Actually designing now. Woot!

Okay enough ranting, I'm actually going to put my money where my mouth is and design a damn game. I now have the basics to make a 2D fighting game for the Gamecube (with logic abstracted away from draw code so I can eventually finish it for PC once my devkit access goes bye bye). I've decided to finally shut up and attempt it instead of a typical side scroller shooter which is easy because the art is easy. I'm mostly wanting to focus on the fighting engine which means that this project will be contingent on finding some dedicated 2D character artists/designers to take ownership of at least one character each. I'm going for two characters initially just to get a proof of concept up. No artists will mean, back to the side scroller which I already have some art for :(

I'm also a firm believer in strong character design, after all I never got into Guilty Gear despite the strength of the fighting engine because I couldn't get into the characters. However Melty Blood React is very similar but I like the characters a lot more and got pretty hooked last weekend :) I'm especially interested in hearing from anyone who has existing character sitting around where you might have once wanted to make a fighting game but couldnt find an engine or programmers to make it. Yes I know of Mugen, but I want this to be a coding exercise too, not just design :)

gameplay programmers saving the world.

I'm merging two posts into one today. The first is.. I've come across a lot of blogs and various opinion pieces where we're all converging on the same concept. That design is stuck in a rut. Hell I used to find engine developments interesting too, and still study them even now but the difference is whereas engine and graphics improvements used to empower us to make better games and new gameplay concepts the cost has been that now the baseline for games is so high and complex that there's no way a programmer can build the whole game by himself. This has cost us the ability for the programmer to also be the design guy since he is the creator of the world. Being the creator of the world isn't enough anymore. All the worlds are the same. These days if anything the artists have a bigger hand in designing and populating the world if you will.

When I read books like Masters of Doom and look at old school games that I grew up playing, the joy of even discovering a scrolling routine that singlehandedly enables your game, and pushing the machines to the limit have been replaced with fighting complexity and just catching up to the Joneses. Half Life 2 did HDR lighting, so now we all have to do HDR lighting etc. It's always more fun when you are trailblazing than spending time reimplementing what others have discovered, that's why I had so mcuh fun with machinima. I didn't even used to think about design all that much, I just took it hand in hand with programming the subsystems, engine of the game etc, but it's obvious now that I'm just gravitating to what would *really* make games better. In the old days it was programming, but now I truly believe it's good design we are lacking.

Another problem is that, while good design is necessary to turn a competent game into a great or even legendary one, good design isn't necessarily appreciated and therefore is perceived as unnecessary. After all the game works right? that's like saying a film is good because it plays on the projector and people can watch it. Adam Sandler films exist sure, but we have the same problem as the film guys (again) in that taste has to be acquired and that only happens over time. I am desperately hoping that as we now have a section of the populace that appreciates films, including financiers that back them, that this will also (NEED) to happen to games.

Reflections on the magic of the dotcom era

Yeah I realise this is a little out of the design league but things aren't as exciting as they used to be now huh? We're definitely well past the honeymoon period of the dotcom era and now into the malaise and the lot-less-sex period. I've been thinking about this a lot over the years and really it's not just that the stock options, money and dotcoms that are gone, there were a lot of other things that captured our techie imaginations during that time. It was the culmination of a LOT of achievements and barriers being broken all at the same time that led us into the new information age. There was so much we looked forward to, and eagerly devoured and the dotcoms were just the face.

1) DVD's, movies weren't just bummy VHS tapes that would wear out over time anymore. Special features, director's commentary, alternate angles, all of that stuff promised us a greater insight into the filmmaking process. Plus movies came on those CD looking things now! We have the technology. We can rebuild him. Smaller, better, faster..

2) CGI comes of age, we were astounded by movies like Final Fantasy and Dinosaur. How much more real could it get? Each new movie wasn't so much as a new movie but also a step further. We were looking forward to just how much better it could look each time

3) 3D accelerators become standard, then we got the GPU. Now we focused on the domains of even larger polycounts, complexity. No longer was fog and shitty draw distance the default LOL. We moved to a new era of physics, shaders, and particle/rain and water effects.

4) PDA's. Palm was the great white hope, here was a company that wasn't just any old dotcom, it also sold hardware with shades of the Apple of old. They carried the future dream of all our lives being seamlessly integrated with our minature digital brains in our pocket, and that we wouldn't blink at dropping $500 on any of these things. Not at all :) Would our mini laptops supplant cell phones? I defintiely had a lot of interest here.

5) The broadband revolution. The US really led point here, pioneering not only rollout, but with an ecosystem of applications alongside it. E-Commerce, on demand TV, gaming, prophets already screaming "FIBER TO THE HOME!". Streaming video, voice over IP, the next generation of bandwidth will have a much tougher fight, and arguably much less of an impact on our lifestyles.

6) Massively Multiplayer games. This was the era of Everquest, which set the standard for today and is still arguably undefeated. The dream of the virtual world had been realised. For me ever since I saw the crude avatars, MUSH's and early efforts with the Sierra Network, even Prodigy, AOL etc, I was hooked from that moment and was never more envious to not be living in the US at the time.

7) The peer to peer revolution, sparked by Napster. I think we all know what happened with this one :)

8) DiVX, that did for video what MP3 did for audio. Finally video was a first class citizen on the internet, no more matchbook sized undecipherable video on geoshitties sites. The size was small, efficient. The quality was amazing. Movie piracy also finally arrived, and with it a ballooning independent film scene online.

9) Along with DiVX to birth the indie film scene(and tv ads online :P) was the ubiquity of streaming video. Audio was dialup, video was broadband. One of the first things I wanted to see when I first came to this country was streaming video, no stuttering, no ridiculous buffering every 4 frames. Wow.

10) Webcomics. Simple, but can't be ignored. Userfriendly was my first love :) Webcomics(and Dilbert) did for us, what newspaper cartoonists did for everyone else. Userfriendly, and a few other comics at the time, summed up the day to day nonsense of our new dotcom era and gave us entertainment while we rolled around in our riches and camped at our stock tickers while pretending to work at the same time.

11) Finally, the dotcoms. I absolutely regret not being here when it was possible to order groceries online. I remember when it was so cool to be able to order *anything* online. This was another thing I was dying to try when I got here. That convenience as well as range of choice, things like pricewatch, amazon. All US only ARGH. The dotcoms were supposed to kill everyone on price as well as offer convenience. That was supposed to be the revolution. I think the true revolution was the UPS/Fedex model they pioneered when "e-commerce" gradually evolved from being a nationwide US only thing to truly becoming a global marketplace (courtesy of UPS/Fedex) today.

When I look back on it now. I look back fondly, and also regret. After all, I was still ultimately a spectator, I didn't get to actually live through the dotcom stock rush, and I was still a spectator for everything else. Arrived too little, too late. The bubble practically burst when I stepped off the plane. However looking back now, this *WAS* our generation's Woodstock/hippy era, we all had so much hope and so many dreams then. It's just a pity I didn't get to prospect for dotcom gold in time. Other countries may have had bits and pieces of this pie, but the US had it all, led point and showed the world how it was done and enjoyed its greatest prosperity.

I seriously do not think we'll see another era quite like that one until mankind starts colonising other planets, then it'll be new products (i.e new cures), new business models, new types of jobs, all over again. Hopefully I will position my kids (and maybe myself) to much better take advantage of the next one :)

Sequels work because of new gamers

Despite all the grumbling from hardcore, old school and long term gamers about how games suck these days, sequelitis and knockoffs still continue to sell and we know it. That's why it pisses us off right?

Well for those of us that have been gaming forever, long before Sony made it "Cool" to the MTV generation, we've seen all this before, however the current generation hasn't. You know, those guys who think that Halo is the first FPS game EVER. Publishers may be conservative but they also would not continue to throw money into this pond if it wasn't making them money. Sequels work for this current generation because for them, this stuff is still new. Hell I attend a game school (my issues with the school aside) where you really have to be a game dork to be here and half these kids didn't really get into games or "get a computer" until it became mainstream. That's why it works.

For everyone that is on the USA sucks bandwagon and champions Japan as the land of originality and katamari, well here I got news for you. It's the same thing over there too! Sadly... Our best hope is that we burn out the Halo kiddies quick soon too and then maybe we can make some real games.

Fight Night Round 2

EA gets a lot of shit from everyone these days, but I like to think that two original properties still managed to come out of them. The Burnout franchise and the new kid on the block, Fight Night which has demolished every boxing game made up to now and has set the bar. What Madden did in the days of yore for football...

Anyhow, ever since I first saw it a year ago to when I got my PS2 recently, this was the game that I was looking forward to playing most, even more than Metal Gear Solid 3, mainly because of the innovative Total Punch Control system. It successfully puts you in the place of throwing the punches yourself and even more importantly, has you thinking about where your hands are and where the opponents are. I have not been as hooked on any kind of one on one fighting game this bad since the original Street Fighter 2. No longer are boxing games glorified button mashing affairs.

I was up till 4 AM beating the crap out of other boxers on this thing, where during round 3 of a bout with Sonny Liston, his high guard had just opened up wide enoguh for me to pop in a straight, I get a knock on the door. I've completely forgotten to turn the volume down (at least that's what I thought it was going to be about), and I thought it was midnight and not 4 AM. A neighbour in the complex had locked himself out and mine was the only light on. When I first opened the door I asked if it was the noise, he replied "don't worry, I'm a gamer myself so I understand. I play City of Heroes". I'm thinking, what the FUCK is City of Heroes? FIGHT NIGHT!!!

Anyway he needs to use the phone to call his girlfriend to let him in, he tells me the number and I manage to dial the wrong number anyway TWICE. My hands are shaking and my mind is still purely on the Sonny Liston match, what combinations I'll be throwing after that straight, what if he does this etc etc that whole chess game. BOTH my thumbs are completely swollen. In just ONE night. I have never ever gotten this so called "Nintendo thumb" that everyone else seemed to have in my life, yet in the space of one night... FUCKING FANTASTIC!!

The next morning, I get up in 4 hours and go to fencing lessons, and since my thumb is swollen I can barely work pistol grip... and I demolish 5 guys in a row. The 5th guy doesn't even try, he just let's me take my points and leaves. After playing Fight Night and looking for openings and so on all night, it seems that everything else was moving in slow motion and I read everyone like a book. Or maybe they suck *Shrug*

This was almost a month ago now, and sadly ultimately Fight Night was still a boxing game and there's only so much to master in it, say compared to Street Fighter, but for that one night. I was 14 again. Nothing else has come close since then, until now. Great fucking job EA Chicago, well done :)

Inventing new game styles

Greg Costikyan has linked to this very interesting powerpoint, tip of the iceberg really that traces the lineage of how game styles dating back to early board games were conceived and evolutions of different gamestyles up to the current day and the impact that some have had.

http://www.costik.com/presentations/Imagining%20New%20Game%20Styles.ppt

I saved this as reference since although I have gone through the same exact thought process myself, this one nails it really concisely and I think I will be looking at it many times over the years whenever I run into "game designer's block"