Sunday morning in San Francisco, pre-GDC.

I sat down an hour ago at a Starbucks. The fourth one I tried. I have a few free hours here in San Francisco, the Sunday before GDC (the Game Developer's Conference). It's been rainy, heavy precipitation hitting California for the first time in a while, and that dropping rain slowly made its way through my clothes.

I was planning on working out of the Westfield Mall. I liked the idea of disappearing in the crowd of the huge food court with a coffee and my laptop. But the mall opens at 11 on Sundays, and I had a good 70 minutes before that. I decided to walk and seek out a coffee shop elsewhere, but walking south in downtown SF just gets you weird closed shops covered in various graffiti, or little rundown stores in this most expensive of cities.

Then I started walking north into the union square area, where I knew there were plenty of 'Bucks. Literally every block for many in a row. But they're all pretty small, and I was unable to find a seat.

Here I am back on Market Street, in a much larger Starbucks, a few minutes into cleaning up code on my latest game, Fire Child. There's a very attractive young woman sitting next to me. We're on one of those narrow counters with stools that looks out the window. She's not doing anything except having her coffee and occasionally glancing at her phone. I think she is there hoping to be chatted with. It's an assumption, I don't actually know. And I have work to do, so I'd rather do that.

After a few minutes a man taps me on the shoulder. Because it's a downtown in a big city, I assume a person asking for money, and the man even has a little bit of that look. Kinda rough but detailed tattoos mark his knuckles and peer out from under the sleeves of his baggy black hoodie.

He wants to know about my code. 

And then it quickly becomes apparent that he is indeed a coder. He talks about PHP, we talk a little about Unity, using C# versus Java. The entire time the girl next to me has a look, that not-unexpected look of watching me "deal with a guy from the street". I chat with him for two or three minutes, and then he says he'll let me get back to it and sorry for intruding. He starts to walk away and she says to me, "Hello world." I don't think it was a coding joke. 

She starts to say a little more, but he returns, and she goes silent and turns away.

He talks about the place he usually works out of, suggesting it as an alternative to Starbucks. But I don't live around here, so it wasn't going to be much help. He said he had been writing tons of articles on quickly made blogs and, using SEO, making a lot of money with these sites. He then sold all these sites to make his big web idea, and then real-life took a hit (drugs might have been the cause, they might have been a side effect), and he was basically back at zero. He said thanks and sorry again, and now he's on the other side of this Starbucks tapping away on a laptop with tattooed fingers.

The glam young gal is still sitting there, and does a look with me. You know, where two people look at each other knowingly after dealing with someone troubled off the street. I've done that before, but I had no such feelings about this guy. She says a couple things, and it's apparent we have much less to talk about than I did with him. After a brief moment where I suss out she has a foreign accent, lives in town, and is "in fashion", we have no more to say. A minute later, she gets up from her seat next to me, and walks out.

My socks are still damp from all that walking, those minutes where I was looking for a dry place to take shelter. With my giant backpack loaded with clothes and my laptop and possessions I care about. I cannot begin to know what it's like to look for shelter for days and months and years, but I know that I count on others, and I can do no less than meet someone where they are. And if they're excited to talk code and apps and such, I don't really care what they look like.

Standard Cards, Game #2: Feud

(I don't remember the rules of Game #1, but I think it's somewhere on this blog!)

I spent the weekend at http://tableflip.us/ in San Francisco. Met smart and interesting people and played and learned table top and social games.

Scoundrels is approaching a shippable/kickstarterable state, so I'm starting to get the itch to design a new tabletop game. In that vein, I've always enjoyed designing games within a standard 52-card poker deck, so today I came up with a quick little game.
-

Standard Cards, Game #2: Feud (2-player variant)

Setup:
-Split the deck into suits.
-Take one red and one black suit. Place the King, Queen, and Jack from red in front of the other player and give them the Ace from that suit as well. Do the same for yourself with the black suit.
-Shuffle the remaining number cards from these suits together.
-Split the number cards evenly, and add your Aces to your hand. (You may look at your hand.)

Play:
-Choose one of the cards in your hand and lay it face down in front of you. Your goal is to predict the color of your opponent's card. Play an odd card to predict they will play the opposing color, play an even if you predict they'll play the same color. If you win, your opponent discards their card, if they win, you discard yours. (Play the Ace to predict they will play the same color as you. If wrong, you lose.)
-Ties initiate a Feud. Leave the cards on the table and continue play until there is a tie-breaker. All tying cards are now discarded, and the loser discards their final played card as well, while the winner keeps their final card. Additionally, the loser discards a Royal [see "Royals Rules"]. The Feud is now over and play returns to normal.

End:
-Upon one player losing all their hand cards or their King.

Royals Rules:
-The King is worth 3, Queen is worth 2, and the Jack 1.
-When you lose a Feud, you discard the Royal worth the number of tied battles. E.g. if a Feud ends after 2 ties, the loser discards the Queen. If they don't have the Queen, the player discards their lowest Royal. If a Feud ends with 3 or more ties, the loser's King dies and the game is over.
-The Queen and Jack at any time may be swapped into or out of the hand (except they may not be swapped after both cards of the round are revealed or during a Feud). While in the hand, they may be played like any number card. They cannot defend the King, but they win any battle against an opposing color. They lose against the same color.

-
Hope you enjoy!
-Randy O
@randyzero

Fracking: the Minigame

"Hydraulic fracturing is the fracturing of rock by a pressurized liquid." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing]

During November I found myself watching horrifying and bleak videos about a destructive oil extraction process called "fracking" which is threatening communities around the country, contaminating water supplies and soil. 

We as a society/species are living and breathing and dependent on resources, but how far are we willing to go to gather one resource rather than investing in safer/more renewable resource production?

Design

I thought about fracking a bit. What bothers me is not really knowing how bad the environmental effects might be, how much fracking actually contaminates the environment. It seems to be approved with little fanfare or questions, and then a midwest town suddenly discovers that its drinking water is flammable.

I wanted to make a game about how collecting resources can be dangerous. Over a couple months of pondering, I came to the conclusion that my game would be about a "city" that continually shrinks. To keep the city alive, the player would have to quickly tap on several types of resources spawning around the screen. The player could resort to "fracking" a resource to make it worth more, but this would also spoil an area of the screen permanently, such that any resources spawning in that area were now worthless.

Implementation

We don't really know how many resources we need to survive in the real world without destroying our future, we can only guess. But a game is controllable. Setting specific worth of resources, generation times, etc, is how I present my vision, my views. So I decided there should be exactly enough resources to keep the city alive indefinitely.

But testing the prototype, I discovered that with enough resources, a good player would never lose. I needed scarcity of resources; the balance needed to be set against the player-character's survival. By giving the player less than they could live on, I forced fracking to delay the inevitable death of the city.

Additionally, I made contaminated areas slowly shrink, based on my coworker Ian's negative response to their permanence. They were a pointless chokehold to him, which is what I wanted players to realize through lots of play. I worried that by lessening their effects, I was misrepresenting how deadly they might be in the real world. Instead, the game became more compelling. When contamination is permanent, you are being told fracking is evil, rather than learning it. And once you've been told something, there is little value in hearing it again. When it is not so clear, you learn it through experience.

Resolution

As I've grown as a designer, I've become ever more interested in designing games with "replay value". Not in the unpleasant commercial sense, but rather that I don't like a game "telling" me what it's about.  Many of the games I play only once, it feels like I've been given a statement, an answer, by the system[s] of the game. I learn quickly that X is bad and Y is good. Maybe the story or art or music leaves me with questions, but I took all from the mechanics. I'd rather the mechanic also leave me with questions.

By taking player feedback and adjusting only a few numbers this way or that, I was able to make "Fracking" ask questions, instead of stating things explicitly. I find myself replaying it, trying to learn the relative values of fracking, and the alternate, less destructive harvesting mechanic.

I messed with the numerical values of fracking, trying to remove my bias. Fracking now plays an important role in my game. It is dangerous and often helps kill the city, but played cautiously enough it prolongs the city's survival more than without. Making and playing this game has made me consider the concept of fracking in a more pragmatic light. The original game concept that fracking is "evil" has been altered. It is instead a dark gray area. 

Fracking is a dangerous avenue that we are pursuing, but it's not evil. It is only reflective of humanity's ubiquity, our presence encroaching onto every surface and, as with fracking, into every crevice. We grow, we consume, else we die. My little game neglects to represent our growth, instead representing only the shrinking space and resources we have to operate an ever expanding machinery of food and waste and shelter.

I'm still opposed to fracking, primarily because it's not a solution to our bigger problem of oil-dependency. But survival is tough when we don't have the resources to sustain how long and increasingly we've been suckling at mother nature's teat.


-

"Fracking" will be available soon in an update to my game Distractions, available right now for free on iOS.

Lost in Mechanics

It's easy to dislike one's own work, even when it works. And there are many questions about what the heck does it even mean for mechanics to work or to not work. There are things you could easily argue don't work, and yet they might. Is a game bad because it relies too much on luck? What exactly is the goal of your mechanic? Do you want someone to play your game once and be done, or do you want them to have the urge to play it at any moment. The difference between Angry Birds and Trackmania is enormous, when one forces you to deal with a seemingly random set of physics outcomes, while the other gives you precisely what you want, provided you can indeed press at exactly the right moment.

I've been making luck based games lately, and it's really annoying. I didn't want to do this. I've been creating scenarios where things are just balanced enough that the player is at the whims of the random seed generated that playthrough. I've got a boardgame where every player has such an opportunity to be the winner that it ends up being almost luck-based. Give every player a chance to come back to the victory, and you don't know which player will draw that straw.

There has to be a point where you decide that you're just going to move forward with the mechanic, but it's tough when you can't tell if that mechanic is what you wanted it to be. Making a game about choosing paths in life, I don't know what I'm writing anymore.

ufdshidfjskal;

this all means jack diddly.

ooooh joy.

more product that's product that doesn't go anyhwere because I can't fuckin move beyond this weird sophomore slump, right? it's easy to draw goats. it's hard to make something new. or to want to make something new.

I left that game behind, that bathtub game behind because I'm making toys. I can't seem to make a system that's got true meaning mixed with control. so here we go again with that. Should I finish this thing? I think I should, but who really knows anymore. I just have to keep pushing, but for now and I can just draw goats. Goats jumping, hhhere we go! Everyone likes something that they know already. I wish i could make the new mechanics more quickly. I could pinpoint whenwhy it works or not.

It's the curse. games are systems, and I don't know where the entry point for the system is . or how You should be affecting it or if you should have a real say, or if you care about how it looks. you shouldn't care how it looks I think. But that's discounting the power of aesthetic. A system is representative, right? or is it entirely abstracted. Oh boy, Okay, I need to just go not think for a couple hours. And get back tro drawering things in the morning.

Let love be. Beyond all laws and boundaries.

You can argue there's no goal in life, but I have to respond with love. Or I must try. Those heartbeats of space and time, those pulsing rhythms deep in our minds, that is the yearning to love.

We must yearn to love. Life is a never-ending yearning. The heart should yearn for love as much as it does love.

We hurt each other, we hurt ourselves, in that denial of love.

It's not about acceptance, it's not about tolerance. Love is deeper than tolerance, it's understanding. It's an embrace. Love consumes. Love is all. And where there is love, there is life.

Let love be. Beyond all laws and boundaries. Love is one.

Just now Ian came up and spoke to me over my shoulder as I was drawing Escape Goat 2 art. On my headphones the immensely dramatic climax of M83's song "Wait" was pulsing through my tiny earbuds. I quickly tapped the F8 key on my Macbook to pause the beautiful moment of creation and catharsis and art that someone had created thousands of miles from here, across an ocean. We chatted briefly about the programming he had just done, making it easier to fit more art into our game at less cost to file size. We finished talking and I hit F8 again. The pounding climax returned at full force, as the particles of noise instantaneously resumed from their frozen state, the emotion waiting for me to call. It could have waited forever.

Game Center Leaderboard Dismissal on iPad vs. iPhone

A random piece of knowledge I send off to you for whom it may help.

I used Cocos2d and Ganbaru Game's Game Center helper to integrate Game Center into Dead End, an iOS game of mine.

However, upon converting the game to Universal, I found two problems.

1. GameCenter wouldn't pop up on iPad.
To resolve this, you have to change the modalPresentationStyle for your leaderboard.  The default does not work on iPad.

So this is my showLeaderboard code, with an added line for iPad/iPhone integration.

- (void)showLeaderboardForCategory:(NSString *)category

{

    if (hasGameCenter)

    {

        GKLeaderboardViewController *leaderboardController = [[GKLeaderboardViewController alloc] init];

        if (leaderboardController != nil)

        {

            myViewController = [[UIViewController alloc] init];

            

            leaderboardController.leaderboardDelegate = self;

            leaderboardController.category = category;

            leaderboardController.modalTransitionStyle = UIModalTransitionStyleCrossDissolve;

            if (UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPhone)

                leaderboardController.modalPresentationStyle = UIModalPresentationFullScreen;

            else

                leaderboardController.modalPresentationStyle = UIModalPresentationFormSheet;

            

            [[[[CCDirector sharedDirector] openGLView] window] addSubview:myViewController.view];

            [myViewController presentModalViewController:leaderboardController animated:YES];

        }

        [leaderboardController release];

    }

}

2. When I was dismissing the leaderboard on iPad, touch controls stopped working.

On iPhone/iPod, the dismissal code looked like:

- (void)leaderboardViewControllerDidFinish:(GKLeaderboardViewController *)viewController

{

    [myViewController dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];

    [myViewController.view.superview removeFromSuperview];//I added this to Ganbaru's code

    [myViewController release];

}

On iPad, however, instead of [myViewController.view.superview removeFromSuperview], it should only be [myViewController.view removeFromSuperview].  I'm not sure why, but it works for me.

Thus, to get leaderboard dismissal to work on both iPhone AND iPad, the full code should be:

[code]

- (void)leaderboardViewControllerDidFinish:(GKLeaderboardViewController *)viewController

{

    [myViewController dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];

    if (UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPhone)

        [myViewController.view.superview removeFromSuperview];

    else

        [myViewController.view removeFromSuperview];

    

    [myViewController release];

}

Hope this is useful for someone!

Gradients

I work in a youth homeless shelter once a week, and I do it as much for myself as for the kids. These are 18-25 year olds. They are officially adults, but this shelter was started because these poor castaways would otherwise go from foster homes and under-age care one day to rough homeless shelters and rougher streets the next. We consider them adults, but tell me that upon graduating high-school you were ready to go live in a shelter with grizzled 50 year old homeless folk.

There's a gradient to our maturity. Some of us never learn any, others learn too much. So many of these youth are struggling just to get beyond an immature and volatile world that left them in poor health and poor preparation for life. The life they know is beyond me to understand. I've been lucky. There's a gradient of people that are in the shelter. There are youth who are escaping abuse at home, others struggling with drugs, some whose homes were too poor to support them, still others who have never known a real home. There are those who are beating the challenges, those who may beat them, and others who will lose. There are more than a fair share struggling with mental health problems. There are youth I enjoy seeing, others I would have a hard time tolerating, were it my job to maintain order in the shelter.

Far above these struggles, and yet just as important, are high level government decisions, high level business and world market struggles. There are people who want laws to control everything we do. Others want laws to control none of what we do. And still more who see decisions one way over here and another over there. There are decisions about who to hire, who to fire, who to support, who to let down.

Don't mistake life for anything but a gradient. I learned that in art the use of pure black and the use of pure white are rarely desired. Give some texture, throw in some tint of a color. Life is better this way if we accept that our beauty and strength lies in the texture, the variety, and that such variety should be embraced.

And that's why, when we look at our troubles, at our struggles, the solution lies not in changing the individuals, because we will never win that battle, but in changing the rules of how we operate as a society. We need to change the rules that help people, that raise kids. We need to fix how we operate, and accept and embrace variety and diversity. We know that things are never black and white, so we need to keep working on the rules. And we will never finish fixing and refining, because the system always changes. But as long as we look at the system as much and more than we attack individual cases, then we might make progress.

I look at the youth in the shelter, and I know with a fairly heady certainty that we needed to help these kids long ago. We needed to feed some of them better food, we needed to teach others better discipline, we needed to find many of them better parents. But they are going to struggle now because their world's rules were defined and built long ago. There are billions yet to come, why not change the game rather than trying to mess with the pieces?

A Letter To Barack Obama

I respect you Mr. President. But I am wavering.

Your intellect, the knowledge and awareness you have in regard to so many national issues far exceeds the typical politician. You are not a politician to me. You are someone who is fighting by using facts, who is fighting by using reasoning as your weapon. I love listening to you debate and discuss issues.

You are willing to talk, to compromise, to think in larger terms. Our country is immense, and you stand there to represent millions of different views on millions of different subjects.

When you talk, I listen. When you say something, I think on it.

And when you take a stance, I hear what your beliefs and values are.

When you back down, you lose me. You have the heart so many of us have. I've heard it numerous times in the way you speak. So stop backing down. Stand up and make your point and stick with it. No one is happy with congress, why should you accept them either? You are the voice of us.

I support much of what you have done and what you say you want to do. Take advantage of that and stop compromising. Be what you feel, because I know there's intelligence and respect behind your beliefs.

There is a fight upon us, and your backing down only defers the inevitable clash and makes it worse.

Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street

We are forever beholden to the regimes and systems and networks that run our lives. This is as true now as it was two thousand years ago. We can decry the hurt that we have endured because of unfair policies and rule, and we should be thankful for the successes and innovations brought about by such governing.

As we become more aware of those around us, we are more conscious of the successes and failures of those same groups and individuals.

-

Occupy Wall Street, to me, is the public discontent arising from the realization that one form of success is trumping all others in this country and elsewhere, even when it causes harm.

Most people want to be rich, sure, but for one reason: to take their woes away. Money solves problems. You can solve every problem in your life if you just have the money to pay for the solution. Money pays to resolve problems, and it also pays for leisure, recreation, and entertainment. But that's it.

Most people want to work and then call it a day. Most people want to have time with friends and family, time alone, time learning more about something they love, time for recreation, time to eat.

Occupy Wall Street is about an inability by the leaders of business to see the small things in life, to only see this one element of life.

It is a backlash from people who do not care about being rich, they only care about having enough. In America it is not considered enough to own a restaurant on a corner where you can make your living, pay your employees, and call it a day. No, you are expected to expand to a second location, and then four more. To make more money.

And here's why you are expected to go the extra mile for money: because if you slip up, you better have that money ready. Because these days it only takes a single car accident or one tough month or one ailing relative to cost thousands upon thousands of dollars of damage. For those who are not rich, it might be years to recover. Perhaps they will never recover. You wanted just enough, but enough is no longer good enough. Now you are forever in the red.

We are told that every second of our time matters, every cent of our dollar has meaning. It only has meaning because it has gained meaning by those who care about money. And we are more numb to every cent because of this. Because there is no more context.

Money does not matter. Everything else matters, and we are discontented now because we see money being valued over everything else. Money should be just one of many conduits through which we stabilize, reinforce, and improve our environment and ourselves, and until we see those who would be our leaders of the financial and political world embrace these same ideals, we will be discontented.

OWS is a backlash to the soul-sucking efforts to wrest every dollar back from the majority of people who want nothing more than to live peaceably in harmony with the systems around them. When money becomes the problem, not the solution, it needs to be dealt with.

Daily Inspiration for Game Developers

One of my favorite things about the universe is that it is beautifully balanced. This set of probably super small equations that run this incredibly complex machine that encompasses thought and stars colliding and clouds and cute puppies. Sometimes I find myself staring at a leaf and thinking how the patterns in it remind me of spatial arrangements of planets and stars. Or how the ingredients in my mocha settle just like a geological formation. I love the slow swirl and filtering as the sugar catches at points and stops, elsewhere, the weight of the heavier ingredients pushing onwards, leaving behind beautiful vertical formations.

They look similar because they are. The rules behind much of the systems are the same. Gravity, mass, tastiness.

I guess what I'm saying this morning is that you should be aware of this when building a game, when running your life, that all of life has a generally simpler set of rules that can be applied and expanded to accompany specific scenarios. The universe is generic. Are you aware of that when building your game?

Bejeweled is a series of jewels, all with exactly the same rules, except that here and there is a "special" jewel. But they all move alike. Most just have one fundamentally different variable which is a property that when the same value of that property is aligned in chains of 3 or more, they will disappear. Color, shape, or you could give them numbers, but that one variable is really all that game is. Move shapes around being aware of this one variable.

Minecraft, I've been sucked back into it. I had an idea to build a town. I'm playing the game solo. I know that when I want to, there's this world that is larger than I could ever explore, and the whole system is run by a few simple rules. When Notch added rain, I thought, crap, now there's more darkness. That's all there was to it. (I haven't dealt with gardens and harvesting and all that yet, so I don't know about rain's effect on that.) But that's the beauty of Minecraft, rain didn't fundamentally change how the game works, it took a variable critical to the game, light, and just inserted a little randomness to outdoor lighting conditions. Simple, but it reverberates.

Far Cry 2, you could say it's an incredibly complex game, but the laws ruling it are understandable. There are pieces to it, and those pieces, once you understand them, generally allow you to move throughout the greater world with an awareness of a system. I hated that every outpost was aggressive as soon as they spotted me, but that knowledge informed everything else. I knew what happened where and a new location was just another roll of the dice against a system which I understood. It was rolling dice, knowing that one of them was loaded.

This idea of balance across systems is important to us as game developers in every manner. Last week a theoretical physicist pal of mine (yes, bragging that I know one) tweeted about an xkcd comic which stated that Emmy Noether deserved a Nobel prize for her work which, he paraphrased:

@hundun2:"Fact: Emmy Noether deserves to be more famous. http://xkcd.com/896/ #xkcd Einstein's letter to NY Times on her death. http://bit.ly/bzzNKO

Her main contribution to physics was Noether's theorem, which says (roughly) that conservation laws come from symmetries in laws of physics. For example, energy is conserved because the laws of physics do not change over time ("invariant under time translation" in physics-speak). Momentum is conserved because laws of physics don't change depending on where you are ("invariant under space translation"). Noether's theorem is a fundamental result in itself. Also led physicists to look at symmetry as a central concept in physics."

Tell me, have you ever once thought about how the laws of physics don't change over time and space? It's mindblowingly obvious, but super critical.

I've been learning the hard way, don't do too many projects at once, use time efficiently. A good gamer knows how to use space and time in your game efficiently. Are systems utilizing that, or do things run differently here and there and everywhere?

My point today is that I love how straightforward the universe is, and the games that I enjoy function in the same manner. (I didn't talk about W. Wright's games since I assume we all know how they derive from the same concept.) Complexity can arise out of a very simple set of rules, so, as a builder, I strive for that, because then I have an incredibly fluid amount of control over the worlds I create. Fifty rules vs. fifteen, are you in control of your game, or being overrun by a flawed concept that the universe is made up of millions of separate situations?

Why I'm Hostile Toward GPS

I don't like using GPS because I have good locational awareness. For others who don't have strong locational awareness, I have no real point of comparison.

GPS, or the idea of it that I am opposed to, is the function in which it gives precise directions on which turns to take where and how to get someone somewhere. I am not opposed to it as a map. I love maps, I think they are there to fill in our brains' gaps in specifics of scale and position. I use maps a lot, before and after and during travel.

The reason I am so opposed to punching in an address and not paying attention anymore is that the mere act of driving requires locational awareness. Where is your car on the road, where is your car in relation to the other cars around you, where is your car in relation to the next stop sign or stoplight? You have to be aware of these things while driving. GPS removes your awareness of everything beyond the immediate, but when it comes right down to it, your use of GPS is for that space close around, for that stop sign, should you turn there? So by using GPS, you are removing the context of each particular location you are in.

When using GPS all I am thinking is stop sign, stop sign, stop light, freeway, left freeway, drive an hour. When not using GPS I'm taking note of field next to stop sign, mini-mall, hills over there. My job driving is to be aware, so why on earth would I want to let the GPS become my awareness of the context of every location?

I don't think GPS is like transitioning from paper to the internet. That is a massive change in how communication works, it changes the amount of work and thought we have to use to get stuff done. But driving, using GPS I become more and more reliant without much benefit, whereas not using GPS I become stronger and stronger and more aware. It takes a lot longer to figure out an area when you're guided by wire rather than having the whole space.

The world is location location location, and I'd much rather be aware of how they are all connected and related than lose sight of that greater space for the blind trust of stop sign, stop sign, turn left.

Tapping the Theme

So you decided to make a game. And you decided that it is going to have a sheep in it. Why? I have no idea. But I hope you have an idea.

The simple request I have is that you think about your theme and your gameplay as integrally tied together. For the sake of creativity, your theme is the best possible fountain of innovation.

I make iPhone games. I spend almost all of my time thinking about apps, finding ones I've heard about, researching, and playing apps, just because I want to know why and what people are trying to accomplish. Sometimes I have an idea for a game, and then I search for similar ideas on the app store. 100k apps, I will find forty apps for any keyword I search.

Recently I was thinking about sheep-herding. Plop your finger down, and the sheep are repelled. Corral them into their pen, add some obstacles, done. Finger-swiping good. I then searched for sheep on the app-store. Oh, there we go, several sheep-herding games, a couple of which were solid. Done, next idea. No point in being derivative.

But what about the other fifty sheep-related games: half of them were physics platformers and sheep-launching games. What the heck? Free the sheep from its dangerous surroundings. Tap the sheep to make it go higher and higher. Not bad games. But why the heck am I freeing sheep from a physicsy tangle of boxes and ropes. Or why am I sending a ram flying through some otherworldly space-portal?

I am being harsh. Worms is an excellent game, and worms have no relation to the theme of scorched earth. Angry Birds: totally ludicrous concept, top of the charts for months now.

But I implore you to please consider why you chose your theme. Or why you chose your gameplay? I know a lot of us are making iPhone games these days with the low overhead and strike-it-rich potential. And you need to stand out when making a game. I want to play your game, but unless it's top 25 or a unique concept/mechanic, I will ignore it.

Theme can help in your design struggles. For the sake of creativity and doing something different, you should consider how your theme can inform your game. If you are making a game about squirrels, ask yourself what makes a squirrel fascinating or funny or a squirrel. If it is the humor of eating nuts and acorns, perhaps you have an eating mechanic, a ridiculous challenge of keeping your squirrel's cheeks full of acorns.

Or you are in outer space, running out of oxygen. Oxygen in space, that is a pretty easy time mechanic. Or an FBI agent who has to balance breaking the rules with making progress in his fight on crime.

When you build a game, even if you just tacked on a theme because you don't want a game of abstract shapes, spend some time working out how the theme can help your game. And if you decide the game is not appropriate for the theme, perhaps you should change your game.

At TIGJam, I really appreciated Scott Anderson's talk on the plethora of indie platformers. It is easy to make a platformer, but who cares? Is that all that excites you? Do you have a goal in your platformer? You want to make a moody depressing game exploring isolation and fear. I would love a game about that where I do not even have an avatar. The game itself is this ethereal space that shifts and perhaps my whole goal is trying to bring the screen into focused, pure white, piece by piece. I have no idea how that might work, but maybe you do.

My point, one final time, is that you have the gamut of interactivity available to you. Why is your game of knocking over boxes any more enthralling than the last? Make me games about specific themes. I would love to be a pirate, a struggling housewife, a squirrel. But not in another platformer. Make your gameplay about pirating, raising a family and dealing with a husband, living as a squirrel. There are so many games we have not yet made because we cannot look beyond our conventions.

TIGJam 3: Day 4 And Retrospective

The fourth and final day of TIGJam, last Sunday, was a great ending to one of the most satisfying weekends of my game development life. For the game jam crew, it was a day of polishing games, showing them off, and having a dinner afterward to discuss all that we had done and become.

I went into Sunday delirious and noticeably tired from a very late-nighter. Over the course of Sunday morning the various jammers appeared and slowly collected themselves from having climbed over the hill. Now it was already lunch for most of us before people were ready for the final few hours of game creation. (As always, there were some people already working hard by mid-morning.) In an effort to be a human being I returned to my friend's house and showered and ate and then returned.

During the final hours of an art project, in the past I have tried to go big. This time, as most people did, I just went for cleaning. Game creation (and so many other things) are about that final ten percent. So I just tried to round out my project. I cleaned up loose ends, I added some nice little art touches, and I worked up til the last minute.

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And then I got to see what everyone had accomplished, and it was impressive. Over the course of an hour we saw probably twenty different games, and even more were being worked on. Here are just a few unique highlights for me. (This is not fair and balanced and also ignores games I've already talked about. [also did not have time to grab information, so please update me with info/links about these games if you're aware])

Negative Spacecraft : This game was black and white. A simple space shooter that added a confusingly cool mechanic in which you and your AI opponent fire negative and positive space at each other (black and white). What this meant was that you could move and shoot in negative space(black) but be hurt by positive space (white), and then transition to the other way around. It was cool and confusing and I can't do it justice describing it.

Night Hike (a Carnegie Mellon University ETC student group): A procedurally generated night hike, this was a beautiful idea and showed the strength of non-violent interaction. Your goal, simply take a hike through starry fields and forests. The creators built a 2d-sidescrolling procedural system so that every hike you take will be through a different environment. A simple piece, but well done.

Desert Bus 2: Space Bus (Ben McGraw): Imagine flying to Alpha Centauri in a bus. Well, imagine no more! Because you can now experience the long, long, incredibly long trip in a game that simulates the realtime experience of flying to Alpha Centauri. A hilarious sequel to a Penn and Teller mini-game called Desert Bus from 1995, which involved driving straight from Tucson to Las Vegas in realtime.

Map Generator (Tyler Neylon): Though not a game, this deserves a mention for cool technology of the weekend. For his love of strategic games, Tyler sought to build a map creation tool that could create a Risk style map in a reasonable amount of time with a plausible geographic look and well-laid out territories. He succeeded. It was very neat technology for a weekend and I would love to see people play some Risk on one of his procedurally generated maps to see if it was balanced well.

In addition to the above, there were several games that felt very polished with their "feel". Kyle Pulver showed off a quick and crunchy 2d platformer with an impressive amount of art (I think he did it all this weekend). Phubans was working on a top-down exploration/upgradeable shooter that felt very satisfying to play. And Erin Robinson created a gravitational exploration game that allowed a player to change orbit smoothly between a series of planets with various gravities.

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And now I'll briefly talk about the game I made (my blog, my soapbox). It is called Sarajevo, and you play a civilian living in the city of Sarajevo during the siege in the mid-90s. All you can do is walk around a small portion of the city in which there are other civilians like you and also buildings you can enter and exit. You can talk to people to hear their mood, but otherwise it is currently a static world. However, every so often, an unseen sniper fires at a random character in the game. It could be you, it could be someone else. They probably won't hit. But they might. All you can do is hope to not get shot. But if you play long enough, you will get shot.

I think the crowd was a little taken aback by my game.

But that was what TIGJam was for. To scratch the itches we all have. To try something new or different or work on something we've had sitting in the back of our brain. You could see people proud of what they had accomplished, amazed at the positive feedback they received, creating their own lighting systems, trying a game and failing and then making a new game, pounding out incredible music, drawing up beautiful art.

TIGJam was recognizing that being an indie game developer is a lifestyle. You have to care about it. You have to want to spend your weekend tackling that stupid bug that has been killing you. You have to redo that art, or create twelve unfinished songs to reach the thirteenth that works.

After we showed off our games we had a wonderful buffet dinner at a nearby restaurant and chatted about what we had seen, what we were going back to, and what we would be doing next time. TIGJam helped foster a community that mostly occurs online, a social gathering for those whose usual interaction is text.

I had felt like an outsider before this weekend, but over the course of four days, I grew a lot and learned a lot and was able to find a whole new set of developer friends who have to create. Creation. That is what the game developer is about. It is always humbling to ponder what we do and of what we are capable. I am just glad to see the love of the craft continue so strongly in this generation of game developers that is taking advantage of all of the tools we now have at our fingertips. It really is the time of the indie developer.

TIGJam 3: Day 3

And it's the morning after Day Three. Day Three was a period of deep introspective questions. I have been spending most of my last several days in the same room with anywhere from five to fifty-five people. I have done LAN parties of such length before, but this has been a strangely trying gauntlet of creativity for me.

There is certainly pressure to create something, but more-so, being surrounded by a group of creative types all accepting of feedback and willing to give their own, one cannot help but be overwhelmed by the hours spent thinking hard about everything game related. Yesterday was hump day, and it was a particularly humbling experience.

I had set my sights on a simple game. A simple world where you walk around and talk to others, and they tell you how they are feeling, based on the events around them and their outlook on life. This I actually got working yesterday, and then I started to think of how they should be acting based on their feelings. And so now I think I am supposed to create AI. I did not think of what I was doing as AI. Yesterday I came to terms with that being my goal. I struggled with what I wanted to actually happen in my game.

I spent yesterday thinking about the boundaries of my project. Now, in the morning of the last day, I have a good sense of how far I want the project to reach, but this is not a day's work. So some of my stress was relieved as I realized I could not complete my goal, so now I am just working on the halfway point. But enough about my little project.

Yesterday was entertaining, it was the day that everyone let themselves out. We were comfortable with each other if we had not been before. And we enjoyed ourselves. The highlights happened as the night progressed.

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In the middle of the evening there were a series of interesting short talks from a variety of angles. There was Derek Yu, with his pal Andy Hull, talking about the stress of working on a project, Spelunky, that has taken over their lives for the last couple of years. This weekend, for them, was a time to step back and enjoy the company of friends and see how the project is actually perceived from eyes other than their own. They also talked about the importance of fostering and maintaining friendships, having themselves met as young teens trying to make games.

Scott Anderson talked about how we are making the same, similar games. How many of us, he asked, were making "traditional platformers"? (There were many raised hands.) We need diversity in games, not in the people making them, but in what we are creating. But we do need new people, too. Indie game development is threatening to become a scene, he argued. We are slowly seeing the castes of the "in-crowd" and the "out-crowd", and our role as a community is to always foster new indie-folk, because we need that freshness.

Brendan Mauro talked about his struggle with the relevance games have beyond our gamer-world. It was a simple talk, but revealed how much people within our industry understand that what we do can and should mean something beyond our secluded desks in our apartments and homes and dorm rooms.

Timothy Fitz talked about being aware of why the big guys are making so much money. The indie developer seems to predominantly make games that could be on Super NES. Perhaps it is the scale of the project. But why, he asks, aren't we employing modern tools of social media and game mechanics? Farmville, he boasted sarcastically, was better than us. And we can do better.

Marc Ten Bosch outlined his efforts in creating a single level in Miegakure. His point, inspired by Jon Blow (which I heard referenced many times yesterday), was to try and make the simplest puzzle he could that meant something. Game mechanics, the need for player revelations, and player comprehension would add the complexity.

And at the end Matthew Wegner even gave us a quick, honest answer to the downfall of Blurst, Flashbang's experiment of every two months releasing a free online game. Simply put, he said, as beautiful as it was to live life the indie life 9-5, one cannot make a living off a product that is free.

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After the talks I played and looked at a couple more games.

I playtested one of Carnegie Mellon's thought-provoking student projects about communicating without speech or text. The team watched as myself and another tried to make our way through a platformer with invisible obstacles that only the other could see. We were entirely reliant on that other player, as they attempted to use their silent character to communicate with hand signals. A well-executed mechanic of waving one or both hands, players could make their character point to important or invisible obstacles. It was clever and an interesting experiment that has been pretty successful and I look forward to the finishing touches.

And then I witnessed the progress on a game about eating cheeseburgers to get fat and roll over people. A unique game, indeed. (Though it was a platformer, like so many other games here.)

Then as the night progressed and focus waned in and out, people mingled, relaxed, focused, and at 1am a Madhouse tournament ensued. I did not accomplish anything from 1-3am as I watched most everyone in the room take each other on in five minute 1-on-1 chaotic deathmatches. Balance was fairly askew, but laughter was present for all two hours as the creator and various other folk commentated on the proceedings.

And then at 3am I attempted to focus. I somewhat succeeded, but the day had taken its toll, and I just allowed myself to do some painting for the next hour rather than scripting. Around 4am the last of the jammers remaining started grabbing couches and the lone futon. I drifted off around 4:30am listening to hazy philosophical discussions of life and our existence. A few others were still playing and making games, but I was done for the night.

Now the final day and it is again already past noon. But that is okay, I am going to enjoy these hours working, but not stressing.

TIGJam 3: Day 2

I've arrived this Saturday morning an hour later than yesterday, and there are less people this morning. Staying up late and chatting and gaming has its repercussions, apparently. Eleven AM and all of five people active at the jam. But it was also a much more active evening last night.

Day two was a much more cohesive experience. More people and more life to the party. The jammers are revealing how much they like to play games. One wall with a projector had a consistent string of Street Fighter matches while near my seat another couple fellows were pretty heavily involved in another older iteration of Street Fighter with their personal game pads (I personally can't tell the different SF games apart).

I played several games yesterday that revealed how much indie developers want to make something engaging. A cute and yet oh-so-gory 2d deathmatch piece called Madhouse by Phubans entertained me and a pal for a good twenty minutes while we discussed character balance. Not his main project this weekend, he's nonetheless made it center-stage as he gets everyone and anyone to playtest it for him.

The fellows next to me from Koduco Games were working on completely separate iPad projects. One was updating their awesome PongVaders, a very clever mix of Space Invaders and Pong built for two players on the iPad. Cole is working on a single-player mode so you can play without a partner. Meanwhile, his partner Jon is working on a meditative piece where you lay out the sand of a mandala.

Meanwhile, the guy across from me, Mike, builds an interesting game of descending slowly on a rope between spikes, fighting off angry bats. It's a clever little procedural game inspired, he says, entirely by level two of Battletoads.

Behind me, Rich Vreeland showed me a poetic pixel game built in Flixel using interactive audio to its utmost (that's his specialty). As I played the game and interacted with elements of the game world, my actions generated a beautiful soundscape of bells and tones, a melody that I won't be able to reproduce next time, but that is the point, isn't it? We sat discussing for a while all the different ideas we have come up with, and that maybe we will one day both create our own magnum opuses, sadly there is only so much time and so many things we are capable of.

But encouragement has become the meaning of this weekend, in my mind, as I see all of the interesting ideas people have. We become aware of the games and the people behind them and their motivations for creation. I have only touched upon a couple of the different games I got to mess around with. As many others are refining previous work, testing out new art and music and code ideas. And of course who can forget the game where you launch mustaches onto hairless men as they pass by.

My own project comes along. I added simple speech into my game and the world has started to interact with the characters. My own goal is to create a mood, a world that you can experience. I am not sure how far I will get, but my progress in coding has been rewarding nonetheless, as the world starts to come alive and interact with the player. Yesterday was slow but steady progress as I allowed myself to explore all that others are doing.

Now it is time to hunker down.

TIGJam 3: Day 1

So I'm here at the beginning of day two of TIGJam3 after a full night's sleep. A quiet, friendly atmosphere, morning light streaming through the giant sky-light into this decently sized warehouse/garage. I have some unhealthy breakfast snacks beside me, purchased from a nearby 7-11 because I was too lazy to find any place better.

I arrived yesterday afternoon to TIGJam, having no idea what to expect. I am an indie developer, and local to Silicon Valley, so I had to sign up, but I still know almost no one in the industry, and I am terrible at frequenting forums. I spend most of my time in coffeeshops and my apartment, trying to feel artsy and indie, constantly checking gmail. Indie life is strange and solitary after coming out of a very social education. (I think social interaction is the most important element of our education, but that's a talk for some other time.)

So I came here knowing no one. You know of people; you have played some of their games, but suddenly you do not feel knowledgeable enough about any of their work to approach. And now I enter a room of indie game developers, part-time, full-time, some already with legacies! And as what always happens at such nervous introductions, you arrive, thinking the room will change now that you have arrived.

But no one cares. This is not the Global Game Jam with teams and set goals. This is TIGJam, and it feels more than anything like a LAN party, with the focus not to play games, but make them. Most people are focused, but there is chatter back and forth, there are some folks with great laughs. There are even some women! (The indie world seems somewhat male-centric right now, so it was good to see not a 100/0 split.) I talked and chatted with some people and I intend to do even more of that, because this is my opportunity to be social with like-minded people! But I am also here to make a game.

The first day of working on my game was spent learning what I should not be doing. It was a valuable workday, because as a friend once said, the quickest way to success is to make your failures quickly. I have plenty of failure ahead (there are three more days of TIGJam to fail), but at the end of a day of failure, I feel pretty comfortable. I am an artist by profession, but I decided to take on actually making a game in Unity, because it seems the less reliant we are on others, the better. I now understand the basics of what I am doing, I understand my goal, and hopefully I can achieve it. There's nothing interesting to say about the actual scripting (I have some scripting experience), but it is getting done.

I feel good this morning. It is eleven now and more people are starting to appear and get to work. I had been expecting an amazing, immediately mind-blowing experience. But this TIGJam appears more appropriate to our scene. Hunkered down over our computers, looking over occasionally to help those around us, but just trying to create something interesting.

Micro Reviews: Backbreakers and Bonecrunchers

For the last two days I've been playing Bonecruncher Soccer and Backbreaker: Tackle Alley, two iPhone apps that are solely about the quick footwork of soccer and football. I like both of these games a lot, with one major, backbreaking caveat: most of the challenge you will face is from the camera.

Each game is built on the simple premise of making it down the field safely with an increasing number of obstacles, the main ones being opposing players trying to tackle you and get the ball away. The games are very similar. Simple controls make your player either dodge or spin to the right or left while tilting steers you. Bonus points abound for being the best at evading opponents and finishing with a flourish (showboating slowly down the field in Backbreaker, and shooting well in Bonecruncher).

There is a lot of fun in the act of dodging out of the way as your opponent slides in to steal the ball, or spinning away as a big linebacker attempts to barrel into you. Both games succeed at how they emphasize this key mechanic of dodging, building it into an entire game. You run right for a guy who's running right at you. At the last second, bam! He got you. You were too slow. Rinse, repeat. But it works because dodging successfully is super satisfying.

Sadly, I have found that the games are crippling me from getting any better. The in-your-face sensation of each game is tied to a camera that sits just behind your player (slightly offset as in all 3rd-person games these days). Unfortunately, the camera is low enough that you cannot see anyone directly beyond your avatar. So I found myself maneuvering the player at times just to change the camera angle. Further, it's a narrow field of view, so you have absolutely ZERO awareness of any players coming up on your sides. The camera in each game has prevented me from enjoying the game at a more experienced level. It is really frustrating because I like both games a lot.

Control-wise, BCSoccer uses swipe controls while BBFootball uses virtual buttons. I prefer the swipe controls as I have trouble with the virtual buttons and a lack of feedback which sometimes means I don't dodge when I intend to. Football has a better presentation and a really wonderful ability to skip straight to the level, passing all of the little cutscenes and replays. Soccer almost has that, but feels just a bit slower with camera-work.

My opinion: they are both well worth a dollar. I got my time out of them, and if either of them deal with the camera by making your avatar partly transparent or do some other trick to make the camera friendlier, I might actually try to beat one or both of them. Great fun iPhone apps, just some troubling issues holding them back.

Randy played Bonecruncher after reading a review and then decided to pick up its inspiration, Backbreaker, shortly thereafter.

iTunes links:
Bonecruncher Soccer
Backbreaker: Tackle Alley

Is your game comfortable?

I had a brief but thoughtful conversation with a woman who worked at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design. She told me how her museum was striving to get functional pieces of craft and design to be recognized in a similar vein as fine art. They were struggling against institutions such as MOMA that do not willingly recognize furniture other than from certain periods such as the Bauhaus. Indeed, it seems that few people recognize the beauty of a chair beyond the comfort of IKEA and Herman Miller.

I sympathized whole-heartedly with her struggle because, years before, I had been exposed to the work of Wendell Castle at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who was clearly an artist. Sitting in his creations I have never been more comfortable and, further, I was in love with the simplistic organic curves that composed his furniture. But I am also an artist, so I look to any man-made creation as potential art. Do others recognize the art of furniture-making? Apparently not, according to this woman.

So what about furniture makes it unworthy of the MOMA? Well, perhaps it is about utility? If something is useful, can it still be art? And that is where I arrive at my thoughts for the day. Our struggle for recognition in the world of art beyond our own is that our art is a craft as well. And craft is user-reliant. Furniture is user-reliant. You ultimately do not care about how a chair looks. You care how it feels. I do not care how a game looks or sounds. Those component parts may be beautiful, but in their own right they do not make the game. The game is feel. It is how I feel when playing. We are crafting an experience for the user that is greater than the individual artistic elements. We are making furniture. It has to be comfortable, too.

Whenever I get deep into a discussion about games I inevitably find myself espousing the importance of interaction. Indeed, many of the games I come up with are not even games. They are just forms of interaction between a user and a world. Are you thinking about the interaction between your game and the player? If that interaction is incomplete, can you still succeed? Are you thinking about the most sensible form of interaction? Have you made a bed without realizing it is better suited as a table? Have you made an iPhone game not realizing your audience was elsewhere?

Why do you build games? Are you trying to fill a void? Are you trying to teach a lesson? Are you trying to build a skill? Because you are making the game for someone. Maybe just you, but most likely not. Your game is user-reliant. You are making art for someone. As a utility for them. Do they know what that utility is? Are they comfortable? Do you want them to be comfortable? We do not have to make comfortable craft. The purposes of a chair are limited. The purposes of kitchenware are limited. We have much more freedom and I hope you think about that fact when crafting a user's experience.

Fine art is a whimsical world where anything goes and the public can only gaze in wonder from time to time but they are not really participants. They are witnesses. We make craft. And I am proud to build and construct crafts because I believe in engaging both myself and the world. What does the world need? How can I craft that?

Spider: Bryce Manor HD for iPad

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