The Digital Polymath

Looking for Collaborators

2010-04-16T14:03:00Z

Since I am starting up on my own this time around, I found out my biggest problem at the moment is getting enough things done; networking with other developers / publishers, doing game design, programming, finding some one to do the art, etc.

This means that I am now officially looking for people to collaborate with. By collaborate I mean, people with production skills, and who thinks it could be fun to do something together. Especially programmers and artists are welcome.

About me: I am an experienced old-school game programmer and wanna-be game designer, who is now starting up his second startup. Through co-founding and organizing the Nordic and Global Game Jams, I also have a lot of experience with prototyping and experimental game development. I really like experimental stuff, and at this stage I am more focused on doing something which is innovative, interesting and plays well, than something that sells well. Of course, making money will also be nice :-)

Platform, design, etc., are details we'll figure out together.

If interested, please leave a note here, or email me.

Experimental Gameplay Project, March 2010

2010-03-30T18:06:43Z

My entry for the March 2010 edition of the Experimental Gameplay Project is finally done.

It is the first time I ever participate, and I am excited to finally get something out there. Check it out, and please come back here to leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Explanation of the game (also on the game page):

This game is my entry for the March 2010 edition of the Experimental Game Play Project. Music was done by Totally Corny Productions and used here under the Creative Commons license.

My first inclination was to make an action game, a little in the style of Earth is a 3D Planet, where in my version you would have 10 seconds to clear the level or the number of enemies would be doubled. However, thinking that I wanted to try something more experimental, I decided to make a text adventure and and see if it would be possible to transfer that adrenalin filled feeling of time-pressure to the text adventure genre. This is also why the game takes place in the cold; the basic idea is that the player needs to keep moving in order to keep warm. If the player stands still for a certain number of seconds, he dies.

In the beginning the time limit was 10 seconds. However, I quickly raised this to 15 seconds as you don't need to type much wrong in order for the time to run out. Having a small trial with an external tester, this time has now been raised to 20 seconds

So did I succeed? Not sure, as I don't think the continuous pressure gives the player enough time to get emotionally vested. Perhaps a more traditional text adventure, with the occassional time limited choice would work better.

The Project-Based Virtual Company

2010-03-01T14:35:37Z

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

My first job extended job as a contractor is now over, I have put a little bit of money aside and I can start bootstrapping my second game company, Kotori Studios. My intention was to work on the company on the side, at the same time as doing the contract work. Though for me, with IGDA related-work, Nordic & Global Game Jams, as well as having a more than fulltime contract job, there simply was very little time for any side work.

The Not-So Lone Wolf @ the Project-Based Virtual Company

The immediate future will bring me out on the road. First I will be going to the US with the Nordic Game Jam organizer group for GDC in San Francisco, where I am a speaker. During April, May and June I will be living in or close to St. Catharines in Ontario. My girlfriend is being stationed there for a short while, so I will simply be working on my own stuff for Kotori while there.

The reason I am telling you this, is that this life on the road ties in very good with how I would like to work in the future. The reasons for choosing the project-based virtual company are numerous:

Personal flexibility
Bigger potential set of collaborators
More involvement
Flexible Downtime Costs
Costs of Living

Personal flexibility

I am often travelling; visiting my gf who doesn't live in Denmark, visit conferences, give talks, etc

Bigger potential set of collaborators

Finding the right business partners can be difficult as you need to find people with precisely the set of skills you need, who have the right experience, who are passionate about what you are passionate about the project and who are ready to take some of the same risks as you are. There is a much bigger chance of finding the right people, if I expand my horizon a bit instead of just looking in my own neighbourhood.

Greater personal involvement than what can be expected from regular employees

I like the idea of people who are passionate about a specific project, coming together to work and collaborate on that project. After the project is done, some of the people may find other projects they are passionate about, some may go their own way and yet some may choose to collaborate on a new project. The age of the freelancer and of project based cooperation are coming to the games industry! By building up your projects like this, you make sure that people are much more passionate and vested in what they are doing, and probably that they have they right skills from the beginning as well.

Flexible Downtime Costs

Having mostly project-related business partners and nearly no employees, means that costs are kept flexible ad the downtime between projects doesn't hurt as much as it does for the regular location based company.

Costs of Living

Lastly, I come from Denmark where the standard of living is high, meaning also we have high taxes in order to pay for the welfare. This is all good, but the flipside of the coin is that salaries and cost of living is also quite high, making it difficult to compete with developers in lower-wage countries. This means that the project-based virtual company model offers some interesting options. Just as I am writing this article, a related piece on Gamasutra describing the hardships of Nordic developers appeared (which are partly due to high costs)

There are a lot of virtual companies success stories these days. One such example of a near-virtual company is Slightly Mad Studios which developed the latest iteration of Need for Speed; showing that the virtual company model can also work for AAA sized projects. Another example of a virtual game company is Boomzap Entertainment.

Interesting Reading

Here is a couple of links describing either the advantages of the virtual office or how to best setup and work in one

A Hard Days Work

2009-09-13T20:24:31Z

So, its been a while since my last post, but that is mostly because I am working hard (on this and other things!). I am at a stage in the code, where there is just a lot of grunt work that has to be done.

I have discovered that Prometheus is a much larger work that I initially wanted it to be. I am really working hard at figuring out an elegant architecture for the interpreter. The normal approach for engines, is that you start the engine, which then loads and interprets the game scripts as needed. For Prometheus I would really like it the other way around, so that it is the lisp code that kicks everything off. This way, you could easily design any kind of application around the code, and only the components that you actually need will be loaded.

My biggest problem in this regard right now, is figuring out how to do a nice and elegant interop layer that works with a baseset of dlls. I have worked with a few scripting languages and even co-maintained once, have worked with swig, etc, so I have a pretty good idea how to do this. The problem is that none of the solutions I have seen so far, are really as elegant as I would like. If you have any good ideas, pointers, experiences you want to share, etc., feel free to contact me.

For Project Phoenix I am rediscovering a lot of algorithms that I had long forgotten such as bresenham, painters algorithm, cbuffers, view frustum clipping, etc. I will probably put this project on the backburner a bit, as I don't want to have too many things going on at the same time.

The Rebirth of Software Rendering? Project Phoenix

2009-08-25T18:05:30Z

I was a bit late to the software rendering game, and wrote my first 3D engine in 1995. It was in 680x0 assembly on my Amiga 1200, when I was just starting out on the demo scene. All datastructures and models were hardcoded, while the textures were linked directly into the .exe as raw binary files.

Now with the convergence of CPUs and GPUs, and multiprocessor computers becoming more and more common, people are again beginning to speak of software rendering. I have long been of the opinion that the the current rendering model is flawed, and have begun a small software realtime rendering prototype (this talk by Tim Sweeney was actually what inspired me to finally get started). I'll let you know as soon as I have something.

The purpose of this exercise is many fold:

To see if I can achieve a different look than most games
To make an engine that requires less maintenance and less focus on working across a whole army of different graphics cards and different versions of OpenGL/DirectX
To experiment with other rendering models than scanline rendering
To improve the current model of using triangles for everything, and modelling detail with textures
Still achieving an acceptable framerate

I would really love to hear from anyone, who have any recent experiences with software rendering. Lets mingle, share experiences and all that.

Develop Conference, Day 3 - Global Game Jam Pushing Ahead

2009-08-08T09:53:22Z

On the third and last day of the Develop Conference, Susan Gold and I had our talk on the Global Game Jam entitled Games Designs and Lessons Learned at the Global Game Jam.

The talk went semi ok... We had a few small semi-annoying incidents; like when I showed one of the games, I could not quit or tab out of it, or as I have quite a powerful voice I don't usually use a microphone, so even though it was moved away it was still turned on, so I kept moving in and out of it's range.

However, the presentation itself went fine I think. For those who are interested, here are the slides:

Global Game Jam @ Develop 09

View more presentations from gormlai.

On this day, I didn't really go to any other sessions, I mostly hung out, went to the beach, talked to Susan, etc. I also had to leave Brighton early to catch a plane, which I actually ended up missing because some dude decided to throw himself in front of a train..

Some more pictures from the conference (the Testronic mascot, Susan Gold and myself):

The Testronics mascot with a really funny character inside

Susan Gold of the IGDA Education SIG

The Guy pretentious enough to assume that you will be reading this

Develop Conference, Day 2 - 3xA Development

2009-07-27T22:12:15Z

Continuing the description of the DEVELOP conference, I went to the following sessions:

Online Functionality for Your Nex Game? Why Not Go 100% Online!

This talk was given David Jones, CEO of Realtime Worlds. His talk was focused on giving a description of what he has done before, and how this has lead up to the creative vision of Realtime Worlds and what they are working on today (APB).

Except for talking with different HR people looking for programmers at a couple of conferences, I don't really konw much about Realtime Worlds. For those of you who are like me, here is a trailer for APB:

Video Games | APB | E3 09: Debut Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Dave Jones has previously worked on several big titles, including GTA. Even though this inspiration and background can be clearly seen in Realtime World's previous game, Crackdown, as well as APB, Dave Jones was a real inspiration in that he seemed to have a genuine wish to move the industry forward.

Dave had 5 design principles that he talked about. Some of them were very contextual to the kind of games that he worked on so far, while others were more general in nature. All of them, however, was difficult to disagree with:

Attention to detail
Simple building blocks, compound effects
Great training, keep it contemporary
Humour
Innovate, Forge a genre

I am really looking forward to seeing APB, as I was exceptionally impressed with the production value and the ambitions of this game. The character customization part was especially impressive:

Playstation@Home - First Term Report

I don't know why a keep going to Sony sessions, as they continue to disappoint me. The ever so friendly Sony guys are never really able to divulge any information of real use. Don't misunderstand me, I really think that Sony has a cool brand, I appreciate their continuing support of innovative and cross-genre titles and as a programmer and old-time demo coder I have a special appreciation of the PS3 architecture. Though I must say that as long as I can remember, they have been botching up their PR with developers, and especially in this time of user-generated content (both in the sense of gamers creating content, and of small developers creating content for aggregators) I am fearing that Sony's persistent insistence on control may cause them to get so far behind that it will take generations to get ahead again.

In the face of all this adversity I do think Peter Edward, the Home Platform Director did an admirable job. Basically Home seems to be just a promotional platform for the big players, cleverly disguised as a social network. With more ambition Home could become the Facebook of the consoles and gain the popularity and cross-demographic profile of the modern social networks on the internet (which is also seem to profile Sony seem to want for the PS3). However, I don't think it can be done unless Sony agrees to give up an unprecedented amount of control as well as give out free access to their software development suites.

However, Peter did give out some interesting numbers about Home:

7 million users
3 million of them in Europe
only(hi!) 80% of the users are 18 - 35 years old.

When a creative director attacks! or What I learned this year with EA!

This session was just one big onslaught of words and Paul Barnett's personality. A resumé would probably more go like the followng:

Dollars, vegetables, ceci n'est pas une pipe (ed - reminds me of one of my textbooks on archaeology), games as art are twaddle - they must make a profit but can be artful, creative director as a muppet hell bent on design, creative director as number cruncher, creative director as bond-super-villain, EA course for designers, 3 things things that inspire you, to get inspired you think of the Eiffel Tower?, inspiration from office with walls painted green, green is the color of creativity and madness, old ideas can be great if exposed to people who don't know them, golden ages, games on socks, The Empire Strikes Back, you are defined by culture, creativity works better under constratins, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, police with big sticks, tapes, floppy disks, bank of England, no-one cares about history, Richard Wiseman, draw Q on head, be suspicious of people who has theories with several levels, be suspicious of people who do not name their theories after themselves, all managers are Captain Picard and Kirk who either see the tree or the forest, Confessions of a Madman, game design is compilicated because people make it complicated, EA has come to its senses,

You wouldn't know from the jumble of words above, but this was probably one of the best sessions I attended.

Bridging the Gap Experiences Learned with Agile Project Management Across Multisite, Multicultural and Multilingual Projects.

This talk was one of those I had been really looking forward to. It was given by Lisa Charman, Associate Producer at Ubisoft and Patric Palm CEO and Co-founder of of Hansoft. While I had been looking forward to this talk, I was also a little bit apprehensive as I was afraid it was going to be one big and very direct advertisement for Hansoft's Project Management software.

However, instead Patric and Lisa made a really good and informative presentation (though also at times a little bit comical, as it had tendencies to seemed like a well rehearsed act with bad actors).

A lot of the talk was focused on Scrum and other related agile methodologies. For me the most interesting part, was Lisa's experiences with cross-site collaboration. This is both interesting in relation to the Global Game Jam, which I am a co-founder of, as well as in a more professional context. I really see this as the way I would like to work in the future.

An interesting detail was that Ubisoft only uses scrum up to the alpha stage, where all features are done.

Last but no least, they gave us a lot interesting scrum and agile related references:

Mary Poppendieck - Implementing Lean Software Development
Bas Vodde - The Nokia Test (later improved by Jeff Sutherland)
Bruce Tuckman - Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing
Will Schutz

The Life Cycle of The Bonsai Barbar for WiiWare

This session ended up being incredibly interesting talk about Bonsai Barber, a game which truly seems like a small gem. The talk was given by Martin Hollis, founder of Zoonami.

Bonsai Barbar had some really curious designs details that I have never heard about before; for one the game is designed to be played only for approx 30 minutes each day. This is a very interesting design constraint, as you really need to focus hard on a game design and reward system that keeps the player coming back every day. This idea also feeds into Martin's description of Bonsai Barber as a game that doesn't show all its cards at once.

Martin had some really interesting, and curious formulated design proverbs. Here are the ones I succeeded in jotting down (completely out of context of course!):

Before setting out to make an original game, you ned to have three hearts
Your foundation is the central meaning in your game
Documents are not the life force of your game

Martin also made a big deal on talking about tactility and approachability. For the latter, Martin posed the interesting question How easy is it for the viewers in the livingroom to become interested?

Among the many many interesting points that Martin made it, I think the last one I will relay here is when they made the game, they actually ended up taking score out of the game (in an effort to make the game more accessible and casual I guess). However, in the end, the game did not feel whole without it, and they put it back in.

Develop Conference, Day 1 - Emerging Platforms

2009-07-15T13:33:41Z

The first day of the DEVELOP conference was called Evolve, and focused on developing games for emerging platforms like mobile, iPhone, Facebook, XBLA, etc.

Here a summary of the sessions I went to.

Keynote - Embracing the Future

The keynote was given by David Perry, creative director at Acclaim. David Perry started his talk with introducing how both physical media and computer processors have moved from very small units to being more and more unconstrained with time, to where we are now with virtual media and cloud computing.

He used this as an introduction to GaiKai, which is a system that runs hosted games server side. A video of the game is streamed back to a small client application, which also takes care of relaying all user interaction back to the server so that the system can react to input.

DP stated that the system run relatively smoothly with a bandwidth of approx 1,2 mbps (depending on the screen size needed).

What I also found interesting, and DP only briefly mentioned this, would be the ability to distribute content and GaiKai clients in a YouTube like manner and embed them on web pages. I do hope that is what he meant.

Also, the fact that as a long as you have a strong enough internet connection, you can really run any application, such as Photohop or the latest Crysis demo on even the tiniest netbook. I am really keen to see what this will do to:

Hardware manufacturers. If such a server-based solution becomes mainstream, will the evergoing armsrace for ever bigger client pcs end?
Will the consoles arms race end, and focus can now solely be on innovation in interaction and gameplay?
Will the concept of IP be even more eroded?

What strikes me about David Perry is that he seems like a geniunely nice guy. I am one of those people, that truly believes good karma comes back to you.

Browser Based Games: The Past, The Present and The Future

This session was held by Jonathan Lindsay and Gustaf Stechmann of Splitscreen Studios. Gustaf, who I know from some of my trips to Gotland, started the talk with a historical overview of browser-based games. He split the games into 3 generations:

The first generation consists of games like OGame from GameForge, which are essentially a bunch of php scripts. Each day you decide what to do, and then a server side script is run at midnight which calculates the result for all the players for the day. Even though OGame might seem a bit dated, the number of players is counted in millions.

The second generation are typified by realtime flash games.

The third generation of games, and of course the type that Splitscreen makes, are full 3d realtime games. The game they talked about was Pirate Galaxy, which is a space scifi MMO where you fly around in a spaceship. Even though the basic pitch sounds a bit like Eve Online, their approach is very different and much more casual. This can also be seen from some of their design key points (most of them are well known design principles for casual games, but they are worth repeating):

Accessibility
The game was full 3D but all control happens in 2D, as just controlling a basic camera can be very advanced to some users
Not skill based
Players must be able to join and leave the game at anytime
There must be a balanced time vs. money trade off. Ie. you must not be able to buy anything in the item shop, that you cannot just invest playing time for getting instead.
Controls should be indirect
The item shop should always be available
Realtime gameplay in 3D
One-button / one-hand to play
Streaming technology should be implemented. This is needed as it should take a maximum of 15 seconds from the moment you decide to play to you actually are playing. You should not wait for several GBs to download.

In summary the keypoints of the session was:

3D
Moving towards higher production value and higher quality
Convergence of online space; downloadable games, browser based games, XBLA, PSN, Facebook, etc
Subscription is almost dead; the entry barrier may simply be too high because of the behemoth that is there
Much for room innovation in business models; e.g. the 'price' of activating a cool item you are carrying around in Dungeon Runners

The European Free to Play Market

This session was held by Thomas Bideaux from ICO Partners. His presentation was an incredible numbers and abbreviations game. I will just let Thomas' excellent presentation speak for itself:

Free to Play games in Europe - 2009

View more presentations from Thomas Bidaux.

How Today's Social Networks Will Change How You Make, Play and Sell Games Tomorrow

This presentation was given by Kristian Segerstråle, co-founder of Playfish, a social games company. First he wow'ed us with some numbers from the world of social networks and games. These games seem to attract so many players that it is completely unbelievable. Their games have had over 500 million plays(!!), have over 30 million active users and over 100 million installs! All of their games has over 1 million fans on Facebook.

Kristian made a number of predictions that made up the meat of his talk

Prediction 1 - The Role of Franchises will Change Forever

Big name franchises do not appear to succeed on social networks
No Franchises in Facebook top 25

Prediction 2 - We will all become services

Physical Products >> Digital Services
All revenue comes post initial download / acquisition
50% - 80% of dev costs post launch (ed - the perpetual beta?)

Prediction 3 - Marketing by Numbers:

The majority of the current marketeer skills will be obselete in the world of tomorrow
Game marketing => web marketing
All about numbers; read up on statistics
All about the consumbers

Prediction 4 - Game Design changes forever

No longer player vs screens, but player vs player
Design drives audience and monetization
Designs can be tested and numbers driven
Designing for a service will be multiplatform

Prediction 5 - Games Will Be Made Better By Listening to Players

More feedback than you can handle!
Balance qualititive feedback with quantitive feedback

Kristian also saw a number of challenges for those wishing to enter the social games market

Creating a hit is very hard
Social networks and APIs evolve all the time
Monetizations still being developed
Network traffic costs can be very high!
Cost of customer support can be very high!

Panel: Opportunities and Hurdles for Mobile Gaming

I thought the subject for this panel was very interesting, however I ended up walking out of the session as the panelists seemed to just be talking amongst themselves.

Launch Your Game Across Multiple Mobile and Social Platforms Without Killing Your Team

This talk was given by Chris White, Studio Head of Glu Mobile. In a very honest session, Chris gave us 2 case studies; one a port from iPhone to Android and the other a port from iPhone to Facebook.

Case Study 1:

The game was Stranded 2: Mysteries of Time, and had been developed with a team of 2 coders, 2 designers, 2.5 artists + QA.

The game had first been developed for J2ME, then ported to iPhone, then to Android. Chris said it took about 2 week porting a prototype of the J2ME version to Android. As he told us the story here, the major lesson learned here, was actually not in porting from J2ME to Android, but in porting from J2ME to iPhone. The lesson was to try to develop the Java and C code at the same time, as this can save time as well making for less of a mechanical task for the porting coder. Other lessons (some wellknown by seasoned developers):

Reuse Artwork.
Make the highest resolution art first
Develop common tools (GLU has both a shared scripting engine, an animation tool, level editor, etc)
Keep controls as simple as possible
All touch screen are not created equal (both in sensitivity and single vs. multi touch)
Reuse level designs and scripts where-ever possible

Case Study 2:

For me this case study was far more interesting, as the platforms were so different. Some pointers about Facebook:

Playing with friends is the point
Suits turnbased and asynchronous game play
Challenges
Comparisons
More friends translates into more success
Provide a reason to return every day
Specific game mechanics are good for this; think daily bonuses, retention mechanics, bragging, etc
The whole idea is sharing the game; do not try to prevent this

As you probably gather, a port is between two such different platforms are by no means trivial if it has to be done right.

Practical Applications of Online Convergence

This talk was given by Paul Croft, Co-founder of Mediatonic. Paul jumped right into the deep end with rundown of the different opportunities offered by todays online market:

Commissioned Games
Indie Games
Cultivating new IP
Social Games
Web

Commissioned Games are not designed to return a commission and usually comes in one of two forms; advergames (for example, Mirrors Edge) or original content designed to bring people to a website (hi Bo).

The three usually scales of commissioned games productions are:

1 developer and 1 artist/designer working for 1 to 3 months
5 people working for 3 months
10 people working for 5 to 7 months

An example of the last is Meowcenaries commissioned by Adult Swim. Meowcenaries took approximately 6 months to make, by 5 to 6 people. During the peak periode, 12 people were working on the game. So far meowcenaries has had over 2 million plays!

Indie games are games that are meant to generate a return of their own. Monetization options:

Ads, usually payoff is approximately $0.007 pr click-through.
Licensing (typical flash game business model)
Microtransactions
Monetizing IP (ie porting Bejeweled to flash, and relicensing that)
Monetizing with own developed portals (very significant investment, and the big guys are moving in)

Three different development models for indie games are:

1 talented developer for 1 month
1 developer and 1 artitst for 3 months
4 people for three months

Cultivating new IP makes great new breeding grounds and offers opportunity for huge exposure. It has relatively low dev costs, offers immediate feedback and the option of incredibly detailed tracking. An example of this is Amateur Surgeon on Adult Swim, which has had over 20 million plays so far and is now getting released on the iPhone as well.

For the social games Paul mentioned an expected average revenue pr. user (ARPU) of $0.20.

One of the games he presented was Fast and Furious. Examples of different development models for social games include:

1 experienced developer for 2 months
1 web, 1 flash, 4 extra for 3 months
12 people for 5 months

For examples of games, Paul mentioned GTA: Social Club, iBowl (iPhone), Topple 2 (iPhone), and Labyrinth that has an online flash editor for making levels.

Keynote - The Long Tail and Games: How Digital Distribution Changes Everything. Maybe.

After a day getting filled with information about all those opportunities out there, David Edery from Fuzbi promptly brought everything back down to earth again with this talk.

Among many facts, David Edery had the interesting points, that indies were actually loosing market share on the new completely unrestricted digital markets. The reason is that the long tail also works for the big hits; for example many of the old Worms games still sell. He did show some numbers to back this up.

David dropped some more interesting pointers to read up on, including Should You Invest in The Long Tail by Anita Elberse from the Harvard Business School.

Secondly he talked about how quality is completely random. He told the story of some university professors who had taken a selection of music and given it to 4 different online communities to rate. The music was rated wildly different on all the communities. What was interesting, is that it is the first few ratings that decides the fate of a song.

For the whole lowdown, I just found out that he put up his slides on slideshare. Kudos to you David.

Develop Evolve Keynote

View more presentations from gueste76e9a.

Conclusion

Despite David Edery's ending keynote, which kind of brought everyone down to earth again, the big conclusion for me seemed to be the enormous possibilities offered by many of the new platforms. The fact that the top 15 games (out of 16K+ games) on Kongregate has had over 80 million plays, and that a relatively simple flash game like Warlords: Call to Arms has over 10 million plays is simply amazing. Over 120 million users log on to Facebok each day! Playfish has had over 100 million installs in less than 18 months! These are numbers that simply dwarf mostly anything that has been on the console side so far.

I also think systems like GaiKai and OnLive has much potential to once again even the playing field for indie guys like myself. The problem for many indies, is that they are caught in a space somewhere between the online flash games and bigger pc games. It is hard to see, where there is room (and good profitability) for the creative 5 to 7 man team, with some advanced graphics and programming ability on board. With the ability of GaiKai and OnLive to bring anything online maybe the playing field can be changed.

Finally I am hoping that we can use a system like GaiKai for the Global Game Jam. The games are so different and it is quite bothersome to download and install them, in order to try them. Even though I know that the participants do their best to make it easy to try their games, sometimes an xna runtime installation is missing, you have a Vista incompatibility, etc. This year we had over 300 games, and we are expecting much more next year, so a solution like GaiKai could really give us a unified easy access interface for trying out the games.

Live coding with lisp

2009-07-11T20:40:35Z

If you haven't guessed it by now, Project Prometheus is about setting up a minimal game engine, with an internal lisp interpreter / compiler running. None of the game engines I have seen, has offered the possibilty to do the live editing and coding that you can experience with most functional languages and a basic REPL.

For an introduction to lisp, I have included this google tech talk by Peter Seibel on how the choice of programming language effects about how you think about your problem. He also introduces lisp and compares it with other languages.

So to get back to the problem. Even though the basic lisp is actually a very small language, I have suddenly realized how huge an undertaking this project is (like all programmers, I constantly overestimate my own abilities!). I have therefore decided to also start working on some small games on the side, while working on the interpreter. This will make sure that I actually get any work done on the end product, it will have the side effect that the source code for the games will then later on make a good test bed for how well the interpreter works.

After this realization, I started (again) to look for some tools that at least did partly what I wanted.

First up is the Steel Bank Common Lisp, which is version of lisp, focused on performance and with a very liberal license. Interesting, that I seem to have missed this in my earlier searches. With many other variants of Common Lisp, they usually either suffer from being too expensive or having a license that prohibits any kind of closed source-code release. Both a no-go's for a technology fixated indie-guy like myself.

Secondly, I did a check to see if a port to lisp had been made of my all time favorite game library SDL. I found two versions, cl-sdl and lispbuilder-sdl. The former seemed rather undocumented and dead'ish, while the latter seem quite alive and well-documented. No choice there.

For editing, I have so far taken the usual choice of Emacs and SLIME. I know this environment works really well, so that was mostly a no-brainer. To make sure I get out of my comfort zone, I have promised myself to take a look at CUSP one day. CUSP is an eclipse plugin for developing lisp applications.

For those who are doubtful about ever going back to Emacs for any kind of work, here is a video that shows how to cool it can be to work with SLIME:

Lastly, since I am also very much the noob with lisp, I often get back to this excellent online introductory text to common lisp written by Paul Graham.

Project Prometheus - Full of Spirit

2009-07-05T20:38:51Z

I have been working on the basic setup of the lisp interpreter for a while now, and I am starting to realize that there are so many things I forgot about writing compilers, that I need to get the good old tiger book out again.

boost::spirit

When I was studying, we used Flex and Bison to setup up lexer and parser. This time around, I decided to use spirit which is part of the boost libraries. Admittedly, in the beginning this choice has given me quite a few headaches. I thought I had C++ pretty well worked out, but the template magic that is used here is just incredible and somewhat mind-boggling in the beginning.

However, as I am stubborn sod, I finally got it to work, and the final solution for my grammar, I have ended up with so far do have a nice conciseness as well as very nice simplicity to it. Not only that, but no external tools like Flex and Bison are reqiured; everything is C++ driven.

Project Prometheus - Definitions & Requirements

2009-07-05T19:41:39Z

Project Prometheus is about writing a lisp interpreter that will sit inside my game engine (engine might be the wrong word to use here, as it is rather tiny). As the interpreter sits inside the engine, the goal is to have a live development environment, where the game/application will be programmed in lisp while the game/application is running.

So far, I have thought about several core components that must be part of the whole system:

The interpreter itself, with all the necessary compiler stages. It must accept valid lisp syntax and transform it into a form that the system can interpret at runtime.
The idea is to have most of the core components running in lisp, but I still need a very tiny interop layer for doing basic interaction with the underlying system.
A live development environment must be setup. Maybe I can see if I can hook emacs directly into the system somehow. In this regard,
I am also thinking that perhaps I should do away with files as well as the concept of a compilation unit entirely. If I work at function level, then the engine can store an internal database with the textual representation of all functions. Functions will then be injected into the engine and database when they are saved, and can be retrieved live as well. This is still very much a brainstorming stage, though having a big directory of files to compile seem very clunky to me, and goes against the idea of live development.

Project Prometheus - Kick off!

2009-06-28T21:12:59Z

So, I am just a small indie guy, who for the time being are coding everything in my sparetime. The question, I have to pose to myself, is how can I become productive and make anything in a reasonable amount of time?

I have worked in several different compaines; from small indie outfits, to casual games to AAA productions. Which means, I know the resources required to do even the smallest polished productions.

As usual, the answer can be defined as broadly as toolchain. The answer here could then be something like invest in a game engine or similar. However, I am not going to do that, and here is why:

At least in the beginning, I am not really interested in making something as big that I need a full fledged game engine.
After working closely with middleware for many years, I have gotten the insight that middleware is often used where it should not; yes it has its place, but most often the decision to use it is made by managers who feel they get less risk by using middleware. My experience is often to the contrary; a quick takeoff often leads into maintaining a big API and code bridge as new versions of that particular API come and go. Often the Middleware does many more things that you really need and you quickly start working around quirks and inflexibilities in the middleware. Why buy a big physics API if all you need are a few line checks and collision detection? It is my belief that in many cases you are much better off just building a small software library that does exactly what you need yourself; this way your coders will also know the code much more intimitately and won't spend hours and days debugging other peoples executables. Of course, this assumes that you keep the coders away from the usual temptation of overdesigning their own code; it must be kept tight, fast and agile.
Most game engines end being big monolithics pieces of c..p, which become contaminated with thousands upon thousands lines of "don't touch it code". Instead, what you really want is an architecture where it is very easy to plug in new components, as well as replace or remove components you don't want. If the realtime GI system is too slow and doesn't give the results you want? Well just take it out and put in a new one. Why doesn't anyone offer the perfect lego - piece it together in the way that makes sense to you engine?
It seems to me, that new indie names are proving over and over again that you cannot separate technology and game play. Games like Braid, Subversion, Prince of Persia, Spore, Ragdoll Kungfu, Love, and many more prove this. You can often easily spot the games, where you can see a team that understands that with the right of creative programming mind on your team, you can look beyond the technology and you know that anything is possible. Of course, like there are a lot of artist and designers who seem to only think in the world that their tool provides, so are there many programmers who are extremely constrained in their world view. Thus my conclusion is that to make something really interesting, you have to allow your programmers to go beyond the usual factory work (and of course have the programmers who have the skills and mindset to be able to do that).

So I am working on a new toolchain, which I am taking much care not to overengineer; I love programming and technical problems but I also want to spend time on actually making games as well. I will tell you more on my next posting on Project Prometheus; untill then I will heartily recommend that you read Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham.

Gotland Game Awards 2009

2009-06-05T09:56:23Z

I have just returned from the Gotland Game Awards, where I was a member of the jury as well as having the privilige of handing out the Nordic Game Jam Award. Even though I was well prepared for what I was going to say, I ended up being quite nervous when I was finally on stage, and I forgot half of what I intended to say.

The winner of the Nordic Game Jam's Jurys' Award, One-Piece, and the Nordic Game Jam's Peoples' Award, Sheeped Away, was competing for the prize. The prize went to Sheeped Away.

The Booth

Excitingly, we also had a Nordic Game Jam booth at the exhibition this year, which we hope will motivate a lot of the students to come and join us in 2010. For manning the booth, I had gotten help from Dajana Dimovska, who is a long time volunteer with the IGDA and a game designer/programmer who worked on some really interesting games. She did a terrific job with her outgoing nature and her genuine interest in the people and the games up there.

The great and very good material for the booth, posters and flyers, were made by Alexandra and David Mariner, who are both currently making a terrific contribution for the rebuilding of the Danish Games industry.

The Games

I was one the jury team that judged the 3rd and 4th year projects. This, to me, was a very exciting prospect as those are the oldest and most experienced students.

Here is quick run down of the projects.

Vertigo

Vertigo is a 2D sideways racing game for between 1 and 4 players. The basic gameplay is very well-working and with more polish, game modes, etc., I think that this could be a cool downloadable title for either XBLA or PSN.

Had it not been for the fact, that the students also showed this game last year (where they deservedly won the Pwnage Award), the game would definitely have been a favorite. Because of this, however, I did not vote for the game.

Despair of Heroes

This good-looking XNA game has the worst title ever. It is a sideways hack'n'slash game in the style of Golden Axe and Castle Crashers. The game has 4 characters that you can change between in-game, depending on which strategy you and your fellow players wish to employ in a specific situation.

I voted for this game as 3rd (mostly for lack of choice of other games), and the reason for it, was that it was more a remake of a genre than anything else. The game showed potential for great craftsmanship, but did not innovate or experiment much in any direction.

Co-op Cop

Co-op cop was a wonderful small 2D physics game, and seemed like Little Big Planet remade in the style of Salvador Dali.

Making good and intuitive use of both mouse and keyboard, the game has two characters, and is a described as a single-player game that can be played by two players. This promise is actually true, and it provides a meaningful experiences in both modes.

The game had some problems, like not really knowing whether it wanted to be a sandbox game or a more classic game, making it seem like directionless experience. Even though this game lacked a lot of polish, I ended up voting on it as 1st game.

Deadly Escape

Deadly Escape was made by a team of Belgians, and was presented to us through webcast. The game is pitched as a 3D shooter for those over 30, who still want to play shooters but who are no longer that good at skill-based games.

Made as a mod for the CryEngine 2, the style of the game itself was an over the top Mexican western setting, much in the style of Total Overdose or Desperado. I did liked the idea of this game and wanted to vote of on the 2nd place. Unfortunately, they were not present on the show floor, and therefore I could not vote for them. Instead my 2nd place ended up going to

Exhaust

Exhaust is a 2D physics game, where you have to maneuver a monster truck through a level to get to the end. The game was a fun and had intuitive controls. It wasn't really my type of game, but deserved the winning place that it ended up getting at the award show.

This blog post has already gotten way too long, but I want to make a special mention of one of the games made by 1st year students.

Walkabout

For the 1st year games, the students have to make an arcade machine; I think this is a really good way to push them into the deep end of the water, and force them to think about physicality, game play and user friendliness.

In Walkabout you have to get a small family of creatures living in a 2D world safely home. Like lemmings they always continue on their path, no matter if they are going into certain death. As the player, you can help them on their path by rotating the world via a big wheel, thereby rotating the world, and helping them navigate corridors and passages that they could otherwise not get past. It is so simple yet works very well.

The brilliance of this game, is that everything is thought into the same context and presented in a thoroughly coherent manner; be it the menu, high score screen or in-game. It never feels like you are leaving the tiny little game world. Deservingly, this game made by 1st year students, won the pwnage award.

Going to Gotland is always an exciting and rewarding experience, and I am really looking forward to seeing what will come out of there in the future.

Another one bites the dust!

2009-05-29T21:48:31Z

After struggling for a while, Deadline Games has finally closed its doors.

Deadline was the place were I first got my feet wet with AAA game development. I can easily say that some of the guys I worked with in the R&D department, were some of the brightest and clever people I ever meet. We also had some fantastic barbeques and went swimming in the clean harbour waters during the summer. Good times!

I really hope this signal the beginning of the end of the seemingless endless row of company closings in the Danish game industry. Hopefully some of you guys that are now out of work, will release your creative energies and intelligence in new startups!

Anyway, where evere you end up, good luck in the future to all you of ex-deadliners!

New Beginnings or How the Stone Rolled Down the Mountain Again

2009-05-21T11:39:29Z

One door has closed, and another one is opening. No! Actually it is more like standing in the hall of mirrors at Tivoli and figuring out what you want to do.

The story is that after some years of getting my feet wet in different game companies, I started 3 Lives Left with a friend of mine in 2007. In January 2009 the company filed for bankrupcy. There were many reasons for that, most of them having to do with us being company owners for the first time.

So what now? I currently work as a freelance programmer in a completely dfferent sector than games. In the very short term this has 2 primary benefits:

I can relatively quickly get back on my feet after some years on a very tight budget
Getting away from the industry allows me to get some outside perspective and do a complete re-evaluation.

Conclusions so far? I'll tell you in a later post..