Stray Dog Strut

Best laid plans and all that..well, the project has started: I’m almost halfway through development of one of the first games, and in just over 2 hours, so a good start. But the aforementioned trip home is looming so i’ll have to put it on hold for now.

I’ll use the break to focus on my dissertation, which sorely needs attention, and possibly make paper prototypes of a couple of the games.

In other news, I recently picked up the complete Death Note anime series for a respectable £35, so i’ll be watching that with Fallingstar in Scotland. I’ve also been chilling out to the Cowboy Bebop O.S.T. 1 album that I also bought recently, but more detailed discussion on that later.

Have a good week everyone.

One of my biggest failings when it comes to study is the efficiency of my working process. Nearly every single creative coursework submission i’ve handed in over the past three years has had trouble meeting the deadline. I undertake projects that are far too ambitious given the timescale and I get so involved in the process that I regularly fail to heed the warnings of an approaching deadline. Well, on the one hand it’s true that you can’t schedule creativity, but needs must so now I plan to do something about it.

One of the sites I enjoy giving the occasional glance is Three Hundred Mechanics by Sean Howard, aka Squidi. He challenged himself to come up with a new game idea or gameplay mechanic once a day for 300 days. He stopped around 50 but still updates occasionally (currently up to #106).

Inspired by his project, i’m proposing The 24 Hour Project. The idea is simple: I will try to create a different game within each 24 hours for a period of seven days. These seven games will each have to fit a specific genre and can be created in any order:

1) Platformer

2) Interactive Fiction

3) Role Playing Game

4) Shoot Em Up

5) First Person Shooter

6) Strategy

7) Puzzle

Where possible, these games will all be created using Unity3d (except of course the IF which will be easier created using Inform7), and the genre definitions are quite flexible. What I mean by this is, it will be necessary to capture the essence of that genre rather than having to create a full and complete game. So, for example, the RPG will not need to be fully developed, but should probably include some kind of party combat scenario at least. Likewise, it would be incredibly difficult to create a Real Time Strategy for the strategy game given my inexperience with pathfinding, therefore this is more likely to be a turn-based strategy in the form of something like Risk.

The focus is on content rather than quality, therefore different graphical approaches can be employed as appropriate, most likely minimal style in most cases. The 24 hours need not be consecutive, although these shouldn’t be spread over more than three days. Furthermore, it may be that a game is developed in less than 24 hours and in this case it will be submitted online. However, to be considered complete, each mini game will have to meet three requirements:

1) Have a clear goal

2) Have a system of definable rules

3) Involve conflict

The first is to ensure that I don’t end up creating an entertaining sandbox utility rather than a game, while the second is somewhat inevitable but should be considered during design. For the third, I’m really thinking of conflict in the narrative sense: as an obstacle or obstacles to be overcome by the player. This may simply be the environment itself, as in the case of a platformer, or it could be an actual enemy, as in the case of the first person shooter. These conditions are very loosely based on Salen and Zimmerman’s definition of a game in Rules of Play (2003):

“a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003: 96)

however similar definitions involving ‘rules’ and ‘objectives’ can also be found elsewhere. An interesting discussion on the definition of games by Jesper Juul can be found here.

I have no doubt that this project will be incredibly difficult! For starters, I will have to think fast in terms of generating ideas for each genre. I already have a few ideas, but i’m deliberately avoiding exploring them further until I sit down to make that particular game. There will also no doubt be serious technical skills required, not least given my limited experience with Unity3d itself, but circumventing major problems (read: knowledge gaps) will be part of the challenge.

I should also point out that i’m deliberately not specifying that these games be original. While I always try to put my own touches into every project I undertake, i’ll be honest and say that i’m running on empty at the moment. Hopefully this project will rejuvenate my imagination and some originality will find its way in there, but no promises!

The only slight hiccup in my plans is my return home to Scotland for a week on Monday. I won’t have access to Unity during this period so i’m considering paper prototyping the IF at least. Before then, i’m hoping to have at least one game completed but we’ll see how it goes.

Bonne chance!

Sorry for my absence of late, i’ve had lots of ideas for posts but none of the energy needed to write them up. Must try harder.

So, what’s been happening? Well for starters Christmas came and went rather quickly. We were without heating for a week up until Christmas due to a problem with the gas main. A burst water pipe got into the system and about 1,000 homes in the area were affected. They set up an information centre in the local school and gave out free fan heaters. We had an extended family Christmas meal just before Christmas and ended up cooking most of the vegetables on a Calor gas camping stove on the back doorstep. Thankfully the oven is electric. We finally got switched back on on Christmas morning.

It was a very quiet one this year, we opened our presents in the living room while watching The Polar Express, a beautiful film. Everyone was feeling the pinch with presents. I had to delay my gift-giving for a couple of days after Christmas as I was still waiting on some money I was owed. (Having worked in several insurance/banking organisations, I know how easily jobs get shuffled to the bottom of the queue…)

Anyway, finally the money came, ending  the poorest three months i’ve had since my first Christmas at uni. So naturally I threw out all common sense and immediately went on a spending spree. I got Fallingstar a DSi for Christmas (I’m telling myself it’s her present and i’ve not to touch it!;-) ). She’s not much of a gamer so was rather surprised to say the least, but I think the DS is ideal for on the go occasional gaming (it’s much more playable than the PSP anyway).

I tried to choose games that she would hopefully appreciate and stayed away from the action/shooter genres that seem to define games for many people. I got her the first Professor Layton game, Scribblenauts and Broken Sword. I’m really enjoying the characters and story in Broken Sword, at times it’s really funny, i’ve not finished it but it’s up there as one of my top five games of all time and a really nice introduction to Adventure games. I think Fallingstar will enjoy it too and she previously expressed an interest in the Wii version (I would have got that, but we don’t really have the space and the DS is much more convenient). As far as I can tell, the dialogue is subtitled too which is ideal. The DS version is the same as the PC version but with an extra bit of gameplay as Nico apparently.

Professor Layton because she might enjoy the puzzles but I haven’t played it myself. I also got her Scribblenauts because when it was initially announced I found the idea that you can solve puzzles by entering your own nouns really refreshing. Since she’s a writer, I thought this would be appealing. Well it turns out she loves Scribblenauts, so much so that she hasn’t touched the other two games yet. I watched her play a few of the early puzzles and the gameplay is really fun. She burst out laughing when she tried to jump a ramp with a plane and ended up landing on the supermodel, lol.

We spent New Year together. We had a nice Chinese meal with her sister and her boyfriend before they went out. Her parents were at friends’ so it was just the two of us and the three cats. We ended up watching the Da Vinci Code again before midnight, much like last year when we missed the bells by watching Smallville episodes. When it was time I downed a wee dram of whiskey as is custom and we had some nibbles. The telly entertainment was a bit of a let down though, as soon as the Bells were over the BBC jumped back to normal programming, away from the music and festivities down at the Thames.

I hate the way the BBC seems to mother viewers deciding what we should watch. I remember watching some news story about Iran or something and after showing a bunch of boring questions with their President (it might not have been Iran after all since i don’t remember it being Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) they switched feeds just as a reporter asked a genuinely important question about nuclear arms. I don’t really trust the apparent neutrality of the BBC now anyway, and I find myself disagreeing with their viewpoints at times, but I don’t really read newspapers and i’m lazy when it comes to reading around online so until that changes i’m stuck with their hypocrisy.

I’m hopefully going home in a week or so since I haven’t been home since September last year. I am feeling a little homesick tbh. I saw my seven month old nephew, my brother’s first child, on Skype recently and he’s really getting big now. My sister’s little boy (yeah, i’m an uncle twice already!) turned 5 in November and has started school now. We didn’t manage to send any presents in time for Christmas so we’ll hopefully do that this week.

I spoke to dad on the phone last week, mum has gone to Disneyland Florida with my sister and her family, so it’s just him and the dog for a week. He’s been unable to work due to the heavy snowfall so it’s a bit worrying since he’s self employed. Worse, Rocky the dog seems to be showing his age. He’s stiff with arthritis and he’s almost completely deaf now, making him easily frightened. One day when my parents came home they found him lying behind the front door, his back legs splayed. He looked to be in pain but he wouldn’t let them near him: trying to bite their hands off which is so unlike him. My dad thinks he may have hurt himself jumping down from their bed as they threw out the rug and he slides on the laminate floor. He may also have fallen down the stairs=S There was some blood around his mouth but they think he might have bitten his tongue or his gums were bleeding. The emergency vet was useless, they wouldn’t come to the house and they could only suggest bundling him in a blanket and bringing him in: not exactly ideal if he’d broken his leg!

After a night he seemed to be all right, he must have just strained a muscle or something. He’s still stiff with arthritis but once he gets going he’s all right, chasing after squirrels in the park. Dad was going to take him to the vet once the snow cleared so hopefully it’s nothing serious. He’s an old dog now, he turned 14 in November, so it’s inevitable that he won’t be with us much longer but i’ll be very sad to see him go, he’s my best friend. Hopefully we’ll get up there to see him soon so i’m looking forward to that.

I handed in my last piece of coursework for last semester yesterday. We had to make a technical demo showing some feature like particle effects or character animation using Unity, which we’ve started using this semester. Typical me, it was a shambles. It was unfinished: I had the environment done minus some better textures, and I got a basic waypoint system working but for some reason the non-playable character (NPC) floats above the ground and moves super fast despite changes to his speed variable. I didn’t get a chance to UV map the NPC so he has no textures and I had wanted to work more detail into his head but didn’t get the chance. The character animation was terrible as it was a hash job at the last minute. I went over 50 hours without sleep in an effort to get it done, but in its current state it doesn’t really fulfil the brief so i’m not expecting high marks. Scraping a pass is more than I think I deserve but i’ll be happy if I do.

As usual, I seemed to leave it to the last minute, although I had been busy with other coursework in the run up to Christmas and the cold house wasn’t exactly conducive to sitting at the computer. I have no real excuse though, if i’d shown more interest earlier I would’ve done better. I’m not really bothered about it as a coursework piece tbh, I feel more disappointed that I didn’t finish it as a game. When i’ve recharged my batteries I’ll go back and finish it properly since I really believe in the storyline I created.

It’s symptomatic of the way i’ve been feeling over the last year. I’ve grown disillusioned with the course and in some ways I just want it to be over with. I’ve already decided I want to do captioning since it’s more realistic and a genuine area of interest. Fallingstar’s mother and I are going to a one-day captioning course at Roehampton university in February so i’m looking forward to that. I started a wiki to document my research into captioning a few months ago but it’s still not published. I made it because I seem to take one step forward, two steps back with the process. Despite successfully captioning at least 4 films, I can’t seem to get it exported to dvd intact. It’s now doubtful whether I managed it before, it’s lost in time, so i’m keen to record my efforts.

I may make it a webpage/blog instead since I’m not really making use of the collaborative angle and I can then do it piecemeal without worrying about having it ‘finished’. It’s just one of the many projects I want to focus on. Another is this blog. I want to finish the new design – it really just needs the header to be finished before it’s useable – and have a good tidy up of the content. In addition to the main blog page, I want to include sections for Cowboy Bebop and Stargate as well, and also my ongoing projects, both in writing and games development. I’d also like to get more regular with my reviews. I think I could keep the film ones going (I have an Avatar review in the pipeline) and i’d like to do some software ones too since i’m always trying out new apps. The only thing keeping me from reviewing games are my gaming habits. I’m going backwards: playing retro games and playing modern ones up to a year after release. I still need to take the step up to the next-gen consoles too.

Maybe it’s not important to be up to date. I don’t think that’s how games should be played. It shouldn’t be an elitist system where we have to continually keep up to date with what’s new. I can still have fun playing older games and there are many classics I missed first time around. Maybe there’s a place for reviews in there then, but i’ll probably make it a continually evolving list rather than a regular feature. Maybe I could take a leaf out of other blogs i’ve read and just put one liners. We’ll see.

I also want to get moving with RealBASIC. It’s a fantastic development tool from what i’ve seen and I have a slew of programs I want to make but I need to really sit down and learn it. My update plan expires this month so i’ve squandered a year already. I also want to get to grips with Unity. Although I was stressed with my first project, I found the development environment itself really satisfying. I have it running on Windows and Mac which is a bonus. If I had a similar 3d and 2D graphics setup (at the moment i’m running 3DS Max and Photoshop on Windoze) I really could relegate Windows to game playing only.

I want to overhaul my Mac too this year. I completely missed Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” but it seems I can upgrade to the newest OS “Snow Leopard” for just £25. I’ll probably save a bit more and go for the £135 pack that includes the OS and all latest iLife multimedia apps. I really need to declutter too, especially on my external hard-drive which is currently acting as storage and backup in one (not a good idea!). So another one of those is on the cards too.

Finally i’d like to get a PS3. The XBox 360 looks really good from what i’ve seen but I still have the games Habboi and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gifted me so it makes sense to stick with Sony. Evil Microsoft. If we get the bursary again this year i’ll definately use that, if not it’ll be awhile. I can’t really justify spending that much on myself at once and I need to be really careful with money this year unless I can find a job before May. Our bedroom also isn’t really conducive to game playing anyway. I’ve got the PS2 hooked up to the t.v. but we never sit on the futon-as-couch and the controller won’t reach to the bed;-) There’s a GameCube in the cupboard too that is seriously neglected. Also, we have wired internet so it’s not like i’ll be able to hook up the PS3 without rethinking all the wires that are creeping around the house. Gah!

Since I had to spend so much time working in Windows I was missing iTunes (I tried sharing the library before but I wasn’t very successful) so in looking for alternatives I discovered Kawaii-Radio, lol, so i’ve been chilling out to copious amounts of J-Pop and Anime soundtracks. I already listen to the Real Jazz channel at Radio IO and I really want to broaden my musical horizons. Oh and i’m on the look out for more Anime too;-)

So, now i’ve brought y’all up to date, what’s new with you?