I’m back!
After a move and getting some new furniture in, I am finally back to state where I have *some* free time to blog and start developing stuff again.
Hope everyone had a good holiday and stocked up on some of the incredible discounts and deals on the games front. With Humble Indie Bundle #2 and the Steam deals (which are still going), I have more then stocked enough PC games to keep me going through the new year :).
I also managed to get some 360 games on the cheap, FIFA 2010, Halo Reach Limited Edition and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit for £25 each!
As for the blog, I have a book review and an article to do with why I left the mainstream Games Industry in the pipeline so look out for those.
Here is to the new year!
Games Design Courses - Are they worth it?
Disclaimer: Everything here is of my own opinion and do not necessarily represent any other party’s views.
Note: When I refer to game developers, this means I am referring to everyone involved in the development of the game such as programmers, artists, producers, designers, etc.
There has been increasingly more enquires about becoming a games developer in forums related to games careers such as the ones on IGDA and GameCareerGuide. As much as I am happy that more and more people are interested in entering the games industry, the majority of these are asking on how they become a games designer and which games design course should they choose because they naturally see it as the best way to get into the industry. After all, if you want to be a plumber, you do a plumbing course. So if you want to be games designer, you do a games design course, right?
If only it was that simple.
Board Game review: Boggle Flash
I didn’t think I would do a review on a non-computer game but I liked this game so much I though it deserved one.
Boggle Flash is based on the popular game that I used to play as a child, Boggle where the aim was to make as many words as you can from a gird of random letters within a time limit.
The only rule was that each letter in the word had to be adjacent to the next on the gird, diagonal, horizontally or vertically.
Boggle Flash takes that concept and mixes it with technology. Instead of a egg timer, letter dice and a box, you are now presented with five independent tiles with an LCD screen on each one.
Nesta Report - Next Gen »
The Nesta report came out recently which generally talks about the lack of skilled applicants coming into the games and creative industries and what can be done to improve the situation.
It generally covers introduction of STEM skills at an earlier level such as at GCSE and A-Level and improving existing courses at University.
All the suggestions and conclusions are valid and echo the thoughts of lecturers from a Games:Edu conference I attended in 2008. However, I see a problem in implementing some of the recommendations listed in the report as they generally involve in getting teachers and/or staff that know how to teach these subjects well.
Where are these people going to come from? Teachers and lecturers salaries are generally not great so what incentives are there for people from the industry to and teach? How do we train the existing teachers and lecturers?
Despite this, the report itself is definitely worth a read if you are interested in education of games or interactive media as it has a lot of data from surveys to support its findings and personally I am interested in one of its recommendations of having an online resource for lesson plans and collection of resources as that will be incredibly useful for people who are interested in the industry.
Bizarre Creations closures its doors today. Good luck to all involved.
This is a great video on the Super Mario World camera which I have never noticed before despite playing the game dozens of times and looking back in hindsight, never annoyed me either.
On the Harry Potter titles that I worked on, our lead gameplay programmer (and our camera integrator on Order of the Phoenix) always focused on getting our 3rd person camera just right and cope with all the tight architecture constraints of Hogwarts.
Although it doesn’t seem difficult to get a camera working correctly, the number of iterations and subtle changes that a camera system can go through is immense. As another developer said, ‘Get it right, no one will notice, get it wrong and everyone and their dog will’.
Super Mario Bros 3 Level Design Lessons »
An interesting link highlighting some nice level design features in Super Mario Bros 3.
‘Free’ to play games? Not this one
The other day, I was browsing the App Store on my iPad as I was waiting for something else to download and came across Contract Killer which was a sniper simulator and was free.
Downloaded it and started playing the game for a bit, graphics were decent, controls had a few flaws, gameplay was a bit repetitive but it wasn’t a bad time waster considering that the game was free.
A few missions in, a pop up message came up while trying to start a mission stating that I didn’t have enough energy. It then dawned on my that each mission took a chunk out of an energy meter.
The only way to replenish it was to make an In App Purchase (IAP) which effectively stopped me from playing unless I spent some money. It had committed the cardinal sin of free to play games.
I could understand the game being a little harder unless I brought some items (a great example being the Mighty Eagle in Angry Birds that allows you to skip tough levels) but actually preventing the player from playing and forcing them to buy items is a stupid design decision as it doesn’t give any reason for the customer to keep the game on the system as they can no longer play let alone progress.
Automated Testing: Building A Flexible Game Solver »
Interesting article on using an AI script to ‘solve’ complete a game and be used for automated testing. I have been looking into this type of thing myself and researching if it would be possible to write one for the games I am working on at Playfish using something like Sikuli as the player.
However, for it to be useful as an automated tester, it would need to be able to pick up on crashes and where the player would be stuck and report to a server/email the developers on where and how it happened.
