A Path Through Possibility

Vote for Goo!

2008-01-18T04:12:00.001Z

Huge redesign to the game, and I released a public demo. Go vote for it here: http://www.igf.com/audience.php

No longer official site for Goo

2008-01-11T07:10:00.000Z

Hi, Tommy again. Aubrey quit working on Goo and made his goodbye post below, but I've seen that this site is still linked in places as the official site of Goo, PillowFort and Amorphous. Instead, go here: http://www.pillowfortgames.com. More to come soon, I'm just about in the polish stage now and things are really coming together. The redesigning of the controls and core gameplay have really done wonders for the game. GDC is next month and the Audience Award is due on Monday...so I'm burning the midnight oil again. Anyways, change your bookmarks and look for a public demo soon.

The Butterfly is in Full Effect

2007-12-13T11:16:00.000Z

They say that when a butterfly flaps its wings, it can cause a storm on the other side of the world. My father told me recently that although this is sometimes true, typically a butterfly's affect is dampened out into insignificance. The turbulence it generates meets a predominant flow in the ichor of the atmosphere, whose impetuous flow is barely interrupted. Any meaningful causality from that flap hits the equivalent of a brick wall.

For this reason, butterflies do not form a prominent place in the American Military Arsenal. There are no fields of cabbages placed strategically at the polar opposite location of Iran, attracting caterpillars who bloom into storm-generating Weapons of Mass Destruction causing lightening storms, flash flooding, and as an unintended positive effect, allow crop production in the previously arid deserts.

Tommy's asked me to clear up some confusion which probably could have been cleared up a while ago. This may be my last post here. (Edit: That sounds a bit like I'm going to kill myself, apparantly. Don't worry. I'm not going to. I simply meant that I'd be posting on this blog from now on).

For the past 5 or 6 months, I haven't really contributed to Goo. This is because of the depression I've been going though. I guess I won't go into detail about how this disease robbed me of the will to work on a game that I had been planning since I was about 19. Basically, my psychotherapist says I built an enormous castle of expectation on it, and was slain by the performance anxiety guarding the gates.

It's never quite as simple as this, of course. There are many other contributing factors to my decline, but there it is. I got depressed. I choked. I'm still dealing with the guilt of leaving Tommy in the lurch. Now I live, cocooned in my parents house, isolated, dormant, hoping to awaken, but not holding my breath.

During my slow and torturous departure, Tommy took on more and more of the weight of production. Not only has he revised the code almost completely (twice over) he's also had to take on board feedback and make design changes without me*.

I'm still proud to be a part of Goo, even though now it goes on without me. Though my coding contributions have been written into insignificance, I still feel I worked damn hard on the design - at least while I still could. I know it seems like a simple concept - one you wouldn't expect a lot of design for - but simple concepts don't necessarily make for simple solutions. I tried my best to focus on the intrinsic joy of handling the Goo physics, to have the shaders explain the interplay of thick and thin, and thus the unending depth of gameplay even with such a simple concept. I wanted to do it without using gimmicks as a kind of apology for weak core gameplay. I wanted it to be "pure", and enjoyable within that. I even tried to think of what the mechanic was trying to express**, and ways to amplify that. I put a lot of love into Goo. It breaks my heart that it no longer belongs to me. The fact that it took me several months before I finally came to favor my mental well-being over this game ought to be proof enough that my heart needs some glue (Note: not gay slang).

I said, a long time in this blog, that passion is like a fuel, and that when you make a game with no secure income, you need to stock up on passion for the long haul. There's obviously something wrong with that analogy, because I had passion... but somehow my petrol tank exploded. In slow motion. Across a 4 lane motorway. Causing five deaths. 15 injuries. Long tailbacks.

Tommy wanted me to point out - to anyone confused - about who was really behind earning Goo an IGF Technical Excellence nomination, since we both seem to have been credited equally in a few cases. I'm here to say that the IGF technical excellence nomination is all down to Tommy's hard work. My contribution to the technical side was certainly not in implementation - Tommy's coding ability humbled me completely any time I tried to do anything useful. I merely outlined the broad strokes of the technology at the beginning of the project - I'd had this idea (of blending blobs to create a height map, and interpret that through different shader visualizations to create a wealth of different effects) for many years, and had been waiting for hardware to catch up. When the hardware finally arrived to achieve it, I was no-where near expert enough to act upon it. Ideas are one thing, but without implementation, they're just ideas. Without Tommy we'd have nothing.

A butterfly's flaps won't always cascade into a major weather-front. Similarly, as the butterflies around us flap as hard as they can in the hopes of causing a storm, the causal persistence from our own meagre turbulence may be dampened and redirected into other streams of flow. In this life, some of us are destined to work hard and achieve little. I know this is true, because I flapped myself half-empty even before working on Goo, and still have nothing to show for it. Tommy, thankfully (and guilt inducingly) still has a lot of flap left in him. Take it home, buddy!

Oh, and speaking of flapping myself raw, I won't be able to fly to the IGS this year, but I do hope that everyone who goes has a nice time.

Goodbye, caterpillars.

*I don't doubt that the game will be different from what I originally intended, but then, that'd be true even if I were in tip top shape, beavering away along side him. It's typical for games to change as they are made.
**In the same sense as Jon Blow's recent talks mentioning "Meaningful Gameplay" which I always called "Logos ex Machina", because translating English into Latin badly, and putting it in italics instantly raises your IQ by four points.

IGF Nominations!

2007-12-03T15:51:00.000Z

The 2008 IGF nominations just came out! Tommy's excessive hard work has paid off: Goo has been nominated for Tentical Excellence!

Who does Huey Lewis ride with..oh that's right the NEWS

2007-10-11T10:58:00.000Z

Hi, It's Tommy. I've been damn busy over the last few months rewriting engine stuff (basically rewrote about 90% of the code base...in August) but have some stuff to announce. There's a new video for Goo, it is below. It was too big to stick on YouTube (can anyone explain the 10 minute restriction on me...the video was 95MB so that wasn't a problem as they cap at 100MB) so yea, it's hosted on the website now. I'll probably chop it up into two parts later on and post it on YouTube but for now it's on my server. Enjoy.

To watch the higher res version, and find out how you to can embed this video into your crappy blog go to http://goo.pillowfortgames.com/.

In other news, After around a 42 hour crunch during which time I took no break (aside from eating and showering) Goo made it into IGF. Hoorray and what not. I think we have a decent chance to get at least a nomination, but there are some really nice looking and creative games this year...so it's going to be a hell of a competition. Wish us luck...you're not wishing hard enough...I can't feel it...Good..that's better...keep that up.

In other other news, we sent a new build to Microsoft on Monday...and that is all I can say at this point...WOOO SECRETS!

In other other other news, Amorphous is no longer Amorphous. It is now called PillowFort (cute huh?) and as such a new, functional website (no more splash pages) along with a website for Goo will be up hopefully by next Friday. The URLs are http://www.pillowfortgames.com/ and http://goo.pillowfortgames.com/. So yes, to all 8 of you that read this blog, here's your news. Don't really expect another post from me for a very long time. Stop crying, it's for the best.
Love,
Tommy

A Path Through Recovery

2007-09-14T10:06:00.000Z

It's been a while. I know, and I'm sorry. A few people have been in contact due to my lapse in blogging to ask if everything's okay, and if the game is still going.

I'm fine, thanks. The last couple of months have been fairly torturous, but I'm back home in Exmoor now, taking plenty of exercise, and leaning on the support of my family. I was pretty severely depressed in Brixton because of the day to day loneliness, and generally feeling kind of burned out, but I feel like I'm getting back to normal now. Prozac seems to help a bit, but even with it, you can feel stressed out an panicky, so it's by no means a total cure to my situation. Still, I'm recovering and getting back up to speed.

Goo is still going, thanks mainly to Tommy's incredible hard work and persistence. It can't be easy to keep going at this project when the only other person doing the work with you is having a nervous breakdown, but he's soldiered on regardless, and for that I'm eternally grateful.

Tommy's been reworking our engine, making it more efficient and stable. Previously, we had this rather nice feeling physics, but it was unfortunately not very efficient, and could be unstable - explosions of goo, a bit like in DarkMan. Tommy's taken that stuff, and completely re-worked it from the ground up to feel just as nice, but to also maintain stability. He told me that he left it on all night once, by mistake, and it was still stable when he got back. Result! We used to use some fairly devious corruptions of Lennard Jones spring potentials, but ultimately Tommy found that simpler is better, especially where bajillions of spring connections are concerned. We now use very basic dampened springs for our physics.

We're crunching for the IGF at the end of this month. Only two weeks to go. The same build we submit there (which won't be complete, but it's rare for primary IGF submissions to be the final product) will also be sent to Microsoft and hopefully championed internally.

Someone contacted me about World of Goo, and whether we're worried about the similarity in name to our own, "Goo".

I'm really looking forward to World of Goo as I've been watching the output of the Experimental Gameplay Project for a long time now. They've managed to popularize the idea of gameplay prototyping, and I want to kiss them for it. While I found all the experiments interesting in some way, Tower of Goo was the one which was clearly ready for a full production.

Am I worried about the similarity of names? Probably not as much as I should be. It seems like there's a whole micro-industry of games publishers who shovel lookeelikee games into their portfolio in a simple attempt to get mistakenly bought by Grandmas who happily purchase "Grand Thrift Aunt" amidst a confused hunt for similarly acronym'd hit games. It's the only service outside optometry dedicated to cataract suffers.

I wish I had the Machiavellian genius to think so hard about something so cynical, and admit to you, dear reader, that the name "Goo" was born of a desire to rob Kyle Gabler of some well deserved sales. I'm sorry to say that the truth is far more innocent.

The reason we call our game "Goo" is threefold:

Most obviously, you control a sticky, blobby fluid - like a dense oil or quick silver. The subject matter is Goo.
The main aim of Goo is to surround your opponent, much like the ancient eastern board game "Go". In a sacrilegious kind of way, Goo is like a spiritual successor to Go - the same premise but more organic and flowing. So, we added an "o" to represent that natural progression. Clearly, if we did a sequel, it'd have to be called "Gooo" (and have sniper rifles and exploding genitalia).
"Liquid War" was already taken. That's right. When I came up with the idea of Goo, I had never heard of Liquid War, and it was only after checking google to see if that name was taken that I found the game. Definitely worth a look, but if you're worried about the credulity of making a game so seemingly similar to it, I can assure you that Goo plays significantly differently, being based on very different physics and very different controls.

So, I don't know yet if we'll be changing name. I wonder how many sales "God of War" earned due to the proximity of its name to "Gears of War", and vice-versa? Perhaps "Tower of Goo" and "Goo" will be mutually beneficial in that way? Or maybe, the obvious answer is to call our game "Goos of War"?

Any suggestions for new names are welcome, of course! "Liquid War Copying Cunts" is the thing you would write if you enjoy trolling, for example!

In other news, I got into the Bioshock credits!

Bioshock First Review: 10/10

2007-08-03T14:29:00.000Z

I just wanted to give a public shout to my mate JP, and the rest of Irrational, because the first review of Bioshock is out.

I'm not the sort to judge a game by review score alone (so much else is important in a review - whether or not you have an established knowledge of the reviewer: I tend to agree strongly with Tom Bramwell from Eurogamer, for example, so I put more credence in his reviews than with people I know I don't have a shared taste with), but when something gets a perfect ten, you have to sit up and take notice.

Once again, congratulations Irrational! I knew you could do it!

Brixton

2007-07-26T12:02:00.000Z

Not many updates of late. Sorry. It's been a bit hectic recently.

I've moved to Brixton to look after my sister's flat. Nice place, and I've got it all to myself. I'm managing to see a few friends, which is good for the soul.

A couple of weeks ago Tommy showed Goo to our MS Account Manager at PartnerDay. Our original worry was that he thought the gameplay was too slow (sorta confused us when he said this - we think it's pretty fast paced), but as it turns out, he was just referring to the fact that he was running it on a slow computer. Tommy's got this insanely fast laptop which runs the game faster than either of our desktops, so he managed to kill any notion that the gameplay itself was sluggish.

The other issue he had was that the game was too abstract for people to understand when they were coming to it for the first time - if you plonk someone in versus mode, and tell them to play, they won't know what the point of the game is. That point still stands, but I've just finished the voice over for our pitch video which explains in quite a lot of depth the goals, controls, and basic strategies of the game. We're heading off that issue, essentially, and I'm not too worried about it.

We're still not greenlit as a result of the face-to-face. Right now, we really need to put forward a convincing demo, video, and design document, but Tommy says that the reaction to the game from everyone he talked to/showed it to was really positive. Tommy met some other cool indie devs like Ninja Bee and Gastronaut, and said that their expression was always the same upon hearing about the game... wide eyes, and jaws dropping [Correction: these reactions were not from those two, but from people from Activision, Sierra Online, and MS]. We got comments from MS like "This is THE game for live arcade!" and "I've loved this concept since I first heard about it".

This is all lovely to hear (if a bit hyperbolic) since we've been working on this game for over a year now with no real breaks, and you can lose all sense of objectivity. I saw a good video of a talk from one of the fun-motion guys, where Matthew said something along the lines of "With physics based games, you have to change the physics to what you want before the physics changes what you want". In essence, he's talking about the transition between platonic ideal and practical reality. This game is such a simple concept, but the work which has gone on researching and developing an engine for a very different kind of game has been extraordinary. Trying to remember what I originally wanted from the game takes some effort when your nose is to the grind-stone, tweaking endless variables and attraction/repulsion models.

I digress. The problem is, all the positive energy Tommy got was a bit like water off a duck's back for me. We were getting a lot of stuff ready for PartnerDay (and actually didn't end up showing it), and so went into some rather mental crunch. There I was, coming right out of jetlag, and punctuating the crunch by knackering myself hobo-ing around London to find a decent place to work. I was completely exhausted, and incredibly low. I love the game, and love making it, but there's a point where your mind physically refuses to work.

Last weekend I went to my neice's christening. There was a big family party afterwards: around 30 people, family mainly. I was low... maybe not quite as low as when I left my last job, but certainly thoughts of suicide were becoming more frequent. I could barely talk to anyone without feeling like I'd snap, and insult them. I didn't want to do that, so I stayed in my room until the party was over. Social anxiety mixed with depression, and I went into meltdown.

I'm a pretty depressive person at the best of times, but the momentum of tiredness, and the knowledge that we had to go straight into another crunch took its toll. The next day, I went to see a Doctor, and now I'm on some anti depressants and looking for local therapists. I'm not looking to become dependant on pills - depression is a desease, and you have to cure it. I want to get on with life and enjoy my work, so I hope this is just a phase.

At the same time, we're in a pinch right now, and are working harder than is probably healthy. Feels like we don't have much choice but to suck it up and keep working, or the development will last forever - neither of us can afford that. We'd have to lean on our parents way too much.

I guess we can be thankful that it's our choice, rather than some boss or publisher forcing us to stick to impossible deadlines - the difference being that if we really don't feel like the game's up to snuff, we won't force it out of the door. I really just hope, in the long run, we have enough time to give the game the attention it deserves without killing ourselves doing it. Seems like there's no point in this endeavour if we can't do that.

On the brighter side, Jamie Parker, an old war-buddy, is helping us out with some of the art. Right now, our demo has no real cohesive artistic direction. This is because we've been all about getting systems and gameplay working - functionality first. Everything's been placeholder and proof of concept. Right now is a good time to have someone with artistic talent take the reigns. I'd love to do it myself, but... I sort of have enough to worry about.

London

2007-07-02T12:42:00.000Z

I've touched down in London. Now that I have some "micro-funding", I'm able to hobo around various friends'/family's abodes for a small amount of rent money. Right now, I'm at Tim and Chrispy's, stealin' their internets. I couldn't be here without the money I'm getting - It's already solved the issues I had being in a broadband deadzone while working in the countryside, and also the problem of having no social life.

It feels as though for about 6 years I've been detatched from my friends: first there was university, and then there was my previous job abroad. After that there were the trips to America to work with Tommy in his secluded family house, as well as working from my parents' home in equally secluded Exmoor.

We had a small reunion the other night. It felt a bit as though I was coming out of hiding... all these faces I hadn't seen for years.

So much has happened: One friend got a PhD, another was part of a Think Tank, and another turned out to be working at SCEE (which only became apparant after I, erm, "commented" on some of Sony's recent PR problems. Oops). Another came back from his new home in Iceland for a visit. It was great to see them all again, as well as meeting new people, but after years of feeling like a hermit, it was a little overwhelming. I think I had a mild panic attack after someone said that I moved like a robot, and made fun of my clothes (this was at about 4am after my cousin and another friend sorta crashed a party which had already run its course. It felt like we walked into freezer, such was the welcome.)

I'm still pretty poor, here, and the overwhelming sense of capitalism driving London means that I have to make a concerted effort not to make lots of impulse buys as I travel from place to place. Food and cost of living are expensive enough as it is without the constant temptation of the game du jour. I'd love to shell out for some new clothes, but there's no way I can afford them, and also, I get a fantastic false sense of superiority telling people that I'm being ecologically friendly by wearing my clothes for as long as possible. These trainers are over two years old, and are the only casual footware I have.

----

We showed our Demo (see previous post) to our man at MS. Unfortunately, we think he may have been playing it on a single core machine (and our engine requires multiple cores to work). As a result, the game ran incredibly slowly, and he wasn't really able to see what was going on. Then again, he may be referring to the general pace of the game, and that he couldn't really percieve what he was supposed to do, or what the draw of the game really was. He still likes the concept, but as we already know, we've got a ways to go before we have the core mechanic properly framed by a proper user experience (the "beginning, middle, end" of games).

The feedback creates some confliciting feelings for me. On the one hand, he still loves the concept, but on the other hand, pushing 2 sets of 20 crunch wasn't enough to make a convincing demo - it's frustrating to know that hard work doesn't necessarily equal success. Never work hard at the exclusion of working smart, is the moral. We know where to go from here, though...

Tommy's going to an invite-only event on the west coast on the 16th which our guy at MS is also going to (I can't really afford the tickets). We're polishing up what we have so that we can show him the game as it's supposed to be presented.

We're working on this polish-up based on the feedback we've been getting from all over about the video. We've been finding that people who see the game for the first time fall into two categories: the first set of people immediately understand what to do "Oh, I see... you surround their goo with your goo!"; The second set simply get a mental block, and need help understanding what the game's all about.

I'm a bit annoyed with myself: I've seen people wander into development myopathy many times before - so concentrated on what they're doing that they can't have any empathy for the outsider. I promised myself that I wouldn't fall into that trap, and make sure I step back and look at the game with fresh eyes as often as possible. I feel like if people don't get what is a really pretty simple concept ("surround their goo with your goo") I failed my duty there.

We've been in it so deep for so long that when AdamAtomic from TIGsource forums told me "the only reason I really understand it is because I've read your blog", I was taken aback. I'm annoyed at myself for not explaining the game better, and for assuming that everyone should just understand it, and know what "Go" is, and know about Sun Tzu's art of war, and Bruce Lee's "Be water, my friend" quotes. I thought I knew better than to be so presumtuous, but apparantly I fell into a spot of denial about how obvious the game is.

Then again, it is a fairly different game, as buddy JP says "If people aren't lining up colors, or shooting baddies, you're immediately obligated to a lot of explanation."

So, perhaps I shouldn't be too mad at myself, for two reasons: it's par for the course to have a lot of effort put into a tutorial for a game with a non-typified mechanic, and also, tutorials are not the foundation to rest your game on... we needed to make the game before we could explain it. Illucidation will come in time.

Before the 16th, I hope to have a better in-game explanation of what the goal of the game is, how to use the controls fully, and how to maximize your points. I want to do this without putting players through example videos/replays, or by forcing them to jump through hoops. I want something more akin to BattleField 2's wonderful "Teach it as you use it" system... but with Goo rather than helicopters. It's certainly harder to do, but far more satisfying for the player when they aren't boxed into the classroom from the get-go.

It's funny how much of good design is just about thinking hard so that others don't have to.

In Brief

2007-06-21T22:08:00.000Z

Just quickly running down the events of the last couple of weeks, in no detail what so ever.

We pulled a 2x20 hour crunch to get a demo ready for MS. We're now totally exhausted and are recovering. We're not going to do a public video of this version just yet, for a number of reasons: We don't know if it's particularly cool for us to do it with MS's say-so (though, we're independant, so I don't see why not - just trying to be careful); we're too tired/time strapped to do a GOOD video - our previous one was done in a rush; The amount of time I spend replying to feed back:

a) makes me look like a pathetic, overly defensive contestant on a fictional reality TV show called "R U Indie Enuff Squire??" where some mean British Game Developer (Tadhg Kelly in my mind's eye) tells everyone they suck.
b) makes tommy get a bit irritated that I'm obsessing over whatever our public image is becoming (because I am a vain insecure bast), rather than getting on with work.

Since the last demo, we've added a new background/music driven visualization (which is really just our first stab, and a bit of a proof of concept), we've redone the HUD almost entirely (Bars, scores, whizzing text etc.) spruced up the sound and music a lot (thanks Justin!), added rumble, re-coded the menu (still needs lots of work, but it's useable now), improved controls (you can now blend between throwing in a direction, and throwing in every direction by only deflecting the stick half way - subtle, but useful), improved some gameplay things like how "chain captures" are balanced, vastly improved Survival Mode (JP says it's like "Katamari meets Geometry Wars meets Total War"), and... um. Added something like 7 skins to the game, including "crowds of bees!". All in all, not bad for two people (and justin) in 1 month.

In a couple of days I fly back to England. I was sort of dreading this because funds are running low, and my parents are intent on chucking me out of the house ("For your own good!"), thus forcing me to pay rent somewhere, thus forcing me to get a job, thus pretty much destroying my ability to be a useful part of development. However, out of the blue, a patron may have saved us! I've just had a kind of dream-come-true conversation on the phone with him and with Tommy. Don't really know how much I can say, but hopefully our wolves are being kept away from the door due to this last minute save.

It's my last night in North Carolina. I have to pack up my Tower PC, get the over-weight charges ready for my luggage (I really ought to get a laptop, as much as I hate their expensive hard to replace hardware and horrible keyboards), and print my itinerary and various angry letters to expedia just in case their systems didn't update my flight to its new day.

Tommy is suggesting we get married so that I can stay longer. Tempting.

Boring update, sorry. This is good, though.

Some Approaches are more Equal than Others.

2007-06-07T21:49:00.000Z

Delivery of narrative is not the sole purpose of an artistic medium.

I say this because I've just read this article on Bioshock. It's a good article, all in all, and I don't want to deride in in any way. There was just one comment in it which triggered my alarm bells:

The point of BioShock, the raison d'etre, is really the story, and the messages and intellectual content that Levine tries to deliver as a payload. "Look at Lord of the Rings," he challenges. "Why is Lord of the Rings more interesting than random RPG story number 507? They're exactly the same thing. They have orcs and goblins and demons and trolls. But Lord of the Rings is a meditation on power. And it's really interesting because of that. It's what gives it it's heart." And with undenied hubris, Levine's trying to do the same thing with BioShock, while still delivering a game 16-year-old cheese eating high school students will want to play. "We have these philosophical notions, but you've got to deliver. You gotta bring home the monsters. You gotta bring home the superpowers." In short, he's become a commercial realist.

There's nothing wrong with this quote in of itself. Publishers demand returns on investment. Marketing the game as an RPG is not going to give them what they want. Therefore, while Bioshock is heavily RPG oriented (though without the unnecessary complexity which typical RPG convention dictates), the publisher wants to focus the market on the percieveably more accessible action aspects. If Bioshock allows players to take on a gung-ho approach as a viable option whilst also fostering sneaky and cerebral approaches, then it's truer to the root of the term "role playing" than most RPGs. Indeed, many FPS/RPG hybrids have certainly been wanting on the pure-FPS side, almost forcing your expression away from Rambo-ism via inadequate core controls. So again, if Bioshock pulls it off, I'm happy that it won't be an implicit cost to other sides of the game.

My issue here is that the implication from Levine (or rather, inference from the author) that the "shooter" aspect exists merely to sate base desires in the mass market and to deliver a story payload, seems to me to be an incredulous amplification. I know a developer on Bioshock, and although I'm not privy to details on the game (bless his NDA fearing socks), I am aware of the design philosophy that guides him. Because I know this, something about the above doesn't add up for me. The view that low level mechanics, proprioception, and feel are in any way less important than the overall message of the game does not match with what I perceive to be their attempts a more symbiotic relationship between the two.

The idea that Narrative and Ludology must together form a master/slave relationship is an old one, and one I had hoped was dead by now. I'll sum it up briefly for anyone who is unfamiliar: How can an interactive medium produce a coherent story without compromising the author's intent, or the player's expression? Who has the reigns of the story; player or author? Surely it cannot be both? It has taken a while for people to calm down and understand that there doesn't have to be a conflict of interest, but you get the occasional article in the press fanning the ashes of a long burnt out debate, hoping to ask a wider audience into this initially ferocious debate, generating a little advertising revenue, no doubt. What's the final point which settles the argument?

Logos Ex Machina*: The Message/Idea in the Machine. Through the forging of a path through possibility (HAY THAT'S THE NAME OF THIS BLOG!!) systems generate stories (or at least, "series of events": "Jump, Jump, Break Block" is hardly Dickens) but at a more abstracted level, systems describe and explain emergent behaviours. In other words, they portray a message/idea in their own way - in a way which is fundamentally different to painting, sculpture, dance, writing, film or any other artform.

When you play Civilization, you can derive an understanding about why, say, the US is in Iraq: From your needs as a player, you grow to understand that you need to dominate resources to fuel a war machine to conquer the world to dominate resources. In the Sims, you see countless truisms in life - our credence of the capitalistic lifestyle and worship of material goods: "The things you own end up owning you", or that there's a fine balance to be struck between all your base needs if you want to be happy and productive. These are not explicit stories - they are messages woven deep into the fabric of an interactive system either by masters of the art form, or by lucky shits with unintended messages to spread. Their exposition is a natural systemic inevitability through the emergence of gameplay, rather than a forced contrivance in a cutscene.

With this in mind, there is no conflict between player and designer for authorship. Both are free to express themselves at different levels, feeling each other's will/intent without an authoritive power struggle.

Clearly there is an overall narrative string in Bioshock, but the progression from System Shock 2 and Thief seems to show that Levine is more and more being reborn as a storyteller who is embracing the strengths of the medium. This is refreshing considering that many die hard storytellers in games see a player's agency as a nuisance; as an affront to their own creativity.

The Narrative, in Bioshock's case, is just one expression of the underlying idea. It is amplified by the gameplay, and vice versa, since both gameplay and narrative are striving to explain the same thing. That moral choice to bio-engineer ones' self, or save a population if little girls is wrought implicit in the fundamental gameplay - moment by moment actions bear out themes in the story, and in more way that one! The openness of possible expression in your approach ("Rambo" for the slack jawed joes, "cerebral" for the poncey art fags) is bookended by a difficulty at either extremity: "All guns blazing" is possible but apparantly difficult; "Tower Defense: the FPS" likewise is hard to survive on alone, but is fully catered to. A mix of strategies, therefore, may be the easiest route, matching the "Fundamentalism is Baaad" overtones which the story tries to express.

I should also mention that the level design also re-enforces the narrative message: it's a sprawling the mis en scene. That's the technique it uses best to describe that same message - the ubiquotous conflict between the arrogance of imposed structure and penetrating waters embodying nature's malevolence: fundamentalisms causing conflict.

The point is, it's a three way symbiosis between exposition of the story, exploration of the physical/virtual world, and experiencing the varied strategies. Level Design, Gameplay, and Narrative are naturally intertwined: That's because this is not a case of "Which came first: Chicken or Egg; Story or Mechanic". It works because every cardinally aligned medium employed in the game is its own expression of a single unified idea. Using the message as a seed, each part of the medium grows out to express the same thing, in their own unconflicting terms - on those different, non conflicting layers.

I don't mean to imply that "Narrative as master" is a red herring, or that "You must have a story to justify a game mechanic". I don't believe either of those things - I welcome all approaches. I just felt that the idea that Bioshock delivers its message in one medium only, or that the other media utilized are subserviant, is false, and discredits the work that I know has gone into the game. Delivery of narrative is not the sole purpose of an artistic medium. Delivery of the idea is. And you can do it any bloody way you feel like. And you don't even have to be intentional about a message, because it's ultimately all in the interpretation!

I don't mean to sound like I think Levine indicted his own team, either. You know what I think happened? I think that a passionate journalist takes measures to dig deeper into details. I think Levine sensed that this guy is more interested in the higher level story, and placates him with more information about that side, playing to his wants, as every good designer should. Journalist (somehow) takes this as an implicit damning of what he percieves as a "lesser art" - that of basic interaction... kinaesthesia.

This whole post seems like an over-reaction to most, I'm sure. The reason that I rebut this incredibly minor point with this many words' worth of effort is because the idea that any one part of a game is more important to the medium than any other, by extension, denigrates what I'm trying to do with Goo: a focus on feel, and an expression of something greater through that one quality.

Just to show that I'm not being a total fanboy, I leave you with this Bioshock cover art, and the first words that sprung into my mind upon seeing it:

"Cowabunga, dudes!" :/

*Forgive me for a fruity embellishment which is probably translated wrong :/

There are two parts to me...

2007-06-05T04:38:00.000Z

Seems like I've been posting more than ever! COOL. This post is in two parts, one is for everyone, and the other is for everyone.

Part 1: You aren't special

Aubrey has brought to my attention that a lot of you "like" that I hate you. Let me just inform you, that you are in no way special to me. I don't hate you because you're an indie developer, or some kind of minority, or some sort of a person. I hate everyone. "Hahah, Tommy hates me...COOL". Hahaha, laugh it up suckslut, it's not a joke. I really have no respect for you or anything you do or say. Now, you may be asking yourself "Wow... I wonder why he..." let me cut you off right there. There's no reason that I hate you other than that I don't know you. If I don't know you, you are by default a jerk. For all you programmers out there...this is how the world was created in reference to me:

memset(people, jerk, sizeof(person) * population);

Get it? Good. If I did know you, I might not hate you but we'll never know, will we? So to all you people that think "Hahaha that's cool, he hates people" Fuck off. This isn't a joke, the comments left don't make me hate you or like you. In fact, there's no way possible I could hate you more.

Part 2: Cats are awesome

Cats are awesome. I like cats. Cats have paws and some claws. My cat, Evil, is big. He's a big cat. I like cats. Cats are better than dogs because dogs are not as good as cats. Cats can jump higher than dogs. Cats have fur, noses and ears. A cats ears can fold backwards. Cats also have tails. Cats move their tails sometimes to show how they feel. Cat eyes can see in the dark. Cats are better than dogs because dogs aren't as good as cats. I love cats.

Thanks for the Interest

2007-05-30T17:09:00.000Z

Well, we've announced the game now, which gives me the luxury of being able to tell you in detail about details you really didn't want to know details of: for example, Tommy just finished our instancing management, which means we can finally have the famous crowds of beees! They're in there, and moving around nicely ontop of a bee hive surface which grows as they move around (clever shader stuff going on there). Just by pure luck of emergence, when the bees are about to be captured, they look a bit scared, like they're trying to escape the other goos' clutches!

Right now, we're trying to pull the demo together properly so that it can be shown to interested parties. We're finishing off game modes, totally revising our menu (which was a bit of a quagmire of prototype code), re-doing the HUD, polishing sounds (thanks Justin). We're also doing a proper background audio-viz, which will be taking a leaf from the demoscene book (though hopefully not to the point of plagurism!).

Because of the video, we were linked from a few places, and got more than twenty one hits! Over 4 days! Amazing!

Feedback on the video has been really useful, and highlighted issues that we'll work on, or atleast explain better. I should say, by way of excuse, that we had been coding for 20 hours before we started recording that video, and stayed up another 6 hours editing. I feel tired just thinking about it.

Some people didn't immediately get that the core point of the game was to capture Goo by surrounding it. I guess we've been working on it so long that it seemed self evident to us (and other people felt that way about it, too). Still, in the next video, we'll have to make that painfully clear.

It also wasn't clear/convincing from the video that the game is one of those "simple but deep" affairs. People suggested that it needed more buttons, or powerups, or levels, or just more perceivable complexity. I've always thought of it as "Liquid Go", hence the title of the game. Go's incredibly simple, and unarguably deep. I really want to keep a hold of that property, and would argue that once you try the game, you'll very quickly become aware of the interplay of density and territory: with territory, capturing is easier, but it's easier for your goo to be divided by slicing attacks. With density, it's harder to be punctured, but you're smaller, slower moving, and easier to surround.

Of course, Go is turn based, so you have time to think with your higher consciousness. Goo is much faster, and therefore becomes more about experimenting with strategies and seeing their results immediately, which helps you to build quickly an intuitive sense of strategy. You're creating instinctive reactions. It's still strategy, but at a different level to Go's. Gillen said it was like "Protozoic StreetFighter", and that feels right on the money. StreetFighter 2 might be button masher to people when they first come to it, but you get a sense of flowing strategy pretty quickly if you give it any time.

On the other end of the scale, people said that it could potentially get too chaotic. From the beginning of development, I've been vigilant about this. We've worked really hard to create a physics model which we can tweak to perfection. I investigated fluid dynamics early on, and found that things like Navier Stokes (a fairly realistic approach) weren't going to suit this style of gameplay. Navier Stokes gives rise to chaotic outcomes very quickly. For me, this isn't usually a useful quality for a player - if their input in the game turns into "noise" too immediately, they don't feel a sense of Perceivable Consequence. Success, failure and consequence in general don't feel like direct results of player input - instead they're due to the seemingly random (but, infact, chaotic) whim of the fluid model being used.

Some games have used it to good effect, mind you, but I don't think it would have worked here where intuitive and expressive control is a prominent goal. The point is, it's far more important to give people a good sense of control than to have purely "realistic" physics - the two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but very often in games, the latter takes precedent over the former.

We use a pseudo soft body physics model - hundreds and thousands of points have connecting and disconnecting spring forces between them, as well as friction. Points from different goos have a different relationship, so that they don't overlap too readily, and so that fast moving blobs can scythe through the enemy, or have their movement slowed by the enemy's density. This gives us an atomic level of control. After tweaking these base forces enough, you get a sense of how these changes affect the higher level gameplay, and all of a sudden, you've got this plyable goo which works for you, rather than despite you. At the same time, all gameplay is an emergent result of these simple spring forces, so it doesn't feel like the physics have been contrived... it feels believable, even though they're unrealistic. That's kinaesthetic verisimilitude, word fans!

Still, if none of this sense of control is immediately clear in the video (go fig. It's not interactive), then we probably have to present it better. The BeeHive skin certainly helps explain goo density and behaviour a lot more transparently than previous goos have, so we can get there.

Blah, I'm wandering off into random thoughts. Thanks for your attention span.

To those that give a shit:

2007-05-22T03:11:00.000Z

Hi,

This is Tommy. I am the engine programmer, I program the engines. That's not to be confused with "injins" which my peepaw calls Native Americans. For the record, I don't program Native Americans...if I did they wouldn't have been so anxious to trade everything west of the Appalachain Mountains for 8 shiney pots and a belt buckle. Plus they would have had many more particle effects.

Anyway, to all 4 people that read this blog, here is our video. We sent this to Microsoft the other day and they liked it. We had a call with them and I thought it was good but Aubrey didn't take the news so well. It's not that there's anything wrong with Aubrey, it's just that as a child his parents beat him with a rake whenever he smiled. I understand this to be the norm in England. Anyway, here's the video. DON'T EVERYONE GO AT ONCE OTHERWISE YOUTUBE WILL EXPLODE.

.wmv - Higher Quality video, limited bandwidth.

Love,

Tommunism

P.S. Clyde McParkstein is avaliable for weddings and bar mizvahs.

Tomorrow or the next day, we'll know.

2007-05-13T19:46:00.000Z

We're submitting a Work-in-progress demo and a video of our game to MS pretty soon. We have at least another 4-6 months development left, so hopefully they'll see past the issues of polish and unfinishedness. Still, I am nervous. Tommy keeps playing this song to cheer me up:

He must not realize that I hate all ginger kids without exception.

Go get a proper job!

2007-05-04T20:14:00.000Z

It sounds like the most pathetic thing in the world, but this game could easily be canned by my own Mum.

I'm currently on no income, and have to mooch off my parents in order to have a place to work on this game. Tommy's the same way. Luckily for Tommy, he has supportive parents. It's not quite the same case for me. My Dad seems pretty much fine with what I do, being a big nerd himself and having some appreciation of what goes into a development like this. My mother finds technology fairly repellant. As such, she has no natural interest for computers, games, or technology in general. In 2004 she finally caved and bought a microwave. I can count the number of times she's used it on two hands (though this might actually be a blessing. Microwaves. Feh.). She used to use computers for work in the 80's, but when the mouse was introduced, she pretty much refused to use computers. I don't blame her - cheaper ball-based mice were jumpy affairs at the best of times. I've thrown a few at co-workers when they've given me the critical mass of frustration. That's why I didn't allow myself a cordless one until 7 months ago - many a potential lawsuit was avoided thanks to a 1.5 meter cable snapping taught.

Bottom line, as a bonafide luddite, my Mum doesn't actually like my career choice at all. She sees games as probably the lowest form of art possible, and she'd use the world "art" grudgingly and with little finger quotes, too. Let me put it this way: even though she thinks that comics are for "street urchins and commoners", she'd still find it preferable if I drew cartoons rather than make games. Imagine Mrs. Bucket and Mary Whitehouse rolled into one, and you see my dilemma.

When I get home from Tommy's, I've got around a month at my parent's house before I'm kicked out. I'm dreading it. I'm not sure how I can possibly focus on the game while earning money, tracking down places to stay etc. It's as good as canning the game, and yet she insists "it's for your own good". She's worried that I don't have a social life, (and I am too!) but if we don't nail this first game, I'm worried that the company will be killed in utero.

Being kicked out is despite the fact that of all the video-games I've ever seen her come in contact with, this is the only one she's been able and willing to try. Now, perhaps she's being polite, but she was absolutely able to play the game (and had no chance with K, incedentally). We've kept it that simple.

I know lots of people who felt alienated by games' percieved high levels of violence, over-complication and sameyness. They're non gamers, through and through, preferring a nice book instead. I've asked them to try our game, even though they've told me that they hate games due to their crass image, or how punishing they can be to newcomers. When they pick up the controller, they seem instantly surprised at playing such a welcoming game. They're confused at the idea that they might like a game. How could they like a video game when games are for spoddy 4-eyed friendless geeks? Will they have to buy new clothes now? Do they have to ditch 75% of their accumulated friendships? What can nerds eat anyway? Will they have to stop having sex for years on end?? It's all so confusing!

It's actually helped development just knowing that there are so many people in my life who haven't been interested in experiencing the joys of interactivity. I see why. From their perspective, there's no entrance point to the cacoon we've weaved ourselves, and watching most gamers as they adopt their zen-autism in order to interact with a complex game hardly makes it look like an enjoyable activity. These are the opinions of people too scared, judgemental, or in fear of being judged to try games for themselves. It's far easier to dismiss them as algae snacks for cultural bottom-dwellers.

When some games try to entice these potential patrons in, (like early Wii games) it's unfortunate, but they don't seem to even scratch the cacoon's surface with their shallow gimmicks. Thus, players are left wondering "What's the big deal with games? They're shallow novelties!". Such games are getting people to pick up a controller, sure, but sadly they're not really showing these newcomers how enthralling the depths of interactivity can be. To have someone understand the appeal of great games, you have to do both in the same stroke (I think Guitar Hero succeeds here). The cliche "Easy to Learn, Hard to Master" seems to be pervasive in interviews and pitch documents. Sadly, it's rarely as true as people would like to believe.

I have to conclude that there's no point enticing people in without showing them the spectrum of joy found in interactivity - from simple surface verbs to deep causal chains of events. It's still easier to require current gamers to jump through less-than-elegant hoops in order to find depth-through-complication within re-hashed works, minnovation occasionally sprinkled ontop. That seems like a shame to me.

So, in a weird kind of way, I've been making this game for my mother. Sadly, she doesn't recognize how ironic it is that she might be canning it.

----

We're in a self imposed crunch right now. The game's coming along pretty well. The other day, I was setting up a single player mode (somewhere between Geometry Wars and Tetris) when we decided to try co-op (up to 4 players) on a whim. Tommy jumped in, and started controlling the avatar with me.

Now, as everyone knows, co-op makes any game better purely through the shared experience you're giving people. It can be like a bridge for both of you into a different plane where your minds meet in tackling the same problems. Something about this game really capitolized on co-op, though. I think it was because we were both in control of so many common entities at once, and could very quickly tell what the other person was doing, and help out. On the flip side, we were never disruptive to each other: we could both work in parallel or perpendicularly, and still not accidentally hurt each other's immediate plans. We could suggest and enact strategies so quickly that it felt like we were reading each other's minds. The game was an efficient mind-bridge, and we were working as one. I've felt that before in other games, but never so densely and immediately as this.

At that moment, I lost a whole lot of stress about whether or not the gameplay was going to be good enough. Any doubt about how practical the concept is has been lifted. I'm convinced that we're almost there.

To that end, we're trying to get a demo/recording of our game ready for MS to see. It'll still be without polish, but I think the concept should be strong enough for them to endourse. A green light might save me from being kicked out, too.

Shaolin kode-fu

2007-04-14T18:26:00.000Z

Yesterday I didn't get a spot of work done due to pulling a neck muscle while sleeping. It's kind of annoying to be bed-ridden when you could be procrastinating.

Instead, I did a bit of research. Me and Tommy stayed up late taking a look at the recent fruits of the demo scene, looking for inspiration for fancy viz for our game. Previously, we've mainly been concerned with just getting the functionality working correctly, and art has been on the backburner. We're getting to the point where we have to start thinking about pulling something a little special for our graphics.

It's been a while since I've looked at stuff from the scene. I used to think that the demo scene was basically just about making a few shiney metablobs with a nice bit of camera work, or some graphical effect so intense that there's no CPU left over for interaction, game play code, or AI. They were beautiful aphrodisiacs as far as technical fetishism went, but there was never any real artistic cohesion to them. It was mostly just procedural navel gazing.

Perhaps I didn't look at a broad enough range of demos, because coming back to them, I feel like my presumptions were wrong in fifty different ways. There are now such a wealth of different techniques being nailed in real time that what separates a good demo from a merely mediocre one seems to be the direction - using the effects to good effect, rather than just for the sake of showing off some mad coding skill.

Check out Chaos Theory by Conspiracy, a 64K demo - one of my favorites from our binge last night. If you watch your Task Manager's memory use per application, it's kind of amusing. You see chaostheory.exe starts with just about 1meg at the start to around 213megs after all the procedural content has been generated. Amazing stuff.

I'm told that there are far better demo examples than this (despite it being completely impressive to me) so if you have tastes for something a bit different, have a look around: pouet.net and scene.org have a metric eyestab-tonne of others to get some inspiration from.

We look at these visuals with envious eyes: They're all realtime, so we know that they ought to be possible to produce in games. You get to wondering why more games don't have this level of polish, in or outside the indie arena. Tommy points out that it's easier to make these sorts of things scream when there's no interactivity to worry about. I've been doing some fractal tree based stuff for our menu (not dissimilar to the matrix nesting tricks I've seen in some of the demos), so I can attest to the difficulty of enabling users' input to be a persistant part of the parameter set. If you don't bound your input ranges to something manageable, you end up with crappy looking procedural results. If you bound them too tight, you lose the feeling of interactivity. It's tricky, and certainly 'part art, part science'. The demo scene has a lot to teach indies and mainstream game developers alike, but developers have to be aware that there is not total overlap between the two. Just because something runs realtime doesn't necessarily mean it's suited to be interactive - that's not (often) the aim of a good demo.

I don't mean to sound negative about that. We have massive respect for the community, and hope to some day learn more deeply of their ways. I really feel like joining up with the scene and learning from their community would be like training under some kind of Shaolin Master (Will Wright obviously feels the same, because a lot of his Spore crew were supposedly recruited from the scene) but as Bruce Lee's philosophy of Jeet Kun Do states, all learning should be tuned toward discovering your own inherent style. Don't follow one master blindly.

Pictures from a Place in Space.

2007-04-04T17:24:00.000Z

Here is Tommy's house in North Carolina. It's built into the side of a hill because his family couldn't afford all the walls.

This is what life looks like if you're a sexual predator, I should imagine.

These are important scribbles, or if you are David Jaffe, An Entire Design Document . Zzziiinng!

That's Tommy, playing Street Fighto 2. He doesn't look diabetic, does he? Well he's not! Or atleast, he was misdiagnosed with Diabetes type 1, but actually has the type 2. For the past month, he's been injecting himself with insulin needlessly. NEEDLE-LESSLY. HAH! Insulin will probably be his gateway into Heroin.

It was a scarey time when he was diagnosed with type 1... for me. I was really worried for him, and even got "Sympathy Diabetes". Sympathy Diabetes is exactly like Diabetes, but without any of the symptoms of Diabetes. It is a well documented phenomenon - the phenomenon of being actually fairly healthy despite everyone around you ruining it all by being sick. (Hey look, there's Captain Torso who we punch because he can't fight back!)

This illustration on the top of Tommy's Teenage Mutant Ninja (Hero if you're from the UK) Turtles: Turtles in Time cab makes me laugh every time I see it, which makes work really difficult since I like to keep looking at it all day, or when I'm sad, which is all day.

Here's my rig. As you can see, I have been drinking rather stupid amounts of coke. Lazier games journalists like to measure game development effort in litres of coke and slices of pizza. I don't know why. Doesn't seem to me like a particularly scientific way to measure effort. Journalists also like to mark games' quality using marks out of ten, though, so at least they're consistent with their pointless metrics. Don't get me wrong: I like journalists, but only when they are using their powers to make fun of game developers, because they're all asking for it.

An alternate view of my desk. I eat ginkgo pills even though I'm not sure if there's any conclusive research to show that they actually improve your focus. The packaging re-iterates this by saying "Improves Focus ASTERISK Only Joking". Similarly, I have no proof of this, but I think they definately cause cancer.

There goes my last 400 quid

2007-03-25T12:01:00.000Z

I'm going to America tomorrow, to visit Tommy! I may drop by Boston on the way back, possibly to see one of the MIT interface groups with my Dad, and possibly to see JP (of Irrational) and Karla, who I have been wanting to meet for years.

The past few days I've been storming through sound specs for Justin. I used our wiki, and I feel like my abilities on it have levelled up since I found out about "transcluding".

Basically, you use transcluding to import the contents of another page. So say you've got two pages which need common information on them - you don't want to have to copy/paste one bit of info into the other, and you don't want to have to update both when information changes. So, for the common piece of information, you set up a new page, and use {{:WikiWord}} to import that page into your other two pages. Update the common information page, and the changes fill down! Really useful! I also hear that you can transclude from individual subheadings in a page, without using the entire page, but it's not supported in the old version of MediaWiki we're using.

Kind of refreshing to get back to documentation after pure coding and back and forth-design as it has been with Tommy. Our wiki went out of use previously, just because it's a bit of a full time job managing it, and I only had one person to inform about design changes. It was a bit redundant, and really just nothing but overhead work. Now that Justin is involved, it's useful to get specs down where both Tommy and he can see them.

People are being very nice about my dumped game, "K", recently. I'm thinking that it might be due a revisitation after our current game, possibly as a bit of an open project (and certainly as a side project for me - I have other ideas I want to seed after this). I could get a public wiki going for the design document, forums for discussion, and hopefully attract dip-in-collaborators to help like Guy Balding has done.

Ofcourse, dip-in-collaboration depends entirely on the attractiveness of the venture offset by the difficulty of producing work for it. Guy Balding is perfect, because pixel art is not percieved as difficult (even though it does take real talent to make really good pixel art), and the project has been started by people who really know their stuff in that realm - it's an unabashed pixel wank, and there's no way your mother's going to open the door and spoil it all. Arne and BMcC are being excellent wayfairers on the project, and I'm looking forward to freeing some time to get some more jump animations done. Might be a while yet, though.

HeadHunted!

2007-03-20T12:56:00.000Z

I've just been headhunted for the first time! Well, alright. It's the second time, but the first didn't really count. More on that later.

After seeing a capture of "K", the abstract shmup I worked on during/after uni, someone from one of the big companies asked if I'd be interested in doing prototyping. Obviously, I had to decline (our game comes first), but being asked to work in prototyping was really tempting. I'm glad that prototyping is something that's being taken seriously by the big guys - it seems like the only realistic way to push new ideas forward without risking vast sums of money.

Rudolf Kremers from Beautiful Game Studios told me that the longer you're in the industry, the more frequently you'll be propositioned. While this first time was certainly flattering, I can imagine it could get boring, especially when you get the more pushy agents lying through their teeth about a company which you know (from other sources) isn't all it's cranked up to be. But he says, "No, no. It's all fuel for the ego!". Good-o!

The first time I was headhunted, I was 17. I had just finished the less popular second version of Matrix Quake. Cevat Yerli of Crytek (at that time just a tech-demo house - I think only X-Isle had been released) saw this and asked me if I'd like to code on their new project.

Precocious, naive little shit that I was, I thought I had hit the big time. It was a dream come true! I was ready to drop everything and get to work, even though I had less than 3 years of coding experience under my belt - not even coding, really: more like high level C / scripting. I was ready to ditch my A-Level retakes (retakes due to too much modding and not enough study in the 6th form). In the end, my parents intervened and told me that I could only code remotely. I'm glad they stepped in, because the next two weeks were pretty silly:

I started off as a game play coder on an unannounced title, working from the school computers (the only internet I could access at the time!). The next week, it seems that the Lead Coder left the project, and I was promoted to Lead. It was only then that I got to see the game engine and design documents.

A fellow modder was previously brought on board to design the weapons in this game. He was renowned for creating some of the most... erm... "unrestrained" weapons designs on the scene. The weapons were designed with real passion. Whole pages were dedicated to pulp sci-fi elaborations on the history of the weapons, their manufacturers, and their most prolific users. As a sort of side note, you got one sentence descriptions of the functionality.

Being a mechanic-centric sort of guy, I complained (probably in far stronger words than were necessary). I don't remember if I got a response from the Project Lead, because mysteriously, the very next week, I was promoted to that same position.

It was then that I realized that I was just a 17 year old, who had only made games by standing on the shoulders of giants, and that I was in no position to take on this work while studying for A-Levels. Needless to say, I felt like a prick for walking away, but there wasn't much else I could do in the situation.

A couple of ECTS's later, I saw Cevat giving an interview to G4 (I think?) in front of his FarCry booth. Everyone at the show was swooning over the game, so I went to see what the fuss was about. I gave it a go behind him as he did his little pitch to the cameras.

I needed to invert the mouse to play, so I went to the options. Unstable as most convention builds are, the game crashed on me, possibly in plain view of the camera. Realizing that I might have created a PR blunder, I looked left, and looked right, and ran outta there as fast as I chubby legs would carry me. If I wanted, I could claim it was a sort of weak attempt at revenge, assuming I had any lingering resentment toward the company. But I don't. These things happen, especially in start-ups.

----

The menu is coming on really well since I broke its back. Tommy and I are working on a way to keep each game mode's menus in their respective DLL so that the main menu can populate its special case game mode related pages just by looking in a game mode directory. This extra work up front makes it incredibly easy for us to add new game modes without having to change the core game. You need that kind of handling if you want to be able to submit downloadable content/game modes without having to resubmit your core download for QA.

Downloadable content has only really recently evolved from buzzword to technically understood possibility. I think a lot of people rushed in, attaching the phrase to their pitches for sexification, not realizing that the process of making extra content starts with planning way before the core downloadable is ever finished. If you start after the game's done, you're encumbered with a lot of retrofitting to make things work. Just sayin'.

The Collective Unconscious

2007-03-18T19:56:00.000Z

From Blather, Rinse, Repeat.

Chaim Gingold had a presentation which was the closest thing to a Will Wright talk, both in terms of content and presentation. His discussion was looking at the "possibility space" of a tool (Maya has a huge space; it can model almost anything. Sim City has a smaller space; it can only model cities), the "probability space" of a particular user with that tool (put a random guy in front of Maya, he won't produce much, and it'll be a different set of stuff than a trained 3d artist would create), and the "desirable space" (harder to define, but if you can make a tool that makes it easy to create good stuff and hard to make bad stuff, you've won). The basic idea isn't hard to grasp, but I appreciated the vocabulary for the discussion, and the examples of how Maxis has struggled with the tools they'll be providing Spore players.

Gosh, this sounds familiar (I'll have to continue that article, but I'm playing catchup, it seems. Oh, and I'll have to conform to the new established terminology, rather than the stuff I pulled out of my bum).

It seems like every year there's a couple of opinions, methodologies, or concepts which I've had developing in my head, and regular as clockwork, GDC always brings someone along who introduces these to a wider populance's attention, ~~as if they thought up the ideas all by themselves~~.

I'm not sure I believe in the idea of a Collective Unconscious in the magical spiritual sense, where new ideas crop up simultaneously in different people across the world due to some ethereal force. I think we just react to similar stimulous in similar ways, coming up with similar solutions to similar problems. In games design, I get this a lot. I'm sure a lot of designers do. We play the same games, and see the same flaws in implementations, and start to consider the same ways to fix them.

Surely, everyone at one time or another has said "Oh, man! I had that exact idea!" when something like Spore or Little Big World or Mercury Meltdown comes out, only to have someone immediately respond "So why didn't you do anything about it then?".

We gripe about it a bit. It feels like we're never in the right position to make "Awesome Game Paradigm X" or to solve world hunger, even though we all know how (feed people, obviously).

It gives me a bittersweet feeling: On the one hand, it makes your personal mental acrobatics feel completely futile. Why should you think these important matters through when someone else can get it done faster, and smarter than you? Think of all that synapse growth you wasted! You could have used that for remembering more Virtua Fighter button combinations!

At the same time, you do feel vindicated. You can't be that crazy if someone else has come to the same conclusion as you. You do start to think about claiming on your Tin Foil Hat's warranty though, which typically has just run out.

I guess the only answer to stop this simultaneous uncredited authorship happening is to widen your horizons, and start accepting a broader range of inspirations (as well as not thinking things through quite as logically?). Step outside the narrow back alley of culture which starts with Aliens and ends in Lord of the Rings.

Respect other people's creativity, and then move on: As much as one might love the combined legacy of the Looking Glass alumni (who have built up a good 40% of my all-time-top-ten-games), one can't keep praying to the Lord Satan for their demise just so that you can jump in and abhor the creative vaccuum, claiming your rightful place on the throne of their creative lot. You have to establish your own unique axis of creativity... but only if you want to. No-one has to have a chip on their shoulder about innovation in games, of course!

With such a young medium, there's so much obvious common ground to explore that maybe we forget to spread our wings, sometimes. Taking a step off the beaten path is currently not creatively difficult (just financially), and sometimes we pick pretty obvious un-beaten paths to surge along. It's not important to innovate for the sake of innovation, obviously, but considering how narrow our current game-space is, it's surprising we don't innovate more, just by mistake. Seriously, is law of averages on strike or something?

Oooh, I know! Let's blame the big evil faceless games industry's unwillingness to court new idea...*ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

----

I've just cracked a big problem I was having with my zooming menu interface. It's something I've smashed my head against for a few weeks (on and off) so I'm rather chuffed with myself. When it's more complete, I may put a video up, with the game proper all blurred out, 'natch.

Indie Vanity and Motivation

2007-03-04T15:22:00.000Z

There are a lot of thing you have to bear as an indie developer. Not least of them is the loneliness you may take on. At first it's quite the luxury to get on with whatever you want, undisturbed and ungoverned. Then you start to miss the human contact. Then you start to wonder what the point of it all is. And then find it hard to get out of bed, because the dried tears make you stick to the sheets.

Tommy and I work separate from one another, purely because we can't currently afford a place of our own. As a result, our only communication is through instant messenger and the occasional phone call. Technically, this hasn't been an issue - text is condusive to code-talk because you can be copy-pasting bits of code across to each other, linking website sources, and generally disambiguating your sentances more. IMing is second nature to us because we've grown up with the IM culture.

We have close to no social lives (probably why we're so good at Instant Messages), and a real lack of human contact outside our families (who we live with and leech off). It can get us down quite often.

Mainly, I think it's a sense of appreciation that we lack most. We don't tell anyone about our game publically because we're really not ready to show anything, so we have very little feedback on how others think the game is going. Ofcourse, this emptiness is caused completely by vanity, but vanity is a human need none the less.

My parents aren't exactly versed in videogames (especially my Mum, who yesterday recoiled at the absolutely jaw dropping new* Bioshock walkthrough), and can only give me moral support while asking when I'm going to get a "proper job". They can't tell us "This game will be great", because they simply don't know enough about games to give me an honest opinion.

Tommy's parents are much nicer about what we do, so Tommy often finds himself having to boost my confidence by showing me pictures of electric supercars which can fly and how we'll be driving them around in outer space, this time next year (Rodney).

When vanity gets the better of us we'll make videos of our progress and send them to trusted friends if only for some short term appreciation. But we're showing them real work-in-progress stuff (which, incedentally, you should never, ever show to publishers - hit them with something polished). Thus, the people who are enthusiastic about it are the ones who see past the placeholder graphics, unfinished features and questionable stability, and appreciate the promise of the game. And God bless 'em, because they put the proverbial wind in our sails.

I mention all this because if there's one thing never lacking in a bigger studio, it's someone with an opinion. Even if it's a really negative opinion, at least you're surrounded with people who are interested enough to comment. When you don't have that, there's a real struggle to keep yourself motivated, despite even the most creatively stimulating concepts. You have to find a way to knuckle down and plough through these dark patches. Maybe just take a little break? Go visit a friend. Play some other games. Try rather too hard to make people on internet forums like you.

One excercise I've been doing to help my motivation is keeping a secret diary (complete with secret thoughts) where I write out what I'm going to do today, or the next day, and also what I've achieved since the last post. It's accessible to a tiny number of incredibly trusted individuals. In writing it, I'm forced to focus on what my goals are, and how to achieve them - a sort of mini design session which sets me up for the day. By letting others see it, I feel my vanity bar is filled (even though it's now so boring that I doubt any of them bother reading it).

Maybe you have your own ways to pep yourself up? I'd love to hear them. God knows I need them.

*I say "new" - this version of the game was from a behind closed doors demo at X06 last year, so it's what... 4-5 months old? Check out how easy to use the Telekenisis is, and how much of a step up the particle effects have taken since the previous demo.

The First Phonecall

2007-02-28T13:21:00.000Z

Our phone meeting has been and gone, and I'm sorry I didn't update immediately after it. I haven't been crying alone for the last 72 hours or anything.

The meeting was actually fine, but since we're under NDA, I can't really say too much about it, unless it's in the form of a commentary on an interpretive dance:

Tommy and I appear stage right, while a troupe of chimps, lead by an ominous looking bald man in a wheel chair appear stage left. In the middle is our Biz manager, trying to tell the difference.

On second thoughts, no. This... this is beyond my ability. I'll simply recount a bit of what happened without breaking the NDA, though to be honest, I don't think we talked about all that much which could be a breach of NDA (unless taling about an NDA is breach of NDA, in which case, I've already screwed us): we're free to tell you about our game, just not about MS's life and workings. So, if I'm vague, it's not because there's anything to hide: it's because I'm vague.

It was fine, really. Tommy and I were a bit nervous, this being our first phone contact and all. We were trying hard not to sound like try-hards, explaining our situation and experience, and pitching the game a bit (even though this really wasn't a pitch session), and our current situation - self funded, earning a bit on small commissions etc.

I talked about the inspirations for the game, and how the focus was on making a painfully obvious and simple game which still had a great deal of depth, but which hadn't been done before. Almost in the next breath, I said "well, it HAS been done before..." and I mentioned the only other similar game which existed, how I didn't know it existed when I came up with the idea, and explained how our game was different. And Bettar! The Freedom of GTA with the storytelling of Tarrantino and the colors of Katamari Damacy with the rendering capabilities of a Hitachi Camcorder! Different! Wikkid Graphix! With bells on!

On a few occasions during this flood of stumbling words (which must have been the most incoherent free associative ranting I've ever mustered [since my first ever pitch, which I can never do worse than]), my throat felt like sand paper, and I had to stop to actually gulp some saliva. Rather politely, this was interpreted as "obvious passion". So there you go. Dry-mouth and passion: excellent bedfellows.

Pretty soon, the cheap cordless phone reciever I was using ran out of Goddamn battery power, so Tommy finished up the meeting alone. Fortunately, I had finished the little pitch bit, and we were told that we had "a great game concept". \o/

There's still a long way to go, mind you. Just because one guy at MS likes our concept doesn't mean we're a shoe in. We have our work cut out, and still have to make a convincing demo to show the sort of experience you get with the game. And even with the best demo in the world, there are hundreds of other reasons beyond our control which could mean we don't see the game on XBLA at all - nuclear war not least of them. Pretty close to least. But not quite. Less likely (but still plausible) would be getting attacked by a wolverine. I know there aren't typically wolverines on Exmoor, but there's that beast of bodmin. That's not far away. I think it's just a panther which Rik Mayall let loose after a drugs binge.

^That is a pretty good example of how I was pitching, actually.

Still, the fact that we are getting actual phone time with someone who seems interested has put a real wind in my sails. Yesterday I worked my arse off re-doing our beat detection (which is never going to be perfect, but might be good enough for triggering visualization stuff). I worked really solidly on it, and it's almost working, however, I'm going to look up some winamp viz coders to see what sort of tricks they use which might be a bit better than my adhoc approach.

Speaking of sound, we've had Justin Bell offering to help us out with sound and music. I'm normally pretty careful about accepting charity work because of all the bad blood you create if you reject someone's free input, or even if you ask for revisions: They tend to come back with that "Beggars can't be choosers" attitude, or "Are you throwing kindness back in my face?". However, Justin is a pro, and understands our position.

We've already had a cool talk about a few technical issues to do with sound effects. For instance, our controls are indiscrete - it's not like you Press Y and Z happens, spawning a sound event. It's more like you're always doing Y, but to different degrees. So we're going to have a constantly looping sound for these indiscrete verbs, and simply use the degree-of-use as a way to fade in the volume of those sounds. It doesn't even have to be just one sound, or a linear relationship - one gameplay value can affect how several sounds are faded in and out at different rates and offsets. This should create interesting composite sounds, different every time, highly attuned to the gameplay - parametric composition, if not parametric sound generation. XACT makes this stuff pretty easy with its Runtime Parameter Controls linking up gameplay variables to a sound's properties, via a graph. Well worth a look if you're not already using it.

I hope this gives Justin what he craves in a side project: a novel problem to stretch his creative muscles on.

I am not breaking my NDA

2007-02-23T01:25:00.000Z

While talking to the XBLA team all this time, Ross Erickson has been our point of contact. However, he's now left Microsoft to work for Sierra Online! The brief contact we had with him was always helpful and reassuring, so I hope he goes on to do great things.

The chap who has replaced him as our Business Development Manager is really stepping up - we're having a phone meeting with him soon so that we can share more information about the game, the biz and whatnot. I think he just needs to get up to speed on our situation after the hand-over. He may be surprised to hear how far we've come, because I have a strange feeling that he believes we're merely pitching an idea, rather than being neck deep in development. Wow, this'll be our first phone contact, with real voices and everything! It's quite exciting to have someone actively interested in our game, even though they're paid to.

Perhaps it's just the general positive attitude you get when dealing with the XBLA team, but we have a feeling that the small amount of information we've sent about the game has gone down pretty well with this guy. I just read back over the mini-pitch we sent out right after we were told that those RDPs we submitted were being phased out for smaller XBLA developers. Now that I've forgotten ever writing it, I must say that it flows pretty nicely. It's a small miracle, considering what a spazzy writer I can be.

Last week there was this interview with David Edery doing the rounds.

Are there any types of games or particular titles that you think are perhaps under-represented and would like to see come to Live Arcade?

DE: There are definitely specific games that we're looking for, and game types that we're looking for more of. Some examples:

1) Non-combat, cooperative multiplayer games (as I mentioned earlier).
2) More board games.
3) More "experimental" games and models of gameplay, in general.

I don't think we'll be revealing anything crucial by saying that those points all* fit our game. Not to sound arrogant, but I'm not too surprised by this - having past experience in XBLA development, I had a good feeling about what suited the platform, and I was able to fit the game to that criteria. The game hasn't suffered in that process, either. If anything having real boundaries (rather than imaginary artistic ones) can be pretty helpful. Terry Gilliam once said "Our restrictions saved us from mediocrity", referring to how he was forced, due to budget restrains, to hit empty coconut shells together instead of having real horses in Monty Python's Holy Grail. We've also not really had anything other than the 360 in mind, so a lot of game design melds into the console's aesthetic and user experience.

Touch wood and all that, but things really feel like they're picking up (in development too, incidentally)!

*It could only tenuously be considered a "Board Game", but it is pretty much played from the same perspective, and is heavily inspired by a classic one.

Jonathan Blow Interview

2007-02-21T14:32:00.000Z

This is an interview with Jonathan Blow, who has had my respect for a long time based on his work for the IndieGamingJam. He's about to release Braid. We're hoping that Braid will be to Prince of Persia what Portal is to Prey - plunging deep into an interesting mechanic where previously developers have only dipped their toes.

Up until now, details have been a bit thin on the ground surrounding the game. It's very interesting to hear the guy's creative process. He talks about a lot of issues which we can certainly relate to. In working on our current game, chaos has always been a big issue. We're trying to model something normally modelled with deterministic systems, which result in really pretty simulations, but which also very immediately explode into unpredictable possibilities. I've always called this "Perceivable Randomness" - when logical causal steps are obfuscated to the player, and it becomes difficult to understand how the system works, and therefore, how to manipulate it - like a magician hiding his tricks behind a cloth.

It's simply not very helpful for a player to be able to call on a system (deterministic or not) which he or she can't anticipate the result of, even after trying through trial and error (or even explicit guidance) to build a mental model of it. Where random elements are concerned, we can at best gage the typical deviation of an outcome from its mean, but only after many, many iterations (part of the reason random Rolling still exists in RPGs is because of this - we feel as though we're still trying to grok combat systems, even after the 500th WheltSnipe has been mashed. Hmm. I'm getting blog deja vu, so I'll get back on topic now).

We try to ensure that our system comes to rest quickly, and makes its immediate causal links obvious and easily predictable: a quality which Doug Church calls Perceivable Consequence (and according to Google, I am the world's most prolific misspeller of that phrase).

When it's just a few game elements you're dealing with, Perceivable Consequence is fairly easy to maintain (both cognitively and computationally) by simply not introducing random factors, or indiscrete values mapping onto wildly dissonant outcomes. Our game has hundreds (possibly thousands?) of elements all springing off each other in real time, which you'd think would cause massive causal explosions. However, everything is well "frictioned" so that we can bound our possibility space.And because friction is a passive property of the physics (resistant force increases with velocity), that bounding feeling doesn't feel sudden and arbitrary (like a glass wall). It's a rare case where technology (in this case, lots of multithreading) has enabled a game play mechanic. All the brute force physics we're using in our game is there to ensure we have a system which doesn't explode quite so readily - pulling something which could easily become perceivably random back into something with great perceivable consequence.

God, this is just too vague to be useful to you, isn't it? Point is, Jon is expressing a lot of things that we've come to learn during this development, so it's reassuring for us. Really looking forward to this.

And now, a Comedy Revue. I mean "Review".

2007-02-21T13:06:00.000Z

As you may have noticed, I got a bit drunk the other night, and, erm, I may have announced my love for not one, but two men. Please be aware that it is a platonic love. I love these men in the same way I love getting drunk, and telling Tommy and JP how cool the next game is going to be, before we've even finished this one.

As a result of seeing two halves of a critical mass of weapons grade comedic plutonium in such proximity, with little more than the beryllium shielding of a ScreenWipe to keep them from a comedy Nagasaki (laboured metaphor courtesy of: Caffiene and Jeremy Clarkson) I decided to finally get around to buying Stewart Lee's latest DVD, "90s Comedian". The only way to do this is online, as Lee "couldn't give this show away", even after offering the show to TV production companies without asking for any cut of profit. (Stewart Lee's previous stand up comedy DVD: "Stewart Lee, Stand Up Comedian" did poorly in sales, understandably: not enough people share my platonic love for this man, and to do so is a frightening prospect: It is, after all, me who harbours these feelings. That is self depracating humor. Get used to it. I have. It got me through two boarding schools.)

To his rescue, ardent fans rode, and the set up known as GoFasterStripe has done a top notch subversyve indie production and publishing job for the good man.

Here is a youtube clip of Lee performing, incase you don't know the fellow. This segment is part of the routine in the DVD, but it's a small part of a much bigger canvas (and at a different venue).

The DVD set is fairly long as far as standup goes - about an hour and fifteen minutes. It starts out a little slow, and you wonder how well the audience is warming to Lee as he deals with fairly raw subject matter. Luckily, he is already used to this, and his treatment of the audience has been worked into the set. A portion of the routine deals with his acceptance of the fact that his comedy is not for everyone, and about as far from mainstream entertainment as a badger being shot and then thrown into a country lane at night to make it look like an accident. (I mean that in the good way).

His jokes, are rarely irreverant or cheap: Although the cameras tend to hover on those audience members most horrified by his raw bits on 7/7, religion, and other hot button subjects (as a bit of sort of clever irony, I suppose) by the end of the set, they've moved onto people who have lightened up. It feels as though respect has been earned during the course of the show... as it should! Stewart Lee has been through the grinder in the wake of Jerry Springer the Opera, and in confronting the audience with both the real tolls it has taken on his life and the political dangers of over-reaction-as-a-demonstration-of-superior-faith he uses his comedy for real purpose, without the incredulity of typical topical satire shows (which, incedentally, feel to me like they're doing more to encourage and justify the horrors of the world [Read: Jade Goody] than actually trample them out of the annals of history).

While I sit here, trying to be a bit funny about a guy who is funny for a living, I can't help but feel like I'm being a redundant little pissant: Honestly, just go to GoFasterStripe and buy things. Do it, and feel haunted, as I was, by the phrase "I vomited into the Messiah's open mouth, until the open mouth of the Messiah overflowed with vomit."

GoFasterStripe uses Paypal, which now, finally accepts Switch, which was the only thing holding me back from giving my money to these plucky independents. Also, the DVD arrived much faster than I expected, and shocked me a bit, so do be careful.

My drunken love of Charlie Brooker

2007-02-19T22:39:00.000Z

Man, I don't know where to go with this, but I just watched the new Charlie Brooker's ScreenWipe, and I totally love it, and Charlie Brooker said that STEWART LEE is on next week, who I love the most! I am so excited and I just had to express my voice!

I think that me and Charlie, we could be best friends if we ever met, except, the only way I'd ever meet him is through the flatmate who my sister knows, but they're dead now (the flatmate, not my sister. [I used a third person plural to adrogynate the pronoun because I don't know if the flatmate was male or female, but then it created an ambiguity which suggested that both the flatmate AND my sister are dead. No. It's just the flatmate. Unless my sister died a second ago... No-one tells me anything in this family anyway, so whatevs.]).

Anyway. No chance of being his best friend now. And I just posted this. So definately no chance.

I got drunk sorry.

Game Design: Sculpting Possibility (Part 1)

2007-02-17T14:37:00.000Z

I almost feel like after playing a game long enough, and grokking a system, I can "see" a possibility space in the form of a kind of cloud of fog, either bleeding out gradually at the edges, or being contained within strict glass walls. This shape, of course, depends entirely on the game. But in a way, I see game design as a kind of sculpture.

I love the concept of "possibility space", and the idea that designers create and tweak rules which "sculpt" and "erode" it into different forms. I love the idea that systems can be represented in some form, other than themselves, and that this form can make systemic elegance or ugliness more obvious to the casual viewer.

I’ve had stabs at explaining it before (there’s more than a few drafted in this blog, but which I haven’t dared publish).

JP just linked me to this site, and I think it might help me start to make a point. Take a look. I'll wait.

The image of a ball's path during a match illustrates the beginnings of how I see possibility space in my head.

Notice in the pictures how one corner of the pitch is fairly empty. What could that mean? Could it be that their forward attacker has a bad left footed cross? Or could it be that the right-back defender is especially good? But this is not a possibility space. This is One Path Through Possibility.

You can imagine what it might look like if millions of matches between the same two teams were over layed on top of each other. The ball paths themselves start to become unreadable scribbles, but all of a sudden, a meta-visualization emerges: a cloud. It would show how those two teams' strategies and abilities bounce off one another. It would show up their most well worn approaches, and show where one team is generally weak, and where the other team is generally strong.

If we're just using two specific teams, we're only concentrating on those teams' approaches to matches. The foggy diagram has more to say about two teams' subjective experience of the game qua system than it does about the game system overall.

Now imagine that we get every football match in history, and lay them on top of each other. All we've done is widen our sample range, but I'm sure you'll see a more generalized cloud. Now we get a better picture of how human beings have adopted the game, and how they end up using it.

Still, though, there are definite areas where the ball is not seen as consistently, even though none of the game's rules explicitly suggest this should be the case. Perhaps you'll see most of the ball's time spent in midfield. That's easily understandable, as a ball must cross the pitch to get from one goal to another, and also since penalty areas are generally well defended to stop opposing players meeting their incentive - the Goal.

Perhaps we'll still see that attacks up the left flank are less likely. But why? There are no rules in the game to suggest this... no slope at that corner of the pitch, rolling the ball back toward the center.

So consider who is playing. Maybe we see this artifact because of our species' predisposition toward right-handed/footed people. This means that there are less wingers who can use the left flank well, and so the tactic is not pursued as heavily. And this idea of exploiting the most effective strategy leads us to another idea: the goals of the game (or even minor incentives along the way) warp possibility space.

If there were no explicit goals (Agon), and no aim to football other than to explore the implicit joy of playing with the ball, there would be no choice but to explore the possibilities that exist (self created/implicit goals; Paedia). Perhaps you'd see a much more even distribution of the ball's possibility across the football field, bleeding at the edges (since people will want to avoid the disincentives of throw-ins). This "pure play" might give us a better idea of how the system distributes the ball's possibility naturally. When we take that image and compare it to the incentivized version of football, we see how the Agon changes possibility.

I guess I'm just trying to say that there's a big difference between "what is likely" and "what is possible", though the former always fits snug inside the latter. The difference between these two is purely human psychology - the drive that Agon and Paedia create for us not only to explore possibility, but to feel we achieve something during our travels.

Next post will be on methods used to sculpt possibility intentionally. But I'll leave you with a something to discuss - if an AI's possibility space for a game does not match a players' has it failed, or are we simply playing a different game, or an alien mentality?

Stepping half way toward a door, forever.

2007-02-15T16:16:00.000Z

There's one benefit of being stuck on the side of a hill, lonely as an Eskimo on an iceberg: Valentine's day.

Every year, I wonder what torture Cupid can put me though. Perhaps he'll remind me how single I am by sending a snuggling couple past me in the street. And maybe when I'm sick enough about all the filthy dirty breeders, fueled for a day by this annual capitalistic cash-in on basic human desire, I'll turn to my friends for sympathy and remember that they're all fucking married or in long term relationships. Bastards.

But this year the worst I got was a pink LiveJournal banner. Pink: The color of raw, exposed flesh.

Yehp, it's a lonely life being an indie gaming hermit. Just as you're getting used to the idea of never seeing another human being ('cept your mum), old friends invite you to weddings and parties to remind you what you're missing out on, restoring feelings in limbs that you hoped had numbed indefinitely. You come home and your parents tell you "We're worried you're not getting much of a social life". You and me both.

I've heard people say that if only they had a year to themselves, without distractions or interruptions, they'd produce their master opus. I'm sure I used to, but I've learned that it's really not as simple as that. For a start, you have to keep motivated, and undistracted. If you've been a designer at a fair sized studio, you might find that you get interrupted by countless questions per day (with or without a comprehensive design document to shield you). That's part of the job, but it leaves you feeling like you get nothing done yourself. Moving into independent development with a team of two, you suddenly find you've been so trained to expect distractions that you have to fill that hole somehow. You find yourself thinking things like: “Gosh, aren't rubber bands dangly?”, “That pencil looks like fun!”, “I think I could do with another brevel sandwhich.”, “I bet there's nothing interesting on telly. Oh look! There isn't, but the moving colors are too hypnotic to turn away from!”.

Actually, a lot of this sentiment has come about because of the way we've handled development. In the early stages, it was mostly setting up our engine, and then moving into R&D for the core game play. Although I could still beaver away learning HLSL, doing little experiements, or work on the Design Document (which becomes a bit redundant in a two-man team), I still felt like a second wheel on a unicycle.

Things are really starting to work out, now: Tommy has created a foundation for me to work off, and I'm picking up steam. The big thing I'm doing at the moment is a Zooming Menu Interface (ZUI). These things have been around for a while (Ken Perlin, Dasher Text Interface), and I think they're a really enjoyable and interesting ways to navigate discrete choices indiscretely. They've never really been pulled off in any mainstream real world application, though. Personally, I'd love to see clunky old onscreen keyboard interfaces replaced with the Dasher approach. The PSP (and PS3?) typing interface is especially miserable to use – I mean, I don't like typing on a number pad at the best of times - having to shift a cursor around to even select the number makes it even more of a pain. A zooming interface, at first, might be a hard transition to make, so I can see why both MS and Sony have fallen back on the most obvious approach. I just think it'd be nice if there were alternatives.

Using a game menu as a problem space seems a good way to introduce people, since it's not a huge choice-tree to map, and it's not like we're asking people to ditch the windows paradigm for this to get work done - they're just navigating into a game. It's a toy - a learning tool for them. See, there's great resistance to re-learning interfaces when you're satisfied with your current one, even if new ones are markedly better. The most I hope to do is to introduce people to this idea, rather than try to create any sort of sweeping change.

It has, however, been a complete nightmare to code (not least because I always end up trying things just out of my comfort zone). I've tried to keep the interface indiscrete, and that's been the hardest part of it. Building a zooming interface which simply snaps from one fixed zoom position to another is a no-brainer (and may have to be the backup plan), but approaching an arbitrary tree of nested options, scaling up each menu page correctly while gradually “discarding” sibling menus by sliding them to the side has been really tricky. Every day I make progress, but every stab in the right direction reveals more issues I haven't considered. I've been writing and re-writing the same area of code for some weeks, just trying to get this generalized position/scaling algorithm down. It's slow work, but I think it'll be worth it. My only fear is that since it's not going to fall into Microsoft's recommended menu spec, it needs to be a self evidently worthwhile endeavor – it needs to be perfect.

Microsoft have been chatty with us lately. The RDP application we sent a while back was badly timed because they were phasing out the use of RDPs for indie developers. RDPs require a lot of work to get people on board, and are (as far as I can tell) meant for bigger studios, rather than every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to pitch Microsoft an idea for “a new MMO with better combat than God of War and better graphics than Crysis”.

Their idea (I think) is to use XNA as a kind of a playground for hobbyists, and to pick the most promising kids. We had our hearts rather firmly lodged in our throats as we explained that our game couldn't be created on XNA. I know, that seems like an incredulous claim; you'd think that even with limited resources, you'd be able to prototype something like Project Gotham Racing in some simple, abstract form. Unfortunately our game relies on a sort of “soft body modeling” which is highly processor intensive and needs explicit control of multi processor threading (which XNA won't give you). It's one of very few cases where technology (in this case the 360's 6 cores) enables game play.

That's the thing about XNA. I'm really looking forward to messing with it after we've done this game (tonnes of experiments stacking up in my head), and have heard nothing but positive things about it from other developers. But any system that wants to give you tools for making anything simpler always seems to inherit a few assumptions about how the tools will be used. While a wide range of game styles are possible on XNA, there's always going to be some exceptional cases which fall outside the realms of possibility. We're one of them.

We explained all this to MS, and rather than smiting us for being petulant (which I wouldn't blame them for: it's me after all.) they actually started showing real interest, asking to see the game. We don't have anything for public consumption just yet, so we had to decline. We're dying to show people the stuff we've done, just to get some encouragement, but we don't want to show things publically, because people are very quick to judge things which are still Work-In-Progress.

The unanimous advice we've had from people is to hold off showing the game (or any game) until you have something which is eye-popping and representative (over-ambitious gameplay target videos tend to set you up for a fall, so show playable demos). Rather than jumping the gun and having a demo backfire on us, we're aiming to have a demo in about 2 months. Yikes. I better crack that menu within a week or so, or I'm moving to a backup plan.

Art, Gart, Gaga, Phooey.

2007-01-14T15:13:00.000Z

I have been watching Nathan Barley recently, co-penned by a couple of my favourite comedians, Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris. The character, Nathan Barley, is described in the source material as a 'Cunt', partly for his dependence on his parents to fund self-indulgent, 'provocative', 'nu-media' art projects, and partly because of his attempts to explain away his misogynistic misdemeanors by pretending he was trying to be 'provocative' or 'ironic'. I don't want to be Nathan Barley, but I have to consider my situation (living at home off my parents' charity to make a game which may or may not go anywhere because it's a bit artsy) and realize that I am at the peak of a slippery slope (although fortunately, I'm a game designer, so I don't have to worry about inappropriate behavior toward women – just court injunctions).

I watched the show, and read the original TV Go Home comedy synopses, and saw a little bit of myself in the character. I worry that what we're doing with the whole games-as-art bandwagon could be construed as overreaching artistic pretentiousness, doing more harm to the medium than good. I worry that sometimes vanity gets the better of us – that we aspire to make art for reasons other than the implicit joy of creating – the fame, or the glory. But then I remember that game designers just don't get famous, to the extent that to the people I know in rural Devon, I'm already the most famous game designer they've ever heard of.

I mention this character, because he seems salient in light of recent Super Columbine Massacre events. Super Columbine Massacre has been talked about a lot, recently... possibly to death. Talking about it more seems unnecessary, as there has been endless (interesting) coverage of the subject.

As far as I can tell, it boils down to this: designers (including myself) want games to be respected as an artistic medium, even though there's really not enough quality literature for the general public to be able to accept it as such. Because of this lack of evident art, we're scared the medium will be killed in utero by big business and public closed-mindedness, and scramble to defend it with the only weapon we have to hand: rhetoric.

SCM really presses the issue, and tests our ability to defend the medium: however badly crafted it may be, it makes some interesting points (though, from what I've read of the game, I strain to believe they are all completely intentional), so we defend it, not so much on its own terms, but because it represents, to us, the entire concept of games represented as works of art.

As a result, lots of rather intelligent people are defending it in order to make a stand for games as an artistic medium – its provocative subject matter is bringing a lot of interest, after all, so it's a great chance to publicize this concept of “games as art” which seems alien to your mum's friends, or anyone outside this tiny circle. It reminds me of a scene in Nathan Barley, actually.

In Nathan Barley (S1E05), the editor of a fictional magazine called “SugarApe” (called “Jonatton Yeah?”) decides to print a fashion spread of lots of underage girls being interfered with. In the episode, it causes a London-wide shock, and sees the editor being interviewed on the news (by an off-screen Charlie Brooker). Jonatton feigns indifference to his actions, arguing that people shouldn't be shocked, and that if they're shocked, they're uncultured idiots for being shocked. Brooker asks why the editor can't understand the offense caused. Jonatton replies “Did you read it? All of it? Even this bit in the spine? The bit where it says 'all models are 7 years older than their stated age.'?” He looks at Brooker with a smarmy smile and the interview ends. You can tell by his shit-faced grin that he's thinking “free press”.

The Super Columbine Massacre incident seems to follow similar lines: the strategic grabbing for attention, the (understandably) shocked reaction from the public, and the Emperor's New Clothes defense. Oh, and if someone points out that we're defending a shock-tactic game, we get to say things like "Well, I see interesting stuff in it, even if it's not intentional" or "Nah, it's not a great game, but then, art doesn't need to be good" or "It's not about the game, it's about the medium" or other expressions of embarassed foot shuffling.

I'm not saying SCM is (or isn't) art. I'm not interested in whether it's a good game-qua-game. I don't think it particularly hurts or hinders public acceptance of games as an artistic medium more or less than any other piece of work. I understand why people defend it (even though it's a bit shit in of itself), though the insight they bring to the game says more about themselves than the developers. It'd all be alright if it was really making an interesting statement (I can't make my mind up on whether it is or not, and whether being intentional really matters). However, the art of provocation doesn't really care whether or not you have an insightful point to make.

The main thing I think that it has re-iterated is that provocation is possible in this medium just as much as any other (i.e. it's not proving very much that Postal hasn't). I hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with provocation, in of itself: When Chris Morris made the controversial Brass Eye Special, I think that his use of provocation was self evidently justified. It's just that the use of provocation has a high correlation with lazy attention seeking cunts.

Are you, or someone close to you, a creator in a nascent medium looking to gain some fame and notoriety, and a week and a half of Internet coverage, but not willing to put in the thought, effort, and attention to detail to actually deserve it? Do you constantly look for the quickest shortcut to making a point, since that point has so little merit that it's not worth the time it takes away from your twice daily furious masturbation to ripper-hentai while Lincoln Park plays in the background, nestled amongst your almost exclusively nu-metal pirated MP3 play-list? Are you willing to use someone else's low brow, grade school tasteless humour to sensationalize your edgy film festival, even though the quality and intent of the work is dubious at best? Do you defend to the death (of anyone's interest) your life's calling to take the medium in new directions, even though that direction falls short of the stars and lands your work in an inescapable ghetto medium? In another life, would you be a holocaust denier? Does every person close to you worship the ground you walk on for your daring acts of artistic subversion, while you secretly die a little inside as you consider how these same acts have distanced you, and the medium itself, from society's acceptance as a whole? The Kilroy team would like to hear from you: 09181 412 165.

------------------------

Personally, I don't feel we get to tell people that games are art. They have to decide for themselves. All we can do is aspire to create games which are self-evidently art, and hope that they are taken on those terms. It starts with us, and our intent to make more than just "Fun Products". "Otherwise", to quote Liono from Thundercats, "it's just words."

I like to bee in YouKay -ick -ahh.

2006-12-19T16:48:00.000Z

I’m back from America now, and have been for a couple of weeks. Naturally Tommy and I got a bunch done by being in close proximity - the engine runs at a good 200fps at our highest required resolution, doing pretty much all the shader passes we need. I got a lot of game systems done. Unfortunately, staying awake for 20 hours in excited anticipation of 24 hours of transatlantic travel (without sleep due to a painful neck) kind of killed me for a while... but now that I’m over my jetlag, and just about over some flu, I’m getting back into my stride.

We’re now under a Microsoft Non Disclosure Agreement, although I’m not sure if I’m allowed to tell you that.

If you’re one for reading between the lines, that might instantly imply a lot more than is the reality: getting your NDA with a publisher is just step one in forming a relationship. Along side that, we’ve submitted our “Registered Developer Program” application, which is step 2.

Our bricking-it at the first-contact e-mail was premature – that e-mail could have been as simple as “Grtz Microsoft. Giv Application formz pls!” along with our address and tax numbers.

In this new application our company history (all of six months?), previously published titles (zero) and publisher recommendations (don’t know any publishers directly) are scrutinized. Hmm, looking good, then!

In the absence of any kind of objective achievements, one is able to supply, alongside resumes, personal recommendations from whichever games industry folks you can grab: from ex-CEOs of major FPS studios to veteran developers, and from family members to that cleaner who comes in nightly, and wonders why you’re still at the office while earning less money than he does.

Just while we’re in the limbo between submitting our application and being accepted/rejected, I want to thank all the people who graciously helped us out in this way. It can only happen now, because if we’re accepted into the program by Microsoft, it was obviously just because of our combined genius shining out of our resumes, and if we’re rejected it’s plainly because you guys fucked us!

I’m endeavoring to make these posts shorter, but more frequent. Next time: how to deal with a creative block!

So you want to be an Indie Developer?

2006-11-26T21:10:00.000Z

"So you want to be a..." posts seem a little fatuous to me, just because I know that you could tell me that I'd die, and never make a game, and I'd still want to try it. If you want to be anything with conviction, a blog isn't going to change your mind. You've probably already learned enough to take the bad with the good. No amount of curmudgeonly complaints about our plight is going to stop you. So, you, the target audience, are just here for reassurance. And anyone else is just here out of interest... checking if the grass is greener on the other side.

Maybe I shouldn't really be posting this, as we haven't released a game yet. Still, this blog is meant to be about giving you one indie dev's anecdotes about the path, so here's where we stand:

Wait Until you are Ready
A great concept is nothing without the ability to implement... it. It's tempting to jump off at the deep end and try to make it on your own. However, your first game is almost certainly going to be over-ambitous: As Alan Moore once said, (paraphrased) "Impossible tasks are great, because you can never be judged on the results". These ultimately pointless endeavours are not all waste: You can still learn from them in a kind of really masochistic way.

There are more efficient ways to build your creative muscles, though: The best way to do do it is by using your free time work on quick, achievable experimental games. You could also join the industry proper, learning the ropes, earning your licks, and other gay slang. Being in the industry may also introduce you to someone you really gel with... Mike and Miles of PomPom met at Argonaut, and me and Tommy at Streamline. It was gay at first gay.

Don't believe the Mythos
My favourite bit of the video game journalism is when they ask the developer how many pizzas they ate, and how many sodas they drank while making a game. It gets funnier each time I read it, because each time I read it, I know that the games journalist gets his wings, and the game developer gets his first coronary.

See, getting fat and unhealthy, and not seeing sunlight for days on end is not as cool as people make it out to be. It is, indeed, living the dream... assuming that the dream in question is dreamt by someone who wants to see you fail in all things. Doesn't sound much different from horror stories in bigger places, eh?

The Grass is the Exact Same Hue Over Here. But it Gets Less Attention... Like a Garden in Student Accomodation.
Now, you'd think that being your own boss means you don't have to put up with overtime or any of the other typical* industry horrors:

You don't have the marketing staff asking you to knock out a perfect, polished, working build for investors, publishers or press with two hours notice before they arrive.
You don't have artists asking for you to make them tools, and then complaining when you haven't included things that they haven't specified, since they're "common sense for any artist".
You don't have designers acting all excited about a new feature, and denying all knowledge when it doesn't work out.
You don't have coders with their arrogant dismissive chortles as you ask for a feature that doesn't fall in line with their favourite areas of interest.
You don't have producers disrupting the schedule to get their pet feature made.

The thing about a small indie development team is:

You don't have anyone on staff to tell people/publishers/press about your game.
You don't have anyone to create content for you.
You don't have anyone working with foresight to maintain the overall cohesion of the project.
You don't have anyone to write the engine.
You don't anyone bringing in meals and doing whatever else it is that a producer is supposed to do.

It's all on you, you sorry bastard. And in this day and age, the bar set where it is, you have your work cut out.

So yes... there is overtime. There's some small solice: it's (partially) self imposed. Other events do force your hand a little:

On a typical day, without distractions, we wake up at 2pm, and get to bed around 4am. we've gotten to this state by having a 24 and a half hour working day. It's all work while we can work. But, since we don't actually earn any money, we've no high horse to sit on when a family member asks for a helping hand. You can't really turn around and say "Look, I'm working here!", because they can just counter with "If you don't wanna help move this furniture, you can get the HELL OUT OF MY BASEMENT!".

The Seven Yard Itch
The moment you're more than 7 yards away from your development computer, you're instantly itching to work. It can make you seem like a dick if you're out socializing, grimacing that you're wasting precious time with human contact when you could be staring blankly at a head-scratcher of a bug.

But when you're at the computer, you realize how much other work there is to do other than just making the game - working out contracts, preparing food, sleeping... all necessary evils. Everything seems to take longer than you expect, and you end up blaming yourself, even though there's nothing you can do about your circumstances. Oh, and the internet is a constant distraction, of course. This blog entry, for instance, took far longer than it should have, and I am pretty angry at myself for not getting any other work done (even though this is tacetly part of the job).

Do it for the Right Reasons
If you want to go indie, do it because you have a great concept for a game. Do it because you enjoy the creative process, and all the toil that goes with it. You probably won't get famous (though you might get props from industry friends). You most likely won't get rich. But if you crave the creative endorphines, indie development might be for you.

When you have no income, passion for the game is your fuel. Development in any setting can turn into a grind. When it's indie, it's grind without monetary compensation... so get a great concept for a big fuel tank. Seriously, you need to be committed to the point of clinical denial.

Free Yourself of Worldly Possessions, ya Tramp!
I'll echo the point made in other SYWTOBAIDs ("Soyewtobaids"): You're not going to get much money from this. In the worst (and most likely case), it will bleed you dry. You'll have to lean on friends and family for charity, which always leaves you with a warm, fuzzy, anxious, I-owe-everyone-BIG-TIME feeling.

You'll have no budget for luxuries after the running costs of the development. You may not even make back that money. So as much as you'd like to see what life was like for Cliffy B all those years ago on alpha centauri, it's not going to happen (but for the same effect, you could watch donnie darko, and imagine that actor Jake Gyllenhal is actor Vin Diesel, and the rabbit guy is that spider boss).

Expect whatever War Chest you've amassed to leak a lot faster than you expect, what with paying for industry standard software and specialized hardware, even if you're living (as we do) rent free. And as Tommy witnessed this week, PCs have a lovely habit of occasionally blowing up, costing you time and money. Oh yeah, and you're your own tech support!

However, the idea that you're not going to make money should be liberating. You owe no-one, and no-one can impinge on your freedom (too severely). You are free to make the game that you want to make. Think of all the audience-second guessing you don't have to do! You're a demographic of one!

If you have any dependants, just forget indie development and get a proper job. It'd be immoral to take your loved ones through this.

Build it and They Will Come. Twice.
Second guessing audiences is a scurge of the conventional industry now-adays. It feels like most every mediocre game out there requires insidious and ill fitting stealth sections, or "gritty urban thug" themeing which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't courtesy of the whitest guys on the planet. The design-by-committee and focus testing tend to filter the personality and soul out of a game.

As an indie developer, you actually don't have to worry too hard about who your market is (queue lots of dudes who have read marketing books spitting their coffee uncontrollably and trashing their expensive LCD monitor. That was the point).

If you're making the best use of the creative freedom which indie development gives you, you'll be making something new - something that creates a market, rather than exploiting existing ones. And since you're creating the market, you get to define it. You do this implicitly, just by making your game. Give the game a horrible interface, and your market will be made up of people with a high pain threshold. Make a shallow game, and you'll get players who only want a gaming snack.

The main draw of all this is to do something different. It's not that it's not possible to make something fantastic through the regular pipeline, but when you're solely responsible for your own actions, and determined to use your freedom, it makes that endeavour a lot easier. If you're no longer worried about making money, you're free to ignore the impulse to simply make a product for sale. You get to make something else.

Just remember what Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses."

BoneBroke
Cliffski’s Mumblings
GameProducer
Gibbage
Introversion
Lemmy and Binky
Reality Fakers
They Came from Hollywood
Zoombapup

*These are definately not my own experiences... just typical gripes I've heard from all over the place.

Stories about their Games.

2006-11-03T21:00:00.000Z

I am in America right now! I am working with Tommy! We are in his basement! I am excited! Mainly because I didn't get interrogated and strip searched on the way in! Like I did last time! (!)!

While driving to a stripmall to grab FinalFantasy XII (for Tommy) and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (which I almost worked on), Tommy made me think of an interesting point, and I figured I'd write it here to congratulate myself.

We were talking about how separate story and game play often are in contemporary games. The Narrative vs. Interactivity debate is not one I'm going to dig up and clobber again, because I will fall the fuck asleep mid-sentance.

I was explaining to Tommy in my most patronizing tone, how Kevin Levine at Irrational tries to work game play and narrative into a symbiotic relationship. When he gets his way, the story tends to be about the things in the world that you interact with. He once gave an example of how, in Theif, he wanted one mission to be about the Rope Arrows that you use - make them a big plot point, rather than just a "tool". In Bioshock, the story is about how the genetic alterations you make to yourself (part of game-play) change and corrupt your identity, and your morality, and how that process has extended to the under water city of Rapture - furnature re-appropriated, and existing walls cracked and crumbled. Levine is, in a way, merely amplifying the inherent message in the gameplay, rather than creating unnecessarily detailed backstories which have no real relevance to the player's moment to moment actions.

I compared that to Kojima, where the story is about memes, genetics, terrorism, conspiracy, but the game is about moving around stealthily. Story in the Metal Gear series is treated a little like a string of rewards - you're playing to unlock an almost unrelated movie. There's real dissonance between the story you're being told, and the game you're actually playing. How much does finding and defusing bombs really have to do with the machinations a clandestine group of "Patriots", who are trying to filter the meme-o-sphere to their own liking?

So here came a hypothetical question: what if all games' stories were forced to be about their gameplay? Here's what I think might happen, (apart from seeing the games industry instantly implode, of course):

We're no longer allowed to have stories about things unrelated to gameplay, so for better or worse, we have to leave behind government agencies, gritty backstories involving murdered wives, children and parents as these aren't really "about" the abstract game play.

If stories start to be about the game play, and a continuing stream of cookie cutter Beat'em 'ups, Tunnel FPS, RPG, RTS and racing games come out, we become inundated with stories about "the way of the warrior", "the totalitarian control of one man's freedoms", "self improvement through toil", or "the art of war"... philosphical interpretations which aggrandize pretty standard games to the height of Go, or Chess's ivory towers.

When every game's story becomes introspective with regard to its game play, and the game play is the same, you get the same story, over and over. Black, Fear, Prey, HalfLife, Halo - these all draw from the same well in terms of game play, and would all have the same intrinsic story to tell - the upkeep of costs involved in travelling through life, the inability to form a path that hasn't already been specified, and ofcourse, the art of pointing at a thing and pulling a trigger until it falls over or explodes. Without the typical unrelated back-story/theme to differentiate them, there is not much left to hide their similarities. People grow tired of hearing the same story much faster than they grow tired of playing the same game, since games have replayabilty. (Except, probably not, because video game stories are already so damn similar as it is. "Oh, you're in a super special forces squadron? Oh, but you have 'special abilities which make you viably different from other products in a highly saturated market'? Oh really?! Wow!").

As a result, I'd love to think that this would force storytellers and designers to think much harder about their game play, and what its intrinsic message is. Y'know - rather than what currently happens - sandwhich whatever existing gameplay you like with whatever story you like.

Of course, we're much worse at coming up with fundamentally different game mechanics than fundamentally different themes and stories - not because it's very hard (though it's not easy either), but because of the costs and risk associated with exploring new territory. It's also very hard to work on this "Message from the Machine" level. Systemic messages emerge naturally through iterations, combinations and chaos in general - it's out of your hands, to a degree. (I do believe that we can get better at this art, and science. For me, that's really what mastering the medium is all about, and it's clear that it's still very early days for us as an artform.)

But if Bioshock is anything to go by, then focussing the story on the game play has forced Irrational to try a fair few new ideas - the focus on AI's interelationships, and creating a social ecology within each level, rather than a series of rather restrictive linear levels. Sure, you'll still shoot and frob your way around, but they're trying a lot more than most would at the same budget level.

And what does this have to do with our game? Well, I've never really had any kind of story for the game - it's rather abstract. However, it still needs some kind of encompassing theme to bring all our ideas into one cohesive bundle. After talking to Tommy about it, I think we've got it now. I'm not saying what that is, yet... but I'm pretty sure it'll win me a Wank Hat.

Feel my Teeth.

2006-10-24T09:50:00.000Z

I am constantly slapping my own face with my own hand. This is because of the anesthetic. I have a weird existential fear that, if I don't remind my face that my jaw is on the side of my head, it will cease to exist.

I came out of the dentist's surgery after my first ever filling. It was without any real pain, except for the local plunging directly into my jaw's nerve cluster, triggering little spasms and jolts on the inside of my teeth.

Anyway, outside the surgery, I'm thinking "have I got something in my mouth? Some leftover oatmeal, perhaps, filling the gap between anaesthetized upper jaw and anaesthetized lower jaw?" After a bit of chewing, I concluded "Ooh! It's my tongue!".

I'll strive to give minute to minute updates as and when the feeling and pain returns. However, I may be too busy teaching/screaming at my mother to learn how to use her new computer. She hasn't touched a machine in 15 years, but is finally acceptant of the mouse. It's one of those first MS laser mice, so she doesn't have to deal with a cheapo ball based one, scragging around on an uneven surface and getting all gunked up with dead skin, or whatever the hell all that grey goo is.

It's sort of interesting teaching her, because you go through the same process as you would teaching someone a game, or developing a tutorial/ease-in period for a game.

In Windows, I'm teaching her the fundamental tools (stuff like window manipulation, task switching, right clicking for menus, the idea of "selecting" vs "opening/running" with the left button, creating files, dragging them into and out of directories, copy/pasting) and then showing them how the same manipulations are re-used regardless of the type of data - text, files, images, whatever. See, once you get someone to make a logical lateral connection between common, fundamental operational consistencies, then you've built a foundation for a well formed mental model. You then build upon that foundation, re-using the core tools in other situations, and introducing new concepts as a natural progression of old ones. And eventually, they'll even start showing their own creativity through those tools to do things you knew were possible, but hadn't expected them to do - and that, for me, is what makes games so great - the dual authorship of player and designer... carving out possibilities, and letting them explore them at their own pace, and of their own creative volition.

Here's the interesting thing about all this (for us, at least): even though she hates computers, and my obsession with games, she's able to quite easily play our game. In terms of interface, we've kept it as simple as possible, while still retaining great depth in gameplay. It's nice, because if a complete technophobe like my mother can pick up and enjoy our game, it bodes well if Microsoft want to ask us about the "casual" market.

Personally, I really don't feel like games should be designed with a target demographic in mind. It creates a lot of "second guessing". And for me, it tends to go against games' unique strengths - that they can be simple, but deep, and open to a wide range of players and expressions. Systems adapt to their users, so it follows that one game can adapt to many varied tastes. But apparantly, that kind of systemic adaptation to ones' audience is not often seen as a useful quality of games, and is underplayed in lieu of chasing "filmic experiences" and whatnot, where the player is treated like an ungreatful, expressionless oaf - an enemy of someone else's "finely crafted" story. *sigh*.

We want people to be able to come to our game with whatever emotions they feel like, and for our game to resonate that emotion. If they bring a sense of calm thoughtfulness, then they'll be able to express their calm. If they bring a fury, then they represent that fury in their approach to the game. Their play style should not alone ensure victory - it's the skill at their playing style which is more important in that respect. It really shouldn't matter if our players are middle aged housewives or teenaged spunking boys. Our game is there as an emotional amplifier, not as an emotioneering machine (which I imagine would be used to brainwash its audience into a certain state of mind - crying at level 17. Jesus. Hasn't Speilburg even seen "A ClockWork Orange"? Didn't he get the point about the immorality of agendaic film making?).

When movies try too hard to push their agenda, they're called polemic... sometimes even totalitarian. But even though it's a passive medium, films do exist which allow the freedom of interpretation. I've always felt that the boundaries of interpretation are widened in video games - there's still a system there, designed by a designer, which cannot be changed. But it is possible (to varying degrees) to express your own opinions within that expression space, and feel like you're being acknowledged by the system... listened to by the designer. However, there are just as many totalitarian game designs as there are expression-friendly ones. I guess I shouldn't moan. It's just one style.

Now, when you see our game, because it's very abstract, you'll be thinking "what's all this rhetoric got to do with this game?". It might be hard to tell at first, but it's a belief that has guided this whole development: Listen to your player. Re-inforce what they have to say. And through what they try to express, express your own message through the percievably natural occurance of the limitations of their own expression. To explore a possibility space is to explore a game designer's message. It's hard to tell if the game will say all this, as it might seem a lot more superficial. We'll have to see, I guess.

[10:32] I cannot feel my teeth.

[10:33] I can feel my teeth.

[11:58] I taste blood.

And just for fun:

(I'm sure this draws strong parallels with some people's experience in the games industry).

First Hurdle in sight

2006-10-15T17:54:00.000Z

I'm in London right now, staying with friends, and making good use of the internet to get some proper work done.

The games coming along very nicely: you often find that your game concepts (especially those experimental ideas) end up needing massive re-designs because you've not thought them through properly. But so far, so good. The concept is so simple that so far, there have been no design tears shed, and stumbling blocks have, on the whole, been foreseen.

In particular, this week a big risk area has been met and tackled completely successfully*. It did require a couple of failed tries, but Tommy nailed a solution which barely affects CPU (while my first stab killed a good 50% of frame rate at its peak). It's by no means plain sailing from now on, but our core gameplay works, and is great fun. We have a foundation to build on!

We've heard back from MS. It took a while, so as we expected, they're obviously inundated with requests for Live Arcade titles. Interestingly, we have a British guy dealing with our inquiry, so it looks like the XBLA team has expanded to cope with demand, which is nice.

Standard procedure for applying involves getting NDAs signed and giving the XBLA team some background about our company. Our heritage spans back a massive 3 months, which probably isn't going to sound very impressive.

Rather than talk about the company, it makes more sense to talk about its people: we're writing up our resumes, (full of linkage to previous work), and asking a few industry friends for letters of recommendation. Hopefully we won't be passed over when they see our previous work, learn of our experience with the 360, and read some rather glowing letters from experienced people willing to vouch for us.

I do hope it's enough, because it's keeping me up at night; that nagging thought that our submission will be tossed because we don't have a famous name, major titles, or publisher backing. Still, I shouldn't think this way - paranoia breeds empty victories i.e. if I'm right, and my fears are embodied, we will have failed at the first hurdle, and I'll have to go get a job in starburger in hammersmith.

There's no such thing as a free pass into XBLA. As you'd imagine, most submissions are thrown out pretty quickly for a variety of reasons: perhaps the game concept is too similar to other things on the arcade, or the team behind it doesn't seem to have the pedigree to pull it off**. It can seem unfair to those on the receiving end of a rejection letter (especially those who would have had the stones to make it happen), but any Gold Rush naturally sees a hundred cast to the wayside for every single person who succeeds. That's just the Video Games game, sadly.

The best bet is to make your first impression count. For us, that means recognizing and acknowledging our limitations while being honest about our positive conviction to make the game worth Microsoft's attention - we've got the talent and drive to pull it off, and all we need is their blessing.

I know we can make this game, and I know that it will be a sorry shame, not only for us, but for the playing public, if we don't.

*Once again, sorry about being so vague. It'd be imprudent to reveal anything too soon.

**I'm reminded of trying to get my first industry job. Sometimes it felt like getting an entry level position required at least two years' industry experience, and at least one shipped title. Interviews were a thoroughly painful experience, to be sure. When you're being interviewed by someone much more experience than yourself, you feel like an ant under a magnifying glass - aware that you're getting hot under the collar, but ignorant of how dwarfing your interrogator's knowledge is. At least in this case, I know roughly how difficult it is to get approved, and can go into the situation with adolescent arrogance a distant memory, and realism guiding my step. We're just looking for the chance to make this game, and then the onus is on us... but that's never an easy decision for MS to make as there are many others like us, looking for a shot.

At last! Recognition!

2006-09-18T00:44:00.000Z

Dude over at The 2 Bears found my K Prototype video. As it turns out, he's really into indie shooters (more than me, which is saying something!) so he did a blog update about it.

Wow. Y'know, I made that thing years ago, and it's only now that anyone takes notice without me forcing their nose in it. This must be Long Tail Advertising at work, or something.

Thanks YouTube... I'll miss you when you're gone after not finding any kind of business model to sustain your increasing popularity. They're losing half a million dollars every month according to The Economist. Man. They should just charge people who put crappy videos up. If Sturgeon's Law is to be believed, then 90% of the crap can easily pay up to make that worthwhile 10% free. (I jest, ofcourse. The moment they start charging users, the honeymoon's over).

Anyway. It's really nice to hear nice things about the game (I get paid in compliments! woo!). Truth is, those who have played it know it's incredibly rough around the edges. I'm glad it's apparently pretty enough to be mistaken for an On Rails shooter... pff. As if I'd stoop so low! Nothing in that video is at all contrived. No cutscenes. All gameplay.

Moment of Truth #1

2006-09-15T21:51:00.000Z

We just sent off our pitch to Microsoft, and it's fair to say that we're both bricking it.

A number of things could happen:

They hate it. They reject us. We get jobs elsewhere and wonder what would have been.

They like it. They like it so much that they already went ahead and greenlit someone else who did a remarkably similar game. Tommy starts to kick my ass for a decade - not for being unoriginal... for being just not original enough.

They like it. There's nothing else like it. It meets all their requirements. They trust us enough to lend us an Xbox devkit. We make the game. It passes submission first time. Gets on XBLA to amazing critical acclaim, and finally, girls don't start crying when we make eye contact.

Well. We can dream. *Ulp*.

Even now, not an hour after submission, Tommy is twitching at the prospect of a return e-mail... acceptance, rejection, anything! Just to know someone is stationed at the listening post.

We've got to chill out. We've got to keep calm. They're busy people. They get more than ten submissions a week from people who, like us, are convinced that their game is "teh b3st game of the univerz3"!! And unlike us, most of those are probably from big hitting publishers.

We've got to chill out. We've got to keep calm. But Lord knows we deserve not to.

IO are good. But...

2006-09-06T10:33:00.000Z

I really like IO as a developer. The Hitman series, though it didn't do much more than refine itself, was certainly closer to interactive storytelling than games which were out and out trying to be (I'm looking at you, David Cage). While the mission struction, if anything, got a lot more confined as the series progressed, your moment to moment actions were at least not crippled by what some would call "good storytelling" (and which I call a complete misinterpretation of the medium). And the scoring system was only slightly flawed in that in encouraged you to get the "Silent Assassin" rating, which effectively meant following a fairly scripted route, making use of the poisoning/exploding/piano crushing set ups - so there was always an implied "correct way" of doing the level... anything else was rather sneered at. I always wanted insane killing rampages to be as equally rewarded as sneak-a-thons... just to embrace the idea that it's the player's expression which is most important.

And Freedom Fighters - wow. It came at a time when squad based shooters really were up their own arse... where commanding your dudes required a high threshold for pain due to the unnecessarily complex interfaces provided to you. Freedom Fighters nailed a really easy approach. Three buttons: "Go there/attack", "Go there/defend" and "Come back here". Out of that you could create some great little emergent strategies - place two guys either side of a door, send a third guy in, pull them back with enemies in tow, then get the drop on them as they walk out the door right into the faces of two shotty weilding bastards. See, it shows that IO know how to learn from their mistakes. Hitman's interface was a little convoluted. FF's was nice and easy. (Then again, FF was painfully linear, despite their best efforts to hide the fact).

Their new game is being discussed. They're calling it a middle ground between FF and Hitman. hooray!

Just one thing though: "Kane"? Seriously? Man, I thought we'd been over this already.

It seems like every other gritty video game/wannabe B-Movie has some character called Kaine, Caine, Cane, Kane, Kayne or Kain. Enough Kane already! I mean, even Michael Caine, whose name is actually "Caine" doesn't bloody go around looking for movie roles where the character's name is Caine. Unless he's playing himself. But you can hardly blame him for that. Infact, according to his IMDB rap sheet he was "Born Maurice Micklewhite in London". Also, he's "Sometimes Credited As ... Michael Scott". Interesting.

So what I think happened was, he changed his name, because, I mean "Micklewhite"... What? He changes his name to "Michael Caine". And that was back in the day when it was pretty cool to be called "Caine". Like "Hey, that's that biblical killer, right? Wow. Damn son! And people are still pretty religious these days. Damn, you be a rebel!" (that's the voice of the deed poll clerk).

And that's cool, but only because it wasn't before every hack from HollyWood to Redwood decided to do the same thing. If you call an antagonist "Caine", it's a shortcut to getting the judeo-christian audience's anger focussed: "Caine? CAINE? That thar's the furst guy that cummitted mordur! If he hadn't introduced that thar concept of mordur, ther'da been no mordur nevur! String him up!"

So at that point, he's like "Wright. Wiwl you bloody hacks stop bloody using my name in vain?" and he uses the name "Michael Scott" instead. Almost the exact same thing happens, though. Shyeet. Name hijacked again.

Anyway. Let me be clear:

STOP USING THE NAME "KANE" IN VIDEO GAMES. Seriously, did you rip one page out of the "Baby Names for Satanists" book and photocopy it for everyone in the games industry? STOP IT.

2006-08-31T12:50:00.000Z

Jeff Minter and his Llamasofties have released some screens of their new game, here.

Jeff really has his own style, and despite the years of new technology, it really hasn't changed unduely.

For me, he's one of the first true digital artists, in that he has always embraced the technology. With his VLM style stuff, he doesn't seem to aim for any specific realization of the world around us. He just asks "what techniques are computers most permissive to?", and runs with it. He's immune to the fetishism of photo realism, or, infact, to any indoctriated style. He's like a sculpter who works with the grain of the wood, while many of those around him move completely against it: how many times have you seen beautiful concept art destroyed by being approximiated by low-fi faceted edges?

That said, it can become a style until itself, as soon as the concept art is ignored, and the actual canvas is engaged - Mario is a low-fi representation of a cartoon plumber, but his 8 bit incarnation is nothing short of iconic - a kind of digital Pointillisse. Pixel art is certainly a style unto itself, and so is low-poly art.

Anyway, back to Minter. Like I say, he's working with the grain of the wood - possibly to extremes. That means he's sculpting trees. If you think about it, a tree is this natural artifact - one expression of how the universe's systems collaborate, and give rise to this emergent object. In Minter's case, the focus is on the microcosmic universe inside the computer. The fascinating blurrs he produces are artifacts of those collaborating systems: digital life.

By bouncing his experiments off the canvas of a computer, he allows us to see the very nature of simple, deterministic machines, at their most elaborate.

That's more than enough art-faggery for now. I only mention it because in doing our graphics (most of which, like Minter's, are generative), I'm finding that it's less and less about what I want, and more and more about what the system wants. When I let it guide me and let it find its own form naturally I get far better results than forcing the system to bend to my will.

Hi to me

2006-08-30T02:08:00.000Z

Hi, I'm Tommunism, Bez's partner in crime and engine designer / programmer extraordinare. I'll be posting on here every once in a while. I usually don't have much to say because I usually don't care about enough stuff to say things. I care about some stuff...but not too much stuff. Sometimes, it's hard to keep track of a lot of stuff that you care about, so I find if you don't care about that much stuff, then you don't have that much stuff to take into consideration when figuring out what stuff is more important to you. One thing I definately don't care about is spelling, I can write a fast spell checker, but I can't fill it. So ANYWAY...I figure my introductory post I would talk about something that I DO care about, and that's computer hardware.

I remember back in the day, back when I graduated Highschool in 1999 the fastest chip you could buy was a Pentium 3 550Mhz. You could get the Alpha chip, the first 1Ghz chip, but...I didn't have like 5grand to drop (*sigh* the days of Pollywell computer wet dreams). My parents bought me my computer for college, a Pentium 3 450Mhz machine that I use today as a backup server. I remember 4 months after I started at NC State the new 600 Mhz chip came out, a few months later the 700, then the 750 and so on...so forth. At the rate chip speeds were increasing back then, we should be up around like 10 to 12Ghz easily, but...we aren't. Back in my highschool physics class my teacher, Mr. Ashcraft (Who is a god), was telling us that scientists and chipmakers alike felt that we would reach a limit as to how thin we could cut the circuts and it would limit the total amount of Mhz we could push out. At the time of the article that he was referring to, they were guessing 90Mhz. They were wrong, obviously.

Though I don't feel we're approaching the Ghz limit any time soon, I feel we are going to start shying away from "How fast a chip is" and lean more towards "How many chips does this chip have" Speed, obviously, will always be the main goal, but speed can be attained through various outlets. I think chip Ghz are going to be put aside for the time, and bus speeds between chips are going to be the focus for, at least a while. Take for instance the chip I have, the Pentium D 965 Extreme Edition, and the new Core 2 Duo Extreme edition chips. Both of these chips are dual core chips with hyper threading...so basically you're looking at 4 hardware threads. The clock speed of my 965 is 3.75Ghz clocked to 3.8Ghz. The biggest and baddest Core 2 Duo Extreme clocks in at about 3.2Ghz. Now...you might be thinking to yourself "Hmm...Tommy, you're both awesome, AND have the most powerful chip on the market". Though, I would agree with you that I am awesome, I would disagree with the whole powerful chip statement. The Core 2 Duo beats my chip by a considerable amount. Why...WHY you're probably screaming. It's the bus speed in which the two cores communicate to eachother. Intel came up with a new architecture that boosts the performance of the Core 2 Duo chip quite a bit. I won't go into it in crazy detail, but it works and it works well. I think these is the first steps towards a new era of computing and software development, Multi-Threaded Programming.

Each next gen console (with the exception of the Wii I think) has several processors avaliable to spread out the software load. It's going to be the job of future, and current, game developers to use these processors to squeeze the maximum amount of power out of these consoles. This is going to take careful planning to accurately balance load on these processors. The days of single threaded programming aren't dead yet, but the best of the best of programmers are going to be spreading their code out and getting some serious performance out of these consoles eventually leaving programmers that only know single threaded programming in the dust. I really feel with the direction chip, and console makers are heading that companies are going to be looking for people who have practical and I do stress PRACTICAL experience with multi-threaded programming. I for one am excited and ready.

That's all I have to say right now. If you're a hot chick, pix pls.

I got Satellite!

2006-08-25T14:04:00.000Z

Look upon me, mere mortals, with dread, for I have a dish-shaped ear to the sky! Mercury himself is my ISP and I shall download Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe faster than David Freeman can invent a new rule to force an emotion upon his audience.

(Just don't mention the upload speeds.)

Muahaha! Muahahahahahaaaa!

Uplink anxiety

2006-08-25T11:15:00.001Z

Oh God. Uplink was the cause of some major freakouts in University.

After 10 hour playing sessions, delving deep into my own insomnia, I'd start to hear things. That satellite outside was blinking directly at me. It would have passed my notice, if only it hadn't moved slightly faster than the rest of the blinking dots in the sky. Bastard satellite, zeroing in on my location, after I got too cocky with a trace-progress bar. I should have heeded its "be-be-beeps".

Footsteps outside the door obviously belonged to an inevitable squad of FBI Cyber Hacker agents, ready to come stop my hackzoring ways. My heart stopped as three knocks rapped on the door on the door: "Oi Bezzy? You ever going to leave your room?" says the one.

THEY'VE COME FOR YOU! But don't answer! It's a trick! Those mancunian accents don't fool anyone, Fed! You're just pretending to be my friend to coax me out! This is university! I know for a fact that I've got no friends around here! Shoulda thoguht of that first, gumshoe!

"I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE. I SAW YOU ON ICQ."

Don't answer. Just keep quiet. Wait until they're gone. They don't have jurisdiction in England anyhow!

"WAKE UP YOU FUCK"

Ahhk. They're all over the door knob now! It rattles!

"Why do you always lock the door? Are you having a wank?"

NO! MY TERRIBLE SECRET!

"Fine, fuck you then. We're in the pub. Just wash your hands before you come down there."

They're going away now - their footsteps receed down the hallway. But it could all just be a trick! Maybe they're just standing outside the door going "TAP, TAP, tap, tap" with their feet.

And then you slap yourself. It's only a game.

What's great about this is the incredible, unprecedented immersion. Introversion don't have any kind of intermediate avatar which the story/game/experience is experienced by. And because you don't have to project your ego onto "Trevor Nova: Elite Hacker", there's this direct connection between you and the game world.

You are your own avatar: When the game's protagonist earns a monitor tan, it's YOU getting a monitor tan. When you interface with a hacker terminal - holy crap, that terminal looks so realistic! It looks just like a real computer, partly because, it IS a real computer. It's not like those computers you're used to, made up of 50 polygons and a 256x256 texture, words on the faux screen blurring into unreadable green lines. It's almost like you're there in the hackers shit-strewn room. Partly becaue, you are there. Your fictional hole is your own hole.

DO YOU GET IT YET? THE LINES ARE BLURRED. DO I HAVE TO SPEND ANY MORE TIME EXPLAINING IT? You're sitting ON the 4th wall, and until the Feds fail to knock it down and take you in, there's very little to prove that what you're experiencing isn't real.

Seriously: BUY THAT GAME. IT WILL FUCK YOU UP.

Greg!!!

2006-08-23T21:25:00.001Z

Greg Costikyan has some (not unusually, and not unreasonably) strong words about Microsoft's Creator's Club. I have to agree with the sentiment to a degree. I was trying to be a little detatched, and unemotional in my previous post on the matter.

As a couple of people who just wanted to get onto XBLA so that we have the option to work on small-but-perfectly-formed original games (and earn some wonga to feed that goal), we're hoping that this won't be an extra hurdle - one where we're tripping over enthusiasts for attention. We don't want to be lost in the noise. Equally, we don't want to be the loudest guys on the block, vying for attention. A game shouldn't be picked up on the basis of the most extreme self promotion. A game should be picked up because it's GOOD.

And, knowing a few of the people behind XBLA, we actually don't worry too much about having to scream to get noticed. They're smart, and reasonable, and certainly listen to you if you take the time to talk to them.

As far as I can tell (and this is my hope) the Creator's Club is not a required step to develop for XBLA. You don't have to rely on your peers acceptance. If a concept is strong enough, and the implementation doesn't stink, I don't see any reason you couldn't bypass the holding pen altogether, and just see what MS think. However, it is still an option if you work 9-5, and do games on the side.

We don't, though. We're on this all day, every day. To be told that we might just be overlooked amongst the mass of other developers... it does us a disservice. Not that anyone owes us a salary for just wanting to be indie, but our money is where our mouth is. Or... if we had money, it'd be where our mouths are, but our mouths don't get much use anymore for that whole "food eating" thing (due to the whole "no money" issue). So, perhaps more accurately, our air is where our sound hole is.

Okay, that one got away from me. How about... our hearts are on our sleeves, and please don't make us get other people's bodily organs on our clothes by making us fight it out with other developers, thunderdrome style.

:o

Sling Shot

2006-08-21T13:43:00.000Z

God I'm loving RayHound. It's the new game by the maker of Warning Forever, which is already classic indie shooter. Although Hizoka T Ohkuba isn't quite as prolific as Kenta Cho (maker of rRootage, Tumiki Fighters, muCade and other insane bullet riffs) his ideas certainly seem a little more divergent from typical shmup themes.

RayHound is currently only at version 0.8, but already demonstrates this beautifully: You are an itsy bitsy cybar space ship (TM), and have no weapons of your own. You can, however, snatch incoming rays within a radius around your ship, at which point, they'll become dangerous to anything that isn't you. Freely moving around a circular arena using the mouse, you alternately dodge and ambush bullets thrown your way, and sling shot them back at their originators (tonnes of identical, circular groups of twisting turrets). Take out a number of enemies at once with a cluster of bent bullets, and you'll earn a 2^n multiplier to that shot. The more skillful the shot, the more you'll earn. Simple, elegant, and encouraging of interesting play.

You're also able to "Boost" by nudging your mouse quickly in a direction. This triggers a bounce-shield around your craft, which knocks any pink bullets in the direction of the nudge. The shots lock onto anything roughly in the same direction. When the bounced, rather than slung shot hits, it earns less points than a sling shot (100, as opposed to 300) as, depending on the number of bullets flying around, and the number of enemy targets, it can be a bit easier to do. It's excellent for cleaning up smaller numbers of enemies quickly, but risky when trying to deal with many different enemies firing at sparodically. Essentially, the sling shot is great for taking on enemies en mass (chuck a swarm of rays their way), while the bounce is better for taking out the last few enemies in a cluster.

There's not a whole lot in this version which I can fault. It's already shaping up very well.

Aesthetically and semiotically everything's fine apart from a few tiny nit-picks.

The bullet slinging is given about a +/-5 degree auto aim so that a higher pace of play can be maintained without successful shots turning into total flukes. To help clarify this point further, I'd love to see little targetting icons pop up over enemies to show that my slung bullets will meet a target if I only let them fly that instant.

Bullets that have locked on all fly straight after releasing, after having been very bendy. Because of this, occasionally their direction will snap straight toward their locked on target creating unnatural, sudden bends in the bullet's path. It should be possible for the bullet to inheret the momentum at release, and calculate the required arc to hit the target without simply snapping to a straight line. However, this'd have minimal impact: as I say, the bullet is already flying off roughly in the direction of the target, so most of the time you're oblivious to the fact.

Being hit by a bullet shows a big "-105" flashing over your craft. This refers to the amount of time you lose on your health/clock. However, as far as I can tell, it's actually 105 hundredths of a second (1.05 seconds). Though hundredths are displayed, the primary display of time is still in seconds, so this is a little confusing. I keep thinking I'm losing 105 seconds. Buh. I must just be stupid, eh?

Interestingly (referring to two posts ago) the lack of a high score board means that I've no real "goals" to aim for, self made or otherwise: The level number passes so fast that if I blink, I miss my progress. The game over screen doesn't even give me enough time to write down my score. I may be achieving new highs, but I'm blind to it, trained as I am, to expect the computer to keep track of it for me. As a result, I end up playing the game almost totally intrinsically, and am probably having a lot more fun because of it.

Certainly I'm not arguing against a high score board, but perhaps this gives us an idea? Maybe it's worth suggesting to the players of our games to play without explicit aims? Perhaps this is what make the open GTA model so wonderful - there's always a chance to just play. Perhaps, to have them toy, rather than game our systems, will see them enjoy themselves more when we DO start to challenge their playfulness and creativity with solid goals? Playing this early version of RayHound makes me feel like I'm playing a Sandboxed version of a typically high-score obsessed shooter. And to its credit, the core gameplay is enguaging enough in of itself that it has me hooked on the intrinsic appeal alone.

Do it your own way, the way you've been doing.

2006-08-21T13:28:00.000Z

Since Tadhg has turned the discussion of interactive storytelling into a fucking quagmire, I vote we move on to something more interesting: Interactive Haikus!

Jump on a Goomba,
Jump! Jump! Jump!
You fell in a hole.

Me, playing Super Haiku Bros, yesterday. Here, I'm using the rather ~~non-existant~~ unpopular 5,3,5 syllable structure.

Seriously though, I hope all this discussion with its constant re-definition of ~~battle grounds~~ terms doesn't see us forget that we don't have to fulfill any grand Crawfordian dream with what we do. We can do anything from "interactive dance" to "interactive history", and not even have to give it a name, and still be equally artistically justified and bankrupt simultaneously.

I just feel like we've propped up a target for ourselves, and it's paper thin.

Just make anything you want. Find your own way... Your own path... through... hnnng... possibility. *gagh*.

The Need to Want.

2006-08-20T22:56:00.000Z

That which follows this is a post made by good friend JeanPaul LeBreton. JeanPaul has been both a mentor and comrade on game design for a good 7 years now, so forgive me if I end up agreeing with everything he says. Our minds often seem somewhat locked into parallel trains of thought. I add my own comments at the end. DO read the linked article first.

Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator

[1] Players who are creative enough to find their own forms of expression within a game must implicitly go beyond merely understanding the game mechanics. That is a base requirement. Expression in games (finding one's own "way" - one's own "style", like Jeet Kun Do) seems only to occur in the emergent strategies thrown up by the core rules. In Deux Ex, placing a Mine is not creative - it has been coded strictly. Equally, jumping is not creative - it has merely been allowed by the developers. But in combination, players have been able to climb sheer surfaces with these two simple actions. That's creativity - not because it was unanticipated (which it happened to be) but because it was at a level of expression higher than the simple use of an existing verb. For many games, this stratosphere of creativity is only met after autistic levels of engagement with the game - typically, video games are quite complex when compared to folk, and board games. There are such a breadth of verbs to learn that the entry level for actual strategic creativity often lies well after total appropriation of a tombs' worth of button combinations and context sensitive verbs. And often, this breadth simply exists to hide the lack of depth present (I do not believe that breath is necessarily inversely proportional to depth - sadly, it often seems the case).

[2] We are not well versed, on the whole, on the art of creating creative tools. They are difficult to conceptualize, design, and produce, and it is easy (too easy) to dismiss the undesireable emergent strategies as un-forseeable... a product of the magic of game design. I wish that we did focus on this side more - the management without contrivance of our own possibility spaces. I have my own scrappy ideas for methodologies which seem to get me by. They basically come down to this: systems that are complex enough for its results to become percievably random not only to its own designer, but to its player, are pointless. Obviously this is rather subjective, but the point is, while we should not sit on our laurels and make shallow game play out of fear of emergence, we should equally recognize that too much depth can turn dull, too. After all, it could be the overwhelming amount of depth that hinders us from being intentionally creative within our play - if we cannot percieve the full result of our actions easily, we may be frightened to make certain expressions.

[3] I had posted something earlier on the subject, but took it down for a re-write (still pending).

[4] I've felt this quite often, and seen friends succum to it too. The technique of well-paced-unlockables doesn't make a game implicitly bad, but it has certainly seen me play more than a few games more than they probably deserved (Need for Speed: Underground, I look in your direction). I'm certainly averse to the idea that this technique "saves" otherwise uncompelling games. They say that you can't polish a turd... but this pavlovian approach makes me think otherwise.

[5] It's also at this point that the exploration of the breadth of the game (the constant opening of new verbs as you level through your different disceplines) dries up, at which point, you've been exposed to the idea of exploring the depth thrown up by your endless verbs. I witnessed four great friends from my childhood, this weekend, all sit around a table during a wedding celebration, trying to figure out the most efficient barrage of spells to take out a single, incredibly tough enemy. So, my point in [1] stands. With enough saturation in the problem area, you establish an accurate mental model, and start to really be able to riff creatively with the game-qua-musical-instrument.

[6] I agree (of course!) but can also sympathise with why such games have been successful - or atleast, why mankind has allowed them to be successful. It's the Need to Want. As Jesper Juul pointed out of Sid Meier's fleeting description of games: "Games are a set of interesting and uninteresting choices". Yes, a player's voice has been sadly unheard in most of the games we play, but often, we like to follow paths. We sometimes like to press the correct button. We sometimes like to be told "you did the right thing", rather than "any approach is as good as the next". We also just like extrinsic rewards (at least until their novelty wears off due to too much repetition). But what this article clears up so elegantly is why, even though intrinsic rewards are so much more fulfulling, why so many people put up with extrinsically biased games. Things like Guitar Hero, where we follow the same track every single time, or Half Life, where we try to follow the "Hero's Journey" - both cases punish unsanctioned creativity. But these games seem to work because they are the ones where the extrinsic end is the intrinsic desire. The need to want to sound like Jimmy Hendrix. The need to want to be Gordon Freeman. The Need to Want is built into all of us through evolution. The need to suffer for even an unfulfilling reward still fills us with a sense of worth. It's the reason we build pyramids and climb mountains and fuck each other over for the top spot. It's evolutionary. It's a bit sad, really.

Up creatively empowering games, I say.

The Indie Gold Rush

2006-08-15T09:12:00.000Z

I'm pleased to see that Microsoft are living up to their pre-release promise of making the XBox360 "your machine" with the new XNA/Creator's Club dealies. For the last year, the console has felt as closed as any other... even more exclusive to developers than platforms that were supposed to be closed - the PSP, for example.

Opening up any console sees a platform holder walking a narrow line. On the one hand, you'll gain a more avid user base, projects of great imagination undiluted by the mitigating forces of investors/publishers/marketers/crackpots, and utilities that make the console more than just a games console - take the XBox Media Center program, which allowed you to stream just about any type of content off a networked PC, or off the XBox hard drive.

On the other hand, you're opening up all kinds of legal shenanigans - modifiable content undermining ESRB ratings (good grief), pirated software, hacks, exploits, enabling the piracy of games, music, and films - take the XBox Media Center program, which allowed you to stream just about any type of content (obtained legally or no) off a networked PC, or off the XBox hard drive.

As Xbox Media Center demonstrates so perfectly, the opening up of a console, while a boon for the consumer, is a legal mine field for the platform holders. When the hardware they've designed so thoroughly to be a legal platform for media (to satisfy professional content creators worried about piracy) is undermined by the hobbyist, they become obliged to do their best to stamp out illegal use - endless PSP patches are a testament. (Tangent: Every PSP game I've bought has had the requirement of an incremental update to the firmware. As a result, my "first play" experience has always been sullied by the process of charging up the PSP so that it has enough juice to safely install, and then the install itself, and then the restart, and the re-entering of clock times and such).

With this in mind, any move to open up a console should, in my view, be applauded - it takes quite an effort for the platform holder to accept the bad with the good.

Microsoft are trying to find a happy middle ground between the Explicit Openness, and Bullet-Proof Closed-ness by creating a kind of "containment area" for open developers - the "Creator's Club". Developers who sign on (and pay) for this service will be placed along side peers, and will have a similar level of access to the console's workings as a real developer would (minus a few key areas: distribution and networking being the main two).

While this is a good step forward, this means that there's never going to be an easy way to distribute new software to average-joe XBox 360 users (which puts a stop to the mass proliferation Media Center equivalent programs (sadface)), but the cream of the crop (the legal crop, that is) may be picked up, polished, and presented to the masses - possibly through the existing online marketplace, or as part of updates in extenuating circumstances. Microsoft become the arbiter of quality and legality. It's not too much to ask, I think, on their own damn console.

Distribution of these open projects is an interesting matter:

(Source: XboxScene)

In other words, distribution for use on the 360 itself implicitly requires you to be open source: forced sharing. This should have a lot of interesting trickle down effects - Microsoft may see interesting techniques and solutions come up in the "Creator's Club", and start pointing professional outfits to them. In the same way, open-spirited indie developers can happily share knowledge between each other, creating a collaborative community spirit. There will inevitably be "leecher" accounts - those that get in on the creator's club to reap the benefits of custom code jobs, but provide little in the way of input. You also open the door to hackers and crackers who will endlessly probe possible flaws in the SDK, looking for a way to gain greater access to the system. Microsoft can also take a fine tooth comb to anything you want to submit as a professional piece of work, making sure that no damaging exploits or illegally gained libraries etc. are built into the code (assuming they can spare the resources to do this).

Since everything using XNA should implicitly work on the PC, it may be that a game's popularity in the existing PC indie scene is the only thing that gains it MS's attention - a diamond in the rough, lost in all the noise. This grass roots popularity could be the single thing pushing some indie games over into XBLA - (not that popular opinion is always the right way to go).

Is this a happy compromise between the totally open and the totally closed? Time will tell. To me, it seems like a bubble of chaos: internally free, but ultimately restrained (or as friend Mike Nowak suggests: "Closed Open Source"). It'll be interesting to see what happens when the bubble (almost inevitably) bursts, and development becomes unconstrained. Will we see illegally distributed programs on Joe Gamer accounts? Will MS feel the need to deal with a clean up which actually benefits the consumer? Could they not, in fact, claim that such a clean up is an impossible task, while watching word of mouth spread about hardware sales increase? And in the same way, if a game has to rely on grass roots popularity in the PC sector, won't the pirates have already distributed the game to the masses, rendering an XBLA version (somewhat) redundant?

These questions come from my paranoid side. I have a countering feeling (from my GUT) that everything's going to be alright. Optimism: If determinism is to be believed, then the lay of the world is the only way the world can be, and thus, is simultaneously the best and worst possibility thrown up by the universe.

It has been clear for years that the publishers' race for blockbuster revenue (earned by a meager number of titles each year) has by now created a flood plain. Over saturation within genres (and franchise fatigue), increasing budgets (leading to) constrained innovation and burned out workers have created a desire for the polar opposite: sustainable, low budget, innovative crews of indie developers. These crews are springing up to harvest the gaps between the big budget blockbusters. Introversion call themselves "The Last of the Bedroom Coders". Personally, I think it's more a case of "The return of...".

I believe that we are past the brink of an Indie Gold Rush. I believe that it has already begun. So rejoice! But pay heed my brothers: If history is anything to go by, then it is not the prospector who will win out. Instead, it is man who sells the shovels.

Then again, regardless of all attempts to funnel them into some kind of neatly structured, harvestable form, indies in all fields thrive in the cracks between identifyable structure. They exist despite a conventional industry, not because of it.

Let me link Naked War to examplify the Pickford Brothers, who are repeatedly proving this point.

2006-07-27T19:29:00.000Z

Despite what the publish date says for this entry, this was written on the 16th of July. There have been more than a few hiccups moving from Holland back home to the green and pleasant hills of Exmoor.

My bike and TV stayed in holland with a friend, the cost of transport being too great. EasyJet lost one of my bags. Fedex forgot to put a "Do not X-Ray" sticker on my PC, apparantly wiping the BIOS, rendering the machine useless. Upgrading wouldn't have been such a problem if it weren't for those green and pleasant hills putting me 40 minutes away from the closest tech shop - and unfortunately, that's PC World; the AOL of computer retailers.

I should really order online, right? Sadly, those pleasantly green hills have done it again, putting us in a mobile phone and broadband blackspot. We can't currently even sustain a modem connection without a pleasant breeze knocking us offline.

I guess that this is the first lesson of many. I had assumed that it'd be rather easy to sit down and get on with development of the game. For Tommy, it's been pretty much fine, but for myself, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. No computer, no net connection, no shops nearby, and thanks to fuel prices, limited transport.

Since we knew we'd be working remotely (myself in England, Tommy in the US), we made sure that all our tools were net friendly. We have a wiki for our design document, and for sharing information. We have e-mail, skype, and MSN for communication. We have Subversion for our code version control. But all these tools don't mean a thing if you don't have an environment where you can just sit down and work - work without distractions, without hindrance.

That's the take-away from this post. If you're starting a work intensive project, your first priority is to figure out a realistic actionable plan to find and sustain a working environment.

Wow, this is the most obvious shit ever. Less obvious stuff, more often... that's the ticket, bez.

Bez on a Bike: Bridging Creativity with Technology

2006-06-15T12:38:00.000Z

Yesterday I jumped on my bike, and rode out and got me the cheapest Shader 3.0 enabled graphics card that money could buy... ~170 Eurobucks. I took the opportunity to be a tourist around Amsterdam city. I've been in Holland almost two years now, but, as is typical for people with heavy workloads (and nerdy, agoraphobic dispositions) I had never really known it very well. The path back and forth to work is etched into my brain, but the possibilities off that well trod route were under-explored.

I let impulse guide me around the city, almost trying to get myself lost. Quite by accident, I rode past my previous employers' apartment. It's a place that I had only previously been to via tram and taxi. Funny how the experience of traversing through the world feels so different when you're in control of where you're going. If you're being lead somewhere, or following a pre-designated path, the cartographical part of your brain must switch off or something. You stop caring about mapping how to get somewhere because it's out of your hands. You're not responsible for your direction, or getting to a location. It's a bit like following an implied path in a scripted FPS, or uncovering more nuggets of story in a lot of other games. That's the reason I hadn't known the route before - I had never visited the area with the responsibility of finding my way back home.

Finding this path under my own steam and being responsible for my own path was a small revelation. I was being incredibly coscient about the areas I was passing through so that, as a last resort, I could always work my way back home. As the geographically disparate locations of my house and my bosses' suddenly linked up in my head, I got a feeling of how the traffic system in Amsterdam flowed, as it does, in its concentric circles and spokes which radiate out from Central Station.

Finding the route was practically random. There was no map reading, no approach, and not even an intent to find the place. However, if I wanted to, I could have used a methodology that would make mapping the route more of an inevitability than a fluke: I could have spiraled out from my starting point, touching the previous arcing path with every cycle, very quickly giving me a highly connected mental model of the street layout. People use this technique to find dead bodies.

I mention this because it's a good analogy for creativity (not the finding of dead bodies). Edward de Bono and Michel Gondry seem to agree that creativity manifests itself in the elegant leaps between seemingly dissonant ideas. Paraphrasing de Bono "Successful Creativity is 100% silly in foresight, and 100% logical in hindsight". Creativity isn't about creating new thoughts - it's about constructing bridges between existing ones.

Anyway, I rode on home, because I was eager to engage in some technophilia.

One fairly painless install later, I had Render Monkey open. It seems like a great tool in that it completely exposes shader functionality while taking away the pain of setting up an environment for it. Scanning through the examples, I started to build up mental models of the common techniques and functionality used to generate a range of shaders. Each new example bridged a gap between what I wanted to create, and what was possible... Sorry, no, I'm still not going to mention what the game is... But now you know that it requires some considerable Shader tech. (And a bit of googletective work would probably reveal the game... If you figure it out, I do hope you'll keep it quiet for a while).

I'd like to claim to be technology-agnostic. To me, a game is a game is a game, whether it's played on a computer, on a pitch, on a board, or in the mind, but in the face of things, it's quite hard to say that I really am. While this game could be done without shader technology it'd probably not hit its intended targets. I feel that it's rare that technology enables significantly different game play possibilities, but it does happen, and this might be one of those cases (probably not, if I'm honest, but the tech definitely allows us to hit a critical aesthetic). At the same time, I don't feel like I'm being a slave to technology when I consider where the game's concept is coming from...

If you look at a cross section of video games, it seems that they lie between two extremes. At one extreme the game's concept has been created with a complete disregard for how current technology can be leveraged to meet the vision. On the other end, there is such an obsession with show casing technological trinkets that the game's design plays second fiddle - the infamous "Tech Demo" games (although in some cases, I'd argue that the elegance of some of the design is underrated).

The former gets produced due to individuals with stunning personality but a lack of understanding of their canvas; that is, the technology and production pipeline they must contest with in order to see their vision through. The latter extreme comes from those who simply have no real compunction to pursue anything remotely artistic (in the interactive, rather than audio/video sense) - the GPU's the star.

When the gameplay-bereft technical beauties appear, their gleam hides their shortcomings, and if nothing else, they're nice to watch while someone else plays for you (assuming you have any kind of a technological sweet tooth). And when those games with unfulfilled grandiose promises appear as buggy shadows of their platonic (and possibly impossible) ideal then we say "Aww. Well, at least they tried to do something different".

The media seem to criticize neither, mainly because they're not allowed to see the truth during a production - they're allowed to talk to the talkers in a company, and are sold the image of a development utopia - or where productions are obviously tough, it's "living the dream", and "we live on coke and pizza!". But that's a rant for another time.

I don't mean to criticize either extreme. In my book, every approach is equally justified. It's just that a director has to be responsible for the quality of the results. If they don't work out, it's probably not that the theory is wrong. More likely, it's because the theory cannot co-exist with reality.

It just seems to me that the middle ground is your sweet spot By that, I don't mean that Technology and Design have "equal say". It shouldn't be able Technology and Design being locked in a power struggle. They should be symbiotic. They should respect and engage with each other, understanding each other's needs and trying to come to an artistically accomplished, but technologically plausible result. Artistic success comes from understanding your limitations, and working with them, rather than against them. That means knowing your canvas. In our case, that means knowing what Shader technology's strengths and weaknesses are.

...The game we're making is something I've had on my mind for several years now, before shaders existed, and before I really knew of a proper way to approach it. It was a really rather abstract idea, floating around, certainly not born of a possibility that technology had thrown up. It remained in that platonic limbo until I started to learn about how shaders worked.

I started to investigate at a very superficial level, and saw how vertex and pixel shaders were basically these power-houses for visualization - simple algorithms applied in brute force onto big chunks of data, throughputting a whole lot of data, constantly. Like anyone, I started to think of how one would use the technology to make superficial graphical doo-dahs - some realistic like refraction and bump mapping, and some abstract, like minter-esque feedback buffers and colormaps. I thought of ways in which I might be able to pull off some of the rather abstract OpenGL 1.0 effects in my previous game using shader technology.

Then, quite by accident, I found my previous ~~employer's apartment~~ game concept. A mental cycle path between the raw game idea and the technical approach had been laid down in crazy paving, its course weaving without intent. Out of a cloud of ideas, two haphazardly found each other, and became one. As a result, we're on the cusp of finding out whether this technological approach really works. If it doesn't, we have a few other possible solutions to try. I'm fairly confident, but you never can tell, eh?

Like I say, I think that there's more to being creative than hoping and praying for a eureka moment (or smoking funny cigarettes for the hyper liquefaction of one's train of thought).

At the same time, trying to actively be creative is never going to stop you from getting lucky.

Self Motivation

2006-06-12T22:14:00.000Z

I do apologize for immediately posting nothing at all. I have 3 or 4 draft posts which start with nice small snappy ideas, but then seem to simply spiral out of control and try to solve world hunger (though not very well).

My next post was going to be about self motivation, but it's really hot here, so I just went to bed instead. No AC kinda sucks. Eventually AC in europe may become rather standard, but only when the north sea is lapping at my feet... in the brendan hills.

So, despite suffering from heat exhaustion most of the day, and getting food poisoning yesterday, we're doing alright.

Tommy Refenes is the coder who works with me on our game. He was one of the engine coders at Streamline before we all decided to leave. He's just recieved all the hardware he needs, and is starting up a Subversion server so that we can code remotely. He's already got a basic DX9 environment going, along with a console and various input interfaces. The engine is also being built with multithreading in mind from the start. Some of the techniques we use could be called "brute force", relying on the nature of the target hardware. In many 360 games, there's a lot of processor power going untapped, so we're trying to be smart about how we process and pipeline everything from game play to sound to graphics.

I'm trying to get my head around some of the shader tech we'll be using and planning game code architecture. We use a wiki to document everything we work on, listing everything from game mechanics and algorithms to business plans and marketing ideas. I personally like to try to document everything I can about a game well before coding anything because it forces me to be intentional. It means that I can't just say "yeah, let's have kick ass feature #131516" without seeing what affect it will have on the rest of the game. It means that I won't code anything half heartedly, or without proper respect to the rest of the architecture (unless the name of the game IS experimentation and prototyping, in which case, anything goes).

Design documents change all the time, naturally, so we try not to look at the document as something that's set in stone. It's more like a repository of knowledge about the project, changing day to day, but helping us to maintain a united vision of the game (even if that vision alters over the development). Since it's a wiki, it's very easy to track each other's changes, and share ideas, text, images etc. It can also rather naturally guide the design of the code architecture (which is both good and bad, but basically comes down to how well you design software) and via "needed pages" can show you what areas need more elaboration before the design can be called "well formed". Damn I love my wiki!

One interesting thing I've encountered with wikis in the past is that although they can give a very detailed (albeit sprawling) specification for a design, it's very hard to communicate a higher level idea of what the hell the game is about. In other words, you can understand each individual component of the game, but it's hard to see how they bind together to make something interesting. As a result, I make pages which explain lots of emergent strategies made possible with the core rules. This gives a newcomer to the wiki lots of practical possibilities in the game, and explains how the core rules give rise to them.

At some point we'll open up the wiki for public scrutiny incase anyone is interested.

Pretty soon I should be able to start actual game play coding - I've been preparing all my favourite physics equations in anticipation, but most of the work will be in game play element management.

I got this idea for a game.

2006-05-24T15:47:00.000Z

My name is Aubrey Hesselgren. This is Blog about a game I am working on.

I previously worked at Streamline Studios. For a year, I was Lead Game Designer on a game called "HoopWorld" slated for Xbox360 Live Arcade. Before that, I worked on mods, and an abstract 3D shooty game. I'm not what you'd call a gaming veteran. I grew up with games as my primary form of entertainment. With a few exceptions, I didn't feel like games grew up with me.

The reason for this blog is to document (as far as I'm allowed to) the journey from a professional development background to becoming an indie developer. I hope that it'll atleast give some kind of anecdotal insight for anyone else wanting to pursue the path - I know you're out there.

Distribution models like Steam, PopCap, and Xbox Live Arcade are making it possible for tiny developers, with small (but perfectly formed) games to make a living out of something that could have only been under the radar projects a year or two ago. Nowadays, for the creatives in game development, spending years trying to climb the ladder of a bigger and more secure company is no longer the path of least resistance to getting one's game made. I know of more than a few developers who are itching to get their modest proposals out, who no longer feel like it'll lead to total destitution.

My feeling is that this influx will create an indie gold rush. Many of us may fail to win one of the prized slots, because it's clear that no-one wants to oversaturate any one of these distribution models (not that there aren't alternatives to these). Despite this competitive starting state, I call every indie my brother, because it is at the fringes of any medium that creative force gains most traction. Whether or not this game succeeds, it will only give way to something that does something great for the interactive medium. We are all in this together, pushing games forward.

Today is the first day of my development of a new game. I don't want to say what the game is just yet, which is a bit annoying of me, I know. I'll try to update regularly, but I won't make any promises.