Today I was part of a group where we tried to make a viable game from a challenging topic: C-SPAN. We were restricted to come up with a full game in 45 minutes and here's the basics of what we got:

Rules:
- minimum of three players: Democrats, Republicans and an intermediary
- each person rolls to decide which roll they get
- the players draw a card on a political issue and are given a set amount of time to argue their position on the topic
- body language and clarity of speech are rated while the intermediary, while also using a guideline list for each party to make sure the person is hitting each key note
- surprise attacks in the form of office scandals would add to the challenge of the candidates persuading them self as the better opponent
- the game is educational -- dealing with current events and enlightening each player with the views of both sides (if they have a certain belief before the game, they are eventually put in a situation where they must argue the other position)
- the winner is deemed president

CrazyBump!

I have been hearing about this magical normal map program that is an industry standard called crazybump. Normal maps are basically bump maps (give the illusion of depth on a flat surface) that realistically react to light positioning and are usually generated from displacement maps (actual added geometry on a flat surface generated from a height map texture). I have been using the standard Nvidia photoshop filter plugin for my normal maps and really never had a problem with it--although it is hard to get a sense of what the final texture will look like on a model. Yesterday I decided to take a look at Crazybump and I must say that I had a great sense of awe when watching the demo movie on the site, www.crazybump.com . With this software you can make specular, ambient occlusion, displacement and normal maps; and I had thought it was only for normal maps. The only downside is that taking a straight up diffuse texture and converting it to bump usually doesn't give the right effect--so I still do the bump map in photoshop and then import it into crazy bump. I have only had a hint of experience with the program but at the moment it seems extremely promising and will definitely be a factor to my future projects.