On the final installment of our series on Mac gaming, we take a look at gamepad support on OS X.
I went with a Playstation 3 controller for a number of reasons
PS3 controllers pair via bluetooth and the driver is already on OS X. The pairing process is a little confusing but there are guides and videos online to make it easier
I’ve owned a PS2 so I’m used to the basic controller design
I’ve never owned an XBox and find the controllers are somewhat bulkier, more expensive, require downloading a driver, and to play wirelessly requires buying an adapter. That said, systems like Steam and many games tend to support XBox 360 controllers as a standard
Wine is a free open source program to run Windows apps on unix-like systems like Linux and OS X without requiring a copy of Windows. There are various applications that based on it that work in different ways
Commercial application that installs and manages various Wine bottles. Has a community that rates ports on functionality and makes it easy to install supported software with CrossTie
Boxer is based on DOSBox but simplifies the process of running commands by packaging your games up for you via drag and drop. Comes with free games to get you started.
There are plenty of websites offering free downloads of old games calling it abandonware. This is a bit of a gray area as it deals with orphan works. Use your best judgement when downloading and never get things from suspicious sites.
This week we start a continuous series of episodes all about playing games on the Mac. The first game I remember playing on a computer was Oregon Trail on the Apple II.
There was also a creative game where you could wire multimedia together like sounds recorded with your microphone, but I can’t find my copy or the name of it.
Today we look at the problem of creative burnout. Just what is burnout? To me, burnout is a lack of passion or energy to do what you feel you should or need to accomplish
Identifying Burnout
Ask yourself honest questions and give honest answers
Am I tired of this project as a whole?
Am I tired with it’s execution or something else I can retool to work better?
Chuck Close on Artist Block
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Give yourself time where you’re supposed to be at work and times you’re supposed to be relaxing
I don’t turn instant message apps on until I’m done for the day. It’s inviting distraction and even if nobody’s on you’ll be waiting for it
Take breaks – sometimes time to grab juice and a cookie, sometimes working on a whole other project
Need downtime from working on one thing? Work on something else. You don’t have to finish each project in one solid burst
Exercises
When I was in art school I didn’t take time to plan my assignments because they came to me. I was an efficient little worker drone but when you work by yourself you need to actively decide what to work on and keep yourself busy. It’s very easy to fall into a slump of only drawing one thing a day or as few things as are expected of you
Take time to make drawings for you that nobody else will see. Enjoy the process, the discovery, and don’t ever fear making these drawings perfect. You can always rework a drawing and it’s perfectly fine to do that until you’re happy
Today we’re discussing video game creation software. Creation software packages have advantages for beginners over more complicated engines because they don’t require you to know a lot of code.
