Recently in the "GameDev" category...
Here’s a little gem I just found on the interwebs: an interview with Michael Bywater. Michael is an astounding wordsmith; writer of my favourite columns in Punch and allegedly slept with my boss. Not my current boss, mind you.
Some gems:
My main memories are of course of Anita. And her bull terrier, Murdoch. And of the chaotic offices in the ancient and haunted part of London called The Borough, a warren of streets and alleys on the south side of London Bridge…
and…
Even things like Myst - which, hell, was just a droopy post-hippie HyperCard stack with a rather good music loop — were way below the level of Magnetic Scrolls or Infocom in narrative terms. So the era came to an end.
My time at Magnetic Scrolls was a wonderful time of my life and I enjoyed every moment of it. Hopefully this article will give you some sense of what it was like for the non-engineering folks who passed our way.
Read it over here.
I randomly happened to be in Best Buy this afternoon with Julian and we were wandering past the shelves of Wii games.
“Hey dad! There’s a Diego! game here, can we get it?”
“Sorry little dude, that’s a Wii game and we don’t have one those consoles.”
Cue the little dude doing the “I’m sad, you suck” thing, when I look down and see about ten boxes of what look like consoles. Note that I’ve never seen a Wii console retail box before - noone ever has them…
I pick it up. I feels heavy.
I look at it. It does indeed appear to actually be one of those fabled console units.
“Little dude! You’re in luck! Go grab a second controller, a second nunchuck and a component AV connector while you’re at it!”.
“Dad, I lost you at ‘controller’.”
“Just grab that Diego game, I’ll get the rest.”
And we left the store fully loaded with Nintendo gear…
Diversion: This evening I set everything up and am now determined to get a new A/V receiver for the home. Our TV our has one HDMI input, but tons of component ones. I really want it to switch the video signal, so I’m investigating something that can take 2 HDMI inputs, 3 components inputs, a smattering of optical and regular audio and just switch it all for me.
Any suggestions?
Anyhow, this little game unit rocks! I recognize I’m over a year late, but playing tennis and baseball, etc… with a motion sensitive controller is awesome. I also had a lot of fun creating Miis for all the family..
Little dude is going to have so much fun.
When I let him have a turn, that is.
Rest in peace Gary, the worlds you created and enabled others to create will be remembered.
Nice job Sir. You entertained a generation (or three).
Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder of JibJab is up on stage now at Gnomedex talking about JibJab’s history. Very inspiring.
He just demoed a new tool where you star in the cartoon: Starring You.
I can’t wait to play with this tonight!
Harmonix Rock Band. Want. It. Now.
[Tip’O’Hat to Kim for the link.]
I find nothing appetizing about people that jump on a political bandwagon, especially in an area that I care deeply about.
Clinton, who is reportedly planning to seek the Democratic presidential nomination for the 2008 election, has aligned herself with hardline right-wing Republican senators in order to pressure Congress into researching the impact of electronic media on children.
Games are an art form. Politics does not belong in art.
Flame on.
As seen at this year’s Burning Man: Dance Dance Immolation. You gotta love a project with the tagline Dance Dance Revolution. With Flamethrowers. Pointed at you.
From the creators’ website:
Dance Dance Immolation is an adaptation of the popular arcade video game Dance Dance Revolution, but with fire! Basically, you play DDR; when you do well, the computer shoots big propane blasts up into the air. When you do poorly, it shoots you in the face with flamethrowers. Yes, you, as in your actual corporeal body. And yes, flamethrowers, like the kind that are on fire.
[Tip’O’Hat to VentureBeat for the link.]
1 Photo by nck wntrhltr.
A bunch of cool stuff was announced at the Steve Jobs Show this morning, including a couple of things that I found really interesting.
First up is iPod Games - Casual games on your iPod. Very cool and yet another outlet for the rapidly growing casual games industry.
Second was the integration of CoverFlow into iTunes.
Other than that, there’s cool new hardware including a direct play for the Media Center space, and a bunch of new iPods.
Oh, and the UI upgrade in iTunes 7 is very sleek.
If you need some great content creation tools, especially for your new Xbox 360 project, Daz is offering free downloads of the excellent Bryce 3D Creator. I always wondered what happened to Bryce…
Anyhow, if you’re building a title with static backdrops, ala a side scroller, you can’t go wrong by checking this product out. The price is great.
Offer ends, September 6th.
[Tip’O’Hat to Steve Kennedy for the link.]
I’ve been holding off on commenting about the XNA Game Studio Express announcement because I didn’t want to sound like a wet towel, but enough is enough :-)
Let me preface this with the fact that This Is A Good ThingTM, but lets take it for what it is.
Microsoft have enabled anyone to write code for the Xbox 360, and deploy it locally to your own console. Yes you can share the fruits of your efforts with others who have also subscribed to the service, and only in source form. I’m sure this will change in the future, but AFAIK, you can’t share the compiled final product with your mate who isn’t a developer.
Ok, so with that out of the way, here’s the other thing.
It isn’t going to come with Will Wright in the box. That’s right folks, pesky things like game design, art creation, and coding mojo are still issues.
There won’t be a “Make Triple-A Title” button.
I’m sure that XNA Studio will provide a ton of graphics clip art, sample models, and sample code, but there aren’t going to be sample game designs, sample cool new ideas or sample innovative game mechanics.
Oh, and one more thing. Anyone can make a game with their PC right now. Just download Visual Studio Express - it’s free, or maybe pick up a copy of Torque Game Builder from Garage Games - it’s only $100.
What Microsoft have done is provided a cheap way for hobbyist (or cash strapped indie) game developer to target the Xbox 360. This is a good thing - it was very expensive beforehand. I’m sure that a few of these titles will be picked up by mainstream publishers, or Microsoft itself.
Just don’t expect thousands of high-class titles to start rolling out of basements anytime soon. It’s just another platform. Albeit a cool one.
Now, where do I sign up? :-)
My former colleagues at Microsoft have released a demo version of FSX. All I can say is wow! You have to believe me when I say that this is no mean feat - actually producing the thing before the product goes final and shipping the demo of a two DVD game within the size of a CD (I have to say, it’s mighty close at 634MB :-)
Well done, guys and gals.
Go and download it now!
And while you’re at it, check out the very cool new flash site.
It looks like E3, the videogame industry’s largest annual event, is going to be going through some serious changes.
In contradiction to an earlier report from NextGen that the event is going to be cancelled for next year and the foreseeable future, Ars Technica is reporting that the conference is going to refocus and move to a more closed-door format.
That’s pretty big news, although interestingly enough I never made it to the event - too much like marketing for my then developer centric viewpoint :-) I wonder if this means that the marketing focus will switch over to GDC. I’ve been to almost every GDC since 1995 and increasingly it’s been an event where more and more deals are being done.
I wonder if that, along with the increasing expense of exhibiting, made it no longer worthwhile?
More to the point, with the exposure that new games get online these days, what, if any, was the point at all?
As a side note, one of the big problems with E3 from a game development standpoint was that E3 had to effectively be a milestone in your schedule. If you were shipping that (or even the next) year, you had to show at E3 and that meant producing a playable stable build that was good enough to put in front of people that might determine the future of your products sales.
And that build had to be produced no matter how disruptive it was to your development schedule. If effect, E3 could lengthen your schedule.
Those that know me will know that I’m a huge fan of Pub Quizzes. They are a big thing in the UK (or at least were when I lived there). For those of you that are not familiar, they a typically run at a bar where you form a team of four to six people with your friends. You make up an amusing name for your team and answer questions read by the quiz master. You write the answers on a provided sheet of paper and there are typically four or five rounds of ten questions. Each round is usually themed as something like “sport” or “general knowledge”.
In between rounds you exchange papers with another team and mark each others papers as the answers are read out.
Lots of fun, but sadly not very common in the US, apart from the Irish or English bars.
Now, an Irish bar recently opened in Kirkland, the Wilde Rover - a decent bar with a great atmosphere and great food. Handily it also started up a pub quiz night on Wednesday evenings.
Tonight I hooked up with Andy (The ZMan) and his running club friends for the quiz. We started out badly with a two out of ten and proceeded to do mediocre things. There was even a round themed on “fashion”, which, surprisingly, we didn’t do too bad on.
Anyhow, when round three which was announced as “the classic video game round”, we were a little bit ecstatic to say the least.
We were writing down answers before the quiz master and even finished the question. I believe “Dragon’s Lair” was written down before he’d finished saying “Which laserdisc game featured…”.
There was even a four point question if you could name all the ghosts in Pacman. Four points scored. Inky, Pink, Blinky and Clyde.
We only got two question wrong, the first being the number of enemies in the first wave of Space Invaders. We had 56, but the answer was 55.
But it was the second that was really interesting to me: “What was Sega’s first game?”
I had a problem with this question as I knew that Sega started out shipping coin-op games to US Military stationed overseas. I thought the answer should be “pinball”, so I asked for the clarification “game or video-game”? The answer was video-game and we were stumped.
It turned out to be Periscope.
Anyhow, that round thrust us into the lead and we held on it.
We won!
The $60 almost paid the bar tab, and when delivering our winnings to us, the quiz master quipped “You smoked that game round - you guys didn’t get out much as kids did you?”
To which Andy had the perfect response: “We spent so much time playing video games that we didn’t get laid until we were 35!”
A fun evening.
Today started out with a session by the IGDA Causal Games SIG. They’ve put out an hundred page white paper detailing how the industry works. This is now on my reading list :-)
There was also a presentation called “Don’t Roll Over”. This was basically a rant about the fact that portals don’t share advertising revenue with developers. This is changing (Microsoft and Real Networks have said that they’re moving towards this), but it’s currently a lot of revenue being left on the table by the developers.
Next up was an interesting session about the business model for casual games in Korea. This model grew out of the fact that piracy is rampant in Asia - boxed retail products make no sense.
Nexon has been in the industry for a while - they have titles such as KartRider that 25% of the population play! That’s right - 25% of the entire population of Korea play KartRider.
Their model is free gameplay and the purchasing of items. These items may be decorative (personalization) or functional (speed boost, inventory bag, etc…) You have to be really careful about functional items as you don’t want to skew competitiveness. Any item that changes game balance causes a barrier to entry for new players - they would have to buy the item to be competitive.
Strike Force is another of their games. This is basically a port of an FPS into the casual space, but it pulls in $5M per month in item purchases.
This model is in stark contrast to the US model which primarily revolves around try before buy. Revenue is purely purchase of game, advertising and subscription. The conversion rate of demo to purchase is currently at 2% in the US.
So far, Casuality is providing some great nuggets of content that I’ll be writing about in due time, but I had to get this one off of my chest. Sorry for the rant…
What’s wrong with this picture?
That’s right. The last bullet point.
This was the first slide that conference attendees at Casuality saw this morning and it effectively says:
- “There’s a cool party going on this evening.”
- “You’re not invited.”
- “No one attending the party paid to attend the conference.”
- “You’re paying for the party.”
Of course, every conference has these parties/receptions and they’re obviously a required “thank you” to the presenters, but why rub the paying attendees’ noses in it?
In addition the schedule in the printed programme is chock full of sessions that are marked as invite only. Why put them in the program and again annoy the attendees with the information that they’re not part of the “in crowd”?
Presumably the people invited to these events actually have an invitation and don’t need the handy reminder in the printed schedule.
And why was there no lunch provided? With only a one hour break for lunch, there’s not a lot of opportunity to leave the venue and find something, plus the incurred cost of the reduction in schmooze time…
Gnomedex, with a similar size and similar price point seems to find a way to provide way more out-of-session value. Not to mention the incredible food…
Today is the first day of Casuality, the Casual Game Developers’ Conference being held today through Thursday in Seattle at the Benaroya Hall - home of the Seattle Symphony.
Seattle is a hotbed of casual game development, with publishers and developers such as Microsoft, Real Networks, PopCap, etc… calling the area home.
With revenues from casual games in the millions and development costs an order of magnitude smaller than “traditional” computer games, it’s no wonder that interest in the genre is hotting up.
Anyhow, why am I here?
Well, I’m a game developer (even though I’m working on something in a different space right now) and the conference is local. It was about time I learnt a bit more about the casual games space.
So today started just like normal when I’m attending an event in Seattle. I left way too early - 7am - as I never trust the traffic on the way into town, and arrived very shortly thereafter at 7.30am - a full two hours before the start of the conference.
Sigh.
I bet if I’d left at a sensibly late time I would’ve been stuck in traffic for hours…
So to kill some time I thought I’d find somewhere for breakfast - something I rarely do.
Just down the street I found a place Harried and Hungry, a bit hipper than my normal haunts, but cheap and they served up a great egg and sausage bagel. Shame about the side of avocado - it went untouched, poor thing. That was the “hip” bit. Recommended.
Back to the venue and it is now 8.30am - I register (first in line); pick up the requisite freebie bag and associated crap and boot up the laptop.
Only another hour to kill…
This post, ATI eyes audio acceleration on the GPU, had me remenicing about the early days of Direct3D again.
What most people don’t realize is that in the early days on Direct3D many of the 3D accelerators (or sometimes “decelerators”1) where in fact very general purpose DSPs. At that point in time (mid-1995) many of the hardware guys were very surprised at the rapid mindshare growth of consumer 3D hardware. We’re talking people like Evans and Sutherland, SGI, etc…
Brief interlude.
Regarding Direct3D and the following OpenGL v. Direct3D wars, one point I feel is worth making is that if it were not for Direct3D, we would not have the gaming platforms that we have today.
In 1995, 3D was stalled, noone was innovating and OpenGL was stagnant. It was only after the release of Direct3D that OpenGL started to make any headway.
In fact, at lunch during the hardware guys’ day at Aftermath event, we put a pre-release PS1 on the main video screen running Tekken in demo mode. You could see the palpable fear in most of the hardware guys’ faces. “What is that?” “That’s not realtime.” These guys, with very few exceptions, were missing the boat.
End of interlude, now where was I?
Many hardware startups in the Valley at that time were putting together DSP based ISA (or even the new PCI) boards to offload modem, audio and other functionality from the overwhelmed CPU.
These guys recognized a good thing when they saw it and decided that they could add 3D graphics too. It’s all just vector math isn’t it?
The Chromatic Mpact part was a case in point. It was a modem, an audio card and a 3D accelerator all rolled into one! Step right up! Well, until you tried to run a few thousand triangles per second through it. Mind you, they had some very cool booths at the shows.
None of the parts of this generation performed triangle setup (apart from the 3DFX Voodoo 1) and they all sucked to one degree or another.
But a special place in my heart is taken by the Rendition Veritee 1000.
Rendition was a true entrepreneureal company built by engineers. Those guys were great. They were the only guys to have hardware ready for Comdex 1995 where we (or rather Ty Graham, our hardware evangelist) showed hardware-accelerated Direct3D for the first time.
Servan (one of the founders of RenderMorphics) and I had locked ourselves away in an office on campus after the Aftermath event and we had a week until Comdex. We finished the driver model, an API that could drive it and had the famous2 “tunnel” sample running on it.
But for a driver model we needed a driver and some hardware. Here was where Rendition really stepped up. One of the guys from Rendition came up to Redmond and basically lived with us. He was writing driver code while we were writing the driver model. Talk about bleeding edge.
The prototype, hot off the chip foundry, V1000 was mounted on a red prototype board with a fan glued to it. Unfortunately, when plugged into the bus on the machines we had, the board was upside down and every hour or so the glue would melt and the fan would fall off. Much hilarity ensued. Much pizza was eaten.
At four in the morning on the first day of Comdex, Ty walked into the office, already late for his flight to Vegas, and witnessed tunnel running at lightning frame rates. We packed up the dev machine in a flight case and off he went - by all accounts everyone was awed by this cheap piece of consumer 3D hardware.
I still have that board.
But that’s not the point of this narrative.
The point is that the V1000 was a DSP based part that stored it’s microcode in it’s onboard memory in an address space just below VGA memory.
Which meant that any bug in the driver, especially the clipping code, caused Direct3D to render triangle fragments all over the microcode. It didn’t just blue screen. Can you say hard lockup, push the big red reset button?
And here’s my other point. Man, was that fun.
[Thanks to Ars Technica for the link.]
1 This term was originally applied to one the first parts out of S3 and I think, ahem, that I coined it…
I’ve always been a big proponent of the Uncanny Valley issue.
Here is a perfect example.
Great graphics. Great animation. Incredibly freaky.
[Thanks to Joystiq for the link.]
This afternoon I was mucking around in Second Life when a very interesting thing happened.
I had just bought some land in the “podcasting neighbourhood” - near someone quite well known who has a castle, and was checking out (in a nice way) my new neighbours.
Anyhow, I stumbled upon bluggcast who owns a nice piece of waterfront next to the Curry Castle and we started chatting.
It turns out that the music I was hearing was his live shoutcast stream which he was feeding from a laptop in his hotel room in Boston.
While he was chatting to me.
It was fun to hear him give a shout out to me over his live stream.
I tell ya, visceral experiences of all types are melding…
