PS4, Xbox One or OTHER!

It's been E3 this week and games news has been awash with PS4 (simple naming convention) and Xbox One (weird chronologically screwed naming convention).

But there is a much more important announcement this week - the launch of my first Kickstarter campaign. Check it out!

By the Power of Brevity

I'm a fan of brevity, I might not be the best practitioner of it in the world, but I'm a fan nonetheless.

It's of particular benefit when trying to sell an idea - no one wants to have to read three paragraphs before you tell them what the hell your idea is all about. 

Be brief, be to the point and be exciting.

Normally I apply this to words, but recently I had the splendid idea of watching the opening sequence from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which has provided me with an excellent example of less being more in the world of moving image.

When I began my search I didn't expect was to bump into the the 4 minute version of Buck Rogers intro, in fact I had no idea it existed. It was used on the theatrical release of the pilot and you can suffer it here.

It's not all that bad, by itself, if you've not seen the TV intro. I guess the strange three minutes of women rolling around do convey some element of Buck's 500 year sleep, although I can't work out why he was so happy about being unfrozen, I guess all the rolling around got a bit boring. 

I certainly found it boring. Now have a look at the intro sequence from the TV series. It's a far superior piece of work, blasting the information to your ears as quickly and as punchy as possible. In fact, the whole thing is over in the same amount of time it takes the longer version to stop speaking.

Of course, if you don't have to explain anything then you can be even more brief. I expect the first teaser for Star Wars Episode VII will be a blank screen, then we'll hear the sound of a lightsaber powering up, just the sound, no visual, then perhaps Star Wars logo. Let's face it, that'll be worth $200 million in box office straight off the bat.

Finally, I say things and they happen!

At the start of the year I migrated from being a game designer to being a producer. Producers in the land of video games are nothing like film and TV producers, they're a lot more like project managers in any other field. Yes, no longer am I in charge of figuring out how things work, I just have to make sure they're done.

At least that's the theory.

This space monkey actually features very few of the space elements,  get the app to see  all!

I do actually still do a lot of design, so I have to tell myself off when I'm late. 

The perk of being the producer on a project is that I get to say what will get made. Lately I've ben working on a project called MonkeyMe, where you get to dress up monkeys in all kinds of crazy stuff. And when it came time to have more stuff I could simply say, "I want space stuff!" That's as far as I went, I don't believe in taking away the creative fun of artists by getting any more specific than is needed. It's always been my policy, and it's served me well, but probably never quite this well.

Mind The Gap

When someone sent round a link to Mind The Gap at work, work ceased for a short time. I would have told everyone to get back to work, but I was too busy playing it. 

The game starts off simply enough - there are three stations and you can connect them by dragging train lines between. Passengers appear at these stations in the form of different shapes, and their shape matches one of the stations. All you have to do is provide a network that's good enough to allow passengers to hop on the trains that move along the tracks to get to a station that's the same shape as they are. And the passengers are smart enough to hop on and off different trains to get to where they want to be.

Easy.

One of my rail networks, shortly before I become overwhelmed and made everything insane...

It is easy, at first, but each station can only have a total of 10 passengers waiting at it before it becomes overloaded and it's game over. Also, you only have five different train lines, so only 5 trains trundling around at any given time.

Just as I was getting really into the game Peter Curry, one of the game's co-creators, popped into the office and we (I mean me) all started throwing ideas at him about how it might be improved. Although we all conceded that all such ideas were incremental, considering the fact that the game is already brilliant in it's fiendish simplicity.

In conclusion, go play Mind the Gap, it might be the best game ever to come out of Wellington, and that's saying something because, for a little city, Wellington punches hard in the video games stakes.

Zombie Sandcastle

For far too long (6 years in fact) I've been playing around with a piece of software called Scratch. This little piece of wonder is made by smart folk over at MIT and is designed to get kids into programming. I've never learnt to program so instead I use Scratch.

Zombie Sandcastle, because this is the way the apocalypse plays in my head...

It has many problems, being a bit slow being its major one, but I can't get out of the cycle of having ideas and then trying to work out how to do them in Scratch. 

But then I had an idea that was actually pretty well suited to the environment, a game I like to call Zombie Sandcastle. I was actually trying to think of something along the lines of Minecraft but better suited to touch screen. 

The proof of concept that I've ended up with has no crafting in it, or any of a whole bunch of ideas I would put into a fully working game but you can do the fundamental action of digging up sand and putting it down somewhere (anywhere) else. And you have the pressure of zombies trying to eat your survivors and your survivors having to look for something to eat!

If you want to know how that works then play Zombie Sandcastle

Tilt Left, Tilt Right

The 14th of March saw the release of Ridiculous Fishing, and despite looking forward to its release and counting down the days I got completely distracted by cricket. (England vs New Zealand in Wellington, a total win win for an English ex-pat who's lived in NZ for 5 years. And literally a win win, as rain stopped play and it was a draw.)

Anyway, come Monday 18th, and just a few days after the release I got an email of my former colleague, PikPok art director and superior game design mind Peter Freer, telling me how much he loved Ridiculous Fishing and had completed it.

Comp-What!

Naturally, I scurried home at the end of the day and set it downloading on my iPad. I then proceeded to play it for an hour, despite being pretty hungry when I arrived home.

Two nights later I was up late submitting an app to Apple and couldn't sleep when we wrapped up the process around about 1am, so I played some more Ridiculous Fishing. Two hours later I thought it might be best to get some sleep. 

The next night I completed the game, well, sort of.

I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to spoil it for anyone.

The controls for the game are pretty simple - you tap to cast your line which then your hook descends through the water in a one screen wide gully. You tilt your device left and right to move the  hook left and right dodging fish, for as soon as it touches a fish it starts going up again, and you again can tilt left and right to hook as many fish as possible before the hook gets to the surface, whereupon all the fish launch into the air and you have to shoot them.

The further down you can get your hook without colliding with a fish the more fish you can have the chance to hook on the way up. There's also quite a variety of fish in the game, and the deeper you go the more different fish you will see and catch. To complete the game you also need to get the hook all the way to the sea floor. So, whichever way you look at it, depth matters.

I'm not particularly keen on tilt controls, so for me to like a tilt controlled game so much takes some doing. For one, tilt controls can be extremely frustrating and making them feel good is not a trivial thing. The most common type is the form seen in Doodle Jump, where tilting in one direction sends the protagonist arcing off in that direction, and the more you tilt the faster they go. Return the device to vertical and the protagonist returns to moving in a straight line.

Doodle Jump is an old game, by iOS standards, but it's still an excellent example of making such controls feel good. The most important thing to get right is the inertia on the player's character, which defines how quickly you can make it change direction, either switching the direction of travel from left to right or right to left. PikPok's Bird Strike suffers from too much inertia in the turn, which seriously hampers the feel of the game. As I was the senior designer at Sidhe (PikPok's parent entity at the time) I have to accept some responsibility for this, as I didn't spot the problem at all, although I don't understand why PikPok doesn't fix it in an update.

But Ridiculous Fishing doesn't work like that, instead each angle of tilt corresponds to an exact x coordinate on the screen. Holding the device vertical sends the hook along the centre of the screen, and any tilt to the left or right aligns to an exact path, not a drift in that direction, as shown in the diagram below.

Temple Run uses these controls too, but it's hard to appreciate on the narrow channel you run along. Again, inertia plays a part, the hook doesn't move instantly from one x co-ordinate to another, but the speed of manoeuvre that's possible is incredible, allowing me to thread the hook through the slenderest of gaps more easily than I could possibly imagine normal inertia controls. 

So, even if you, like me, don't usually like tilt controls, I strongly recommend you play Ridiculous Fishing.

Badges Come Full Circle

Over a hundred years ago Robert Baden-Powell launched the Scouting Movement. It's a fine institution, and I say that as someone who has never been part of it. Part of it is the rather neat factor of awarding Merit Badges for doing various things, like camping, canoeing, carpentry and game design. 

Yep, they've just introduced a game design merit badge. 

Boy Scouts - now enjoying the great outdoors activity of game design...

I don't know if the Scouts invented badges but they certainly popularised the concept. Now badges are everywhere, most notably in video games and a wide variety of gamified systems - some good, some best ignored.

Funny how things come full circle.