Mucking About

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

From Exhausticated.

Blueberry Garden

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

Prism on Gamefaqs

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

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!

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

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

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!

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

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.