We boarded the plane at high noon. By three in the afternoon I was on the ground again, nearly ten hours passed. A direct flight from Paris to Toronto is eight hours long, but this one had a stop-over in Quebec to let off all the Quebecois. The final one hour stretch from Quebec City to Toronto Pearson airport was wonderful; the majority of passengers had disembarked, leaving a mostly empty and spacious plane for the more English speaking passengers. I kept trying my French with the stewardess, partly out of habit and partly because this might be my last time I can do so for a while. I am now in anglophone land.

The in-flight entertainment was a Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker movie followed by a Twilight movie. Once this was announced and we hit cruising speed I quickly got up and pulled out my little netbook and the thumb drive which I had preloaded with music and some better entertainment. Minutes after booting, I switched off VLC, stopped my movie, and did something rash: I opened Flash CS3.

With my legs stretched out and crossed–oh how wonderful it was to have seat 1A–and the EEEPC balanced on my knees, I started making things to kill the time. I set up basic DisplayObject structure, created an mp3 loader and player, played around with audio visualization, created some blurring effects and filters, used the visualization data to generate “enemies”, brought in user input and player bullets, and, as a whole, got into a serious groove. In less time than it took to show to horrible movies I had the basis for a playable music game.

It probably won’t amount to much in the end but it stands as a testament to the creative possibilities that arise when you are trapped in an uncomfortable place with nothing to do and no means of escape. If this is true, then my being in Mississauga should herald a new creative era.

David Shute’s Small Worlds is an entry for JayIsGames’ “Explore” competition. It is a great example of simple storytelling in a game.

That might seem like a loaded statement when you consider that the entirety of the piece has no dialog, two lines of text, and features a protagonist that is three pixels tall. It’s mechanically simplistic too, only allowing you to move left and right and awkwardly jump. But that’s enough. Through your own explorations it slowly reveals the world and leaves it to the player to infer what happened and what is happening, building on all of that towards an effective ending. A simple story, but one well told within the confines of the system. And one that is told by the players’ own actions.

When I talk about narrative via gameplay, amongst the likes of Super Metroid and Left 4 Dead and others, this is exactly what I mean. It’s an extreme example, stripped down to the barest of elements, but a persuasive one.

EA’s Fifa Earth is neat. A Flash based real-time visualizer of stats and trends from games played in Fifa 10. I’m down with stuff like this. It’s ambient information that fits somewhere between the stat heavy specifics of something like Halo 3 and, well, nothing. Indirect stats like this always give a little extra life to an interactive product, making it seem more vibrant and organic.

Fifa Earth tracks things like what countries do well, statistically, in online matches, what clubs are most frequently chosen, how many games have been played, and the latest buzz from Twitter. Oh god why? And it’s unfiltered. And there’s a search tool? So with some selective search queries I was getting a stream of somewhat negative Twitter posts, some of which were directly complaining about EA, right on EA’s site. Nice.

It’s jarring. In this midst of this broad, unspecific ambient information is an overly direct tweet from what’s-his-bucket complaining about all the assholes that play FIFA 10 online. The whole thing then loses its charm. You realize that for all the hundreds of thousands of numbers and data points being shown, many of them are dicks.

Coming from Nick Stumpo, whose abnormal behavior child (abc) I fondly remember as one of the early paragons of the emerging flash/web/motion design scene back when Flash 5 was still fresh, is Fatty Bum Bum. An installation slash game Flash piece by Hanazuki for the Cinekid festival.

From a game design perspective, Fatty Bum Bum is rather poor. The controls are a little unresponsive, not mapping properly to your mouse position or click actions. It’s hard to read — it wasn’t until my second playthrough before I realized what the hell was going on — and it’s impossible to tell if you are being penalized or rewarded for your actions. And, of course, the random item popping up collect-a-thon mechanics are, well, boring.

But as a piece of interactive design and animation, it really is something else. There’s so much variety in the animations, and they’re all weird and goofy and entertaining, that you are compelled to play through it a couple of times. It might be mechanically poor, but the whimsy of the whole thing is enough to support it for, at least, two or three passes. For something designed to be an installation, where attention is fleeting, it is perfectly suited. Location is everything.

Back in 2000, if you wanted to create rich media for the internet you had two choices: Macromedia’s Flash and Macromedia’s Director. Director, which produced Shockwave files, was the more powerful of the two: far faster, capable of pixel level manipulation, and with a proper (if weird) scripting language in Lingo. Proper Actionscript, which showed up in Flash 5, was still months away. But Shockwave was a heavy format (broadband wasn’t so widespread back then) that sometimes had problems running properly in-browser. Its roots were in the CD-ROM authoring days of yore and it felt like a relic because of it. Flash was small, quick, and sexy. It soon came installed with browsers. It became ubiquitous. It took over.

With Quake Live (just got an invite, but haven’t played it yet) and Battlefield Heroes on the horizon, and all the content from Flashbang Studios, amongst others, getting a lot of attention, many are back on the in-browser bandwagon. Browser based games, ones more powerful than Flash, are seen as a growing and more commercially viable trend. Even Google is jumping in with a browser-based Native Client.

While Flash has grown a lot since those early ActionScript 1.0 days, matching what Director could once do, and while it’s still growing in possibility (Doom in Flash; NES emulator in Flash, Nintendo’s going to love that one), it’s also starting to feel old and tired. It’s everywhere and there’s a large pool of designers and developers for it, so it’s not going away any time soon, but when it comes to more specialized high-level content — games — it’s limiting. That’s where Google’s Native Client, EA’s and iDs custom engines, and Unity 3D come into play. These are browser plugins designed, in this decade, from the ground up for speed, 3D, and/or gaming applications. They are quickly filling the niche that Director once held, but Macromedia (now Adobe) abandoned. Especially Unity.

If 2009 is going to see the emergence of high-quality browser-based games, then 2009 is going to be the year of Unity. It has: lots of powerful features; iPhone support (I see the Unity logo in a half of the iPhone games that I’m interested in), which is a space that Adobe has consistently failed to enter (it’s trying though); Wii publishing; a developing community (which was essential in spurring Flash’s early spread); quality developers using it; and an upcoming PC version. In short, it is about to make a major splash. I feel compelled to jump in with it — the indie license is cheaper than the Flash IDE.

It won’t take over Flash, that’s too much of a hurdle to overcome, but it will fill that void that Director’s absence created. If it achieves even that, it will be a success. It will generate a little bit of something that Adobe desperately needs: competition. The whole of the rich-media space will be better off for it. Flash needs an alternative, because Silverlight sure as hell ain’t it.

Adobe Flash is like the mafia to me: just when I think I’m out, it pulls me back in. This is the “problem” with doing something for so long (eight years this month^[1],) you get good at it and then you get known for it. Well, it’s a “problem” for me because I like to diversify. For years I was the “flash guy” and it’s a title that’s become hard to avoid, especially when there are bills to pay. Or airline tickets to buy.

I have a love/hate relationship with that tool, though I’ve realized that most of that hate is purely by association. It’s the web production equivalent to it’s not the band I hate, it’s the fans. The Flash plug-in is mostly unobtrusive, Actionscript is a great little language that is useful to know (especially with recent javascript developments,) and the Flash IDE is more than competent when it’s not crashing. The issue is that in its ubiquity it is, and has been, highly exploitable. Flash has seen its excessive share of security and privacy violations, dubious “content”, unwanted noise, pointless animations, complete disrespect for basic web usage, et cetera, et cetera. I know, because I’ve had to build some of those things. That’s why I burned out on it and why I’ve been avoiding it, with great success, since the spring.

Despite all my negativity, Flash is very good for things like video, visualizations, and games. It is particularly great for one little subtle aspect of game making: prototyping. It’s one part scripting language and one part — its original foundation — animation tool, and these things combined make it perfect for creating quick, working versions of ideas without any of the complicated rendering and display issues of other pure scripting languages^[2].

These factors kept me on top of what was going on in the Flash world even when I wasn’t using it, and my increasing desire to pay bills has brought me, this week, back into its fold. The quick prototyping that Flash allows was one of the motivating reasons for this, even if it was a convenient excuse for getting some of the rust off in hopeful anticipation of upcoming contract work. As I’ve subtly alluded to in previous postings, I’m attempting to take a more active “do or do not” approach this year to the things that I’m interested in^[2]. This is one of them. Inspired by numerous sources, and an interest in participating in the global game jam at the end of the month, I wanted to see if I could prototype a working game in one day.

Turns out: I can!

I sat down a little after noon on Sunday with nothing more than an idea and by 2am I had a sent out a working link. It was tiring and exhausting and I don’t want to look at Flash again for another week, but it was great to feel that creative instinct flow through me for a day.

Here’s the playable version. Guide the red squares to the green goals using left and right arrow keys to move, and up and down arrow keys to activate teleporters. Use the yellowish teleporter to kill any square you can’t save. Try to get an A+ rating.

It doesn’t look like much, but the core functionality that I wanted is there and that, in itself, is the most useful part of a prototype. A working example can tell you more in a minute than a design document can in a hundred pages. Whether it works or not, or where I can take it, I don’t know yet. But I do know that having made it, I am now one day, and one game, more experienced than I was last week. Ideas are good to have, and I have had plenty, but they’re useless braincrack unless executed.

So yes: executed, learned from, new ideas gained, new code for for future executions^[4]. Huge success. Well, the action; maybe not so much the game.

See also:

• How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days, a now three year article but a timeless reference. Build the Toy First was my main strategy. World of Goo emerged out of this. Buy it, it’s great.
• Kloonigames’ list of articles about rapid prototyping. Or the whole kloonigames weblog, where he attempts to create a game in seven days every month. Not all succeed, but eventually something good comes out of it: Crayon Physics Deluxe should be available for purchase today.
• Game Design Sketchbook, where Jason Rohrer releases (or did release) a game every month.
• Indiegames’ “Best Freeware Games by cactus 2007″ and Indiegames’ “Freeware Games by Jesse Venbrux” because if you make enough content to warrant its own top ten list, you’re doing something right.

Whoops: I posted the wrong link initially. Here’s the prototype. This here’s an updated version made on Monday where I was trying various things, including ugly pixel art. It has two level sets; the second one emerged out of various ideas I was trying out.

1. Christ, has it been eight years already? If I wasn’t so aloof with the industry I’d probably have a senior position somewhere by now.
2. It helps that I know my way around it, so I can spend less time figuring out the tool and language and more time implementing ideas. And in their defense, there are useful libraries for other languages that do simplify visual tasks.
3. No resolution was made. Void where prohibited.
4. Another reason to do this frequently. Eventually, you might be out of ideas but you’ll have a massive code base to draw from and maybe some diamond in the rough ready to be polished.

Harmonic 313‘s EP1 is an interesting, if brief, excursion into bleepy, old school “Detroit techno.” The record makes heavy use of retro Speak N Spell samples, which is probably one of the most sampled toys ever.

That little reference to the toy game isn’t restricted to the music though, it’s there through the packaging and website. All the track names are obscured behind a simple color coded substitution cipher. The website plays with this and makes a simple little interactive game out of it (with three lives and everything). The reward for completing it? A bonus unreleased track.

It’s all very simple stuff but this game adds a nice little reward and working your way through it is, in my mind, much more engaging and gives me a better sense for the music than any standard discography site with downloadable samples could ever provide. This is how to engage using the interactive medium. (Or, if you prefer more complex games, there’s Year Zero, as reviewed here.)

It speaks volumes that, in the last month, the only games I have touched are Grand Theft Auto IV and Puzzle Farter. Hell, Puzzle Farter is the only game that I’ve finished since Rez HD in March. Of course, I’ve had other priorities.

The developer of Puzzle Farter is also a member of a secret cabal internet community that I’m in and it was there that the alpha and final builds were posted. I linked to it, giving a fellow member a plug, and it somehow ended up on Kotaku. The link there was regurgitation (hi McWhertor!) so I felt I should follow it up with some real content¹. Here’s a small email interview with the developer of Puzzle Farter, Pet Tomato‘s Austin “astro” Haas.

About Pet Tomato:

We are a two person company. It’s just me and my wife. I do all the
game design, programming, and sound fx, and my wife, Yoko Imanishi,
does all of the art. The little music tags were done by Ben Jastatt of
Afire Music.

On the origins of Pet Tomato and Puzzle Farter:

My partner and I met at Cartoon Network. We were both employed there,
as part of their internal game development team. We left 3 years ago
to start our own company. Since leaving, we’ve done a lot of work for
them.

Our motivation for creating Puzzle Farter was part of a larger strategy and direction for our company. Ultimately, we’d love to be
doing nothing but our own independent games, but in the meantime we
are doing work for hire. We designed Puzzle Farter to be a game that
we could put out on our own, use to attract new clients, and also to
build off of when we get client work. We believe this type of
character based platform game supports the widest array of scenarios
and mechanics.

Normally, with client work, we need to pitch a complete idea from the
start. Since we weren’t under any pressure for this project, I wanted
to start with some simple mechanics that we knew would be fun and then
just see where it goes. I really just wanted to make a game that I
would want to play.

On how they created the character designs:

We go to the bar. In all seriousness, this is a new approach for us
and it works really well. We determine what we need to figure out,
then we go to the bar and we don’t leave until we’ve got it figured
out. I don’t think that would work for most developers, but we’ve had
a lot of success with it. The main advantage is that we aren’t in a
hurry to wrap it up.

Features scrapped or never fulfilled:

We added in the duck from the very beginning, but we never had a use
for it. The hero is too short for it to be significant. We left it in
just because it felt nice.

We also had the hero throwing these large berry things around. He
could run past a bush and then it would be in his hand and you could
throw it with the spacebar. We had several ideas for it, but nothing
that merited the extra complexity.

In the alpha discussion, it was often suggested that you should have a UI gauge to show your fart “fuel.” Can you elaborate on why you chose not to implement this?

Simplicity. I’m still not sure about it, though. Lately, I’ve
considered the idea of having him fade-in/out and sweat a little to
indicate when you are really tapped and shouldn’t try to fart so soon.

I was also thinking about adding a “Tips” page to the menu to describe
some of the nuances, like “you can jump higher by holding UP longer”
and “you can jump higher if you take a few steps first.” I really hate
when Flash games have instructions that require reading more than a
few words, though, but maybe burying it under “Tips” would be a good
compromise.

There is a lot of variety in the fart noises, I think it’s safe to say that you enjoyed recording these. How were these recorded and how easy was it to channel your inner nine year old?

It was pretty fun. It took me a few hours. They needed to be about a
second and a half long and I wanted them to get higher toward the end,
like he was really squeezing it out. It took a bit of rehearsing.

Coming soon?

We tried to release this one as soon as we had something complete, but
the next version will also allow people to create and submit
levels. We have that working now, but we need to clean it up. We also
created another enemy. It’s a vase-shaped plant guy that launches the
balls up in the air. He’s a little more musical than the others, which
is something that I really wanted to expand on.

I want to thank Austin Haas for the short interview. Go play Puzzle Farter but don’t be disappointed with the no-reward NES era “You Win” screen at the end. He promises me he’s working on it!

Lastly, I was curious about how this Flash game was built since this is something relevant to my interests. His response to my curiosity follows. It might be useful to some people. It certainly is for me.

Read the rest of this entry…

One of the things that has kept me super busy over the last month has just launched: Quatchi’s Shootout Shutout. A small flash game for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics’ “Meet the Mascots” page. I’ve liked the Meomi designed characters ever since they were revealed last winter, so it was a joy and privilege to be able to work with them.

The game was produced by zinc Roe Design, who recently launched their own weblog. All Flash coding by me. PS. try to break 3000 points.

FITC Toronto was in full swing over the last weekend and it struck me with a severe case of deja vu. Annual conferences like this, if you attend them frequently enough, are strange beasts. Forgotten names are brought up, faces that are seen once a year show up and all the lunch time (in)decisions and presentations feel awfully familiar. There are always interesting bits and pieces and insights to take away from some of the talks, though it’s often a bunch of stuff that can be seen on the presenters’ website anyway.

But it’s a great place to network and find work and, with my upcoming ronin lifestyle, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

One of the main presentations at FITC, every year, is the Adobe keynote. It is often the same predictable thing. They show some weird, little side tools (this year it was kuler), some new Adobe Labs stuff, they boast about the adoption rate for the latest version of Flash player (video traffic this year) and they show new features from the perpetual next version of the Flash authoring application. This year they focused mostly on improved animation tweening controls, a modified timeline and some native rigging and 3D tools. Nice features, but they should have been in the previous version of Flash. Or, more accurately, they should have been there before they alienated their animator (read: non-programmer) demographic.

A preview of some of the motion tween features in Flash 10. See the rest of my FITC 08 pictures here.

But it’s all part of the Madden philosophy: getting people to pay for a constant stream of incremental updates and fucking over those that don’t by restricting the compatibility between the new versions. Fuck you Adobe. Everyone would be perfectly happy if you released upgrades half as often with twice as many features, but you couldn’t milk that now, could you?

Even those files that are saved as “Flash 8″ documents don’t work for me because I have the audacity to have “Flash 8 Basic“. Unable to open document with this version of Flash because it contains screens? Seriously? Screens? Who uses “screens”? No one. The file has no screens. You’re just trying to fuck me. Damnit. I’m sick of it. You win. I give up. Take my money. I am upgrading today.

But this better be the last time.