handcircus

IMPORTANT - SITE URL MOVE

2006-07-13T16:02:00.000+01:00

Well its time to move on from Blogger. I've deciced to merge my blog and portfolio site into one easy to use place - and so I've moved everything over to handcircus.com with a brand new wordpress front end.

So. Point your browsers and bookmarks to:

WWW.HANDCIRCUS.COM

And update your RSS feeds to point to

http://www.handcircus.com/feed/

Bit-Generations

2006-07-04T17:06:00.000+01:00

Keeping the GBA Micro well fed and watered, Nintendo are obviously serious about continuing to support it rather than force migration to the DS lite. As it gets to the end of its lifecycle, its interesting to see titles like Bit-Generations appear. A cousin of the "Touch Generations" range on the DS, the focus appears to be a "back-to-basics" approach to game design - very simple (one or two buttons) to encourage the lapsed or intimidated gamer to play. With a nice mixture of visual styles (perhaps edging towards the crude at times), many look like simple flash games in nature.

Read more at N-Sider.

Code as performance - Livecoding

2006-07-04T10:43:00.000+01:00

Theres an article up on Wired about "Livecoding", the live writing of code to create performance - for both audio and video.

This is something I find really interesting - someone with a deep level of understanding of the algorithms and patterns involved in the generation of music or engaging visuals, combined with a good eye for aesthetic and/or music ability. The two should allow someone like this to create a genuinely new type of performance. The trouble I have with it though is that writing code seems to be the most inappropriate way to generate or manipulate these algorithms as its so inefficient.

Writing code is too general. Although I might be being presumptious, I'm assume that the kind of creation and manipulation that would go on in these kind of performances would be things such as the combination of existing modules and the tweaking of parameters, with some live input from more tactile devices (keyboards, mice, joypads?). This is something far more suited to schematic programming (ala virtools, max) than raw typing in of code. Unless you are planning on writing and debugging a brand new system from scratch, its much more efficient to be able to drag on a pre-built system, configure, tweak and link into your composition. Entering text, while potentially "glamorous" in that it appears that you are working at a low level, is simply not efficient for these kind of operations and performace in general. Do the low level stuff beforehand, creating your modules etc, but why type to make those connections?

A Physical desktop interface that works

2006-06-22T10:40:00.000+01:00

As soon as 3D graphics became achievable on desktop PC's (and probably way before that) people have been drawn to creating 3d interfaces to visualise information and manipulate objects. Often its done clumsily. Mostly its done for the sake of it - because theres something so appealing of a whizzy 3D interface. But occasionally its done for all the right reasons, is well thought out and truly presents a progression and new ideas in the way that we manipulate and view objects and data.

This is the case with BumpTop - created by Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan. At first glance I was pretty sceptical - it looks like many other "Physical desktop" interfaces that have cropped up before, with items physically represented by boxes that interact with each other according to rigid body dynamics. But what the BumpTop team have done here is to create a sophisticated gestural based vocabulary to manipulate these objects. This come in more obvious interactions, such as sorting piles and throwing objects around - to filtering objects, sorting into a grid and a wonderful technique to allow the insertion of items into a pile by flipping through adjecent items in turn. The team have really taken the time to think about the advantages of a standard tangible desktop and what people do with the items on their desks. This is really evident in the BumpTop's ability to fold over the corners of documents to mark them, or to leave them poking slightly out of the pile. They've also thought about what additional operations could be performed that wouldnt be possible in the real-world, such as the ability to scale individual items.

The number of different interactions working so well together is remarkable, and they have obviously taken inspiration from some outstanding existing interfaces such as Maya's marking menus to simplify the interface as much as possibly. The ability to perform such complex operations in a single drag as a real achievement (I LOVE the rounding off the tail operation to sort into a pile).

Anyway its well worth a watch. Cant wait to have a play with the beta.

Via Fun-Motion.

Retro Technoplastic

2006-06-20T09:30:00.000+01:00

There is something so charming about futuristic toys from the past. Fortunately, there are people like Eric from Germany to collect and catalogue such treasures and publish lots of pictures and details on sites such as Miniorgan.com (specialising in vintage musical electronic toys).

For vintage electronic games (from Game and Watch to bizarre Godzilla games) there's no better source than Electronic Plastic. The creator of the site, Jaro Gielens, has created a garish, nostalgic (and highly recommended) coffee table book of the same name, designed by Buro Destruct.

Terry Gilliam on Interactive Narrative

2006-06-20T09:11:00.000+01:00

I've long been a fan of Terry Gilliam - I think there are few filmmakers that are able to create such vidid, fantastic, engrossing worlds on-screen. I've been reading the excellent "Gilliam on Gilliam" over the past few days, and came across a section where he discusses his opinion (in 1996 I believe) of the effect of interactivity on narrative:

"We visited Expo '67 in Montreal, where there were some wonderful film presentations, including Francis Thompson's six-screen 'We Are Young'. The Czech pavilion had a film in which you could vote on the way the story should go at the end of each scene. When we were making 'Twelve Monkeys', Bob Gale, who co-wrote 'Back to the Future' with Robert Zemeckis, made a film where every member of the audience was able to vote at key moments, and it was terrible. My daughters went to see it with me and it was us against two men behind us: we were outvoting them on every point. My daughters thought it would be a good game at home, but it's not why we go to the movies. Movies aren't about that kind of interactivity: the moment you do it you're pulled right out of the experience. My daughters understood that film is about storytelling, like sitting around a campfire at night, giving yourself over to the storyteller - he's the guide, not you."

Its interesting to see the differentiation that he makes between home entertainment and movies/campfire storytelling - clearly seeing home entertainment as being less involved but going to the theatre as much more engrossing. I wonder whether he would apply this to watching DVD versions at home? I definitely agree that going to see a good film at a theatre swallows you up - its so easy to forget where you are, but I'm not sure that I agree about interactivity pulling you out of the experience. Bad interactivity combined with bad content certainly, but belief that you are in some way responsibile for the action on-screen I would argue would make you feel more involved.

The movie he mentioned was called Mr. Payback: An Interactive Movie. The reviews are indeed very poor. I like the final comment though: "Perhaps the experience would have been more palatable had I been drunk. That's the only way I can imagine getting anything worthwhile out of this.

Powers of 10

2006-06-12T09:56:00.000+01:00

Powers of 10 is a ten-minute documentary that was a source of inspiration for Will Wright's Spore created by Charles and Ray Eames for IBM.

From Kotaku.

My brother in Wired

2006-06-05T16:20:00.000+01:00

My brother Toby and his wife Sharon recently started a company called PathIntelligence. They have been working on technology to allow the behaviour of people within a space to be measured passively without the need for any user-participation (and any invasion of privacy). This is done using software-decoded radio and the triangulation of radio signals transmitted from mobile phones during their communication with base stations. Analysis of this data allows measurement of correlation between spaces, density within spaces and much more.

Wired recently interviewed Toby for an article on GNU Radio. You can read it online here.

over_play @ onedotzero 10

2006-06-05T14:48:00.000+01:00

On Friday, onedotzero 10 kicked off at the ICA, and the first event in the innervisions series of talks was over_play, billed as "an exploration of the future of gaming".

First of all, one of the biggest disappointments of the festival is the absence of "lens flare" - a look at motion graphics in the gaming sphere. While I was never really a fan of the original line up (basically pre-rendered fmvs), I think its starting to get to a point where gaming aesthetic (in-game) is really worth taking notice of. From the abstract worlds of Rez to the heavily-stylised graphics of Killer 7, (and Viewtiful Joe, Loco Roco, XIII, Katamari, Jet Set Radio Future all deserve a mention), its the fact that these are rendered interactively and that the scenes can be manipulated them by the player that makes them so unique. FMVs (for me) were nothing more than tacky candy added on that usually added very little to the experience. I know that traditionally Lens Flare has excluded anything outside of cutscenes, but games progress, these cutscenes will disappear. The next generation of graphics will bring the potential for almost any graphical style that can be imagined to be represented in realtime, and there should be more focus on the achievements and explorations in this sphere. The death of the non-interactive cutscene should be celebrated.

Anyway - back to the point in hand - over_play. While not strictly about gaming, it was essentially a discussion by two artists working in the digital sphere (Andrew Shoben of Greyworld, and Matt Adams of Blast Theory) of their work, and the thinking behind their projects.

Greyworlds work revolves around the creation of public art. Their most famous work (although not strictly public) is The Source, a gigantic installation created for the London Stock Exchange, consisting of a 9x9x9 grid of glowing spheres. The spheres can be configured to move to any position on the wire that they are suspended upon, allowing the collection to move to a vast number of different configurations, allowing them to represent anything from words to figures. As the glow of each sphere can be configured seperately, the light itself can animate across the installation even when the spheres are static.

Other installations that really stood out were Flowerwall (IIRC) - a new work that has just been commissioned that consists of a huge number of giant flower bouquets (very similar to that of a magician with flowers up his sleeve) that sprout out of a wall on request. This gives the user the ability to create a forest of vegetation appear from nowhere. Others that stood out were Railings, a set of tuned railings that play "The girl from ipanema" when you drag a stick along them, and a carpet that gave anyone walking upon it the impression that the surface was not what it appeared.

What really struck me about each project was the way that it used interaction to either augment reality, or to bestow upon the user a "special power" of some sort. Each project is hugely playful. Its great to see such work being commissioned that people can really take joy in interacting with

Most of the videos Andrew showed are on the Greyworld site.

I have to be honest and say that Blast Theory's work really didnt blow me away. While some of the thinking behind the work was certainly interesting - looking at the way that a virtual system can affect the real world (and vice versa) and the effects on the user of two such environments existing simultaneously. Blast Theory's background is in theatre, and it really does show - both the projects - "Uncle Roy is All Around You" and "Day of the Figures" feel very theatrical, the first using actors to interact with the real world players. I have to admit though that it reminded me a little of The Lawnmower Man - and that is definitely not a good thing. That said, the projects do ask some interesting questions even if the actual execution is a little underwhelming.

Josh Randall Keynote @ Cybersonica

2006-05-21T22:19:00.000+01:00

On Friday I was fortunate enough to have the apparently to meet Josh Randall, the creative director of Harmonix, as we were doing an interview for PlayStation.com as well as covering the keynote he gave for the first day of the Cybersonica festival.

In both the interview and keynote (entitled "Interactive Music for the Masses"), Josh detailed the background of Harmonix from its inception in the 90s - a venture from two graduates of MIT Media Lab - right up to the forthcoming release of Guitar Hero 2 . Its fascinating to see how the original vision - to develop ways for people with no musical training to create and interact with music - has been fulfilled and how the methods implemented to facilitate this vision have been refined over time. The first product that Harmonix created was "The Axe", a piece of software for the PC that allowed the user to create and improvise music using the mouse or joystick. This was followed by a modified version of the same software, combined with infra-red motion detection, for an installation based at Disney's retro-modern (and butt of several Simpsons jokes) Epcot Centre. Upon realising the potential for the widespread and familiar console controller to become a musical instrument, Harmonix's exposure really grew after SCEA saw an early prototype and snapped up what became Frequency, published in 2001. By scaling down the freeform nature of The Axe, and giving people a more directed sonic playpen, it made the software more accessible and suitable for mass market. While Frequency and its sequel Amplitude (I remember doing an online promotional sound sequencer toy for this while at randommedia a couple of years ago) were critically praised, they didn't sell in huge numbers, and it wasn't until they worked on Karaoke Revolution for Konami that their real break came in terms of sales. Karaoke Revolution's development and subsequent success demonstrated to the team the significance of the player's performance as an essential piece of the interactive music experience, and this is something that they have capitalised on, combining with their previous experience on Frequency/Amplitude to create the much adored Guitar Hero. Just check out some of the links on youtube to see how people have adopted the performance aspect of the game.

Its great to see people like Josh in the industry as the enthusiasm he has for his work (and for the culture surrounding interactive music) is infectious and the perfect antidote for the cynicism that can cloud the interactive entertainment industry at times.

The interview with Josh should be online on PlayStation.com over the next few days. In the meantime you can read an online feature on Harmonix here or more on the festival here.

Thanks to Chris for hooking us up with the interview and press passes - congrats on such an interesting conference.

Over_play at onedotzero

2006-05-21T18:55:00.000+01:00

Seminar from onedotzero a week Friday (2nd June):

"an exploration of the future of gaming through emergent forms of gameplay and direct interventions into the physical and urban environment, featuring leading innovators in art, gaming and mix-realities. speakers include members of internationally renowned artists' groups: blast theory [uncle roy all around you, i like frank], who explore interactivity and the relationship between real and virtual space, focusing on the social and political aspects of technology, and greyworld, [the source at lse] who create art that involves human interaction in an urban context, with unexpected articulation of public spaces."

More details here.

Game designer hippies

2006-05-21T16:00:00.000+01:00

So this is what game designers do when they retire

"These days Ea nourishes his soul by sun bathing on the rocky shore of Peaks Island, Maine, lets his soul speak through drum, dance and song, and ponders the remarkable implications of quantum mechanics for "miracles" which many rational "scientific" people claim are impossible"

Curious? You should be

Armadillo run

2006-05-18T17:07:00.000+01:00

Armadillo Run is a lovely little indie game from Peter Stock. A playset-style physics puzzle game, you have to piece together different physical objects such as cloth, rockets, struts, and plates to create a system to guide the little armadillo ball to where it wants to go.

As Matthew points out, its like a cross between The Incredible Machine and Bridge Builder. It has a really intuitive, easy to grasp user interface and encourages experimentation.

Found at Fun-Motion.

Cybersonica

2006-05-18T09:23:00.000+01:00

The Cybersonica conference starts tommorrow, offering a diverse line up of speakers over two days - ranging from interactive installation artists to game developers. The conference is held at the Science Museums Dana Centre in London. Tommorrow's keynote speaker is Josh Randall, the Creative Director at Harmonix, the creators of Amplitude, Frequency, and of course Guitar Hero.

Also, the Cybersonica Exhibition is on until Saturday at Phonica records, featuring a number of installations exploring the fields of audio and interactivity - including Fijuu, the PSP controlled Interchange, and the wonderfully playful Shadow Monsters.

The best of E3

2006-05-15T12:14:00.000+01:00

Well, I got back from my first E3 yesterday, having spent a week at the madhouse that is the conference itself, plus the SCEI press conference on Monday, and it has certainly been an eye-opening experience. Most of my work out there involved sorting out video - from shooting on HDV to compressing various video collected round the conference and getting it online as soon as possible (on Playstation-E3 and Playstation.com). Being there on official Sony business, but also acting as Media, meant that I managed to see the conference from a number of angles, rather than just as a regular punter.

The biggest disappointment personally was not being able to get into the Nintendo stand - I was too busy to visit until the last day, and even at ten past nine the queue was 4 hours long! Thankfully I did managed to get a good slice of time with the wii controller and Red Steel, thanks to a behind-closed-doors demopod courtesy of Ubisoft (who are rapidly becoming one of my favourite publishers). The first thing that really struck me about the controller was quite how dinky it was - its really small. The game also uses the nunchuck controller and its a shame that it has to use a cable between the two as the elegant simplicity of the one-handed controller is considerably compromised with the nunchuck setup. Its quite strange to use initially - I kept wanting to bring my two hands together after so many years of joypad use, and it is also wildly sensitive to movement. I wanted to use my arms at first - but the designer of the game was on-hand to advise wrist use and to suggest pointing at the screen - to use it absolutely rather than with relative motion. Its not as intuitive a device as I imagined it would be but from a 10 minute session with the game you can really see the potential that will be exploited from the controller over time. I'm gutted I didn't get a chance to see the rest of the demos to get a better range of uses (I really wanted to play with some of the one-handed games) - but hopefully there won't be long until another chance to play comes along.

On the PS3 side, the game of the show for me was Assassin's Creed. Although Heavenly Sword looks stunning, and definitely has the edge visually, it was Assassin's creed that really stood out (in my opinion). Essentially starting off where the Prince of Persia series left off (with added sprinklings of Tenchu), this time you are cast as an assassin, using your parkour skills to negotiate the rooftops of medieval Europe. The core difference this time is not the focus on assassination objectives, but the nature of movement through the environment. While PoP was essentially "on-rails", with a series of linear paths to negotiate using the Prince's nimble movement, this time around you have much more freedom to move around the streets and rooftops of the town, again much like Tenchu or the Sly Cooper games with added flair. Also of note was the use of crowd simulation within the game and its positioning as a gameplay element - you need to work with crowds in order to conceal yourself or create a barrier between yourself and those that would attack you. Oh and you can even ride a horse for Buster Keaton-esque acrobatic leaps.

One other aspect that was really notable about some games at the show was how much more coherent and believable environments and characters will become in the next generation. Two games really stood out as examples of innovation in this area - Crysis from Crytek (being published by EA) and the new Indiana Jones game from LucasArts. The demo of Crysis available at the show was not playable (apparently due to its stability - its still only in Alpha) but watching one of the Crytek employees run through the demo was enough to illustrate advances being made. Following on from its predecessor Far Cry, the environments are brimming with vegetation - the detail and abundance is quite staggering - but the signifant difference is that now this vegetation reacts physically to actions and events within the gameworld. These reactions vary from the small - walking past a branch now causes the branch to bend and sway, appropriately affecting the shadows and sound, to the large - its now possible to shoot down trees (they bend and snap appropriately from where you sever them) with them falling to the ground, supported by any branches they may have. The abundance of trees in the environment makes this truly significant to the design of the game - its possible to create road blocks for vehicles or to fell a tree onto a building to block an entrance for example. Somewhat less realistically, it also appears to be possible to punch a tree in half (a feat that would turn even Geoff Capes green with envy). Even the subtler effects are significant in terms of gameplay - the simple swaying movements and changes in shadow of a character passing through vegetation are enough to alert a player to a physical presence nearby. This physical realism also extends to artificial elements in the game - buildings can literally be blown apart into their constituent pieces (an example shown was a shedlike building collapsing after being blown up by a grenade).

The new Indy game was taking quite a different direction with its innovation. While it does feature some rather tasty destructible elements in the environment - chuck a chubby thug through a wooden door and it splinters realistically (the door not the thug) - it is in the realistic AI and character-character and character-environment interaction that is truly impressive. Indy is the first game to be announced that uses Euphoria, the bio-mechanic simulation software from Cambridge-based Naturalmotion. Some demo videos are available here of Endorphin (the off line version of Euphoria). Essentially the software is able to take characters the next step on from ragdolls, and allow them to bridge the gap between an their aims and what needs to be done to physically achieve these aims in the environment using their bodies. An example shown was a number of characters whos primary aim is to stop falling (to their death) as they are chucked down a bunch of poles. Whereas a ragdoll would merrily bounce from pole to pole, these simulated characters are aware of their bodies, and will attempt to position themselves and grasp with their hands at the poles (or anything else nearby that is grippable) to slow/stop their fall. This even extends to a character gripping onto the legs of another character that is already hanging from a pole - truly emergent behaviour.

Soft bodies

2006-05-02T23:54:00.000+01:00

Often new types of systems present themselves for simulation - and for people to study in order to find ways of exploiting them to numerous ends. Often the games industry will find many hugely creative ways of making the most of these simulations by making them interactive and creating goals for the player to reach by manipulating them directly or indirectly.

We've had many systems before now take advantage of the ability for ever-increasingly powered computers to create these simulations in real time - Rigid Body dynamics (in games such as Half-life 2), simulations of large groups of agents (in games such as Lemmings or Medieval Total War), even fluid dynamics (such as Wave Race Blue Storm, Plasma Pong and Liquid War although still hugely underused int he commercial sphere). Could Soft body physics be the next simulation darling of the industry?

I think the first time I remember playing with soft-body physics was when Sodaconstructor first blazed round the net (this probably isn't real soft-body physics. Please excuse any rubbish I may be ejecting from my fingers). Simple collections of springs manipulated by forces applied by gravity and the player can create hugely interesting a. Of course the popular indie game "Gish" also uses soft-body-esque collections of springs for its main character. Games as different as Rigs of Rods and Loco Roco (which greggman has admitted was inspired by sodaconstructor) both take advantage of such simulations and both give a really tactile, organic experience to interactions.

For lots more examples of physics-based gaming, make sure to keep an eye on the fun-motion blog.

Book Review : Level Design for Games

2006-05-02T23:20:00.000+01:00

Continuing my subconcious attempts to purchase every book in the entire "New Riders Games" series (glad they've not moved into trashy romance novels), I picked up Level Design for Games a few weeks ago and finished it over the weekend.

The book is written to be very inclusive, covering even the most basic aspects of videogame creation, and dedicates a reasonable amount of itself to detailing game team structure and interactions, reasons why creating games is t3h b35t etc, but when it gets down to business its not a bad read. While he does primarily focus on 3D action titles (well pretty much exclusively FPSs) Phil Co does cover a much broader outlook on the process, from initial brainstorming for likely content in a level and methods of how to make an environment more coherent and believable - right the way through to actual implementation in UnrealEd. Some of the discussion of his personal views and reasons why he is drawn to level design (he has a background in architecture) are definitely of interest. I've not spent much time in bespoke editors like UnrealEd - all level creation for 3D games I've done before has been in Maya, so the BSP mapping process seems quite exotic. Since then I've dug out the Source SDK to have a play with Hammer (watch out for a follow-on post soon).

So in general I'd say it covers a lot of ground, and while focussed primarily on the FPS genre there is enough generalisation to be of use to anyone designing levels for Action Adventure titles, maybe even platformers or any title that has any element of spacial movement in a 3D environment, and it would certainly be of use for someone with little or no experience that was curious to find out what level design is all about.

Ever a murakami game?

2006-04-27T19:37:00.000+01:00

I've long been a fan of Haruki Murakami, much like many of my friends now, ever since I first read "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" - a tale littered with unicorns, surrealism, comedy and science fiction. I've just finished reading "Dance, Dance, Dance" - reminded me strongly of "The Wind up Bird Chronicle" - a novel that features a character with recurring character traits throughout many of his novels - an introverted, sensitive, regular middle-aged japanese man, on the edge of society - to which extraordinary events happen. While reading the book, it made me think of some of the statements from Robert McKee's "Story" - a popular screenwriting guide - that discuss how difficult it is to transfer a novel that is particularly introspective to the screen. While narration and other techniques can be used to force an audience to understand the thoughts of the character, it bypasses the real beauty of cinema when an audience discovers a character's persona implicitly through their actions rather than directly. It would be hard to really convey the emotional dialogue of his books through film (although the first officially sanctioned Murakami film is now out in the UK - Tony Takitani).

While it seems near impossible to create that kind of experience on the screen - what further challenges are offered in attempting to add interactivity to the mix. Would it be possible to create a game that provided an experience that bore similarity to a Murakami novel? While a lot of the pleasure of a Murakami novel is letting the book wash over you and transport you to a dream-like state, could this be possible in an interactive setting? Or would it just be tiresome and aimless?

Back into game design

2006-04-20T01:47:00.000+01:00

After a few hours of working on a current project, I've really noticed how much I've missed creating games over the past few months. I've really lost focus on what it is that enjoy so much about game design and become more obsessed with the how rather than the why. While the PlayStation.com project was very rewarding, its so refreshing to get back to design. Getting the physics engine up and running, and seeing the ideas in my head starting to take form has really sorted me out. I feel like I've met an old friend again. Its bringing back many memories of creating FLY, Shooting Stars and Create-A-Make while at Random Media.

Interesting aesthetics in video games

2006-04-12T13:44:00.000+01:00

Couple of unusual aesthetic experiments floating round the web at the moment (both of these are courtesy of fort90.com). One is an example video of fish-eye lens projection for a 3d environement, as used for the much-sought after rarity Sonic X-treme, a cancelled Saturn title with an extremely peculiar history and dedicated set of treasure hunters searching for existing prototypes. Have a look at the video here, and you can really see how unusual the aesthetic is when playing a 3d game with this kind of projection - it looks utterly surreal but (in my opinion) refreshing and really visually pleasing. It gives all straight edges a peculiar curved edge, and makes the world feel completely different as so much changes visually as you navigate the space.

Secondly is "Sketchfighter 4000 Alpha", an OSX game taking a rather fetching sketchbook style, the kind of additive-induced hallucination a bored 8-year old with ADT might encounter in a paritucularly uninspiring maths class. You can watch videos of it here. I love the explosions

Hippo Lake

2006-04-10T09:28:00.000+01:00

I got round to finishing my first ogre project this weekend - a simulation of flocking featuring some slightly fetching hippos.

I've always been fascinated by the complex behaviour that can be exhibited by a simple simulation with interesting interactions between elements, ever since seeing Craig Reynold's boids.

You can read a bit more about it and download Hippo Lake here.

New PlayStation.com

2006-04-07T11:14:00.000+01:00

The project I've been working on for many months has finally gone live : the new PlayStation.com. The project was built in house at SCEE - I did the initial prototyping concept work with the IA's here and built the final flash front-end. Its been a *massive* project from start to finish - mainly because of all the different systems being brought together and the huge amount of content (thousands of game records and tens of thousands of stories, multiplied by 22 locales!) but its great to see it finally live. The main aim was to give the site a fresh look in keeping with the current PlayStation branding and really open up the content. Use of pagination and expansion/contaction gives the user flexibility in their browsing and by maintaining all PS2 game record metadata in memory, we were able to add features such as the game finder. I'll try and do a more in-depth post-mortem soon.

Does gaming have a lot to learn from Interactive Art Installations?

2006-04-05T15:49:00.000+01:00

More great coverage from We Make Money Not Art, this time from Game Set and Match II. Interesting commentary, but I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with all of it. I think it assumes that just because games are not created that explore such outlandish methods of interaction (such as touch-sensitive coloured floor-grids) or unusual environments, that these are currently areas not being considered or explored by game developers. I think the final comment: "If the gaming industry doesn't pick up from this, in the end it will be left behind by the new art of gaming born from installation art and architectural design." is perhaps slightly naive, and doesnt really factor in the essential differences between an artistic endeavour and a commercial product for consoles. A lot of R&D is done exploring exactly the same ingredients on show (gestural interfaces, natural interfaces, even things like Philips game controlled ambient lighting), but its rare that such a product breaks through, due to the huge number of restrictions on creating a commerical product. Eyetoy is a great example of something that was developed as an R&D project by Richard Marks at SCEA R&D while artists such as mine-control were doing there own thing. The end Eyetoy product could not use background subtraction or color tracking (some of the most effective forms of computer vision for interaction) because you cannot guarantee lighting conditions in the living room of the average consumer, so it was only viable for the controlled conditions of gallery spaces (for now).

Couple of links from We-Make-Money-Not-Art

2006-04-03T10:48:00.000+01:00

Shigureden
Nintendo's Yamauchi combines traditional japanese culture with modern tech. Short write up here and official site here.

UVA's latest installation
More responsive work on those purty LED screens here

Changed my mind, time to switch

2006-04-03T00:45:00.000+01:00

Well I've changed my mind. Got about 80% of the way with getting rendering up and running from a collada source, with lighting and texturing (and it was an interesting learning process) and started questioning my own intentions for what I was doing. It was taking up a lot of my time to write rendering code, and made me realise that I'm just not that interested in creating that sort of thing. As a result I've swapped over to OGRE. My main concerns about the switch were the art pipeline from maya. I expected things to get a bit screwed, especially with characters, but after only about 5 hours work from first compiling an ogre program, I've now got almost everything working *exactly* how I wanted it to. This engine is all I was looking for in a package... theres so much support for different graphic techniques and so much of it is defined in scripts, removing the need for recompilation. Some testimonies here .

Hippo Collada Party

2006-03-21T11:58:00.000Z

I've been trying to get stress out of my system from the big project Ive been working on for past months (finally launching on 5th April) by making some more recreational personal stuff, one of which is a tranquil scene if hippos-on-ice, a vision conveyed to me though my iPod while shuffle provided me with Tchaikovky ballet piece. I thought it would be fun to try and turn that into reality to its been something I've been tinkering with on and off for a few weeks. This time I thought I'd take a bare-bones approach and try to put almost everything together from scratch rather than using something prebuilt, so that hopefully theres no areas that are a bit grey in terms of knowledge, so I'm doing the modelling, texturing, rigging, animation, AI behaviour, scene rendering, and particles.

One of the key components that I've always found challenging is finding a decent solution for getting artwork into my framework without using an entire engine like OGRE. I've tried using OBJ and numerous other formats and always found it a pain. I wanted decent texturing and nested scene nodes, plus full support for skinning etc, and finally it seems that Collada covers pretty much everything I need in the open-source Collada DOM and free exporters for Maya.

Had a bit of a play last night trying to export some stuff from Maya and get it rendered in OpenGL, and despite finding it all a bit odd, it seems to be working very well! Shame theres not an open-source viewer that might go through the process of rendering the geometry but I guess the DOM hasnt been out long. I'm slightly afraid of implementing skinning but hopefully that won't cause too much of a problem. The bonus is that the format seems to be be supported by a *lot* of people (Max, Maya, XSI, Nvidia etc) and even includes support for shaders assigned to materials. The other tasty part is that you can fully create from scratch a complete scene in your application and then export to Maya - it has full saving capabilities. It seems well placed for a lot of geometry processing / procedural generation of static content work.

Hopefully this means that I can spend more time with pen/paper and in Maya, and less time in Visual Studio :)

Beat your dog at poker

2006-03-21T09:35:00.000Z

We-make-money-not-art reports that my dream has finally come true. I can now play video games against animals. Be careful though, apparently hamsters have the upper hand.

I know this... its a UNIX system

2006-03-20T18:55:00.000Z

Theres an interesting (but ultimately rubbish) example of someones personal vision of the future of operating system interfaces available for download (and indeed purchase) at tactile3d.com. Imagine someone watching Jurassic park, Enemy of the state, Hackers, The lawnmower man or most likely TRON, and then thinking that it was an outrage that these elegant interfaces had not yet been birthed and that the only option was to make this happen themself.

Well thats what we have here. Some of it is intriguing, such as the depiction of nested folders, but its an absolute pig to use. Using a 3d grid for displaying files, where all the ones in the centre are completely unaccessible is a plain unworkable idea. Its interesting for visualisation purposes, perhaps, to see what your file system looks like, but it doesn't even convey that well, as you dont have much scope beyond the current folder you are looking at. Still might be interesting to watch it progress, but theres no way I'm forking out 20 quid for it!

Physics gaming

2006-03-20T11:28:00.000Z

All your physics gaming needs are catered for on Fun-Motion, a blog dedicated to covering all kinds of games and toys that use physics at the core of their design (as opposed to having debris bounce around for purely aesthetic purposes). The Blog is run by Matthew Wegner, a game designer/developer from Flashbang Studios (one of the finalists in this years IGF). When I first came across the blog I was suspicious that there would be enough content to keep it going, but Matthew has obviously spent a lot of time tracking these examples down, and has managed to find an abundance of projects and games that fulfil the criteria , many of which are downloadable for free. While some may be incomplete ideas, or very unpolished (most examples are from hobbyists), theres a lot of brainfood for thought.

Lets make systems

2006-03-04T12:29:00.000Z

Following on from a previous post about connections leading to complexity, I've recently become mildly obsessed with schematic linking and networks, and the fun of building systems when you can just muck about with the inputs and outputs of your modules. Maya's hypergraph (and indeed internal graphing system for pretty much everything from shader networks to animation) is one of the most wonderful things, allowing you to link up anything with pretty much anything else. You want to plug the y position of your object into the photon emission of your light source? Sure! You want to make the distance between two ants turn affect the rotation of a wheel? No problem!

More and more software packages are tending to take advantage of the power that can be levered by allowing the user to create their own networks of functionality, and allow the software to be used in ways never imagined by the creator. As well as Maya, theres packages such as Max MSP, Reason (taking a real world version of the same concept and making it virtual), Virtools (schematic programming at its best) and a lot more. The ease of making these connections is the key to its success, as the results are instantaneous making experimentation easy. In the case of Virtools, you are able to completely change the functionality while the systems are running, with no need to re-compile. Compare that to the inflexibility of creating software in say C++, where you are dealing with the systems from an abstraction (writing code) and even minor modifications to each connection between objects can take a while.

So, I want to have a play with this sort of thing myself, and create a modular framework for playing with connections. So I'm gonna kick off (as soon as I'm finished with the other 900 projects I'm working on) a new project called "LetsMakeSystems", an attempt to make a fun piece of software to allow you to experiment with common systems involved in multimedia and games.

Originality in Concept design

2006-02-19T14:01:00.000Z

I've just finished watching Originality In Design, the first in a series of tutorial DVDs produced by Nick Pugh for The Gnomon Workshop. I've seen a number of gnomon dvds before, primarily from the Digital series for instructional purposes when learning Maya, but not seen much from their Analog series. Its fascinating watching, as you get to see a great concept artist at work, in fast forward, as he runs through the creation of five (IIRC) different pieces, narrating all the while. Its a process I've never see before, and considerably different to how I would imagine a concept artist would work. While the main thrust of the DVD is to break out of a creative rut that you may be in, or to steer your designs into new territory, its noticable how utterly free his creative process is. There's no mood boards, no reference material, barely any tools except a pencil. Starting off by letting his hand roam free over around 150 big sheets of paper drawing whatever his mind and hands suggest to him, Nick finds that he starts to break loose from the cliched imagery that clings to his minds eye like steak and cheese in the colon of an overweight truck driver. Colonic irrigation for the creative mind perhaps? After a while, the free sketches start to take interesting and original new forms. At the end of the process of producing hundreds of 10 second sketches, Nick reviews them in a group, selecting those with the most potential, and looks to render them into more definite forms. This for me was the really intriguing part of the process, as it seems almost like divining.... at the start of the rendering the shape is very vague, and he has little or no idea what each element is going to be or look like, but things present themselves at every stage in the rendering, so the form of the item literally comes from nothing... no premeditation on the details. This goes significantly against my preconception of the process of the work of a concept artist, which I had thought would involve an almost completely filled in image in the mind that was effectively photocopied from mind to paper. The lack of reference material was also startling.

While there are some breathtaking examples of great concept design in games (I'm a huge fan of the Oddworld, Katamari and Sly Cooper universes and anything by Tim Schafer ), browsing the shelves in Game would suggest that the games industry is in some sort of rut, with such a glut of "urban" titles and fantasy titles still cribbing off Tolkein. While this is of course no different in the film industry, and may also be a symptom of the conservativity of games publishers in the current climate, it would be great to see a chance for such great concept artists to help lead the games industry as it evolves into a more accepted creative medium.

Some guys get all the fun

2006-02-08T09:07:00.000Z

I wish I was a researcher at university with a cool name like Jefferson Y. Han, and people threw money and amazing components at me to bake them a cake of new forms interaction. (if anyone is listening and needs such a cake, do let me know). Anyway, I'm not, but fortunately someone else is, and they've been researching touch-screen technology with multi-point input. One of the main draw-backs with current touchscreen technology is that you can only click one thing at a time. Not a big deal if you are using a stylus to click things, but if you need to perform more complex actions (such as stretching, bending, painting while rotating etc) then you'll need a bit more interaction bandwidth. Han's system provides that bandwidth, as the demonstration videos gracefully illustrate. This is definitely going to become big in the future in creative industries, as it makes some actions so much easier if you can peform different actions with different hands, let alone different fingers (theres a nice demo video of a prototype maya using two pucks on a giant wacom tablet to rotate and sculpt at the same time). Applications for games are most certainly true there. Imagine a catapult game, one hand moves the catapult, the other stretches it back, or perhaps geometry wars?

Shadow of the telecoms colossus

2006-02-07T08:58:00.000Z

Unable to deal with the shame of my filthy, scratched, slow, barely functioning old phone, I went shopping at the weekend to try and get something to replace it. I'd previously had the Nokia 6600, which was fine, but started going mad recently, so it was time to put it to sleep gently (well take it to the cellular knackers yard anyway). I'd been waiting to have a look at the P990 but grew impatient, and when out on Friday saw something that I was not aware was even available yet. A friend of a friend had a Windows Mobile 2003 phone, running Skype for pocket PC, and was using it for all his telephony. He was only using the phone company for GPRS. I had no idea that Skype now offer both in and out services for connection to regular phone networks, and at a reasonable price, too (20 quid a year for line-in, and low call charges for out). Combined with this, if you have a Wifi connection in your phone, theres no need to use the phone company at all, and if you know other people using skype, you dont even need line in and out. The Skype client integrates seamlessly with your address book, so you can just dial with Skype instead of a standard mobile call. As a result, I've picked up the rather tasty Orange M500, and a cheapo wifi card for it. Its one of the few PDA phones around that doesnt make you look like some some sort of cyber-businessman dickhead.

I've always greatly resented telecoms companies and the exortionate prices they charge for connections, so hopefully this will force them to drop their prices and create a new model for charging. Especially combined with developments over at Fon, a company that has just got 12 million euros from google and skype to set up their global wifi sharing network, a network that will allow you, once you set up sharing on your own wifi connection, to roam around the globe and get free access all over the place from other members of the network. Things are definitely changing. Theres no need to guess why Skype want to finance the operation.... Fon, if successful, will effectively build a free global VoIP network for Skype users.

Create your own (google) earth

2006-01-30T20:16:00.000Z

Its great to see so many people mucking around with Google Earth, as demonstrated by the number of posts on Ogle Earth, a blog specialing in coverage of these terraformers-hackers. From mapping london to sticking big red dragons into new york, it seems that google's KML markup language is pretty extensible, not just for adding waypoints but for importing full geometry. If still bored, have a look at OpenGL Extrator from Eyebeam, a bit of software that apparently lets you dump a whole bunch of geometry data from almost any opengl application, in a format that can be brought into Maya or your package of choice. Now UVs or texture dumping yet, but it seems to be a project thats very much in full swing.

Indirect control

2006-01-30T19:35:00.000Z

I've been playing through Kirbys magic toothbrush canvas (or something) on the DS, and trying to figure out what was so different and refreshing about the control method. Obviously its touch-screen based, using a pen to control the action, but thats not what the main innovation is. There are a number of games on the DS that use stylus control for input, but the thing that really makes the difference with Kirby is the implementation of indirect control for interaction.

With the vast majority of console titles, the control method is direct... that is that your movements directly correspond to a movement on the avatar or avatars on the screen. Press A to jump. Press left to turn left etc. The difference with kirby is that while there are some basic actions you can perform directly (such as the currently purloined ability), the real challenge and core of the game is in the creation of these magical conveyor belts used to guide the blobby pink umm gas thing around the environment (I loathe Kirby as a character. Someone at HAL was either lazy or drunk or the boss's nephew that came up with that one). In effect you are manipulating the environment rather than controlling the character. Obviously games have done this before (such as the wonderful Chu Chu Rocket), but this takes it far further. Rather than arranging blocks in a structured logical manner, you are drawing curves and guiding the avatar in a kind of symbiotic manner. You as the player are not kirby, you are not some kind of maintanence man removing rubbish from his way.... you take on an entirely different role. And its great, a genuinely new experience. A really new type of game design that could only have been realised on the DS.

Hopefully with the more widespread appearance of devices that allow gestural interaction (such as the DS pad and the revolution controller), this form of indirect interaction will continue to grow and evolve. Whether used to make waves in a water simulation to guide kids in bumper boats around an obstacle course, or throwing appropriate vines at an energetic ape, I think theres a lot to be explored.

Book roundup

2006-01-16T19:49:00.000Z

Picked up a couple of great books over the last couple of months, and one not so hot...

First up is The Computational Beauty of Nature, a very ambitious and reasonably technical book, attempting to cover a wide variety of topics from neural networks to fractals, basically a lot of the fun aspects of computer science simulations that are great to code and muck about with. The stuff of processing heads dreams, its very well written so far (I've only had a light read through), allowing you to approach the book in a number of ways, from a vague interest in a particular topic, to a complete understanding of the gestalt of the subject being discussed. There's also downloadable source for those wanting to play without writing the whole thing from scratch themselves.

Next up is the The Art of my Neighbor Totoro, the latest in the series of Art books that have been translated by Viz. This covers a lot of the intiial sketches, concept art and a number of interviews with Hayao Miyazaki and the production team. Its also got a bunch of the beautiful cels used for the final movie. Definitely one of my favourite ghibli's (alongside Laputa, Spirited Away and Porco Rosso and .... well pretty much all the Miyazaki ones)

Lastly is the disappointing The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness, a game audio book that admittedly claims to have nothing about game audio, but genuinely doesn't . For a few pages, its genuinely intruiging and does contain a few amusing stories of the early days of game development and tales of stunts pulled at GDC, and while it might pique your interest, I found that it was really really padded, and contained nothing much of value. Its more like reading somebodies rambling blog. Filled with a lot of pictures of the author during his career, and with every other page a scrambled typographic motto, it is a disappointment, particularly because he is obviously a very talented guy. More discussion of interactive audio, systems like iMUSE, and general in-depth theory would have been great, rather than pure anecdote. ho hum. Guess I was warned on the back.

Open source

2006-01-07T18:55:00.000Z

As my forays (or perhaps bunglings) into more "proper" game development have continued, I've had a bit more time to play with Ogre, (thats Object-Oriented Graphics Engine), the open source engine thats rapidly growing in strength, support and community. And its a wonderful thing (I'm starting to grow concerned that I spend a lot of time posting things that I describe as wonderful. Although I suppose I wouldnt normally post anything awful unless I had quite a considerable amount of time on my hands).

Anyway. Its great. It contains pretty much everything you need out of the box to get building games. Great exporters from the most popular 3D packages. Cross-platform, great functionality with everything from shader support, stencil shadows, physics, BSP support, skinning, you name it. And being open-source, of course, its totally free.

What I find a shame, though, is the barrier to entry - that is the pre-requisite skills needed to take advantage of the engine - are so high. While it does all the hard work for you (by providing libraries of all these features rather than you coding them yourself), you need to have a rough understanding of how these things work in order to actually create anything. You also need to have solid programming experience, a good understanding of C++ and 3D graphics techniques. If you don't know what a float is or a vertex is, and don't know how to set up a compiler.... its totally useless. I know its only aim is to be a great game engine, which it succeeds in fantastically well, but it would be wonderful if anyone could take advantage of it.

As there is a growing consensus is that the games industry needs to attract more talent from outside the industry, where are the programs for the hobbyists, that make creating this stuff easy? Director attracted non-programmers at an early stage, but is now being left in a corner to rot and die. Virtools is a wonderful piece of software, allowing non-programmers to create fantastic software, but is so expensive and has such restrictive publishing options that its priced way beyond hobbyists. Flash seems to be the most successful platform for hobbyist game developers, producing such wonderful titles as Samarost and Banja (and is what I really first started making games in) but even that is moving in a much more technical direction, moving to proper object-oriented, strictly typed code. So far, the best examples I've seen are the products from Blitz, such as Blitz3D, which do seem to provide a great deal of functionality and speed, with a low barrier to entry, both in terms of price (its only $100 for Blitz3D) and programming experience.

But surely it can be easier still. Theres some great interviews (which I cant find the links to right now) with John Maeda where he talks about these huge technical barriers to the average user that are being put in place by technology creators, and of the need to break those barriers down, even if it means reducing functionality, if it makes the end product more useful. Keita Takahashi spoke of the need to attract more people from diverse backgrounds to the industry, and how can we do this? By giving them really fun, really easy to use tools. New paintbrushes to allow them to paint! Ogre is a great step in giving something really amazing and useful away, but lets build a layer on top of that to allow anyone who wants to to experiment and create and play and make wonderful things.

The future is here.....?

2006-01-05T22:28:00.000Z

So we've arrived at the next-generation. I've been fortunate enough to be generously given a 360 for Christmas (which I have to admit might be a decision kate may soon regret) . I've now had it exactly a week, and its quite a machine. That said, its not all roses either.

I'm a complete sucker for a shiny new thing and its only now that I feel I can have any sort of perspective on it. Like a sugar-fuelled infant with attention defecit disorder, all other toys have been dropped and pretty much all my playtime has been focused on it. I've got the premium pack with Gotham Racing 3, and with broadband at home its enough to hopefully get reasonable impression of what its capable of.

I spent about the first hour with the thing poking, prodding and trying to get it to connect up to as much as I could in the house. Linked it up to broadband, got my live account sorted, got it connecting to my itunes library upstairs (eventually after muchos pissing around, and switching to twonkyvision rather than MS's own media extender bollocks). Started mucking around downloading a few demos, having fun with Jeff Minter's lightsynth "Neon", getting all the free trailers, themes etc. And the result? Very very tasty. The infrastructure is very well designed, a great interface and everything fits together as it should. The system is always there at your command, whether watching movies, playing games....errr anything else. Little popups inform you of your friends activities, or any achievements. A menu can always be brought up to allow you to change music, check friends status, go back to the dashboard.

Anyway, so onto the main sales point of the 360... the games. Well PGR 3 is weird. At first I thought it looked shit, like driving though a model village. Then I thought it looked almost photorealistic (incar view through daytime vegas is stunning), and now I think it looks like a very pretty xbox game but shinier and with HDR lighting. I'm not playing in HD so not sure if I can really comment, but when you are concentrating on the visuals rather than the game itself at times it really is stunning. BUT the game is THE SAME! I know this has been said god knows how many times by people younger and uglier than me but theres no game innovation besides live support. The Kameo demo again looks lovely and is kinda fun but it doesnt make me rub my eyes like Mario 64 did. And the bricks are too shiny damnit. Perfect Dark Zero looks ok. Just downloaded the fight night demo and my god the graphics are good. The characters are amazingly realistic, I mean REALLY realistic.... no zombies here the skin and muscles are so well modelled (scanned?) and rendered (and I LOVE the fact that it was available for worldwide download within hours of Bill G's keynote speech talking about it.... nothing like not having to wait) but the game is soooooooooooooooooooo tedious and oldschool.

So in general.... next-gen infrastructure is a wonderful thing. Next gen graphics are nice and all (although you dont notice em after a few hours of playing) err and hopefully some new games will come out soon that do something a bit different with this stupidly powerful machine. Oh and xbox live achievements is the new pokemon. except you cant trade.....

OpenSteer

2005-12-21T09:38:00.000Z

Opensteer is an open-source c++ library that provides a number of steering behaviours to drive autonomous agents. Created by Craig Reynolds of SCEA research (the original creator of "boids" in 1986, one of the first computer models to demonstrate flocking behaviour), it offers behaviours such as seek, flee, align, and object avoidance. It comes with a very easy-to-use demo framework that allows you to easily develop quick prototypes of ideas.

Toshio Iwai Will Photoshop your Eyes

2005-12-19T11:48:00.000Z

Definitely one of the best news/blog sites I've come across, We Make Money Not Art has more converage of the Digital Arts Festival Tokyo from last week. Among the coverage is a short write up of Toshio Iwai's latest work, Morphovision, a new work exploring his theme of warping reality.

This latest installation gives the user the experience of his vision being warped, not through the use of a screen, but directly affecting a real object he's looking at. This is done by apparently rapidly spinning an object and altering the timing and pattern of light hitting the object. As the light hitting the eyes is slightly delayed when reflected off certain parts of the model, different parts appear at slightly different rotatations, making the model appear melty and soft. Genius.

Follow this Link to a Japanese description.

Magnetic Fluid Art Project

2005-12-19T11:35:00.000Z

Like something out of a science fiction film, these installations created by Sachiko Kodama of the Magnetic Fluid Art Project, are stunning and more than a little unnerving. Using a NASA developed fluid that reacts strongly to magnetic fields, they modify the surrounding magnetic field in response to sound input, to generate patterns that the fluid is bound to follow. The result is a series of stunning organic patterns, reacting to voice, music and ambient sounds, in a form that appears to be a ghibli-esque amorphous lifeform, that performs like a pet for the artists. Mesmerisingly creepy, I'm amazed that this hasnt been used more (although I'm guessing that the kit is probably quite pricey). Would be so great to connect to a webcam input device for an Abyss-style interaction with the blob.

(Found from the ever-amazing We Make Money Not Art)

Computer Vision

2005-12-04T20:48:00.000Z

Been having some fun making a little installation with Duncan that implements some simple computer vision techniques. The installation has a little snow particle simulation combined with webcam input to snow-ify people that happen to pass the window of where its going to be installed. Its been done before, most notably by the incredible folk over at Mine Control, but its been fun to make. It just uses the Vidcapture object to grab frames from any DirectShow device, combined with a Sobel filter to detect the edges, and then the particles move freely unless they drift into an area with sufficient gradient to make them stick. It doesnt have a bias for x or y gradients at the moment, so looks a little odd as snow sticks to vertical surfaces, but a bit more tweaking should getting it looking more realistic.

Magic pengel research

2005-11-22T09:06:00.000Z

Just come across the work of japanese associate professor Takeo Igarashi. Igarashi is the inventor of numerous methods to facilitate creativity via simple intuitive interfaces, including 3D modelling, animation, and curve manipulation. Some of is work is really lovely, reminiscent of moovl by Soda, Mario Paint and Mario Artist, a some of the work thats come out of MIT media lab.It turns out that his modelling interface was used by garakuta studio to create magic pengel and graffiti kingdom. Theres also a bunch of demos to download and play with. Its interesting to see work created in academic circles being picked up by game studios.

(found via Christian's blog)

First lyricography done

2005-11-20T12:24:00.000Z

Well, I've finished the first edition lyricography, with Roni Size and method man. Its an attempt to visually represent, though layout and animation, the lyrics and tone of music. Still not 100% sure bout the choice of music for this one but its a good test for something with really rapid lyrics. The next one will definitely be more chilled! Planning for something with procedurally generated vegetation I hope. Probly gonna hook up with Mr Bone for one soon.

Anyway, download or watch videos of the Lyricography here.

Khronos Projector

2005-11-20T10:16:00.000Z

This is one of the finest and most original ideas for an installation I've seen. Check out the Khronos Projector created for siggraph by some Japanese academics. Its an installation that turns a sequence of video frames into a three-dimensional space-time volume, and allows the user to create ripples through the space by interacting with their hands. I can't say I've ever seen anything like it... its such a natural idea and so beautifully executed, and provides a great parallel to the way that 3 dimensional space and time co-exist in a way that is far easier for the human mind to understand..... genius. Theres even a little processing demo applet here (oh and thanks to nick c for the link)

Lyricography

2005-11-14T21:30:00.000Z

Bit more tweaking and getting the code up to date, I really want to get this released over the next week or so, its just another one of those things thats been hanging around too long..... really can't be bothered to sync up all the rest of the lyrics tho.... so tedious! Plus trying to think of some interesting ways of hooking user-interaction into the visuals rather than leaving it as a self-running thing.

Proto-ICO

2005-11-14T18:50:00.000Z

For those unable to get their hands on the unbelievably desirable limited edition shadow of the colossus box, theres hope for you. Some kind internet users have shared the majority of the videos from the pre-order DVD covering early footage and trailers for ICO and Shadow of the Colossus for those unable to get hold of it. This forum post has links to them all.

For a few good splines

2005-11-14T18:35:00.000Z

Since first playing around with curveTo in Flash 6 and doing the first few Maya NURBS tutorials, I've wanted to have a better understanding of Splines and all things curvy. Heres a horribly complicated explanation that I've not bothered reading, but hey it was one of the first google links when i was looking for a nice spline picture.

Theres a project I'm having a play with in my spare time for which I'm trying to create some bezier terrain surfaces, and the only resources I could find were a few years old. Digging deeper has turned up some interesting bits and pieces tho, and heres a few links for that I found pretty useful. OpenGLs own functions seem pretty useless as you cant get access to the vertex data.

Dynamic Level of Detail Terrrain Rendering with Bezier Patches by Mike Rayner, one of the programmers from the SSX series (currently having a play on PSP right now btw, not a bad title). With most 3d packages being able to edit and create NURBS surfaces. This is very applicable. I'm hoping using beziers might be a good way to procedurally generate interesting shapes and things with a complexity without a lot of work for each creation. but only playing will tell :)

Bezier Curved surfaces. Student work, but includes source for generation of bezier surfaces.

Graphics Gems Repository. Download all the source code for the graphics gems series examples. Gems V, example 4-8 has exactly what I was looking for.... a routine for generating a 3d bezier curve from an unlimted number of control points.

Connections

2005-11-07T20:24:00.000Z

Just read though a fascinating section of Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin, where he talks of the work of Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute, and his theories of networks and connections in terms of assembling complex systems. Using the example of a large number of unconnected buttons on the floor, Gribbin explains what happens when you start to connect the buttons randomly to each other. Whereas you start off with a number of single items or simple pairs, the more connections you make, the more complex the system becomes, and large chains start to join together forming a superstructure that eventually brings all the elements together. This got me thinking about some of the AI examples from "Programming Game AI by Example", where a number of simple inputs connected to a number of simple agents with basic rules can produce some amazingly interesting behaviour. Flocking and predator/prey behaviours can seem enormously complex compared to the actual algorithms in place. (Braitenberg vehicles are a great example of complex behaviour from incredibly simple rules). Sometimes it feels like the art of creating an interesting piece of interaction is careful selection and combination of simple elements to create something that is considerably more than its parts, masking the simplicity. Its also exactly the same phenomenon that appears when looking at emergent gameplay built on a number of simple systems or rules, such as the incredible range and variety of chess strategies. This makes me think perhaps that its almost impossible to sit down and design anything of any complexity from scratch... prototyping is essential and change is inevitible as things will happen along the way that you can never predict that arise from the various systems interacting and connecting with each other. But that said "happy accidents" are something you should expect more than be surprised by!

city crawlers

2005-11-06T12:24:00.000Z

Been having a bit of a play with abstract graphics over the last week or so, and having a think about complex systems built from simplicity, and this is one of the things that came out as a result, a little interactive piece called city crawlers. Download for your PC, or watch a video here.

"That cloud game"

2005-11-05T10:23:00.000Z

Damnit, looks like I'm not the only one when it comes to games called Cloud. Take a look at this if you get the chance, a student project from the guys at the USC Interactive Media division, this is a rather polished and original game, seeing you set as a poorly child in a hospital bed collecting up clouds and reorganising them to make things like lollipops etc. Feels a bit inspired by Katamari, especially the cloud level in the sequel. A bit hammy but definitely impressive for student work. Download the 30mb game here.

A few good books

2005-10-29T10:39:00.000+01:00

Heres a few books I've picked up over the last couple of weeks. All are highly recommended:

Deep Simplicity

Great book covering complexity/chaos theory, both in terms of the history of its invention/discovery as well as a very accessible explanation of the maths and concepts involved. This is something I missed out on at school/uni, so its good to get a proper understanding. Main reasons for buying it were to think about possible applications for AI and procedural art.

Pictures and Words

With a lot of recent dicussions circulating the web discussing the problems involved with striving for photorealism, and the lack of adventure being demonstrated in looking at alternative game aesthetics (such abstraction and symbolic representation), this book does provide a variety of examples of alternatives. Mainly geared towards artists using comic art/illustration to make a point, it provides a number of entertaining examples, including David Shrigley, Mr Clement and more.

Illustration Now!

A much more comprehensive selection of illustrators and styles, this book effectively acts as a catalogue, showcasing a huge amount of talent (and providing contact details for all those on show). Great for picking up and flicking through, looking for inspiration.

Rapid prototyping

2005-10-28T10:56:00.000+01:00

The guys from the Experimental Gameplay Project have a write up of their experiences at gamasutra here. Part of a course at Carnegie Mellon University, the challenge they were set (or set themselves?) was for each of them (there were 4 in total) to create a brand new game every week, including all art/sound/coding. Often based around a single theme (such as vegetation, gravity), they found that the restrictions they set themselves fueled their creativity.

Theres some cracking games there, and much of their philosophy echoes that of IDEO's approach to prototyping (read about it in their book "The Art of Innovation"), particularly the importance of embracing failure and being able to let go of things that you've worked on rather than try to force them to completion. Also interesting was their mention of how their collaboration methods, formation of ideas and the value of brainstorms.

Videogame aesthetics

2005-10-10T17:15:00.000+01:00

I've just finished reading the online article "Videogame Aesthetics : We're all going to Die!" by David Hayward, and highly recommend taking a look. Its an excellent examination of the space of visual representation of games, making a direct reference to Scott McCloud's picture plane system of dividing visual representation into a triangle with three poles: abstraction, iconography, and photo-realism. Hayward highlights the industry's struggle and obsession with photo-realism, but points out the huge opportunities there are for those willing to explore the undiscovered country towards abstraction and iconography. Perhaps the reward may not be commercial success immediately, but for those with the time, and inclination, there is a vast creative landscape to be conquered. Citing references such as Shadow of the Colussus, obviously Rez, Killer 7, Darwinia, and Okami, he points out the number of developers that are willing to brave it into these areas, Columbus style, while also making the observation that this may be the only way some developers will survive, given the vast costs involved in making near-photo-realistic art assets.

On a side note, I've been playing Sly 3 : Honor among thieves, and absolutely loving it. I have such a soft spot for the Sly games, in terms of personality, dialogue, game structure/variety and environment design. While playing through, it really struck me how close they've got visually to true cartoon aesthetic. The level of detail, the texturing, the voice acting, dialogue, and especially the animation have really got it right. It did get me wondering what could be improved on the next generation of hardware? Theres some obvious things, such as curves are still relatively angular, and perhaps the environments and characters could have a little bit more detail, but in general adding too much more detail would detract from the aesthetic. Could this mean that art asset generation for cartoon games has peaked? Again, this could be the way forward for companies that don't want to go down the megastudio route. Anyway, play Sly 3, its fantastic.

Scale

2005-09-29T21:16:00.000+01:00

I've been reading the throughly engrossing A Brief History of nearly everything by Bill Bryson, and its set my mind free-wheeling back to afternoons sitting on wooden stools in heavy blazers trying to bend my head round curiously abstract concepts while trying to avoid getting caught spraying hydrochloric acid on friends eyes through a bunsen burner.

Anyway one of the things that utterly terrifies me is the sense of scale you are dealing with in the universe. From the subatomic particle level to the intergalactic level, when comparing these sizes to the everyday, its nearly impossible to get any comprehension of the big picture. This in turn got me thinking about the presentation of scale within games and other interactive systems. These kind of systems could provide the ability to present scale in a way that helps our poor heads really fathom whats going on. I guess the most recent attempt to present continuous content over a wide range of scales would be Google Earth. I love google earth. If I had had access to this as a child, I would probably have had a far greater understanding of where things are. Its actually FUN to move around the world, zooming in, finding where you live, where you grew up, how many shops sell pork within 20 yards of oxford circus etc. Because the content is displayed continously, you can relate street to street, town to town, county to county, country to country, contintent to continent in a seamless manner that really gives you an overall understanding that is lost when trying to combine understanding using seperate mediums such as an A-Z, Atlas and globe.

This isnt the first time I've been given the opportunity to explore from the very small to the very large in such a manner. I remember the first time playing Peter Molyneux's Black and White. Zooming in to see invidivual faces, and then zooming out to see the entire planet was an amazing sensation. And now Mr Molyneux plans on showing off further, with Black and white 2 allowing you to zoom in to INDIVIDUAL ANTS. I hate ants (i seem to attract ants like candyman attracts flies... still no idea why), but its a nice idea. This kind of superhuman ability to massively zoom in and out is something you can only do in interactive systems and is real fun.

Will Wright, perhaps a bit threatened by Peter's performance, decided to go coder hunting in finland, obviously recruiting some insane talent to help him recreate his next visionary title "Spore". Have a look at his presentation here. Not content with ants to countries, he is now attempting to have a scale range from the cellular to the galactic (check out the vid.... you can scale out from creature level to at least solar system level continuosly). And it seems to work remarkably well. Obviously theres an insane amount of artwork that needs to be used but by using procedural generation techniques this doesnt need to be created manually. One particularly interesting thing though is that with this range of scale, you have numerous different systems that interoperate with each other (eg you have personal combat interacting with social groups, interacting with inter-tribe warfare), so theres an insane amount of emergent complexity.

Of course, for sheer enjoyment of change in scale, nothing beats Katamari Damacy, where not only your viewing perspective changes scale but also your AVATAR! Never played a game where you can wreck such pleasant revenge on a bloody cat that kept knocking you about when tiny. (never picked up the taj mahal and eiffel tour before either i guess).

Mystery future eyetoy device

2005-09-28T21:13:00.000+01:00

ive had my interest piqued by this post by nr (mrs?) fort90. no one told me the future was already here

Sketchup

2005-09-26T21:47:00.000+01:00

If you've not had a chance to play with Sketchup, I'd strongly recommend it. Its very easy to use (theres a free trial too), and this would definitely appeal for someone relatively new to 3d. The premise is a 3D sketching tool. Its essentially a tool for blocking out 3d layouts. Originally geared towards the architectural market, its now making headway into the the level designers toolbox. What really sets it apart is the easy ability to draw on existing surfaces (circles, squares and polygons) and the push/pull tool that massively simplifies creating booleans. It also exports to 3DS and OBJ formats, and produces a nice clean set of UVS, giving you the perfect point to tidy the mesh up, texture properly and polish.

Systems

2005-09-26T20:13:00.000+01:00

Been having a think (following up from a previous post) about the kind of systems that are in place in interactive pieces (from games, toys, tools, educational lessons, er....). Thought I might have a play listing as many as possible (to expand on further) as it might provoke a few ideas. Hopefully theres a few systems that havent been explored that might lead to some form of innovation. I guess they all have to be systems that allow for some form of conflict.

So, without further ado.... a list of systems and simulations

Logic - Sudoku
Physics - Half life 2, Scorched Earth, any Golf game
Sports - could this be a special case?
Verbal - Word search, crossword
Urban simulation - Sim City
Personality - The sims
Social groups (small scale) - Friendships, bridge clubs etc - err DOA beach volleyball?
Social groups (medium scale) - Local and national organisations, interest groups
Social groups (large scale) - Politcal organisations, international organisations
Business and economics
Dating - numerous pervy japanese titles
Battle (small scale) - SFII, Most beat em ups
Battle (medium scale) - Most tactical titles, squad based titles
Battle (large scale) - RTS, Epic war-games
Weather systems - wow. be in control of air pressure... create sunny weather, hurricanes, cyclones etc
Gardens - now we're talking! recreate the blue peter garden, fill the bird feeders... how relaxing
Animals - Cross-species competition, breeding etc
Evolution - wasnt this done somewhere?
Creative success? - reputation as viewed by critics of your work?
Parenthood
Teaching, mentor/student relationship
Fire - how it spreads
Mixing of liquids
Resource collection of animals - Bees pollination

Shadow of the Colossus (And Wanda)

2005-09-26T16:59:00.000+01:00

Thers a nice little feature on 1up covering the making of Shadow of the collosus. One of the things that really struck me was the ambiguity of the main characters motives. As the article mentions:

Throughout this process, though, it slowly but surely begins to dawn on you that these giants have done nothing to harm you. And as you grab them by their fur while you climb their backs and rest on the bizarre platforms jutting out of their bodies, before ultimately finding their exposed weakness (typically a glowing spot on their head) and driving your sword into their brain, you realize in an odd way that what you're doing isn't as chivalrous and magnificent as you thought it would be when you first set out.

How refreshing. This (and Fahrenheit) seems to be adopting some more subtle storytelling techniques and moving away from simple good/evil clean-cut methods.

Nintendo... the apple of videogames?

2005-09-25T12:31:00.000+01:00

Much as I'd like to spend most of the day writing about the possibilites of the nintendo controller, one of the most striking trends is how inspired the controller design appears to be from Apple's process of interface design for their products. The way that Apple took the mp3 player, subtracted the superflous and streamlined the interface by selectively integrating functions, Nintendo seem to have done exactly the same. What is particularly impressive though, is that while the ipod was effectively a far better device for doing exactly the same thing, Nintendo's controller simulatenously provides massively enhanced functionality with its ability to capture gesture, so the resulting device provides ipod-like ease of use and accessibility while providing the core gamer with an entirely new model for video-game interaction and hence new game experiences.....genius.

Rise of the boutique development team

2005-09-25T12:00:00.000+01:00

One of the most enouraging trends that seems to be becoming more apparent over the last year or so is that a viable alternative to the predicted 100-strong teams of the next-generation seems to be emerging. One shining example is one of the most interesting titles to emerge from this years TGS, Loco Roco . Created by an 8-10 strong team (including dev-blogger greggman ),
this title was created in only 4 months preproduction and 4 months full-scale production, from initial concept from 1 game designer, prototyped by a single programmer. This type of development is significant for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the small budget allows far greater risks to be taken than with other titles... if the game doesnt cut it, theres not a huge amount at stake if it does need to be cancelled. This stimulates experimentation and innovation. Secondly, the small team size means that everyone involved, not only gets input into many aspects of the game (encouraging cross-pollinisation of ideas across different disciplines), but they also have a strong sense of ownership... they can really say "I made that... I created that...", which increases morale and encourages great work.

This formula seems to be exclusive to the handheld console market (titles such as brain training, ouendan) and the PC Indy market (such as gish, which admittedly bears a strong resemblance to Loco Roco...) but one of the really encouraging aspects of the next-generation is the opportunity for a network distribution channel (as flirted with in xbox live arcade), allowing companies to massively cut their distribution cost. This is something strongly supported by Greg Costikan in his recent rant, and brings back personal recommendation and word of mouth as a major factor in games sales (with any luck).

This could eventually lead to a new period of innovation as ideas and creativity become highly valued and sought after to differentiate titles from the glut of genericism. Making things easy for potential new developers is obviously key (and is something that Satoru Iwata seems to encourage going by his keynote at TGS).

The Burnout experience

2005-09-25T11:20:00.000+01:00

Well its that Burnout time of year. This time, however, beyond the usual iteration on PS2 and Xbox (is there a gamecube version this year?) theres also the release of Burnout legends on PSP (and a DS version I believe, but dont know much about this one).

I've spent the last couple of days with both of them (admittedly more with the PS2 iteration), and while I've thoroughly loved the home version (although perhaps the road-rage Moses feature is a little bizarre) the PSP version does really feel like its missing something. I was really looking forward to this on the PSP, but now that I've taken it for a spin, it seems to be a classic example of creating whats possible (basically a slightly inferior PS2 port) rather than creating a tailor made game for the platform. While in basic form, its the same game, theres something really missing that detracts from the experience. Burnout for me is the extreme feeling of speed, its a really visceral title. Its frantic and all about trying to react to things flying at you at an insane pace. Your eyes focussed on a pinpoint area on the screen as it grows into obstacles, targets etc. It feels more shoot-em-up than driving game. But the PSP title, presumably due to technical limitations of porting the title, has had to drop some of the things that made the experience what it is. Firstly they've dropped the framerate from 60FPS to 30FPS. This is a *shocking* mistake. It totally trashes the feeling of speed as you dont have the same amount of information being chucked into your eyes, and it really breaks the connection with the screen for a game like this that is so much about the senses. Secondly, they've got rid of the blur effect when you are boosting. subtle as it is, it really triggers something in your perception, to tell you YOU ARE GOING FAST. With both these changes, its really lost it for me, and taken burnout legends down to a fairly standard battle racing game.

Games meets Interaction design

2005-09-25T10:23:00.000+01:00

I was fortunate enough to attend a seminar as part of the london design festival, the primary focus of which was to examine the disciplines of interaction design and games design, and to see where there is an intersection, what opportunities there are for cross-pollination of ideas. The event comprised two presentations, one from Ben Cerveny which looks like it might have been an adaptation from his reboot presentation "At play in the garden" . Ben began by examining the process of play, proposing (IIRC) that interaction is a subset of play, and by describing the components that comprise any given interaction. It was a fascinating presentation, Ben is a fast talker! Wish I'd taken some notes now, admittedly.

The second presentation was from from Durrell Bishop, a partner in LuckyBite , (who appear to be based about 2 minutes away from my house). Durrell's background seems to be more focussed on the physical aspects of interaction design as opposed to screen based, and he has been a senior tutor on the interaction design course at the rca . He gave several examples of his work, and some of the work of his students (a lovely finger puppets example from Philip Worthington . Check out the lineriders example too. v tasty ).

The ringleader for the event was Nico MacDonald , who did an excellent job of fielding some disparate and passionate contributions from the presenters and audience. The majority of the audience was from the interaction design field (as opposed to games) and there was definitely a feeling that they wanted to get involved in the game design process and that they felt shut out somehow. Some examples of the crossover of interaction design companies with game creation came with the use of amberlight to tune the experience of both eyetoy play and singstar. I'd argue that interaction design is not ignored or excluded by game creators, but that interaction design is implicitly part of game design. Game designers HAVE to have an indepth and intimate understanding of interaction design for the player to have a meaningful experience without the awkwardness and barriers associated with bad interaction design. I guess however their knowledge is less formalised than that of a pure interaction designer.

All in all, a valuable event, look forward to the next talk "Point and schtick : can interactivity make you laugh?" on October 20th.

Tokyo glow go-go

2005-09-24T15:17:00.000+01:00

Not remotely up to date, but want to play with images now i can stick em on the blog. this is from roppongi hills in tokyo, taken around a year and a half ago. its a very tasty mega-lcd style display of impressive scale. what the numbers represent is not apparent immediately, but after a while i reckon me and kate cracked it...... it seems to be from the lifts in the complex

First blog

2005-09-24T15:04:00.000+01:00

Well I was getting *fed up* with valuehost's appalling service, so it was about time to move over to something else. Might make sense doing it in a proper blog service rather than that flash one I'd knocked up before. i'll probably publish over to flash in the long run but in the meantime, this should be fine. plus the added bonus of the ability to add comments, nice easy RSS support amonst the other things. and its hopefully never going to go down :)

god that was tedious. finally moved over all the posts from my old system to blogger. definitely looking forward to putting a lot more images on this now. hopefully will break up my hideously monotonous writing style ;)

Style

2005-09-11T18:44:00.001+01:00

Saw Sin City this afternoon (totally loved it) and it got me thinking a bit about the relationship between style, maturity of form, target audience and marketing. david jaffe had a bit of a discussion about the need for style to involve an audience on his blog recently, but how far can you deviate from the current standard expectations of game graphical style and still be able to sell in any quantities? i guess theres a few style/setting/presentation types that have an established audience (modern photorealism, whimsical fantasy, dark science fiction, exaggerated cartoon), but if someone was to release a game that goes as far stylistically as sin city, would people leave it alone on the shelf? im guessing the relatively poor success rate for rez, killer 7, and XIII do suggest that they're harder to sell. could this because of a lack of an establishment for critical analysis of games? im looking forward to seeing how well everyone loves katamari damacy sells in europe. PLEASE let them back it up with a decent marketing campaign.

Assembling a game engine together

2005-09-11T18:44:00.000+01:00

I've finally pieced together some of the major ingredients i've needed for a while to make what I hope will be a nice engine for rapid prototyping of ideas. take one bit Collada renderer (for importing models and animation created in maya), add one bit Novodex physics engine and spread liberally with SDL (for managing windows, initialising opengl, joypad input, sound etc etc). It was a bit of a headache to be fair, and has certainly forced me to review my knowledge of c++! but should form the basis for a couple of ideas ive wanted to try out that have been beyond the scope of virtools or director. ive got a rough playaround version of mott and baileys working, letting you fire cannon balls to smash down castles :) now the fun bit begins!!

LOST

2005-09-04T18:44:00.000+01:00

I've just finished watching the first series of lost. and i can honestly say that i despise it. i have never felt so utterly cheated by a tv series in all my life, its SHIT. what portrays itself as an intriguing mystery suspense series with supernatural flavours (ala twin peaks) is nothing more than a collection of badly written tv minidramas about a bunch of whinging self-obsessed totally unlikable 2-dimensional losers (with the exception of charlie), sewn together into a soap opera, dragging the audience along like a stubborn puppy, with the promise of something interesting happening THAT NEVER DOES. even the season finale shows nothing of any interest. you CANT make series like that! you arouse the interest of the audience by portraying it as one genre, while feeding them a bad example of a genre they are less likely to be fans of.

i think charlie brooker summed it up best.

Kandinksy

2005-09-04T18:43:00.002+01:00

Was playing rez through again the other day, looking for inspiration on how to do abstract environments and visuals tastefully (or perhaps looking for ideas to steal), and thought it might be time to join the kandinsky name-checking mass of game designers and follow up on the ending tag-line ("dedicated to the creative soul of kandiksy"). Not really paid much eye-time to the guy before but was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of similarities between the work in this rather tasty portfolio and the work of
scottish eduardo paolozzi, whose "turing series" work i fell in love with at the tate modern. (also tagentially tried to follow up on wittgenstein, another inspiration for paolozzi work). anyway, the real attraction for me was the fact that the paintings to seem to take representational form of behavioural and dynamic systems (things like physics engines, character animation etc). there seems to be a direct link in my head somewhere between what he painted and the way that certain things behave. so whacked a few on the wall to stare at when my mind has turned to dirge.

also came across the rather nice fort90 blog, and while there looking for information on den-sen (a game seemingly about a girl flying round the power cables of japan on a coat hanger doing god-knows-what), apparently one of prince of game design keita takahashi's favourite games, despite having never been released) i came across these early prototype videos of k-project (that evolved into rez...k stands for kandinksy). anyway ive mirrored them here to deliberately flaunt copyright.

k-project prototype 1

k-project prototype 2

k-project prototype 3

Yet more katamari worship

2005-09-04T18:43:00.001+01:00

Takahashi's Keynote speech from GDCE written up by Kieron Gillen.

Wonderland

2005-09-04T18:43:00.000+01:00

I'm really enjoying Alice's blog, wonderland. always a great read

More books and pieces

2005-09-04T18:42:00.001+01:00

Been reading through a few more books for general inspiration and interest. I'd definitely recommend Burton on Burton, covering (obviously) tim burtons career up to sleepy hollow, it takes the form of an extended interview, split into different films or sections of his career. highlights are definitely coverage of his work on edward scissorhands, his early work at disney and working on vincent (his first short and wonderfully personal), the pee-wee herman film (no idea this was burton!) and his general attitude to working and the role of creator in general. If anything it has reassured me that a high level of drawing skill is no essential to convey character, idea or even mood. it seems just enough skill to express yourself is required, not photorealism. that said, burtons drawings are very very charming.

Also picked up the Art of howls moving castle (stunning as always).

Keita Takahashi continues to blow my mind

2005-09-04T18:42:00.000+01:00

Read his cat-peripheral-based solution to the granny game design challenge at GDCE here

More Toshio Iwai

2005-08-07T18:41:00.001+01:00

Another collaboration for Mr Iwai, this time with Yamaha, continuing with his themes of easy to learn musical interfaces and the synaesthetic principles of combining light and sound. Theres a bit more info on his siggraph session here.

Story

2005-08-07T18:41:00.000+01:00

Finally wrapped up reading Story by Robert McKee (as mentioned earlier). Great book. made me feel utterly clueless to any notion of what story is, and how stories are crafted, as well as things that seem so obvious now (such as the nature of the inspiration for writing dramatic fiction versus comic fiction). i did find it hard work, but i guess thats always the way when reading about something you know so little about, but do now feel that i have at least a basic understanding of the form, which will help no end in looking at how narrative can feed into interactive systems. the main message that really made an impression is that the common ground between games and story is conflict and quite how central it is to both.

Fahrenheit

2005-07-30T18:41:00.000+01:00

Just been playing the fahrenheit demo (available as a torrent from eurogamer here. Its a very fresh experience. As well as being a highly polished title, theres a number of really unique aspects in its design. Seemingly billed as an interactive narrative, the game is presents you almost as the director/storyteller, and is self-aware (the director introduces the game himself at the beginning). It throws you right in at the deepend. You've just commited a murder while in a trance produced by an unknown antagonist and have to clean up and get out of there as soon as possible. Plays like an adventure game but a little higher paced. Every scene can pan out in a number of different ways depending on your actions, and the use of split screen really adds to the pressure as you have to react and make decisions in a limited time. Its borrowed heavily from film, in terms of cinematography, writing, style and the wonderful music from Angelo Bandalamenti (of twin peaks and most lynch music fame). Significantly, it is truly engaging on an emotional level. Perhaps not as much as if it had been a film but impressive nonetheless

Lyricography

2005-07-26T18:40:00.000+01:00

Something ive been playing with over a couple of evenings is ways of representing music lyrically. walking around with ipod, like 90% of all londoners now it seems, one thing that really hits me is how differently lyrics might be visually represented from artist to artist, track to track. ive been meaning to write a little opengl/c++ text rendering engine for a while, and thought id plug in some lyrics and sync it up to some music. its really early work so far, with only a couple of effects on the text/camera and some blocks that look pointless and shit. anyhow, heres a quick vid.

What makes up a game? Where could game innovation lie?

2005-07-25T18:39:00.001+01:00

been thinking a bit about what ultimately constitutes the structure of a game. not in terms of its artistic content, storyline, aesthetic etc but in terms of the bare parts of the interactive system. So heres my definition! hopefully ive not subconciously robbed this from somewhere else (although it is more than likely)

A game consists of a number of elements and systems that act upon these elements. These elements can consist of assets (passive elements) or agents (active elements). Each of these elements can have a number of attributes that affect their behaviour within the active systems. All games involve changing the value of these attributes or the attributes of the systems, with the goal of the elements being configured for a goal state. The attributes are modified by the player using one or more verbs. The final part is the input device allowing expressions of these verbs.

So for example in pong, you have 5 elements - the top wall, the bottom wall, the left bat, the right bat, and the ball. The bats and the ball are active elements. The walls are passive. The goal state is to get the ball past the opponents bat. The verbs you are able to use are to modify the height of the bat directly. The game system dictates how the ball behaves when it interacts with other elements. There is also an AI system controlling the opponent (unless also controlled by a human).

Or in a simple platform game you have your character and a number of AI controlled enemies (the active elements). You have a number of pickups and the environment elements (the passive elements). The verbs available to the player are apply a force to the left and right of the hero character, or apply a jumping force. The goal state is to get the player to a specific location. The systems in place are a general collision system restricting movement, gravity, and AI systems for each enemy.

So, given that those are the bare parts of games where can innovation lie? well i guess you could say:

Types of element
Types of simulation relating to gameplay (advanced AI as seen in Halo, advanced physics as seen in Half life 2, metaballs simulation in mercury, water/wave dynamics simulation in wave race)
Types of verb available to the player (rolling-collecting in katamari damacy, assigning creature behaviour in lemmings, swinging off buildings in spiderman 2, running up walls in PoP, holding hands in ICO)
Input device/method (eg Eyetoy, konga drums, gesture recognition in black and white)

Of course combinations of many different things is also innovation but this has helped me isolate areas for consideration for innovation and helped me to try think about the bare bricks of games .

My name in a game manual!

2005-07-25T18:39:00.000+01:00

Just seen the manual for God of war, and seen my name in the manual for Sony Europe staff, for my role as interactive developer/designer for the God of war site. The site was quick to develop (about 3 weeks work, including the design, build, and 3d work, although we did have the benefit of being able to modify and use all the original game assets!) and although could have been better (bit more polish and a proper introduction to kratos and the narrative) im pretty happy with what i managed to do. more to the point tho, its awesome seeing my name in the manual :)

Tim Burton

2005-07-23T18:38:00.000+01:00

Theres a wonderfully charming interview with Tim Burton on the guardian film site. his awkwardness and modesty are so likable. reading the article definitely makes me realise how much of my interests stem from story and the creation of interesting characters and worlds, as well as interaction and game design. whether or not this is purely as a result of recent reading and marks a burgeoning curiosity or whether its something thats alsways been there, im not sure. Also just seen that Amazon has an interesting book for sale comprising an extended interview, entitled Burton on Burton.

Comics and Sequential Art

2005-07-15T18:38:00.000+01:00

Phew. One more to read, this time a book by Will Eisner, entitled "Comics and Sequential art". I got put onto Will Eisner by a young lady called Michelle (if memory served) who took a life drawing for animation class at London Studio. She brought the book in and it was truly inspiring. Drawing filled with expression, almost appearing as its animating even when static. Anyway, this is a book he wrote as a companion to a course he holds at NYU Visual arts school, examining the form of comic books, the combination of words, graphic design and illustration. Im hoping it will give me a bit of a hand getting to grips with storyboarding and visual storytelling.

Screenwriting

2005-07-15T18:37:00.001+01:00

I've been reading a few books on story structure and how it can be applied to interactive narrative, but speaking to a mate on holiday (who works closely with the film industry), he mentioned Story by Robert McKee. Meant to be THE book to read on the subject, so im hoping to get a much deeper understanding in the form and the techniques involved in the creation of compelling characters and weaving a narrative that can touch its audience.

Seriously slack. some books to read:

2005-07-15T18:37:00.000+01:00

What a hectic month. sadly no updates, but i've been up to a lot. Went to Malta on the SCEE company conference for four days of heavy drinking and a lot of early starts for sessions (and some real good sessions there were). Brass bands, fire jugglers, catamarans and phil harrison covered in plastic ducks were among the highlights (plus the unbelievable PS3 footage). This was followed for Kate's sis' fiance's stag do in budapest (more boozing, 4 airports in 24 hours was a real pain), and finally in the hot, expensive and surreal barbados for a mate's wedding. phew. anyway back in the uk, and ready to learn a lot more after a number of different points of inspiration.
Anyway, heres a few books ive been reading. Discovered Tom Robbins, now added as a one of my new authors to obsess about. Over the past month I've read a couple of his books, Another Roadside Attraction - a jungle king, his clairvoyant wife, a maverick genius and the baboon king steal the body of jesus and start a roadside zoo. its awesome. and also Fierce invalids home from hot climates - a CIA agent buddhist genius with a mind of his own is trapped in a wheelchair in supernatural circumstances and attempts to piece together the spiritual future of humanity. prose without compare, its well worth a read.
Also picked up the da vinci code and i thought id write a bit about the possibilities of adapting it as a game based upon the story structure and the events that happen within. ive made a few notes so i'll try and get them posted soon.

Jeffrey Ventrella

2005-06-06T18:36:00.000+01:00

A hugely enjoyable and eclectic range of ideas, interactive sketches and essays can be found on http://www.ventrella.com. Found from the always excellent Hi-Res! Feed.

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat

2005-05-23T18:36:00.000+01:00

Ive been doing a bit of trade in to pick up a few games that I'd been meaning to play but never got round to. The last couple are Metoid Prime 2 (which ive not started playing yet) and donkey kong jungle beat.
this is quite a remarkable achievement. take a peripheral apparently designed around one activity (err bongo drumming) and somehow create an interaction model to allow it to control an incredibly intuitive, deep and instantly enjoyable platform game. not to sound like a nintendo fanboy, but this is the reason i love nintendo. pure innovation, huge amounts of invention and creativity in all aspects of the game, but built on very solid ground of gameplay concepts honed over the past 20 years or so. it feels weirdly like a sonic game in the sense of flow and timing you need to get round the levels and pull off decent combos, and the tactile sensation of using the drums to pull off moves really draws you into the game (especially when using the bongos to strike or smack rival monkeys in the face). great fun and only 33 quid with bongos at play.com, you cant go wrong.

Everybody loves takahashi

2005-05-15T18:35:00.001+01:00

The gdctv sessions continue with the awesome keita takahashi and his session "Rolling the Dice - The Risks and Rewards of Developing Katamari Damacy"

Creating the art of the game

2005-05-15T18:35:00.000+01:00

I finished this book last weekend. its a quick read, and at quite an introductory level, but its definitely a good overview of a lot of the aspects of creating game art. avoiding anything to do with character rigging and animation, it concentrates mostly on environments, and core components such as polygon modelling, creating textures from photos, vertex lighting, lightmapping and a lot of other stuff. the chapter on advanced texturing was a good read, something id not really read much about anywhere else, really going into detail about a lot of photoshop tricks to add character and inviduality to your textures. some of the applications of vertex colour were also pretty interesting.

The wonderful Tim Shafer

2005-05-15T18:34:00.000+01:00

I've been playing psychonauts on import after hearing such encouraging praise from the noisy buzz of the internets mouth. at first i have to admit i thought it looked dead dodgy, that the characters were original but the interaction and game structure looked very derivative, but by the time i got to the lungfish level i could not believe how wrong i was. the funniest game i can remember playing for a long time.
anyway, theres an interview with tim schafer, the president of doublefine (developers of psychonauts) you can see online here.

Behind the scenes of Rez

2005-05-08T18:34:00.000+01:00

Relatively short article at Gamasutra interviewing the only western game artist working at uga on rez. gives some interesting perspectives on the games creation.

Peter Molyneux @ GDC

2005-05-07T18:33:00.001+01:00

Watch the "Next Generation Game Design" session from GDC online here. Essentially its a walkthrough of current lionhead projects (and a bit of r&d at the end), but of particular interest is the focus on usability and simplicity of user interface design to appeal to a more casual audience, the briefly touched upon notion of morphable gameplay and the idea of playing with peoples perception of reality in the alice-in-wonderland like demo towards the end.

Creative play

2005-05-07T18:33:00.000+01:00

Ernest Adams' regular column on gamasutra this month features a discussion of various forms of creative play and their significance within game design. have a look.

Alias R&D

2005-05-03T18:32:00.000+01:00

I came across an old Alias|Wavefront promotional CD that covered their research from 1995-2000. Quite a lot has made it into products (such as fluid effects and paint effects) but theres a lot of quite out there stuff, particularly some ingenious use of "tape-drawing" systems nabbed from car designers and some great two handed input methods. Unfortunately there doesnt seem to be much on the alias site anymore, but the chief scientist at the time (who has now left) has his own site, so go check out Bill Buxton.

Sad news from Oddworld

2005-04-17T18:32:00.000+01:00

After the stunning strangers wrath, it is a sad thing to see oddworld inhabitants leaving the games industry. such a unique creative force is rare and it is a true shame that lorne lanning feels that there is no room for companies of this nature to propser within the industry. more discussion from numerous corners does suggest a fragmentation of the games industry into different strands, from real casual gaming ala nintendogs, singstar etc through to indie gaming ala katamari, through to the blockbuster event titles like halo 2.

Character and world creation

2005-04-13T18:31:00.000+01:00

Couple of nice writeups from DICE by gamespy. Tim Schaefer (creator of day of the tentacle, full throttle, grim fandango) talking about taking risks and how he creates worls. Plus the legendary Stan Lee on character creation.

Learning to draw

2005-04-11T18:31:00.000+01:00

Been attending life drawing classes at Sony, but my drawing skills are so dreadful (especially compared to the amazing abilities of the full-time artists working in london studio) that i've been trying to improve in my spare time a bit.
A book called Drawing on the right side of the brain has been useful in giving me a really basic understanding of the elements of drawing, ways to think about edges, shading, proportion, negative space.
I've also come across a number of different resources online that have been excellent. Save Loomis is a site dedicated to preserving the art teaching resources from the 40's written by Andrew Loomis. Some of them are really fantastic and you can download them in pdf form or browse online. Secondly Conceptarg.org is a real inspiration, showing how vivid and varied the imaginations of concept artists can be.

Braitenberg Vehicles

2005-03-31T19:30:00.000+01:00

Something I meant to post ages ago, this is something I came across for the first time in the Interactive Storytelling book by Glassner. Its an excellent example of life-like behaviour being exhibited by simple systems, describing a setup of a car fitted with light sensors and motors and how they can demonstrate definable characteristics with almost no complexity. Definitely want to build a little simulator for this sometime.
Its made be want to get Programming Game AI by Example, which is meant to be a fantastic book on the subject.

mmm... mental ray

2005-03-31T19:29:00.000+01:00

starting to get to grips with mental ray a bit better thanks to a bunch of tutorials. finally properly understand final gather, global illumination, and image based lighting through HDRI. been having a bit of a play with the emily and randolph setup (theres a new thumbnail there). also just picked up on the feature in Maya that lets you convert a paint effect tree/shrub into a set of polygons if it has "mesh" in the name. hey presto, easy trees, flowers etc. generates about a billion polygons tho.

Housekeeping

2005-03-30T19:29:00.000+01:00

Been doing a bit of tidying up of the site. finally added the ability to go back to old news posts, so you can go back about a year. mainly did this cos i couldnt be arsed going through phpmyadmin to find old posts i made ages ago.
ive uploaded a couple of "lost" projects that seem to have been taken down, roadies and the ratchet and clank viral, just so they are still online somewhere, and ive added a new page for tunnel tap, so ive got somewhere to put progress.
there is a comments system thats kinda built but its a load of hassle to get finished off, so i dont have time tonight but will definitely add it soon.

ideas coming together

2005-03-29T19:29:00.000+01:00

voodoo ray has finally got some decent level designed for it and is starting to feel fun. seems like that first level design is the hardest bit of creating a new game, to create that first experience that captures the challenges, the interaction model and the essence of the game. still looks like crap but i think its solid ground to build on :) tunnel tap is the latest thing im looking at, inspired by a bit of toshio iwai, trying to stick bits of otocky, reason, rez, tempest and jeff minter inspiration into a sandwich, hope it tastes ok. even if it doesnt, its interesting learning. came across the wonderful zynaddsubfx as part of research, its a great open source software synthesizer, bit more than i need but all learning is good eh?