K2 Prototype

It's one day before the TIGSource Procedural Generation contest ends.

You can get my entry from this thread.

I'll add another post for the complete version.

K2

Some homebrew I've been working on (for just a couple of weeks in my spare time) for the TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition. It's a sequel to K in that it will also, probably, never be released.


K2 Early Footage from Aubrey Hesselgren on Vimeo.

Marketing is Evil and Wrong and Here's Some:

For the past few weeks, I've been getting around ten times the hits on this blog (and on the old one). Now, fair enough, ten times nothing is still nothing. And of those people admiring the sites, only 5% will find anything useful or interesting.

This (despicable) inflation of traffic is due to evil Bruce Everiss. 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.

I have been unduly noted twice in this list, which has been copied around, contaminating the blogs like... like a virus. A sort of "viral marketing". Ha. I just equated marketing to a disease! The marketers are going to hate that shit. +1 to the good guys!

Anyway, as a pure, good human being who doesn't spread marketing evil and lies and racial hatred, I want to re-post this travesty. I resent every hit I've received as a result of this "viral" post (haha. Eat that, marketeers!), 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.


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.
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:

• Mainly About Games. Informative and well written it has a nice personal feel to it.
• Dopass.com. Short entries not just about gaming. Funny at times.
• A path through possibility. Irregular updating but well worth a read for some incisive commentary. [Edit: Irregular is less correct than "defuct"].
  
• Japanmanship. An incredibly good read of a Western developer’s life in Japan.
• Magical Wasteland. Refreshingly irreverant.
• Survival Horror. Does what it says on the tin.
• Gamedev.net. A big and serious site with a lot of good content.
• Seven Degrees of Freedom. Very nice diary style blog.
• Random Encounters in Imaginary Realms. Just cherry picks the good stuff.
• Cheeky. Sparse and interesting development diary.
• Peter Mackay’s projects and development diary. Quake on Gamecube.
• Life In The Rain. Often long interesting personal articles.
• T=Machine. Wide ranging blog with much that is happening at the sharp end online.
• Black Company Studios. Semi diary semi event driven articles. Nice.
• .mischief.mayhem.soap. A serious game developer’s blog.
• JakeWorld Blog. The life of a game developer.
• Gamefeil. Games, comics, diary.
• Scientific Ninja. Technical stuff here.
• Devbump. Aggregation of gaming articles.
• Nimblebit. Game development diary. Lots of technical stuff.
• It’s Bezness time. Bedroom developer diary. [Edit: See last post: no longer in the bedroom]
  
• I love it, I feel like Sisyphus. On start-ups, game development and programming.

For anyone with any interest in games the above blogs are just pure gold. Japanmanship, 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.

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]

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).

Ah jeez

Looks like I got a job!

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.

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.

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.

Jeez, what a total non-post! Sorry. I fail at blogging.

A Video of D@sher

I'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".

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.



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.

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).

Forum Cross Posting

I've been posting my progress in the Feedback section of TIGSource 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.

There's a couple of early builds of the D@sher system there if you'd like a look. It's still early days, so they're just tasters, really. But hey, you may be interested! Maybe!

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.

Also, Tommy got a demo build of Goo ready for the IGF Audience Award. He'd be much obliged if you tried it (if you can meet the hardware requirements), and considered casting a vote.

Ideas having Sex and making baby ideas which are better than both parents.

Yesterday, I was watching this rather long, but very interesting video about Dasher - how it was created, what it has become, and what it could be.

(Skipping forward to 25m and 40m will reveal some instant coolness).

Before watching the video, all I could really conceive dasher to be useful for was trippy text entry and perhaps as an alternate (but weird) way to zoom through an abstract hierarchy - a replacement for right click menus, perhaps, and certainly an improvement (or welcome alternative) for most consoles' virtual keyboards.

But then the video started going into what was happening behind the hood: The prediction algorithms are simple, but could be effective at destroying TXTing's malformed literary artifacts. While an abc-123 style mobile phone text input encourages you to write like a... well... like a cunt (I got dumped over TXT once, incidentally), Dasher naturally encourages and enables you to spell better, without being a game of Thumb-Twister*.

Dasher could 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 removing 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.

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 encourage the interesting 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, immersive, systemic world, but also disallow the player's ability to create their own pace.

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.

Sleeplessly trying to shift a cold, I played a bit of Aquaria. 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?

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 combined.

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.

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 force) players to develop their songs with respect to a higher level grammar.

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):


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 hierarchy isn't a case of twitching all over the place - you just hold "left".

*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 everyone to make cool stuff more than I want a schaden-freude-hard-on. However, it only took one mistake to fix my schaden-freude-erectile-dysfunction. That reason is this: the PSP text interface. What kind of blind-in-the-thumb SonyEricsson-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 The New Suit), but even that's destroyed as you have to manipulate a cursor, 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.

**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 right, somehow. Luckily, the approach I'm proposing (much like dasher) doesn't stop you playing the "wrong" notes if you happen to think, despite the music model, that they sound about right.