/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.

Highlights

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:

• The Orange Box
• Mario Galaxy
• The Trilby Games
• Zelda Phantom Hourglass
  
• Peggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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..

... 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.