Dinomo

Redirect to Honeyslug

2009-03-22T09:20:00.001-07:00

Hey folks,

I'm not updating this blog much at the moment, mainly because all of my energy and enthusiasm for games is being directed into making my own. If you'd like to see what I've been up to, best plan is to head over to the Honeyslug development blog, which is now updated regularly.

I've been playing L4D and Noby Noby boy.

A Year in Review

2008-12-30T03:26:00.000-08:00

In a word, 'phew'.

2008 was the year in which a number of things happened to me for the first time:

The realities of owning property sunk in for real (building work and numerous DIY projects throughout the year which I became more involved with than my inner ostrich felt comfortable with).
I was made redundant.
I started a company.
I turned 30.
I won a pub quiz (the marvellous Bigger Boat film quiz).

Despite all of the 'real stuff' above, it was also an excellent year for rectangles - my new catch-all term for games, books and DVDs (although strictly speaking, rectangles applies only to the physical forms of media, and it was also an excellent year for ethereal media too). Here are some of my favourite things of the year:

Favourite Video Games of 2008

Left for Dead (Xbox & PC): The best co-op game ever? It has that most powerful of rules in co-op: if one person screws up, you all die. And then it does everything in its power to get you to work together so you can keep each other alive. And Expert mode is incredibly hard, and yet I still want the achievements for finishing. Oh. and being a Valve game, all the things about Valve games are also true (world-class animation, voice acting, art direction, sound design etc).
Braid (XBLA). Because it made me think real hard (about playing it and about making games), and the art and music is lovely.
Loco Roco 2 (PSP): Hurrah for Pikmin 2 style sequels - don't change anything of the essence, just make more of it and add a bunch of features. This game contains some of the highest quality nonsense ever, in any medium.
Geometry Wars 2 (XBLA). A Super Pure game. I'm fairly rubbish at it, but that didn't stop me playing it repeatedly, trying to beat Ronny and Bambos.
World of Warcraft (PC): Yep this is still here. I went through Burning Crusade early in the year, and a very happy few months I spent doing it. I plan on following the same pattern in '09 with Lich King (really didn't have the time for it this year).
Professor Layton (DS): Fairly uncontroversial choice this. Is there anyone who doesn't like this game?
Res HD (XBLA): I've owned every version of this, but this latest one made me very happy (or maybe it was just my tv is the best its ever been).
Fl0w (PS3): I spent a delightful couple of hours collapsed on the sofa going through this in the early hours of the morning. An audio-visual treat, albeit a short one.
World of Goo (PC): best game of its type - I reckon I enjoyed this more than Armadillo Run
Boom Blox (Wii): Best use of a Wiimote so far.
Castle Crashers (XBLA): yes, admittedly its just Golden Axe with funny pictures, but I kind of like Golden Axe, and the pictures are very funny.

Apologies to: Little Big Planet, Dead Space, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect for not having gotten around to playing you yet x

Biggest Gaming Disappointments of 2008

Fable 2 - fell deep into the uncanny valley and never came out, with its terrible Poser manniquins and dialogue ruined by ham and lag. Also the way you can just teleport around the map, or follow the idiot-pandering glowing trail around, neutering the whole 'wide open world' thing. Having said that, I will probably finish it nonetheless, cos it's actually not rotten to the core - in fact perfectly enjoyable if you switch off your brain and don't worry too much about the flaws.

Spore - I *loved* the first 2 chapters where you turn a cell into a tribe of walking, talking, dancing creatures. Then it became a third rate RTS game, EVEN if you made the pinkest, dancingest, fluffiest creatures you could. I never made it into space.

Favourite Music of 2008

Been a bit rubbish at music this year: my walks to work have largely been dominated by something else, and I've found it hard to listen while trying to concentrate on other things. Sorry music!

The Vampire Weekend album
The Fleet Foxes album
The David Cronenburg's Wife album
Estelle - American Boy
MIA - Paper Planes
MGMT - Kids
The Ting Tings
Nick Cave
Jens Lekman live at All Tomorrow's Parties
Metallica live at the O2 (thanks Ben)
Listening to 6Music (and discovering things like Chairlift, The Noisettes, Florence and the Machine and Ladyhawke)
Playing in Satan's Cock

Favourite Books of 2008

I didn't read that much in 2008, though the highlights are below. What I did do - and surprised myself in doing it - was get addicted to Harry Potter. I started listening to Stephen Fry reading the first book on a whim, but before I knew it I was hooked, and spent my (40 minute) walks to and from work gorging through the rest of them, until I finished the last one in November, whereupon I went right back and started again (you know - for some 'perspective').

The first 3 or 4 books are definitely guilty pleasures - the writing isn't fantastic and the plots are fairly formulaic. What JK Rowling does so well is write characters and build a coherant world around them. And she seems to know where the series is going from very early on, and sews a number of things into each book which seem irrevelevant within the context of that book, but become important later. This means that although the early books seem a bit slight, the series builds to a proper good climax - I'd describe the final book as a masterpiece of its genre. Harry's world was where I did most of my escapism in 2008, and I never suspected that would be the case.

The other books I enjoyed this year were:

Red Seas under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Favourite Films of 2008

There Will Be Blood
Juno
Happy Go Lucky
Son of Rambow
Margot at the Wedding
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
In Search of a Midnight Kiss

Not seen yet but want to:
Wall-E, Ponyo on the Cliff, No Country for Old Men, Synechdoche, New York, Burn After Reading, Horton Hears a Who, In Bruges, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Man on Wire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Persepolis, Somers Town, Waltz with Bashir, The Wrestler

Terrible Rubbish that made me want the time back:
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Faded Dreams,

Favourite Sport of 2008
Does walking to and from work every day count? If not, then Climbing, without a doubt. I think 2008 will be the year I finally abandon the gym forever.

Favourite Television of 2008

Not a big year for telly for me. Haven't dived into The Wire yet, but will in 09. Missed Dead Set. Hated Gavin and Stacy.

Survivors on the BBC was very good.

RIP Oliver Postgate

I love your television programmes.

Happy Birthday to Me

2008-11-17T00:10:00.000-08:00

Cripes, I've not updated in a while - been somewhat preoccupied, what with starting a company, more on which as and when. However, I felt this day should go marked - the first day of my thirties, and the conception of Ricky 2.0.

The last film I watched in my twenties was Spiderwick Chronicles (some nice character design and ideas hamstrung as usual by condensing a load of books into a shortish film).

The last book I read was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is outstanding - it's a novel about the birth of comics, the Second World War, and an Escapist.

Best of all was the last video game I played - the single player Xbox demo of Left 4 Dead. Valve have taken their knack for level design and industry-leading production (textures, voice acting, animation) and married it to a high octane, multiplayer Zombie blaster. The original Doom is definitely a strong point of comparison here. The levels seem to be highly replayable, since the game's 'AI Director' generates waves of zombies and pickups programmatically, ensuring that no two experiences are the same. Highly recommended.

I am currently working on 4 separate games. The last one I finished was a flash conversion of a platform game I originally made for mobile: Balloon-Headed Boy for Gimme5Games.

In addition to the games I'm making, there are also a bunch of games queued up to play. This includes Fable 2, Loco Roco 2, Fallout 3, Lich King, Left 4 Dead and Little Big Planet. Then there are some I may check out depending on having a go of them - Gears 2 and Dead Space among them. I still need to finish World of Goo, and apparently Crayon Physics may yet be out this year! This comic sums up the predicament of gamers nicely.

Had a big party, saw lots of friends and got some awesome presents (including this print by Scott C from my lovely wife).

Okay, that's it for now - will no doubt post some kind of end-of-year summary before '09.

Braid

2008-08-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

This whole Braid pricing thing is ridiculous, but interesting.

For me, arguments about price versus longevity are moot - as in fact are discussions about how fun, pretty or concise the game is, all of which fall into the trap of comparing it directly with other games on XBLA.

The thing is that Braid is more akin to the experience of going to see an exhibition in an art gallery with the expectation is that it will change the way you think or see things - a proposition which people are quite accustomed to paying more than £10.20* for without griping at the price of entry

Furthermore, the art gallery transaction typically has no 'free demo' - patrons simply trust that the artist they are going to see will be worth the price of entry. And having happily trusted that Braid would be worth the price of entry, I bought it immediately without needing to see a demo. And being entirely satisfied with my transaction, I have a great deal of sympathy for Jonathan Blow's position that if only the 'art games people' buy Braid, he will make back his investment at 1200 points, and can only hope that he does okay out of it and then some.

Incidently, I think that 'art game' is an inaccurate and potentially misleading description of Braid - unlike the work of people like Jason Rohrer or Rod Humble, it's very much more game than art, by which I guess I mean that it follows more conventional rules of gaming, which people who already play videogames would understand. But the *experience* of playing the game does similar things to my brain as good art I've seen, hence the comparison.

I'm probably under half way through, and I've already come across several puzzles which I found completely delightful, and which have since sent my brain spinning around the possibilities which they suggest.

So far my only criticism is that there's only one save slot. So I can't have my wife share the experience of playing through it properly until I'm done. ** Edit: but I completely missed the fact that I can just create a fresh profile and have an independant save game for that too. Shows what I know huh?

* yep - we pay 134% more for the game in the UK - nearly the highest Microsoft points markup worldwide.

Mucking About

2008-07-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

The Glob private view went very well. Thanks to some fantastic testing and bug-tracking by Nat, the game behaved itself impeccably, and it was a genuine delight to watch people exploring it - including a number of people who probably don't play many video games, if any at all ever. There is now a version available to play on the website at www.gleanofglob.org, and apparently the exhibition will be discussed on the BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review programme.

The week continues apace. I'm down in Brighton this week for the Develop conference, where I have a number of meetings with my new company. I imagine I'll blog more about that when there's something more definite to say.

Work on Glob has led me, tangentially, to think a bit about playful games recently. By playful, I mean games which are comfortable in their own skin, and prepared to have a bit of fun with the player, and doing so perhaps lift them out of the experience of playing a video game a little bit.

This could be something really big, like having gameplay which is willfully obtuse and confusing but in a fun way - the best example I can think of right now is Wrath of Transparator, which is a game by Matt Korba et al where you control a gigantic monster trashing everything, but where you are also completely invisible, and have to work hard to even keep track of where you are on the screen.

Or it could be something really small, like the layer of gaming references in No More Heroes. Or the way you have to swap control pad ports to beat that boss in Metal Gear (not sure which version - never played it, but loved the idea). Or the caricature animation and crowd taunts in Rock Star's Table Tennis on the Wii (I didn't notice quite so much piss-taking in the 360 version, so perhaps they retro-fitted it).

In fact, playfulness can even be inscribed into the very DNA of a game, as it is in the Katamari series. I'd suggest that probably the Japanese are very much better at being playful than western developers.

I think in general, playfulness in games is underlooked. We work so hard iterating mechanics to make them play well, and then polishing up the content, that we don't leave enough time, or energy to muck around a little bit. And the result is too often these slick po-faced blockbusters that don't feel like the people making them were having enough fun.

Globolg Blogolb

2008-07-26T01:59:00.000-07:00

For the past few months I've been collaborating on a project called Glob with my friend Daniel Baker, and it's pretty much finished, and ready for its exhibition at the Jerwood Space in South London, near London Bridge station. It's been really fun (and Dan always has really great bread at his house for toast).

The game is written in Flash and based on characters Dan originally created on a huge pinboard he found. It involves the player having to find the 'Glean of Glob', by exploring the world and interacting with its inhabitants.

I shan't say more about the specifics, but there's a website up here where you'll be able to play the game after the exhibition opens, and you can also see some artwork at our blog. There's a lot more of this blog that's currently private - we need to go through it and decide how much more of the process to reveal. This is a tough one - we have to weigh up the benefits of discussing the process with the negative impact on the mystery of Glob world by doing so.

We spent some effort trying to make Glob's presence in the gallery feel as much like a homogenous part of the Glob world - and as little like a computer game - as possible. I reckon we pretty much succeeded through the application of plenty of cardboard, and some barkway raddows that Dan made. Here is a photo.

Procedural Content

2008-05-16T01:11:00.000-07:00

Despite being in an almighty swirling shitstorm of work right now, I've somehow persuaded myself that it would be a good idea to enter the competition over at The Independent Gaming Source, where they're calling for games which have procedurally-generated content. I dunno - I must be the eye of the storm or something.

Anyway, I spent a happy morning last weekend beavering away on the laptop in the sunshine, and got a swirling-circle-cloud-thing going for a little pixel dude to leap around on, collecting pieces of stars.

Now I just need to add some baddies and a difficulty curve and I can get back to the other 5 projects I'm working on!

Doom 4

2008-05-16T00:56:00.000-07:00

Another wonderful game from Pixeljam - this one is called Dino Run. The gameplay is very simple: the asteroid apocalypse has arrived in the Cretaceous Period and all the dinosaurs are fleeing the doom.

You play one such dino, and run from left to right, leaping over your fellow dinos, eating those small enough, catching rides on terradactyls and surfing the wave of molten doom.

This is pixel art turned up to the max - the gameplay is simple, but the detail and range of interactions belies any screenshot - those Pixeljam guys obviously have real love for this game. There's even multiplayer, and the ability to buff your dino's stats with points awarded from successful runs.

Things and Non-things.

2008-05-02T11:35:00.001-07:00

This game called Karoshi, where you have to kill your little platform jumpin' guy on every level is great fun. Play it!

Gametap have an article titled 'Indie Games Blowout 08' that looks worth a look. Read it!

My friend Caroline has a fantastic new blog about useability which I hope to contributing to soon. Laugh at it!

I'm alive and well and beavering away on a number of projects which will see the light of day at some point so help me.

Lovely animation

2008-04-12T04:02:00.001-07:00

Note to self: study this video closely before iterating the tree code from Flora. The musician is someone called Josh Pyke - who I've never heard of - and the artist is James Gulliver Hancock.

(Via drawn, as so many things seem to be these days).

You Have to Burn the Rope

2008-04-12T01:13:00.001-07:00

Postmodern video games! More of them please!

This game is inspired by Clockwork Orange, Castlevania, that article in the latest issue of Edge about Boss Battles, and Portal.

It's here. Huge investment of time not required.

Gymnast

2008-04-11T03:48:00.000-07:00

Had a great meeting last night about a new collaborative project with Daniel. All the really high level things have been thrashed out, and it looks like there will be enough overlap with Hohokum that I can reuse a lot of the code, which should mean we can concentrate on some interesting gameplay and visual treatments.

On that subject, a playable version of Hoho is now long overdue - I just need the time to bash out a string of small levels that introduct all the basic concepts. They're mostly all designed in my head even! It won't be this weekend though - the beta for Flora is next week and I'm going to Olympic Studios to record some songs with the Cock on sunday.

Once I stop being so busy, I can't wait to check out this game by Walaber - the JelloCar dude. I'll be interested to see how such complex motions have been mapped to the two analogue sticks..

Gymnast - launch trailer from Walaber on Vimeo.

I'm in a Wide Open Space

2008-04-09T02:01:00.000-07:00

Thinking about ideas for a forthcoming collaboration with a friend of mine reminded me of an old game I remembered fondly, despite having never played..

Back when I was 8 we had a PC XT with a couple of games that my dad brought home on 5.25" diskettes from his pals at work. We had Space Quest 3 and Police Quest and some D&D games like Hillsfar, and some free ones too, like Alley Cat (I can still remember the music!) and Montezuma's Revenge. Sometimes the majority of the fun was extracted from working out how to make them run!

Anyway, I somehow acquired a copy of an early multi-format games magazine, whose title escapes me. Even though we only had a crappy PC and my pocket money wasn't in game-buying league yet, I loved that magazine, and read and re-read it until it fell apart. One game that always stood out for me was the one below: Typhoon Thompson on the Atari ST - a computer I never owned. Something about being able to explore a big wide ocean really stuck with me, and definitely explains why I was so taken with the sailing aspect of Windwaker.

I was reminded of this game the other day - and the only words I could think of to search on were 'Atari ST, Sea Sprites' - so I was delighted to find this video:

/flounders for ideas

2008-03-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Bambos says:
plus he doesnt know c++ and isnt interested in learning

Ricky says:
I don't understand people who get hung up on languages

THEY'RE ALL THE SAME!
(basically)

Ricky says:
it's like saying:
"well I can ride elephants, but only if they're Asian elephants"
"I don't know how to ride those African elephants!"

Ricky says:
yes.
it's EXACTLY like that.
especially the part about the elephants.
/firm nod

Hohokum Meeting

2008-03-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

Had a really productive meeting yesterday evening about Hohokum, with Dick and Nat - a designer at Morpheme who will be helping us with the game. In retrospect it's surprising how many things we managed to work out, especially since I wasn't sure exactly what we were aiming to achieve before we started.

It's amazing the extent to which three heads are better than one. Issues that seem intractable when you're thinking about them by yourself are solved instantly the moment you have to explain or justify your thoughts to a group. And as you think on your feet, solutions seem to come from nowhere. It's like putting the game design over a flame - the assumptions burn off the surface, and the design heats up, becoming more fluid and can be molded into a new shape.

Working with a graphic designer is interesting too. I find it allows me to decouple gameplay mechanics from their visual representation in a way that isn't so easy when I'm working solo. This means I can consider mechanics in the abstract, knowing that someone else will be worrying about to communicate them visually.

Plenty of coding to do over Easter anyway!

What Video Game System Should I Own?

2008-03-13T03:34:00.000-07:00

From Exhausticated.

Blueberry Garden

2008-03-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

Erik Svedang's game looks like what you'd get if you gave the comic artist Lewis Trondheim a physics engine.

Prism on Gamefaqs

2008-03-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

No matter how happy you are with a game you've made, I don't think anything quite matches the feeling of finding it on gamefaqs, and seeing that someone liked it enough to do something like this - meticulously create solutions for every level.

Thanks to both of you, Darkstar Ripclaw and Anarcho Selmiak!

The Fruit Farm team were filmed yesterday for a short documentary for 4Talent, talking about what each of us does to get a game from its initial concept to final. It's going to be interesting to see how the two and a half hours of footage gets edited down to 5 minutes! I thought we all did okay - it takes enormous concentration to make succinct points about something as complex as game development without stumbling over sentences, and switching focus smoothly from screen to face, but the filmmaker did a great job of helping us organise our thoughts and movements.

I've added a bunch of new links, including some games which I've tagged with [NEW], not because they literally are new (I've been meaning to add em for ages), but to make them stand out from the others you might have played already.

Machinarium

2008-03-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

Two of my favourite adventure games are Samarost, and its sequel, which are visually sumptuous, and based around delightfully whimsical puzzles.

Here is an interview with their creator, Jakob Dvorsky, about his new game, which is called Machinarium.

Every Puzzle Has an Answer!

2008-03-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

If Hayuo Miyazuki, the creator of Anime classics like My Neighbour Totoro or Spirited Away, created a story based on Tintin, after watching Les Triplettes de Belleville it would be a lot like the world of Professor Layton.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village, for the Nintendo DS, is a wonderfully absorbing game, which I gorged my way through in several days whilst in San Francisco for GDC (yes - I have a lot of draft posts backed up).

It's an adventure game, in which the eponymous Professor and his plucky assistant Luke explore the village of Mystere for clues surrounding a case involving a lost treasure bequeathed in the will of a rich baron.

But the primary game mechanic isn't the traditional fare of point and click adventures, which usually involves locating objects in various locations and combining them in unpredictable ways to progress. Instead, this game uses brain teasers, which the residents of Mystere require Layton and Luke to solve in return for assisting with the investigation.

The puzzles are far richer than in a game like Dr Kawashima's Brain Training, which provides a limited number of puzzle types (like mental arithmetic) and has the player repeat variations of these over and over. Instead, the Curious Village contains 150 hand crafted puzzles - the kind you might get in a broadsheet newspaper. So you get riddles, math, matchstick or chess problems. Some involve physics or mazes or sliding blocks - there's a lot of variety, which is one reason why this game is so compelling - it makes you think hard, but continually changes the *way* you have to think so as to provide exercise for all your mental muscles - a bit like swimming in that sense.

Level 5 have done a terrific job of building on the core game mechanic with a number of design decisions which are right on the nail. There's a friendly and forgiving hint system (the writing in this game is strong throughout) in which 3 levels of hint can be provided for any puzzle by spending 'hint coins', hidden throughout the village. There are hidden puzzles too - interesting asides provided as a reward for exploratory clicking.

There are also a number of metagame sideshows: a number of the puzzles reward the player with various objects - gizmos which come together to form a useful tool, painting scraps which must be put together like a jigsaw, and furniture for Layton and Luke's lodgings - initially bare - which the player must share between the two to maximise their happiness.

The difficulty level is pitched just right - until the very end, you're not forced to complete any puzzle that's really hard, though there's a good chance that you won't be able rest until you've solved them all.

The music and the art (with its limited palette and art style which evokes Belleville) paint a wonderful picture of that fantasy Europe that the Japanese seem to have in their collective consciousness, and the cut scenes are of the quality of a 'proper' Anime film.

In addition to everything else, what makes this game especially noteable is the plot, which is genuinely surprising and delightful, and about which I shan't say anything further, except for..

Game of the year so far.

Gravitation

2008-03-08T03:18:00.000-08:00

Gravitation is a new game by Jason Rohrer, and joins his previous game, Passage as one of the few autiobiographical games ever made. Gravitation is a comment on the artist's creative mania, which swings from periods of great creativity when ideas come thick and fast and work is frantic, to times when he feels lethargic and can't achieve much. It also discusses the difficulties of balancing time spent working with time spent with family or friends.

I feel Gravitation is a successful game, more so than Passage. Whilst I identify with the sentiments behind both, Gravitation provides richer interactions for the player, and this makes its message stronger and more emphatic. Without giving too much away, I also feel that the level design does a decent job of communicating what it feels like to be buzzing away on a creative drive to programming something new and exciting.

Download Gravitation here.

The Future of Highways

2008-02-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

I watch this with a mixture of amusement at the naivity of our predecessors and admiration for their vision.

I wonder how many games it has inspired.

Take to the Rooftops!

2008-02-03T05:08:00.001-08:00

One (good) measure of immersion in a game is the extent to which its mechanics spill over into everyday life. After playing a lot of Zelda every bush and dustbin becomes a potential source of Rupees. Katamari had me continuously parsing my surroundings to decide the order in which I'd roll everything up. Now Crackdown has me peering up at buildings, identifying every possible ledge to take me ever higher in the search for vantage points and agility orbs.

Considering that my perception of this game before playing it was 'GTA in the future', my expectations have been far exceeded - I don't think I've spent more than about 20 minutes in a vehicle throughout the entire game, preferring to first max my agility and weapons skills, before moving onto giant explosions. Not sure whether I'm gonna bother with driving or not.

Best simple, dumb fun I've had since Mercenaries on the Xbox.

Don't Involve Yourself

2007-12-29T04:06:00.000-08:00

I loathe and detest DIY. And owning a new house which needs work has help me pinpoint some reasons why: it's primarily the differences between DIY and software development that make it so frustrating for me.

1. Inaccuracy

When writing a piece of code, I can make it unfailingly correct and absolutely precise. When complete it's a thing of beauty which perfectly fits the task for which it was intended, smoothly sliding into the software without touching any sides.

When I try to mark a straight, horizontal line on a wall, measure and mark off some screw points and drill them out, it just seems impossible to achieve anything close to precision.

For one thing, in our house, the walls aren't even perfectly straight (it's an old house). Then there's the process of marking things with a pencil (whose lead has a thickness and which must run alongside a rule - both sources of inaccuracy). Then there's the drilling itself - trying to hold a heavy vibrating machine completely still while it both hammers and twists itself around isn't easy, especially working off a ladder. And then there's the structural integrity of the wall - being composed of a combination of soft and hard material at unpredictable points so that the drill will move very rapidly through the soft before striking something hard which causes it to jolt off course.

All of these factors conspire to result in drilling holes which:
a) don't go straight into the wall, which makes putting the screws in difficult.
b) aren't in the right place, which makes putting the screws in impossible.

2. Lack of Undo or Source Control

When coding, if I do something wrong, I hit Ctrl-Z to undo. And because I always set my undo buffer size to something enormous, I can successively undo changes a long way back. If I want to retrieve an earlier version of some code, I can usually go and find it in Source Control.

When I drill a hole (or worse, a series of them!) in the wrong place, there's no recourse to any such convenience. Moving a curtain pole means unscrewing it from the wall and starting over. And hopefully it's being moved up and not down, because otherwise the result is unsightly rawlplug holes who staring at you accusingly from above the pole. The only thing to do then is pray that you're planning on decorating soon (my advice for new homeowners: drill and screw and install every single thing you're every going to need, and only then decorate the entire place).

3. How long everything takes

Now I've been doing it for a while, I can make software happen pretty fast. Modern IDEs and SDKs are well-streamlined, and knowledge of where to find your tools allows solutions to come together with relative ease.

Doing even simple DIY tasks seems to take me ages. And I'm not even talking about the extra time to minimise the inaccuracy (which in my case is considerable). I just mean locating the right tools, putting them in the right place, and swapping between them as required.

In fairness, what I have in software development is the equivalent of a work-shop, with all my tools arranged tidily where I can find them and with plenty of space to do things. But (also in fairness) a real-life work-shop wouldn't be a lot of use in a number of the DIY tasks around the house, where tools need to be brought into the field. The worst is drilling and screwing up a ladder on your own, where you have to come up and down the ladder to exchange tools.

I was thinking that perhaps a decent tool-belt might be a solution, but to take the example of switching between electric hammer drill and electric screwdriver, this just isn't feasible, so I guess what I'm really waiting for is some kind of hand held multi-tool from Star Trek.

4. Lack of a Community

I'm working on some code, and I'm stuck. Maybe I don't have any idea how to achieve what I want, or I'm aware of a range of solutions and don't know which to choose, or else I've chosen a solution and it doesn't seem to be working for me. Either way, I switch to a browser window, do a search, and can usually turn up some useful advice in minutes. Failing that there are email lists full of wise people who always seem happy to help their fellow developer.

In contrast, when working on a DIY project, I feel as alone as Samus in an alien cave. I've searched, and the internet isn't so full of helpful DIY advice as it is for programming. I think one reason is that the medium isn't text-based like code, so it's harder both to give advice in that form and to search for it. But mainly I think it's because the people with all the wisdom - the DIY mavens - aren't on the internet doling it out like they should be.

5. Bad Tools

Where DIY is concerned I'm happy to describe myself as a bad workman - in fact I'm rubbish. But that doesn't disprove the existence of bad tools.

In software there are bad tools too, but this is mitigated considerably by the existence of a strong community who are constantly refining their tools and and sharing them on the internet. Not happy with the standard c++ String clases? So head over to CodeProject and consider one of the many alternatives.

Actually the reusable tools of DIY like hammers and screwdrivers aren't the focus of my ire here - oh sure, the hammer drill isn't the most accurate of beasts, but at least it fundamentally works.

No I'm talking more about things like curtain rails or plumbing components, which seem to be suffering from underdesign. Plumbing in particular doesn't seem to have moved forward much since the Romans - it's 2007 and we're still having to hacksaw up bits of plastic to make them fit together before employing a combination of various sticky sealant solutions and blind faith in order to tame the water. By the 21st century, I'd have expected plumbing to be no more complex than Lego by now, but apparently not. I think there are two reasons why this is the case:

1) The key stakeholders (like plumbers) have little to gain from making their trade accessible to the wider public.

2) Whereas the internet serves as the mechanism for software tools to be constantly improved upon and then fed back into the development community, no such mechanism (or indeed community) exists for trades like plumbing.

6. Lack of Reusability

This point is perhaps a bit flippant, but apart from keeping out of the cold and the rain, one of the nice things about being a software developer is that the requirement to repeat the same tasks over and over again is fairly limited. Once you have a piece of code in your toolshed you can wheel it out over and over whenever it's needed, repurposing as required.

Unfortunately, when you need to drill holes in walls, or sand floorboards, or repair toilet cisterns, you actually have to do it each time. Bah!

7. Underwhelming End Result

My final issue with DIY is that the requirement for the work is usually in order to achieve something utterly mundane. If all the misery of sawing, drilling, glueing and screwing was aimed at creating some kind of adventure-playground funhouse-wonderland for some children, well! I still wouldn't enjoy doing it, but at least it would give me a sense of gritty determination knowing that the end result would be worth it.

I just don't get that from towel rails.

Highlights

2007-12-22T04:56:00.000-08:00

This will be my final post before I disappear off to rural Ireland for Christmas, so I'm going to take the opportunity to look back on some of the good stuff that happened in 2007:

Moving into a new house of our very own, in Finsbury Park. Hurrah!

Playing guitar in Satan's Cock

Some games I particularly enjoyed included:

Praise for the game I designed, Prism:Light the Way:

"I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS" - Tycho from Penny Arcade
"Prism is in fact excellent." - Rev. Stuart Campbell (from comments in Eurogamer review)
"there seems to be a lot to enjoy in Prism." - 1UP Review

Working on Hohokum with Hoggo:

Not Fun

2007-12-20T15:15:00.001-08:00

I'll tell you what kind of game wouldn't be fun: A game where you have to lay out and cut rolls of loft insulation and then lay out and cut sheets of chipboard, in order to insulate and board a loft - that's what kind.

Gamma 256

2007-12-17T01:43:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a blast through some of the entries to Gamma 256 - an indie game dev competition whose event closes the Montreal Games Summet.

You can find the games here.

So far, stand-outs include:

Bloody Zombies, where you mow down the dead with a lawnmower, Braindeadstyle, then surf around on their blood like that old forgotten Molyneux platformer, Flood.

Mr Heart Loves You Very Much, which is an interesting take on the space-navigation, block-sliding puzzler.

And Stdbits, which is like a nu-rave take on the old Atari VCS game Adventure.

You'll be wanting an Xbox 360 controller for Windows, which (happily) is becoming a standard requirement in the indie-games scene. Enjoy!

Fez

2007-12-15T04:22:00.001-08:00

In a two-for-one-weekend-special, here's a game I found linked from Jason Rohrer's Arthouse Games Blog.

It's called Fez, and it looks very much like a cross between Cave Story, and the PSP game Crush (which I've not played yet). It's being made by a group called Kokoromi.

Passage

2007-12-15T04:01:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting piece of interactive art (I would hesitate to describe it as a game exactly, although it shares many elements with simple games.

It's called Passage. Download it (PC, mac, unix) and play through at least twice. The visual effects are interesting as is the procedural music, but it's also strangely affecting, considering its limitations. Get it here

Once you've played it a few times, there's a statement by the artist, Jason Rohrer about the work here.

Self-Assessment and Mario

2007-12-11T09:54:00.001-08:00

Phew! Something about the end of year does something funny to me. I think a combination of both the year and my age changing in such a short space of time makes me take a long hard think about what I've achieved in the year, usually resulting in a coding frenzy that starts in mid-November, and continues into the new year. The regime of doing a full day's work before heading home in the dark and cold for another few hours bathed in the glow of a screen is both gruelling and exhilarating in equal measures, but I definitely wouldn't do it if I didn't have a project I was proper excited about.

Work on Hohokum has been progressing pretty well, albeit not quite as quickly as I'd naively hoped. The thing about programming is that you can go really fast and throw skyscrapers up in no time, but if you do their internal layouts tend to work out a bit sub-optimal, and you find yourself walking out of lifts straight into toilets and all kinds of weird stuff. It's generally better to spend ages on the lobby and make sure you've got it just right before you start heading for the stars. Anyway, excuses aside, I should be able to post something here before the end of the year, assuming I can work out how to link it into the blog.

I've also finished the Flash version of CowBandits, which is a game I last made in 2002 for mobile, and involves the player piloting a little Thrust craft through a subterranean cave system looking for cows to abduct and drop into a giant space mincer. I'm really happy with the way it turned it - it's much closer to my original vision of the game, which was somewhat sullied by the format at the time - chiefly that mouse controls are much better than mobile phone keypads for controlling fiddly little spaceships being pulled by gravity.

And finally, I'm still playing Mario Galaxy. I have over 60 stars now and have 'completed' the game, so now it's the hunt for every last one. I still look forward to playing it every time I turn on the Wii, but I think there are a few glaring faults:

Dear Nintendo,

Guys, it's 2007 - it's now officially okay to not have a lives system. It patently doesn't add anything to the game - I've yet to run out of lives once so far, and even if I wasn't diligently hoovering up all the star bits for regular 1-Ups I get plenty from the hub world (primarily from Peach and her stupid letters, which keep arriving even now she's safe in her Mushroom Castle). When I'm on a particularly difficult level, the distant possibility of running out of lives and being rudely booted back to the hub isn't a good thing- it's just unnecessary stress that marrs an otherwise wonderful experience.
Please put in ALL of the sensible restart points in future. Oh sure, Galaxy is still hundreds of times better in this area than most of the main offenders (many other Nintendo games among them), but it's still not perfect. The rule is really simple - doing a difficult bit successfully, then failing at the next difficult bit and being forced to repeat the first one is just NEVER FUN. You've almost put restart points in all the right places - now just go and add that final 10%, and we have a deal.
Springy Mario and flying Mario aren't added bonus features. They're irritating and half-baked - don't acknowledge this by barely using them; just remove them instead - Galaxy has plenty else that works brilliantly, so we won't mind, honest.

Thanks.

love Ricky

Thoughts from the Toilet Bowl

2007-12-05T09:29:00.001-08:00

Flicking through the back of Edge magazine, I wondered what the games industry would be like if nearly all the advertisments for jobs or degree courses didn't employ a picture of a giant fucking barbarian on horseback, or a scantily clad manga babe.

More exposition coming real soon folks!

Friday already!

2007-11-23T01:26:00.000-08:00

Apologies, dear regular readers (both of you) for these past days of blogging indolence. I can however report that I've been absorbing myself in relevant activities, discussion of which will reach these very pages, very soon (read: I've been playing Mario and compiling a list of complaints).

Work on my current side-project, Hohokum, is gathering pace. I've now switched physics engines, from Ape, to an Actionscript3 port of Box2D. B2 seems much more fully featured, being a port of an existing c++ engine, and it's also really nippy, partly because it implements a broad phase - a pre-process to calculations which works out which objects have no chance of interacting, and so massively reduces the overhead of calculations.

I'll be sad to leave Ape behind, partly because the userbase is very active and enthusiastic, but it simply doesn't support some of the features I'm looking for in a physics engine at this stage.

Anyhow, I now have my Extractors vibrating as they pump out lumps of rock, whose physics are handled by Box2D beautifully. I'll post something in the next month so you can see what the hell I'm talking about.

In work news, this week we had a big meeting with our publisher, where we unveiling the various games we've been prototyping, and then we all decide which one we should make next. It's kind of a strange bitter-sweet experience - you'll only be able to take one of your children home and raise them, which is fantastic, but the others will have to stay in the orphanage for the time being, until their features have grown more beautiful.

D(ecision) Day has passed..

2007-11-19T17:06:00.000-08:00

... and Super Mario Galaxy was the winner!

On Sunday, I played a few hours of both Mario and Crysis. Both great games, but the latter is Far Cry with better graphics and a lower frame rate, whereas the former is proper good old fashioned Fun, like in the old days, with bright colours and capital letters and everything, where all the old stuff works exactly as it should and everything new exactly as you suspect it might.

So today I came home and made a bee-line for Mario, played it for a solid two hours, and didn't want to stop. Every level it's something completely new, whether it be 2D platforming with a twist, reprises of Mario 64 levels with 2007 (ok, 2005) presentation, or a minigame tuned to perfection for the Wiimote. 20 stars in and 10/10 so far.

In the Prime of Life

2007-11-17T03:29:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday to me! The obscenely large television is here, the 360 is connected to it with a copy of Gears good to go, plus I have Crysis and I'm getting Mario Galaxy...

Tell me what to do first!

Nil Points

2007-11-16T01:17:00.000-08:00

Team Fortress 2 is the game I've been thinking about playing but haven't most over the past few weeks. I fired it up last night for a few hours, and reminded myself why. I absolutely stink at Team Fortress 2.

I'm not even sure why this is - in principle it should be ideal for me. I'm moderately skilled at First Person Shooters; usually play things on Hard, and my favourite ever deathmatch experience was Doom - super fast and simple with a limited requirement to exhaustively learn the maps to the depth that games like Counterstrike or Battlefield demand.

But in practice, it just doesn't quite work out for me. Eschewing the complexity of a class like the engineer or spy, my weapon of choice alternates between the soldier and the scout, depending on the map. But as the soldier my rockets never quite seem to connect solidly with their intended targets. And when I'm the scout my shotgun blasts - whilst consistently hitting their man - rarely provide the killing blow.

Oh sure, I can bob and weave about to avoid the sniper fire well enough most of the time, or play sniper when I want to spare myself the ignominy of coming bottom, but I still feel like I'm missing out on most of the joy that TF2 should so clearly be providing.

Are my reactions gradually dulling with age, or have I spent too much time away from these type of games to ever catch up with the other boys and girls, who seem to know instinctively how to land a grenade on a distant head, or baseball bat a passing goon at high speed?

Bah and double-bah! I'm going to keep at it a little longer before I finally hang up my spurs.

Wow!

2007-11-15T08:54:00.000-08:00

Was up late last night - checking out the new World of Warcraft patch 2.3 and questing with some guildies, hence no post this morning - only just had time to wolf down porridge, feed fish and dash!

It's surpising given how long the game has been running, and how successful it is that Blizzard are still ways to massively improve even the basic interface.

They've made it easier to level from 20 to 60 too, so no doubt I'm gonna park my 70 warrior and get back on my alts, juggling between Priest, Warlock and Hunter.

Still in for the long haul then, though if I don't see some major graphical improvements by the next expansion which make use of my 8800, I fear my attention will begin to wain..

Bridging the Gap

2007-11-14T02:31:00.000-08:00

This week sees the release of Crysis, a game I am very much looking forward to playing. Crysis is the sequel to Far Cry, a game I very much enjoyed playing. Far Cry exemplified the 'sand-box' mode of play - give the player a wide environment, rich with its own systems, and let the player approach it as they like.

So, given a stretch of jungle with two villages connected by roads, you could choose to attack them in any order. Maybe steal a jeep from one and steam up and down the road mowing down the mercenary soliders. Or stay hidden the bushes gradually sniping the off one by one. Or perhaps just take a hang glider over the whole thing. The environments were *huge*, and exploration was nearly always rewarded - it was quite an eye opener for me at the time - I don't think any game before or since has trusted players with quite that degree of freedom, and the space to express it in.

Recently I completed episode 2 of Half Life, a series that approaches level design in the polar opposite way. In Half Life the player is led by a gentle but firm hand down a single path full of perfectly balanced combat situations and spectacular set pieces. If they are ever allowed to stray from the path, and do, the most that will happen is that Steam will capture and report this fact, and Valve will be sure to stick in another Gman sighting from that point (although I didn't spot him once in Ep2).

Both of these approaches make for good gameplay, but I find myself wondering whether they couldn't be combined in some way, and whether Crysis will go any way to address this.

The problem is that in order to have a truly successful 'set piece', the player needs to be genuinely involved in the action, rather than just stumbling into a situation that is going on regardless of their presence (like all those infinite npc battles raging on in World of Warcraft's Outland).

The way Half Life usually deals with this is to funnel the player down a narrow path, whereupon they trip an invisible wire, and the scripted action plays out right in front of their eyes, where they can't possibly miss it. In order to reproduce this kind of effect in a open Far Cry environment, the scripting, AI and triggering system would need to be considerably more complex. I guess what you'd ideally want is a way to describe a series of things happening in a general enough way to allow the game engine to apply them to arbitrary situations and environments.

At this point, even I barely know what I'm talking about, so I'm going to get back to Actionscript 3.

Nobi Nobi Boy

2007-11-13T01:25:00.000-08:00

So Keita Takahashi, the designer behind Katamari Damacy, is making a game where - by the looks of things - you control either end of a stretchy worm boy with the two analogue sticks and use his body to herd animals around.

It seems the player will have some control over the tension in the body, and will be able to make the two ends fly into the air, trailing the body around like a colourful streamer. And eat the animals too, which then form lumps in the body which work their way down, presumably due to some revolutionary peristalsis physics engine.

Multiple players may join in for all kinds of entanglement too.

It's called Nobi Nobi Boy, and it's shaping up marvellously. He makes it seem almost effortless - and how many other games do you see demoed in this state - just a mechanic, with no game at all?

This was a Triumph!

2007-11-12T01:18:00.000-08:00

So, I finished Portal this weekend, and can only reiterate what everyone has already said - a mind-bending and delightful way to spend two hours.

I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud so many times playing a game. There's a rich vein of science comedy that Valve do better than pretty much anyone else in the world, and the plot and script just got better and better right up until the tantalising credits (which surely deserve some kind of Bafta or something - I'm currently rewatching it on youtube twice a day).

If I have a criticism, it's that I'm not sure that the Portal gun alone is enough to support a sequel. By the last third of the game, I felt like it had already laid out its bag of tricks onto the table, and I was simply repeating the same mechanics in slightly different situations, and the final challenge was really more about exposition than play.

Still, that Half Life 2: Portal mod seems to have.. uh, potential, eh kids?

Tis the Season to Prioritise

2007-11-09T01:07:00.000-08:00

So Bioshock didn't slip down then, but became lodged in my throat somewhere in the second chapter. The problem was that despite the rich environment, the plot, the plasmids, all the innovative ways to kill Splicers, Bioshock is a not-very-good First Person Shooter with a not-very-good version of PipeMania sellotaped to it.

Rapture may be lush, but it sure hasn't been designed for gun combat. The Splicer AI may be clever, but it isn't fun to fight. That graphical blurring effect that it covers the screen with may be pretty, but it pretty much breaks the firefights, along with its pal, 'realistic kickback'. The damage model is broken too (I can shoot a boss in the head at point blank range over 10 times to kill them, or just throw a piece of furniture at them? Whoops).

It's a shame, because I dearly wanted to be immersed in the game, and I love exploring the wide maps to find new diary entries, but when you're constantly under attack by Splicers chattering over the voice acting, it rather spoils the effect. Can someone release a mod that removes them from the game, leaving only the Big Daddies and Little Sisters please.

Oh, and about *that* 'interesting moral decision'. Come ON. Is this really the best example of we've seen yet in games? If so, we should definitely stop going on about it. Anyway, which characters to take to level 80 in FFXII was easily more interesting (Balthier and Fran ftw!)

It's that time of year - and this year especially - when all the big publishers prepare their marketing goons with the finest marching powder, take out their giant cocks and start swinging them around. It started with the aforementioned Bioshock, which I abandoned just in time for the Orange Box. Finished Episode 2, enjoyed being rubbish at TF2, but haven't quite finished Portal (I know, I know). Then Metroid 3 comes out, but I still haven't finished Phantom Hourglass on the DS. Now it's my birthday, and I'm 'looking forward' to Mario Galaxy, Crysis, Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed. Plus I just got a 360 (thanks mum n dad!) so there's a giant backlog of other stuff to play, to say nothing of little snacky oddities like Rockstar's Table Tennis on the Wii, or Geometry Wars Galaxies.

It isn't good for the gamer, all this. Nothing to play but World of Warcraft for months on end, and then waaaay too much at once. I understand that the industry has locked itself into this Q4 feedback loop over the years, but the sense of magic you used to get back in the day when a new game came out that everyone had been waiting for, and every gamer friend you knew would be playing it at the same time has been lost. I've no idea in what order to tackle the seasonal releases this year, or which consoles to plug into which tellies to best share out the experience between Nikki and myself (adhering strictly to the no spoilers rule, where every time you enter a room, you daren't look at the screen for fear of seeing a boss fight before you've reached that bit).

Flash on the Beach

2007-11-08T01:04:00.001-08:00

Just got back from Brighton, where I've been attending talks at the Flash on the Beach conference. Really good timing, since I'm just about to plough right into Actionscript 3 programming by porting my current game CowBandits (itself a port of the second mobile game I ever made).

I'm also going to port my particle engine across from c++ (in fact I already started on the laptop), and the work of algorithmic artists such as Robert Hodgin, Joshua Davis, Eric Natske and Jared Tarbell have left me super-inspired to add a number of features to it. In particular, I want to have bitmap data affecting particle behaviour in various ways, introduce ribbon trails and get some sound interaction going.

I'm gonna add these guys to a new 'art' section in my links. They deserve it.

I'm also keen to check out the Processing language - Robert Hodgin's work especially shows off what this can do, and I'm particularly interested in the ability to do spectral analysis on an audio input and infer physics properties from the sound data - thinking about doing some work towards visualising my brother's band.

Most of all though, I want to get back to working on the Flash game I'm making with my pal Dick Hogg, codename 'Hohokum'. It's inspired by Asteroids, Armadillo Run and Katamari, and I must must must get back to it!

(I finished reading The Hobbit on the train down to Brighton yesterday. Gandalf is nowhere near as hardcore in that book - he must have gone to advanced wizard training college between that and the start of Lord of the Rings, otherwise he'd have had no chance against the Balrog).

Attack of the Clones

2007-02-19T14:10:00.000-08:00

For many of the most successful games in the casual space, there are a number of clones - games with the same functionality, often with no, or only very minor changes, except for the artwork and sound. Sometimes even the theming will be the same.

Most clones so far have been of games which don't rely on a large amount of varying art assets, and where the levels can be generated programmatically with a simple algorithm.

There are a number of properties of a game that would make it considerably more difficult to clone, and whilst higher production costs are a factor, I don't think there's a direct relationship between the development cost of a game and its cloneability. Creative developers should consider what they can do - relatively inexpensively - to give themselves a competitive advantage over uncreative developers seeking to piggyback their work.

Here are some of those properties off the top of my head:

reliance on hand-designed levels, so that the player feels like they are solving a problem that another person has designed for them.
reliance on a large amount of high-quality artwork (like Huntsville).
reliance on a 'black box' simulation where it isn't immediately obvious how to copy the functionality (e.g. a sports management game).
inclusion of a well-written, well-presented story (like Monkey Island).
inclusion of strong characters (and perhaps even their development).
an online community providing social play (like Puzzle Pirates).

Back from the Dam

2007-02-10T05:53:00.000-08:00

Yikes! You look around and suddenly it's been three months since you last posted anything.

I'm blaming three primary factors here:

I've been working really hard to get Morpheme's first truly 'casual' game finished, which has involved a whole load of sanding the floor, painting the fence (both sides) and waxing the cars until they're really shiny.
I've been readusting the balance of my spare time I spend on content-creation versus content-consumption (read: I've been playing Zelda on the Wii and looking at crap on the net).
I've joined a band, which has really fun cos I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed playing electric guitar.

Anyway, the main purpose of this post is to report from Amsterdam, where I just returned from the Casual Games Conference, Casuality. I love this city anyway - so much good food and architecture, and really close to London, so it's a perfect place to get out of the office for a few days.

These kind of things are where industry folks meet to strike deals, so the air is thick with hectic sales talk. Being a developer though I can sort of sidetrack a lot of that and just enjoy the talks, chat to folks, and generally let the zeitgeist wash over me whilst I meditate on plans for the future. Special mention goes to Scott Bilas, whose talk on tools and optimisation of the development pipeline was chock-full of useful stuff.

I say sort of, because I actually did some pitching this time - showing my game 'Bernie the Pyromancer' to some folks, who really seemed to like it. Once our current game is done, I'm hoping to concentrate on Bernie full time and get it released on some interesting platforms.

I have loads of draft posts queued up, by the way, so hopefully I'll bash a few of them into shape before another three months is up.

PixelFace

2006-11-08T01:38:00.000-08:00

Here's my idea for a new mechanic for players to create the face of their own game characters: Something I call PixelFace, which I wrote last summer after being inspired by the work of an artist at the Royal College who had made a project around random pixel generation.

It takes 4 pictures at random from a directory, overlays them, and allows the user to blend them together organically. The results can be pretty convincing, or just plain weird!

It works pretty well with the eBoy graphics I took from their site.

Yes to Always

2006-11-01T02:48:00.000-08:00

This isn’t a post about games, but it is about design, and it is a rant.

At least once a day, and usually more than twice, I’m confronted with that dialog box in Windows, that says ‘Yes to All?’. This happens when I’m copying files from one place to another, usually from my machine to my mp3 player / storage device or back again, as I transfer files between work and home.

What particularly annoys me is that Windows will ask once for each directory I’m copying. So I’ll click Yes to All, and seconds later another box will appear: “Yes to All?”. And my answer is always the same. Yes, yes, yes to all, always.

It’s not like these constant confirmation dialogs are ever going to prevent me from accidentally overwriting a file I wanted anyway – Clicking Yes to All has become so habitual that I don’t think I could ever click No, even if I wanted to.

I’ve long hoped for an ‘I’m not a fucking idiot’ setting in Windows (Settings: Control Panel: Idiot Options), which would completely disable hassle like ‘Yes to All’ once and for all. Maybe in Vista eh?

Everyone who feels frustrated with the everyday world and wants someone to blame should read this book.

The Casual Tomato

2006-10-30T16:05:00.000-08:00

Casual games seem a lot like tomatoes.

The core game part of the tomato is the seeds, and they come surrounded in a soft gunk that helps them to slip easily down the throat without the player even noticing.

The seeds are surrounded by dense, fleshy matter which tastes bland, but constitutes the majority of the tomato's bulk This flesh is analogous to all the things that happen in casual games when the game isn't being played - the status screens, bonus reward screens, map screens, intro screens, shop screens, cut scenes..

2D or not 2D?

2006-10-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

For the foreseeable future I’m going to be concentrating my game design sensibilities on 2D games. Before I get into my reasons, I’d like to clarify what I mean by a 2D game. It’s not necessarily one in which the representations are strictly in 2 dimensions, but one in which the game space does not rely on 3 dimensions in order to work. To choose a recent example, Nintendo’s Pikmin is practically a 2D game. Although everything is represented in 3D, the map is 2D, and wherever situations there are that rely on height – throwing 10 Pikmin onto a paper bag to squash it for example – could be conveyed perfectly to the player using only 2D graphics.

The more 2D a game is, the more precise control can be exercised over what the player sees on screen. And the more control there is, the easier it is to infuse the game with charm. Compare one of the original Lemmings games to the later 3D version for an excellent example of this.

With a 3D game, the designer has many complex issues involved in working out what the player will be able to see of the gameworld at any one time. And this complexity passes right along through the production process, through level design, programming and art.

The artist on a 2D game has far less to worry about with regard to what transformations will be applied to their work. Loco Roco would have considerably less impact were it a 3D game.

There’s probably a workable analogy between cinema and games here: compare the amount of control the director of Disney’s Cinderella (insert your favourite traditional animation here) would have over the finished film, to the director of any live film today, with the large number of outside influences, technology and actors to deal with. It just has to be a lot harder to achieve artistic perfection with cameras and lights and action.

So what about the most important people in this argument - the players? Well, I’d certainly accept that 3D games are more immersive. The more you can make the game look and behave like the player’s real life experiences, the easier they will find it to become caught up in the world, get the sense of ‘really being there’.

But I’d argue that there isn’t a terribly convincing relationship between immersion and fun. A 2D playing space (and/or representation) hasn’t hurt games like Chess or Backgammon. I saw Will Wright talk in London recently, and he was asked what his favourite game was. Before answering, he defined his terms, which were that he considered the quality of a game to be measurable by the ratio between the number of rules and the complexity or depth that those rules provide. On this basis, he chose Go, with the smallest number of rules, that provide for an incredible wealth of playing styles and strategies.

As someone with a DS and a PSP, a lot of the best games I’ve played recently certainly don’t need to be 3D to succeed, and in most cases would be inferior in 3D. (short list: Loco Roco, Advance Wars, Electroplankton, Metroid Prime Fusion). In fact I’d go further and say that some genres are inherently flawed in 3D. For example, there will never be a 3D platform game that’s as good as the best 2D competitor – a game that predominately involves jumping from surface to surface in a series of parabolas simply doesn’t lend itself well to a 3D representation, and wonderful games like Jak and Daxter get around this issue by bending the rules of what a ‘platform game’ is, until, for my tastes, it becomes a different genre altogether (a 3D action-adventure, or whatever).

Finally there are the pragmatic reasons why I’m avoiding 3D stuff for now. As a developer working for a small independent and someone making games in their own time too, I need to maximise the amount of functionality and fun I get from every line of code I write. The only truly 3D game I made was called Cluster, and it was basically Magic Carpet set inside a computer, inspired by the marvellous Darwinia (and why has no-one re-released Carpet yet?!). One day, if I ever have a large team of artists and programmers at my disposal, Cluster may be resurrected, but for now, I think 2D games better fit my mantra: smaller games with bigger brains.

Frogs

2006-10-12T17:16:00.000-07:00

Some reasons why Frogs are the ideal candidates for computer game characters, an incomplete list:

Frogs can hop along the ground.
Frogs can jump.
Frogs can swim.
Frogs can hop along the ground underwater.
Frogs have big bulgy eyes, all the better for expressing stuff.
Frogs have sticky, prehensile tongues, that can grab stuff.
Frogs have great sound effects.
Frogs can be smooth or spikey, and come in a range of colours.
Frogs look great in hats.

Elephants

2006-10-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

I have the elephants wandering around now, chasing down those pesky fires. Go elephants!

So, this is a blog in which I may occasionally post updates about various game projects I'm working on, or thoughts about games in general.

I'm a games developer at a small company in London called Morpheme. I mainly do design and programming, but sometimes graphics too, though I prefer to leave that to the experts wherever possible.

Originally, Morpheme started off as a mobile developer, doing WAP games when I joined in 2000. We've gone from WAP to J2ME mobile games to web games in flash to PC games for casual games portals and hopefully console platforms like Xbox Live Arcade and Nintendo DS in the future. My time in the industry has been a condensed form of the path many developers who started in the 8bit era have followed. Professionally, I've made around 20 games published on various platforms (mostly mobile), but also a whole load of private projects, in varying states of completeness.

I guess over time, all being well, I'll gradually post more stuff about my games.

In the meantime, here's a screenshot of my latest 'home' project - Bernie the Pyromancer:

Games I have made, a very probably incomplete list, presented here mainly as a memory jogging exercise for things I intend to mention in the future:

School:
TunnelRat (Amos/Amiga)
Gribble and Slipps (Amos/Amiga)
Burble the Dragon (Amos/Amiga)
Arther and Jim's Letter Quest (Amos/Amiga)
Bip (TurboC/Dos)
Yellow Submarine (TurboC/Dos)
Midnight to Dawn (Visual Basic/PC)

WAP (all I can remember, anyway):
Backgammon (J2EE)
Battleship!(J2EE)
WAPHack (J2EE+PL-SQL/PC)

Mobile (all J2ME):
Gribble and Slipps
Kahoots!
MonsterTown
Ricochet
CowBandits
PassBall
Gnome Garden
KeepAhead
Meh!
Christmas Pig Out
Balloon-Headed Boy
Go To Hell!
Heads
Penguin (Pinball Logic Script Engine)
Bluetooth Biplanes
Worms Mania
Worms Forts 3D
Blazing Fists
Prism: Light the Way

Web:
Primordial Soup (Flash)
Piano Pooch (Flash)
Scan (Flash)
Balloon-Headed Boy (J2SE)
PixelFace (J2SE)

PC:
Fill Up (J2SE+WildTangent)
Ukase (J2SE/PC)
Cluster (J2SE+Java3D/PC)
MonkeyBand (J2SE)
Balloon-Headed Boy (J2SE)
Bernie the Pyromancer (C++/PC)