Atari "Asteroids" Movie Director's Quote
In a recent interview with ComingSoon.net , the director of the upcoming Asteroids movie, Lorenzo di Bonaventura had this to say about the concept:
"...we really went after a mythology on the level of "Star Wars." We'll see if we succeeded or not, but it's not a simple like, the asteroid's gonna hit the – we never come to Earth. The entire movie takes place in the asteroid field "
Last year we wrote out own top-10 list of alternative ideas for the Asteroids movie. Maybe #7 from that list is not so far-off after all:
7. U.F.O. : The owner of space rock mine in Alpha Centauri has been going about his business for 100s years until one day some malicious a-hole hyperspaces into his asteroid field, and start blowing-up all his precious products. What’s more, the bastard’s space-ship is really f*cking fast, and can shoot dozens of shots at once, while the owner’s slow moving giant U.F.O. fires one shot at a time and flies in a distinctive patterns that gets it blown out of the sky almost instantly. Can our hero use all of his ingenuity to build a better faster, smaller U.F.O. before all is lost? By studying the TV transmissions from a small blue planet 30 or so light years away, he uses his worm-hole transportation device to capture Earth’s greatest T.V engineers: Mike Brady (architect), Mr. T. (unique weapons crafter), McGyver (mechanical genius), .Murray from Riptide (hacker/robotics expert), and Arthur Fonzarelli (for that magic touch) and employs them all to help make a weapon that can save the family business from total destruction.
No More Corporate Teat – #3 – The First Day
Today was the first real work-day of my non-corporate development life. Since I have an iPad contract that starts up soon (I am a little scared as the client is delaying a little on getting it initiated) I decided to re-acquaint myself with Xcode and the iPod/Pad development work-flow.
First I downloaded PhoneGap in an attempt to port an HTML application I have been developing. PhoneGap allows a developer to take an existing HTML/Javascript/CSS application and target it to the iPhone/Pad platform. It adds the appropriate wrappers and templates to Xcode that allow a relatively seamless compile to a native iPhone/Pad application. I initially tried to take a Dashcode widget HelloWorld app and publish it as native, but it didn't work. It did compile, but the simulator would not go passed the first screen of the multi-screen application. That was odd, but it might have had something to do with my inexperience with Xcode and a Dashcode Safari mobile folder structure then a technical issue with the application. My thought is that Dashcode is perfectly suited for making PhoneGap applications as it outputs Safari Mobile (as well as regular Safari code). Plus, it has some nice interface elements and widgets built in.
That attempt failed though, so I decided to test out my latest HTML5 game for the O'Reilly book Steve and I are working on. That was pretty easy as I was able to get it running in the simulator within an hour of installing Phone-gap and going through the simple setup and HelloWorld tutorial. The problem was that I have no idea with PhoneGap how to target the iPad so the application played in a strange little partial window. I any case, it was a pure Javascript/html5 application running a full speed in the simulator. I was encouraged by my initial success, so I moved on to native Objective-C. I have a decent new book on iPhone game development, (see note) so I started to go through it to refresh my brain on the syntax as it is very much unlike Actionscript or Javascript.
Note: This book is rather slim, but don't let it fool you. It is AWESOME and covers actually creating a real game framework that almost any entertainment application can use. It is very similar to our AS3 Book, but it doesn't have nearly as many full game projects.
This worked pretty well, and in a couple hours I had the little app playing on my real iPod touch. This was enough to make me feel comfortable with iPod/Pad development again until the project gets kicked off next week (hopefully).
So, as of right now, I am officially unemployed with no contracts or other jobs to do (at least for another week or so). That is a scary thought, so tomorrow I am going to have to reach out to my contacts and see if anyone needs a helping hand with a project. I'm pretty sure I need to have at least a couple irons in the fire to make this work at home gig a reality. If not, I will consider this week a vacation from other people's work and start back up one of those 8bitrocket game projects that I have left on the back burner for a while.
I think I can get used to this...