Slashdot Mirror
How Poly Bridge's GIF Generator Turned an Indie Game Into a Reddit Sensation
An anonymous reader writes: The creator of bridge physics phenomenon Poly Bridge discusses the rise of the bridge physics phenomenon in a new interview this week. Patrick Corrieri of New Zealand's Dry Cactus studio reveals the Reddit hit has sold at least 48,000 copies so far, but that its smartest feature, a GIF generator to capture all your successful crosses and crashes, only came about by accident: "Ultimately it was another independent developer, Zach Barth from Zachotronics, who pushed me to integrate the feature. Not only that, but he also gave me the source code to his GIF encoding routine so I could hit the ground running. That's what is so awesome about the indie dev community: a willingness to share and learn from each other, as growing together is much better than competing with one another."
Slashdot, I know it'd violate your lovely tradition and all, but is it too much trouble to check your links before they go live?
http://www.redbull.com/us/en/g...
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Here is the working link:
http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331742704256/poly-bridge-interview-constructing-a-viral-hit
*mumbles something about editors and welcome to Slashdot*
This developer doesn't get enough recognition. His games are always fun and good.
Because Reddit is going to buy Slashdot... Why the hell do you think there are so many Reddit stories over the last few months?
Those of us who are fortunate enough not having to work for a living?
>rise of the bridge physics phenomenon
Too young to remember Bridge Builder?
Overnight sensation
Raspberries
Eric Carmen
Busted while driving an SUV loaded (him, not the SUV)
Boz Skaggs
Silx Degrees
Shouldn't they be studying for the kindergarten entrance exam?
The only GIF you need to see from this game.
It's the place where people with psychiatric problems, who are in perpetual debt, can't get medical insurance and whose evil boss won't give them paid time off for an abortion - go to hang out.
"as growing together is much better than competing with one another."
Well sure, YOU are benefiting from it currently. But if you have a great idea, and share it, and others make money off of it, then you have nothing. You should be compensated for your hard work.
It's a website, and you shouldn't.
Not all news items will be of interest to you. That's fine. I'd encourage you to ignore them and look at the next one.
The success of animated gifs, despite their horrible inefficiency as a video format, reflects the utter failure of websites, standards bodies, etc., to provide a simple, reliable way to deliver video to a browser. When I visit a website with a video, there's a substantial chance that it won't work - and it's almost certain not to work unless I enable Javascript and run whatever possibly-malicious code the website serves up.
Animated gifs are simple, reliable, and - as far as I know - completely secure. I'm perfectly happy to lose a factor of two (or ten) in bandwidth in return for that peace of mind.
I couldn't agree more, however...
Competition is also necessary. Just because one person (corporation, club, etc) does something well, does not mean that someone else cannot do it better. And the human tendency and corporate -mandate- for NIH means that good ideas tend to be enshrined.
The beauty of open source development is that someone with a better idea can take an approach that has been elevated to axiom and improve it. If the original developers aren't interested in the improvements, well no problem. Just take the new approach to the universe of possible users, and let it compete with the golden child. If it is -actually- better in some respect, people will end up migrating.
And being open source means, fundamentally, that "Gee, I can do better than that" can (and often does) end up as "Everyone gets to benefit".
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
The buzz was slowing down so the developer paid dice to try and give it another injection of publicity.
I really enjoy Zach's games. I believe they are published under the name "Zachtronics" vice "ZachOtronics". Great games, especially SpaceChem!!
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
Stop using GIF. GIF sucks. There are better options.
On that note, why didn't browsers ever decide to support MNG or M-JPEG?
Just to be clear, this was NOT the first, not by a long shot.
Pontifex is still probably the 'purest' version of this, and IMO still the best in some ways. IIRC it's available on your phone now.
But when Pontifex came out, there was no kickstarter/indie "community" nor a Steam to act as a marketing/delivery agent. The ecosystem really has matured, for sure.
-Styopa
And here I disable animated GIFs in my browsers. The internet is so much more enjoyable without them.
I think the best bridge building game was Lemmings on Amiga platform: https://youtu.be/9_hZHW6Ef1I
Please, for fuck's sake.
Gif is a bad image format and shouldn't be used.
There are superior formats like apng or webm or png.