LZorro Studios

Cardboard Jam, April 9-10th, 2011

2011-04-12T16:15:00.015-04:00

We had another Boston Game Jam this past weekend, this time focusing on board and card games. A bit of a departure than our usual video game creation, and it really had a different flavor because the weekend was all about game design. Jeff Ward wrote a quick write-up that highlighted these points, so I'll point you there instead of stealing/paraphrasing him.

Our Project

I worked with Gabe Warshauer-Baker, Kevin Jackson-Mead and Nick Troy on a project that Gabe had pitched. The concept was "Other People's Tools", with the inspiration coming from a mechanic from the game Caylus - the idea being that you gain some residual benefit from letting other players use "tools" that you own.

First Prototype

Here's a sample of cards that represent our first stab at creating the game. For resources, we played with a set of Looney Labs' "Icehouse" pyramids because, well, we happened to have a set.

The white cards are the tools, and the yellow cards are the objectives a player has to meet in order to win. Each player was dealt a hand of 3 tool cards and given 1 objective card. The players presented their tools to the group all at once, and play went around to each player, where they selected which tool they wanted to use. When the round ended, if a player happened to fulfill their objectives, they won and the game was over.

We started with the tool cards on the left, which came to be known as the "gather" tools. They consisted of taking the appropriate number of "triangles" from the resource pool at no cost, and the tool's owner received a triangle for their trouble as indicated on the bottom of the card. We found quickly that there wasn't a lot of strategy in which tool you offered the others - you picked the tool that gave you a benefit that matched your objective, and hoped that the others would provide a tool to help you along, as well. Often you had a choice of three tools that didn't really help you in any way, so the choice was kind of "meh". Players were focused more on meeting their objectives instead of providing helpful tools (which we meant to be our core mechanic).

We played around with other changes - making the objectives private knowledge, more diverse objectives, even adding an "Apples to Apples"-style system of presenting the tools anonymously. By the time we got to adding the "conversion" tools - which we knew we needed - the prototype was dying. (Notice that there aren't any benefits listed on the conversion tool cards in the middle column above.) The biggest problem was that of divergent goals. It boiled down to "I want to help you win (by giving you a tool you want to use), but I don't want to help you win (because I'll lose)." So, back to the drawing board.

The Game Takes Shape

Our goal for the second prototype was focusing on the basic premise - to provide the most useful tool to the other players (and be rewarded for it). So, the tools became the resources, with their value determined by the core "elements" they provided and by what the other players bid on it to claim it, poker-style. Players cannot bid on their own tools (it is forbidden among gnomes), but this was balanced because they were holding the auction and gaining income. At about this time we were also trying to add a bit of flavor with a story, which we settled on a group of gnomes in a silly, steampunk setting. So each tool provides one or two of four elements: whack, hole, cut and fuse. A basic hammer provides 1 whack, where a hammer-saw could provide 1 whack and 1 cut. And so on, up to the Semi-Automatic Blade Pipes and such.

The singular objectives were gone, and now the players were using these tools to build "projects". The projects were priced such that a player would need to use at least two tools to claim it, and they provided additional income. The economy was changed to a single currency (coins, since we were using pennies). Whoever had the most coins at the end of the game won.

At first, we determined the end of the game simply by exhausting the project card pile. But, then we added a lot more projects, which would have dragged the game on. We tried stopping the game when a player built their fourth project, but an interesting wrinkle came up during playtesting. One player had 3 projects and was poised to built a fourth, but he didn't have enough money to win the game. So he declined, postponing the game further until someone else could gather the tools to end the game. Game time was already averaging an hour, so to curb this unnecessary prolonging of the game, a "Game Over" card was added randomly toward the bottom of the project deck (Tourist Season, when the humans flock in to buy up the gnomes' projects).

What's Next

And so, we are left with our game, Gnome Economics. We plan to complete the cards by adding all of the names and flavor text, and get them set up in a file with graphics that can be printed.

Overall, I think the project was fairly successful. I'm not much on bidding games, but the series of checks and balances inherent in our auction system (created almost by accident) keeps the game from favoring any one particular strategy.

If there's anything that "went wrong" during the game's development, it's that the game is too long for us to get a lot of iterative game testing done. The mechanics of the game are simple, so a lot of our adjustments were minor value tweaking. And an hour-long game isn't too shabby, considering that about how long most modern board games are expected to last. But we found that playtesting among ourselves was slow, because we were discussing the game as we played it, and playtesting with others was slow because they were analyzing the game, trying to figure out the optimum strategy and calculating expense versus returns (which is to be expected - this was a room full of gamers, after all!)

Keep an eye here, I'll make an update when we get the files finished so you can try the game out for yourself!

HTML5 Tools Jam

2011-01-10T00:23:00.003-05:00

On the weekend of January 8th and 9th, Darren Torpey and Darius Kazemi hosted the first Boston Game Jam of 2011. Which is a bit of a misnomer, since this was a tools jam. The idea was to spend some time working and collaborating on a bunch of tools using HTML5, with the idea being not only to learn about this relatively new technology, but to make some ready-to-use tools in the upcoming Global Game Jam.

This was an intimate affair, with only about 10 people participating, and once again held at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Cambridge. The projects were interesting - it's really cool to see this technology work "in browser" instead of going through the rigmarole of compiling and various file types and stuff. I can't claim to be an expert in HTML5 or even Javascript, but I'm learning, and the potential here is really exciting.

My own project was inspired by the Akihabara engine, specifically the "toys" that are built into it, which provide the framework to create various arcade games. My goal was to build a similar toy to create card games - partly because card games are easy and cool, and partly to share since people will have the opportunity to create card and board games at the Global Game Jam this year. Darren and Darius quickly talked me out of that, since there's a lot of overhead into learning and using the Akihabara engine. So the project evolved into creating a Javascript library, with the cards being displayed in browser using CSS3.

By the end of the day on Saturday, I had most of the framework written, designed and tested out, and Darren had a crude card system working early on Sunday. The goal was set to put together a solitaire game to make sure the system would handle most everything that someone might expect it to, and by the time presentations were due, most of it was in place.

There are a few things left that I'd like to get done before I call it finished. One, finish up the functionality. Two, clean up the code and make sure things can be written easily (more for my own benefit, especially on the CSS side). Three, make sure it's all documented. Then, at least, we should be able to write card games with a standard poker deck.

My ultimate goal is to make the library more extensible and abstract, so that someone could write any kind of card game. This goal kind of got in my own way...I had grand plans for this project, when in reality it isn't all that complicated. But at the very least, I'll have the libraries to work on my own games. I'll be sure to post again when I've got something ready to show.

Special thanks to Darren who worked with me on the project on the second day, to Darius for his occasional help with Javascript and Git, and to Jonathon Myers for letting me use his spare laptop. :)

New Year's Post

2011-01-10T00:08:00.002-05:00

It is lame for me to make New Year's resolutions a week into January?

Yeah, probably.

Either way, resolutions seem so final, which is perhaps why people rarely follow through with them. So here are a few of my plans for 2011 - and the nice thing is, plans can change.

In 2011, I plan to:

Update my website more often. Hence this post. I know I've been slacking for the last few months.
Learn Unity. Like, really learn it, and not just keep saying I will. The makers of the Unity 3D engine had a contest where they'll give a Pro license to 4 winners to create an idea they tweeted about. I doubt I'll win, but it's still a noble goal. I was even a little reluctant to share - afraid someone would steal my multi-million dollar idea, of course - but since it's now a matter of public record, here it is.
Make a game I can share. The machinations for this one have already begun, which I will outline shortly. I want something tangible and recent, and not just half-baked game jam games or inaccessible student projects.
Continue being awesome.
...okay, plan to BECOME awesome.

That's good enough to start with, don't you think?

"Immigration Jam", August 20-21, 2010

2010-08-22T21:54:00.004-04:00

This weekend was a game jam even put on by Alex Schwartz and Darren Torpey, as part of Boston Game Jams - a group seeking to foster a sense of community among local area game developers. We met at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab for a weekend of game development fun.

The reason the theme was immigration was in honor of fellow WPI student Yilmaz Kiymaz, who's looking to come back to the United States since his student visa expired. So, many of the games developed had to do with immigration, ranging from the satirical to the tangentially related. Keep an eye on the Boston Game Jams site to see them and the presentations!

Fun fact: This particular game jam had an exceptionally large number of participants dealing with audio. Usually it's the audio people that are the hot commodity; this time around it was some of the artists who were juggling their time between groups. So at the very least, this was a very good sounding jam.

I ended up in a group with Greg, another WPI alum, as well as three Berklee students, Leah, Kristen and Lawrence. The original proposal was a combination of two similar ideas, one featuring plants in garden, and one about the Chinese Rhino beetle (I think he meant the Asian Longhorn beetle). Both ideas had the central theme of balancing an ecological system, with the idea of migrating species presenting a challenge in maintaining the balance. I added the suggestion of styling it more as a strategy board game. For lack of a better name, we've dubbed it "I-Migration".

We chose to use the Akihabara game engine, which is a relatively new system that's essentially a set of Javascript libraries to access the Canvas element of HTML5. In short, the entire code of the game is on a webpage and runs in-browser. (Well, except Internet Explorer, but that's because it just sucks.) Darren gave a talk about it at last month's Boston Indies meeting, and has been working with Darius Kazemi to provide documentation and tutorials for the engine.

I felt the decision to use Akihabara was a good one. Because it's basically Javascript, it's fairly easy to pick up and learn (despite the lack of in-depth documentation, although Darius and Darren's efforts are a good start). Because it's HTML5, compile time is negligible, and we can use things like Firebug to get real-time debugging information. Also, adding art and audio assets isn't complicated either. At the last Global Game Jam, I mentioned one of my great regrets was not being able to get sound working in our game. This time, music was one of the first things we had working!

There was a bit of a learning curve where the two programmers of the group were essentially learning a new game engine, and as such the initial struggles were getting the game to load art assets, and yet most of the game came together within the last few hours. The other problem came because I shot myself in the foot. Despite the fact that we were working in the GAMBIT Game Lab, we didn't have access to their equipment, so the jam was bring-your-own-computer. And I don't own a laptop, so my role on Saturday was mostly relegated to that of design and support. And while I love the design aspect of it, there comes a time where you can't tie up the people actually creating the product. Thankfully Greg was able to secure another laptop for me on Sunday. But even if I had a system to work on the whole weekend, another issue was source control. It wasn't a big problem since it was effectively one programmer working on one file, but there was a headache when I was able to contribute code and it was a matter of hunt-and-peck-and-copy-and-paste. But that's understandable, given the short time span and jam-mentality of "throw everything in a bucket and just get it to run".

I'm pretty proud of what our group was able to accomplish at the end of 36 hours. It's effectively a vertical slice, offering one round of play. It has some awesome art and sound elements, thanks to our talented Berklee members. But, due to time constraints, it's not as complete a round as originally designed. And it's not as automatically as I'd like - there's a lot of hand-holding, and even then the user doesn't really have an idea of what's going on unless they pay real close attention. But hey, given the ease of development, we may still poke at this some more, and move closer to a complete game.

Another interesting twist to this whole weekend was the food. Vickie Wu, Darren's fiance, had a one-woman "food jam", making a variety of snacks and tidbits for us through the whole weekend, which was great because otherwise the official "meals" were all pizza. Delicacies included berry smoothies (yum), peanut butter/banana/yogurt smoothies (more like "thickies", way too sludgy - the only real misstep of the weekend), Waldorf salad in lettuce cups, two different kinds of hummus, freezer pops and ants on a log (reliving childhood!), microwave s'mores (marshmallows need to be fire-roasted, but they still tasted good), frozen coffee mocha drinks, and strawberry/mint soda spritzers (I could have done without the mint - too earthy and not minty enough, plus the cup full of tiny leaf-chunks is off-putting). I'm not entirely sure why she did this (other than "she wanted to"), but I'm glad she did! Plus, Yilmaz brought some honest-to-goodness real Turkish Delight. I had heard the closest thing to it was jellybeans, which it was, but a little chewier, but not as chewy as say, candied fruit. It's also flavored like almond and had almonds in it (though there was a mint variety), and completely covered in powdered sugar or coconut. Of course, the only time anyone's ever heard of Turkish Delight is from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so it's neat to actually try some.

In conclusion, as much as I love game jams, I'm not 100% sure at this time if I will participate in the next Boston Game Jam, unless I can definitively secure a laptop to work on. I think everyone did a great job and I had a fun time!

Games Review: 6/29

2010-06-30T22:44:00.002-04:00

I'm getting involved with another group of game players, this time Boston Cards and Conversations, a Meetup.com group that usually meets in the northern Boston area. They had their monthly New Member Mixer last night, and here's some of the games we played at the table I sat at.

Guillotine

Guillotine is based on the French Revolution, where the players are trying to execute as many nobles as possible over a 3-day period (rounds). Action cards are played to shuffle people in line for the blade...the idea being you want to move up more valuable nobles to the front of the line for you to collect into your score pile when it's your turn. It comes with a little cardboard display of the namesake device - cute, but unnecessary - and the real charm of the game comes in the art design. Very Disney-esque. Fairly simple and straightforward.

Fluxx

We then played a couple games of a game that I own - Monty Python Fluxx. Not sure if I mentioned it before that I have this game, but there it is. I do like the basic premise of the game - that every card changes the rules - but I find that Fluxx is a lot like sex: either it's a long marathon session of whirlwind activity, or it's over so fast that you're left quite unsatisfied.

Gloom

Gloom is a very depressing card game...by design. Actually, it's not, but it's got that macabre feel, a mash-up of the Addams Family and Tim Burton and Lemony Snicket. You are a family of five, and the goal is to do cause events to your family member that depress them significantly (decreasing your score - which in this game, is a good thing), and then you put them out of their misery. Alternatively, you can cause positive things to other player's cards, make them happy and raise their score. The game ends when one player's family is all dead, and points are totaled.

The really cool thing about this game is the core mechanic. All of the cards are clear plastic. The family cards are at the bottom of the pile, and as you play your cards on top of them, parts of the cards are obscured, while other parts show through. Say you put down a card that shows a -10 score in the top slot. Then someone else could put a card with a 0 in the top slot and +15 in the middle - the 0 covers up the -10, but you still read the +15. You can then put another card with a -10 on the top and -10 on the bottom, which ends up as a -5 (-10 + 15 -10). Then at some point you play Untimely Death cards and those scores get locked. And of course, most of these cards (especially the ones with significant scoring) have additional abilities.

Archaeology

Archaeology is a real charmer of a game, because it plays so quickly, and the strategy is pretty simple. The game only takes like 20 minutes to play, so it's fun to get a lot of games in (sadly, it was getting pretty late at this point, so we only played twice). The idea is that you're a bunch of explorers collecting artifacts in Egypt. You draw cards, then sell collections of artifacts to the museum (your score pile). Usually the more cards you have of a kind, the more points you get. You can trade these artifacts at the market. There are also maps to explore the pyramid (getting you a stack of cards), and there are thieves and sandstorms to contend with, too. The trick is figuring out when to sell to the museum...do you save up to get the points, or do you risk losing them, or not being able to sell pieces back before the game ends?

This group plays a ton of different games, from traditional trick-style card games (like Hearts or Spades) to toy-store party games (think Scattergories or Pictionary). I've already been to one of their Magic: The Gathering nights, and I'm hoping to make it to more of these events.

Boston Unity Day

2010-06-13T17:24:00.002-04:00

Boston Unity Group is a new off-shoot of the Boston-area game development community, founded by Elliott Mitchell and fellow WPI grad Alex Schwartz. B.U.G. is a meetup group centered around the Unity game development engine.

On June 12th the group had its first meeting, dubbed Unity Day. Over 100 developers met at Northeastern University to hear from Unity's "product evangelist", Tom Higgins. The morning started off with Tom giving an overview about the Unity engine - how the company started, about himself and how he got involved with the company, some features about Unity, both current and what's in store for the future, and some business information about what's involved with licensing the engine. Then people had the opportunity to show off the projects they've been working on in Unity.

After an impressive lunch spread (thanks to Demiurge Studios), we headed back in for some tips and tricks about using the Unity engine. Unfortunately, this part got off to a late start - a lot of people were engaged in conversation - plus I had to leave early for a previous engagement. So I missed out on a lot of the tutorial talk, which is a shame since that was my main motivation for attending.

Overall I think this was a good start to what will be a great group. Personally I would have liked to see things stay on schedule, since this had a very strong conference vibe to it. And I'm not sure what the group's plans are for the future (aside from the next meeting at the end of August), but I think it would work well to follow the format of the Boston Postmortem and Boston Indies - to be able to meet and talk with people, with a short presentation. I thought the conference could have used a little refocus. Tom gave a lot of talk about how to get involved with Unity, but it seemed like everyone who was there is already on board with it.

I'm excited about the Unity engine. I'd like to work with it more on my own, which I really should, since it's available for free on Windows. But then, I need to sit down and do anything, really...not just go through Unity tutorials. Although I wonder if I should wait a bit, considering the cool new features that will be available with Unity 3.0 when it's released later this year.

Recent board games review

2010-05-07T21:19:00.004-04:00

In an attempt to socialize more, expand my knowledge and experience in games and game design, and just to have fun, I'm on the lookout for gaming groups...specifically, board games. Right now I'm averaging about 3 or 4 game nights a month with varying groups. I thought I'd share some thoughts about some games I got to play last week.

Last Tuesday I went to the board game night at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. There I got to try a couple games:

Innovation

I don't quite remember, but I think this is the name of the game. It's a card game that represents man's progression through society and technology. There are 10 "eras" of cards (ranging from the Stone Age up to the Information Age) as well as up to 6 color-coded categories (one might be technology, another may be more abstract like philosophy or mathematics). The trick is to build up your collection of tech and put cards into a score pile, which can be used to buy achievements which win the game.

I liked the general feel of the game - all you were basically dealing with were cards, and the interesting mechanic was that each card had an ability as well as up to four symbols. The more symbols you have, the more likely you'll be able to use the abilities and draw more cards. Plus, there's the possibility to "shift" your piles of cards, thereby exposing more symbols. The problem I had was, since I was learning the game, I didn't have a good sense of what I needed to do. As I found with Settlers of Catan, I'm more interested in building up my part of the board and prolonging the game instead of doing what it takes to win. Additionally, since each card comes with an ability, more of my time was spent reading the abilities and figuring out if they were worth activating - a similar problem I have with another game that's popular with another group I play with, Girl Genius: The Works. Because of this, the beginning of the game took a long time, but by the time we got to the end game, it went really fast, we breezed by what might have been more interesting abilities, and, because of my aforementioned problem with not getting the right resources, I didn't have enough score points to come close to winning. Not that I play these games to win, necessarily, but it's not good when you cripple yourself from even being able to win.

Royal Palace

I've come to two conclusions. One, I've found I have a growing fascination with modern board games that use little wooden pieces. As such, I've decided that any game from Rio Grande Games gets an automatic pass from me unless I play it and decide otherwise. This game feels an awful lot like a game last time I went to Gambit Game Night, Stone Age. Except this time, instead of building a tribe, you're influencing and trying to gain the favor of aristocrats. Unfortunately we were a bit pressed for time when we were playing this game, so it was cut short, and as such we didn't get the opportunity to really dig into the meat of the game with the added special abilities that gaining more nobles into your area allows.

Battlestar Galactica

We played this in a game group we're trying to start up at work. I was reluctant to try this game, since I never got into the show it's based on (the modern one on Syfy...though I never saw the original either). But, it came highly recommended by the others in the group, so I was willing to learn.

Much like Pandemic, the idea is for all players to work together to "jump" enough times to make it back home. The problem is, you're dealing with crises on every turn... and then there's the Cylons. We played with four people, and I played as "Helo", so I got to act as Admiral.

What I like about the game is that there's lots of stuff to do...lots of options and little ships and pieces and dials and cards. The thing I don't quite like about the game is the part of the game that everyone likes and makes the game somewhat unique...that someone may or not be a secret Cylon agent and trying to sabotage the humans' efforts. I mean, I understand that this part of the game needs to be there - for flavor, and otherwise the game would be pretty straight-forward - but it's that meta-gaming that I can't wrap my head around. Not only do you have to worry about what actions to do, but you have to be aware of how the others in the group will view those actions ("Oh, he did that action...does that mean he's the Cylon, or is he just stupid?"), plus you have to keep track of everyone else's actions to analyze THEM for possible Cylon activity, PLUS, if you happen to be the Cylon, make sure you do enough to sabotage AS WELL AS cover up your tracks. Bleah. It's like that Truth-teller/Liar Cannibal mind puzzle.

During the second half of the game I was exposed as the Cylon Sympathizer. Once I had to be a Cylon (effectively), I found it quite liberating since I knew what my actions had to be and didn't have to worry about everyone else's motives. Which is funny, since I started as human and probably did the most to get us home (as Admiral I chose to jump the furthest I could, which triggered the second half and turned me Cylon). In the end the humans lost due to running out of food.

PAX East 2010

2010-03-29T21:52:00.007-04:00

The big thing going on last weekend was the Penny Arcade Expo, being held for the first time in Boston. Apparently PAX has gotten so huge it's now branching out.

PAX Eve

Things actually kicked off for me on Thursday night, with a "Made in MA" party held at the Microsoft offices in Cambridge - the New England Research and Development center, or as some call it, NERD. Most of the Boston area game companies had set up tables and showing off their latest and greatest (or in the case of 38 Studios, just kinda standing around ;) ) Even we at Quick Hit had a table...unfortunately paling in comparison to the Harmonix Rock Band setup next to it.

The event took place on the 1st and 10th floor of the building (which I thought was a little weird...but then, I don't know what's on the 2nd-9th floors). On the first floor was some smaller setups, including WPI, Macguffin Games' All Heroes Die and Fire Hose Games' Slam Bolt Scrappers. The last one I gave a try, and it's pretty fun once you figure out what's going on. It's come a long way since I saw its prototype, and I think it's got a lot of potential - I hope it does well.

PAX: Day 1

I showed up to the Hynes Convention Center at around 11:30am on Friday, and since I didn't really have anything better to do until the doors "opened" at 2, I waited in line. I'm not sure who's diabolical idea this was, but it really set the tone for the rest of the weekend. The main exhibition hall on the first floor had a small area where you could pick up tickets, but the rest of the hall was roped off into one gigantic queue. So there we were, sitting on the floor, some playing with the free pack of Magic cards that came in the swag bags (okay, bonus points to PAX there), plenty with their DSes out. The room had two huge projection screens which interacted with the crowd. To be honest, it was the most entertained I've been waiting in line since Disney World.

Eventually we were let in for the keynote speech, presented by Wil Wheaton. I wish I had taken some notes, but the basic theme of his speech was: welcome home. We are geeks and we are gamers and PAX is a celebration of both. He shared his thoughts about his own childhood and what gaming meant to him. I thought it was a good speech.

Afterwards, I wandered around seeing as much as possible, one sardine in the expo hall can. Partly because it was the first day, but mostly because they probably oversold the convention, but there were a TON of people there. And there were lines for EVERYTHING. To groups gathered around every booth, to the interminable lines to get into the panels, to the wall of bean-bags for people to chill and play more DS.

The main expo hall on the second floor was where most of the action was. I'm not a hardcore gamer, so I didn't find a lot of interest in all of the hardware-related booths, nor the games coming out in a few months on systems I don't own. But, it was still fun to walk around amid all the loud noises and shiny things. Oh, and free swag. Though not as much as I could have gotten, were I more patient.

Friday evening was spend in the tabletop gaming area. There were a couple vendors of game start-ups showing off their games, so I gave them a try. One was Summoner Wars by Plaid Hat Games, which I found quite enjoyable. You get a deck of cards of your summoner and troops, and you place them in a specific way on the playmat. You then take turns moving, attacking and summoning more troops to destroy your opponent's walls and summoner. Added bonus is that expansion packs are more decks of cards - there's no blind purchasing - which excited my frugal side but didn't quite sit well with my collector's side. But still, recommended. I might've bought a set if I had someone to play with (with the groups of people I play with, a multiplayer game would work better). The other one I tried was Battleground:Fantasy Warfare from Your Move Games. Basically, it's a miniatures war game without the miniatures. Instead, you use cards representing units of troops, which can be drawn on with dry-erase markers to issue commands. That's an interesting mechanic, as well as the fact that the stats are kept track on the cards - you don't have to do constant checking with tables in books. My problem was that this is still a wargame, which isn't my particular strong suit, so the other guy I was learning the game with and I were having some difficulty remembering all of the different modifiers in certain game situations - and we didn't even get into flanking or pinching or any other more complicated maneuvers. Plus, any special abilities that the troops have are written on the backs of the cards, against the table - so you tend to forget them anyway. So as nice as it was to walk away with some free stuff, I wasn't particularly impressed by the game.

Friday night was also when I caught my first infection. My aforementioned wargame opponent infected me with LARPcolepsy. This was part of a social game, PAX Pox, by the MIT GAMBIT Game Lab people, as a parody of the fact that many people came down with the H1N1 flu at the last PAX in Seattle. So Carriers went around giving willing participants stickers representing these silly diseases. Saturday I was infected with Wii-coli, and there was also MMORPGingivitis and DDRLS (Dance Dance Restless Leg Syndrome). Sunday the Cüre was released. And reporting to the GAMBIT booth, I got a +1 HP bandage holder for my trouble.

PAX: Day 2

When I arrived Saturday morning, I didn't bother waiting in the mega-line. I'm just minding my own business hanging out in the hallway, and I turn around to see I'm standing by G4TV's Adam Sessler. I am kicking myself now for not getting the nerve to introduce myself or get a picture or something. The weird part was, there were a few times I noticed Sessler when navigating the escalators...I was an accidental stalker. And speaking of random encounters, I managed to, at random intervals throughout the whole weekend, bump into what seemed like almost everybody I've met over the last three years, between WPI classmates, former and current coworkers, and other game industry people.

One of the other items in the swag bag was a coupon for reduced entry fees into Magic: The Gathering tournaments, including something called the Intro Pack League. For $15 ($10 after the coupon), I received a starter theme deck and a booster from (I think) the latest set, and I could play as much Magic as I wanted against others who signed up for the league. Every 3 games you played you could pull 3 random cards from a box they had - I managed to pull a couple rare cards. So, I ended up playing more Magic on Saturday than I think I've played my entire life so far...which isn't saying much. But it's especially weird since I'm barely even a causal Magic player, and I certainly didn't attend PAX with the intention of playing Magic.

Throughout the con, because I was playing games, I managed to miss out on some panels I was somewhat interested in attending. But I wasn't too sad since none of the panels really inspired me, that I had to be there...plus, the aforementioned stupid queues. Besides, I was doing what I really wanted...playing games.

Saturday I also found what I had missed on Friday - the arcade and classic console rooms. It was a nice nostalgic trip to look at the old school pinball machines and Ms. Pac Man and Dragon's Lair and Atari and Colecovision and all the old Nintendo and Sega consoles. There was also some quasi-nostalgia as I peeked in the modern console gaming area and watched quite a bit of Street Fighter 4.

As much as I would have liked to have gone to the concert on Saturday night (featuring the Video Game Orchestra, Paul and Storm, and Johnathan Coulton), I didn't for two reasons: (1) the inevitable line, and (2) the concert would go very late, and I had to make sure to leave early enough to get the T back to where I was staying. I did go to the LoadingReadyRun panel, and there's a chance I might show up in a future video, so I'll keep an eye out for that.

PAX: Day 3

I signed up for a Dominion tournament, and ended up playing that for most of Sunday morning (missing out on yet another panel - the XPlay Live panel). But again, playing an awesome game trumps that. The tournament had a weird format - basically it was an accumulation of victory points, instead of any brackets or total wins or something. So when the second game started, we had a gentleman's agreement to try to amass the most points possible for everyone before causing the game to end. Thanks to that second game, where the Gardens was in play (1 victory point for every 10 cards in your deck), someone earned like 80 points and shot up from the like the 5th place table to the first, and ended up winning the silver medal. It was also neat that, since everyone at the table knows how to play the game, turns were just flying by.

After another afternoon of pointless wandering, having already seen what there was to be seen, and sitting in half-heartedly in one last panel, I got into line for the closing ceremony. Not the super-line downstairs, but the one to get into the balcony seats, since I was up on that floor anyway. So, no entertaining video boards, which sucked because whatever they were doing beforehand went over and we waited in line an extra hour than was necessary. Now, I opted to attend the closing ceremony because I wanted to see the entire con from start to finish; plus, I have never been to a con's closing ceremony before, so I wanted to see what it was all about. Well, at PAX, it turned out to be the final round of the Omegathon (their weekend-long videogame competition). Which was cool and entertaining and all, but when it was over, Gabe and Tycho said, "See you next year!". And that was it. Not exactly what I had pictured it to be.

While waiting to board the T to get back home, an little old Indian woman passed me and noticed my lime green swag bag. She asked me, in a tiny little voice, "You were at expo? Penny...Penny..." "Yes, Penny Arcade", I replied. She then wanted to see the free stuff I had gotten. So I tried my best to rummage through the bag for interesting things (I didn't end up with much cool swag), but I showed my Magic deck, which she seemed to recognize. "Oh, it's dat game." One last looksee and she walks off saying, "Dey give too much stuff." It made my day.

tl; dr

Overall, I had a great time. PAX is awesome, except for long pointless lines and too-high people density.

Global Game Jam 2010 Postmortem

2010-01-31T22:04:00.004-05:00

I participated in the 2010 Global Game Jam, held (among many locations) at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Cambridge. I did it last year, and it was so much fun I opted to do it again, despite the fact that I haven't had a free weekend yet in 2010. (We've been in something of a crunch mode at Quick Hit.)

The theme for this year was "deception" and "abstraction", as well as the local constraints of "rain, plain and/or Spain". The project I worked on was called Define Yourself. The original pitch was that you started out as some abstract avatar, and your actions at the beginning of the game determined how the character was defined until you were much more fully realized. We were throwing back and forth ideas as we discussed game design on Friday night, when we developed the core concepts of an exploration space. Eventually concepts crept in borrowed from fellow programmer/developer Darren Torpey about an idea he had about a Facebook college simulation game. The game, as it stands now, is more that as a freshman entering college, you are very loosely defined as a person (abstract, if you will), and the choices you make in college - which classes you attend, how often you socialize, etc - define who you are by the time you graduate.

I think I'll move onto a list to outline what went right and what went wrong in typical postmortem fashion, but it's not to say it wasn't fun, that it's not a bad game, and that these aren't in any particular order or importance. I am not placing any blame on anyone for any perceived failures; I'm just mentioned who worked on what on the team.

What Went Wrong

The initial design. Of course, with a game jam game, with the time constraints and the limited options you're given, either you come up with something simple and you do it and that's it, or you come up with something vague, and the design can go in multiple directions. Ours was the latter. One of my ideas early on involved nurturing a creature Pokémon-style in order to solve puzzles (hell, I still may make that game). Honestly, the Friday night design session is one of my favorite parts of the Game Jam, and game development in general. I would have loved to spend all night taking several ideas and molding them into basic game designs. But, unfortunately we only have two days to make a game, and we can't afford to "kill our babies" and run through several prototypes.
Over-designing. Once we came up with our idea and we started hunkering down on the technical parts of it, our original pitchman Dan Roy and consultant Ravi Purushotma continued to make further designs. It's great that they nailed down the details of some of the things we planned to build, but they also added some features that weren't discussed during the initial design. So it got to a point where we were like, "oh, okay...guess we'll have to build that as well".
Technical difficulties. For some reason, Darren had a hard time getting Visual Studio working for him on the MIT computers. I wasn't familiar with the repository system Darren set up for us (not that it was difficult, it just took a while to set it up, plus I'm prone to making mistakes. I'm still not used to working with repository systems :P). All told we were really kind of spinning our wheels until Saturday afternoon, so we had a lot of ground to make up. Additionally, some of the things I was working on were really simple things that I shouldn't have had problems with, and are really probably quite easy to fix, but with the deadline looming there just wasn't enough time to worry about it. Specifically, I'm thinking about the sound system. I don't know what kind of crazy format XNA expects its WAV files to be in, but apparently we couldn't figure out which magical settings it needed in time.
Didn't meet all the constraints. This is a minor issue. We can make up arguments/excuses as to exactly where it is in our game that shows "deception" (and I think there were some good ideas thrown around in the design session), but the rain/plain/Spain kinda got left off to the side. Plus there were additional optional achievements, such as using all organic sound effects or using only 16 colors. But, we felt that these were more guidelines than rules, and there really more to spark creativity than to hold us to some arbitrary game conditions.

What Went Right

Choice of platform. We chose to develop the game in C# under the XNA format, and specifically AngelXNA, which is an open-source port of the Angel prototyping engine developed by Darren and Jeff Ward. Now, I haven't programmed in a while (and never really in C#), so it took me a short while to get reacclimated. And since I was learning a new system, I was bound to make some rookie mistakes. For example, Darren questioned why I bothered to communicate within the game using AngelXNA's messaging system when I could have much more easily done a method call. And the answer to that was, well, I was mentally stuck using the messaging system since that was how it was reading keyboard input, and the sparse documentation didn't help to break me of that mental lock. However, it's still in its infancy, but the system made it much easier to build systems that would have taken us hours to build ourselves in XNA...which, of course, is the whole point of AngelXNA.
Art and Music. Our artist Dan Salsberg came up with some great art with a nice visual style. And I have to both thank and apologize to our musician Alex Liberatore. I really do admire the Berklee students that attend these Game Jams, and game audio designers/engineers in general - it's really an under-appreciated aspect of games. He wrote some nice music and sound effects, and he and Dan Roy designed some really cool ways to implement the music as a function of the gameplay...but unfortunately you won't hear them because I couldn't get the sound system to work (see above).
Complete prototype. It may not have sound, and the controls are a little sticky (for Darren, for some reason - they were working fine for me), some features were dropped, and it might not be terribly fun, but we accomplished the core concepts of the design, and it works. And for something that was only built in 48 hours, that about all I can ask for. Plus it looks good.
It was fun! It was great meeting old friends and making new ones, and it's wonderful to go through the whole creative process of making a game.

What I'd Do Different

Simplify. Maybe it'll take a bit more practice, but I'm slowly learning what kinds of things make for successful Game Jam games. First, come up with a simple yet specific "elevator pitch". Make sure the design is locked down by the time we leave Friday.
Prototype, playtest, iterate, repeat. Make sure we've gotten a prototype done by Saturday afternoon, and a first playable by Saturday night. Sunday should be for polishing and fun-making, not "oh yeah, we should probably put all of the pieces of the game together and make sure they work before we need to upload our final game to the website in an hour".
Get the sounds working in the game early. It's one thing if I'm using clunky sound effects I've borrowed from the Internet, but I don't want to waste another audio engineer's time again if I can help it.
Don't forget the small stuff. If I were producing, for the first-playable I'd dedicate at least one hour to make sure we have a title screen, end screen, credits, and all other the other little things that tend to get forgotten that end up being slapped together.

That being said, it was a wonderful weekend and I can't wait to do it again next year.
We had a lot of other great games made at MIT:
RunRunRunJump: a platformer with text cues. Looks great in 3D Unity (even if it is mostly text in blocks).
Quest for Stick: a platformer where you can alter the platforms. Great visual style.
Jumble is Trademarked: a word jumble where the solution is not what it seems. My second choice when we were organizing.
The Hunt Alone: first-person shooter where you're a visually-impaired hunter caveman. Had they gone with their original idea of "blind caveman", I can't help but think, with some tweaks and more innovation, it'd make an interesting Daredevil(tm) game.
The Last Bullfight: first-person perspective where you're the bull. I think given a little more polish time, this would have had a real emotional impact.
Press X to Not Die: Flash game that's all quick-time events.
Pigmalion: action-stealth game. Worth playing if only for the opening cutscene.

New Year, New Post

2010-01-20T21:39:00.003-05:00

Things have been chugging along for me quite smoothly. I've taken a step back to work on getting into a routine, and kind of settle into my job. At least, that's my excuse for not blogging or making games. Some notes:

The job at Quick Hit is going great. People ask me how I like the work, and I like it just fine. Sure, some of it is tedious, but it fits right into my mentality and the way I work. There's a checklist of tasks, and I do them until they're finished. If there's a problem, I figure out the circumstances behind it and try to fix it (or more often than not, go talk to the developers and have them fix it). The only downside is that it's a temp job (which means no paid time off) and it doesn't pay terribly well. I worked all through Christmas break to make up hours. I worked all last weekend to prepare for a release we're making this week, and will be working again this weekend for the release next week. But, I'm getting paid overtime, so I suppose it's not all bad.
Coming up next weekend is the Global Game Jam, which I'll be participating in again. Last year was a good time and I hope this year is just as good. There's a good chance I'll blog about it here again. It will be great to get back into creating and programming, even if it's only for a short while.
I have finally joined thousands of others and have gotten an iPhone. My old phone was really unreliable...could barely hold a charge, and I couldn't hear through the earpiece - I had to constantly use the speakerphone. Well, I don't have to worry about that any longer. It's really quite liberating to have access to the Internet pretty much anywhere that I go, and luckily I'm one of those types that doesn't have to constantly check my messages and Twitter so I get in trouble. I just check when I have a few free moments. ;)
And part of the reason I really wanted to get an iPhone is to develop games for it. It's the wave of the future! And now that the Unity engine is available for free, I bet I can actually do it, too. Of course, it's a matter of taking the time to sit down and actually learn how to do it, which is easier said than done. Still, it is my goal to make at least one iPhone game this year, and hopefully even maybe sell it in the App store.
I will be attending PAX East this March. This will likely be very awesome.
Speaking of board games, one that I play regularly, Heroclix, is back after a long hiatus. We're in the middle of the tournament season for the latest expansion, Hammer of Thor, which I'm actually helping to organize at the place where I play, Friendly Neighborhood Comics. Also exciting is the next set that will be out, DC's The Brave and the Bold, as well as a new, Blackest Night themed started set!
And segueing nicely into comics, my own comic has been in a hiatus as well. (See: the aforementioned "routine"). Well, just a quick note to say that I think I've gotten a good storyline worked out and I hope I can get back on that horse again soon.

So as you can see, it's not that I'm not staying busy; it's more that I'm just neglecting my website.

New Job Achieved!

2009-10-13T01:22:00.003-04:00

It's been three years since I was laid off from my factory job. Three years since I decided to refocus my life and get back to working towards a career - not a job that was just a paycheck. Three years since I made the commitment to follow my dreams.

And now, I am at the threshold of achieving those goals.

As previously mentioned, a couple weeks ago I had a phone interview with Demiurge Studios concerning a QA tester position. Well, the short of it is, I didn't get that job. But, you don't close a door without opening a window (or something like that), and I discovered another QA testing job, this time at Quick Hit, Inc. I previously applied there for a programming position, and so I had a connection with someone already there. So, I asked to pass along my resume.

A couple whirlwind weeks later, and now I've landed the job of QA Tester at Quick Hit!

There are some provisions, however. This is a temporary contract, but that's to be expected with most QA jobs. And QA isn't precisely what I wanted to get into. But, the important things to note are that

QA is a very popular way to break into the game industry,
my background in programming lends itself very well to QA in regards to close attention to detail, being able to find and diagnose problems, and in a more direct sense, as part of my job will entail writing automation scripts,
I might come to find I enjoy QA,
this is giving me the industry experience I'll need later on to get a more permanent job,
and perhaps most importantly, I'm being paid to work at a videogame company.

As I write this, I've only worked one full day. It's been a little bit crazy, since I'm being subjected to a baptism by fire. I'm jumping right into a busy schedule while I haven't quite gotten my bearings yet. But, it's only the beginning. Perhaps more details to come (if I'm even allowed to give them).

Status Report

2009-09-22T14:50:00.003-04:00

I feel a little bit guilty about not updating my website, or anything else really, lately. What's been happening is that I've been focusing more on temporary work in order to secure some kind of income, for two reasons.

One, I'm very near broke, and student loans are looming over the horizon. I opted to sign up with a temp agency, and they've been pretty good about finding me work. I spent almost a month working at the Wrentham Premium Outlets at the Nike Factory Store in the backroom processing inventory. They had a lot of inventory coming in, and a few other associates and I were tasked with taking apparel out of boxes, pricing them, adding security pins, and hanging them up. It's repetitive, sure, but actually I like that sort of work. I enjoy it where I have a known amount of work and do it until it's finished (or at least get to a point where I feel comfortable leaving it for the next day). I've had another assignment since then, doing a similar thing but with auto parts.

I also have an interview later this evening for another position for quality control for a medical supplier, but the most important news is that I have a phone interview this Thursday with Demiurge Studios for a QA tester position. I'm super pysched about that...wish me luck!

The second reason is, I simply haven't been aware of many game job opportunities lately. Announcement at the Boston Postmortem have been very sparse the last few months, and those that are looking are looking for artists, mainly. I know I should hit up the contacts that I have and get a feel for how things may have changed since the spring.

So, unfortunately, I've put my personal game development on hold because of all this. Also partly because I seem to have gained writer's block...not only for my game but for my comic as well. Plus, what I'd also like to do is prototype in idea or two, and at the same time familiarize myself with some other technologies. But of course, that takes time, some of which I can hopefully muster up soon.

Game Spotlight : Puzzle Pirates

2009-08-23T18:43:00.004-04:00

As I previously mentioned, something else I wanted to do with this blog was share with you some of the games I've been playing recently, both casual games as well as MMOs. I don't plan to go into any real in-depth review, and these likely won't be very long...just sharing a few thoughts I have about the game. It is my hope that you might find you like the game yourself, and perhaps get a glimpse into my personality and taste in games.

Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates
http://www.puzzlepirates.com

Genre: MMO, puzzle

I've been playing Y!PP off and on for about 5 years now. So far it's the only MMO to which I've ever subscribed, but then, I'm the kind of person who prefers to finish a game before moving on to the next one...usually.

In Y!PP, you take on the role of a little chibi-style pirate, and how you want to go about building your pirate fortune is up to you. Most of the activity in the game takes the form of puzzle mini-games, from duty puzzles (sailing, bilge-pumping, carpentry, navigating) to carousing (poker, hearts, spades, drinking) to labor puzzles (shipwright, distilling, blacksmithing).

I heard somewhere that how you play an MMO reflects how you operate in a real-life work situation. If that's the case, then I'm most useful as a grunt. There's the chance to become captain of a crew, or even royalty of a flag (a group of crews)...but I'm not sure how well I'm suited for management - I'm a middle-manager at best. There's also quite an economy built into the game. One can set up their own shop, bring in supplies, set competitive prices, etc. But I'm not that big into economics, either...and besides, I don't want my game life to be like a real job. No, usually I play Y!PP to play the puzzles. But I don't think there's any shame in that. That's one nice thing about Y!PP...it's varied enough to appeal to different types of gamers.

Another cool thing they added was trophies (achievements, basically). Sure, it makes trying to collect them fun, but the downside is also the way the experience system works. Pirates don't level up in the traditional sense; they're rated by how good they are at the puzzles. So it's really difficult to get some trophies because you have to be better than everyone else on the ocean, and there are some good players out there. And you can't get better at the puzzles by constantly playing them and making a little number get larger; you have to constantly play them and actually get better at them.

One thing I've realized is why I don't put as much time into this game as I'd like. Partly because I tend to get "puzzle vision", and that I don't do very well at the "social puzzle" (that is, I don't tend to make a lot of good friends in these games because I don't talk). But also because there's no real incentive to advance. Sure, there are blockades, flotillas, and the recently added monster hunts (blockades against special, stronger NPCs), but there are no "quests" like in other MMOs.

Of course, don't think that I don't enjoy the game anyway...I wouldn't be writing about it if I didn't. I'm sure like with most things, there are parts you like and parts you don't like, and different parts appeal to different people.

Game Development - Escape Game #2

2009-07-27T17:07:00.005-04:00

The "Escape the Room" game (working title)
Progress: Prototype phase

All right, I think I've gotten over the initial hurdles of game navigation. I decided to redesign the inventory to stay on-screen at all times. The retractable inventory was getting a little unwieldy, plus I like the idea of seeing what objects you have available at a glance. The only problem is that the inventory "slides" along with the rest of the room when the player changes views, but it's more of an aesthetic issue that hopefully no one will notice. Well, unless they've read this. To help combat that issue, I've placed the inventory at the bottom of the screen.

So here's how it works: the player clicks and drags items from the inventory onto the screen, and the item snaps back into place when the player releases the mouse button. Unless it happened to be over the hot spot (the red square, in this case), in which case it will set the item there and disable it from the inventory. And by disabled, I mean the item stays there, but is grayed out and can't be clicked or moved. As an early design decision, I figured, like some escape games, that I'd have a fixed inventory - usually when the inventory is full but all the items are used, you're at the end of the game. It's an easy fix to just wipe the item out of the inventory if I need more storage space, so to speak.

By the way, the "S" on the wall there indicated that it's the south wall. I've got an "E" and "W" wall as well, and the door (as seen in the previous post) is on the north wall. Hooray for programmer art!

I've also implemented the close-up feature seen in many escape games. Typically you can zoom in on an object for closer inspection...this is most often for combining two objects for another purpose, or there's some clue to another puzzle hidden on the back or inside the object. Here, the player toggles the button on the lower right to engage "zoom" mode, then clicks an item in the inventory. A gray screen pops up with an enlarged picture of the item. The player cannot resume play until the close-up screen is closed with the button in the upper right.

One helpful side-effect of writing this all out in a blog is that I'm realizing potential pitfalls when it comes to my game design. For example, I just remembered that I effectively disabled clicking-and-dragging inventory items when the item is in close-up, to prevent said item interacting with what's going on behind the close-up "window". This will no doubt hinder any future puzzles if I plan to combine items. So, I wrote myself a note, and will see to fixing that later.

With the higher level components of the game mostly taken care of, now comes the hard part - puzzle design!

Game Development - Escape Game #1

2009-07-21T19:18:00.007-04:00

All right. Here it is. If I'm going to be talking this project up to people, I'd better follow through on my promise to myself and get some actual work done on this.

The "Escape the Room" Game (working title)
Progress: Early prototype phase

As I mentioned elsewhere on my website, some of my favorite games to play online are the "escape the room" games, which I usually find at Jay is Games. It was suggested to me that since I like them so much, I should make one. So, here is the beginning stages of that project.

For those unfamiliar with the genre, "escape the room" games are pretty much just that - you find yourself locked in some kind of enclosure, and you have to use the objects found inside the room to escape. This takes the form of logic puzzles, ranging from the simple (use key on locked desk drawer) to figuring out codes (combination locks) to sometimes bizarre leaps in logic (tie a sawblade to an eggbeater to fashion a drill). It seems that these games are popular in Japan; therefore, you'll occasionally have to sift through some Engrish. And sometimes it devolves into a tedious pixel hunt. Luckily, on the Jay is Games site, a walkthrough is usually posted within a few hours if you get stuck.

If you'd like to try these kinds of games out, one of my favorites is Vision. This one is a bit long, but anything else by the developer, neutral, is also very good.

I've decided to start out by developing this in Game Maker. Why? Because it's free, I know how to use it, and it's what I have. I would do it in Flash, if I could afford it to tinker around with it. These kinds of games are a little complicated for something in 3D, although maybe if I had the resources and art software, I could do that. But for now, Game Maker.

Right now, all I have is the room itself, and a crude navigation system. The nice thing about Game Maker is that it's set up as a series of rooms. My plan is that each view, or side of the room, or close up, can be represented with a separate room in Game Maker, and the inventory and such can be dealt with by "persistent" objects.

My main sticking point right up front is exactly how I'd like the game to operate. Oftentimes these games have an inventory on the side of the "room" picture. Since I'm experimenting here, I have currently implemented a retractable inventory (as indicated by the blue "I"). I'm deciding how I want the player to interact with the inventory, whether to select and highlight it in the inventory, or allow the user to drag the object around with the mouse. I need to sit down and either design out how I want this to work, or just fiddle with it some more until I get something I like.

So that's what I got so far. I'm going to attempt to get a fairly intuitive interface finished (at least by escape-the-room standards), and then I'm going to write up a story/design some puzzles.

Renewal of Resolve

2009-07-09T16:14:00.003-04:00

I've fallen into a rut, and it's not the good kind of rut. Or else it'd be a routine. Anyway, I've fallen back into bad habits, and I haven't made much progress lately toward my goal of getting a job in the videogame industry. Part of that progress involves staying on top of videogame trends as well as my own personal development. Both of these things I plan to keep updates on my website and this blog, which I have been neglecting lately.

So, here's the plan.

Step 1: Work on my own games.
Since I'm not employed as of this writing, technically I could consider myself an independent game developer. And as such, I should be making games. I've had a couple ideas floating around in my head, and now is the time to put them into practice. And for accountability purposes, I'm going to blog about the process.

Step 2: Play more MMOs.
I attended the Boston Postmortem again last night, and talked with some people from Turbine, one of the major game companies in the Boston area. It seems like if you hold a game job at a company in Massachusetts, chances are that you worked for Turbine at some point. And I realized that I'm not as well versed in MMOs as I probably should be, considering a) if I want to work at Turbine, and b) given the plethora of free-to-play MMOs that are out there. Granted, most may not be of the best quality, but then, one could argue that for a majority of games. Anyway, my point is that I'm going to try some more of these MMOs, and write some of my experiences about them.

Step 2a: Write about casual games.
Another thing I had planned, related to the previous paragraph, was to write about some of my more favorite casual games that I had found online. I probably won't go into a detailed review, but I wanted to show off some of the games I thought were fun, and maybe provide a little insight into the kinds of games that I enjoy.

Hopefully this gives my blog here a little more focused purpose, and maybe you and I can both learn something from all of this. There's a strong chance I'll even make Twitter updates when I update here, for added pressure on myself. Wish me luck!

IGC East '09 - Part 2

2009-05-08T19:40:00.002-04:00

Friday's sessions started out with the keynote by Dallas Snell of the Happy Corporation (and formerly of Origin System Austin), about the importance of social interactions. One would think that this would be about the importance of social interactions in games specifically, but Snell emphasized the importance of social interactions in everything in general. The talk boiled down to him describing his life, with a lot more about his personal history and genealogy than anything else, and he apparently took some time away a long and storied career in games and did some personal research in social psychology.

The meat of the talk itself was quite interesting, and it struck something deep inside me. The point was that millions of years of evolution have come down to this, that humans generally require four things in life to be truly happy. Of course now, after the fact, I can't remember precisely what those four things are. They're four C words: choice, competency, maybe connection, and one other. I feel dumb now for forgetting. Anyway, the short of it is, humans are social creatures. The subtext of the talk was that we need to embrace that when designing games, although that was never explicitly said. Mr. Snell gave a great talk, as long as you were able to get past his rambling about his family and horrible singing.

Snell's talk went long, so the next talk I went to was a little bit rushed, especially since it was in the other building. William Ferguson of BBN Technologies gave a talk about a system he plans on building that would be a story engine. It sounds like it would work kind of like most BioWare games, presenting a list of choices and options of a story. Except the options and text would be "crowdsourced" (written by the general community, like Wikipedia), and tagged. The system would string together similarly-tagged parts of the story as long as certain criteria were met, with those criteria being defined by the user's actions, for the most part. It sounds like an interesting experiment for moving toward better interactive fiction, arguably one of the weaker parts of game development currently.

Next I sat in on a talk about iPhone development by Ravi Mehta of Viximo Studios. Basically it was "if you want to develop a game for the iPhone, here's some of the features the iPhone can handle, and here's what you can expect from Apple when trying to distribute it."

Then it was off to lunch at Uno's with Ichiro and Rohit of Dejobaan, a couple fellow WPI students, and a couple others (I'm sorry, I forget their names). Lunch went long, just by nature of the fact that we went to Uno's, and the delayed schedule caused by talks going long. I thought it was a bit ironic that I was late going to the next talk, Networking for Indies, featuring Darius Kazemi, Scott Macmillian and Sam Houston, when really I was networking at the time. It's okay that I was late, though, since their talk was essentially "use Twitter". I don't know what other advice they gave earlier in the talk, and I'm curious how outdated that talk will seem in a couple years when the Next Big Thing comes along.

Off to Duncan Watt's talk about the role music plays in games...another similar talk he gave at WPI before. And then a presentation by a couple of guys from Muzzy Lane Software about a system they're developing called Sandstone. The system uses Locust, a hybrid of XML, Javascript and a language they made up, which modularizes functions of the games they put online. It's a way of providing 3D multiplayer games online to run on off-the-shelf computers. It's a lot neater than I'm making it sound.

Later in the evening was a performance by Video Game Orchestra, which was free for conference members to attend. It was held at the Fenway Center, which was a converted church there on the Northeastern campus. I was a bit disappointed to learn that this was a chamber group...usually it's a full orchestra with a choir and everything. So this performance was a lot more intimate than I was expecting. They played a few of the video game music standards, such as Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Halo and a jazzy version of Super Mario Bros. (for the Berklee students in the group, apparently), as well as from God of War and perhaps a couple more I'm forgetting. All in all it was a nice, informal performance, and I hope sometime I'd be able to see a full concert.

Overall, I had a good time at the conference. I found most of the talks to be interesting, even if they weren't necessarily anything I could directly apply, myself. I only wish there was a bit more free time, to mingle, network and talk with the other conference patrons. I hope I get to go again next year...it's really exciting to see Boston emerge as a major player in the video game industry.

IGC East '09 - Part 1

2009-05-07T20:46:00.003-04:00

Today and tomorrow I'm attending the Independent Game Conference East '09, being held at Northeastern University.

I left extra early this morning to account for traffic, since I'm not used to driving in during rush hour traffic and I didn't want to be late. Turns out, the traffic only slowed a little bit, and I made it into Boston at about the usual 1 hour, so I had a little extra time to kill. I spent some of that time shooting the breeze with WPI IMGD professor Charles Rich, also in attendance. Also, upon registering, I got a T-shirt. Bonus!

The conference is basically a series of panel/lectures, divided into a business track and a technical track. The first keynote lecture was by Vlad Starzhevsky of Creat Studios, about "Challenges of Independence". It was more anecdotal about how Creat moved from pure developer to becoming their own publisher in the new digital distribution age. This was a theme I was going to hear a lot today (all these indy companies releasing their games via PSN, XBLA and WiiWare), which is fine.

I went to the technical discussion by Eitan and Ethan of Fire Hose Games, a lot of good and humurous lessons about their rapid prototyping process. Next was a large panel discussion about the ten "Really Important Things" to remember about game design. I believe the panel moderator, Linda Currie of Creat, gave a similar talk at WPI last semester. I was also surprised when I got home that Darius Kazemi had pretty much tweeted the entire lecture...that was a lot of tweets to sift through. All good things to consider, but unfortunately, like all things of that nature, it's hard to give all 10 equal billing in practice. Or maybe I just haven't had much chance to practice them yet.

After a quick burrito lunch at the Marino Center, I sat in on the business side of things. Brett Close of 38 Studios gave a talk about quality of life in the game industry, and explained how things worked at 38...making me even more disappointed I didn't get a chance to work there (yet). I stuck around for a panel discussion about managing your company's brand, but unfortunately I was starting to zone out due to a lack of sleep the previous night.

So I went over early to the setup of the Game Demo Night. A bunch of people set up their laptops and computers, and it was kind of a show-off-your-work/pitch session. Finally got to see and play a bit of Dejobaan's alpha of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity (seriously, that's the name...which alone rates a 4 out of 5 on the awesome scale). I've never BASE-jumped, so I don't know if they're realistic controls...but I found them to be a bit sluggish. Plus, I'm sure gameplay will be a lot more interesting once all the little extra features and powerups get added. Also, if it's going to be that easy to crush all of your bones and die (pretty much after just colliding with a building), then it would be great to have a faster turnaround to get back to free-falling. Going through the menu system every time was a bit of a drag.

Another of my favorites was a game called Bumble Tales, by Tandem Games and Perfect Dork Studios. It's essentially Bejeweled, except there's added layers of collecting materials to build a town, along with a cast of characters (the Bumbles...green blobby people things) that grant combo bonuses. Now, I like Bejeweled, so this game was right up my alley, what with all the extra features and ways to do things, instead of just "click and slide". They're also awesome for giving away near-complete copies of the game. I hope this game does really well...I really enjoyed the few minutes I got to play of it.

Part Two coming tomorrow!

WPI Game Jam D09

2009-04-07T00:49:00.002-04:00

This past Saturday, WPI GDC held its D-term Game Jam. This term's theme was "3 Things". The idea is to incorporate 3 things - an image (a pineapple), a phrase ("TOO MANY GHOSTS!"), and a sound (a .wav of a young woman making a train noise) - into a game. Pretty simple, right? These games are going to be presents at Wednesday's GDC meeting, and will be judged and awarded prizes. And while prizes are nice, I participated for another chance to make a game for the sheer fun of it.

I took these items and went with a fairly free-flow game design, making up parts of the game as I went. The basic idea is that the player goes around collecting pineapples strewn around the screen. But there are ghosts around, who love pineapple, and rush toward the player when he collects the pineapples. After a short time, the ghosts aren't as urgent, but will still persue the player as long as he holds pineapple.

The player can deposit the pineapple into a train (unofficially dubbed the "Pineapple Express" - a stupid and not entirely clever name, and certainly nothing to do with the movie...not that the movie had anything to do with pineapples or expresses, as far as I know). Once the train is full, it moves off to exit the screen, and once there the game ends and you win! Plus, there's a timer, for added "challenge" (yes, I know it's an artificial challenge and not a terrible original one, but hey, it's a game jam game).

However, collecting pineapples cause ghosts to appear. If a ghost touches the player, it either steals a pineapple and stops moving, or takes some of the player's health. Health gone, game over. And, if there are too many ghosts, the train can't leave. So, there's a random chance a machine part will also appear, which are brought to The Machine. Enough parts, and The Machine revvs up, causing the ghosts to disappear.

One interesting idea came to me during the development. At first I slapped together the usual "use the cursor keys to move" on the player, but I remembered I did this for my 38 Studios MGC game, so I thought I'd try something a little different. So, the player clicks the mouse, and the character moves toward the pointer.

The game still needs some tweaking. Values need to be adjusted for gameplay and challenge, and I need more sound effects and perhaps a little more art (right now, it's just bitmaps hastily drawn in Game Maker's sprite editor). I was also tinkering with the idea of the ghosts running after the train to prevent it from leaving. And perhaps little extra things of that nature, we'll see. Plus, a background would be nice (it's a boring flat gray background).

I'll see about putting it up on the website sometime after Wednesday...or perhaps after I've messed around with it a bit more.

Job hunt now in full swing!

2009-03-16T00:00:00.003-04:00

Okay, here goes. I fired out a bunch of emails today to a bunch of local game companies I'd like to work for, plus some that I know that are hiring, plus one long shot, Naughty Dog. It's a long shot, since I'd have to convince them to help relocate me to California, but their Twitter said they had positions available, so I thought I'd give it a try.

So, wish me luck!

Boston Postmortem - March 09

2009-03-10T22:54:00.004-04:00

Just got back from this month's Boston Postmortem. A good time, as usual. Got to see a lot of the people I know from 38 Studios, as a whole bunch of them were there supporting Jamie Gotch, the guy who created Fieldrunners, a tower defense style game for the iPhone. He gave a postmortem about his game, which I guess was the first iPhone postmortem done at the BPM. And, as an added bonus, they organized a raffle and everyone had a chance to win one of 10 "copies" (as in, a code to redeem for a free download) of Fieldrunners. And I happened to win one!

Now, all I need is an iPhone. :)

Saw some other familiar faces, as in the usual WPI people, and a couple of guys from my group from the Global Game Jam. Not as many announcements concerning job opportunities as there were last time, and therefore not as many business card I got to give away. But, I still have enough names and places from the last couple BPMs that I've been to, so I've got a good start. Which I will have to really start soon!

Postmortem postmortem...er, wrapup

2009-02-11T23:40:00.002-05:00

Had a fairly good time at the Boston Postmortem tonight. Quite a few WPI students there, which was commented on by a couple people I had talked to. It seems everyone here in IMGD suggests going to the Postmortem as a way of meeting industry people and getting jobs, so I get the feeling it might get to the point that there's going to be a grand migration from Worcester to Waltham every month and there will be more WPI students in attendance than anyone else.

I was happy to recognize a lot of faces from the Global Game Jam, which was the topic of tonight's presentation. It made me feel good to "know" people at the Postmortem, which is my goal right now...to meet at lease one new person each month and see them on consecutive visits. It feels a little weird to me that I was able to talk to so many people tonight, especially considering my past, as I was a lot shyer in my youth.

Our presentation went pretty well, except our game was the only one that experienced any technical difficulties (I think it was just an issue with the laptop talking with the projector). There were some upgrades made to the game the other day, so we're up to version 5. Another person in our group, Trey, ended up being our designated speaker, so I didn't actually say anything to the crowd, but I stood up front and tried to be helpful with my laser pointer.

I suppose I shouldn't get down on myself about our game. On the one hand, I think it's a strong premise and the name "Porcupine and Balloon are Friends" is just quirky and fun. Although, I don't think it's quite as strong as some of the other games made that weekend. But then again, it's a game jam game, it's supposed to be bad. But, everyone seemed really impressed with it.

So, all in all I'd say it was a successful night, and I'm looking forward to next month!

Boston Postmortem tonight

2009-02-11T10:59:00.002-05:00

I'm excited about going to the Boston Postmortem again. I think that makes this my fourth one, but certainly nowhere near my last.

I think this is doubly exciting tonight because the "speaker" is an actual postmortem of the games we made at the Global Game Jam a couple weeks ago. Which means there's a good chance I could even go up on stage and talk about the game I worked on (I'm not entirely sure how they plan on presenting or who else in my group will be attending).

So, if you're there, say hi to me! Wish me luck!

MQP Update

2009-02-09T21:08:00.001-05:00

So, we uploaded the latest version of our MQP game, Hooping, to the website. http://hooping-game.com. We've also set up some forums for feedback...though that's likely being pretty optimistic.

The game isn't quite where I'd like it to be at this point, and hopefully it will be at that point next week. The point where we have all of the images in-game and some honest-to-goodness courses to race in. Right now we still have our demo levels where we've been testing out the game features as we've been adding them. But, it functions pretty well, and hopefully other people find it fun.

2009-02-08T15:59:00.002-05:00

The 38 Studios guys left a few minutes ago. I showed our game off to them, and they all seemed fairly impressed. They had good suggestions for improvements, but my concern is that I'm not sure how much I want to add at this point.

I even convinced a couple to play it, and they had about the reaction I was expecting: that they had fun, and that the game appears deceptively simple. They way it works now, it takes a few times playing through it to realize the winning strategy. They tried what they thought would work, but found that by the time they made real progress, they were running low on time.

So, I'll plunk around with it a bit more, but the good thing about this game jam is that I can devote the whole weekend to it. I'm not sure how much time I'll get to devote to it in addition to all the schoolwork I still left to do. And the trick part is, the deadline for the contest is just before classes end for the term, so I can't have any free time after class to polish the game. But that's okay.

Hi 38 Studios readers!

2009-02-08T13:47:00.002-05:00

So the 38 Studios guys have shown up. With doughnuts!

And I hear from Rich that, because my blog has shown up in relation to the Game Jam, that everyone at the office has been reading this blog. So to those at 38 Studios, I say HI!

I invite all of you to check out my other work on my portfolio website, http://www.lzorro.com.

38 Studios/WPI Game Jam, Day 3

2009-02-08T12:17:00.005-05:00

Back in the lab again. It's kinda quiet in here right now...not nearly as many people as there have been. Then again, it's noon on a Sunday, and there's no food or 38 Studios people here yet. I'm guessing things will pick up soon enough.

While I'm here, I thought I'd talk a tiny bit about the art we're using for the game. I was going to do it myself, and Sarah agreed to do it anyway, but the plan was to model the game assets (namely, Munch) in 3D, and render it out into a sprite sheet, which we would import into Game Maker. That's what we've done, and it looks pretty good so far. Sarah's also renders scenes of Munch and the garage/driveway for our intro, lose and win screens, as well as part of the game's scene.

I wish I was a little better at sound design, because I'm just grabbing sounds off of http://www.sounddogs.com/, and I'm afraid so many sounds are going to be too garbled or distracting. But, that's the point for today; to show off what we have and try to get some playtesting feedback.

2009-02-07T22:08:00.003-05:00

Okay, I think I'm going to wrap it up for the night. Thanks to Sarah (my partner in this) for all the wonderful art she's done so far; we've got most of it in game and it's looking pretty good. A lot better than my hastily slapped-together "programmer" art.

So, if you're reading this, perhaps you're curious about what kind of game we're making. The inspiration came to me while I was shoveling the driveway during one of our New England winter storms a couple weeks ago. The premise of this game is that Munch (38 Studios' mascot and the star of the game) is running late to work at 38 Studios, but there's a terrible Blizzard happening. Munch must clear the driveway by eating all the snow before the alarm goes off. However, the Blizzard occasionally dumps more snow on the ground, and if there's already snow, it may create a sheet of ice, which Munch can slide around on. Powerups of salt show up too, which clear the area surrounding Munch...ice can only be cleared with salt. Additionally, some pesky neighborhood kids run in and throw snowballs at Munch; if he's hit, he'll be frozen for a couple moments. It's up to you and Munch to overcome The Blizzard!

Tomorrow, a few more art assets need to be made, as well as figure out why one particular art asset (the blizzard) won't import, for some reason. Right now, I made it in Game Maker, so it's a bunch of ugly white streaks, but inexplicably when we try to import a nice looking Targa file, it gets corrupted. Also, I'll be asking around (and also, hopefully 38 Studios' QA director, who's slated to visit) tomorrow and getting some feedback on the game. I've got the values in now where I am capable of winning the game, and I want to make sure it's a fair game for most people to play. Also, there might be some more interesting things to add, and we'll see if we have the time tomorrow to add them.

There were also rumors of Curt Schilling (Red Sox pitcher and founder of 38 Studios) visiting today, but he never did. Which I thought was a little weird, since he tweeted that he was excited about seeing the entries from WPI. Well, maybe he'll stop by tomorrow.

2009-02-07T18:47:00.003-05:00

I think I got the gameplay pretty well complete. Now I'm going to search online for sound effects.

Had a couple nice conversations with the 38 Studios guys here earlier. Producer Erik Theis, who remembered me from when he gave a talk here last year, also remembered I was working on my MQP (senior project). So I showed that off to him, as well as our game jam game. He seemed pretty impressed!

Curt Schilling hasn't shown up yet...not sure if he's going to be able to make it. Here's hoping.

WPI Game Jam, Day 2

2009-02-07T12:49:00.003-05:00

Arrived back at the game jam after a restful night. A couple 38 Studios guys are here already. And a reporter from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette was just here interviewing someone. Nice.

Now, changing some of the way the features work, and perhaps adding more enemies!

(Again, sorry about being vague...but I'd prefer to work right now than explain my idea.)

2009-02-07T00:03:00.003-05:00

OK, I think I hit a pretty good spot to quit for the night. I got a lot done...at least all of the basic functionality and the special items.

Tomorrow, add some more game flow logic, further playtesting and tweaking (this game is going to need a lot of that), maybe some additional enemies.

It occurs to me that I haven't described my game here; maybe I'll do that when I get home.

So, off to home, and to bed!

2009-02-06T21:36:00.004-05:00

Earlier, when the 38 Studios guys showed up, they asked everyone for questions. They offered the first person to raise their hand a T-shirt signed by both R.A. Salvatore and Todd MacFarlane (who, if you don't know, are the two of the principal three of 38 Studios).

Just now, they got around asking everyone for a good question in exchange for some of their other T-shirts. I'm sure their definition of "good question" is kind of lax because, hey, they're just T-shirts, and they're encouraging interaction...which I think is great. They really are a bunch of great guys.

Well, continuing on the development!

2009-02-06T19:41:00.003-05:00

Blue Jeans pizza and soda! Yay food! Om nom nom...

Also, talking with some of the 38 Studios guys is cool. They seem really impressed with what we have so far (which, admittedly, it's much...but it seems to be a good gameplan).

2009-02-06T18:52:00.002-05:00

The 38 Studios guys show up, gave a quick speech about some of the details of the contest.

One of their producers, Rich Gallup (which I happened to meet before) showed off his really cool hoodie sweatshirt. It's white with black accents, and when the zipper comes up ALL the way, to the top of his head, it looks like an Imperial Stormtrooper. Very cool.

Talked over my design idea with my art partner, and now getting down to starting in development.

The WPI/38 Studios Game Jam

2009-02-06T17:52:00.004-05:00

Okay, this time around I have the resources (and the fact that I remembered) to blog during the WPI Game Jam, sponsored by 38 Studios.

The WPI Game Development Club usually holds a game jam once per term, but this one is special because the goal is to create a game into the Massachusetts Game Challenge, for fablous cash and prizes. Well, only cash.

So right now, it's just before the official start, and we're setting things up in the lab, such as a live webcam feed, and people are trickling in. I know people from 38 Studios are due to stop over the weekend. I'll try to remember occasional posts of what's going on!

It's the little things in life you treasure.

2009-02-04T12:21:00.002-05:00

Last night, at the last Master Class session with Darius Kazemi, he mentioned the website Game Industry Tweets, which lists a bunch of Twitter accounts of people who work in the videogame industry. I went through and picked out a few to follow, especially those that have tweets for the company as a whole...companies that I admire and would be high on my "would like to work there" list.

And maybe it's a little dumb, because in the world of Twitter it doesn't mean that much, but I got a little thrill when companies like PopCap and SEGA follow me back.

Global Game Jam 2009

2009-02-02T01:52:00.000-05:00

This weekend I participated in the Boston chapter of the Global Game Jam. Overall I think it was a great experience and provided me with an opportunity to do something I've been meaning to do...make games for the hell of it! Plus, networking is always good.

My original intent was to blog about the Jam every day, make it a three part series. But, a lack of computer and limited sleep time didn't help that. Then I thought I'd write everything at the end and backdate the entries, but looking back at it now, nothing terribly excited happened during each day. So, you're getting a post-game wrap up.

Friday, January 30th

I arrived at the Singapore-GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT in Cambridge, MA about 4:40pm or so. Later than I had planned, but still plenty early (perhaps it was a good thing that I hit a tiny bit of traffic on my commute in). Some light chatting with the others, and then we got down to business. A brief overview of what to expect for the weekend...schedule, important information, all that fun stuff. We had several constraints/themes to work with. Our total gameplay had to be no more than 5 minutes. We could choose one of three words: illusionary, persistant or pointed. We had a quote, "As long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems." And finally, we were challenged with making a game around 120 beats per minute. How that got implemented, was up to us. The idea was that at the end, we could play all of the games at once and everything be synched up.

Let me say that the GAMBIT lab is a very nice facility. Although first walking in, it seems easy to get lost, but it's really kind of a square-A shape (or, a figure 8 if you count the hallyway with the elevators). The most striking thing is that the rooms all have some section of translucent wall, a kind of plexiglass surface, and everyone uses them as whiteboards. It's neat, as you can sort-of make out the images from the other side of the wall, but they're usually set up in the corner, so there are tables or something else in the way which doesn't make them that effective of whiteboards, in my opinion. It's more of the cool factor, than anything. Also, they call their kitchenette the "Respawn Point".

So, we had 20 minutes or so to brainstorm game ideas, and afterwards we pitched them to the group. [Now, personally, this is where I would've liked a lot more time. Maybe because I'm just not that good, er, experienced, in coming up with original ideas that fast, but my favorite part of game design is taking an idea and rolling it around in the brain, fleshing it out a bit, analyzing it against basic game design principles.] We then took these ideas, written on index cards, and pinned them up on the wall. Everyone then pinned their name and "job" (art and code, mostly...though we had a few sound and music guys there that ended up working a bit on all the projects) up next to the project they wanted to work on. In this way, the ideas got sifted down and people shifted around until we had about 6 total projects. And with that, we were on our way.

Dinner was Thai take out. My first time trying Thai food, actually.

Most of the rest of the evening was brainstorming with our group, figuring out the details of gameplay and all that fun stuff, which I really like. Our project ended up being a combination of two project pitches, as there weren't enough people in either group, so we joined up, and our ideas ended up working together. One idea was a Pac-Man sort of game, where the player controls two entities at once, but one entity moves at right angles to the other. And the directions each entity can move changes when it hits certain obstacles. The idea was to collect pulsating "pellets" (this is where the 120 bpm comes in), and you could only actually gather the pellet on its "upswing". The other idea played more on the "together, we never run out of problems" quote, and it wasn't much besides the title and a sketch, "Porcupine and Balloon are Friends". So, we kept that title, and the entities became the titular characters. We then filled in the gameplay with plenty of ideas, about altering speed, the size of the characters, various obstacles, special powers, and tying the gameplay together with some music.

The last decision was about development environment. One idea was to use a kind of IDE that Popcap Games has released (I'll have to investigate that further - Popcap rules!), but it would have taken too long to set up. Somehow we ended up deciding to use Yoyo Games' Game Maker. And the weirdest part was, I was more of an expert on the program than anyone else in the group!

A word of caution. Sure, Game Maker might catch a lot of flack. But, it does do good in that you can create a game prototype fairly quickly. However, MULTIPLE PEOPLE WORKING ON THE SAME GAME FILE IS A PAIN IN THE BUTT. It's just not multi-developer friendly, and in the end, I think that's why were weren't able to get as much done in the end as we would have liked. The "solution" we came up of trying to merge game files together is just much more of a hassle than it really ought to be.

Saturday, January 31

Really, not a lot happened on Saturday besides spending just about all day developing. We spent a good chunk of the day just hammering out more effective movement code. The original idea was easy to implement: when the player pressed a button, move one thing in that direction, and move the other in a perpendicular direction. But, when one collided, the other moved forward a step (usually because it could), which was something we didn't wanted. So there's all sorts of crazy checks, including ghost objects which handle the collision detection (and if they can both move freely, then the character sprites moved).

Lunch was Chinese food, and dinner was Middle Eastern. Again, Middle Eastern was a new one for me. Weird, I know...I'm just not that big into exotic food.

Sunday, Februrary 1

We really went down to the wire, trying to get as many of our features implemented as we could before our 3pm deadline. We had something fairly workable, but once again, thanks to our Game Maker problem, our final integration resulted in a lot of bug that would have taken too long to really sort out. I mean, it works, but it's very finicky and very liable to break on you. Unfortunately, that also mean that our sounds and music were a casualty, since they got put off for so long in the project. Heck, we almost didn't have a game start or win conditions. Still never got around to lose conditions, come to think of it.

We eventually got our stuff uploaded to the main database, and we gathered together in one of the rooms for brief presentations, and a chance to play each other's games. Plus, an informal vote for best game. I would recommend you look them up yourself on the Global Game Jam page and play them...look for "The Beat" and "Move mouse for your destiny". The Beat is a two-player cooperative puzzle game, with a sort of "The Blob" 50's B-movie style theme, but it really takes the 120 bpm idea to heart. Everything is in time to the music, including trap doors which you must cross, and the actions you take must fall on the beat of a measure. The "Move Mouse" game is extremely simple, it's almost abstract, but very poignant and aesthetically satisfying. You run through life, starting as a young kid working your way up through adulthood, and you move between tending a farm, building a house, and entertaining guests. It starts off slowly, the idea being that it seems like time passes slowly when you're a kid, but it ramps up quickly and you're spazzing out trying to take care of everything. It's more complicated than it sounds; really, you have to deliberately not do anything to really "lose" the game.

Again, these two were voted the best among our group, but the other games are worth a look as well.

While "Porcupine and Balloon are Friends" at this point doesn't seem to be that successful, I think it holds a lot of potential. There's still plenty of things to accomplish and a lot of challenge can be designed into it. Maybe it'll get converted to the Popcap thing and it'll work out better...I'll let you know if it does.

Keep an eye on the website for the game. Or, go to the Global Game Jam site now and download it yourself.

And thanks to everyone who worked with me on the project, and everyone else who participated in the jam...it really was a great experience!

Welcome post

2009-01-30T14:12:00.001-05:00

Hi, welcome to my new blog.

I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to keep this, right now it's in an experimental phase. I already have a blog at http://altdelusions.blogspot.com, but that's infrequently updated. I don't know, maybe I'm just not the blogging type. Worst case, I get fed up with this and I delete it, and what you're reading now will only be a figment of your imagination. oooOOOOooohhh....

Well, the intent of this blog is more for the video game side of my life, as opposed to the other one which is more comics and random thoughts. Maybe I'll put random thoughts here too, we'll see.