tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61784565886585671502024-02-08T02:10:09.968-08:00It's Bezness TimeBezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-48588295163432743042009-02-07T13:32:00.000-08:002009-02-08T03:12:27.115-08:00Why I haven't posted in several months......I unno. I',m drunk i guess!<br /><br />you know how you have like, a really good idea for a thing, but then you're like, man i'd need a phd's time and funding to do this idea justice... i don't want to shoot off some half cocked guff when there's stuff like the lost garden around doing really well with explaining the things. just does a disservice to blogging, you know? I keep having all these thoughts and little theories and i keep meanaing to spout them before will write and all that all say it first (bloody... The Wedding... I've been talking about all that "mechanics as message" stuff for bloody ages amongst my friend but then i never get a chance to do anything about it because i'm too shit and slow at making games), but then get tangled up with how much effort it is for a literary lightweight like me to get it out in a coscient, well formed, simple way that i just sorta giveBezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-68819166477374445022008-08-22T08:45:00.001-07:002008-08-25T11:38:31.637-07:00Lee Sheldon on the Emotional DivideI don't know if this is old news, but I was linked to a <a href="http://www.anti-linearlogic.com/Emotional%20Divide.ppt">Lee Sheldon PDF</a> at work (<a href="http://www.anti-linearlogic.com/">Lee's site here</a>). He covers, in an easy to understand way, how I've felt about storytelling in games for a long time.<br /><br />To be sure, there's a lot of unanswered questions: How can mainstream development possibly be converted to this almost totally philosophically polar approach to storytelling in games? We tend to love to stick to fragile, film-aping storylines, just as television stuck to radio style plays, and then theater before finding its own legs.<br /><br />We rarely attempt anything like systemic characterization or mission design, because it's so under explored. And it's under explored because there are so few good exemplars of the approach. It's a catch 22 which I feel can only be fixed by the indie scene and academia, <a href="http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=15">or developers trying experiments in their own time</a>*. Far Cry 2 seems to be promising a hearty stab in this direction, too, so I shouldn't entirely discount the mainstream's ability to push this issue. Ahk, what am I saying? Anyone and everyone can contribute to this direction in games. Heck, even <a href="http://www.gametrailers.com/player/38541.html">Mercenaries 2 sounds like it's philosophically aligned with this attitude</a> (in that they refused, from the start, to make "fragile" tasks which result in "Fission Mailed"). It's just that there's going to be a lot of trial and error before we even begin to settle on something cool, and I hope that won't dissuade people from the idea - from continuing to try this stuff out.<br /><br />Personally, I feel like this approach (or something like it) is one of the more natural uses of the medium - certainly more natural than gameplay book ended by cut scenes, or trying to <a href="http://kotaku.com/gaming/the-flop-bin/the-flop-bin-david-freeman-024623.php">manipulate a player's emotion</a> when you could simply react to the emotion they express.<br /><br />I can certainly feel the shift in outlook amongst developers, but ultimately, many of them may not be in a position to do this approach justice any time soon. There are lots of growing pains to go through before we get there, and a lumbering risk averse mainstream to convert before anything big budget comes out with this approach (with notable exceptions, obviously).<br /><br />I think we also have to accept that whatever comes out of this approach probably won't feel like whatever ideas the phrase "Interactive Movies" conjure up. It'll be its own thing, like like TV is a different feeling thing to books, or dance. I think we have to respect that, and not fault games for not being interactive versions of other mediums - let them be what they naturally want to be.<br /><br />*Not to blow my own trumpet, but K2 will eventually go in this direction, after decent core gameplay is established - assuming I can expend the effort outside of my day job, which feels less and less likely.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-264921339470127362008-07-27T11:25:00.000-07:002008-07-27T11:45:06.910-07:00Mind Mapping: Succinct Ideas made IncomprehensibleI haven't worked on K2 for a while, mainly because I really wasn't sure where I was going with it. It's hard to get excited about an idea which doesn't get you motivated. As a result, I decided that today's work would be about defining what I wanted from the game, which in turn might bring me to a better understanding of the actual tasks I'm facing.<br /><br />Friend <a href="http://games.leighashton.com/">Leigh Ashton</a> introduced me to the concept of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map">Mind Mapping</a>. Through this process, you essentially unload your thoughts onto the page. By starting at a root, and filling outwards, you eventually get a more and more detail picture than you ever would if you kept it in your noggin all at once. The human mind can only deal with 5-7 concepts at once, so this mind map becomes a kind of augmented RAM as you channel the ideas onto the page.<br /><br />It occurs to me that since a lot of the time, developers don't like to read high level design documents*, the <span style="font-style:italic;">act </span>of writing the design document is often far more important than creating the artifact for others to read. <br /><br />While ideas remain in your mind, they are unreal - indisctinct platonic ideals. The gulfs of reality that they must cross are vast, but your brain always seems agile enough to distort reality, and make you feel like the idea is a coherent one. The act forces you to think these ideas through - to birth them into something which <span style="font-style:italic;">isn't</span> using reality distortion as a crutch. In other words, writing documentation is just a tool which will hopefully hold up a mirror to your ideas, and show their flaws early on.<br /><br /><a href="http://bezzy.net/Docs/K2/K2mindmap.html">Here's the results of my Mind Mapping for K2</a>. I've used a program called <a href="http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page">"FreeMind"</a> which is nice and easy to use to generate this kind of brain-dump.<br /><br />I doubt it is anything close to coherent upon first viewing, but the process has certainly helped me understand what I want from this game, and has made me super excited to get started.<br /><br />It's a completely over ambitious project, but my hope is that by working outward from the core gameplay, toward the lofty goal of Social Mechanics and self harmonizing persistant universes, I'll be able to tackle the project bite by bite.<br /><br />I'm inspired by <a href="http://www.taleworlds.com/">Mount & Blade</a> who seem to be doing the same thing. Each new release results in deeper gameplay, giving the core mechanics more and more context and depth.<br /><br />*Obviously, a well written technical design is worth its weight in gold. But high level bluesky wishywashiness? Not as useful to the dev in the trenches.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-56938073415075720742008-07-24T06:57:00.000-07:002008-07-28T10:30:19.129-07:00Far Crying and Far WankingI just wanted to <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3727/redefining_game_narrative_.php">link to an excellent, if pretentiously titled, interview with Patrick Redding about Far Cry 2.</a> Actually, it's pretty much impossible to not sound pretentious when talking about Interactive Storytelling, so I'll forgive all involved.<br /><br />My buddies and me have been talking about this kind of thing for ages, all the way back to the Ludology vs. Narratology wars of early '04. For us, it's really encouraging to see a decent stab at it in the mainstream. We've seen the re-occurring patterns of this more granular approach to narrative in all sorts of games: Civ, Total War, X-Com - games where every verb and noun are crafted with the intent of creating a possibility space which could also be described as a story cloud (see? I told you this stuff gets pretentious).<br /><br />Basically, if you build an arbitrary set of mechanics you end up with an arbitrary possibility space. That's fine - I'm not knocking that approach.<br /><br />If you craft your mechanics with the intend of them being <span style="font-style: italic;">atomic elements</span> in a bigger story, all of them helping to <span style="font-style: italic;">resonate </span>some <span style="font-style: italic;">central theme</span>, you end up with a possibility space which more readily generates <span style="font-style: italic;">story-like strings of events</span>. When every element in a story is <span style="font-style: italic;">infused </span>with a theme, then a linked path of each element is intrinsically infused with that theme - a linked path of elements being a basic (if emergent) form of a "story". There's lots of arguments about the difference between a "story" and a "string of events", but let's, *ahem*, ignore that for now.<br /><br />The crafting of verbs and nouns is really where the author's control occurs in the sort of Interactive Storytelling that I'd personally like to see more of in games. A well defined sandbox where each verb is crafted, but their use is completely open to the player, giving them the freedom to explore and understand the "theme" or message behind the game. The story isn't forcing the player to listen to it. Instead, the player, simply through interacting and learning the limits of the world, grows to understand the underlying message.<br /><br />I keep thinking of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wire</span> (watch it if you haven't) as a great example of this, even though it's not a game. Everyone's story in it is just <span style="font-style: italic;">one emergent thread</span> from the world they're living in. Each thread weaves together a complete tapestry to explain the encompassing <span style="font-style: italic;">system</span> of Baltimore. Each character HAS their own freedom, but their desires and free will are so thoroughly wrapped up in "the game" that their story arcs seem fated to express Baltimore-as-a-system.<br /><br />In the same way, playing <span style="font-style: italic;">any </span>game over and over, creates individual threads when build up this picture of what the designer was trying to get across. Not every game has this philosophy in mind, obviously: read Mario 3 through this lens, and the message you end up with may be something like "Jumping is pretty important in life, and touching things makes you shrink, or sometimes grow". Doesn't stop Mario 3 being a wonderful work of art in terms of its kinaesthetics, though (see, there's more than one kind of game "art", and they can all live happily side by side).<br /><br />Where<span style="font-style: italic;"> Far Cry 2</span> is concerned, I'm looking forward to it, but I'm still slightly worried that the focus on the higher level aspects (driving the emergent narrative) will take away the developers focus on core gameplay, affecting it negatively. Will we see a stunning lack of usability or rushed central controls? In other words, in chasing this (sorta) new approach to narrative, will it sacrifice the things that make games like Mario 3 great?<br /><br />Or is there an argument to be made that for this approach to interactive storytelling to <span style="font-style: italic;">work</span>, it's <span style="font-style: italic;">absolutely adamant that the core gameplay</span> (the way in which the player actively expresses him/herself and <span style="font-style: italic;">creates the story</span>) <span style="font-style: italic;">is easy and enjoyable to manipulate</span>? After all, the core mechanics are, in fact, the central way in which the narrative is driven... gameplay is not just filler for long, cutsceney bookends - gameplay <span style="font-weight: bold;">is </span>the story. Focus on this narrative approach, and you intrinsically focus on the player's moment to moment ability to weave narrative, and therefore, you must make those tools enjoyable to use in the first place, or the act of weaving the story just won't be... well... fun!<br /><br />God, I just love this stuff... the game IS the story! There IS no Narratology vs. Ludology debate! It was all a fallacy to begin with! I fuckin' knew it!Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-70508965677493379312008-06-12T13:49:00.000-07:002008-06-12T15:40:54.405-07:00It's nut* butter and jelly time! *As in "brain"I'm not a neuroscientist. You can guess this already, by the way I spell nyorosiyance.<br /><br />I'm a game designer who is full of misconceptions about how these fancy mind interfaces work. And yet I have the gall to have opinions on them, assuming my misconceptions turn out to be premonitions. How <span style="font-style:italic;">dare </span>I?<br /><br />There's a couple of different kinds of "mind control" devices being talked about, recently, so I'll differentiate. On the one hand, you've got <a href="http://play.tm/story/5455">Sony's patented "beam images directly into your brain" technology</a>, which I pray is an April Fool's Day Joke, incase Michael Crichton smells a whiff of some new society-upheaving technology, again, and then willfully misinterprets it <span style="font-style:italic;">again</span>, and makes lots and lots of money. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Again</span>.<br /><br />It's the simpler brain-wave readers which I'd like to talk about. Have a look:<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9la3Z3F4sRA&hl=en"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/9la3Z3F4sRA&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/z9Nw8l_bY4U&hl=en"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/z9Nw8l_bY4U&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />These (I believe) monitor and interpret a user's (alpha/beta/motor?) brain waves in clever ways, converting the sketchy, fluctuating frequencies into commands for the computer. The computer acts on the command, often showing its result to the user. A basic interactive feedback loop is established. That's important for later. Remember that bit what I just sed.<br /><br />Here's the un-educated bit: concentrate. Working on Goo, I got to brush up against sound analysis a little. Tommy got Fourier analysis going, which basically allows you to look at the volume of the sound being played in real time. The track is made up of loads of numbers, which represent what position the cone on a speaker wants to be at. Chuck enough alternating numbers at the speakers at high frequency, and you get vibration, and then sound. You know this already. I know you do. I'm just recapping to explain where my likely misinterpretation of the mechanics of brain-readers comes from.<br /><br />I imagine that in the same way that I tried and failed to get real-time beat detection working, the waves put out by the brain are equally filled with noise, and never going to come out as raw, discernible computer commands. They have to be processed, and while a lot of smarter people than I have done a much better job at it, stuff like that is still no-where near perfect (in real-time, at least). Try loading up the XBox 360 dashboard, running the audio visualizer, and see how many of your tracks make pleasingly synchronous imagery? I love Jeff Minter and all, but I'm guessing that it's certainly not 100%. <br /><br />Getting beats out of a signal, then, is not easy. What <span style="font-weight:bold;">is </span>easy is the raw properties of the wave - the volume, and the pitch. We also (almost) tried some experiments in Goo where you would shout as loud as you could into a microphone to get more force into an attack. We saved ourselves some burst blood vessels by calling it what it was: a <span style="font-style:italic;">bad fucking idea</span>. It would have worked, though, because volume is easy to grab from a sound signal. So is pitch, as <a href="http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/research/voice/voice.htm">this wonderful array of pitch controlled controls</a> shows.<br /><br />So here is the big deal that I think most people are going to point out at first: are these mind-control devices going to have us using our brains to do something as arbitrary and unrelated to the mind-controlled avatar, as screaming in falsetto? When I try to calibrate a verb to a brain wave, is it going to pick up on false positives? When I use my technology-aided telekinesis to raise objects aloft, am I powering it with contemplation over the human condition? When I try to lower the object again, am I imagining the taste of a peanut butter sandwhich?<br /><br />In fact, the mind monitors shown in the movies above aren't watching anything even as close to specific as tastes, visions, or even abstract concepts. They're watching whether you're relaxed, concentrating, or activating motor controls in the body (though I don't believe they can make specific movements out through the noise). So in order to "use" these things, you're having to manually choose what verb to map your "relaxation", "concentration" and "general movement" to, and then try really hard to trigger those kinds of alpha, beta, and motor(?) waves.<br /><br />Designers know that good "mapping" is ideal. Natural mapping is when the action you take on a system logically and intuitively matches what happens to/in the system (i.e. "pull a trigger to fire" makes a lot of sense in a video game. The physical action and the in-game metaphor of a gun with a trigger match up nicely). What the mind interfaces currently give us is a way to monitor "being sedate", and "concentrating". It's a bit hard to think of good ways to map that to game play, since meditation and concentration are typically side effects of playing many games, rather than requirements for interfacing with them.<br /><br /><ul><br />Consider:<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">*WARNING* BIG BOSS TWO THOUSAND APPROACH *WARNING*</span><br /><br />Oh crap it's huge! It has guns in its <span style="font-style:italic;">guns</span>! Bullets are taking up the screen like... Bon Jovie fans around a... <span style="font-weight:bold;">CRAP!</span> I don't have TIME for clever metaphors... how do I set off the smart bomb again?<br /><br />Oh yeah.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Meditate.</span><br /></ul><br /><br />(Actually that could be sort of cool).<br /><br />However, the human brain is an amazing thing. It's able to adapt itself to even the most hostile interfaces. We learn to put up with the foibles of crappy interfaces far more often than we complain about them (assuming, as we do, that we are the idiots for using the interface incorrectly, rather than realizing when the designer is being a malevolent dick-head to his users). As we learn a new interface, we build new neural connections to be able to deal with the problem faster, next time. We keep doing this until we're well practiced, until the point that even when objective improvements are made to the bed of nails we've come to enjoy, we feel like they're snatching our hard earned expertise away.<br /><br />In the same way, I imagine that no matter what thoughts the verbs in mind-controlled games are calibrated to, our brain will be able to recalibrate itself to make that neural connection a much higher frequency mental path way, which we find easier to access, and thus find control easier. Eventually, it will become almost common sense to our brains that "concentrating" is closely equivalent to "pyrokinesis".<br /><br />In other words, we, as dynamically adjusting users, will have to do the grunt work of adapting to a new user interface. But then, hasn't that always been the way?Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-20945323415602780662008-06-11T12:47:00.000-07:002008-06-11T13:14:09.175-07:00Don't Vote For K2 if you don't like it!There's zero chance in a hell snowball wrapped in petrol flames that I'm winning this TIGSource thing, so I'm not going to beg for votes. However, <a href="http://www.tigsource.com/features/pgc/">I do insist that you give a few entries a try</a>, and <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=2007.0">vote</a> on it.<br /><br />As far as K2's progression goes... well... I've been having to build my flexi-time back up at work recently, so I've been a bit too tired in the evenings to continue. This is because I had to go to the dentist and have a filling on my birthday, last week. Plus, I deserve a bit of down time after pulling a few late-nighters, right? <br /><br />Last weekend, I got a stub program running OpenGL using the Tao framework, but I still have a lot of work ahead, porting over what I already have (need replacements for XNA's pretty fantastic Vector Math libraries). It might even be worth starting it from scratch, and just copying the more choice pieces of code over from the prototype... after all, prototypes are there to be learned from, and thrown away. <br /><br />I've set up a <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=1971.0">TIGSource thread</a> for it. First post is just a look back in time at the original K, though I'll probably be returning to a similar aesthetic (the prototype is just a multicolour mess at the moment). Yuss. I think that this K could be special.<br /><br />I've also been trying to help JP with his home brew project, <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=1811.0">Purity</a>. We had about an hour long knock-around online, but our distance, and my wifi connection hardly gave me the best latency to appreciate it properly. It's going in the right direction, and a lot of the core game play is already in. The biggest issue to fix for this kind of "naked" abstract game is clear feedback. When there's no naturally limiting real-world metaphor to work within, you're completely free to express mechanics in any way you like, and thus, your approach to feedback simply becomes "What's the most informative and intuitive way to get this idea across?", rather than "What's believable?". Gots to watch out for information overload, though.<br /><br />Oh, and my new company <a href="http://www.splashdamage.com/node/238">interviewed me for their website</a>. I always get self-conscious about photos, and this one is not exactly catching my MySpace angles.<br /><br />I saw <a href="http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=1&cId=3168113">American McGee putting forward his wishes for a mind interface</a>. I think I have a rant brewing about that. Nothing nasty, just some issues I think we'll probably see with the early attempts.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-27446640140876202082008-06-07T14:31:00.000-07:002008-06-07T14:43:04.151-07:00K2 Prototype FinishedIt's over. In all the confusion, I forgot to link anything. Here's the <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=1675.0">thread to get it from, again</a>.<br /><br /><object width="400" height="300"> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1108730&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" /> <embed src="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1108730&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="300"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://www.vimeo.com/1108730?pg=embed&sec=1108730">K2 Prototype For TIGSource Procedural Generation Compo</a> from <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/user498252?pg=embed&sec=1108730">Aubrey Hesselgren</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com?pg=embed&sec=1108730">Vimeo</a>.<br /><br />So, this is less than 22 days work in my spare time, most of it without the benefit of internet. I learned a fair amount (including: try even harder not to re-invent the wheel). The main thing I learned is that most people cannot get XNA to run.<br /><br />My first move for continuing this project is to move it over to something a little more compatible. I've started using <a href="http://cs-sdl.sourceforge.net/">SDL.NET</a> and the <a href="http://www.taoframework.com/">Tao Framework</a>. This doesn't give me platform freedom (since it's based on .NET), but I'll at least be able to let more people play it this way. I mean, even if this isn't a popularity contest, it's good to let more people play so that you have more of a chance of decent feedback.<br /><br />Moving over to OpenGL isn't going to be an insurmountable task (since I'm familiar, but rusty with it - it was used for the original K), but it's going to be a fair amount of work re-building all the crutches that XNA pre-built for me... nice, clean, clear libraries for maths, vectors, importing fonts... a great sound tool in XACT (which allowed me to get all my sounds in, including random pitch offsets, game-play controlled pitch shifting, and 3D positioned sound in less than 4 hours from start to end).<br /><br />I'll miss XNA. I'm sorry to leave it behind. It's just that while the installation process for the end-user remains such a clusterfuck, it's not quite worth the pain of realizing that you make up probably 20% of your own audience.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-8363465478268294872008-06-01T18:21:00.000-07:002008-06-01T18:22:57.123-07:00K2 PrototypeIt's one day before the TIGSource Procedural Generation contest ends.<br /><br />You can get my entry from <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=1675.msg39317#msg39317">this </a>thread.<br /><br />I'll add another post for the complete version.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-40580682449013953132008-05-21T02:00:00.000-07:002008-05-23T03:31:24.983-07:00K2Some homebrew I've been working on (for just a couple of weeks in my spare time) for the <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=9.0">TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition</a>. It's a sequel to <a href="http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=C1iELMw4qBM&feature=user">K</a> in that it will also, probably, never be released.<br /><br /><object width="400" height="300"> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1055093&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" /> <embed src="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1055093&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="300"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://www.vimeo.com/1055093?pg=embed&sec=1055093">K2 Early Footage</a> from <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/user498252?pg=embed&sec=1055093">Aubrey Hesselgren</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com?pg=embed&sec=1055093">Vimeo</a>.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-6186972446301207152008-03-19T05:02:00.000-07:002008-03-19T05:24:26.906-07:00Marketing is Evil and Wrong and Here's Some:<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">For the past few weeks, I've been getting around ten times the hits on this blog (and on the <a href="http://apaththroughpossibility.blogspot.com/">old one</a>). Now, fair enough, ten times nothing is still nothing. And of those people admiring the sites, only 5% will find anything useful or interesting.<br /><br />This (</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">despicable) </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">inflation of traffic is due to evil <a href="http://www.bruceongames.com/">Bruce Everiss</a>. Bruce is in marketing (nuff said, am I right?) and has figured out some key marketing ideas, such as "hyperlinks link people to other internet pages", and thusly came up with this list of hyperlinks to circle jerk a bunch of games industry blogging dudes who happen to be on an invite-only forum.<br /><br />I have been unduly noted <span style="font-style: italic;">twice</span> in this list, which has been copied around, contaminating the blogs like... like a <span style="font-style: italic;">virus</span>. A sort of "viral marketing". Ha. I just equated marketing to a disease! The marketers are going to <span style="font-style: italic;">hate</span> that shit. +1 to the good guys!<br /><br />Anyway, as a pure, good human being who doesn't spread <span style="font-weight: bold;">marketing evil and lies and racial hatred</span>, I want to re-post this travesty. I resent every hit I've received as a result of this "viral" post </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">(haha. Eat that, marketeers!)</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">, and just say one thing to anyone who has arrived here as a result of clicking one of the links below: BAAAAAAA. YOU ARE LIKE A SHEEP AMONGST SHEEPS.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.bruceongames.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/game-development-essentials.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></span><br />Most of the knowledge available to keen gamers about the gaming industry can be of a pretty low quality. This is because that knowledge is third or fourth hand. As a very minimum it has been “spun” by a marketing department (I have done loads of this) and then “interpreted” by a journalist. But there is a way round this, keen enthusiasts can get their knowledge directly from the horses mouth, if they read the right blogs.<br />Whilst there aren’t many blogs from the publishing side of the video game industry there a quite a few from the development side. And they are excellent. These are the guys who actually make the games that everyone plays, so they know what they are talking about. And when they analyse a game they do so with an authority no magazine could match. These guys are the complete opposite of the fanboy, they are intelligent, informed and incisive. There are quite a few in my blogroll but here are a random selection:<ul><li><a href="http://mainlyaboutgames.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Mainly About Games</span></a>. Informative and well written it has a nice personal feel to it.</li><li><a href="http://www.dopass.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Dopass.com.</span></a> Short entries not just about gaming. Funny at times.</li><li><a href="http://apaththroughpossibility.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">A path through possibility</span></a>. Irregular updating but well worth a read for some incisive commentary. [Edit: Irregular is less correct than "defuct"].<br /></li><li><a href="http://japanmanship.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Japanmanship</span></a>. An incredibly good read of a Western developer’s life in Japan.</li><li><a href="http://www.magicalwasteland.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Magical Wasteland</span></a>. Refreshingly irreverant.</li><li><a href="http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Survival Horror.</span></a> Does what it says on the tin.</li><li><a href="http://www.gamedev.net/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Gamedev.net</span></a>. A big and serious site with a lot of good content.</li><li><a href="http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Seven Degrees of Freedom</span></a>. Very nice diary style blog.</li><li><a href="http://randomencounters.vox.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Random Encounters in Imaginary Realms</span></a>. Just cherry picks the good stuff.</li><li><a href="http://www.cheeky.gr/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Cheeky</span></a>. Sparse and interesting development diary.</li><li><a href="http://aaiiee.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Peter Mackay’s projects and development diary</span></a>. Quake on Gamecube.</li><li><a href="http://www.lifeintherain.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Life In The Rain.</span></a> Often long interesting personal articles.</li><li><a href="http://www.t-machine.org/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">T=Machine</span></a>. Wide ranging blog with much that is happening at the sharp end online.</li><li><a href="http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Black Company Studios</span></a>. Semi diary semi event driven articles. Nice.</li><li><a href="http://msinilo.pl/blog/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">.mischief.mayhem.soap.</span></a> A serious game developer’s blog.</li><li><a href="http://blog.jakeworld.org/JakeWorld/main.php?left=leftframeN/blogs.php&main=blog/BlogDisplay.php" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">JakeWorld Blog.</span></a> The life of a game developer.</li><li><a href="http://www.gamefeil.com/blog.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Gamefeil.</span></a> Games, comics, diary.</li><li><a href="http://scientificninja.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Scientific Ninja</span></a>. Technical stuff here.</li><li><a href="http://www.devbump.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Devbump</span></a>. Aggregation of gaming articles.</li><li><a href="http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Nimblebit</span></a>. Game development diary. Lots of technical stuff.</li><li><a href="http://beznesstime.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">It’s Bezness time</span></a>. Bedroom developer diary. [Edit: See last post: no longer in the bedroom]<br /></li><li><a href="http://www.lai.as/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">I love it, I feel like Sisyphus.</span></a> On start-ups, game development and programming.</li></ul>For anyone with any interest in games the above blogs are just pure gold. <a href="http://japanmanship.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">Japanmanship</span></a>, for instance is written by a game developer who works for a Japenese games company, lives in Japan and speaks Japanese. If you want to understand the game industry in Japan there is no finer source of knowledge. It amazes me when fanboys with a millionth of his knowledge and experience argue with him on forums.<br /><br />Note to bloggers, journalists etc, feel free to copy and paste the above list or even the whole article to anywhere you want. [Edit: I will, if only to show what an EVIL MARKETING MAN YOU ARE]<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">P.S. None of the people linked even ASKED to be on this list, so click on all the links to show your support against their victimization, but don't even read what they have to say (because you wouldn't have if you avoided all the synister marketing threats to freedom in the first place). </span>Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-11848855360934975792008-03-15T06:49:00.000-07:002008-03-15T06:57:26.277-07:00Ah jeezLooks like I got a job!<br /><br />I start next week, so I guess I have to wrap things up with this blog for the time being. The company itself has its own blog, so I may simply cross post anything that goes on there from here. And for once, it doesn't seem like a sales-man style blog - it feels more like the .plan files of ye olden dayes.<br /><br />And I know, I know. Me saying "I'm not going to update much anymore" is a bit redundant, and my absence will not be noted.<br /><br />I still feel like I have a few worthwhile posts to put out, and eventually I'll get to them, assuming I'm not too busy on prepping the thing I'm working on which I can't talk about.<br /><br />Jeez, what a total non-post! Sorry. I fail at blogging.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-33060507683048319652008-02-25T15:23:00.000-08:002008-02-25T15:57:43.720-08:00A Video of D@sherI've just (semi)finished working on a blur effect, which makes sure that the objects most immediately selectable are rendered "sharp" while less interesting objects are made "out of focus".<br /><br />I love using XNA, but for most people, it's been a real pain to get all the required installs going. Indies really don't need that extra hurdle (because every single hurdle tends to distract 50% of your audience from actually downloading and trying your stuff). If I had to ask MS one thing for XNA, it would be to make it easier to compile everything the end user needs into a distributable download.<br /><br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5oSfEM8XpH4&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5oSfEM8XpH4&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />For that reason, here's a video, which I can now upload easily, because after 3 years of begging, we finally got broadband (wireless) in our technology black-hole.<br /><br />In other news, I'm currently fishing around for jobs. I've got one interview coming up, which I am fully expecting to fail: I'm under no illusions as to how hard it is to get a game designer/game play programmer job. Hopefully this prototype will show a little bit of my acumen (though it IS a prototype, so I hope they're not too mean).Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-41144932124545500522008-01-18T04:28:00.001-08:002008-01-18T04:48:39.047-08:00Forum Cross PostingI've been posting my <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=960.0">progress</a> in the Feedback section of <a href="http://www.tigsource.com">TIGSource </a>Forums. For some reason, I don't feel like doing too many quick and spotty posts on this blog, so day to day progress seems to go in there. When I do proper write-ups of what I've come up with, they'll go here.<br /><br />There's a couple of early builds of the D@sher system <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=960.0">there</a> if you'd like a look. It's still early days, so they're just tasters, really. But hey, you may be interested! Maybe!<br /><br />Currently I'm dealing with one of the trickiest parts of the whole system - actually navigating through arcs (rather than simply magnifying them). I've spent most of the week feeling sick (third cold in three weeks, and a switch of medication to get me off Effexor) but I've managed to clean up the code quite a lot in preparation for this difficult step. I think I get it... but this is a dangerous moment, and it could all come crashing down at this point.<br /><br />Also, Tommy got a demo build of Goo ready for the <a href="http://www.igf.com/audience.php">IGF Audience Award</a>. He'd be much obliged if you tried it (if you can meet the hardware requirements), and considered casting a vote.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-70178888664267816942007-12-28T13:15:00.001-08:002007-12-28T14:46:51.824-08:00Ideas having Sex and making baby ideas which are better than both parents.Yesterday, I was watching <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5078334075080674416">this rather long, but very interesting video about Dasher</a> - how it was created, what it has become, and what it could be.<br /><embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=5078334075080674416&hl=en-GB" flashvars=""></embed> <br />(Skipping forward to 25m and 40m will reveal some instant coolness).<br /><br />Before watching the video, all I could really <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">conceive</span> dasher to be useful for was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">trippy</span> text entry and perhaps as an alternate (but weird) way to zoom through an abstract <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">hierarchy</span> - a replacement for right click menus, perhaps, and <span style="font-style: italic;">certainly </span>an improvement (or welcome alternative) for most consoles' virtual keyboards.<br /><br />But then the video started going into what was happening behind the hood: The prediction algorithms are simple, but could be effective at destroying <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">TXTing's</span> malformed literary artifacts. While an <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">abc</span>-123 style mobile phone text input encourages you to write like a... well... like a cunt (I got dumped over <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">TXT</span> once, incidentally), Dasher naturally encourages and enables you to spell better, without being a game of Thumb-Twister*.<br /><br />Dasher <span style="font-style: italic;">could</span> have just had endless letters nested within nested nests, with no weighting on the size of nests at all... and it would have completely failed. Since it weighs predicted/deducted letters heavier than other letters (without <span style="font-style: italic;">removing</span> those letters), it suddenly becomes very fast to use... but it's more than that. It bends the possibility space implied by the alphabet to encourage valid words while discouraging illegible ones. In essence, if you're as bad a speller as I am, Dasher can improve you simply because it's giving you a helpful nudge in the right direction by making spelling errors harder, and correct spelling easier.<br /><br />In a funny kind of way, it's a microcosm for how games designers work (or how they probably ought to work): when we play a game, we're flying along a path through possibility, and creating a story (or, strictly speaking, a "set of events". Stories are edited with dramatic impact in mind... but this is a whole other fiasco of a discussion which I'll avoid for now). This story can be as boring or as interesting as the system abhors, but as designers, we can do a lot to <span style="font-style: italic;">encourage the interesting</span> paths, without disallowing the boring ones - if we were to do the former without the latter, we'd not only compromise a consistent, complete, believable, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">immersive</span>, systemic world, but also disallow the player's ability to create their <span style="font-style: italic;">own</span> pace.<br /><br />So anyway, as I said in my last post, I had thinking about doing both a "radial" version of dasher, but also a music game. When I heard Mr. Dasher talk about how he was using many different "grammars" and "probability models" to drive the weightings in Dasher in different ways, my mind opened a bit more, and my love of it increased.<br /><br />Sleeplessly trying to shift a cold, I played a bit of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Aquaria</span>. I ended up just laying at the bottom of the ocean, playing out a tune on its radial singing interface. By almost sheer luck (or could it be Alec and Derek's foresight to keep music in the same key as the sung notes?) I was able to play out a tune which sounded really nice. Now, this was a completely alien musical instrument to me, and I don't have a great amount of musical talent myself, but somehow I was jamming along happily and without any noticeable error. How the hell does that happen?<br /><br />Then I considered a documentary I had seen about how a computer was taught to create their own variations on famous piece of music, using music theory, mixed in with chaos theory to provide the variation. This got me thinking - if music has its own grammar**, and Dasher is, from one point of view, a way to explore grammar (without compromising your ability to explore stuff that lies outside of the grammar), they might be <span style="font-style: italic;">combined</span>.<br /><br />A "Music Dasher" (or what I'm dubbing "Beet Root Jam") might be a way to give a novice musician at an abstract instrument a way to produce music that sounds pretty "correct", but unlike something like Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero etc. doesn't constrain a player's expression to a prescribed "correct" one. I.e. Jamming made easy.<br /><br />I don't know yet how I'll fit a game around this... at first it needs to work as a toy - totally abstract, just to see if the concept even works. Once the "toy" is both proven and also "fun", I can layer on higher level mechanics which will encourage (but not <span style="font-style: italic;">force</span>) players to develop their songs with respect to a higher level grammar.<br /><br />Here's kind of how the interface may work (but this is a slightly more generic one, for non-music stuff as well - menus or whatever):<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bezzy.net/Images/BeetRootJam/BeetRootFirstDesign.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://bezzy.net/Images/BeetRootJam/BeetRootFirstDesign.png" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I'll have another quick picture up tomorrow which explains how, no matter what arc you move into, the discarded ones always slide around to the left hand side, so that going "up" the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">hierarchy</span> isn't a case of twitching all over the place - you just hold "left".<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*I know Sony have been in the dog house for a while, for a wide range of reasons. It sort of upset me, because I want <span style="font-style: italic;">everyone</span> to make cool stuff more than I want a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">schaden</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">freude</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">hard-on</span>. However, it only took one mistake to fix my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">schaden</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">freude</span>-erectile-dysfunction. That reason is this: the <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/jamesh/2005/11/28/psp/"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">PSP</span> text interface</a>. What kind of blind-in-the-thumb <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">SonyEricsson</span>-whipped producer decided that a virtual mobile phone pad was a good idea? Look at it. About all it's got going for it is "familiarity" (a dirty word where interface innovation is concerned. Consider the story of <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=USBbi1Dyw4sC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=%22there+was+this+fellow+who+decided+he+needed+a+new+suit%22&source=web&ots=7QlBOWzHRs&sig=kL95jPUr4iO0VvdEiEgJT_X7t6k">The New Suit</a>), but even </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >that's</span> destroyed as you have to manipulate a <span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >cursor</span><span style="font-size:85%;">, one step at a time before you can actually select a key, which you have to press multiple times before you get your desired letter! The thing is, I actually talked to a coder responsible for the interface, and, poor sod, it wasn't his choice at all - some mentalist higher up the chain of command probably decided was a safe bet. Shit rolls downhill, and blame rolls straight back up.<br /><br />**Music Theory as a be-all, end-all theory of "what sounds good" became pretty punctured by Jazz, which proved that music could defy the so-called rules but still sound <span style="font-style: italic;">right</span>, somehow. Luckily, the approach I'm proposing (much like dasher)<span style="font-style: italic;"> doesn't</span> stop you playing the "wrong" notes if you happen to think, despite the music model, that they sound about right.</span>Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6178456588658567150.post-37680443814467165252007-12-18T13:02:00.000-08:002007-12-26T15:48:14.928-08:00Wasting Internet Space for the Good of MankindNew Blog. Clean Slate.<br /><br />This will be home to rather random blatherings, I'm afraid. I had thoughts of doing some kind of proper blog, with unique insights into design, and rants about various shit which fucks me off. Perhaps they'll come in time. For now though, prepare to be disappointed, and hopefully, bored.<br /><br />I'm starting to get back on the horse after 6 months of depression, self pity, spiralling anxieties, 6 different kinds of antidepressant (none of which helped), and on-going psychotherapy. My mother isn't being too helpful about this. She's concerned that if I spend any time whatsoever with a computer that my obsessive streak will grow again, and in a couple of years time, I'll be back in burnouts' ville, contemplating quick roads to suicide. I don't think that's going to happen again. If I can grow some self confidence, and a willingness to be a bit more selfish (or "self-full" as my psychotherapist would say), I'll be able to muddle out a bit more of a balanced life style.<br /><br />I've been looking at a way to get started on small games again. Recently, good ideas have been coming thick and fast - I'm finally rediscovering the creativity-driven endourphin rush which I used to crave so much. However, I was without any kind of easy platform to put these things into play. I tried a bit of Flash, but it was a little too alien to me. Other systems weren't quite empowering enough when it came to deeper manipulations of geometry, shaders etc.<br /><br />I talked to my friend Haowan about this, and he reminded me of XNA. For a long time, I wanted to try it out, but just forgot that it existed for so long. We had a look at XNA for goo, but couldn't really use it because Goo required as much horsepower as possible for the processing of physics. We guessed that C# would be slightly less efficient than a C++ approach. During Goo, I got to use XACT - the sound tool which comes with the DirectX SDK. It was a real joy to use - very straightforward, but still extremely powerful. The assumptions it made were rational ones, which belayed my fears (middleware can so often make assumptions which cripple your expression) and XNA seems like it's the same way - lots of elements are wrapped up in neat packages, but very smart decisions have been made while doing so.<br /><br />I've had a few teething problems just collecting the resources: my development machine isn't online, and it took a while to find the<a href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/express/bb403190.aspx"> non web-based version of Visual Studio 2005 C# Express Edition</a>. After ducking out of Christmas socialization at every opportunity (and there's a lot of opportunities when everyone's looking after their wailing babies), I was able to nurse my constantly disconnecting modem/satellite connection, and nabbed it in under a day - a christmas miracle!<br /><br />So far, I've only put together some really basic "hello world" equivalent programs as I learn the XNA api. As I say, it's put together wonderfully, with things like interface access being very immediate and easy, graphics windows working out of the box, and lots of other lovely standardizations to look into (excellent documentation, too). I noticed that the equivalent for "deltaTime" (time since last frame) is actually a full class, which records elapsed game time and elapsed real time separately, so that messing with your game speed for bullet time effects becomes a no-brainer. Not only that, but you can get it to report the time in Hours, Minutes, Seconds, Milliseconds - formatting's right there for you, so that there's less confusion. I can't wait to have more time to study it.<br /><br />I've got a couple of projects that I'm hoping to prototype. One is an Arc based zooming user interface - sort of a radial interface which you can "dive into"... like <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5078334075080674416">Dasher</a> (cool parts of that video are at 25m and 40m), but bent into a circle. I was trying to do the same thing with Goo's menu. Unfortunately, I spent a long time thumping my head against a brick wall with it, mainly because the idea I could see in my mind's eye was kind of distorted, and didn't exactly fit reality. Here's a video of an early version of the old interface.<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/aeN4ZpjO5Jw&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/aeN4ZpjO5Jw&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br />In that video, it's hard to see the problems we encountered (because I didn't dive very deep, exposing some obviousl flaws in portal placement and unwrapping), but, eh, trust me: It wasn't working. Tommy eventually had to abandon the menu. I don't blame him - it was a big risk area, and one which didn't work out... not in time, anyhow. We were stretched as it was, trying to make a pretty risky game design work. Having a novel menu on top was maybe a bridge too far.<br /><br />Still, I believe the concept can work, and learned a lot from the failures. The problem, I think, was that I was trying to scale these individual portals up, but only with one metric - overall scale. What I <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> needed was something which could deform in two dimensions... in this case, it's arc breadth and arc thickness. I wanted to do it all in an indiscrete way, rather than just having you tween between prefab portals - just having a faked animation between each portal would have been easy, but I wanted to do it "for real"... so the hierachy distorted in real time, as you moved through it. Proved to be too tough to me, and probably a fundamentally flawed approach using circles. Sorry. Hard to explain<br /><br />So, the new one is going to be rather different. Rather than plunging into expanding "holes", you'll just be diving into <span style="font-style: italic;">arc segments</span> which grow and wrap around into an almost total circle as you approach them. Then, within each arc are more, smaller arcs, and so the growth occurs recursively until you hit a leaf in the option tree.<br /><br />I don't know what I'll use it for yet. As well as typical right click menus, or simple game front-ends, it seems like it'd be useful for the exploration of deep and broad hierachical selection... creating a Toy Language interface might be a good way to go with it. It's been on my mind for ages. More about that another day.<br /><br />The other thing I want to do is a pretty quick, simple music based shmup, which I'm calling "BeetRoot". It will only use two buttons (left and right, which also "fire"), but the game will generally encourage you to use these buttons to tap out a rhythm. Repeating the rhythm, or placing beats on the down-beat, or semi-beats results in stronger/more interesting attacks. Attack patterns coming at you will be defined by the rhythms you tap out, so it'll encourage you to keep a "chorus" going, and occasionally throw you a wobbly so that you can throw in a bit of a drum roll come down.<br /><br />Yeah. I got lots of ideas for this, but for once, I'm not going to do too much planning up front. I'm going to give the Jon Blow approach a try, and just do whatever springs to mind, and see if it works. I think I'll be able to explore XNA a bit faster that way, through experimentation and practice.Bezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08296337066041438209noreply@blogger.com3