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“People ‘Back Then’ Must Have Had Better Imaginations…”

May 282009

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Players Handbook

Indeed.

As far as faculty/professors are concerned, I’ve always considered myself pretty cool, but I’m beginning to suspect that my students think of me much in the way that I thought of my more… challenging professors. Apparently my grade distributions are second only to the “law” faculty in the department and my ability and indeed desire to stick to syllabilical requirements has become well known in only one short year. Damn right. All of that said, as someone who teaches game design and classes about the history and political-economy of the videogame industry, I still think I’m pretty hip. I may make you work, but at least the source material is cool, right? I tend to not “do” finals, as they are already overdetermined. As if you (my student) hadn’t managed to already make your bed throughout the semester, why on earth would I offer a single moment in which to redeem yourself? I’m a consistency person.

So, this spring I actually held finals, though they had no impact on grades, officially. To the one student who asked, “Can I leave? I have real final I need to get ready for.” You are on notice. Two classes, two very distinct finals. Continue reading »

Water for the Fire

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May 232009

Water Dropplet Guy

So, as you can see I’m playing with water and fire a bit this summer. I’m not entirely happy with the way that the brush system worked out on the little water guy, but all in all not too bad. I’m not sure how well the transparency of the brush has worked, but I’ll get a sense of that in a bit as I start tiling the image on the screen. The next component of what I’ve done is create feet and animations of those feet and assembled them into PNG files which can then be animated on the screen. I’ll post these assembled PNG files next. Once I’ve done one set of animations, I’ll work on some other poses for each fo the water/fire characters.

Again, I used similar methods for this drawing, though the real experiment was in determining how to use the brush system of Pixelmator, which for a geek like me was probably more fun than it ought to have been.

I am assembling these together in a simple little iPhone/iPod Touch application while preparing a syllabus for an iPhone class based heavily on the Stanford iPhone class, though our emphasis will be more on the technology and design for it than the particularly computer science focus of the Stanford course.

Osy Goes to the Game Education Summit

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May 212009

Osy Osmosis

Well, it looks like I’ll be headed to the Game Education Summit this year, thanks to the NIH SEPA grant that I’m doing game design work for this summer. I’ll be bringing the latest build of Osy Osmosis [an early prototype build to the left] along with me. We should have our vertical slice completed by then and with any luck a build working on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is my hope to submit an NSF grant this summer to support my ongoing work on the project.

Work on the project is progressing well thus far thanks in large part to the artist and part time engineer working on the project. I’ve had to put my money where my mouth is as far as design goes, so we’ll see how that goes over the next couple of weeks and months. I think our vertical slice represents a pretty good sample of everything we’re attempting to put together for this game that happens to contain educational elements. I think it is a good example of what games with educational content could be. I shy away from calling it an educational game, because so often those games aren’t all that much fun. What I’ve attempted to do with this project is make the underlying game mechanics match up with real-world scientific processes. Instead of quizzing students though, we design the game such that “winning” requires that the player find and recognize that underlying model. We should be rolling this out to some teachers and students very soon as things move forward.

I suspect that in the end this particular component of the SEPA grant will hit a kind of 1St Playable state and remain there, as going into production and producing several levels for the game may not make sense. Perhaps it is an economic opportunity to take these kinds of 1st Playable pieces and flush them out, though I’m not sure who has time for that. 😉

First Art Blood

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May 192009

Playing with Fire

I have already drawn several other little characters for some of my game concepts, unfortunately I’ve taken my sweet time getting them posted online. In part I’ll blame it on just being busy at the end of the semester and my trip to Iowa to see my little sister graduate from high-school.

In the mean time, I’ve been playing a great deal with Lineform, Pixelmator, and my Wacom Bamboo tablet. I continue to use Scribbles a bit, but for what I’m attempting to do, it just doesn’t seem to do the trick. I really like being able to use a vector graphics program to do my line art and then color. Scribbles does not allow me to import an image, so I cannot color something in created in another application. Now, this isn’t spectacular stuff that I’m creating. It is just my attempt as someone with no training to try and get some of my ideas and the visions in my head into my computer such that I can begin using them to prototype game mechanic prototypes. The first set of little images are fire and water characters.

I am currently enamoured with simple 2D games as they can seemingly be more compelling to a wide range of audiences. They also seem to express more clearly some of the design mechanics one is attempting to express in a given game. More images shortly as they come along.

Thus an Experiment Begins: Programmer Art

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Apr 292009

I’ve been prototyping quite a few different game designs recently and have been struggling with not having place-holder graphics that give enough sense of the overall aesthetic of a game concept. Boxes, lines, and colors are useful to an extent, but I’ve wanted something more before I start recruiting people to help me out with the art side. Plus, there are all sorts of technological issues associated with transitioning to real art created by talented artists that are already taxed for time that I would rather not put off.

Thus, began my new experiment. I started thinking about how much time I invest in the tools that make me a better programmer, designer, writer, etc. What I realized was that I had not put much time or energy into the tools and software that I was using to create art. I use Mellel for writing, TextWrangler for many text editing things, Versions for SVN management, Omnigraffle for diagrams, Bookends for bibliographic and research material, Evernote for research and archival, ScreenFlow for software demonstrations, and even a special program for using Gmail, Twitter, etc. Now, I will cut myself a bit of slack, because I long ago invested in Pixelmator for image editing, but I use only a fraction of its capabilities. Continue reading »

UGA Homepage and Columns: More Ego News

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Apr 232009

Ok, it has now been removed from the front page of UGA.edu, so I feel a bit more comfortable posting about it. About a week and a half ago I was featured in the UGA Faculty Newspaper, Columns. This was then turned into a lead story on the UGA Website. What this meant was that for a brief moment (about 4 days) I was on the front page of the UGA website. Eeek! Well, I’ve finally been cycled off in favor of something about Second Life, which I don’t mind in the least. For those interested, however, I’ve posted a PDF here of the site while I was on it. I’m sure everyone is dying to see more photos of me, so I must not disapoint… That was sarcasm.

UGA Front Page Archive

Java? Really?

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Apr 212009

I recently came upon an FT.com article, “Java looked upon as the hottest prospect,” to which I thought, “Java? Really?” In a world of AJAX, Ruby, Perl, Python, Lua, and numerous others, Java is still a topic? I know that Java is in wide use on the server side in many places and in many embedded devices like J2ME on cell phones. To quote the article:

Part of the reason, this person says, is that Oracle believes it can make far more from Java than Sun ever did. That is because Sun decided a decade ago virtually to give the software away to make sure it was widely adopted. Many of the Java licences – including one that Sun granted to Nokia – were for 10 years and come up for renewal next year, implying that, in future, Oracle will look to extract a higher price for the technology.

But, if the price is too high, many of these companies may go the way of Apple or Netbook makers and simply begin making devices closer to real computers. Then they can run Linux variants and full blown application development environments. Java was a magic platform bullet, that failed to really arrive, and even on J2ME devices platform variations plague development. What does Java really do that cannot be accomplished with the combination of other technologies? I don’t think very much.

What really amazed me about the article was that the real punch line was left for the final paragraph of the article, a mistake that I beat out of my students early in their classes with me. Never, ever, hide the real punch line.

The final big software prize is MySQL, the open-source database program Sun bought last year for $1bn. Oracle’s databases handle more massive workloads, but MySQL has been adopted rapidly by next-generation web companies looking to save on cost. With Oracle in charge of MySQL, it could reap revenue from related services contracts while ensuring that the programme does not develop into a more serious rival product.

Yes, MySQL is a much bigger prize than Java. Duh.

Prototyping and Tools

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Apr 082009

I have spent a great deal of time lately assessing different tool chains for prototyping games in my classes. There are of course a great many options for this, but I wanted to start documenting some of what I’ve been playing with. All of these efforts will eventually be incorporated into a project that I am doing for the IGDA Tools Sig, which I guess I am supposed to be bloggin for now, but have yet to start.

Game Salad – This seems to be an actual release of something similar to the long promised Stencyl application. I have been looking for system like these GameMaker that allow you to quickly mock up 2D game prototypes. Of course one of the major sticking points with all of these applications is that they are not cross platform in many cases.
Lost Garden (Danke’s Numerous Artistic Contributions) – The numerous freely available graphics that Danke has shared with the independent community are awesome, and I can’t really thank him enough for doing this sort of thing. My students have made some use of these tile sets. I on the other hand, use them all the time to mock up designs.
IndieLib and Pieced Image Map Editor – IndieLib is a new find for me. I’ve spent a significant amount of time as the OS X lead on G3D, a cross-platform game tech/engine. Lately I’ve had more need for something like G3D, but 2D. IndieLib seems to have found a kind of critical mass of independent game developers interested in working on the library, so I’ve begun looking at what it will take to bring it to OS X. To this end, I’ve been focused on making it as friendly as possible with Quartz Extreme, which would give a 2D library the biggest spread of support from graphics cards on OS X (including those integrated Intel cards).
FlashDevelop – Flash Develop is a kind of sideline interest. Open Source Flash development seems to be a growing interest for many. I am no exception. I have no love for proprietary software like the Adobe Creative Suites, but Flash certainly is a growth area, so figuring out how to support developers interested in Action Script and Flash is something I have spent a great deal of time with lately.
Löve – Löve is also a love/hate/hate-love thing I have going. I’ve been using a great deal lately to prototype my own game concepts. So I love it. At the same time, I’ve encountered several strange things related to the underlying Lua language, which I hate. At the same time, some of the things I hate are actually kind of growing on me. Hmmm…

I wined a few weeks back about being unable to register on the PopCap Developer Forum so that I could download the PopCap Framework. Post GDC this announcement came out, which seems to indicate that the project is being scrapped by PopCap, but released into the wild at some future point as an Open Source Software project. This is partially why I decided to throw my hat into the IndieLib ring. Continue reading »

Georgia Trend and Ego News

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Apr 082009

So I feel compelled to blog it when it happens, but Georgia Trend recently published an article about the growing industry in Georgia. You can read the particular quote from me after the break. But what I’ve been screaming about since arriving here is that the real opportunity for Georgia is the opportunity to make a different kind of industry. This is why I’m so interested in independent game development. Rather than importing existing large companies, Georgia has an opportunity to really forge their own industry. Ian Bogost’s comments seem to capture this far better than mine did, but at their heart are close to my own:

“Most graduates go off to California or Seattle or wherever the industry is thriving. A lot of them would happily stay here if there was more of an industry to graduate into,” says Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost, researcher, critic, designer and author of the recently published Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. “We’re not going to be viewed as a serious player in the industry until we see some successful products released, with critical acclaim and all that stuff.”
…
“Georgia doesn’t need to create an industry. It needs to create a unique industry,” he says. “We should be looking at what a regional games industry would look like. Every state is looking for ways to capitalize on this new form of entertainment, but the opportunity we haven’t cashed in on is the specific voice of Atlanta or Georgia or the Southeast.

The Everyday Lives of Videogame Developers

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Mar 292009

So, I know that my article over at Transformative Works and Cultures, “The everyday lives of video game developers: Experimentally understanding underlying systems/structures,” has been live for a while now, but I have yet to blog it. It’s a nervous tick I have about my work I guess. I like to see a little more reaction after the fact. It also doesn’t help that I was in pre-GDC chaos, which I have now returned from. Anyway, the article is indeed live and can be reached at:

O’Donnell, Casey. 2009. “The Everyday Lives of Videogame Developers: Experimentally Understanding Underlying Systems/Structures.” Transformative Works and Cultures 2

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