for collaboration even for people that don’t have or use Stikkit… and you can email it notes, too, which is pretty cool.
• NetVibes which I use. Basically it’s the ultimate customizable homepage, much like My Yahoo, except more flexible. You can turn any RSS feed into its own window, as well as drop all sorts of kickass productivity applications onto one page. It even has separate tabs you can load up with different categories of information. For example, I have a tab that contains a calendar, my personal life todo list, upcoming holidays and weather. On another tab, I have a series of small boxes that contain RSS feeds to every major news site I visit. On another tab, I have useless crap I waste time with. :) There’s a huge, thriving community of amateur developers that make modules and custom applications for it to make it infinitely extendable. I highly recommend checking out NetVibes.
• Google Calendar - I use this as an embedded window in NetVibes. It’s simple, straightforward and fun to use. I also set it up to email and text message me on my phone anytime I have an upcoming appointment so I never forget. It’s indispensible!
• FreshBooks - The Fastest Way to Invoice! This is a really cool and well-positioned company. Invoicing can be a bit of a bitch and this can help you keep track of it more easily. You can manage a huge series of invoices, send them by snail mail through the website, track the time spent on the job, accept payment online, manage work orders and generate reports. What a kickass idea!
• ConceptShare - An online visual collaboration tool. Basically, add notes or paintovers to anything you need to, and have small sticky notes that can turn into miniature discussion threads that float on top of the image and have pointers everywhere. This is so damn cool, I may try using it myself with my contractors.
• Meebo - Gain access to every single IM app on the planet through their website without downloading or installing anything. This is such a mind-bogglingly great idea. smArtists, listen up — IM communication is incredibly useful, and offering it can often be a good thing. Whenever possible, offer it as a quicker alternative for email for smaller, quicker questions. Even if you don’t use that app normally, Meebo can help. :)
• K7 - A terrible name but an awesome service. This will set up a temporary phone number for you to receive faxes and voicemail messages, which are emailed to you. What a great idea!
• Nolo - Got a legal question that pertains to contracting? Have it answered here and check out their articles and how-tos.

Any other gems I might have missed?

I just found a great post by Gianfranco over at GBGames that’s called What Would A Game Developer Do?

Gianfranco starts out detailing focus problems we all relate to, then drops some knowledge in the form of solid tips on surrounding yourself with things that motivate you. Then he breathlessly goes straight into conditioning your mind to think more like a game developer and to help stay focused. A choice quote:

Would a game developer come home from a day job and watch television? Would a game developer feel much anxiety about sitting at the computer to work on a game? Would a game developer procrastinate on game development in favor of chatting online with friends or reading random articles online?

No. A game developer would BE a game developer.

A simple mantra like “WWAGDD?” is a fantastic way to focus your mind on what’s important by asking a tough, no-nonsense question you can’t shy away from. This is good stuff! Go read the post!

I just checked out Rick Stirling’s excellent blog and found an article for young artists that I wholeheartedly agree with… it’s called Art for games, not games for art. Basically he posits that one of the chief considerations of art for games is putting the needs of the game above your own art and your need to feel creative for yourself only without consideration for the project. Very true, often overlooked, and needs to be said. :)

Found a cool article this morning: 101 Hidden Tips and Secrets for Photoshop

Some useful information in here I didn’t know. A few repeats, but here were some of the highlights I found most useful:

• 5. Sick of the default gray background around your image? Select paint bucket, hold shift and click on the gray background, it will change to whatever color you have in your foreground color box.
• 10. Hold Ctrl will temporary make any tool into move tool until you release Ctrl.
• 19. When free transforming with Ctrl+T, hold Alt to keep the original image and then to transform a duplicated layer of it. Ctrl+Shift+T to repeat whatever you did in the last transform.
• 28. Hold Alt while clicking on the eye icon beside the layer, it will hide all other layers.
• 39. Ctrl+Tab allows you to switch between different image files you are working on.
• 58. Change the active layer : Alt + [ or ].
• 59. Move the active layer up and down : Ctrl + [ or ].
• 62. When using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, click backspace to undo a lasso step.

Hope these are helpful. :)

Just found a cool writeup on the best of what’s new in the upcoming Photoshop CS3, and it’s actually got me excited:

Adobe Photoshop CS3: Top 5 Standout New Features

There’s a lot more detail in the article above, but this is the basic breakdown:

1. Nondestructive Smart Filters
2. Quick Selection Tool & Refine Edge
3. Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending
4. Automatic layer alignment and blending
5. Vanishing Point with adjustable angle

As a game developer I’m excited about Nondestructive Smart Filters and ESPECIALLY the Quick Selection Tool. As a dilettante photographer, I’m really psyched about Photomerge and the automatic layer alignment and blending. Sounds like Adobe’s really stepping up their game! Most of the new features I notice from version to version is making each new version harder to use by rearranging icons and arbitrarily changing keyboard shortcuts.

Looking forward to CS3!

I found this over on LifeHacker today and thought it was pretty sweet.

Here’s the direct article link: A Primer on Electronic Communication

Basically it’s a guide on how to guarantee responses to your emails. It’s a pretty good read and applies directly to the game industry and applying for jobs or contract work. It’s a good read.

Here’s a couple useful snippets:

Write a clear and descriptive subject line. The reason for carefully crafting the subject line is two-fold. First, you want to make sure your message is not filtered out by a program as spam. Second, you want to make sure the recipient does not delete your note manually, assuming it is unwanted junk mail.

and

State your reason for contact. Start out by explaining why you are contacting the person. If you have a more elaborate question, first just state the general motivation in a sentence and proceed with more details further down in the message. You want to get your point across quickly, before the recipient loses interest or thinks this is spam.

There’s a lot more in the article… go check it out!

I just ran across a website on accident that has a few people ripping on me and my site. It made me laugh, and I wanted to post it here.

Here’s the IndieGamer forums post.

And here are the highlights:

What a shit website. That guy sucks and is full of it.

I just can’t [listen to Jon Jones], because he calls himself the smARTIST. Next!

“smArtist” may be the dumbest name since “Wii”

the term “smArtist” made me cringe. My first thought about what it meant was “Smart A** Artist”. :D

You guys made my day. :)  In all honesty, I am HONORED to be important enough to be criticized! You can’t please everybody, and I’ve been waiting for a while for someone to speak up against me. I’m sending this to all my friends!

It was also nice to see a couple people stick up for me, including good ol’ Gianfranco over at GBGames! Thanks buddy! :)

Hey, I’m in Texas! I’m staying with my good friend Eric.

Yesterday we drove up to Fort Worth with a friend of ours to go trawling around in a condemned and heavily damaged dog food factory, and then onto a massive grain silo in a very scary, very bad neighborhood. The purpose? Taking cool pictures.

I’ve always wanted to do urban exploration like this of extremely weathered, decrepit spaces because I love going places and seeing cool things. It’s remarkable seeing what mother nature can do to utterly destroy a place all on its own, without human help.

The best part is, the whole thing can be incredibly dangerous, but rewarding. The dog food factory had immense structural damage and a ridiculous amount of leaks everywhere.

The grain silo was even better. It was about ten times larger, and roughly 40 stories tall and full of incredible machines and awesome details that I had a lot of fun capturing.

It was an incredible experience, and very exhausing. I’m going to do it again as often as I can. Anyway, here’s the main page of ALL the pictures I took:

Jon Jones’ Urban Exploration of Fort Worth!