planet pigmi

Controlling an aircraft using physical forces is... hard. I've managed to implement something realistic using various Fin objects which apply forces on the aircraft. This video shows the autopilot system using these fins to keep the aircraft stable.

Our model today was an interesting lady. She was into numerology and various name-related offshoots.

She seemed pretty spiritual, like a lot of people here in SF, and has changed her name quite a few times. I don’t recall an exact number, except she said at intervals of 7 years she’d change her name and start a new chapter of her life. She said she’s analysed strengths and weaknesses of past names and had synchronicity that led her to each new name.

I thought it was pretty interesting because I’ve never really felt like a Simon. Her belief was that her name affected the direction of her life, but under her grounds for getting a name change I don’t see any reason to change mine. I have no problems with how my life’s going. In fact, I like the amount of responsiveness I have to everything happening!

This all came up in relation to a sequence of events that caused her to be late for our life drawing session. Turns out she’d changed her name again this morning, to Ishta if I recall correctly.

And now some Nu Pastel drawings. Dark green and pale yellow on halftone paper.

I did a couple of sketches today, one was for a student, the other just to record the process and practice some tonal work.

Enjoy!

Here is the YouTube video of the last one:

My daughter Eliza, who is four-and-a-bit, is starting to help around the house. I’m proud that she, without being asked, removes the depleted toilet paper roll from the holder and fits on a fresh replacement before either throwing the old cardboard tube in the bin or, more likely, using it as a didgeridoo or decorating it with stickers.

I’m particularly proud because someone in the building where I work isn’t capable of doing this, and they’re all growed up.

Rather than going through the simple, obvious steps (unhook toilet roll holder, slide off used cardboard tube, pick up fresh roll from the convenient stack within arms reach, thread it on the holder, rehook the holder, take the empty cardboard tube out when you’re done to throw in the bin), they’ve chosen some not-so-obvious ones (start rationing the last remaining scraps of paper in the hope that you’ll avoid the hassle of being the person to replace the toilet roll by leaving one tiny dangling ripped piece of paper on the roll, thereby signalling that it’s Not Quite Finished Yet, or, in the worst-case scenario, retrieve a fresh roll only to balance it precariously on top of the fucking empty cardboard tube, resulting in a completely non-functional toilet paper dispenser).

This obviously annoys me, as small things often do. It’s annoying mostly because it’s not obvious why this strategy benefits the individual whom practices it. You see, it doesn’t require any less effort than the strategy which has a beneficial outcome for every (man) in the building, so why do it at all? When presented with two actions of comparable cost, why not choose the one with greater utility? Isn’t there an Occam’s Razor for responsible human behaviour?

Equally annoying are drivers who choose to signal that they’re changing lanes, turning the corner or moving into the freeway exit ramp while they’re in the act of doing it. I can understand why people choose not to signal at all – they’re actually saving themselves a modicum of effort. But why go to the same effort (of moving your hand to the signal lever and pushing it up or down) while, at the same time, completely removing any beneficial effect to other drivers on the road (that is, actually giving us fair warning of your intentions)? I know that when you were seventeen you were taught how to move the signal lever by moving it while turning the steering wheel (up for anti-clockwise, down for clockwise), but that doesn’t mean you should still be doing that. It’s not a rule, you know.

I try to give these people the benefit of the doubt, I really do, but it’s of no use. I think they’re just passively evil.

This is from... an upcoming project.

Research can be speculative or applied. Artificial Intelligence research is often both, trying to solve real-world problems while at the same time testing theories about how the human brain works.

A branch of the AI research crowd are interested in games both as a testbed for theoretical work and as a market for applied AI. Unfortunately, these are conflicting goals.

People play games to be entertained, and any AI present in the game must contribute to this. I personally think that AI enhances player enjoyment when it is both surprising and relevant. That is, it should result in an experience which feels new, yet which is consistent in the current context.

This regrettably suggests that AI is synonymous with NPCs, which is a mistake that both game players and researchers make. There are plenty of opportunities for non-NPC AI in games, and yet there is scant research being done in these areas. I’m referring to things such as

• a cinematic camera that responds realistically to game world events and player movement;
• dynamic set pieces, including chase sequences and fights;
• story events that fit the overarching narrative but which adapt to a sandbox environment;
• an audio score that foreshadows unscripted events and announces the presence of hero characters;
• large-scale crowd and vehicle simulation;
• adaptive character animation and movement;
• accurate matchmaking algorithms for multiplayer online games;
• elegantly handling dropouts with automatic AI takeover;
• automatic navmesh generation from a polygon soup;
• predicting player behaviour to counteract controller and network lag; and
• automatic exploit detection and prevention.

The problem is that the role of the (usually lone) AI programmer on a game development team often involves many tasks that get in the way of performing research, including asset acquisition, audio and animation integration, data production, tool implementation and support, multithreading support, optimisation, debugging and so on, leaving a perfect opportunity for academia to supply the research chops. What’s needed are robust, efficient, designer-tweakable techniques that are easy to debug, and which scale with available CPU and memory. Sadly these requirements are not a priority for researchers, and yet researchers remain perplexed that game developers don’t use some of the inefficient, unpredictable techniques that they develop.

You see, the problem is that your neat little algorithm might perform well 95% of the time, which may be a great improvement over the state-of-the-art, and which may justify publication, but 95% is not good enough when you have an audience of 5 million game players (as hundreds of thousands of them will see broken behaviour).

But the biggest point of contention between game developers and researchers is that we gamedevs think that cheating is acceptable. After all, a game is just a Turing Test, with the player deciding whether intelligence exists based on the behaviour they perceive, so why not use all available information to deliver on that promise, instead of placing artificial restrictions on what data can be used based on whether or not it would be available to a human player? It just doesn’t matter how the behaviour is achieved – we’re not looking for insights into how the human brain works – it’s all down to player experience. This behavioural approach is out of favour with researchers (and has been ever since Chomsky defeated Skinner), but is the core of pragmatic game design. Perhaps never the twain shall meet.

To be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve picked up a book. When I got my iPad I was surprised at how quickly I traded books in for eBooks as I’ve always been a proponent of the “Nothing can replace holding a physical book in your hands” mentality.

However after a few eBooks read on the iPad, I kind of seemed to lose interest in reading anything at all, which was unusual for me. Do eBooks devalue the appreciation behind reading somehow?

This past weekend I spent a couple of hours at Borders in the city as I had free time between that morning’s errand at the Apple store and meeting my friend Ellen that afternoon. I picked up a book, bought a coffee from the in-store Gloria Jeans, and started reading. When I finished my coffee I moved to the lower ground floor, where armchairs were scattered between shelves of books. It’s like the urge to read gripped me once more! This felt different to reading on my iPad. Reading an ebook, for me, is just something you do. The book may be excellent and I certainly get through books quicker when I read them as eBooks – but holding this physical book in my hands wasn’t just about getting through the text or finding out the story; it was an entire experience.

It very much helped that the book itself sucked me in from the very first page (The Passage by Justin Cronin, which I’ll write a review of when I finish). When it was time to go I purchased the book and now all I can think about is reading more and more of it.

Now that I think back on it I’m reminded of the scene I read in The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (translated by Ralph Manheim) years ago, one of the most memorable things I’ve ever read that left a lasting impression on me through the years – the scene of boy making a nook for himself in his school’s attic and hiding out there through the day and night as it rained outside, reading this book. He was immersed in his own world – adventuring through Fantastica, fighting glorious battles, and meeting fantastic creatures. The outside world and the ordinary people in it were forgotten and disappeared as he went deeper and deeper into his adventure. I think the movie based on The Neverending Story book really depicted this scene beautifully and recreated that same feeling that I got from the book. Then again this was years ago, so my mind’s probably embelished the scene. When I read a book, I always dream about having that kind of experience – holed up somewhere quiet, or curled up in a corner near a window in a cozy armchair with a quilt or blanket keeping me warm, just reading for days on end. Unfortunately I don’t think anything will be able to match the awesome impression that the scene in The Neverending Story made on me, but I compare everything to it.

Back in 1994 I applied for a job at Epic MegaGames. I sent them a bunch of my digital art and a resume.

I was 15, and very naive. :-)

It seems the guy who read my application took some pity on me. He sent me back some constructive criticism and gave me a few pointers on how to produce things they could use. He also included a 3.5 inch floppy disk, with the "PCGPE" software on it. This was the PC Game Programmers Encyclopedia. I'm very grateful he did this. He saved me from a lifetime of producing second rate game art!

It a shame that kids are no longer taught this kind of stuff. I doubt many of the new generation of graduates can actually explain how a computer works. I owe a lot to Denthor of ASPHYXIA, his VGA tutorials really got the ball rolling. I had to convert all his code to C from Pascal, as I did not have a Pascal compiler. In the end I had quite a collection of my own demo/intro programs. Horizontal Parallax Starfields, Fire Effects, Sinus Plasma, Scrollers, Lightning, Fractals... I guess a lot of this knowledge is now used in shader programming, and isn't entirely obsolete.

None of this would have happened if someone at Epic hadn't sent me that 3.5 inch floppy disk. I think it was Tim Sweeney. Could it be? I'm going to hunt through my old boxes of junk and see if I can find the letter...

At the last few GameJams, I've seen an increase in the use of RAD game tools, some of them even being developed by the participants themselves.

I thought I might collect a list of those tools here. The main criteria for being in this list, is that they don't require programming in a traditional computer language. Data Flow / Diagram languages are ok...

Shoot-em-up Construction Kit
Scirra Construct
Game Maker
Koonsolo RPG Editor
Adventure Maker
Reality Factory
Scratch
GameSalad
DS Game Maker

Hmmm we really need a Python based engine in here... Please let me know of any others in the comments!

One of the most ‘wtf’ conversations I’ve had in a while was a couple of weeks ago with a guy from the Perth Apple store.

I called up the Apple store to ask how many iPhone 4s they have in stock. When the guy on the other line became aware that the reason for my asking is because I needed to exchange my faulty iPhone 4, he said that I’d need to make an appointment with the Genius Bar online. So, a little confused but optimistic, I go online at lunch time to make my appointment. Unfortunately the booking page won’t open and comes up blank in both IE and Firefox, so I call the Apple store again to see if I can make an appointment over the phone (the following isn’t a word-for-word exact copy of what was said, just how I remember it):

Me: I just called up about exchanging my faulty iPhone 4 and was told to make an appointment online, but the booking page is blank when I try it in IE and Firefox, can I make an appointment over the phone?
Apple guy: Oh yeah, our site was really made to work with Safari. Firefox has a bug with our site.
Me: Um..o-k…soooo…
Apple guy: Yeah, do you have a Mac available?
Me: Not at the moment…
Apple guy: Oh that’s ok, you can download a PC version of Safari online.
Me: heh…I need to download a new web browser to be able to make an appointment to return my faulty device?
Apple guy: *pause* Oh, no..I can do it over the phone for you.
Me: Yeah that’d be great, thanks.

Unfortunately when he tried to make an appointment on his end the system turned out to be down and he said he’d have to call me back :S. The guy was really nice the whole time, I think their processes are just a bit..weird. On my way home from the city I ended up just walking in and they fit me in, my iPhone was exchanged straight away. Unfortunately the new iPhone had one of the same issues as the original one I bought on launch date, so I had to return it again this past Saturday. Thankfully this one is all good so far!

I remember playing this on my old XT machine, with a Hercules Graphics Card in 4 shades of amber. I had to run a program called "CGA.COM" which let my Hercules graphics card emulate a CGA adapter.

Modem Wars was interesting as a tactical game. I never had a modem on my XT, so I could only play against the computer AI.



IIRC the game was turn based, and you could move each unit on your team before the AI took control. The aim of the game was to take out the opposing side's command unit, so it was a bit like chess, with some added moves. For instance, you could ask your units to 'bunker down', which added a defensive bonus at the expense of movement.



The command unit had a special move. It could send an unmanned, player controlled aircraft around the battlefield. You used this to find out the location of the opposing command unit. I think you could also use it to crash into other ground units, but this was usually a waste unless you were targeting the command unit.

Let’s Make Games is proud to announce our next event:

• Title: Short Talks by Perth Game Developers
• Time/Date: 5:00pm – 8:00pm, September 10, 2010
• Location: eCentral TAFE, 140 Royal Street, East Perth
• Description: Let’s Make Games has invited four local game developers (Matt Comi, Saxon Druce, Aranda Morrison, and Paul Turbett) to share their first-hand experiences developing and releasing games for various platforms (iPhone, Flash, Xbox360, Playstation 3, and PSP).

We’re very excited to have such a great line-up of speakers talking about recently released games on multiple commercial platforms. Perth game development has sure come a long way in the last few years!

Here are some links to our speakers’ games:

• Square Off! by Gnomic Studios
• Star Hammer Tactics by Black Lab Games
• Class 3 Outbreak by Binary Space
• The Incident by Big Bucket Software

Here’s the event flyer (click image for a print-ready version):

Hope to see you there!

I’m not in the business of reviewing games, or even caring whether anyone else likes the same games that I do. Having said that, I wanted to share my thoughts on LIMBO, the new XBLA title by PlayDead, which is precisely the kind of game I want to be making. I had my RROD’d XBOX repaired especially to play LIMBO, after having my interest piqued by the video. Style-wise it’s right up my alley, but I also love the physics and animation, and the similarities to Another World and Flashback (two “cinematic platformers” that I enjoyed playing on the old Amiga 500 many moons ago).

The reason why I feel compelled to share my thoughts on LIMBO is that several friends have made statements to the effect that the demo was boring and that it’s just an average platform game with great lighting and artwork. I respectfully disagree, but I no longer find it important to convince everyone else they’re wrong (turns out you eventually grow out of that), and I appreciate having friends who have different opinions to me (I gave up wanting to be surrounded by clones of myself when I turned 8). So, rather than explain why everyone else is mistaken, I thought that I’d just try to explain why I like LIMBO, and why I think it’s more than a run-of-the-mill platformer with a pretty face.

Background

I’ve been playing games for 30 years or so. I used to be able to play Elite on the Commodore 64 from 5pm on a Friday to 5pm on a Sunday with few interruptions, but these days I have a wife and two small kids, which means I need to grab a spare 30 minutes here and there. The longest gaming session I’ve had in the last 5 years was playing Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube for 8 hours straight with the curtains drawn and the surround sound turned up, and only a six pack of beer and a few packets of chips for company, but that was Before Kids, and the wife was interstate at the time. The games that shaped me are Exile, The Sentinel and Zarch. I love puzzles, text adventures, the old LucasArts games and new games that favour atmosphere, exploration and narrative over precision, action and competition. These days I mostly play iPhone, XBLA and online Flash games. Yes, I’d like to try Red Dead Redemption, but I don’t think I can make a commitment to completing it. And no, I’m not a fan of the FPS genre in general. I do find many contemporary AAA titles repetitive and boring. Heck, I even thought Half-Life 2 got repetitive, and that’s supposed to be pretty good.

All of which means: perhaps it’s just me?

Style

The first thing you notice with LIMBO is its style. The animation, art, lighting and sound are all spot-on. Everything appears in silhouette, and a subtle vignette means that objects lose detail towards the edges of the display. In general, it looks like foreign arthouse cinema, and the typography used on the credits screen is consistent with that look. Everything contributes to an overall sense of foreboding. This puts you on the edge of your seat from the get-go. Something’s about to happen, and you don’t know what it’ll be.

Controls

The second thing you’ll notice is the controls. Or, should I say, the lack of controls. It’s the stick to move, one button to jump and a second button to manipulate stuff. Couldn’t be easier. No, I don’t want to spend time learning a complicated control system anymore; I don’t want that to be a barrier to entry. My time is precious, so I’d rather learn by doing. Character movement is fluid and natural, and platforming is as satisfying as it was in the original Prince of Persia.

Insta-Death

The third thing you’ll notice is the insta-death. Now, that’s often a sign of bad game design. But here I think it’s great. It never sets you back very far, and, although some instances (like the water) are unpredictable, you quickly learn the rules. All drops are fatal if you can’t see the bottom, so no leaps of faith are required. And many insta-deaths are forecast, and are therefore avoidable with careful play. When they’re not, the results are sometimes used to foreshadow a similar situation that occurs later in the game (one red herring is used to great comedic effect), or to form part of an intricate puzzle (such as turning the death traps against others).

Puzzles

These are what I really enjoyed about LIMBO. They’re so well designed. There’s no repetition, which is always so common in other games (as if the designer, happy with themselves for inventing a cool puzzle, decides to reuse it throughout the game, turning an original and fun idea into a chore). All objects that you can manipulate have a use, so there’s no blind alleys. And many objects have multiple uses, which is often really clever. Great puzzle design means that situations that initially seem impossible are surmounted after a little bit of experimentation, exploration and thinking. You get to experience that moment of insight throughout the game, which is very rewarding.

Game Length

I’m not an achievement whore, and I don’t care much for leaderboards, so, although they’re present in LIMBO, they’re not going to compel me to play through again. I’m very happy to have experienced LIMBO in 5 or 6 sessions of between 30 minutes and an hour each over the course of two weeks, and I found myself anticipating the next play session, as I do with the episodes of a great TV series. That synchronised pretty nicely with my wife watching some Mindless American Drama on the TV after the kids were put to bed, and didn’t hinder my ability to do other stuff after hours. Finally, the ending is really well done, and worth seeing. I will play LIMBO again, for the same reason that I watch great movies again; simply to re-live the experience. The short game length and lack of repetition benefits replayability greatly.

LIMBO is pretty, immersive and lean to the bone. An almost perfect game.

Thinking about edge quality for this one. Edges are either hard, soft or lost, and I’m using different types of edges to render form and create a focal point.

Look at how sharp the area around its shoulder is. I went in and painted the forms with textural brushes, then to get it so sharp I used the hard round brush to just clean up the areas where surfaces meet. But it’s such a subtle cleanup that I can retain most of the texture.

I felt like I was summoning all these things I’d observed in Nic Klein‘s work back when I started digital painting. I love the way he paints robots, same with people like Jon Foster, Ashley Wood, Phil Hale and other classics that have a similar graphic style.

Many thanks to Mike Wall at armlessoctopus.com for writing such a glowing review. Please have a read: http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2010/08/26/xbox-indie-review-square-off/

There are so many great quotes to put on our critical acclaim page so I’m still deciding which to use. For now I’m leaning towards “an extremely fun multiplayer experience that ranks up there with Castle Crashers, Bomberman Live and Rock Band.“. 

In a previous post I described kalman filters and gave a very simple example of a 1D filter implemented in C. In the real world, having a filter with three or more inputs is common. A standard 3rd order example would be a filter that considers the position, velocity and acceleration of a system.

In this case you would have a 3x3 measurement matrix (H) (with the diagonal set to what you can measure), a 3x3 process noise matrix (Q), a 3x3 measurement noise matrix (R), and a 3x3 state transition matrix. The standard transition matrix would simply contain v+=a*dt, x+=v*dt, but we can use a 2nd order leapfrog integrator to get better accuracy of our position from our acceleration data. So in total we have:





You can either solve this using the standard kalman matrix maths, but you will find that an SVD approach will give you more stable solutions. OpenCV is one library that already has the kalman matrix maths built in. To set up a kalman filter with OpenCV we just need to setup the matrices we need and call the appropriate cvKalman functions.

(ugly) Code snippet follows:

#ifndef KALMAN_H
#define KALMAN_H

/** OpenCV Kalman filter for 1st, 2nd and 3rd order position, velocity and acceleration data.
    (c) Adrian Boeing
    www.adrianboeing.com
 */
#include <cv.h>

typedef enum {
    K_P = 1, //position only
    K_V = 2, //velocity only
    K_A = 4, //acceleration only
    K_PV = 3, //position & velocity
    K_PA = 5, //position & acceleration
    K_VA = 6, //velocity & acceleration
    K_PVA = 7 //position, velocity and acceleration
} Kalman_e;

class KalmanPVA {
public:
    KalmanPVA(int order, Kalman_e type, float initial_pos, float initial_vel, float initial_accel, float dt, float process_noise[3], float measurement_noise[3]) {
        m_order = order;
        //create the OpenCV kalman structures
        kalman = cvCreateKalman(order, 3, 0 );
        z = cvCreateMat(3,1,CV_32FC1);
        
        //construct the transition matrix
        SetDT(dt);
        
        //enable only the measurements we have!
        for (int i=0;i<m_order;i++) {
            cvmSet(kalman->measurement_matrix,i,i,((type&7)>>i)&1);
        }
        //configure the process noise matrix
        cvSetIdentity( kalman->process_noise_cov,    cvRealScalar(1) ); //zero the matrix 
        for (int i=0;i<m_order;i++) {
            cvmSet( kalman->process_noise_cov,i,i, process_noise[i] ); 
        }
        //configure the measurment noise matrix
        cvSetIdentity( kalman->measurement_noise_cov, cvRealScalar(1) ); //zero the matrix
        for (int i=0;i<3;i++) {
            cvmSet(kalman->measurement_noise_cov,i,i,measurement_noise[i]);
        }
        cvSetIdentity( kalman->error_cov_post,cvRealScalar(10) ); //large initial unknown
        
        //setup the initial state
        cvmSet(kalman->state_post,0,0,initial_pos );
        if (m_order>1)
            cvmSet(kalman->state_post,1,0,initial_vel);
        if (m_order>2)
            cvmSet(kalman->state_post,2,0,initial_accel);
        
        
    };
    void SetDT(float dt) {
        //3rd, 2nd, and 1st order transition matrix models
        
        //3rd order uses 2nd order leapfrog integration
        float F3[] = {   1, dt, 0.5*dt*dt,
            0,  1, dt,
            0,  0,  1};
        
        float F2[] = {   1, dt, 
            0,  1};
        
        float F1[] = {1};
        
        switch (m_order) {
            case 3:
                memcpy( kalman->transition_matrix->data.fl, F3, sizeof(F3));
                break;
            case 2:
                memcpy( kalman->transition_matrix->data.fl, F2, sizeof(F2));
                break;
            case 1:
                memcpy( kalman->transition_matrix->data.fl, F1, sizeof(F1));
                break;
        }
    }
    void SetMeasurements(float pos, float vel, float accel) {
        cvmSet(z,0,0,pos);
        //if (z->rows>1)
            cvmSet(z,1,0,vel);
        //if (z->rows>2)
            cvmSet(z,2,0,accel);
    }
    
    void Update(){
        const CvMat* y = cvKalmanPredict( kalman, 0 );
        cvKalmanCorrect( kalman, z );
    }
    float GetPositionEstimate() {
        float v = cvmGet(kalman->state_post,0,0);
        return v;
    }
    float GetVelocityEstimate() {
        if (kalman->state_post->rows>1)
            return cvmGet(kalman->state_post,1,0);
        return 0;
    }
    float GetAccelerationEstimate() {
        if (kalman->state_post->rows>2)
            return cvmGet(kalman->state_post,2,0);
        return 0;
    }
    float GetPositionError() {
        return cvmGet(kalman->error_cov_post,0,0);
    }
    CvKalman* kalman; //openCV Kalman filter
    CvMat* z; //measurement matrix
private:

    void cvKalmanNoObservation() { 
        cvCopy(kalman->error_cov_pre, kalman->error_cov_post); 
        cvCopy(kalman->state_pre, kalman->state_post); 
    } 
    int m_order;
    
};

#endif

When someone sends me an exe file, or an ActiveX DLL, and asks me to help out with something software related...

I don't. I haven't run Windows for seven years, and hope I never have to again.

It's amusing when you detect incredulity on their end... they can't believe that someone just doesn't have Windows. Some people even get annoyed. I can tell.

It's not that I'm trying to be elitist, difficult or contrary, I just don't like Windows. I hate it. Windows abuses it's users. I get all tense and angry every time I have to use it (which is _only_ when helping out close friends). If I really had to solve a Windows problem, I'd simply pay someone else to do it.

Some people imagine that 'commercial reality' should dictate what I use, what services I provide. Well, your'e welcome to your own reality, I'll stay in mine thank you! That is why I use tools like Python, and Unity3D. Software isn't worth writing (or using!) unless it is cross platform. Of course, Unity3D is not _entirely_ cross platform, but that will change one day.

People like cleaning up. Well, not always literally, and not quite everyone. But, for whatever reason, there seems to be something that’s intrinsically enjoyable about reducing entropy. I enjoy actual, real-life cleaning up once I get into the swing of things, and then I can’t stop until it’s “done”. But getting motivated enough to start in the first place is difficult, which is why I wait until I can’t stand the mess anymore. Or perhaps I just want to give myself a challenge?

As far as games are concerned, cleaning is a common metaphor. Tetris is perhaps the best example, as are match-3 games such as Bejeweled. In Tetris you interlock falling tetrominoes in very pleasant, satisfying ways in order to remove rows of blocks, while in Bejeweled et al you remove gems of the same colour by shifting them around. In both cases, the essence of the game is arrangement and removal. There’s something addictive about sorting like stuff into groups, identifying patterns, planning for what may happen next and progressing by removing groups of stuff to leave behind smaller collections of stuff.

Postal Worker, the game that I was intending to work on at the beginning of this year (and which suffered ludus interruptus due to the Global Game Jam and the Interzone Fiasco, and is yet to fully recover) was based around this concept of sorting things into groups. I do plan to return to it eventually, once I finish the Kranzky Engine for iPhone. But, I digress.

I started writing this blog post because I was thinking of two important issues that both involve cleaning in some form, and which are both inspired by recent events. I don’t want to make a federal election out of it, but I have been thinking about both the government’s proposed mandatory ISP-level filtering of RC content, and of the shelved emissions trading scheme.

I first learned about carbon trading about seven years ago when I read, I think, “The Armchair Economist“, by Steven Landsburg, which is a study of how incentives change behaviour (with famous examples including the fact that mandatory seatbelt laws result in an increased number of car accidents – you’d minimise accidents by requiring everyone to mount a metal spike on their steering wheel which is aimed directly at their heart). In essence, the intent of carbon trading is to incentivize individuals and corporations to look for alternatives to their energy supply by creating a marketplace that will inflate the cost of carbon-producing energy to the end user. That is, the operators of coal-fuelled power plants will need to pay more to continue polluting the environment, and will pass this cost on to their customers, who will then have an incentive to consider other means of fulfilling their energy needs. This will create a market for greener (in the sense of lower CO2-emitting) energy production. Along similar lines, wouldn’t it be interesting to introduce a cholesterol trading scheme, to improve the overall health of the population and thereby to reduce the strain on the health care system? I kid.

The proposed Internet filter has proven unpopular, as so many of us are opposed to censorship of any form. It is difficult, however, to have a proper discussion around a subject that threatens to raise the spectre of child pornography (which is a core reason for wanting to implement a filter in the first place). Child pornography is quickly replacing Godwin’s Law as a means of nipping any debate in the bud. It’s similar to accusations of racism making any measured debate of policy regarding asylum seekers difficult. The truth is that censorship simply limits exposure to offensive material that needs to be deliberately sought out anyway, and won’t prevent those who deal in such material from continuing to do so. In fact, it may make it onerous to identify and bring to justice those who produce such material, as it will only serve to encourage them to go deeper underground, obscuring any handy evidence that would have been left behind had they traded the stuff online. The fact that the production of images of child abuse is a multi-billion dollar criminal industry is under-reported, and the success rates of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice are unknown. I want to know; we should all be in the business of protecting children everywhere. Just not  via censorship.

Enough with the depressing thoughts. Just cleaning out my brain. Please don’t get all Nazi on me in the comments :)

Messed a lot with the value structure of this piece. It’s still very graphic, but more readable than the ink version.

I really hate it when games become a chore. Maybe that’s why I got bored with World of Warcraft so quickly – it felt more like a chore than a fun thing to do. It is also why I quit Mass Effect – after spending somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour fighting to finally get to the end of the winding road that I had to drive over I reached the final cutscene just to find myself dead within five seconds.

That’s fine, I thought. It’ll just restart me back at the cutscene.

That’s not what happened. I found myself back at the very beginning of the level. I didn’t have it in me to go through that entire thing again, left the game, and every time I thought about going back to it I had the mental image of having to go through that entire level all over again.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I think games shouldn’t be challenging or hard or even frustrating sometimes. But the mechanics of the gameplay isn’t what should frustrate me as the player. If anything should frustrate me or prove challenging it should be part of the in-game role I assume or figuring out that puzzle or level. I don’t mind being frustrated by other players or characters. I don’t mind being challenged by bosses or other in-game situations.

What I do mind is being forced out of the world I’m currently immersed in. Taking me back to the beginning of the level that took me at least half an hour to get through is like pressing the rewind button, or skipping a record back to the beginning. In that instance, it wasn’t interaction with anything in the game that was annoying and frustrating to me as a character, or a person acting out this story – it was the mechanic of the game, not the world, and it made me angry as the player of the game.

I didn’t go through that level in the first place because I thought it was just the awesomest experience ever and wanted to do it over and over again – I don’t want to drive up the same fricking mountain for half an hour twice in a row – that’s not fun. I just wanted to get to the end and continue along the storyline.

I admit – I should have saved the game manually when I had a chance. Silly me, assuming that a cutscene would mean an autosave. I’ve learned my lesson for next time. However, I think that whoever decided that if the player dies at the very end of that level they’ll go back to the very beginning instead of starting back at the cutscene made a bad choice.

I’ve noticed that a lot of folks who seem to do the most remarkable things (like Reinhold Messner for example, the first person to climb all 14 of the world’s peaks taller than 8000m) were actually just trying to understand their own limits and themselves.

Inspiring as hell, Christ, I get tinglies just looking at this:

I’ve been so busy with Techalite lately that the only thing that’s been able to drag me away from work are my dog and the rainbow lorikeet we found injured on the road. I’m of the opinion that every responsible small business owner could benefit from owning a pet. I found out first hand how easy it is to get sucked into working on your business – working on clients, networking, participating in small business forums, working on your own site, writing, and the endless array of other tasks that just never end – and never actually take time to relax and do something that doesn’t involve your work; or heck, even do nothing for a change.

I know that every evening as I’m link building or writing or doing one of the other gazillions of things to do I need to stop and take my dog for a walk, and to give attention and play with the little rainbow lorikeet. My pets rely on me to take care of them and keep them happy, so they can make me shut the laptop and take a break from work like no one else can.

Keep in mind I’m not recommending every business owner to run out and get a pet now – the key here I think is responsible. Too many people would get a pet, pay attention to it for the first few days, weeks, maybe a couple of months, and then forget that it needs ongoing care and attention – not just a food bowl set in front of it once a day.

And now, I finally took some photos of the new addition – the rainbow lorikeet we found. Here they are!

Hey dudes and dudettes, been trying to really hammer down on that large piece, I finally feel that is is close! So damn close! It has really surprised me how long it takes to do an A0 rendering in pencil and charcoal, holy hell it is time consuming, but is coming out nicely!

Yesterday night, I wanted to take a break and did this as a 1/2 hour break and recorded a sketch and finished with this:

If you’d like to check out the video process from start to finish, see it here at youtube:

Today, I went to sketchgroup and did a sketch of a demon’s head, it was fun:

Anyway, I look forward to getting some decent time to do some personal work after this week hopefully, I need long stretches of time to do any decent art dammit! I don’t want to keep just doing sketches! I want to do something nice and polished!

Hope you’re all keeping well in Internets land.

D-man

...Editor's Choice Edition





This was built months ago but it never got released. So now I am releasing it.

Take control of the Master Chef and, with the help of his lovely sidekick, brave danger and certain death in order to make your way into a base on a planet far from your home! Left click interacts, right click looks.

This game was designed to recapture the feeling I got when playing classic Sierra adventures as a kid (and still get!). Characters graphics by AngelicCharon. Music by funkmast. Assistance in various ways including writing by kaputtnik. The rest by me.

Download

PS: Sorry.

I keep finding awesome iPhone apps and meaning to write reviews about them, but something more urgent always comes up and it never ends up happening. So I figured I’d put together one post with some of my new iPhone apps which I think are pretty awesome.

Highborn – A turn-based strategy game by Jet Set Games. I used to work with the Joseph, who’s the designer there, and was so excited about this game! It didn’t let me down. You play as a knight on a mission, ridding the world of evil with your team of do-gooders. One of my favorite parts of this game has to be the dialog between characters – it’s just hilarious. I’ll write a more in-depth post about the game when I get the time. The iPad version was recently released Get it!

Mega Jump – A nice and simple jumping game not unlike Doodle Jump, with a few differences. Your little creature jumps to collect coins. Collecting a coin (or landing on top of one) makes you jump farther up. You tilt the iPhone to control which direction your create is jumping in. You also collect boosters and powerups or negative effects as you jump. You unlock different stages, creatures, and other goodies throughout the course of the game. I’m actually finding this game quite challening – I’m only on stage 2 and have been at it for a couple of days!

NinJump – another jumping game. You’re a ninja running up the side of a building. On the other side is another side of a building. You tap the screen to jump from one building to the other to avoid and/or kill obstacles. Successfully attacking 3 obstacles in a row gives you a temporary powerup. You can also collect shields. Pretty fun casual game.

EpicWin – a to-do app that turns your life into a role playing game. You create a character and earn XP for every chore you complete. As you complete more and more chores in different categories (like Strength, Stamina, and Intelligence) your character levels up, travels along the map, and finds loot. I have to say the actual to-do features aren’t very robust in this app yet, but the developers sound enthusiastic about updating the app and adding new features on a regular basis.

Woot! So Ludum Dare 18 starts tomorrow, and I have one game idea in mind. With minor alterations it fits about 50% of the possible themes, plus some other ideas I’ve been kicking around suit the other themes. It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

My goal this time is to get something small and playable released. No more reaching for the crazy wild ideas, and no more waiting until Sunday to get started. Finishing is the one thing I have problems with and I’m going to see if this can be different.

Aiming for first, but I’ll settle for being in the top 20%.

OK, I promise, last of these historic posts! The title was inspired by Andrew Braybook’s game diary in ZZAP!64 magazine, which you should immediately read. I wrote this 13 years ago, when I was young and stoopid…

Football

I went to a football game the other day with a few friends. One of them commented that the oval looked smaller than he had expected. I said, “What do you mean? It’s 100 metres wide and 200 metres long! Of course”, I added, “that’s only a ballpark figure.”

Axe Murderers

There was this news story on TV a while back about a young man who murdered his parents. When the reporter asked the obviously shocked neighbours about the man, they told him how quiet and harmless he seemed. Then one of them remembered how he had made constant death threats against his parents. Another chipped in with stories of him shooting cats with an air rifle. And then pandemonium broke out, as the neighbours started yelling about how he was a crazy freak, and how they all hated his guts.

Indian Food

Did you know there was an Indian version of The Beatles? They even went through a weird stage, hanging out with the Archbishop of Canterbury and playing acoustic guitars instead of their sitars. Here’s the lyrics to one of their most enduring songs:

Dear Sir and Madam, here’s your vindaloo
It took me days and days to cook it up for you
It’s based on a recipe I got from my mum
And it’s very very hot, so you’ll need to have some
Cucumber raita!
Cucumber raita!

It’s a lovely curry, with some lovely naan
(there’s some popadoms in the frying pan)
Sir, you appear to be turning pale
You’re an unsteady sod; so instead of beer
Cucumber raita!
Cucumber raita!

Words

Isn’t it interesting how words change their meaning with time? I was reading a book from 1895 the other day, and I came across a passage which read: “The chambermaid rushed sobbing from the room, followed by Mr. Dawkins, who was ejaculating wildly.” I was very offended, until I realized that the word “sobbing” has changed meaning drastically in the last hundred years.

Hollywood

I really hate those corny romantic American movies where, at the end of the film, the two lovers embrace in a public place and the crowd of onlookers break into spontaneous applause. I was in a restaurant once and this guy kissed his girlfriend, so I started clapping and whooping. But nobody else joined in. And then the guy said “Hey, what are you doing, buddy?”, so I said “I’m clapping man, can’t you see that?”, and then came on over and punched me in the nose. So that’s why I hate those movies.

Clothes

I was in the city with a girl, and she said to me, “Do you like the sarong that girl over there is wearing?”. I bellowed out, “What sarong?”, and a passing ethnic stereotype yelled back “Nothing’s a-wrong, mate! What’s da matter with you, eh?”

Ties

I have always found it rather odd that businessmen affect to wear their ties on their shoulders when outdoors in the city. I think someone should do a study on it.

Smells

I think the next big leap in technology will be smells. It will take just one geek to come up with some big breakthrough, and in no time at all everyone will be talking about the great new “smell chip”. Sony would develop a sleek smell machine, with their own smell format, but the other manufacturers would band together and develop an inferior smell format which would become successful through clever marketing campaigns. Televisions would be made “smell compatible”. If you wanted to smell in private, you could wear little “nose-olfactors”. Musicians would play special smell instruments at gigs, and you’d better watch out for the door-to-door smell salesman. Smell lovers would complain about synthetic smells, and they would harp on and on about the good old days, and how great the natural smells were back then. Computers would come with an optional “smell card”, and software for mixing smells. You could customize your desktop to have your favourite smell, and you’d be able to download new smells. When an error occurs, a special smell would be emitted.

Tattoos

The other day I pointed out a tattoo on a man’s arm to a friend. “That’s a Swastika”, I said. “You mean its not a real tattoo?”, she replied.

Body Piercing

I reckon if you’re lucky enough to have a big sticky-out mole on some weird part of your body, you should paint that mole silver and pretend that you’re into body piercing. People would express amazement at how you managed to get that part of your body pierced, and they would admire your impressive looking stud.

We’ve moved onto using ink in Media class, and our first assignment is to do a master copy of one of the artists shortlisted. While Tsutomu Nihei wasn’t one of those artists he’s a manga artist I only heard about today. I saw this piece of his and thought I’d do my own version with some adjustments.

I didn’t even attempt the smoke but he handled that very well. I may go back into the background and pick out some shapes, but otherwise I’m very happy with this! Haven’t indulged in inking before but it sure makes rendering clothing easy, and it’s so much faster than trying to ink on Photoshop… Unless you make a mistake.

Also, I tried a compositional ‘trick’ called counterchange. Where you have a dark shape on a light shape switching to a light shape on a dark shape.

Due to my iPhone 3G + iOS4 running like treacle down a hill, I am giving the HTC legend another go. I'm optimistic, as a software update is available which may help improve on my last experience.

Apple have really done their users a disservice with iOS4 on older phones. Given that the older models cannot use any of the new features (apart from the useless and unattractive UI changes) there is no reason the older phone should have such an awful performance degradation.

It is almost as if this line of code is sitting inside the iOS4 source code...

if deviceVersion != "iPhone4":
    GoReallySlowMode(True)
    SuckLotsOfBattery()
    WaitSomeSeconds(Random() * 10)
    ThinkAboutDoingSomething()
    PretendToDoSomething()
    FinallyDoSomething(reallyJerkyMode=True)

In fact... I'm willing to bet it is. Apple is the new Microsoft, using shady business methods in an attempt to force users to upgrade.

Megh.

/rant

Sometimes I feel compelled to do stupid stuff. And by some times I mean all the time. Having already accumulated 10+ hours of life drawing this week I thought I’d use my mouth to draw during a 20 minute pose.

Slow and steady. Well, maybe just slow. The charcoal pencil had a mind of its own, wiggling its way across the page. Not to mention whenever I drew a line I was too close to look at the model, or even the rest of the drawing. For each line placed the distance was estimated. Plus, when mouth drawing different directions achieved different extents of wiggle, and drawing down sometimes caused a machinegun stippling effect.
Here’s a closeup of the area I screwed up next to his arm, and more stippling on the hip.

After the first one I’d come to terms with how the charcoal behaves and did this mouth drawing in about 10 minutes during the next pose.

I really like how these drawings turned out, I think they have a lot of charm. The lines just flow without careful deliberation. The wiggly lines and distorted proportions remind me of Egon Schiele‘s work. All I needed to do was compromise my motor skills. I could see where the lines needed to be, and had all the knowledge to place them, I just needed to coerce the charcoal pencil to place them in the right vicinity.

We’re doing vignettes in Composition class at the moment, and today I felt compelled to draw a zombie. Or anything dark, for that matter.

I’ve also been studying torso anatomy lately (outside of TAD) as this has always been a weakness. So, to encorporate more skin to render my zombie became a trashy consumer zombie.

And here’s a painting I did on Monday. Our live model did a 2hour pose and I jumped into Photoshop to try out a soft airbrush rendering technique. It’s a sidestep from the painterly stuff I like to do.

Even though I haven’t fully rendered it here’s a .gif showing its progression at 20 minute intervals. I missed a step though, so one jump is 40 minutes.

Immersive Technologies, leading mining simulator trainer, asked me to take some of their structural extremely complex models and to reduce them to a usable size and in the end render them to their liking.The final product, as you can see, ended up being a very professional and strong piece of work.

When dealing with portability and preprocessor issues while coding in C it is often very helpful to find out what all the default GCC compiler defined macros are. It's not immediately obvious how to see this. This is how you do it.

I’ve been lurking on a thread over at the Pigmi Discussion List that’s been debating the pros and cons of Game Classification, in the wake of the news (reported on Kotaku) that the Australian Government is working to close a loophole that allows unclassified games and applications to be downloaded and used on mobile devices. Coincidentally, I was contacted yesterday by Ben Grubb, a journalist with the The Sydney Morning Herald, for comment on the very same issue. I wrote this blog post partly to express my thoughts to Ben (his article has now been published online), and partly to respond to Nick Lowe, who expressed some opinions in the Pigmi thread which irked me. Nick has since written an opinion piece that suggests he had a change of heart before I’d had a chance to change it for him :)

Classification exists to allow consumers to make informed choices. The Classification Website states that games are classified to “provide consumers, especially parents, with classification information to help them choose a … game to play”. This implies that game classification exists to help us protect our kids, which makes it especially annoying when games clearly only intended to be played by adults are banned from sale in this country. Besides which, I believe that these kinds of recommendations are of limited benefit, and are often ignored by consumers. When deciding whether or not to allow my child to play a particular game, I’d much prefer to base my decision on my previous experience with the game, or on the recommendations of my friends and family.

The Classification Website states that “every film and computer game, whether produced locally or overseas, has to be classified before it can be made legally available to the public”, which means that most of the games I’ve ever created, including my GameJam entries, and the iPhone and iPad games released on the App Store by RocketHands, are illegally available in Australia.

Apart from causing some titles to be banned, this mandatory classification system, which requires game developers and publishers to pay to have their games classified, has resulted in some content just not being available at all in this country (presumably because publishers/developers choose to forego the expense of getting a game classified if it is not forecast to generate a large return in this market). This robs us from experiencing small, independent offerings which, for mine, are where the fun’s at. These classification requirements mean that many smaller WiiWare and Virtual Console titles don’t get a release down here, and have prevented Microsoft from making the Indie Marketplace on XBLA available to Australians. This is a regrettable state of affairs.

On the other hand, countless downloadable games and online Flash games are readily available, and, due to their entirely unregulated nature, sometimes contain highly objectionable content. The behaviour of the Australian Government makes it easy to accuse them of revenue-raising (by fining Apple, and requiring them to pay for classification) rather that performing their stated duty of protecting the kiddies (although I’m presuming that they assume their proposed Internet Filter will take care of everything else).

I think Apple should be applauded for flaunting the letter of the law, allowing countless applications and games to be available to Australians via the App Store, while satisfying the spirit of the law, by policing the App Store themselves, ensuring that violent, pornographic content is not available, and rating all games and applications to allow consumers to make an informed choice. Rather than complying with the Australian Government, Apple needs to fight for a shake-up of our classification laws. At the very least, games should be treated the same as TV, where the commercial stations self-regulate based on an industry code of practice (which is essentially what Apple has been doing until now).

What I’d like to see happen is for the classification process itself to be deregulated and crowd-sourced, with each game initially released as unclassified (and, therefore, unavailable to minors), and for adult users to submit the age threshold that they deem appropriate after experiencing the game for themselves. I’d predict a wide standard deviation of responses (which begs the question of why we allow one or two public servants to make these decisions for us), but it’d be great to be able to see the average recommended age for a game as taken from members of my social circle.

P.S. Note that “Plants vs Zombies” has been classified as 9+ by Apple, but that I’m still happy for my 4+ daughter to play it :)

FreePlay was absolutely stellar this year. This is my third FreePlay, and it's the third set of people organising the event/conference/festival here in Melbourne, Australia. Maybe it's a sampling bias, but to me it feels like there is something in the genetics of this thing that guarantees enjoyment. Just the right mix of "well organised" and "punk rock", it carries a delicious slice of the indie gaming zietgeist over here to Australia.

That's not to say that Paul and Eve don't have anything to do with how great it was. On the contrary, it remains so great because it has come to rest in such capable and nurturing hands. These guys are green-thumbed indie gardeners, ripening a plot of earth where many tiny seeds of ideas will end up growing into lovely games. And they are such incredibly nice people too.

A lot of the angst was gone this year. Many of us have left our jobs in industry and are doing that starving punk rock game developer thing. And it rules. The we-can-make-something-beautiful vibe was palpable. The inspiration and desire to create was so infections that I found myself reaching for the laptop to hammer out some code whenever I could, and so Infinite8BitPlatformer saw a few bugfixes and enhancements between sessions.

Just as it was a highlight meeting Jonathan Blow in 2007, for me a highlight of this year's festival was meeting Brandon Boyer and Adam Saltsman. Brandon and Adam each brought their own brand of energy and love for the art form. I only wish I had been around to hear Petri Purho speak last year too, all of whom highlight what a great job is being done of getting critical thinkers and practitioners over here each year.

Brandon's keynote was brilliantly emotive, and perfectly captured a sort of wistful energy for those games that don't yet exist, but could. He painted a brilliant, shimmering image of possibilities in front of our eyes, and lent us a powerful lust to coax our ideas into reality. When he pulled up a slide full of American indie record label logos from my youth, like Dischord, and Matador, and Calvin Johnson's K records, I felt a definite tugging on the heart strings, a flood of bittersweet memories, and this simultaneous realisation that hey, we are part of something as awesome as that whole thing was.

Adam got down and dirty in the semiotics of games and redefined in our minds the level at which games and play are part of our culture, and even our evolution, our genes. Conjouring forth papers on play and games from mid-century French intellectuals and the like, he was certainly showing tight research chops. At the beginning of the talk, "war came from games" sounded very contraversial to me. At the end of the talk I was convinced.

After hours the beer flowed, and of course that's where all of the most interesting, unrestrained conversations took place. Once again Eve and Paul's refinement shone through in their choice of venue, just around the corner from the library where the festival was going on. It's an oft-underlooked aspect of conference organisation, and usually left to the delegates to find a drinking hole where the ideas of the day can be unwound, probed, picked apart, and put back together again. At FreePlay however, this was all taken care of, and that was an excellent thing.

So anyway, there it is. Great festival, wonderful people, with the most awesomest of organisers.

Now it's time to create.

I can’t actually post links about this, but if you have a US gamertag, sign in with it to see Square Off getting some all important extra dashboard love. We’re in there at the 3rd spot which should give our sales a very nice kick.

We’re still planning to do a proper sales data analysis soon. This should provide another interesting point to talk about.

The Australian newspaper recently ran a story entitled “Apps and games to face censor, says ALP” which leads in with “THE Labor Party has flagged it will shut down a major loophole in the mobile phone industry.

I’ve very interested in this topic, and have spend the last few days forming (and refining) my opinion. I’ll run through my thought processes over the course of this post, but for now I’ll start with a couple of excerpts from the story.

On classification requirements before computer games can be sold in Australia:

It is a legal requirement that films, computer games and some publications be classified before sale, but a loophole, or lack of awareness, means apps are being sold for use on smartphones such as the Apple iPhone without any censorship or guidance for users and parents.

In regards the standard practice of releasing mobile phone games without submitting them for classification:

While a number of submissions to the ongoing inquiry into computer games classifications raised the potential issue of classification for mobile games and apps, Australia’s smartphone providers and games developers have blithely broken the law and dodged hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.

After some discussion on twitter, I started a thread on the PIGMI mailing list (unfortunately, it looks like replies aren’t appearing on the online archive). I’ve also conducted some more online research, and I would like to share the results here.

I initially felt it was fairly clear that smartphone games need to be submitted for classification, and that Apple (and other smartphone app providers) was in breach of legislation by selling games that have not been classified. However, I now feel that Apple probably has a defensible case given:

1. Lack of clarity between “computer games” versus “mobile phone games”
2. Years of government inaction in asserting classification requirements
3. Free games may be exempt because they are not for sale in Australia
4. Classification may a developer, rather than publisher, requirement

There are good counter-arguments to each of the above points: The term “computer games” covers console and handheld games, so it should cover the iPod Touch and iPad at the very least; Inaction doesn’t imply tacit approval; Distribution and sale may be treated similarly in Australia; and no matter who is responsible for classification, retailers cannot sell unclassified material (regardless of indemnity clauses in developer agreements).

Another area of contention is jurisdiction. The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) and the Australian Broadcasting Association (ABA) were wrapped up a few years ago, and media regulation is now left to the Classification Board (part of the Attorney-General’s office) and the Australia Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

The Classification Board is generally responsible for classification of media that will be sold in Australia (traditionally in brick-and-mortar stores): films, books, and video games. Works must be submitted to the Classification Board for review before they can be sold in Australia, and those items refused classification cannot be sold. The process is lengthy (20 days for each decision), costly (hundreds of dollars for each submission), and ill-suited to media with substantial dynamic content (which is impossible to exhaustively test).

The ACMA tends to be responsible for regulation of content that will be transmitted: music, online content, television and radio content. Presumably, part of the reason for this is because classification of high-volume and live content is infeasible. Moreover, industry codes of practice have shown to provide and adequate level of consumer protection. They allow content producers to quickly distribute content (with minimal overhead), and consumers are able to complain of any breaches to the codes of practice.

Given the high-volume and dynamic nature (patches, updates, and online play) of online and downloadable games, it’s probably more appropriate for the ACMA (rather than the Classification Board) to be responsible for regulating them. The ACMA registers industry codes of practice for commercial television and radio broadcasters, and the Internet Industry Association. However, I was unable to find any evidence that there is a similar code of practice from the games industry.

It’s important that these issues are resolved as Apple arguably has a commercial advantage over other publishers who do (possibly unnecessarily) submit their games for classification (eg. Nintendo DSiWare and Sony Playstation Network).  I believe that the best outcome for all parties (the Classification Board, the games industry, consumers, and the general public) is for industry self-regulation via a code of practice.

What should be in the code of practice, and who it should apply to, are topics for further discussion and future blog posts.

Some basic knowledge of CAD packages never hurt anyone. Two of the most common ones used in industry are AutoCAD and SolidEdge. Most of the time you will just need to take measurements from some diagrams rather than build a complete model.

AutoCAD has a command line interface (from way back in the DOS days). Two useful commands for measurement are:

• di - Measure a distance between two points
• id - Print the coordinates of a point of interest

Other things you might find yourself doing include drawing lines and circles, which are all relatively self-explanatory. Occasionally you need to measure something relative to a reference line or base line that you want to project through the whole drawing. You can do this by using the 'extend' option to lengthen the line. Simply choose the 'Extend' option from the modify menu and draw a line to represent the boundary of the lines extension, right click, and select the line you wish to lengthen. AutoCAD will lengthen the selected line up to the boundary you specified.

Like Photoshop AutoCAD also has layers which you can work with. You can turn layers on/off by clicking on the lightbulb function.


With SolidEdge you can use the dimension menu to make measurements (Make sure you are working on the correct sheet!). These can be either horizontal/vertical, by two points, or you can select an element in the drawing to use as the axis (easier than in Autocad!).

A long time ago in a place far, far away...

I used to clean windows, in a small regional city called Bunbury. Not the operating system type, but the kind you look through, made of glass. :-) The money was good, the work was fun, and it helped me through the last year of my Comp. Sci. degree. Well, I never actually finished that degree. Ah well. Even so, I always hoped one day to build computer games instead of washing windows!

One day, while cleaning windows and contemplating what I wanted to do in life (game development seemed like a distant dream), I struck up a conversation with an older gent. He told me about his son, who spent day and night in front of his computer, making 3D graphics with a computer language, and apparently he was really good at it! His son was now working in Scotland, and had worked on a game called "GTA". Of course, at that time I had played the demo of GTA and knew exactly what he was talking about.

Why do I remember this quaint little story, more than a decade later?

I think that this was a turning point, where I realised that it was possible for someone in a remote town in a remote country to get an awesome job, building computer games. I think this event is probably a major reason that I am building games today, instead of accounting systems, or worse... web pages!

Why am I telling you this story?

Today I received an email from an Australian who is working in the UK, and is keen to move home. He works with computer games, and is investigating the local scene to see what it has to offer. He also happens to have worked with Take Two... on the GTA graphics engine... 14 years ago, and is from Bunbury. Yep. He is that guy.

Amazing. What are the odds?

Well Freeplay 2010 just occured in Melbourne and it was really awesome, I have a lot of thoughts, a pile of re-affirmation about what i’m doing and some great skills to test out when I get back home.  But I spent a lot of time on twitter over the weekend, talked with loads of people so I decided that the best way to run through all the twitter accounts I found (or already had) over the weekend with my thoughts where I can apply them.  Sort of a report but in context of people.  This is by no means a complete list as I could keep pouring over the list for days, so I decided to stop here right now and get the first draft out.  However I would love to make this a even MORE complete report, considering there was 66 people listed in the programme booklet and I have NINE people listed here as guests (granted right now I’m not going looking very far, e.g. not beyond the #freeplay10 search) I have a little more work to do.

In short, please check this over and follow some of these people, if you want me to update / add / remove yourself off this list ping me @Sonictail or jon@game.pride.id.au.

Really Important People

Basically these are the people who made the event / parts of the event happen, check em out!

• @free_play: The official FreePlay twitter account, important to note.
• @paul_callaghan: Paul was one of the Co-Directors of FreePlay, please direct thanks there!
• @peenydeeny: Eve was the other Co-Director, I had a nice chat with her both nights when she was wiped.  Seriously epic achievement here!
• @IGDAMelbourne: The Independent Game Developers Association of Melbourne, awesome bunch of guys who organised drinks every night, check em out! They’re more active than ever (literally!)

Important People, but not for freeplay…

Here’s two accounts you should be following cause basically, it might help you out in the future!

• @artsdigitlera: Fee Plumley from Australia Council, introduced everyone to the idea of how the Arts funding through the AC works. Check out http://www.artsdigitalera.com/ for more info.
• @WorstMC: Mike Cowap is from Screen Australia, I didn’t realise that they were only 18 months old! He also gave info during the Government Secrets panel.  They’re open to ideas so check out Screen Australia’s website.

Guests

These are the guests I could find on twitter, this is by no means a complete or accurate list, but I did try to match people to what they did etc, please don’t hurt me ;>.>

• @AdamATOMiC: Adam Saltsman gave the Keynote on Sunday at #FreePlay10 on Play & Games & Video Games & Us… I still need to finish digesting this talk before I speak on it.
• @brandonnn: Brandon Boyer gave the Saturday keynote on All Play is Personal speaking about how he stopped making games and started writing about them and more importantly why. Also thank him for Offworld, even if you haven’t read it, it’s affected you in some way. No joke!
• @Doolwind: Alistair Doulin is a Brisbane based developer who is listed as a speaker, but I cannot find what he spoke on! (please feel free to correct me) But in the meantime he has already put his thoughts on #FreePlay10 online, check http://bit.ly/indiecondition to read it!
• @benbritten: Gave the talk on using Unity3d, which you can now check out on his website here.
• @terrypaton1: Terry Paton was up during the “A Million Little Ideas” talk and had some excellent thoughts on the subject, also check his blog http://pixelpaton.com/.
• @brawsome: Andrew Golding is responsible for Jolly Rover which won Best Game at the #FreePlay10 awards. Seriously, check out Jolly Rover now!
• @KlickTock: Matthew Hall runs KlickTock which is responsible for Doodle Find on iPhone. He also was on the “One Man Band” panel talking about what he’s learnt as a solo developer.
• @morganjaffit: Morgan Jaffit was on the “Play is Everywhere” panel, runs a startup in Brisbane called Defiant Development and seems to be really awesome. You can check his blog here. Also has worked for Irrational, Relic, Ubisoft and Pandemic. I hope I didn’t annoy him over twitter ;>.>
• @lantree: Glenn Watson gave a talk on pipeline tools and development which I really enjoyed, I just wish he had more time. He’s a big beliver in sharing so check his blog here.
• @dangolding: Dan was on the twisting space panel which I unfortunately missed (but many said was epic) check his website here.

Indie Devs

These people didn’t necessairly speak but have awesome games, do I need to say more on this?

• @TinManGames: Group of Melbourne devs who were nominated for Best Sound at #Freeplay10, check their games out at http://www.tinmangames.com.au/.
• @TheVoxelAgents: The Voxel Agents apparently make Train Conductor which looks pretty cool (on Iphone). All I know is that I spent a little time chatting to Matt Clark about what the Voxel Agents are doing and I want to keep up with what they’re doing next!
• @Jason_Bakker: Lead Programmer and Designer on one of the experimedia games, Shadow-Field.
• @RBA_TimothyRyan: One of the Ryan Brothers, check their website at http://www.ryanbrothers.com.au/
• @RBA_TobyeRyan: I suspect this is the other Ryan Brother…

And everyone else

These are the people I found on Twitter that commented through the weekend, I’ve posted what I could find with a couple of links (no time on google here folks) but if there’s no comment, why not drop me a line and let me know what’s what? (@sonictail). Additionally if you’re in this list and are a speaker or a dev, let me know and i’ll correct that.

• @grassisleena: Leena seemed fairly active during #freeplay10 but she did a nice little piece beforehand on the Co-Director on #FreePlay10 and you can read it here.
• @DYoshii: There is only one thing I can say about Brad… RUN FOR THE HILLS!
• @Jickle: James O’Conner, Writes awesome articles for Hyper and is a all round awesome guy. I’m dissapointed that I missed catching him at #Freeplay10 but you can check his website here.
• @GameTacoWall: People from Game Taco were tweeting all weekend, their podcast / website is located here.
• @BRKeogh: Brendan Keogh has been writing reports on #FreePlay10 for Gamasutra, check out his report on Brendon Boyer’s keynote here: http://bit.ly/cUtuwn

And that’s all for now, i’ll post some thougts later, now I have to do some actual work (yuck)

It’s a rainy day, so I decided to post some photos rather than going for a swim. Here are some captions:

1. Twin wooden bath tubs
2. Living with cats
3. Rain
4. We found a kitler!
5. There are heaps of cats here
6. Teh O Ice
7. Iguana?
8. View from the highest point (a bit foggy)
9. Familiar roofing
10. Star fruit
11. Night markets (Ramadan break fast food)
12. Too many plastic bags (colourful)

I noticed a local developer has started hiring. It appears they're working on a PS3 game...

They're advertising a bunch of jobs, including creative types, and technical types. The advertised rate for the creative jobs is "40k". That seemed pretty low to me, so I did some research.

They stated in their requirements: "Minimum of 3-year degree with an emphasis in character animation or equivalent work experience." What is the award rate for a person with that kind of education?

Fair Work Australia tells me that it is $41579.20, assuming a 40 hour work week. If we assume the 40k figure includes Super, that means they're getting paid almost $5000 below the award rate. Ouch.

The technical jobs have a "45k" salary attached, which, including Super, is still just below the Award rate. Ouch Again.

Australian residents could lose access to the iTunes App Store.

If the legislation described in the linked article goes ahead, it is more likely that Apple will simply drop and block .au customers from it's App Store, rather than ask developers to pay the quoted $470 - $2040 dollars to get a game classified in Australia. At a minimum, It is likely that all free games would disappear.

Xbox Live Indie games already suffer because of Australian censorship laws. Local developer Black Lab Games cannot sell their StarHammer Tactics title on the Xbox in Australia because of this same legislation.

Working with multiple threads is often a necessary evil.

This is how I do it safely inside a Unity3D component. There are only certain times when it is safe to read or change variables in other components. For example, you will encounter problems if you try and modify or query Physics components while a FixedUpdate is occuring! This component uses a Mutex to let the thread know when it is safe to use other game objects.

using System;
using System.Threading;
using UnityEngine;


public class ThreadedComponent : MonoBehaviour
{   
  Thread thread;
  Mutex mainLoop;
  
  void Awake() {
    mainLoop = new Mutex(true);
    thread = new Thread(ThreadWorker);    
  }
  
  void Start() {
    thread.Start();
  }
  
  void OnApplicationQuit() {
    thread.Abort(); 
  }
  
  void ThreadWorker() { 
    //Catch and report any exceptions here, 
    //so that Unity doesn't crash!
    try {
      _ThreadWorker();
    } catch(Exception e) {
      if(!(e is ThreadAbortException))
        Debug.LogError("Unexpected Death: " + e.ToString()); 
    }
  }
  
  void Update() {
    //Gives the thread a chance to work with gameobjects.
    mainLoop.ReleaseMutex();
    mainLoop.WaitOne();
  }
    
  void _ThreadWorker() {
    while(true) {
      //Play nice with other threads...
      Thread.Sleep(0); 
      
      //Do random work here...
      
      //Wait till it is safe to work with GameObjects.
      mainLoop.WaitOne();
      //Work with gameobject in here...
      //But don't take too long!
      mainLoop.ReleaseMutex();
      //Signal Unity that we're done with GameObjects.
    }
  }
}

Another historic article, from the 1990′s. Of course, these days you’d just look it up in Wikepedia, but that didn’t start until 2001.

Introduction

My fascination with Solresol began when I recently watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. My PhD research is focused on Language Processing, and I found the concept of a musical language interesting. I wondered whether Spielberg had made the whole thing up, or whether such a language existed.

I read all of the reviews on the Internet Movie Database, and I was surprised to find that none of them mentioned the musical language at all. Strange, given the part it plays in the movie.

Coincidentally, I picked up the “Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language” the day after watching the film, and read a paragraph on an Artificial Language called Solresol which uses musical notes as elementary symbols. My fascination had begun.

A web search turned up scant information. The only web page dedicated to Solresol didn’t exist anymore, and its author, Greg Baker, had changed jobs. After a few email exchanges with his former work colleagues, I tracked Greg down. Most of the information in these pages is based on the email he sent me.

History

Solresol, or “Langue Musicale Universelle”, was invented at the beginning of the 19th century by Jean Francois Sudre (1787-1864), a music master who realized that the seven-note diatonic scale could provide elemental symbols for a universal language.

The French versions of these seven symbols are do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and si, although in this document I use so in preference to sol, and ti instead of si. So, in truth, Julie Andrews should have sung:-

Do, a deer, a female deer
Re, a drop of golden sun
Mi, a name I call myself
Fa, a long long way to run
Sol, the closest star to Earth
La, the note that follows sol
Si, the Italian word for “yes”
Which brings us back to Do!

The words in Solresol are short melodies. I’ll represent words as a sequence of characters taken from the set {D, R, M, F, S, L, T}. For example, the word solresol will be written as SRS, which corresponds to the three notes so, re and so. The word itself translates as “language”.

Solresol may be spoken, sung, whistled or played on a musical instrument. It may be written compactly, simply by representing each symbol by its first letter. It may be signed, which is reminiscent of “Close Encounters” yet again; it may even be represented with the seven colours of the rainbow.

As with all a priori languages (languages which use an invented set of elements which stand for basic concepts and are grouped into supposedly universal logical classifications, based on scientific and philosophical issues), Solresol is difficult to learn. Even so, it became very popular in the mid-19th century, and won several prizes.

It was so popular, in fact, that the French army toyed with the idea of using Solresol as the official means of communication when on the battlefield. This is presumably due to the fact that pure tones may be broadcast over further distances than articulated speech, and the confusion it would cause the enemy!

Design

The words in Solresol consist of sequences of notes. Sudre planned to use seven words of one note, 49 words of two notes, 336 words of three notes, 2268 words of four notes, and 9072 words of five notes.

Words need to be separated in some way if they are to be decoded uniquely; for this reason Sudre decided that word boundaries would be denoted with brief pauses. This requirement tends to break up the “melody” in an unpleasant way.

It is also interesting to note that Sudre didn’t use all combinations of three and four notes. It has been suggested that this was intentional, in order to avoid repititious sequences of notes. In fact, in the information I have, only 42 two-note words are defined—the seven repititious ones are omitted.

Combinations of one or two notes form the participles and pronouns, while three-note words are used for the most frequent words. There are seven classes of four note words, called keys, according to the initial note. For example, the key of do contains words which represent the physical and moral aspects of man. Finally, combinations of five notes furnish the names of the three categories: animal, vegetable and mineral.

To allow future expansion, Sudre included an encoding of the letters of the alphabet.

Grammatical categories may be distinguished by the position of an accent over the notes, which means the note should be lengthened to indicate stress. The verb is unstressed throughout, the noun is stressed on the first note, the adjective on the next-to-last, and the adverb on the last. The feminine is also marked by final stress.

The opposite of an idea is often expressed by reversing the order of the notes in a word.

Dictionary

This copy of the Solresol dictionary began with a version sent to me by Greg Baker. I HTMLised it, and converted the representation of Solresol notes to an unambiguous one. I also changed the ordering of the words to Solresol order, which makes their grouping into classes more obvious.

One Note Words

These seven words cover the most frequently used words in the English language.

Solresol	English
D	no, not
R	and
M	or
F	at, to
S	if
L	the
T	yes, agreed

Two Note Words

Although Sudre planned on using 49 two-note words, this list omits the seven repititious ones. These words form the particles and pronouns.

Solresol	English
DR	I, me, we, us
DM	you
DF	he, him
DS	oneself, himself, herself, itself, themselves
DL	one, someone
DT	other
RD	my, mine
RM	your, yours
RF	his
RS	our, ours
RL	your, yours
RT	their, theirs
MD	for, so (so that)
MR	that, which, who
MF	whose
MS	good
ML	look!, here (is here!), there (is there!)
MT	good evening, good night
FD	what
FR	with, together
FM	this, that
FS	why
FL	good, delicious
FT	much, very
SD	but
SR	in
SM	evil, bad
SF	because
SL	always, without end
ST	thank, thanks!
LD	no-one, nothing
LR	by (agent, means)
LM	here, there
LF	bad
LS	never, ever
LT	of (of the)
TD	same (the same thing)
TR	each (each one), every (every one)
TM	good day
TF	little, barely
TS	mister, sir
TL	boy, youth, bachelor

Three Note Words

Sudre planned on using 336 three note words; this list has only xxx of them. These words are used for common words.

Solresol	English
DDR	earth
DDM	season
DDF	winter
DDS	spring
DDL	summer
DDT	autumn
DRD	time, weather?
DRR	January
DRM	day
DRF	week
DRS	month
DRL	year
DRT	century
DMD	universe
DMM	February
DMS	God
DFF	March
DSD	hungry (be hungry)
DSR	eat
DSM	bread
DSF	thirsty (be thirsty)
DSS	April
DSL	drink
DST	water
DLL	May
DTD	help, assist
DTF	accomplish
DTT	June
RDD	one, unity, first
RDR	think
RDS	acquainted with (be acquainted with), know (person)
RRD	July
RRM	August
RRF	September
RRS	October
RRL	November
RRT	December
RMM	two, second
RML	give
RFD	look at
RFR	pass, cross over
RFF	three, third
RFL	ask
RFS	encounter, meet
RFT	reply, answer
RSD	listen
RSM	leave, come out of, go out of
RSF	return, later (see you later)
RSS	four
RSL	pay
RLD	sleepy (be sleepy)
RLL	five
RTT	six, sixth
MDD	thirteen
MDF	prefer
MDL	reciprocity
MDS	admire
MDT	friend
MRR	fourteen
MMD	seven
MMR	eight
MMF	nine
MMS	ten
MML	eleven
MMT	twelve
MFD	pleasure
MFF	fifteen
MFL	wish
MSD	come
MSR	enter
MSL	equality
MLR	confidence, trust
MLT	like, love
MTF	husband
MTS	happy, happiness, good luck
FDD	eighty
FDM	letter (probably mail)
FDF	date (tell the date of)
FDS	signature
FDT	finish
FRD	address, direct to
FRR	hundred
FRM	be
FRF	go
FRL	post, mail
FMD	stamp, pay postage
FMR	serve
FMM	thousand
FMF	stamp (postal stamp)
FML	letter-carrier
FMS	possess
FMT	carry
FFR	twenty
FFM	thirty
FFS	forty
FFL	fifty
FFT	sixty
FSR	leave
FSL	do, bring about
FST	prepare
FLD	necessary (it is necessary)
FLR	able (be able to)
FLM	means (means of doing)
FLF	understand
FTR	information
FTF	want, wish
FTS	cry, weep
FTL	decide
SDD	Sunday
SDR	copy
SDS	interpret, translate
SRR	yesterday
SRF	abridge, abbreviate
SRL	dictionary
SRS	language
SMD	Devil
SMM	today
SML	remember
SFF	tomorrow
SFL	leave
SSD	Monday
SSR	Tuesday
SSM	Wednesday
SSF	Thursday
SSL	Friday
SST	Saturday
SLM	pardon
SLL	hour
SLS	permit
SLT	to go up, climb
STR	joy, joyous
STM	misfortune, unfortunate
STF	laugh
LDM	school, student
LDF	read
LDT	book
LRR	fog
LRS	lesson
LMR	write
LMF	pen (writing pen)
LML	ink
LMS	forget
LMT	difficulty
LFF	snow, hail?
LFD	paper
LSD	pencil
LSR	entertain, amuse
LSF	defeat
LSS	ice, freeze
LST	flour
LLF	morning
LLS	evening
LLT	night
LTD	something
LTF	hesitate
LTT	cold (it is cold)
TDD	air
TDM	enemy
TDF	begin
TDL	progress
TDS	study
TDT	learn
TRF	exactitude
TRS	correct
TMR	explain
TMF	meaning
TML	ease
TFF	sun
TFL	repeat
TFT	again
TST	question
TLD	compare
TLM	detest
TLS	to go down, descend
TTD	rain
TTR	wind, blow
TTS	thunder, thunderstorm
TTL	heat, hot (it is hot)

Four Note Words

The four note words are divided into seven classes, called keys, which depend on the initial note of the word. Each class represents some philosophical category. Sudre planned on designing 2268 four note words, although there are only xxx listed here.

Key of Do: Physical and Moral Aspects of Man

Solresol	English
DDSD	bible
DRDM	body
DRDF	head
DRDS	hair
DRMR	eye
DRFL	arm
DMRD	senses (the five senses)
DMRM	see
DMRF	touch, feel
DMRS	taste
DMRL	sense
DMRT	hear
DMFD	man
DMFR	live
DMFS	child
DMSF	intelligence
DMLD	say, speak
DMLR	pronounce
DMTM	liberty
DMTT	superstition
DFDR	wait for, wait on
DFMR	quality
DFMM	behind
DFFD	Easter
DFSM	beautiful
DFST	truth
DFLD	candor, sincerity
DFLR	goodness, gentleness
DFLM	sensibility
DFLF	warmth (warm attitude)
DFLS	generosity
DFLT	humanity, humaneness
DFTF	conscience
DFTS	honesty
DSDR	call
DSDS	open
DSMF	light, kindle
DSFM	rise, get up
DSTF	guide
DLDM	accept, consent (consent to)
DLDF	put, place
DLRS	glass (drinking glass)
DLRT	wine
DLFR	food
DLFS	soup, broth
DLSD	meat
DTDR	enough
DTDM	vegetable
DTDF	salad
DTDT	egg
DTRD	milk
DTRM	butter
DTRF	cheese
DTRL	fruit
DTRT	bakery
DTFD	thoughtless, unwise act
DTFR	beer
DTFS	coffee
DTFT	sugar
DTST	chocolate
DTSF	cooking, cuisine

Key of Re: Family, Household and Dress

Solresol	English
RDRF	shirt
RDRL	shoe, boot
RDMD	wash oneself
RDFF	health (be healthy)
RDFT	clothing
RDST	umbrella
RRDR	build, construct, construction
RRDL	masonry
RMRM	walk around
RMRD	go, walk
RMRF	car
RMRS	visit
RMFL	house
RMFT	lodge, lodgings, reside, residence, rent
RMSD	sleep
RMTS	stairs
RFDM	furniture
RFRF	sit down
RFMD	dead, die
RFFM	locksmith
RFSD	fire
RFSF	equal, peer
RSDF	hide
RFLD	linen
RFLR	tear, rip (rip up)
RFLM	mend, darn
RFLF	sew
RFTS	cut, knife
RSRR	pliers, pincers
RSTR	work
RSML	continue
RSFF	hammer
RSLD	tired (grow tired)
RSLM	lie down, go to bed
RSLS	rest, lie down
RSTD	useful
RLDR	bleach, wash, washing
RLML	inexpensive, cheap
RLFF	right (on the right)
RLFT	hold, seize
RLSM	find
RLLD	cabinet-work
RTDD	equipment, tools
RTDS	family
RTDT	father
RTRS	son
RTMR	brother
RTSR	name
RTLM	loan, lend
RTTD	machine

Key of Mi:

Solresol	English
MDDR	how much, how many
MDRR	almost, around
MDRF	before
MDFL	abandon, forsake
MDFS	orphan
MDSD	fear, be afraid of
MDLD	refuse, reject
MRDL	undertake (undertake a project)
MRRS	gradually, imperceptibly
MMDM	however, nevertheless
MMFD	before, in front of
MMFR	opposite, facing
MMFS	everywhere
MMSR	at (someone’s house), with
MFRD	selfishness
MFMF	laziness
MSDL	change
MSRD	remain
MSRS	receive
MSRL	meet, get together
MLRL	slander
MLTR	play
MTMF	responsibility
MTFD	indiscretion
MTSD	experience
MTLL	last
MTTR	without

Key of Fa:

Solresol	English
FDRM	country, rural
FDTD	gardening
FDTT	comfort, relieve
FRDR	agriculture
FRDM	after
FRDF	plow, furrow
FRMF	harvest, gather
FRSD	horse
FRTR	dog
FRTM	cat
FMRR	camphor
FMMD	convalescence
FMFR	army, troop
FMFL	regiment
FFDR	sick, sickness, be sick
FFDM	consultation
FFDF	doctor
FFDL	dentist
FFDS	surgeon
FFDT	occultist
FFRS	chemist, druggist, pharmacist
FFLR	left (on the left)
FSRL	pull
FSMR	strategy, tactic
FSLM	sailor
FSLT	boat, ship
FLDR	sail, travel by boat
FLRL?	heal
FLFR	flood
FLST	unite, unity
FTDR	travel
FTRD	railroad, railway
FTRF	transport
FTMR	speed
FTMT	advance
FTFS	accident
FTSF	way, path
FTSR	throughout, through (go through)
FTLL	anatomy
FTLT	station

Key of So:

Solresol	English
SDDF	chillblain
SDRM	theatre
SDRL	black
SDSD	close
SDST	succeed
SDTD	orchestra
SDTR	instrument
SRMF	sing
SMFS	tone
SMSR	music
SMST	harmony
SFDD	suffocation
SFMD	age
SFLL	danger
SSRD	migraine
SLDL	painting (art of painting)
SLMF	sculpture
SLLR	purgation
SLTR	know (know a fact)
STDD	bier
STDR	literature
STFT	new
STLD	telegraph

Key of La: Industry and Commerce

Solresol	English
LDRD	industry
LDRM	manufacture
LDRF	matter, substance
LDRS	produce
LDRL	sell, retail
LDRT	bulk (in bulk)
LDMD	establish
LDMR	store, shop
LDFD	commerce, trade, merchant
LDLD	muslin
LRDR	colour
LRDL	buy
LRDS	white
LRMR	violet
LRMF	green
LRMS	yellow
LRML	blue
LRMT	red
LRFR	propose, offer
LRLR	count
LRLM	calculate
LRLF	number (symbol)
LRSM	string, twine
LRSL	take
LRTD	price
LRTR	value
LMDS	mix
LMMD	tinsmith’s
LMLF	merchandise
LMLR	expense
LMST	all, everything
LFDR	numbering
LFDM	add, addition
LFDF	subtract, subtraction
LFDS	multiply, multiplication
LFDL	divide, division
LFDT	sharing, distribution
LFRL	half
LFLD	measure
LFLF	litre
LFSD	cash (on hand), money
LFSF	money
LFSL	franc, dollar
LFST	centime, cent
LFTF	gram
LSDD	grocery store
LSRF	metre
LSRL	give back, repay
LSMR	specimen, sample
LSFD	display, show
LSFR	exposition, exhibition
LSFM	assortment, set
LSLF	guarantee
LLRL	bookstore
LLRT	hardware store, iron monger’s
LLMD	press, printing shop
LLFD	watchmaker’s
LTDD	butcher’s
LTMS	notions (store)
LTLT	earn, win?

Key of Ti:

Solresol	English
TDRD	town, citizen
TDRT	street
TDMT	municipality
TDFS	restaurant
TDFT	market
TDTD	middle, midst
TRDR	government
TRDS	election
TRTD	diplomacy
TRTR	politics, political?
TRTL	republic
TMLD	magazine, newspaper
TMTF	recede, lose ground
TSMR	finance
TSTF	kill
TSTL	fall
TFRM	country, nation
TFMR	internationalism
TFLF	rendez-vous
TLMD	police
TLTL	lose
TTDS	magistrature
TTMD	testimony
TTLF	imprisonment, police station

Five Note Words

Sudre planned on using 9072 five note words, although there are none known at this stage.

Acknowledgements

Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which got me interested in the idea of a musical language in the first place.

Some information about Solresol was obtained from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language.

Greg Baker was kind enough to pass on to me all the information he had about Solresol, after I found that his web page on the language no longer existed.

My recent work on Solresol has been aided by the information made available by Steven Rice, including his English translation of Boleslas Gajewski’s Grammaire du Solrisol.

John Schilke has mailed me hardcopies of all the information he’s obtained about Solresol in 20 years of searching.

Something I read a lot about these days is that a lot of artists hate their work. Why? I LOVE my work, warts, problems and all, just as I would love my children, warts, problems and all.

Life is too short to stress out over such things, you will die early if you stress out like this! So smile and be happy =)

I’m not earning a hell of a lot of money as I am spending a lot of time on a personal commission that is time consuming but very important to my client, so I want to do a very good job on it as I know it means so much to him. I’m treating it as a fantastic opportunity to also practice my charcoal and graphite which I have not had a chance to use for a while. I’m hopefully going to finish this off by this week.

I am also going to be doing a couple of indie title box art pieces this week and I’ve also started to regularly teach a few people privately which is lovely fun. All great people of all different ages all wanting to learn art, it’s really enjoyable. I am looking forward to doing more personal art work in the coming weeks as well as having the time to solicit more personal and commercial jobs heh.

I’ve become really interested in delving into my cultural background as of late seeing as I have never done that before, so I have purchased some books on Chinese and Japanese art and I am tearing into it so that it informs my work a little bit more. Also, I have become a little more interested in Buddhist teachings and mediation.

Sketchgroup has been going really well, we’re having new people join all the time, seen new faces just about every week, been pretty awesome, recently had some new dudes turn up, they’re great artists and great people too, I have a feeling that they will become good mates.

I've just found a project which provides the V8 Javascript Runtime, embedded in .NET!

Think of the possibilities when mixing this with the OpenTK project. Fast, cross platform graphics, audio and input with game scripting in Javascript.. Hmmm.

I recently bought Heidi a Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition mobile phone. It’s a basic feature phone with GPS and turn-by-turn (voiced) navigation.

Here are some promotional pictures:

It’s probably the best value phone we’ve ever had between us, and the perfect balance between features and price.

Everyone seems to be buying smartphones (such as the iPhone and Android handsets), but a feature phone still has many advantages:

1. Price: The 2710 is $177 outright in Australia.
2. Durability: Heidi has already dropped this thing a few times.
3. Size and weight: This phone is tiny and light.
4. Battery life: One charge lasts a few days of pretty heavy usage.
5. Tactile: Real buttons that go click. (Okay, this is subjective.)
6. Functionality: Contentious assertion?… I’ll write more about this below!

Clearly smart phones have a lot of potential functionality (according to the iPhone catch phrase: “there’s an app for that”), but feature phones are more directed in their actual functionality.

The 2710 is a perfect example of directed functionality. It’s succinctly designed for maps and navigation on a low-cost phone. It doesn’t just include an under-utilised GPS sensor and a choice of (paid) navigation apps. Maps and navigation are well-integrated and purposeful features, and it’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into integrating the phone’s software and hardware with this focus.

Here are a few notable features:

• Maps data is on the phone, so navigation doesn’t require live data transfer.
• A dedicated navigation button, so maps are always readily available.
• Easily MMS the address and a map of your current location.
• Preloaded with regional maps, and global maps are available.
• All maps are free indefinitely (so no annual charges.)
• Local points of interest (eg. hotels, restaurants) with direct call option.
• Comes with a window (and dashboard) mount and in-car charger.
• Walking guide as well as driving navigation.

This phone has been fantastic during our trip to Malaysia. I bought it outright in Australia, so it’s unlocked and readily accepted a local SIM card (so no roaming charges). Also, maps of Malaysia were preloaded so we could immediately use turn-by-turn navigation in our rental car (great for poorly marked roads).

Conclusion: Highly recommended.

Oh, and here is a promotional video:

Being in a privileged position of being able to help guide other people in various ways is a humbling experience.

When someone of their own free will comes to me with a question that will potentially shape a large part of their life or help them to choose a path to travel, I consider it a real honor. So I do my best to give them an authentic point of view that is my own, as opposed to a lukewarm limp wristed politically correct answer. It may grate some people, but I am unapologetic about it.

That isn’t to say I tell them they have to do anything I talk about – that they must do this or else they will fall into a pit of acid and go to hell. That’s not what I’m about.

In fact, I do like to start with a disclaimer, and that is to take anything that anyone says with a healthy pinch of salt. This includes anything I say as we are likely to be very different individuals, the opportunities opened to me may not be present for you, just as there are opportunities present to you that may not have been around when I began.

Things change so fast in this technologically dependent age that, if I can make an analogy…recipes can lose their flavour very quickly.

As I am in the field of concept art and illustration, logically, the bulk of the questions that come my way deals with that path and what it entails.

Just recently, I was sent a lovely email by a young woman who is contemplating her life journey, or at least a very big chunk of it.

It is a similar question to many that have come before it, so I asked her permission if I could post it here to my blog where it may hopefully help some of you out. I have of course changed her name and other references to institutes, but other than that and a few logical and syntactical alterations, her email and my subsequent reply are pretty much intact.

I hope you get something out of it.

Her email:

Hi Darren,

I just read your initial sketchbook post at ConceptArt.org, and wow… that was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever read. Ever.

I’m currently a second year undergrad at Greyland University, Computer Science major, Asian parents, the works. My parents never even had to tell me that art wouldn’t be a lucrative direction; I think all Asian kids just know that instinctively.

I’m also currently interning as a computer engineer and I recently found out that the woman who moderates our meetings (who is not an engineer herself and seriously does fuck all for a living) graduated from Greyland Art Academy.

It made me so depressed to think that even a talented artist who graduated from such a rigorous art program could still wind up doing absolutely nothing down the road, taking notes for a roomful of socially awkward men on a daily basis. The entire prospect of someday building a career in art just dimmed to faint flicker.

So I’m going to stick with CS for now, but your story has given me so much hope for what else I might be able to achieve as long as I keep working on my own to improve as an artist.

My dream is to do just what you’re doing now. I want to make baller games and eventually be able to teach others what I’ve learned. But I need to get so much better, because I haven’t studied nearly enough to produce concept art for real.

So I have a question: were you able to study art and improve while you were in college?

If so, how did you find the time, and how did you keep yourself motivated in the midst of all the parties and life, etc. I get distracted SO EASILY, but I really want to capitalize on my time at Greyland, because it’s the most inspiring and motivating place I’ve ever been. I’m afraid of wasting that inspiration by being lazy.

Anyways, thanks for the story, thanks for the hope, and I hope to hear back from you. (OMG and sorry for writing so much!!)

Best, Linda

My response:

Hi there Linda,

It was lovely to get your message, thanks for that and the kind words about the stuff I wrote.

Connecting with others who have a similar life story, who perhaps aren’t as advanced in experience or helping to give them a word or two of encouragement when all they have known is doubt and fear yet still inexplicably are drawn towards the creative energies of their life is completely the reason I wanted to write that up.

Call it an exorcising of past demons too if you will and a basis for any redemption that needs to take place.

Your story seems very similar in a lot of ways to my own and a lot of others out there, so I guess the first thing that is reassuring is that you’re not alone.

You’re not the first to experience your questions, fears, aspirations and doubts…just as you will not be the last.

Now, before you read my advice, please take it on board that I give it from the stand point of someone who is in a very different place from you, mentality and experience wise, not that that is anything unique, everyone is different, but what I am getting at is to take my advice with a grain of salt as we’re not the same person. What works or worked for me may not necessarily work for you.

Also, I tend to be a bit more spiritual these days, so please excuse if some of this seems really vague or Zen like.

Okay, in reference to your comment on a lucrative career direction, that in itself is, I feel a dangerous point of reference, in that it implicitly denotes that money is something to strive towards and will establish some sort of baseline happiness – something most people are looking for.

I feel it is important to understand that happiness comes from within, especially from what you think, as opposed to what you have or may have, which is what money is – a token that allows you to delay attaining a physical good or service.

I’m not against money at all (and I’m not saying you’re all about money either), I personally like a lot of the finer things in life. But if that is your major point of focus, you’re better off going into some other industry like finance.

Money is of course needed for daily survival, but as I grow older and I question things a lot more objectively, I find that a lot of what makes many of us unhappy – lack of money, relationship issues, envy, etc stem from the world around us telling us through media such as television, newspaper, radio, consumer magazines and other people perpetuating this thought pattern that you “need” all of this to be happy.

House, marriage, cars, designer wardrobe, exotic holidays, thinner stomach…you really don’t, to be honest, I consider them to be what Greg Manchess refers to as “Golden handcuffs”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with striving for any or all of these things, but be aware when they really begin to affect your “true happiness equilibrium”.

For me, as I’ve grown a little older, I’ve found that the less I worry about these things in an “OMG! I’m going to die if I don’t have that new shiny material good!” the happier I become.

When I walk down the beach near my house and look across the beautiful, expansive ocean and hear the waves lapping gently against the pier struts and I breath in the fresh salty air while the sun shines on my face, I know peace and happiness. And the price was simply opening myself up to enjoy these things that most of us take crazily for granted.

An interesting side effect is that as a result of unlinking material gain from my artwork, the pressure to make my artwork conform to other people’s expectations diminishes, which paradoxically unshackles me to do better work which strangely meets client expectations in a higher way. Once the external pressure is off, you’re free to really ask yourself “What the heck is it that really makes me tick?” you become internally driven and suddenly nothing a client or employer can ask is daunting because you ask of yourself greater and greater things – which I must mention you may not always succeed at.

So on this point, in a very roundabout way, if you spend energy worrying that it will not be a lucrative career, it probably won’t be. If you free your mind from that, relax and do the work because it is a part of what makes you complete as a person, you’ll be much more likely to succeed – and it’s almost pre-requisite to be like that in this field. You have to love it so much you’re willing to do it in your own time for free. Experience, especially early on in your career is the currency you should be most focused on.

In reference to a second point that you mention, regarding your moderator having gone to a reputable school and not doing anything of note with it, that’s an interesting point, but one that you really shouldn’t be too concerned with. It is of course natural to look to others for inspiration, but be weary of who you do look at as we tend to digest and then reflect much of what we see in others, and even more so at a young age when we are especially perceptible to being influenced by others who we deem more “experienced” or “intelligent”.

Now, in playing devil’s advocate for a moment, I’d also like you to think of not judging that woman so harshly, you only see her for a fraction of her time, yes she may be languishing in a dead end job which has nothing to do with what she studied, she may do that for the next 50-70 years and pass on with regret for not chasing the opportunities in abundance out there.

Or.

She could be working her butt off in the time you don’t see her, toiling away at her job as a moderator in order to pay the bills while developing herself as an artist. Jack Vettriano worked as an engineer for years, toiling away at his art for decades before becoming an “overnight sensation” at the age of 35. His paintings, which take about a day for him to do now sell consistently for six figures.

So, try not to judge people so harshly (it’ll give you more wrinkles than you know what to do with), better to turn that energy in on yourself to work to make your art better, and look at people in the field you aspire to who have “made it”, read about their trials and tribulations and understand that if they made it through alright, there’s no reason why you can’t do the same.

Now, if you’d like to become a concept artist, I’d say great for you! It is an exciting field, the job is almost never the same and you get to work on your art skills all day in a creative fashion. It’s also one of the most competitive fields to get into because of the skills required, the sheer number of people who want to become concept artists and the comparatively small number of positions and jobs out there for such people.

So if you’re not looking to become one of the better artists, you either won’t last long, or you’ll languish on uninteresting jobs that kill the soul. With that out of the way, don’t at all feel discouraged, I do that for a living and I don’t think there is anything special about me, nor a lot of the other concept artists I know. But there are some vital ingredients that I personally feel are responsible for me doing okay, that I’ve learnt that I possess along the way.

Now I’m not saying you need to possess these, just that I possess them:

1. I love what I do more than anything. Including significant others, family and friends. If I had to choose between all of that and art, there would be no contest. Harsh but true. And I am one of the happiest people you will ever meet, so I’m not some depressive type who cut’s himself.
2. I am learning to improve in some way with every stroke I put down on paper or tablet, if you’re not learning, you’re either stalling or moving backwards. There is no room to be lazy if you want to become great at what you do.
3. I ask good constructive questions of myself…bad questions are ones like “Why do I suck!?” Good questions are ones like “How do I improve the description of form?” Good questions, mean good answers, which means knowledge and growth.
4. I have persistence. Stupid mule like persistence where if someone were to say “You can’t do it.” I say fuck it and do it anyway and either prove them wrong or fail. Then try it again. And again. And again. Until it works.

You also mentioned a few other things that I deem important to look at and understand that in professing these points, you already hold some of the answers you are looking for:

“I haven’t studied enough to produce concept art for real.”

Firstly, if you’re coming up with things from your imagination, you’re already a concept artist, that’s the basis of the work, that you can conceive of something which does not exist and to put it on paper, no matter how rough a form. So congrats, you’re already doing what you want, perhaps not professionally,  but you are in essence producing concept art “for real”.

What I believe you meant, is that you haven’t studied enough to translate those ideas into a workable form that is presentable to others in order to sell your concepts to them. There is a difference and it is important to understand that this difference exists.

In response to studying, my answer is that I did not study art at all during my college years, becoming an artist was the furthest thing from my mind and all I was worried about was going to the gym, hanging out with friends and chasing girls haha.

I only found out about concept art after college and was working full time, so I guess my schedule was even tighter than if I had studied art at university.

When I did however find out about this and wanted to make a go of it, I disciplined myself to come home from work every day for 6 months and teach myself from DVDs and books, every night and on weekends too. I made a commitment to cut off just about any contact with friends and family members and probably alienated a bunch of people by doing so, but that is how I taught myself art.

I’m a 150% type guy, I don’t tend to be able to do anything half way, nor do I like to, if I don’t want to do something, I’ll quit. If I do, I’ll work my ass off to deliver more than is required.

My advice on distraction is to firstly develop in your mind what it is you really want, tell yourself this dream 10 times a day every day until it crystallises in your mind, so that you can hold it in your hand, turn it around, see all the facets of your dream.

When it becomes something tangible, when you realise that the only thing between you and that dream is hard hard work, you’ll work hard. Don’t even worry about talent. “Talent” is the word invented by people who haven’t made the effort to find out the real story behind why some people succeed and why most don’t, so they put it down to some inexplicable force. I don’t conform to that theory, I believe to a large degree that we are all naturally inclined towards certain pursuits, but that we have a more powerful force that can be developed – and that is self determination.

The reason you perhaps don’t work at it as hard or consistently, is probably because you’re not sure it’s worth it or that you can attain it or that you don’t really want it, but it seems like a nice dream anyway so you keep it around like pet dog that you can tell people about.

Wanting and doing are worlds apart, and the chasm that lays between them is hard, difficult, soul searching work and that is why most people do not become artists – because they are not willing to sacrifice, to pay the price that is required.

My hope is that this email make sense, didn’t come off too harshly and that you get something from it =)

So, long email huh? I hope you find something useful.

Peace, Daz.

Taking candid shots in public places is a topic of debate for a lot of people. Is it ethical to photograph someone without them knowing even if it’s a public place where it’s technically legal?

From the point of view of someone taking the photo, I’d say there’s nothing wrong with it. However, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s possible that I’m thinking this way because I really like taking candid photos. As soon as people notice a camera in your hands pointing toward you, they change. Their posture, expression, behavior changes – often without them even realizing. If nobody took candid photos we may never see a photograph of a person where they aren’t posing in some way shape or form.

From the point of view of someone who is being photographed in a public place, essentially in secret, I think it’s a bit more complicated. It’s easy to say “It’s legal. You’re in a public place. I have every right to do this.” as the photographer. But really, just because you have the lawful right to do something doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a decent thing to do. What if someone doesn’t want to be photographed? What if they then don’t want their photos posted on Twitter or Flickr or some other website?

If I saw a photo of me taken in public on a website, I personally wouldn’t mind unless it was saying something insulting or mean about me. I probably wouldn’t like it if the photo was unflattering, but I might still think it’s pretty cool to find myself in someone’s portfolio or even somewhere random on the internet. I would be flat out angry if it was obviously and purposefully demeaning in some way IF it showed my face or something to identify me by.

But how I personally would feel about having candid photos taken of me in a public place doesn’t matter at all because I have no right to speak for the rest of the population going out in public. What if someone doesn’t feel the same way? There are people who hate even the idea of getting their photos taken. Do photographers have the right to take candid shots of them? Yes. But should they?

I haven’t decided which side of the fence I’m on but despite this I find it hard to resist taking and posting photos of people in public with my iPhone 4, specifically using an app called Hipstamatic, which allows you to simulate analog cameras by switching lenses, flashes, and film. Check out some of my shots:

I came across this little video on a speech delivered by Elizabeth Gilbert, best selling author of Eat, Pray, Love this morning while I was lying, warm and snuggled in my bed.

I had just woken up after another crazy late night working till 5am – which I love by the way, so I’m not complaining, and I was checking out my emails and any new interesting Facebook updates so I guess I kinda discovered it by accident since I don’t really pay too much attention to people posting vids.

Most likely it is because I have grappled with such issues in the past, regarding creativity blocks that I really enjoyed listening to this alternative method of dealing with success and failures.

It’s similar to some of the sentiments and ways of thinking laid out in The Artist’s Way, but delivered with some good natured humour, warmth and emotion that is difficult to get from the written word.

Hope you enjoy it and if you wish to discuss it or comment about it, please feel free to use the comment section below.

Stay chilled.

D-Man

I really like how this drawing turned out. I thought I’d share.

Nu pastel on smooth, halftone paper.

Metroid Prime is the best Metroid game I've ever played.

It's also the only Metroid game I've ever played.

Well, not actually, I played a few minutes of Metroid Prime Hunters on a friend's DS but that was years ago and I don't actually remember any of it. So I stick to my previous statement.

Anyhow. The short of it:

Positives:

-The graphics... this is an 8 year old Gamecube game ported to Wii controls and it still looks great. Lots of detail and lovely effects despite the fairly low poly graphics.
-Gameplay is so darn well balanced that most other FPS games I've played are just lazy in comparison. Exploration is encouraged and rewarded.
-Midi music that still sounds great.

Negatives:

-Not today, folks.

Metroid Prime is awesome. I loved it quite a bit. Good game, really it is. And it came in the Metroid Prime Trilogy... so I still have 2 sequels to puzzle and blast my way through!

My 4 year-old daughter loves playing “Plants vs Zombies”. So much so that she used watercolour paints to dress up as a zombie, frightening her parents when they arrived home from work. We use the game as a reward for being good, and a five-minute session sometimes replaces storytime before bed. It’s amazing to me that a little poppet who can’t yet read can grasp so much of the strategy, and can create a consistent narrative for herself that explains how and why she’s playing the game. I couldn’t resist capturing her in action. Take a look!

We’ve also been doing some block-ins lately for our Light and Form class. They’re also known as constructs, with the purpose of getting your eye in. Thankfully in San Fran we get to do this under the guidance of Dorian Iten, the current resident instructor at our studio. Observational drawing is his specialty so it’s great to have him around while doing these.

The aim of a block-in is to map out the shape of the cast and then break it into light and dark masses.

It’s all about seeing shapes over ‘things’ – things being what they are in real life. When you start thinking of the cast as a cast (with a torso, some legs and so on) you fall into the trap of drawing what you think a torso or leg looks like instead of seeing the shapes they’re actually made from. You’re not really observing, you’re making bits up. By seeing the object as a collection of (2-dimensional/flat) shapes you can draw it more easily, and one trick in doing this it to squint and/or picture the shapes as something else.

Here’s one of my block-ins, along with a shape visualisation example:

To help draw the shape I highlighted in red, aside from squinting and just matching the angles I could’ve imagined that shape as the bottom of a crocodile’s jaw. It could be anything, there’s no significance in choosing a crocodile. The purpose is to psychologically trick you into looking at it in a different way, like an optical illusion. After this I just need to match that shape on my drawing.

Doing block-ins/constructs is a great way to train your eye, and at traditional ateliers art students will keep doing block-ins until they’re good enough to move onto the next phase, which involves rendering the form.

Another Perth Game Jam has come and gone, and what a huge bag of fun it was too! The mighty Simon Wittber once again outdid himself, making a fantastic venue available for the 20-or-so participants, who banded together to hack up nine games from nothingness over a period of 45 hours or thereabouts.

For me, this event was totally different to the Global Game Jam held earlier in the year. Due to the lack of other sites around the globe, I wasn’t spurred on by a sense of competition. It was more a case of manufacturing inspiration and enthusiasm by surrounding yourself with like-minded people and imposing constraints in the form of a deadline, a theme, and a “significant asset”. Also, the non-presence of that Louis Castle douchbag removed hate as a motivating factor, so I wasn’t keen to develop an evil game with Louis as the antagonist, as I did for GGJ.

Mr. Wittber chose to announce the theme and significant asset well in advance of the jam, giving everyone ample time to think about what they wanted to do. This was a great decision, as the amount of dithering about was reduced almost to zero, replaced with interesting discussions about several really promising game concepts. I went into January’s Global Game Jam wanting to make a flash-based game, which I’d never attempted before, and I used the time to learn how to write a game in ActionScript, using the FlashPunk framework, from scratch. This time, I knew I wanted to create a fluid simulation, similar to this one. I was pretty happy when I found out that the significant asset was a bubble, because that fitted what I wanted to achieve. As for the theme of “choose two at the expense of the other”, my first thought was the old project management adage “cost, quality, time: choose any two”. Kudos to Simon for choosing a much, much better theme than GGJ2010.

During the pre-Jam BBQ (during which Simon proudly revealed his massive cheese kransky, which both honoured and humbled me), I discussed two concepts with Jack, Nick et al.:

1. A resource management game called Gusher, whereby you send out geologists to explore land and sea, them choose a suitable spot to drill an exploratory hole, then build an oil rig to extract the crude, then refine it, store it to manipulate the market, then pipe or ship it to sell. You’d need to manipulate the media and the authorities, and there’d always be the chance of an incident (either deliberate or accidental). Each choice would allow you to fix two of the three cost, time and quality constraints, so, for instance, you would get an inaccurate report of where to drill if you sent your geologists out on a tight deadline and didn’t pay them very much.
2. A fishing game called Floater where you paddle your wooden boat across a turbulent ocean, choosing to stop and fish, bail out your vessel or move it left and right (only being able to do two of these things at a time).

After I began coding, I quickly realised that the fluid simulation would take a long time to code, and wouldn’t run at a decent framerate in Flash (I coded up a quick demo in C++ and in Flash, both using Box2D, to find big performance hits with more than 100 physics objects at once in Flash). So I started doing a little bubble simulation instead, using Box2D’s built-in support for buoyancy. This quickly led to an idea of a chef cooking a pot of soup on the stove, with ingredients being thrown in to raise the water level, and a game mechanic of merging like-coloured bubbles both to increase score (the deliciousness of the stock) and decrease heat (hence reducing the likelihood of losing an ingredient due to the intensity of bubbling, which would be the lose condition).

This worked out pretty well. Jack helped out with the graphics and playtesting, and the game mechanic came together nicely. You can have a go yerself on the RocketHands web site. Comments and feedback welcomed!

So what now? As I mentioned to Jack, Simon, Anthony and others at the end of the Jam, I treated things this time around as a great way of getting started on a project, rather than as a great way of finishing something off. So I plan to keep working on the soup-making game, which I’ve called Gusher2, until it’s at a point where I’m happy with it. With that in mind, here’s my to-do list:

• Ask Simon Boxer to draw some lewd cartoonish graphics, inspired by Muscle March. We need an attract screen, the main game screen in the same style, a win screen, a lose screen, and five distinct ingredients (celery, tomato, carrot, onion and kransky sausage).
• Add an egg-timer, and constrain playtime to 3 minutes, with a new ingredient going in every 30 seconds.
• Make the ingredients change the water level when they go in, and change the tint and alpha of the stock, to ramp up the level of difficulty as the game progresses.
• Display the current score somewhere on screen, and tweak the scoring mechanism to favour multi-merges.
• Continue to improve the game mechanic. Some playtesters have said they’d prefer to click on bubbles, rather than click-and-drag. So I’ll try that out.
• Animate some fire under the pot, some particles in the stock, some steam on top of it and so on.
• Add suitable sound effects, musical stings and… voice acting. Oh yeah: “My soup… she’s a-ready!”

After all that, I’m going to perform an experiment with online flash games:

1. Integrate with mochimedia. to experiment with in-game advertising as a revenue stream, to get analytics information, to keep online high scores, and so forth. Did I mention I want 5 different win screens, depending on whether you’re the top scorer, in the top 10%, and so on?
2. Integrate with Kongregate, to do much the same thing with a different API (mochimedia and Kongregate have an agreement to stay off each other’s turf, so to properly experiment you need to do both).

I’m hoping that integration with these services will increase re-playability. After all, competing with members of your social network for high scores seems to work. I’d like to give it a shot.

I want to get all of this done in the next four weeks. I’m working on three other projects. I have two small children. I’m building a house. We’ll see how it goes!

My last blog post was from Bali on my last day there, and here I am again about to jetset back there!  Where has the time gone?
Well I've made some more sales with Surf Prodigy which seems to be picking up momentum again.  I think the iPad has added a bunch more customers.
I have one new game almost ready to ship, and I am taking over another few game stubs to Bali to do my own little GameJam - soz for not coming this time guys - I just had too much lesson planning for TAFE to do.  Promise I'll be there next time.
So I should be able to do my little Game In Day sprints on 3 game ideas I've got, in between lazing, grazing and surfing.
Here's a link to my original GID post - http://drewfx.blogspot.com/2009/12/game-in-day-post-1.html