After Bethesda completed Skyrim they let the people working on the game jam on it for a week to see what they could add to it. Here are the results:
I wonder what the future holds and how much of a factor the technical limitations on consoles is. Still, the best use of kinect I’ve seen.
For those of you out there wanting to try your hand on improving Skyrim you can download the Creation Kit.
Skyrim has been out for a few months now and the internet is still talking about it (which is like an eternity in internet time!). Heck, you may have noticed that the frequency of posts appearing on this blog has decreased and I blame Skyrim for this.
Anyway, I’m playing Skyrim on the PC and the stock UI is totally ridiculous because it’s clearly not designed for a keyboard and mouse. Bethesda clearly decided that they should make only one way to interact with the inventory and levelling system and that’s through a controller. I’m sure the UI is good on consoles, but the PC version is pathetic. I’ll let Rock Paper Shotgun and Armed Gamer elaborate on the bad UI.
Luckily the mod community around Skyrim has created SkyUI!
SkyUI improves the UI for PC players by adding basic things like searching and listing inventory items based on value, stolen, weight, etc.
It has turned a frustrating part of the game into something I no longer think about, which is a good thing. If you play Skyrim on the PC then you need to go get SkyUI now.
Here’s a video showing what it does:
I’ll leave it to Gamasutra to add even more issues with the UI in Skyrim.
This might be the neatest experimental Minecraft mod that I’ve seen: AMEE mod, essentially carbon emissions in Minecraft. The mod tracks what you burn and then contacts AMEE to figure out how much carbon to toss into the atmosphere.
This might be a good way to teach about ecosystems and Earth’s atmosphere.
Of course, it’s not just wood. Loads of things burn, and not just in furnaces. The hack supports combustion of almost anything in minecraft; wood, planks, coal, tree saplings, and so on. I even put in some calculations for setting fire to cows (as any Minecraft player knows, an effective way to quickly get cooked beef). Even the hostile mobs like creepers have their emissions mapped (mostly to generic biomass calculations). I also added redstone (like electricity) emissions using AMEE’s realtime UK national grid data.
This blog is run by Adam Clare who teaches game design at George Brown and makes educational games at Wero Creative.
Contact: Adam@WeroCreative.com
