Cubie, post-Offworld
The following post was originally meant for Offworld, but, well, you know. It’s sad to see it end as a its own entity — it’s subsumed into the cluttered new Boing Boing design — and I’m not saying that as someone who occasionally contributed. I was a fan long before my first post there. That said, do follow Brandon’s weblog for any possible new, post-Offworld developments.
sadmb’s Cubie (embedded above) is a java powered music creation application that, by the author’s own admission, takes a great deal of influence from puzzle games. The above video, a demo of a recent touch-screen implementation, certainly shows this: blocks fall from above as if from Lumines; pieces, and the entire stage, are rotated off to the side as in a Rubik’s cube.
The aesthetic is also very game-like, so much so that I wish that it was an actual game that I could play and not an open-ended digital musical instrument. Designed with live performance in mind, it is, as the site claims, also of interest to those who like unidentifiable but curious thing.
I certainly do.
Cubie [sadmb.com, freely downloadable version available]
YMO OMY
I randomly* came across the above video from OMY (quaint, out of date website), “Oriental Magnetic Yellow”, yesterday. The mid 90s homage-band, if there is such a term, to YMO, “Yellow Magic Orchestra”, is interesting because it consisted entirely of Japanese videogame music veterans, all of whom worked at Namco: Nobuyoshi Sano, Hiroto Sasaki, Takayuki Aihara, and Shinji Hosoe. Most of these guys contributed to the music of Tekken and Ridge Racer.
After discovering the existence of this markedly obscure band, I thought back to my YMO related post on Offworld. Specifically, my little context adding paragraph at the bottom with the lazy researched (I just Googled for the most obvious cited “influences”.)
Knowing of YMO’s mid-70s electronic and computer game influences and their subsequent influences on videogame music composers like Hitoshi Sakimoto, there’s something genuinely fitting about seeing their classic tunes played on a Nintendo DS.
Here we have a very direct manifestation of that influence and, more to the point, Nobuyoshi Sano would later form, with Michio Okamiya and Yasunori Mitsuda (the Crono Trigger guy), a project called “Trio DS-10.” Here’s an interview with them on GameSetWatch and a video of their Nintendo DS-only live show.
Fitting
was right.
Knights of Charlemagne
Right from the start, Reiner Kniza’s “Knights of Charlemagne” is in my good graces. It does something that all apps in the App Store should do: it doesn’t mute my music on start. I have an iPod Touch and an iPod is primarily, above all else, a music player. If it’s on, chances are it’s playing music. Any app that mutes it without my consent makes too many suppositions about its place and role on the device it’s on. “Knights of Charlemagne” isn’t so presumptuous.
Much like “Poison,” the game is mechanically simple. There are ten estates, 5 uncoloured ones numbered 1 to 5 and five unnumbered representing five colours, in the middle of the playing field that two players vie for. Each player is dealt eight knight tokens, each one representing a colour and a number. Every turn, the active player has to place one of his knight tokens on a matching estate (either colour or number.) A new knight is then drawn and the game continues until the last one has been placed.
At the end, players score one point for every estate in which they have a presence, no matter how many the opponent has there too. The real scoring benefits come from every estate in which you have more knights than your opponent. Each coloured estate is worth five points and each numbered estate is worth its value. Additionally, the first player to control two estates, counting up, gets a crown worth five points. It’s an important game balancer that makes ignoring the least valuable estates a perilous choice.
It’s always dangerous because the AI is competent enough to punish you. The easiest difficulty, squire, which acts as a tutorial, is a pushover, but the other two, knight and king, locked until you beat the preceding level, provide a heady challenge. It’s not much, but the limited progression towards beating the king level adds to the replayability of Knights of Charlemagne. Although equally portable, in the best of ways, as Poison, Knights feels more rewarding because of this design. When you don’t have human opponents to play against, or even physical cards, these little additions are essential to keep a game engaging.
Best of all, the level of strategic thought and planning that Knights of Charlemagne requires is engrossing enough to be fun but simple enough to never be frustrating during brain addled morning commutes on the train. For $2, it’s a great little strategy game to have in your pocket.
Kickstarter
As Andy Baio has announced, Kickstarter has launched. It’s a cool little venture. Basically, it lets a creator set a funding goal for a potential project and crowd-sources the investment for it by offering rewards to backers that pledge certain amounts. In a way, it’s kind of like PBS pledge drives, mixed with Dropcash, mixed with Threadless. The concept is rock solid, but fuzzy enough to allow for a lot of creative leeway in how Kickstarter is used. It will be interesting to see what people come up with.
Since I always think about videogames, I thought about how Kickstarter could be a useful tool for the indie videogame community. Say you have a cool game that you made in Unity and you want to get it onto the iPhone, but you don’t have the $200 you need to license Unity’s iPhone support. You can create a project in Kickstarter, announce it, offer free copies of your future game to anyone that pledges $5, offer custom postcards to those that offer $10, or whatever, and wait to see if there’s any interest for it. If there is, you have that initial cash you need to get started; if not, you lose nothing, all your backers lose nothing, and you move on. It didn’t hurt to try.
It’s really early (one day old, really), but if a good enough community forms around it there’s a lot of potential there. I was going to create a project over the weekend and thought that this could be a good way to not only cover hosting costs but to incentivize its actual creation. Seeing that people are interested in your project and seeing them pledge cold, hard cash to get it done would be, I imagine, a strong motivator.
Unfortunately, it uses Amazon Payments and as a non-US citizen it seems as though I’m shit out of luck (unless there’s some hidden Canadian version with Canadian bank support somewhere.) I have to find that motivation the old fashioned way, but if this is something that can work for you I have a bunch of creator invites to give out if you want any.
Unity and the Future of Browser-Based Games
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.
DigiPen and I
No, I never did go to the DigiPen Institute of Technology, but I had considered it. I remember reading an article about the school back in the mid 1990s, not long after it opened, in either Nintendo Power or EGM. It was mind-blowing for me at the time: I can do post-secondary education at a school specifically doing game design on Nintendo hardware? Best of all, the school was located in Canada? Sign me up.
I had thought about trying to break into the games industry in those youthful days, but up to that point it was this weird, nebulous goal that I had no idea how to get to. After reading that article, though, it felt tangible and close. I was a junior in high school and for the first time I was considering what to do after graduation.
It was around this time when I started fiddling around with my family’s old Tandy 286, an old shitbox that was already obsolete by about four years. The technology didn’t matter. My interests weren’t with the advanced PC games of the day, Doom or Quake but were focused on QBasic. I spent a summer hacking the language (my first) with only its built in documentation and two examples, Gorillas and Nibbles, as reference.
It was a slow and tedious process but within a few months I managed to make a sort of text-only adventure game (I had never played interactive fiction at the time; I was mostly emulating Shadowgate and Deja Vu.) It wasn’t very good but it was a start. A short while later I learned how to do graphics — all of it via code, there were no external editors — and made a, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Metroidvania“-esque side-scrolling platformer (the “Metroidvania” label was still years away from being penned.) They weren’t very good but they were the first videogames I ever made and they hold a nostalgic place in my heart. I just wish I still had the floppies holding them (and a floppy drive to access them.) sigh.
As I approached my final year in high school I sent for an information package from Digipen and that’s when I learned the disappointing news: Digipen had, that same year, relocated from Vancouver to Redmond, Washington. They were now international and, because they weren’t accredited at the time, they weren’t accepting international students. I might not have been able to afford it either way, but not having the option at all gutted me. The next year I went to the University of Toronto for Computer Science, got bored of the “discrete math” and the theoretical shit, and eventually, in my second year, quit. It’s been a long and convoluted road since then.
Anyway, I realized that I have a ton of old EGMs and Nintendo Powers stashed around here so I made an attempt to find this one article. I found a lot of great content from those days — ads, news, previews, reviews: the mid-90s were weird as it had reviews for SNES and Genesis games right next to 3DO, CD-i, and Amiga CD32 titles. Man, I completely forgot about that one — but not the article in question. Google seems to suggest that it might be in Nintendo Power #75, but I can only find Virtual Boy related scans from that issue.
Further searches yielded a couple of extra interesting tid-bits: a Wired article from December 1995, and a copy of the 1995 DigiPen Applied Computer Graphics School Student Handbook, focusing on The Art and Science of 2D and 3D Video Game Programming, A Super Nintendo Entertainment System® Game Programming Course
.
I think about “what could have been”, but then I realize I’m still in my twenties and all those dreams continue to exist as “what can be.”
Yur-Gaming
As I mentioned in my two reports (part one, part two), Essen Spiel had more than just boardgames and LARP gear: it had some videogame content too. These came in the form of retailers selling their games or the occasional licensed products based on boardgames. There was one exception: an entire, new videogame console! The Yuraku Yur-Gaming V-MAX32.
There’s not much to say about products like this. Like the ePhone, these kinds of clones exist not to compete against the products they are mimicking, but to confuse befuddled consumers who don’t know any better.
I even took a (crappy) video of it in action. WATCH! As a clueless mom gets the sales pitch. SEE! Players haplessly swing their arms as if expecting their motions to be properly captured by the device. They aren’t. I tried to make sense of it and I think it has an accelerometer, maybe, but I couldn’t really get it do what I wanted so I don’t know. It was registering something, but it wasn’t mapping my movements spatially like the Wii does.
Click for largerThere isn’t much to say about this system except to acknowledge that when you’re being so blatantly (and poorly) copied, like the above mentioned ePhone, then you must be doing well. The Wii is doing well.
Explore Photo Vomiting Rainbow Panda
I’m not sure what the origin story is for the Flickr explore Panda thing, it seems to start over here, but it’s another thing on the list of “Reasons Why I Keep Paying For Flickr.” It reminds me of the ancient (by web standards) classic: Prime Number Shitting Bear. A creation born in those goofy and weird no-more-money post dot-boom days, before everything needed to have a weblog, required to have ad words, and had to be social.
So even though Flickr was early to embrace tagging, social feature, “web 2.0″ features before they were known as “web 2.0″, and even if they were bought out by a large corporation and all the problems that brought with it, and even if they’ve reached a size and scale far, far past the likes of Prime Number Shitting Bears, they still have a charm and character that screams “early 2000s”.
It is, apart from my web-hosting and domain registration, the only web-based service that I pay for. The Explore Photo Vomiting Rainbow Pandas are one of the many reasons why.
