The Mystic’s house and the city of New Mound are two locations where this look really shines through. Later in the game, you explore a dilapidated shanty town on a polluted and an Ewok-esque treehouse village. If you like what you’ve seen in the Spellirium screenshots, rest assured there’s a lot more where that came from!

Subscribe Por Favor

If you love Spellirium, it would help me out a lot if you upvoted it on the Steam Greenlight page? Or check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

Today’s Spellirium Minute talks about the visual references that informed the trashpunk look of the game. They include Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children, Delicatessen, Amelie), Terry Gilliam (Twelve Monkeys, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), The Dark Crystal and The Princess Bride. Easily at home on the list would be Labyrinth which, in addition to featuring a character made out of junk, features a whole lot of David Bowie’s junk.

Help Me Out by Subscribing

If you love Spellirium, it would help me out a lot if you upvoted it on the Steam Greenlight page? Or check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

But when our background artist Greg Brown came on board, the project turned a corner. Suddenly, the vision i had for the game was being realized. Suddenly, i could see Spellirium as a finished product. And lo, it was glorious.

Help Me Out by Subscribing

i use the royal “we” a lot when referring to Untold, but by and large, it’s just me over here. There are lots of little things you can do to help me out. Why not upvote Spellirium on the Steam Greenlight page? Or check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

Thankfully, Jimmy’s suggestion to allow freedom of tile swappage made the difference between a not-very-fun game and a very-fun-game.

Jimmy McGinley Would Probably Subscribe

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

As the video reveals, the most popular puzzle was “Picture”, so we put it in the current game such that players would be playing it again and again. But our implementation was a bear, and it turned out to be a level of work akin to fighting through a 100-level randomized dungeon in order to power up a single, consumable health potion in Disgaea. We’re going to be less heavy-handed with the Picture puzzle in future revisions of the alpha.

SUBSCRIBE, and Prove that you are Noble of Heart

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

Well, Mission Totally Failed during our first attempt, which we outline in the video. Based on that initial UI failure, we made the following critical changes to the Dictionary that you’ll find in the current version of Spellirium:

1. By default, the Dictionary filters by words you’ve already made. So the first time you open the Dictionary, you see it filled with words that you recognize, because you just finished building them in a challenge.
2. Instead of only two word states (“got it” and “don’t got it”), there are now four states: unseen, seen, owned, and spent. You can filter the Dictionary using any of those parameters for more or less granularity.
3. There’s a cheeky % complete counter at the bottom of the current dictionary, which usually says something like “0.0017% complete”. This is almost there to dissuade players from building all fifty thousand words because, come on … get a life.
4. There are two Cheeves in the game related to collecting words. One of them is called “You’re Almost There”, which rewards you for completing 2% of the Dictionary ;) The other one is for 100% completion, but it implores you NOT to achieve it, offers you no reward, and encourages you to get out and join a community group instead.

SUBSCRIBE is Not in the Dictionary…

… but it’s in our hearts. Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

In the video, i tease a fight i had with a fellow game dev. It’s actually not going to be mentioned in the very next video, but it is upcoming, so watch out for it!

No Limits on Subscription (nudgehint)

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

i Post This Video Every Day

Robby “the Doogs” Duguay has been a big supporter of the campaign so far. Last week, he sat down with me and we banged out eighteen Spellirium Minute developer diary videos. All of them are short, screencapped vids about two minutes apiece, in which i talk about different design processes during the five long years we’ve been building the game. The videos contain info about our prototype regimen, communication with artists, and the inspiration that led to the project. They make for interesting viewing, and of course i’d like to get them out to as many people as possible.

i have enough content to release one video every day for the duration of the campaign. What i didn’t realize was the enormous chunk of every morning that would be taken up promoting each video. This is the process i follow from the moment i hit that “Upload” button on YouTube:

Prepping the Video on YouTube

1. Write a video description. Make sure to include a link to Spellirium off the top. If the video references a playable game prototype or a blog article, add a link to it at the bottom of the description.

   

2. Write as many tags as my little mind can fathom. This improves searchability.

   

   (my little mind can’t actually fathom very many tags)

3. Fix the auto-caption track to create an English closed caption track. i have no idea if this improves searchability, but i do it anyway. Even with only two minutes of video, it is an asspain.
4. Create a custom thumbnail for the video and upload it.
5. Add an annotation to the end of the video linking to the previous video.
6. Add an annotation to the end of the previous video linking to this video.

   

7. Write a little note to subscribers.
8. Launch the sucker.
9. Cue up the video and add it to the Spellirium Minute playlist.

Shouting From the Rooftops

From there, i have to pull a million different levers to get the link out to a bunch of different nooks and crannies:

1. The Untold Entertainment blog. Every post must contain, at a minimum, a link to the Spellirium campaign, a link to the Spellirium Minute playlist, and a link to the Untold Entertainment YouTube channel with a call to action to subscribe, because subscriptions are a big deal on YouTube. They’re like your mailing list, and they’re how YouTube determines your worth as a content creator.

   

   This is what posting daily video content has done to my blog traffic this past week.

2. Ensure that the Untold blog post uses the tag “Spellirium”, so that a plugin will automatically repost to the developer diary at Spellirium.com
3. Tweet the blog article with embedded video out to both the @Untoldent and @Spellirium Twitter accounts
4. Post the video link to Facebook under my personal Ryan Henson Creighton account, and on the Spellirium Facebook page. i haven’t been posting on the Untold Entertainment Facebook page, but i probably should.
5. Post an Announcement on the Spellirium Steam Greenlight page.
6. Post to the Spellirium backers-only message boards, and
7. the Spellirium press kit page, and
8. the Spellirium wiki (for posterity) and
9. the Spellirium subreddit (which we had to create because Redditors kept deleting our links)
10. Email the vid to the guys at Evolve PR, who are helping us out with the campaign.

TIGSource

There’s a Spellirium thread on the TIGSource forums that i update regularly. But TIGSource is a rare and precious snowflake that operates differently from many other sites. For example, the forum doesn’t let you embed YouTube videos (PLEASE let me know if i’m wrong about that), and it uses a phpBB/wiki-style markup. Here’s the painful process of posting there:

1. Screencap the video.
2. Upload the image to my server, since the TIGSource forums don’t let you upload images (again, if i’m wrong, please let me know.)
3. Copy/paste the content of the Untold blog post in a new reply to the TIGSource thread
4. Meticulously go through the post and rewrite the HTML markup as phpBB markup (if anyone knows a handy conversion tool that will do this for me, PLEASE let me know! It’s not quite painful enough to make me write my own convertor, but it’s getting there)
5. Point to the uploaded image of the YouTube video
6. Link it to the YouTube video
7. Change the Reply title
8. Change the Thread title

Finally, since Twitter is easily our largest referrer, i make sure to schedule or post repeated announcements throughout the day, since Twitter is only effective if people happen to see your link float by in their feed when they’re looking at Twitter.

Comb hair. Brush teeth. Promote video.

This is the routine i run through every morning, which actually begins the night before at midnight EST when i post the video to YouTube and Twitter only (partly for my Australian friends, and partly for fear that i’ll sleep in the next morning and completely miss my promotional window for the Eastern Standard Time breakfast crowd). Another key repost time is 11:30/12:00 PM EST, which is the double-whammy of lunchtime break for EST people and breakfast for PST people.

We’ve also created some “special” videos which took longer to shoot and required more effort, but they’re there to sort of break away from the sameness of the screencapped vids, and to hopefully enjoy some viral sharing. The last “special” video we posted showed me pointlessly demoing the 2D Spellirium game on the 3D Oculus Rift. Today’s special is a Spellirium-styled parody of the Pokémon Rap:

The punchline is that through all of this, my video strategy is not working. Just take a quick look at the abysmal double-digit views each video is pulling.

Over the past week, with one video going up every single day, and despite a big push from Kotaku that brought over 5000 people to the first vid, YouTube accounts for a whole 27 visits to the Spellirium campaign. However, that’s more eyeballs than articles on certain big press sites have brought us. Our conversion rate is high at 64%, and our lowest-priced and most popular tier is $15. If my i-flunked-high-school-math calculations are correct, the entire week-long YouTube effort has been worth roughly $275 to us so far. But maybe it’s a slow burn?

i’m Taking Requests

You’ll notice that despite all of this hustling, i’m still really only hitting a lot of insular locations. Where’s Google+? Where’s Dailymotion/Metacafe/Vimeo? There are so many more places on the Internatz. My blast radius is still quite close to home, and i haven’t yet discovered many great places to share these videos that draw a potential audience from far and wide. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Maybe then, i’ll have to spend the entire day promoting these videos, instead of “just” the entire morning.

Robby “the Doogs” Duguay is responsible for the bang-on musical homage, while you can thank Jon Remedios for the chorus that’ll stay in your brain far, far longer than you’ll want it to.

Spell all the words!

Subscribe to All the Videos!

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

This challenge is interesting because it implores the player to not excel, by word game standards. By making longer, more difficult words, the player gets into more trouble with a harder-hitting monster.

The flobbert hasn’t made it into the current game, but if it does, it will probably be based on this slimy design:

The creature’s name will have to be changed, though, because it’s eight letters long. i’d like all the creatures’ names to be spellable in the game grid, because reasons.

Superscribe!

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

It turns out, as i reveal in the video, that i didn’t rip off Loom as badly as i’d thought. And Lloyd Alexander, who looks in person every bit like Quentin Blake’s drawing of Roald Dahl’s The BFG (due to his other-worldly schnozz), liberally borrowed from Welsh mythology for his Prydain Chronicles.

Great artists steal.

Subscribe, Why Doncha?

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

The prototype i cover in this video represents our first proof-of-concept for Spellirium, where we actually give this puzzle-within-a-puzzle idea a whirl and see if players find it compelling. Thankfully, the game passed that test – which means we’ve got many more videos about the ensuing five years of game development to share with you!

Always Be Subscribing

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

This latest prototype was another step in our journey, five years ago, to develop a unique and interesting word puzzle game mechanic that no one had ever done before. Building and iterating on so many prototypes gave me a real appreciation for masterful puzzle games like Tetris, Dr. Mario, Puzzle League and Super Puzzle Fighter which initially seem simple in their execution. A lot of thought goes into these things, and this video series is a behind-the-scenes look at those thoughts.

Subscribing is Sexy

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a thing!

Once piece of unanimous feedback from early Spellirium playtesters was that time limits in word games are no fun. There do exist hardcore factions of speed crossword puzzlers who enjoy a little time pressure with their solving, but the vast majority of people would prefer the kind of turn-based pressure that enables them to go fix and devour a complete sandwich – with pickles – between moves. Prototype 2 bore this out, as the video explains.

Free Subscription!

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any!

To scratch our game dev itch, we dipped our toes in the water and chipped away at various prototypes for Spellirium, slowly developing and iterating on the game’s letter-swapping mechanic, its collectible word concept, and it innovative (and HOT) puzzle-on-puzzle action. In this first Spellirium Minute video, we explore the very first Spellirium prototype, and totally make fun of it.

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any!

The Oculus Rift is a Kickstarter-supported pair of shielded goggles that beams two slightly offset images of a video game directly into your eyeholes, and tracks your head movement to make it appear as though you’re actually looking around in 3D space. Following on the heels of sensational reaction videos like grandma tripping balls on the Oculus Rift, this one was intended to be a parody video, but judging by our YouTube and Kotaku comments, some viewers don’t quite get the joke.

A Few More Minutes

This is the first in a series of dev diary videos, the majority of which Robby “the Doogs” Duguay and i screencapped during one wild Thursday session, the outtakes of which will surely be released as B-sides when they’re trying to milk posthumous Christmas albums out of us. i’ve written a LOT of content on Spellirium over the past five years; these videos highlight the most interesting content from those five years, except video, so better.

Check out the growing Spellirium Minute playlist, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any!

Although we don’t have a fundraising target posted, a dream scenario would have us raising $50000, so that we can cover off voice-over comfortably (at ~$20k), and then have enough left over to hire storyboarders and animators to clean up existing cut-scenes, and animate new ones for the third act (~$20k), leaving $10k for the balancing, gameplay testing and polish that the alpha requires.

Here’s how the first ten days of the campaign look, sales-wise:

The campaign launched on a Tuesday, and all kinds of magical, marvellous things happened. The little spike on the following Sunday was courtesy of Tim Schafer, who has generously helped out many crowdfunding campaigns since his own record-shattering Kickstarter campaign last year. Big thanks to Tim for his generosity!

Moron Math

When i “ran the numbers” for the campaign, this is what i thought: at a dream target of $50k, and an assumed (and extremely conservative) conversion rate of only 1%, we would “only” need to drive five hundred thousand pairs of eyeballs to the campaign site in order to raise that kind of money. No problem, right? With a good mix of press attention and word of mouth, it was no small feat, but we were up to the task.

Reality paints a different picture. Our actual conversion rate is astronomical, at 62.6%. That means that most people who hear about Spellirium come to the site with wallets in-hand. That’s great news.

The glum news is that if we maintain a daily average of $192.30 (which will only decrease the farther we get from that large Day One sum), it will take almost three quarters of a year to raise the dough. We’ve only budgeted one month to drive the campaign really hard, so a dramatic fall-off is imminent if we don’t do something to increase traffic.

Something to Increase Traffic

So how do you get a whopping truckload of eyeballs to your website? Common sense says that you go where the eyeballs are: in this case, press sites that have the attention of a large number of people. But dig this: the media focus that so many indies strive for may not bring the boom that they expect.

Here is a list of the significant press attention the campaign has received to date:

• Rock Paper Shotgun: Hands-on: Spellirium Alpha
• Gamezebo: Kickending Spellirium
• GameFocus: Spellirium’s Kickender Lets You Play The Alpha Version Now
• Polygon: ‘Kickending’ Spellirium, an adventure game for ‘hardcode word nerds’
• YouGamers: Spellirium Teaser Trailer
• @TychoBrahe – SOLD, you fucking bastards.SOLD
• Toronto Thumbs: Alpha Bits
• GamersHell: Spellirium Available for Pre-Order
• GirlGamersUK: Pre-order Spellirium Now
• Jay is Games: Link Dump Fridays
• Reality is a Game: “Kickend” Spellirium, Get the Alpha
• IndieGames.com: The LOOM and Boggle lovechild Spellirium now for pre-order with alpha access
• HardcoreGamer: Spellirium Alpha Available, Go Play Now!
• Tim Schafer -“If Loom and Boggle had a baby, and then let you mess with the source code. From the makers of Ponycorn Adventure! http://spellirium.com/”
• Joystiq: Spellirium, from Ponycorn Adventure dev, out in alpha now
• Indiestatik Alpha Impressions: Spellirium
• Creative Coding Podcast 36 – Spellirium with Ryan Henson Creighton http://creativecodingpodcast.com/36-spellirium-with-ryan-henson-creighton/
• National Post Post Arcade Podcast #9: Ryan Henson Creighton on ‘kickending’ Spellirium
• IndieGamesHQ: Untold Entertainment Opens Alpha Funding for Spellirium

Now take a look at the traffic sources for the website:

The three t.co links are Twitter traffic. @UntoldEnt has 3600 followers on the social networking site. That network, with considerable help from the likes of Tim Schafer and Tycho from Penny Arcade, accounts for the bulk of our visitors.

The second-biggest referrer is Mojang.com, the studio that created Minecraft (with their own legendarily successful alpha campaign). On Day One, Mojang’s Marc Watson tweeted about the project. The Mojang website features a sidebar where employee tweets roll by.

Marc’s tweet couldn’t have appeared in that sidebar for more than a few hours, but players clicking on his link have accounted for the second-highest amount of traffic to the campaign. That’s the kind of attention 10 million unit sales of Minecraft gets you!

De-Pressed

Press sources that you would expect to have driven more traffic are suspiciously absent from the Traffic Sources list. Have you ever dreamed of seeing your game in lights on a site like Joystiq.com? Their Spellirium article, posted in the apparent traffic Dead Zone last Sunday night, brought a whole 8 visitors to the campaign. JayIsGames who, six years ago, brought two thousand people to Untold Entertainment in a single day, has only pulled in a tenth of that traffic in a week and a half!

Bizarrely, in other instances the posts i’m putting out seem to be completely traffic repellent. Look at this weirdness from a post i wrote on the Oculus Rift message boards:

The Skydive post, which went up around noon, has had 230 views. A mere 3 hours later, the Spellirium post has only drawn 14 people. Bizarre! (Although in retrospect, i should have just titled the post “Spellirium” … it looks like any mention of 2D is like a garlic-infused crucifix to the 3D-loving Oculus Rift vampires.)

Big Game Hunting

Now, please don’t misunderstand: i am very grateful for all the stories press people have been writing about Spellirium so far. It’s just an interesting cautionary note that the “big score” you’re chasing may not pan out.

Just this week, i heard an anecdote about someone who busted hump chasing an IGN story which, when it finally dropped, sent only a few dozen people to his website. i’m placing a lot more hope in the mid-size sites who perhaps post less frequently, have a more intimate relationship with their readers, and can talk about Spellirium through a number of different avenues available to them, including Twitter, Facebook, and their email list. And in certain cases, maybe a trashpunk adventure game just doesn’t interest the readership of certain sites?

Will You Give Me a Minute?

Search loves video, or so i hear. The vlog strategy backfired on me a few years ago when i paid five-dollar increments to have the crazies over at Fiverr.com shoot ZombieGameWorld.com testimonials for me. This time, i’m taking the vlogs into my own hands. Robby Duguay (AKA “the Doogs”), composer and campaign contributor, helped me bang out no fewer than eighteen developer diary videos, which we kicked off today with the immensely silly Spellirium Minute Episode #0: Tripping the Oculus Rift. We have enough segments to release one a day for the next two and a half weeks. And so we shall!

If you want to catch ‘em all, subscribe to the Untold Entertainment YouTube channel. The videos will appear in our “Spellirium Minute” playlist. The first six vids talk about the different prototypes we built on our way to finding a fun mechanic for the game.

Pimpin’ Comes Easy

Having an entire month to devote to grassroots PR makes me wonder if i’ve missed my calling? It’s very, very difficult, and it means humbling myself and shaming myself and extolling myself all at the same time. It’s frenetic and exhausting and it sometimes feels like i’m in the middle of a Rube Goldberg machine, and have been tasked with making sure it runs properly. But because of its intricate and challenging network of interconnected puzzles, promoting Spellirium is one of the most fun and exciting adventure games i’ve ever played!

If you have any hints for how i can achieve a complete score of 50000 by the time i finish the game, leave them below in the comments section. Spoilers are encouraged.

Powerups can add different types of letters to your grid (vowels, and high- and mid-scoring words), the can increase your energy, protect your energy from depleting, and change the colours of the tiles. They can cure poison tiles (currently, the Graelig at the end of Act II is the only poisonous creature), and they can soften stone tiles (stone tiles are implemented, but none of the creatures create them … yet). Powerups are super useful if you want to, say, 3-star the errgrd to earn the decorative gourd item for the incense quest in Act II.

Improvements for Future Versions

All these interconnected systems are already kinda complicated to begin with, but in alpha v0.36 and below, there are some extra steps thrown in that make it needlessly difficult to craft one lousy powerup! Here are the changes we’re planning to make:

1. Currently, Powerups can cost up to five items to craft! We’re reducing that number to three ingredients, max. Most Powerups will probably cost one item.
2. At the moment, you have to solve a picture puzzle whenever you cast a Powerup. Some of those puzzles are so difficult, you need Powerups to help you solve them. Holy crap! This isn’t Disgaea, for Pete’s sake. :) We’re scrapping the picture puzzle requirement. Hopefully picture puzzles will show up somewhere else in the game.
3. Cheeves unlock Spells, and Spells are templates for Powerups. You start the game with a blank Spellbook, but i think you should start off with at least one Spell, so that you a reason to want the Spells you see in the Cheeves area.
4. Cheeves are represented by a carrot-on-a-stick. You unlock the feature by talking to the Mystic, but it’s currently part of an optional conversation tree that some players miss! We need to do more work to help players discover it … probably by making it mandatory.

   

   Look familiar? No? You’re not alone.

5. The Cheeve requirements are all completely imbalanced. How many semordnilaps should you have to build to earn the blue Shield Powerup? Is 25 too many? i don’t know! That’s why we’re playtesting! (Note: a semordnilap is a word that makes a different, perfectly valid word when read backwards … like ROOM <-> MOOR)
6. Right now, you don’t get any notifications that you’ve completed a Cheeve. What’s up with that? Needs fixing.
7. Since a lot of the Cheeves are progress-based (“Build 100 5-letter words!”), i’d like to see a little carrot icon show up whenever you build a word that advances a Cheeve.
8. Item prices in the Merchant’s store are WAY too expensive right now! In a future version, we’re going to SLASH PRICES! Everything must go!

9. That’s the story, and our plan. If you have other suggestions and you’re a Spellirium backer, head over to the Spellirium Backers-Only Message Boards and leave your feedback in SEECRET!!

   Not yet a backer? Pre-order Spellirium and play the alpha today!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/13/introducing-the-spellirium-powerups-system/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/09/spellirium-pre-order-campaign-day-one/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/09/spellirium-pre-order-campaign-day-one/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:20:35 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4962 i’m not necessarily going to do a daily play-by-play of the entire Spellirium pre-order campaign, which we launched today to Seussian fanfare, because SNORE. But today was eventful enough that i wanted to record a few tidbits for posterity.

   You’re Going Down

   For startsies, my Internet service provider decided that this would be the Best Week to do nightly maintenance, and threatened complete shutdown every night at 1am. Picture me sitting at my living room table last night, double-fisting laptops and hopped up on Dr. Pepper, straining my neck muscles at the sloooowly-creeping upload bars on YouTube as the clock raced towards 1am. John from Rock Paper Shotgun had told me the schedule for their impending Spellirium alpha impressions article. It was slated to go live at something like 2 or 3am Normal Person Time (did you know the sun comes up at a different time in Britain? Talk about Bizarroland.), and so it was an actual race against the clock to get everything working before my service cut out completely.

   

   It was a thrill-a-minute, let me tell you.

   By 1:20am, the campaign video and the PC versions of the different reward tiers were launched and tested, but i still had this pesky Mac problem (did you know the buttons do different things on a Mac? Talk about Bizarroland.), and home Internet access did indeed go down.

   And so it was that in the middle of the night, i packed my PC and Mac laptops into a suddenly achingly heavy backpack, and ventured out into the inky void to find a 24-hour Internet cafe. i launched the Spellirium pre-order campaign from behind a grody grease-covered desk that smelled of corn chips and despair. Bedtime last night was 4am.

   Miracle Quip

   When i awoke only four hours later, i launched the announcement post and started the Buzz Machine. By midday, former intern Mo had alerted Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, two adventure game mainstays, to the campaign on Twitter, but Tim couldn’t see the site for some reason. This all led to some groaners about a database-themed adventure game. Venerated adenture dev Noah Falstein chimed in. It was all very surreal:

   @grumpygamer @timoflegend Hey guys! My former boss (@untoldent) made an adventure game & I’m thinking you’d like it! bit.ly/fQrcyO

   — Mohammed Al-Sahaf (@MohdSahaf) April 9, 2013

   @mohdsahaf @grumpygamer @untoldent Cool! Is it called, “Error establishing a database connection?”

   — Tim Schafer (@TimOfLegend) April 9, 2013

   @timoflegend @mohdsahaf @untoldent I think the world is ready for an adventure game about SQL.

   — Ron Gilbert (@grumpygamer) April 9, 2013

   @grumpygamer @timoflegend @mohdsahaf @untoldent so many collection quests

   — Loren Bednar (@LorenBednar) April 9, 2013

   @grumpygamer @timoflegend @mohdsahaf @untoldent Bah. The gaming world is already plagued by remakes and SQLs.

   — Nidoking (@IAmNidoking) April 9, 2013

   @grumpygamer @timoflegend @mohdsahaf @untoldent It’s an instant bestseller. Even the first game is a sequel

   — Noah Falstein (@nfalstein) April 9, 2013

   Noah apparently didn’t get the memo about that joke, so Ron got a dig in:

   @nfalstein @timoflegend @mohdsahaf @untoldent We can always count on you, Noah.

   — Ron Gilbert (@grumpygamer) April 9, 2013

   
   

   Why was the site down, anyway? It likely had something to do with Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade (on whom i blame the entire concept of Spellirium to begin with because of his outlandish review of Bookworm Adventures so many years ago):

   SOLD, you fucking bastards.SOLD spellirium.com

   — TychoBrahe (@TychoBrahe) April 9, 2013

   
   

   

   Ruh-roh, Raggy.

   The site was brought to its knees. i had been there twice before, but i hadn’t learned.

   i managed to restart the server a few times, before MySQL completely crashed, which i guess is the point at which the LucasArts vets tried to access the site.

   Thanks For the Memory (?)

   Folks on Twitter suggested that i house any and all images on Amazon S3 servers to alleviate the load. That was all well and good, but i couldn’t get into my site to make those changes, and i had never dealt with a database crash before. i called my hosting company and asked what was up. It was particularly stressful to make a support call when i knew that a bajillion of Tycho’s followers were trying to see what he was so enthusiastic about.

   The guy on the support call restarted MySQL for me, and then suggested one little tip that would make everything run a bit more smoothly:

   Him: Click on the admin page.

   Me: Yep.

   Him: Now click on the “server update” button. Tell me when it’s finished.

   Me: Mmmm … okay. …. Now. It’s finished now.

   Him: There. Now your server has 2x the memory.

   Me: It … what?

   Him: Do you have any more questions?

   Me: …. uh …. yeah, actually.

   Him: Shoot.

   Me: If there was a way to double the server memory all this time, why did you wait for me to click that button? i probably would have been okay with YOU pushing that button. Without me. Like, a long time ago.

   Him: Well, we just kinda wanted you to know about and appreciate the upgrade, i guess.

   This was some full-grade ruby-slippers-return-you-immediately-to-Kansas bullshit right here.

   A Swift Kick in the Ego

   With double plus server memory, i was able to access the campaign site and offload most images to Amazon’s servers, except for the gigantor full-page background images, due to a WordPress weakness.

   The last little surprise of the day was this conversation i had with a friend of mine on Facebook about Spellirium:

   

   Only a few minutes later, i was watching the pre-order emails fly by, and i see one from “Kim Swift”. i thought “that couldn’t be the Kim Swift, could it? One of the original developers on Portal? What kind of an insane coincidence would THAT be? Talk about Bizarroland.”

   Yep. It was that Kim Swift. And she was only one of a number of amazing devs i admire and respect who decided to give Spellirium a shot today.

   In summary: Day One was a roller coaster of emotions, and now i need a powernap. Day Two of the Spellirium Pre-Order Campaign begins tomorrow.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/09/spellirium-pre-order-campaign-day-one/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/09/the-spellirium-pre-order-campaign-launches-now/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/09/the-spellirium-pre-order-campaign-launches-now/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:24:55 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4931

   

   Come mothers and fathers, come sons and come daughters,
   come graduates sprung from your old alma maters
   come lovers of words, come adorers of books,
   come peer at these pages, come take a good look

   For today at long last, you will finally play
   the game we’ve been building for many a day
   (i’m so proud to say it, it’s making me teary some)
   this is the day that you’ll all play Spellirium!

   While it’s not fully finished, it’s come well along
   we’re ready to let you all play, you big throng
   and with your support, it will end perfectly
   and we’ll make it the game that we meant it to be.

   

   So open your wallets! Un-mattress your cash!
   Donate all your savings, and empty your stash!
   Dig deep, and find money, and give it all here
   And then yell to your friends so that they overhear

   And THEY give us their money! And THEIR friends do, too!
   and then when it’s all over … just what did we do?
   We shut down the banks, and we took all the bucks
   and every last dime in the world went to us

   The people of Earth will all turn out their pockets
   And hope, beyond hopes, that we’re gonna rock it
   And rock it we will, for the price you did pay
   Oh, the game that we’ll make. OH, THE GAME THAT YOU’ll PLAY!!

   

   
   Word.
   
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/09/the-spellirium-pre-order-campaign-launches-now/feed/ 7 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/04/announcing-an-announcement/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/04/announcing-an-announcement/#comments Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:48:28 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4934 Many sorries for not announcing that i’d be announcing this announcement today, but know this: for those of you who have been waiting patiently for Spellirium news all these weeks, months, and even years, mark your calendars for April 9th 2013. In ink. And NOT that erasable ink, or the novelty disappearing ink that you get at joke shops. (Why do you even have that kind of ink near your calendar, anyway? You must miss a lot of appointments.)

   Tuesday, friends. TOOHZ-DAY.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/04/announcing-an-announcement/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/04/level-up-student-showcase-2013-contents-under-pressure/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/04/level-up-student-showcase-2013-contents-under-pressure/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:57:36 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4936 i attended the 4th (?) annual Level Up Showcase student show last night.

   The show is a really great thing, as it combines all of the fragmented student shows from Toronto-area colleges teaching video game design and development, and blobs them into one gigashow. It’s a very smart thing to do, because

   1. industry folks don’t have to run around the city to different shows on different days evaluating emerging talent – Level Up is a “one-stop shop”
   2. it enables the schools and their students to compare output with each other and to compete on results, which will hopefully drive the schools to raise their quality bar
   3. there’s just a nice feeling of unity and community solidarity in having everyone under one roof – even competing entities like schools

   The event was hosted at the Design Exchange, a big impressive building in Toronto’s financial district. Impeccably organized, the show was set up in multiple rows of large monitors on stands, with student teams clustered around them.

   

   It’s great to see various media acknowledging the world-class games industry in Toronto

   This Bit Doesn’t Really Work Quite Yet Because We Only Had Nine Weeks and Seven Group Members

   While the logistics and raison d’etre of the show were both excellent, the games themselves were (once again) somewhat of a let-down. Here’s an exchange i had with a student last night, which is typical of these types of shows:

   Student: So you fly around collecting these things, and they fill up your Power Meter.

   Me: Okay … cool. (Looking around the screen) Where’s the power meter?

   Student: Oh. We didn’t have time to build it. So once the Power Meter is full, you can …

   Me: Wait a second … i thought you said you hadn’t build the Power Meter?

   Student: We haven’t. i just want to tell you about the way the game would work if it was in there. (Student proceeds to describe how every single game mechanic centres around this non-existent Power Meter.)

   Me: MMmm. Alright.

   Student: Yep. And we have five levels, where the terrain changes and you …

   Me: HOLD THE PHONE A SEC. Why the Hell did you build four more levels of this thing when you didn’t nail down the whole crux of your game mechanic? Don’t build four extra levels … build the g-d Power Meter!

   It was the same story throughout most of the show. It got to the point where i was just rage-quitting games at station after station.

   Student: So you have to go to the edge of this platform and jump …

   Me: How do i jump?

   Student: We didn’t have time to program that bit.

   Me: (tears headphones off and throws them) FUCKSAKES!!!

   i spoke to one group of students who had created an absolutely terrible game (i visited their school weeks ago and i warned them it would be terrible, but they soldiered on). They were dismayed at the sight of one game in the corner of the room from a certain private diploma mill in Toronto. The game had gorgeous current-gen 3D graphics and was apparently made in CryENGINE®. i approached those students and asked what their roles were on the game.

   Student: We did everything.

   Me: Yeah?

   Student: Yeah, everything.

   Me: Well, you didn’t write the engine. This is Crytek, right?

   Student: Well, yeah.

   Me: Because other students in the show wrote their own engines from scratch. What about these assets? These trees and bushes and ground textures?

   Student: Yeah. We did those.

   Me: Bullshit you did. Those are out of the box, right?

   Student: Yeah, they are. But we modelled the terrain and we put the trees there.

   Me: Okay. So … so what did you actually do on this project?

   Student: The scripting.

   Me: WHAT scripting?

   Student: Like, LUA. There are inivisible boxes and triggers and when you collide with them, they trigger sound effects and voiceover, and in some places they trigger NPCs to walk away from the player.

   Me: KTHX.

   i returned to the students who made the terrible game to reassure them that things are not always what they seem. Toronto-area schools are all running very different flavours of instruction. This exchange underscored the importance for both students and recruiters to clearly express exactly which skills are on display in any given capstone project.

   Keep It Simple, Students

   While i didn’t get around to every game in the show, there were three games that stood out for me. One was a multiplayer pirate ship naval battle. Cruise around in your ship, fire cannons off either side with the two trigger buttons, and sink enemy boats. It worked, it was fun, and it didn’t try to do too much.

   Another game was an extremely simple bullet hell game. Big deal, right? But in contrast to most of the games at the show, it worked just fine, and it had the typical variety in power-ups and enemy types. Simple and functional. They weren’t trying to blow anyone’s minds – they just wanted to make a working game. Good plan.

   Finally, i played a multiplayer version of a word game with a mechanic that was very similar to Spellirium. While there were still a few kinks to work out, the game had a refined, professional-looking presentation and it played well. Simple and functional.

   It’s really easy – especially as a game dev student (and then years later as the president of Untold Entertainment ;) to bite off way more than you can chew. But i hope the students at the Level Up show last night had an opportunity to wander around and play each others’ games. The show is a very, very good step in the right direction towards solving What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges, and towards forging a stronger bond between academia and industry, such that Toronto-area schools produce the kinds of grads that can immediately find work in their chosen field (and that industry is happy to hire!).

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/04/level-up-student-showcase-2013-contents-under-pressure/feed/ 16 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/02/untold-entertainment-demystifies-their-april-fools-day-prank/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/02/untold-entertainment-demystifies-their-april-fools-day-prank/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:06:40 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4927 Hi, everyone. i just wanted to reassure you all that yesterday’s post was, indeed, an April Fool’s Day joke. From the chatter that exploded all over Twitter, it looks like we convinced a lot of you. Thanks so much for your enthusiasm, and for believing in us, but this one was unfortunately a falsehood.

   

   That’s us – zany, wacky, and full of fun! We hope nobody was TOO fooled!

   For the rest of the year, it’s business as usual here at Untold, and we promise not to be such nutty funsters … that is, until NEXT April Fool’s Day … so watch out!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/02/untold-entertainment-demystifies-their-april-fools-day-prank/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/01/untold-entertainment-posts-april-fools-day-prank-on-blog/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/01/untold-entertainment-posts-april-fools-day-prank-on-blog/#comments Mon, 01 Apr 2013 04:01:14 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4921 Today on their blog, Untold Entertainment posted a facetious entry intended to trick the reader into believing a falsehood, to celebrate April Fool’s Day. April Fool’s Day is observed worldwide as a day of pranks and tomfoolery. Numerous corporate websites play host to misleading or deliberately silly content that is posted with the express intent of shocking, surprising, or raising the hopes of the sites’ readers.

   

   Cologne, Germany on April Fool’s Day

   Only Joking

   This year was no exception, and Untold Entertainment pulled out all the stops to craft a slyly droll post that drew suspicion from only its most astute readers. The post was followed by comments from readers asking “Is this real?”, and “Are they serious about this?”, peppered with occasional interjections from savvy prankees calling out the jape for what it was: a bit good-natured misdirection. “Untold Entertainment is just funning us,” they reassured, and “If you believe this, I have a bridge in Florida I’d like to sell you, boy howdy!”

   

   Untold Entertainment’s April Fool’s Day blog post

   Untold Entertainment posted a follow-up entry on April 2nd, ensuring confused readers that their April Fool’s Day post was only a jovial ruse, and that it was business as usual at the boutique game development studio.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/04/01/untold-entertainment-posts-april-fools-day-prank-on-blog/feed/ 4 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/26/this-preposterously-large-novelty-button-is-the-best-promotional-purchase-ive-ever-made/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/26/this-preposterously-large-novelty-button-is-the-best-promotional-purchase-ive-ever-made/#comments Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:01:35 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4916 Guys: forget one-pagers and business cards and booth space and being friendly on Twitter. The greatest money i’ve ever spent trying to promote a game at a conference like GDC this week is this absurdly gigantic Ask Me About Spellirium button, which i have to securely pin through ALL of my shirts, or else it will drag on the floor and peel me out of my clothes:

   

   It also affects the tides.

   Everyone here at GDC is asking me about Spellirium because of this astonishingly huge button. Even if they don’t CARE about the game, and they just want to make FUN of my inappropriately grandiose button, their sarcastic japes actually open the door for me to tell them about Spellirium. Damn their mockery – my message still gets heard.

   My audaciously enormous button serves an important secondary function: it is a reference to a character in The Secret of Monkey Island who wears a button that says “Ask me about LOOM”.

   

   

   (i always thought that guy looked a lot like Ron Howard’s brother)

   Spellirium is unabashedly inspired by LOOM, and anyone who gets the reference and points it out to me has just identified himself as someone familiar with point n’ click graphic adventure games. That person is now a prequalified lead, with the upsettingly gigantic button having done all of the work for me.

   It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/26/this-preposterously-large-novelty-button-is-the-best-promotional-purchase-ive-ever-made/feed/ 4 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/22/gdc-for-you-and-me/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/22/gdc-for-you-and-me/#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:20:55 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4909 i’m heading out to GDC tomorrow. Here’s what Untold Enertainment is up to in San Francisco:

   Fact or Fiction Panel at FGS

   

   i really have to wonder if the Flash Gaming Summit will be around next year? They’re calling it FGS, and distancing themselves from the word “Flash” much like Kentucky Fried Chicken tried to bury the word “fried” by re-christening themselves KFC. The difference between Flash and saturated fat is that one is a gross gloppy mess that can stop your heart and end your life prematurely, and the other is saturated fat.

   To that end, i’m moderating a panel called Fact or Fiction? with a dream line-up of panelists, to have a rapid-fire opinionated discussion about the FUD surrounding the high-level game and app development world. We’ll be poaching the elephant in the room with very first slide, which asks “Fact or Fiction? Flash is Dead”, and we’ll keep going from there. Joining me are my esteemed colleagues:

   • John Fox, GM, Games.com
   • Ben Garney, Chief Engineer, The Engine Company (Loom, Pushbutton Engine)
   • Pany Haritatos, VP of Mobile, Kongregate
   • Matt Rix, Founder, Magicule (Trainyard)
   • Scott Walker, Partner & Head of Production, Ninja Kiwi (Bloons, SAS: Zombie Assault)

   The panel is Sunday at 5:30. i hope to see you there!

   Education Panel at PAX East

   If you read your program and lined up for hours to see me speak and to sign your boobs at PAX East this year, sorry to disappoint you! There was a mix-up. The inestimable Steve Swink of Enemy Airship will be speaking instead. Although, if you think the charismatic and chiselled fellow at the front of the room who does CrossFit five times a day is actually me, so much the better.

   

   Steve Swink, the game industry’s answer to Viagra™.

   Spellirium at GDC Play – Even for Women

   i’ll be demoing Spellirium the OMDC GDC Play booth Tuesday from 10-1! This is the new alpha build that will become available very shortly (look for an exciting announcement on April 9th). Spellirium is the game that three years ago, the casual games portals told me women were “too stupid to play“. Guess what? i made the game anyway. i’ll be at GDC assuring women (and men) that they are, indeed, smart enough to play Spellirium. i’m sure that will come as a relief to all involved.

   

   Spellirium is hard! *giggle*

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/22/gdc-for-you-and-me/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/21/save-girl-game-dev-wannabe-mackenzie-from-gross-old-man-sex/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/21/save-girl-game-dev-wannabe-mackenzie-from-gross-old-man-sex/#comments Thu, 21 Mar 2013 23:13:50 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4905 A great Kickstarter campaign just went live with an irresistible hook that’s so irresistible, you can’t resist.

   

   9-year-old Mackenzie, a girl, wants to go to STEM camp to create her own non-violent role-playing game, and her douchebag brothers say she can’t do it. Anyone who’s played Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure knows that little girls can, and little girls will … so BACK OFF, BOYS.

   The one erroneous assumption the video makes is that Mackenzie will be able to eliminate shacking up with a sugar daddy as a career path if she gets into game development. i’ve been in this industry for 13 years (6 of them as an indie), and by this point, i’d kill for a sugar daddy. i’d easily trade having to caress a set of over-tanned flabby pectorals sprouting grey curly chest hair for a lifetime of fully-funded game projects. Mackenzie! Don’t be a fool. Marry rich and OLD. It’s the only way.

   Whither Thou, Gorgon?

   You’ll remember that Project Overboard began work on Head of the Gorgon last year at TOJam, the proceeds of which will send at-risk youth to nerd camp like the one Mackenzie wants to attend. Gorgon is finally nearing completion – watch for updates on it in May.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/21/save-girl-game-dev-wannabe-mackenzie-from-gross-old-man-sex/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/19/printfgood-morning-vietnam/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/19/printfgood-morning-vietnam/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:08:23 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4900 There’s a remarkable post making the rounds on Twitter today. i thought i’d pull it onto the blog to help it reach a wider audience.

   Neil Fraser, who works for the education department at Google, visited an elementary school in Vietnam to learn about how Computer Science is taught there. What he learned was fascinating, and frankly, it should have Americans quaking in their boots!

   Read: CS in VN by Neil Fraser

   During the article, Neil links to a Vic20 commercial that i was desperately trying to find for my TEDx talk last fall:

   
   
   

   Neil’s summary of American CS education near the end of the article is both frightening and sad (and all of it true). i repost it here, in case you can’t make time to read the rest of his account:

   • School boards fight to keep CS out of schools, since every minute spent on CS is one less minute spent on core subjects like English and math. The students’ test scores in these core subjects determine next year’s funding, so CS is a threat.
   • Teachers often refuse to teach real CS because more often than not they don’t understand it. Instead, they end up teaching word processing and website construction, while calling it CS.
   • Parents often oppose CS classes since the grade has no direct benefit on their child’s academic prospects. This is compounded by a lack of understanding of the difference between their child playing video games and their child writing video games.
   • Students intentionally tune out of CS class since there are few things worse in American high school than being labelled a nerd.

   Last year, i felt like i was fighting tooth and nail to teach a Scratch class (for free) at my daughter’s elementary school for the third grade students there. Getting permission to run a weekly lunch club was like pulling teeth. Since that experience, i’ve been teaching occasional classes at schools and summer camps that are happy to have me. i really wonder when North American schools will have completely missed their shot at this, and those of us who are eager to teach compsci to young children will just give up and buy a plane ticket to Vietnam?

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/19/printfgood-morning-vietnam/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/18/5-film-tropes-murdered-by-technology/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/18/5-film-tropes-murdered-by-technology/#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:11:00 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4889 TVTropes.org, one of my FAVOURITE sites on the Internet, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is nothing new under the sun. A quick cruise through the site (which, if you’re like me, will balloon to hours of your life sucked down the Internatz hole) turns up so many commonalities between created works that you’re liable to be left feeling there’s no possible way to dream up anything remotely original.

   

   Is he gonna say his catchphrase? i hope he says his catchphrase.

   Interestingly, with the advent of certain technological breakthroughs, certain common tropes can no longer be plausibly depicted in film or teevee … though i don’t suppose that will stop anyone from writing these scenes when so much of our creative industry seems to be on auto-pilot. Here, then, are five tropes that have been ruined by technology.

   1. Teevee in Store Windows

   i’ll admit right away that you don’t see this trope very much these days, but it’s been a staple of film storytelling for a good 40-50 years. In it, characters see late-breaking news about some disaster or other being broadcast from an array of teevee sets being sold in a store window. i was on my way home the other day, and passed by one of the rare independent teevee shops that still exists. The teevees in their front window were showing super-crisp footage of leaves, to showcase the sets’ high definition capabilities. It got me thinking about how, even in the days of cathode ray tubes and lowfi, i had never seen a store window showing live television … it was almost always the latest VHS release on display.

   

   Look what’s on the 6 o’clock news tonight: plot development!

   It’s all pointless now, because if you’re one of those uncommon indie teevee stores, the very last thing you’ll use to convince people to buy a teevee is live footage from a 24 hour news network.

   2. Families Grouped Around the Teevee While Something Important Happens

   Another trope killed by the changing uses of teevee is the one where some big event happens, and we see the teevee’s point of view, peering into bars and living rooms around the world as rapt people stare back at the screen. Now, the bars i’ll buy (even though the only thing i’ve ever seen on a bar teevee has been two well-muscled UFC guys pretending to wrestle, and everyone else in the bar pretending it’s not super gay), but the image of a family snuggled on the couch together watching some announcement about Our Hero, maybe with Jr. in the foreground wearing his cowboy hat and playing with his Howdy Doody doll, is a little too much to bear. There’s no family fireplace any more; instead, we all have tiny fireplaces burning in our individual bedrooms and in our pockets.

   

   Don’t worry: the teevee POV shot is alive and well in home video game console ads.

   3. Arguments over Trivia

   This one’s a lot more subtle, but i’m sure if you trawled back through hundreds of popular movies, you’d find piles of examples where discussions about researchable trivia would have been stopped dead by one character whipping out a smart phone.

   

   Vincent: And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

   Jules: (whipping out a smart phone) A Royale with Cheese.

   (15 minutes of bored silence)

   If you’re writing dialogue that takes place in the present day and in a wealthy country, you can really only have your characters arguing over opinion … or cook up some excuse as to why they’ve misplaced their cell phones, which brings us to …

   4. Slasher flicks

   In the 80′s, it made sense to have a maniac terrorizing a group of teenagers at a sleepaway camp. Phones were tethered to buildings, and you had to get to those buildings. And even if you limped your way to a building, face bloodied and missing a high-heeled shoe, you might even find that the phone cable had been cut.

   

   How am i gonna hear the phone over the sound of that chainsaw?

   But thanks again to cell phones, the implausibility of a slasher actually getting away with it without anyone placing a call becomes too much to bear – so much so, in fact, that someone made a supercut of all the excuses slasher flicks now need to make to account for missing cell phones or coverage:

   
   
   

   5. Last-Minute Airport Reunions

   The trope of the couple reuniting at the airport, just as one person has a foot inside the aircraft, hasn’t made sense for decades, but we keep seeing it – even as it’s abundantly obvious to anyone who’s travelled lately that if you run and shout in an airport, or if you try to get anywhere near a plane without a uniformed high school drop-out irradiating you or feeling up your junk, you’re likely going to face a probe (think “alien”, not “Congressional”).

   

   And while it wasn’t set in an airport, the Empire State Building scene in Sleepless in Seattle has always bothered me. The movie makes it seem as though you can just take an elevator to the top of the building and moon over that guy from Bossom Buddies when in reality, even pre-9-11, getting to that observation deck involves buying tickets, waiting in line, going through a metal detector, waiting in line some more, and then “sharing” the deck with a few hundred gawking tourists.

   

   How much are tickets to the Hollywood fantasyland observation deck on the left?

   Honorable Mention

   i would mention how ridiculous it is that film and teevee still use live-audio recorded-to-tape answering machines, but i’ve spent an entire post on that in the past.

   More Data Required

   These are just the examples i could come up with while writing this post to keep my web traffic up. i’m sure YOU can come up with even better examples in the comments section below, so have at it!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/18/5-film-tropes-murdered-by-technology/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/13/the-myth-of-the-digital-native/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/13/the-myth-of-the-digital-native/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:45:07 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4883 There’s a term flying around that really gets my goat, to put it like a Nancy Drew character. “Digital native” purports to describe a young person who has grown up surrounded by digital technology. It is a dangerous, grossly misleading term that needs to be nuked from orbit if we ever hope to move forward into a healthy relationship with The Future. Here’s why.

   There Is No Fork

   i remember a quote making the rounds during a conference on kids and technology. i’m not sure if it was borrowed from somewhere, but the gist of it was this: we’re not excited about using forks, because we’ve grown up with forks all our lives. Kids today have the same relationship with the Internet.

   

   It’s true: there now exists a generation of people who have never known a life without the Internet, smart phones, VOIP, video conferencing and game consoles. So it must follow, some people reason, that these new technologies are as commonplace to them as are eating utensils.

   Ageism

   To compare something as earth-shattering and civilization-changing as the Internet with something as mundane as a fork already betrays a lack of appreciation of the capability and complexity of the current Age … and i capitalize “Age” because i have no doubt that the networked computers have ushered in a capital-A Age of human technological development: as in Stone > Bronze > Iron > Internet. An astoundingly myopic focus sees only Pinterest and cat pictures; what’s happened in the past few decades is nothing short of epochal.

   

   The Internet has been compared to the printing press, but that invention was not made available at a very low cost to millions of people enabling the unfettered transmission of type, sound, AND images – both moving and still – WITH automated language translation and free duplication and instant WORLDWIDE distribution. Take a much more macro view of human existence, and the printing press won’t even rank.

   But more importantly, the term “digital native” subtly implies that because young people are surrounded by networked technology, they intuitively know how to use that technology. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. It doesn’t matter what sort of technology you’re surrounded by: no one comes out of the womb knowing how to type a search engine query, pilot a spaceship, or even use a fork.

   Priorities

   The crucial difference, continuing with our fork/computer comparison, is that today’s parents know how to use a fork, they know the importance of using a fork, and they consequently teach their children how to use a fork. In contrast, today’s parents do not know how to use computers, they do not know the importance of using computers, and they therefore do not and cannot teach their children to use computers.

   

   Father may know best, but he definitely doesn’t know how or why to defrag a hard drive.

   Calling kids “digital natives” seems to leave technology education up to forces of nature, as if kids are somehow going to learn how to properly use a computer by osmosis – much like we’ve done with sex education, and look at how that’s turned out. i’ve seen the resulting ignorance that a tack like that produces; when i taught a group of first year college students a few years ago, i required them to zip their midterm test file and email it to me as an attachment. The class erupted with protests. They did not know how to zip computer files. They did not know how to attach files to emails. They did not know how to send emails. And in which program were they enrolled? Video game design.

   

   So in this computer course, you want me to … USE … a computer?

   But why should they know how to send emails? Email is a very recent advancement. It’s really only seen widespread use for the past fifteen years. i didn’t really begin to use email heavily until i was working full-time in an office setting. And how were these kids supposed to know how to archive a collection of files? It’s an easy thing to do, but you don’t know what you don’t know. Archiving has only been a recent addition to operating systems; prior to its inclusion in Windows XP (i believe?), you had to download a shareware program like WinZip or gZip or WinRar to archive files. It’s not really something you’d naturally know how to do until you’ve been required to do it.

   

   Tying your shoes: not incredibly difficult, but definitely a learned skill.

   Wickedpedia

   i found that the students i’ve taught and the young graduates i’ve mentored – “digital natives”, all – have been completely hopeless at using search engines, a skill i call “Google-Fu”. They’ve been taught by their high school teachers never to use Wikipedia as a source because it’s “unreliable”, due to the fact that “anyone can edit it”. (Teachers, if you think that just anyone is on Wikipedia writing extensive entries on complex mathematical theorems, ancient Jewish mysticism, and common practices in the manufacture of thumbtacks, kindly retire. The Future will take it from here.)

   Lately, this admonishment has softened to become “fine – use Wikipedia, but it can’t be your only source”, which is equally ridiculous, because many well-written Wikipedia articles are already cross-referenced to the nines with links to all of the material that would turn up through diligent independent research anyway [citation needed]. And often, articles that are further off the beaten path all have Talk pages which feature ongoing discussions on how those articles are being written and refined. Talk pages are excellent resources to help young researchers identify authorial biases and to develop media criticism skills.

   And again, the fact that so many young people i meet have been told not to use Wikipedia as a source suggests an education system that, itself, does not understand the current Age and has been teaching neither adequately nor accurately.

   

   If someone vandalizes a Wikipedia article to make Magellan a contemporary of Cap’n Crunch, and a student cites that passage verbatim, the problem is not Wikipedia.

   Forgotten Knowledge from the Mists of Time

   i attended college on the cusp of the changeover between a period in personal computing where it was a niche interest of hobbyists, and the explosion of networked machines into the lives of everyone on the planet. And being involved during the changing of the guard, i was very fortunate to attend a class at my school that unravelled some of the crucial mysteries of computing for me, and to this day, i am immensely thankful that i have this knowledge.

   

   The course taught me what a disk is, and explained the actual physical process involved in storing data inside a computer. i learned what RAM was, what a ROM was, and why waving a magnet around near your computer was a bad idea. i came to understand how digital displays worked, and the difference between our increasingly old-fashioned cathode ray tube monitors, and these newfangled flat LCD monitors. i learned what a bus was, how a microprocessor worked, why we talked about “BOOTing” computers, and where the term “spam” came from. i learned how search engines indexed web pages on the Internet, and that knowledge alone has made me particularly adept at Google fu. i was taught about viruses, what they were and how to avoid them.

   

   To this day, i understand how disk drives and CDs store digital information. This should be common knowledge.

   All of this amazing and wonderful arcane knowledge is stuff that we no longer teach, because we have a generation populated by “digital natives”. Our kids know how to thumb around on tablet and smart phone devices that have one button. They can communicate with each other as long as it’s nothing too complicated, and as long as it all boils down to one gigantic shiny graphic element that says “SEND”. Some know it all boils down to 1′s and 0′s somewhere down the line, but they have no idea how or why, or why they should care. As long as it all just works, they’re fine. They can’t swap the battery out of their devices, but pretty soon they won’t need to: companies like Apple are leading the charge with perfectly impenetrable little boxes that we must return to them to service. The days of tinkering are disappearing. Our future – The Future – belongs to the companies who build the devices, who hold the keys, and who alone understand how things work.

   Making Us Go

   IANASTF (i am not a Star Trek fan), but one Trek episode introduces an alien race called the Pakleds:

   
   
   

   The Pakleds appear to be very simple-minded, yet somehow they’re flying around in spaceships. That’s because they steal as much technology as they can get their hands on – “things to make us go“, without ever putting in the effort to develop their own technology, or to understand how their stolen technology works. They desire only the power that this technology brings, and they don’t care about the ramifications or consequences of using it.

   The poisonous term “digital natives” excuses us from effectively teaching our children how to properly use, appreciate, and understand the incredible networked computer technology that now permeates our lives. We don’t want to learn how to program – we just want programs that work. We want things to make us go. We have become, and we are raising, a generation of Pakleds – a devolution of humankind which, instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, is dandruff on the shoulders of giants. To wit: we’re flaky. It’s time that we do away with the term “digital natives” altogether, accept our responsibility, and recognize the importance of teaching our young people how to effectively navigate and steer the incredible future they will soon inherit.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/13/the-myth-of-the-digital-native/feed/ 9 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/07/visiting-video-game-exhibit-smells-like-victory-and-rec-rooms/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/07/visiting-video-game-exhibit-smells-like-victory-and-rec-rooms/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:09:45 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4878 It was my great pleasure to speak on a panel last night to kick off the Ontario Science Centre’s new GAME ON 2.0 exhibit. Here’s me, next to Assistant Professor Sara Grimes from the University of Toronto, and James Everett, a designer at Ubi Soft Toronto:

   

   Photo by Douglas Gregory

   Marc Saltzman, who is essentially our evangelist to the unwashed mainstream masses, moderated. We spoke briefly about a number of heavy topics, including violence in games, women in games, and whether consoles were doomed. (No, yes, and yes in my opinion). As usual, i played the contrarian; as an audience member, i can’t bear panels where everyone is polite and agrees on every topic. We’re competing with reality teevee here, folks … some idiot has to take his top off and gyrate while standing on a chair. And it might as well be me.

   And Speaking of Exhibition…

   The exhibit itself is fifty flavours of cool. Clearly curated by someone who know what he’s doing, the gallery (on loan from London) features most of the game you’d expect to be in there, coming off as a living, breathing “50 best” list from any reputable games magazine. This is very much an exhibit for the masses, so you won’t see any fruity indie games (but who really cares about those, anyway?) The one notable exception was Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year, which looked downright important encased under glass.

   

   A Slow Year is the token black guy in an overwhelmingly blonde-haired, blue eyed collection of games.

   No – this is triple-A in all its rapidly fading glory. You’ve got Halo, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Rock Band (or was it Guitar Hero?), Dance Dance Revolution, Tomb Raider, /New/ [Super] (Mario) World/Bros/64 – most of what you’d expect to be there is there, and the bonus is that it’s almost all playable. But as i waxed nostalgic, i was delighted to turn corners and see some delightful surprises, a few of which i’ll ruin for you here:

   

   The exhibit kicks off with playable, original versions of Pong and SpaceWar. SO awesome. On one wall were mounted original animation cells from Don Bluth’s laserdisc hit Dragon’s Lair, right across from some original character napkin character design sketches of Mario from Donkey Kong (although these looked like they may have been prints?) There’s a nice (if slight) nod to educational gaming with the NES Sesame Street carts, a big collection of units from the ever-evolving GameBoy line, and one very early pinball machine with an analogue score counter!

   The value of this exhibit to me is that i can take my daughters there and tell them tales of WHEN I WAS A BOY like a crotchety old coot, and enthusiastically take them through the history of this craft to which i’ve devoted my life (and to which i’ve committed their well-being). One hot tip, though, is to avoid March Break like the plague – that’s when the Science Centre becomes a zoo, and the Toronto Zoo becomes … well, just take my word for it.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/07/visiting-video-game-exhibit-smells-like-victory-and-rec-rooms/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/06/teaching-your-foetus-how-to-code/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/06/teaching-your-foetus-how-to-code/#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:53:19 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4869 i wrote an article earlier this week about a 9-year-old app developer from Brampton. Now, my friend Jason has writen an article about teaching logic concepts to babies, presumably just to link-bait me. :)

   

   Okay … now maybe some newly-educated can teach it to ME?

   In the TEDx talk i gave with my daughter Cassandra, i prescribed programming and tech classes for kids as young as 4 in junior kindergarten. Jason’s one-upped me here by suggesting we print logic symbols on baby blocks. i think the next step beyond that is to read C++ classes to our kids in the womb.

   A friend of mine, Thomas Henshell from Mirthwerx, is developing A is for App, a “daddytime storybook” where instead of the usual inane “Z is for Zebra” nonsense, we get “F is for FTP” and “P is for Programming”. i’m kicking myself for not thinking of this first, which is the true hallmark of a brilliant idea!

   

   Step 4: profit.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/06/teaching-your-foetus-how-to-code/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/02/everybody-codes/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/02/everybody-codes/#comments Sat, 02 Mar 2013 22:32:18 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4863 It was exciting to see this video rocket to four million views in the course of a couple of days, but it earned every single view it got:
   
   
   

   The video echoed the sentiment i expressed in the TEDx talk i did with my daughter last fall, a sentiment which i in turn borrowed from a number of different (and infinitely more wise) visionaries, all of whom are chanting the same refrain: LEARN. TO. CODE.

   In the climax of the video, Gabe Newell says that coders of today are wizards of the future. Confirmed: after i had spent 3 years on the job as a video game developer and really had a solid handle on Actionscript 2 programming in Flash, i literally felt like i had magic powers. It felt like the world was mine, and an entire, previously hidden dimension of possibility had opened up before me. It’s a lot like what my daughter Cassandra is currently experiencing as she learns to read. Imagine that incredible jump, from a world filled with complex runes in all different sizes and colours and styles, to a world where it all comes into focus and you can finally make sense of it all … and do powerful things with your newfound knowledge. That is what learning to code felt like for me.

   The Contagion Spreads

   An excellent companion piece to the video is the story of Tanmay Bakshi, a Canadian kid who – at NINE years old (NINE!!) – had his first app approved by Apple. The amazing thing about the article is that it casually mentions Tanmay had also written his own operating system at one point. Despite all my experience with computers, i barely understand what an operating system even is. The fact that a 9-year-old wrote one boggles my mind.

   

   If i was Tanmay, i’d be smiling too.

   This is my favourite tidbit from the article:

   His teacher says another boy in the class is now into code because of Tanmay.

   Attaboy! Like a virus. The good kind.

   Now, please feel free to leave a comment below and smugly explain operating systems to me.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/03/02/everybody-codes/feed/ 4 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/25/first-time-game-dev-team-yoyobolo-pulls-it-off/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/25/first-time-game-dev-team-yoyobolo-pulls-it-off/#comments Mon, 25 Feb 2013 07:41:30 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4819 i want to tell you the story of a neat-o partnership we began in the fall!

   tl;dr – go play New School Blues!

   A Strange Turn for an Intern

   Last September, Untold Entertainment took on an intern named Mike Doucet. Mike was a recent graduate from a private Ontario college who needed to escape the work/experience purgatory in which so many graduates find themselves. After coming under fire for our nefarious practice of helping graduates, i put some new parameters around Mike’s involvement with Untold.

   

   My friend Jason accused me of bringing Mike (left) on-board because he looks like a young Ron Gilbert. Guilty as charged. (Mike doesn’t see the resemblance.)

   Within a short time at the studio, Mike had formed a small, separate game dev team called YoyoBolo Games. Mike took a producer role, while Jonathan Phillips would create art assets and Ryan Roth would take on music and voiceover duties (including casting, recording and editing). Programmer Amir Ashtiani would handle scripting in UGAGS (the Untold Entertainment Adventure Game System), which the team would license from Untold.

   

   UGAGS powers a number of great games, including Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure and Spellirium

   All I Want for Christmas

   i tasked the team with building a short point n’ click graphic adventure game and releasing it by Christmas; in exchange for the use of the Untold offices, mentorship from me, and a discount on a UGAGS license, YoyoBolo would give Untold Entertainment first right of refusal to publish their game. YoyoBolo would keep their copyright and IP.

   The team decided to release their game for free, to avoid the complications that money might bring. (i counselled them that as a first-time team releasing a mobile adventure game, money wouldn’t enter into it anyway :) The end goal was for YoyoBolo to have the experience of creating, releasing and marketing a complete game from start to finish, so that the team members would have a polished portfolio piece they could show off to prospective employers.

   

   The experiment worked, and the team completed the game by the second week of December!

   The resulting title, New School Blues, was partially based on Mike’s experiences as an elementary school teacher, and his desire to create a game to which grade school kids could relate. (Mike wondered why there aren’t more kids’ games that are set in schools? i think he has a very good point.) i made sure that YoyoBolo didn’t stop at simply building the game, but that they went the extra mile to prepare a press kit, a press contact list, and a press release to help market the game. Mike has been maintaining a near-daily developer diary with contributions from the team, which is a great read if you’d like to make video games, and wonder what the experience of a group of first-timers is really like.

   

   (PROTIP: It’s like being lost in the woods at night and hunted by a demonic witch.)

   i really want to highlight the team’s artist, Jonathan, who went above and beyond the call of duty by taking over UGAGS scripting on the project to ensure that New School Blues looks and plays as well as it does.

   Mission Accomplished

   So how did they do? i found the game quite charming, and i thought the team did an excellent job for a first-time collaboration. i happily exercised Untold Entertainment’s option to publish New School Blues. Here’s a gameplay trailer of the first few minutes:

   
   
   

   What’s in it for Untold Entertainment? Two wonderful “firsts”: this is the first time we’ve published a game that was developed by another team, and it’s the first time that we’ve licensed our UGAGS engine. So call it a win/win/win all around – the third “win” being you, because you get to play the final game!

   

   New School Blues is available for free here at Untold Entertainment, over at Kongregate, and on Android tablets and the iPad.

   You can get in touch with the members of YoyoBolo Games here:

   • Mike Doucet – Producer
     • email: mike [at symbol] michaeldoucet.com
     • twitter: mikeDocDoucet
   • Jonathan Phillips – Artist/Animator and Scripting
     • email: jonathan.f.phillips [at symbol] gmail.com
   • Amir Ashtiani – Programmer and Scripter
     • email: ashtiani.amir01 [the at symbol] gmail.com
     • twitter: pillowmermaid
   • Ryan Roth – Music, Sound Effects and Voice Over
     • email: ryan [the at symbol] rawroth.com
     • twitter: dualRyan
     • professional services website: dualRyan.com
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/25/first-time-game-dev-team-yoyobolo-pulls-it-off/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/23/spelliriums-neighbouring-letters-rule/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/23/spelliriums-neighbouring-letters-rule/#comments Sun, 24 Feb 2013 03:50:34 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4846 We were very fortunate to have, as one of our early Spellirium testers, a fellow named Shan. Shan is a word wizard who is a member of – or in some cases the founder of – a number of Scrabble® clubs around the Greater Toronto Area. Shan made a really interesting suggestion to help us solve a problem in the game.

   

   At certain times in Spellirium, you’ll need a certain letter to make a specific word, a word required to solve a puzzle. Because tiles cascade into the grid randomly to replace the letters that you remove, you’re not guaranteed to get that “L” you so desperately need. The game includes a couple of different features to remedy this problem:

   1. You can just keep building words so that new tiles cascade into the grid, and hopefully that “L” will make an appearance eventually.
   2. You can craft a powerup that lets you “inject” a letter of your choice into the grid.

   So far, our testers haven’t found either of these solutions satisfactory. Continually rolling the dice in the hopes that your letter will show up is no fun. And the road to crafting a powerup is a long one: first, you have to complete an achievement to earn a spell. Then you have to collect the spell’s ingredients. Then you have to craft the powerup. Then you have to fill out a foolscap form in triplicate and mail it to your regional government.

   

   Can i have my “L” now please?

   Howdy, Neighbour!

   Here’s what Shan suggested: let the player sort of control the letters that cascade into the grid. How? When you build a word and those tiles are removed, the replacement tiles are alphabetically adjacent.

   

   So if you need an “L”, spell a word with a “K” or an “M” in it. After removing a “K”, Spellirium will send one of its neighbours – either a “J” or an “L” – into the grid. This rule applies only to consonants; it skips over vowels. That’s because vowels are outnumbered 21:5, and we don’t want players to end up with grid full of consonants! For every vowel you remove, the grid gives you another random vowel. Vowel distribution is stacked in favour of A’s and E’s.

   The alphabet wraps. So if you spell a word with a “Z”, you’ll get either a “Y” or a “B” next (we skip “A” because it’s a vowel).

   It’s a neat solution, and while it could solve our problem, it creates another one: the rule is simple in practice, but a smidge complicated in theory. It’s not easy to explain eloquently.

   But did i explain it well in this post? Does this game rule make sense? Is it simple enough? Is there something even better that we could try instead? Let me know in the comments section!

   Word.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/23/spelliriums-neighbouring-letters-rule/feed/ 17 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/22/spellirium-2/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/22/spellirium-2/#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2013 22:15:54 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4840
   
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/22/spellirium-2/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/20/truth-in-advertising-matching-your-game-to-your-paying-players/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/20/truth-in-advertising-matching-your-game-to-your-paying-players/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2013 07:17:32 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4807 Have you ever run across a video game or movie that was wildly mis-marketed? Many players expressed their frustration after playing recent indie game releases Dear Esther and Proteus because they weren’t gamey enough, and countless moviegoers have been lured into theatres to see Kevin James or Adam Sandler movies that the trailers would have them believe are actually funny.

   

   Don’t buy into false advertising: Every Adam Sandler “comedy” is actually a tragedy.

   While testing Spellirium, our upcoming point n’ click graphic adventure / word puzzle mash-up, i started to make many of the same mistakes i made with past games: relying too much on the advice of my game dev friends who weren’t interested in the genre to begin with, and telling myself that the game just needs to find its audience to be appreciated. i’m determined to correct those mistakes with Spellirium. This is the story of how i plan to do it.

   List Your Turn-Ons

   

   i faced many challenges testing Interrupting Cow Trivia a few years back, and while i learned a few important lessons, a number of things remain a mystery to me.

   The most important thing that ICT testing taught me was to weigh testers’ feedback according to how “into” the game they are. If you asked a casual puzzle game fan like me to playtest Gears of War, you wouldn’t necessarily get the kind of feedback to make a better Gears of War game … you’d only end up making an unsuitable game slightly more palatable to a casual puzzle audience.

   

   NOW we’re talking!

   i revised my feedback survey for ICT testers to begin with the question “Do you like trivia games?” If the tester answered “no”, the rest of his feedback would get shuffled to the bottom of the stack.

   

   A 5-Letter Word for DERP

   i’ve been testing Spellirium with people who aren’t word game fans. How do i know? There are a number of “tells”. The most obvious is when it takes a player forever to build a word. Spellirium gives you a 49-letter grid, and you can make words from 3-8 letters in length using any of those 49 letters, in any order. When a player struggles to make a 3-letter word, i know something’s up.

   

   (i can make a couple of 3-letter words from that first row alone)

   If the player has no trouble making words, there’s another “tell” that outs the player as somewhat of a non-wordgamer: the player makes a long 6- or 7-letter word using “common” letters, and is disappointed he’s not supremely rewarded with Peggle-style fireworks. i’ve had a few testers complain (or express surprise) that a word like “TESTERS” scores lower than a word like “POX”. Of course, any Scrabble player will tell you that it’s more rare/unique/difficult to use high-value letters like P and X in a word, than with common final-round Wheel of Fortune letters like RSTLNE.

   
   
   

   The issue of players’ reactions to high-value letters was apparent with two iOS word games that were released around the same time last year: Puzzlejuice and Spelltower. Puzzlejuice creator Asher Vollmer told me he actually bowed to player pressure and changed the game’s scoring mechanism to reward longer words instead of words containing high-value letters. Spelltower, meanwhile, becomes more difficult as the grid fills up with X’s, Z’s, Q’s and K’s, implicitly reinforcing the idea that these letters are tougher to squeeze into a word.

   

   Puzzlejuice and Spelltower: two different approaches to the letter value problem.

   So through Spellirium playtesting, i kept telling myself that i just needed to get the game in front of the “right” type of player – that those who would like it, would like it a lot. Unfortunately, that’s not at all how the market works.

   To Market, To Market, to Buy a Fat Game

   The way the market actually works is that you catch wind of a game through a friend or a website, and you eventually stumble upon its page on a digital distribution site like Steam or Good Old Games. You watch the trailer, look at the screenshots, maybe double-check its purported quality by reading Metacritic reviews (or just glancing at the game’s damnable Metacritic score) … and you imagine what the game might be like to play, and whether you’ll enjoy it. You create a mental picture of that enjoyment you’ll get from the game, and then you compare that to the asking price. If the asking price is aligned with the enjoyment you predict you’ll get from the game (and everyone’s equation for this is different), AND you have that money to fart away on entertainment, THEN you may just complete the purchase.

   

   Spellirium: fartworthy.

   So if that’s how game sales actually work, it makes more sense to me to simulate that environment, gauge potential customers’ value equations, and then determine from their testing feedback whether the game delivered on their expectations. So the approach i’m taking now is to mock up the sales page for Spellirium as if it were currently for sale on Steam (to be absolutely clear: it isn’t. Yet.).

   

   i’m going to show potential testers this page, and then ask them a few questions:

   • What’s your level of interest in this game?
   • Which aspect(s) or features of the game interest you the most? The least?
   • How much do you think this game costs / what would you pay for this game?
   • List another game that is like this game. Tick this box if you’ve played it. Tick this box if you’ve enjoyed it.

   i may A|B test this with an image that shows a price for the game, and one does not. For the potential testers who see the price, i’ll ask:

   • Would you buy the game at this price when it was released, or would you wait a few months for a sale?
   • How many hours of gameplay would you expect to get from this game at that price?
   • How do you feel about the price of the game compared to its description, trailer and screenshots? Too low/too high/just right?
   • (if respondent answers anything but “just right”) How would you price the game?

   

   If i were to approach this exercise completely cynically, i would continue to tweak and refine the page until i got the best potential conversion from my respondents, and then release Spellirium without making any changes to it. Because, speaking absolutely cynically, it doesn’t actually matter if the game is good or bad – it only matters that people buy it. But that’s not how Untold Entertainment rolls!

   

   i try not to be that guy.

   Of course, i desperately do want to make a good game. So i’ll use the Steam page mock-up and survey as a funnel to decide on my testers. Those respondents who report the highest interest in playing the game, and the highest likelihood of buying it, will test the game. At that point, it doesn’t matter who is a “proper” word gamer and who isn’t: what matters is that i have an obligation to the people who are excited about my game and who want to buy it. If those players struggle to make 3-letters words, and if those players expect long words to be rewarded over tricky words, then i will adjust the game for the sake of those players. Because those players are my paying audience – not some mythical “perfect” players that i’ve hand-picked to enjoy Spellirium the specific way i’ve configured it. The players choose my game – not the other way around.

   It’s the sale page and my surrounding marketing efforts that attract the player. i need to make sure that the player i attract is happy with the object of that attraction.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/20/truth-in-advertising-matching-your-game-to-your-paying-players/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/15/searching-for-truth-at-the-flash-gaming-summit/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/15/searching-for-truth-at-the-flash-gaming-summit/#comments Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:32:21 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4824 i’ve been thrilled to be involved with the Flash Gaming Summit for the past number of years, as a delegate, a moderator, and a speaker. The conference, which conveniently takes place in San Francisco the day before the GDC summits, is filled with people i consider sister sufferers in a very particular (and increasingly beleaguered) pocket of game development.

   

   Flash! / Aaah-aaahh / Saviour of the universe (?)

   Many of the FGS delegates are folks who started their careers building web games with (then) Macromedia Flash, and who have come through the fire of learning how to earn a living with the software with help from distributors like MochiMedia, Flash Game License, NewGrounds and and Kongregate, and portal-owning publishers who are willing to pay license fees for the games, hoping that they’ll make it back in ad revenue on their sites. Some of the people you meet at Flash Gaming Summit are the people who have become successful enough to afford a plane ticket to San Francisco which, considering their often humble beginnings, is really saying something. And a good number of the delegates are from studios who evaluated Flash and decided that it was a good technological fit for their platform or business strategy.

   

   It’s not unusual to find industry visionaries like Dan Cook of SpryFox (Triple Town, Leap Day) milling around during the Summit.

   This is a time of uncertainty for devs like Untold Entertainment who largely earn their living making games with Adobe Flash. For many of us, the uncertainty is over why there’s so much hype for vastly inferior technologies like HTML5, and why we’re being pressured by the market to adopt far more expensive tools like Unity to do the same work we’re already comfortable and proficient at doing with Flash?

   The Flash platform was dealt a major blow when Steve Jobs – for somewhat vindictive business reasons, thinly veiled as technological snobbery – declared that Flash content would not be supported in any iPhone browser, and then dropped the mic and left the stage (in more ways than one). To this day, the myth persists that you can’t develop any content for iOS using Flash. The opposite is in fact true: many devs like Untold are happily wrapping their Flash creations with Adobe AIR and creating successful native apps for Apple’s devices.

   

   Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, which is on sale on the iPad this week, was developed in Flash.

   Real Talk with Ryan Creighton

   In an effort to get down to the bottom of things, i’ll be moderating a panel at FGS this year asking the hard questions: is Adobe Flash worth sticking with, or is it time to jump ship? Cutting through the hype, what are the advantages and disadvantages of competing technologies, and what would it take to transition a shop to start using them? And is it even worth it? What do Adobe’s recent announcements about Actionscript Next and abolishing the “speed tax” reveal about the company’s plans for the platform? All these questions and more will be discussed, in amongst a line-up of talks and panels by some of the biggest players in this corner of game development.

   

   Enter the special promo code blog_UntoldEnt for a 15% discount when you register for your Flash Gaming Summit pass. See you all in March!

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/15/searching-for-truth-at-the-flash-gaming-summit/feed/ 4 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/13/sissys-magical-birthday-celebration/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/13/sissys-magical-birthday-celebration/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:17:02 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4809 To celebrate Cassie’s 7th birthday this weekend on February 17th, we’re having a sale! This weekend only, the Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure iPad app will be on sale for 99 cents, and all Ponycorns merch in the Untold store – T-shirts, buttons and limited-edition plushies – will be 17% off! The sale starts THIS FRIDAY. Enter the promo code “BIRTHDAY” to save!

   

   Yaaaaaaaaaay!!

   Cassandra Update

   Thank you to everyone who has donated to Cassie’s education fund. The donations were placed in a registered education savings plan for her, and we’ll continue to make lump sum contributions as donations come in.

   Now in grade one, Cassie is reading and spelling quite well. This new literacy has opened up a world of interests for her. She dove into Pokémon manga books that she found at the school library, and then launched into a campaign in Pokémon Ruby after discovering and dusting off my old GameBoy Advance SP in the closet. She has no idea they made a Pokémon teevee show, so she’ll totally flip when i show her the Pokémon TV App i downloaded for her today!

   

   Uh … how ’bout putting these headphones on, sweetie?

   Ain’t No Party Like a Robot Party

   Last year when Cassie turned six, she asked us to throw her a robot party. The room was strewn with cardboard boxes which her guests could decorate with all kinds of craft supplies – markers, stickers, pipe cleaners and streamers. The party culminated in a robot parade as all the kids showed off their robot costumes. (FUN FACT: Cassie’s robot birthday party was the inspiration for her robot transformation in her TEDx talk last fall.)

   

   i hope this dial turns down the adorable.

   This year, i’m really excited to give Cassie an Arduino Uno starter kit so that we can make actual robots together. An Arduino is a microcontroller – the brain of a robot. You can hook it up to your computer and use free software to tell it to do things. Then you plug all kinds of gizmos into the brain, called “shields”, which enable the robot brain to receive input (from microphones, light sensors, barometers, etc) and then output electricity to other attachments (lights, LCD screens, motors, speakers). i can’t wait to spend more daddy/daughter time with Cassie as we work through the guidebook and figure it all out together.

   

   It’s like fishing tackle, but for NYERDS!

   i’ve read a lot of material about getting more women involved in the game industry and science & tech in general. Women should absolutely be involved, and of course, they should earn the same amount of money as their male counterparts. i’m always showing my daughters things like the Forbes Top Jobs for 2013 list, on which math and computer science skills feature heavily. But i don’t think that we can all just wish it into being, or snap our fingers (or stamp our feet!) to make it happen right away.

   As a career-aged woman today, you can’t exactly read that Forbes list and think “instead of being an office manager/bank teller/teacher, i’m going to make a lateral move to become an information security analyst! Let me just update my resumé … ?” By the time you’ve graduated from University with a major in Cultural Studies and a minor in Linguistics (and this goes for men and women alike), you’re in a difficult place. Not impossible, but very very difficult.

   My firm belief is that women in tech is an attainable future goal, not a present one. It’s a change that will take a generation to really happen – not a quick fix we can force by retraining adults for a couple of years. Let’s face it: learning everything you need to know about math is a long, slow burn. Today’s parents need to actively sow those seeds with their young daughters if that’s the kind of change they want to see. We need to make a conscious effort to explore math and scientific reasoning with our little girls! We need to stoke their natural curiosity and wonder before the world Barbies it out of them.

   

   “Form a hypothesis about whether you smell pretty enough, little girls! *giggle*”

   So! Cardboard robot party last year, actual robot present this year, and Ponycorns for all!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/02/13/sissys-magical-birthday-celebration/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/29/indie-game-dev-goes-down-in-a-blaze-of-glory/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/29/indie-game-dev-goes-down-in-a-blaze-of-glory/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2013 04:33:01 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4804 For some people in the video game industry, this is where the debate about games-as-art will be tried in the court of public opinion.

   Until today, indie game developer David S. Gallant was a part-time customer service rep in a Canada Revenue Agency call centre. David did not enjoy his job, and wanted to make games instead. Desperately. So he committed to spending one day a week at the Untold Entertainment offices to learn whatever he could about the industry and our craft. After leaving Untold, David made a few games on his own, including I Get This Call Every Day, a game he used to express his frustrations about his job.

   
   
   

   Today, after an incendiary Toronto Star article in which the reporter appears to have tipped off the office of the Canadian Minister of Revenue Gail Shea (David was always guarded about where he actually worked), David was fired from his job.

   Never Again the Burning Times

   The claim by TOJam co-founder Jim McGinley and others, who are seeing red, is that the Star article (and the Minister’s reaction) reveal a distinct bias against video games as an art form. Jim asserts that if David had expressed his frustrations through any other artistic medium – writing, painting, stand-up comedy, film, interpretive dance – he would not have provoked the same reaction.

   As someone who has been fired from his job for being critical of his employer, i’m not so quick to call this an anti-games witch hunt. A few years ago, i remember being so aghast at the incapability and apathy of the students at the Hervé Velasquez School For the Digitally Inclined (my nickname for George Brown College), that i wrote a pair of articles called What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges (Parts 1 and 2) expressing my frustration. In those articles, i went much further than David did in his game, by actually naming my employer (among other schools), and by being a general dick about it. The Dean at GBC sniffed out my articles in a Google vanity search, and i was fired from my teaching position shortly thereafter.

   

   i regret to inform you that your employment is hereby terminated immediately! (How’s THAT for a catchphrase?)

   Sidenote: i regret nothing. When you’re so unhappy with a job that it oozes – achingly – into your art, getting fired is an absolutely blessing … a fact i truly hope David will come to realize in time.

   Gag Reflex

   The best consolation i received from anyone about being fired from George Brown was that in this new age of digital media, old institutions like schools (and governments, in David’s case) need to control the message. And thanks to blogs like this one, where i can freely criticize George Brown College, these institutions’ inability to control the message drives them completely bonkers, and they feel that their only recourse is to aggressively dig out the cancerous cells with a spoon. Bleeding be damned.

   

   There. We’ve burned this relatively-unknown novel “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”. That’s the last we’ll be hearing about THAT.

   Of course, as we’ve seen so many times, these institutions don’t stop to consider the backlash their knee-jerk reactions cause. In my case, after my firing was widely publicized, i was able to single-handedly dismantle all heartless Ontario college diploma mills and replace them with tightly-focussed, effective programs that produced skilled and educated students (and uh … and then i woke up.)

   In David’s case, the video game community is rallying to his cause with Twitter hashtags like #saveGallant (David is currently trending on Twitter in Canada), and organizations everywhere are encouraging people to buy and upvote his game. (PROTIP: By paying more than the $2 minimum donation suggestion, you can help float David for the next little while until he finds a new job. Give generously!)

   So does the Star’s article betray a bias against video games? i’m not sure it does. Plain and simple, you can’t bite the hand that feeds you, even if that hand is also strangling you and periodically feeding you shit. Did i do something wrong for slagging off George Brown College? Yes. Am i thrilled that i’m no longer working there? You betcha. Did David do something wrong by criticizing his call centre job? Most likely. Will he one day be thrilled that he’s no longer working there?

   You betcha.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/29/indie-game-dev-goes-down-in-a-blaze-of-glory/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/28/reeling-from-it-part-3/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/28/reeling-from-it-part-3/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:54:02 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4786 This is the final collection of anecdotes about my trying times between graduating from a completely useless accelerated animation program at a community college, and trying to find work with a crummy demo reel.
   • Reeling From It – Part 1 In which Ryan gets booted from school for cutting his demo reel
   • Reeling From It – Part 2 In which Ryan seeks his fortunes in Florida amid a minefield of sexual advances

   Flew the Co-Op

   The first tip i give to many students is that if your school offers a co-op placement, be very careful where you place, because you’ll likely end up there for the next few years. This was true for me and many of my classmates. The girl who placed at her uncle’s trucking company is probably still working there to this day. My own three-month placement at an elementary school led to a job at a technology summer camp with the same board of education, which led to a year-long position as a technology tutor at another school within the board, which was probably followed up with another board summer camp, for all i can remember.

   

   The last thing i wanted to do after spending sixteen years of my life in school was to end up back there.

   Throughout this time, i really felt like i was stuck at these elementary schools, and i felt that teaching computer skills to kindergarten-to-eighth-grade kids was degrading. (In retrospect, i’m thankful for my teaching years. What, at the time, felt like a completely disconnected diversion from my chosen profession has turned out to be a complement to the work i currently do creating software for young children).

   Do the Hustle

   So during my stint at the schools, i was constantly out hustling and putting my demo reel into as many hands as possible. This was when there were actual hard costs to duping a VHS tape, and every time i parted with a reel, i heard that cash register “ca-CHING” sound.

   

   Here’s four dollars for you to throw in the garbage. Enjoy.

   One of the aspects of being a grad that i try not to forget is that unless your school did their job (and i guarantee you, they didn’t), you’re completely clueless about the local companies that could potentially hire you. You’ve heard of Disney and Dreamworks and Digital Domain, and once you’ve exhausted those choice leads, you’re in the dark. It’s very difficult to apply to places when you don’t know they exist. (This is why today, i try to help grads out by creating things like the Ontario Interactive directory.)

   i clearly remember three crummy experiences from my life as a recent grad – three indignities, each suffered at the hand of a different villain: The Doubter, The Liar, and The Cheapskate.

   The Doubter

   When you apply for jobs out of school, nobody replies. That’s why i try to reply to everyone who applies to work at Untold Entertainment, even if it’s just to say ‘no thanks’, which it often is. Sometimes i’ll get applications that are so misguided or terrible that i’ll respond with (hopefully gentle) advice on how the applicant can improve the offering, because i hate to think of that applicant continually wasting everyone’s time (and his own). If an application has bad grammar and spelling errors (especially if the applicant is a programmer), i’ll usually speak up. If it’s a 3D artist applying to our 2D shop, another common error, i’ll say something. If someone applies with a form letter saying “i love your studio’s work”, i’ll call bullshit and ask the applicant to name something we’ve done.

   But i try, through all of this, not to be a giant dick about it. Because one Wednesday afternoon many many years ago, i found myself in the Hudsucker Proxy-esque office of The Doubter, and i don’t wish to inflict his treatment of me onto others.

   

   The Doubter was a high-ranking guy at CBC. He needed someone to develop props for the Canadian “comedy” series Royal Canadian Air Farce. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, Air Farce is to comedy as a plate of steaming corn-speckled dog turds are to food. And here, for once, i do not exaggerate.

   

   Air Farce cast members pose in front of the chicken cannon. Stop, stop! My face is hurting from laughing!

   The job was this: let’s say the wacky Air Farce cast wanted to shoot their Gallagher-style chicken cannon at the target of the week – say, rude drivers or the Ontario Premier. They need a prop image to put on the chicken cannon easel. CBC was hiring a prop artist to create that image. Or if the cast needs a prop newspaper or a set needs window signage, the prop artist creates it. On a computer. Using Adobe Illustrator.

   

   Adobe Illustrator.

   i’d used Illustrator in school, a whole lot. i was the top of my class at using the software, and was regularly praised by the Illustrator teacher. My demo reel did not showcase any Illustrator work (except for a few textures here and there), because why would it? It was an animation reel. i popped the tape into The Doubter’s VCR and showed him the reel.

   

   After it had finished playing, The Doubter tented his fingers and looked apprehensive. “Hmmm … yeah. This job is for someone who knows how to use Illustrator,” he said. “i know how to use Illustrator,” i said. “i used it throughout my program. i’m very good with it.”

   “Your tape doesn’t show any Illustrator work.” “Yes, that’s true, but i DO know how to use the software. The job posting wasn’t very specific – otherwise, i would have brought more Illustrator work to show you.”

   And then he paused, looked at me skeptically, and said “Hmmmmyeahhh. Even though you say you know how to use Illustrator, i don’t think you know how to use Illustrator.”

   Then, he twisted the knife: “Your portfolio makes it seem as though you’d like to become an animator. Have you considered taking animation at Sheridan?”

   “i … ” i stammered a little. “i just came from school. i did attend Sheriden, and Seneca College after that. i just completed an entire animation program. i’m OUT of school. i’m looking for a JOB.”

   “Hmmmm….well,” he purred. “Good luck in your search.”

   Of course, hindsight it 20/20 – if i could go back, as people later suggested, i would have said “i don’t know how to use Illustrator, eh? Put me on a machine NOW, bitch. i’m about to ROCK this.”

   

   Lessons learned: 1. Don’t be that guy. 2. Find out as much as you can about a position before showing up for an interview. If the posting is vague, a phone call is not out of line. 3. It’s okay to suggest that someone improve the quality of their portfolio, but suggesting the applicant go back to school is insulting.

   The Liar

   The most audacious interviewer i met was named The Liar. He actually liked my work and brought me back for a second interview. During that interview, he marched me around his studio and introduced me to everyone, saying “This is Ryan – we’re bringing him on as our newest animator.” Then he SHOWED ME where i would be sitting, and said “This is where you’ll be sitting.” i went home after that interview, and despite frequent follow-ups, i never heard back from him.

   

   You dick!

   Lessons learned: 1. Don’t be that guy. 2. Don’t listen to a word anyone says until there is INK on PAPER, and even then, be wary.

   The Cheapskate

   The Cheapskate worked in the interactive department at Much Music, which was Canada’s answer to MTV before MTV Canada, which is Canada’s answer to TLC. The Cheapskate wanted me to do some interface design for some sort of music player. i worked remotely, having never been in a client/freelancer relationship before. i also had no idea what proper UI design was all about – this was years before it was a subject Ontario colleges would think to teach. i didn’t do a very good job, and i worked for a few weeks on it before The Cheapskate said that it was all going in the wrong direction and he needed to “cash out”. i felt absolutely sick making out my invoice for my work that he obviously wasn’t going to use.

   The bottom line on that invoice? $120.

   

   Lessons Learned: 1. Don’t be that guy. 2. What seems like a lot of money to a recent grad usually isn’t a lot of money to someone at a large media shop. 3. If freelancers need a little hand-holding due to inexperience and because their schools didn’t do their bloody jobs training them, be gentle. That’s why you’re paying ten bucks an hour instead of forty.

   The caveat to this is if the current year is greater than 2000, don’t hand-hold for NOTHIN’. i recently had a graduate working with me on a game and she didn’t know how to write an invoice, so she asked me instead of doing a Google search. This, dear friends, is a no-no. Don’t embarrass yourself. Type the phrase “how to write an invoice” in the Google search field and save us all some embarrassment.

   

   She was far from being the first graduate from a particular Ontario college who didn’t know how to use Flash or write an invoice. i actually wound up writing to the school and requesting they get their shit together and properly train their students in this.

   Righting Wrongs at $0/hr

   During this tricky time in my life, i would have killed for an opportunity like the one i currently provide to students and grads. i don’t pay grads, because they usually suck, and i don’t end up using most of what they produce. i mostly put them on make-work projects, like populating the Ontario Interactive site that i mentioned above. But they get to sit in a studio and see me struggle through client feedback and revision requests. i show them the financial realities of running a studio. i show them my invoicing process. i talk to them about my strategies for keeping the lights on at Untold, both short term and long term. It’s a very valuable opportunity (despite what certain people have to say about it). When i was a recent graduate, that’s all i ever needed – just to be able to sit in a studio and get a feel for what was expected of me if i was going to contribute value to the industry.

   

   And i halped!

   Much of how i conduct myself these days, from the way i act at industry mixers to the internships and mentoring i provide through Untold Entertainment, are due to the lousy treatment i received after i graduated. It’s a tough time, especially as Ontario’s lacklustre college system continues to churn out a gross number of poorly-trained graduates well beyond what the local (or even national or international) video game industry can bear. i only hope that i’m able to ease the passage a little bit for students and recent grads, and that in return, i am simply able to enjoy the bounty of their sweet virgin bumcakes.

   Further reading: TENure.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/28/reeling-from-it-part-3/feed/ 3 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/27/dont-be-this-guy/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/27/dont-be-this-guy/#comments Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:53:08 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4793 Remember, kids: before you sass-talk someone, update your Flash player plugin. And make sure that person hasn’t taught at your school and isn’t on a first-name basis with your faculty.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/27/dont-be-this-guy/feed/ 12 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/27/reeling-from-it-part-2/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/27/reeling-from-it-part-2/#comments Sun, 27 Jan 2013 21:51:52 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4784 Want the whole story?
   • Reeling From It – Part 1 In which Ryan gets booted from school for cutting his demo reel
   • Reeling From It – Part 3 In which Ryan meets three life-changing characters: The Doubter, The Cheapskate, and The Liar

   In the last article, i posted my student demo reel from 1998. The reel got me very nearly physically kicked out of Seneca College. i produced it in a single weekend as i nervously clutched a plane ticket to Florida, so that i could use it to seek my fortunes at the SIGGRAPH convention. This is the story of what happened next.

   But before we get into that, here’s another artifact from 1998. This is a Leica reel for the animation starring that Jell-O-headed underwear-clad character from my demo reel, Dr. Delicious.

   
   
   

   Mr. Creighton, You’re Trying to Seduce Me

   i try my very best to be pleasant and helpful to students and recent graduates. There’s a very good reason for this: there are few more devastating transition periods in your life than moving from your “i’m gonna take the world by storm and kick off my career with a sky-high starting salary” phase, to your “no one will give me a job and my mom converted my old bedroom into a home gym so i’m going to be moving back home and sleeping on an exercise mat for the foreseeable future” phase.

   

   And as of July, you’re no longer covered under your parents’ health insurance.

   The two years between graduating from my el-cheapo, rushed 3D animation program at Seneca College, and giving up all hope of finding a job in my field, were two of the most discouraging, difficult, and humiliating years of my life … and i played a silver lamet-clad disco vampire in the high school musical.

   

   Really.

   i’m Going to Fizzny World!

   When last we left our intrepid me, i had escaped the overly-hostile strip mall campus of Seneca College with my new, extremely mediocre student demo reel and a plane ticket to Orlando to attend SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics convention. Students like to circulate wild rumours, including “starting salary is $60k”, and “everyone who goes to SIGGRAPH is guaranteed a job”. In video game schools today, i’m sure that a similar rumour circulates about the career faire at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

   

   Excuse me, but is this where they hand out the jobs?

   Off i flew to Orlando and the show, where lots and lots of dudes were really, really friendly to me. Like, really friendly. i mean, they were promising me jobs without ever even seeing my work. i felt like i was a real talent. One fellow worked for Fizzny, and after a private recruitment meeting of JUST TALKING, he gave me a ticket to this exclusive party at the top of one of the Fizzny theme park’s hotels. His name was Joe. i saw him the next day on the show floor, the day of the party, and other young college dudes like me had apparently been given the same glowing treatment. It turns out, i was not the only one who had been offered a ticket to that party.

   

   Excuse me, but is this where they hand out the “jobs”?

   Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

   When i finally arrived at the party, Joe seemed disappointed to not have more of my undivided attention. i was trying to work the room. Joe pointed at a guy standing near the buffet, with a small crowd of people around him. “See that guy over there? He’s the VP of Fizzny feature animation.” Joe clapped me on the back and said, in resigned tones, “Go get ‘im.”

   Through very careful detective work in my mindbrain, i pieced it together. The realization slowly crept up on me: Joe was gay, and he was spending the conference hunting college dudepoon. He realized he couldn’t have me, because he wasn’t important enough, and (as he saw it), i was a real climber. The feature animation VP was, presumably, also gay. i could go farther in my burgeoning career if i was gay – if i offered any of these gentlemen my sweet virgin bumcakes.

   

   i didn’t end up talking to – or doing anything else with (or on, or in, or at) – the Fizzny VP. i decided i wasn’t quite prepared to sleep my way to the top.

   i almost regret not doing something i’d regret. Two years later, after my job search had completely failed, and if technology had allowed, i likely would have booked it back to that party in a time machine, flashing hot pants and jazz hands.

   

   These days, i can’t even blow my way into a five-hour freelance gig.

   Apart from that episode, i made it into all the right parties and talked to all the right people at SIGGRAPH. i was even interviewed by Digital Domain, who made vague promises about following up with me and slotting me into one of their departments. That was the first time i learned that people lie to grads, and can’t be believed. But it wouldn’t be the last.

   • Reeling From It – Part 1 In which Ryan gets booted from school for cutting his demo reel
   • Reeling From It – Part 3 In which Ryan meets three life-changing characters: The Doubter, The Cheapskate, and The Liar
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/27/reeling-from-it-part-2/feed/ 10 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/22/reeling-from-it-part-1/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/22/reeling-from-it-part-1/#comments Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:22:56 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4778 Recently, i grabbed a Groupon for VHS to DVD transfer, and i decided to convert my student demo reel and share it with you all, along with the sordid tale that goes with it. Here’s the reel:
   
   
   

   And now, the tale.

   The Tale

   i graduated from a condensed 3D graphics and animation program at Seneca College, after dropping out of Sheridan. i left Sheridan because i somehow got into their Illustration program despite never taking a single art class all through high school, and i found i was unable to keep pace with my excellently talented classmates. Stepping into Seneca from Sheridan was like leaving Downton Abbey and stepping into Welcome Back Kotter. Or the Wire. It was bad.

   

   Stay classy, Seneca.

   The school was clearly out to make a quick buck (and not much has changed here in Toronto, with Seneca being far from the only culprit). My program was accelerated, clearly so that they could churn more students through and increase their profits. The “campus”, at the time, was in a strip mall at Finch and Dufferin, across from a peeler joint called Charlie T’s – the outdoor signage of which, on a daily basis, invited me to “come get wet with the hot tub girls”. A good number of my classmates actually DID heed that call, and would come back from the strip club half-soused, ready to “fukkin’ model some three fukkin’ dee”. Their resulting work was often big-titted chrome robo-babes. Sigh.

   

   3D model by Keaton3D (note: NOT a Seneca student from my class. The give-away is that the quality is way too high.)

   It was one of those schools where like so many others (Centennial comes to mind), the program “offered” a co-op placement. What this means is that the school really only had a connection with one studio in the city, and could only place two students there – their own pick, naturally. The rest of the thirty students had to fend for ourselves. The co-op “class” was a prerequisite for graduation. One girl got a placement typing up schedules at her uncle’s trucking company. i found my own placement teaching technology at an elementary school.

   

   WHERE’S MY $60k STARTING SALARY AS A 3D ANIMATOR, YOU LITTLE WHELPS??

   My on-campus classes ended in May, let’s say, but my co-op position ended in June. At the time, a wild rumour was circulating among students that if you could only arrive at the promised land, the SIGGRAPH conference, you could land a job no problem with Pixar or Digital Domain. Cinchy. So naturally, i ponied up the cash for a plane ticket to Orlando so that i could shop my reel around the conference. The problem was that i didn’t have a demo reel.

   A Reel Problem

   A week after my co-op placement ended, i booked Seneca’s edit suite for a weekend, with my plane leaving the following Monday. The pressure was intense. i had to assemble and edit all of my school assignments together in a reel in that one weekend so i would have something to show in Florida. What’s more, i didn’t live in Toronto – i had to commute an hour through the worst part of town to my geriatric great uncle’s condo, limited by whenever the buses stopped running. So off i went.

   In the middle of my sleep-addled Hell Weekend, the big gruff Eastern Bloc guy who handled equipment bookings stormed into the edit suite. “WE HAV PROBLEM,” he announced.

   

   (you’re going to suplex me?)

   “Wh… what’s the problem?” i asked.

   “YOU ARE NOT A STUDENT HERE ANY MORE.”

   In my defense, i told him that my last class (for that’s what my co-op placement technically was) had ended the week prior. i also pointed out that it was a dead weekend, and that no other student had the room booked.

   “TAKE YOUR THINGS, GEEV ME THE KEY, AND GET OUT,” he intoned coldly.

   i was in shock. My reel was only half-finished. “What’s the big deal?” you ask, because you are young and don’t know any better. Well, this was in 1998. All of my work was on these thick-as-a-dinner-plate ZIP disks. This weekend predated digital editing – everything was done on tape editing machines. To complete my reel, i’d have to book time in an edit suite in town somewhere, which also had to run 3DS Max and the other software i needed to produce rendered frames. So i was completely hosed.

   

   Nothing says “completely hosed” quite like a ZIP disk.

   i walked down the hallway to the President’s office carrying my things in my arms, feeling weirdly like an assault victim. i remember very clearly standing in her office, the stress and pressure of the weekend and my plane tickets bought with money i didn’t have and my lack of sleep weighing down on me, and begging her with tears in my eyes to allow me to finish cutting my reel.

   

   Think about that: Seneca College, which took my money and gave me the bum’s rush, booting me out the door of their computer animation program without even offering a portfolio readiness course or sufficient time to produce a demo reel, made me beg them to let me produce the one crucial artifact that would help me successfully land a job in the workforce. This is why until now, you won’t have caught me mentioning i ever attended that school. i have actively avoided them throughout my professional life.

   Proclamation and Banishment

   The President waved her sceptre and deigned to let me use the suite for one more day, sternly warning me that i was not to return to the school, and cautioning me that if i partook of any food or drink while i was there, i would be trapped in Seneca’s Finch and Dufferin strip mall campus forever, never to return to the lands above.

   i had no urge to return. i cut the rest of my reel as fast as possible, left the place, and have never looked back.

   

   So if i’m ever hard on Ontario colleges these days, i feel justified; they were first hard on me.

   Then What Happened?

   More on how this steaming turd of a demo reel was received in Florida, and elsewhere, in the next post.

   • Reeling From It – Part 2 In which Ryan seeks his fortunes in Florida amid a minefield of sexual advances
   • Reeling From It – Part 3 In which Ryan meets three life-changing characters: The Doubter, The Cheapskate, and The Liar
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2013/01/22/reeling-from-it-part-1/feed/ 9 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/12/20/white-as-a-sheet/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/12/20/white-as-a-sheet/#comments Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:57:17 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4765 i began a brief Twitter conversation with Theodore Waern of SkyGoblin, whose graphic adventure game The Journey Down debuts on iOS this week at an introductory price of 99 cents, which at least one reviewer has called criminally low. i haven’t played the game myself (it’s been sitting in my Steam queue along with the hundreds of other casualties of the service’s too-good-to-pass-up software sales), but it looks gorgeous. The game’s characters have African-inspired masks for faces.

   

   The primary argument for increasing the diversity of the mostly white, mostly male game development workforce is that it will result in a similarly diversified product. “New and varied stories can be told, and new voices can be heard”, to cop a few phrases from film and/or National Public Radio. The Journey Down had me curious about whether a diverse dev team had led to a “black” cast of characters, so i asked Theodore how many SkyGoblin devs were black. “Actual devs are white as hell”, he answered. :)

   

   i looped lily-white Tim Schafer into the conversation, thinking back to his game Grim Fandango, which starred a cast of primarily Hispanic characters. The game wasn’t at all maudlin or stereotyped (but, being white myself, how would i know?). So how did Tim pull it off?

   

   “I relied on my Spanish-speaking actors to make the dialog more authentic. Tony Plana came up with a lot.”

   Theo took a similar approach:

   

   “I encouraged our actors to experiment a lot with the script as well. Definitely killed off some of the überwhite.”

   i would hazard a guess that neither Tim nor Theodore approached their games thinking “i want to make a game about people of colour”. Rather, they both saw a cultural art style (Día de los Muertos and African ritual masks respectively) that they wanted to use in their games, and it made sense to hire voice actors to suit the style (although The Journey Down advertises a “black African twist”, while the characters’ accents are West Indian – the confusion over which prompted my original Twitter question to Theodore).

   Do Not Go Gently Into That Non-White

   It got me thinking about how i approach diversity in my games, and the best word i could come up with was “fearfully”. Our upcoming game Spellirium was originally intended to reach the PC downloadable “mom” market, and yet it stars a white male protagonist. Why? Because i don’t dare write anything but white, for fear of someone calling me out for my non-white or non-male character being stereotypical, offensive, or – at the absolute worst – outright racist or sexist.

   

   Spellirium is a very male-dominated game because i am cowardly. The sex divide, at this point, is ten male characters to three females. i took (what i felt was) somewhat of a risk having a female in the main cast of characters. i patted myself on the back for asking our character designer to give her a small chest, and for marring her face with a big red scar to “de-beautify” her. Despite this, she still turned out smoking hot:

   

   (if you’re into ice-cold ass-kicking redheads, that is)

   All in all, i was pretty happy with the Hunter. Here was a woman who was holding her own in the apocalypse, living off the land and sustaining herself, defending her hand-built log cabin with a blunderbuss and a snarl. She isn’t in the game to be a love interest for the main character; she knows more about the game world and its creatures than anyone else, and she joins the quest to satisfy her revenge sub-plot. She makes it through the game without anyone kissing her. She does get rescued at one point, but the Spellirium is self-referential, and the characters cheekily mention how disappointing the moment is. So … pretty good, right?

   Well, no? During development, along came Anita Sarkeesian’s controversial Kickstarter campaign with her run-down of female video game tropes, and my Hunter character could arguably fit at least three of them – the “Sexy Sidekick”, “The Fighting F#@k Toy”, and “Man with Boobs”. Sssssuper.

   

   Give Him Enough Trope …

   i will point out, though, that it’s possible to disagree with Sarkeesian civilly, and i do. Her final video is titled “Positive Female Characters”, implying that every other trope on her list is negative.

   Simply identifying a trope (and feeling all clever for it) does not necessarily beg a value call on that trope. TVTropes.com (one of my favourite websites since they shut down thisIsWhyYoureFat.com) is packed with oft-used scenes, characters and story elements … but because a trope merely exists, i don’t believe we should stop using it. i defy anyone to try writing a story that doesn’t use a single trope from TVTropes.com … or to try writing a female video game character that doesn’t even remotely fit one of Sarkeesian’s depictions.

   
   

   (What – we’re not allowed to do the “hand over your badge” scene any more? Preposterous!)
   

   i had a hard time when Anita launched her campaign, because as a white male who was already nervous about writing non-male, non-white characters, i felt that Anita was making it even more perilous to do so. Let’s face it: not every game calls for Jade from Beyond Good and Evil. Sometimes you need that cigar-chomping roid-raging testosterone-stuffed space marine. Sometimes you need a sidekick. Sometimes that sidekick is female. Any why not make her attractive while you’re at it? Entertainment media is no place for ugly people.

   

   Buffy the Vampire Slayer: no fatties

   The Seeds of Fear

   When i was in the eighth grade, we had an assignment to draw a character from a historical fiction novel we were reading, which starred a boy and a girl. i opted to draw the girl, because i thought it would be a nice challenge. i had trouble with her chest. i had almost zero experience with boobs, and this was in the early 90′s, when … ahem … source material was hard to come by. So i did my level best, and was pretty proud of the results. i showed the teacher, whose eyes bugged out. “What’s the matter?” i asked. “Good God, Ryan,” she said, “She’s a 13-year-old girl.” i took that to mean her chest was too big? Ashamed and embarrassed, i don’t believe i drew another female until i was in art college.

   

   i feel like i should include some sort of picture here, but plugging “13yo big boobs” into Google Image Search is problematic.

   i was in a performing arts program in high school as a drama major. We were placed in groups, and tasked with putting on a short play. It was my first role as a director. We had been reading George Bernard Shaw, and i chose his play Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, which had three roles: a husband, a wife, and a villain. One of my group members was the program’s only black student. i cast him as the villain, because being a Shaw play with its antiquated language, it was a period piece. As my reasoning went, i figured i couldn’t cast the black kid as the husband, because an interracial marriage in a period piece would have been conspicuous. i didn’t even consciously consider the villainous nature of the third role, or the connotations of having a black villain. i caught hell for it from our lesbian feminist extreme-left drama teacher.

   

   Again, if i add a picture after “lesbian feminist leftist”, i’m a dead man.

   So for me, striving for game content diversity is a case of being once bitten and twice shy. i’ve hired both women and people of colour to work with me at Untold Entertainment, but i’ve always been terrified of saying the wrong thing around them. i’m altogether too nervous to write a female or a person of colour in one of my games, for fear of the Anita Sarkeesians and the drama and English teachers of the world calling me out for inappropriate chest size or for perpetuating harmful stereotypes. And on the flipside, i worry that i’ll catch flack for continually writing games with only white male protagonists.

   i’m not offering up any real solutions here – just thinking out loud. i guess i hope that as my depth and breadth of experience grow, my writing and confidence will grow along with them, allowing me to shake this fear and trepidation. But those who are banging the drum for increased diversity both in the games workforce and in depictions of women and minorities in games could, i think, help things along by approaching the subject from a position of love, patience, understanding and humour, and a commitment to appreciate honest attempts at increasing diversity without the Damoclean threat of lawsuits, placards, shouting and ostracism.

   And with that, i humbly present to you the blog comments section. :)

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/12/20/white-as-a-sheet/feed/ 6 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/12/07/wrong-mcgrath-why-linear-storytelling-in-games-matters/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/12/07/wrong-mcgrath-why-linear-storytelling-in-games-matters/#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2012 20:35:44 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4751 This year, Gamercamp invited cheery Mary DeMarle from Eidos Montreal (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) to speak about storytelling in video games and other interactive content. It was one of those talks that made me want to stand up and yell “YOU’RE WRONG YOU’RE WRONG YOU’RE WRONG” in the middle of it, but that would hardly be polite.

   Another audience member, Shawn McGrath (DYAD) had just finished giving his own presentation, and apparently sat through Mary’s talk thinking “YOU’RE RIGHT YOU’RE RIGHT YOU’RE RIGHT.” Moments after the talk, Shawn was interviewed by Toronto game mag Dork Shelf, to whom he imparted these nuggets of half-baked “wisdom”:

   I think linear story and interactive anything are completely diametrically opposed. They make no sense together at all, and any attempt to put storylines in games, in any traditional sense, is completely idiotic.

   

   A live talk may not have been the time and place to shout “YOU’RE WRONG”, but Dork Shelf has a comments section where any asshat with an opinion and a keyboard can drop vitriolic truth bombs. And so i am, and so i did:

   Ryan Henson Creighton says:

   i did some soul-searching and thought-formulating during Gamercamp as well, and arrived at the conclusion that folks like Shawn who praise “emergent” storytelling are stuffed with crap. No, not “full” of crap – STUFFED with crap, so that you couldn’t cram a single glob of crap into their crap-packed selves if you tried cramming it in there with a cannon rammer. Blog post to follow.

   This is that blog post.

   Sympathy for the Devil

   Through all of this, please understand that i love Shawn and i think he’s great … stuffed full of crap, and too cocky by half, but lovable regardless. This was the man who, two years prior at Gamercamp, was asked during Q&A how DYAD is actually played, and he responded “oh – you wouldn’t understand it.” Wow! That’s the kind of hubris that makes you very famous, or very punched in the face. Shawn is the former. … for now. :)

   

   i’m going to see if i can restate or frame Shawn’s point of view, because i’ve heard it before: if you have an interactive thing, like a video game, and that thing is constrained by a linear story where the player has no agency whatsoever, and is only pulling levers and dials to advance through that linear story, then there’s no point in the thing being interactive to begin with. Go create a book or a movie – something suited to linear storytelling. Don’t make a video game. (Did i get that right, Shawn?)

   i’ve heard a similar argument about animation. So the argument goes: if your movie could have been shot live action, and there’s no “excuse” to animate it, then don’t animate it. i heard this a lot when the uncanny valley poster child, The Polar Express, was released. “Wow! That 3D puppet looks SO DAMNED MUCH like Tom Hanks!” Great. Why not just use Tom Hanks in the first place?

   

   You know, this would be a lot more straightforward if you’d let me wear the conductor’s hat instead of eight thousand tiny motion sensors on my friggin’ face.

   There are, of course, exceptions here. Animation can evoke a certain mood – an other-wordliness – which, on its own, can be worth the extra effort. Then there are films like Persepolis and Fritz the Cat which are animated to match the graphic novels on which they’re based. It feels like a better approach than filming a live action conversion, as with Ghost World.

   

   Of course, Scarlett Johansson makes a compelling case for live action.

   So the argument, in sum: if your game is interactive, and your interactions don’t impact the outcome of the story (as was the complaint with the maligned Mass Effect 3 ending, then don’t structure your game around a linear story because there’s no point. Shawn even posits that it’s theoretically mathematically impossible to structure a game such that every choice you make impacts the story, because you get this exponentially branching tree. A developer could never create enough content to complete such a game.

   The Alternative

   So now, what all the cool kids are talking about as a solution to the linear storytelling “problem” (note: absolutely not a problem – see below) are six dollar words like “procedural” and “emergent” storytelling. Emergent storytelling, supposedly, results from building a big toy-like sandbox game (a la Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft) and letting your players run amok, creating their own fun and, consequently, their own stories.

   
   
   

   And here’s where that all falls down: call it what you like, but what happens in a sandbox game is not a story. It’s an experience. It doesn’t become a story until you retell it, and in the retelling, it becomes linear, because stories, by their very nature, are linear. A YouTube video of Grand Theft Auto horse mod shenanigans is a linear retelling of an emergent experience. Put another way, it’s not a story until it’s told – until it’s codified as a story in your brain, and then optionally retold via YouTube or fan fiction or water cooler chat.

   Let’s say you’re playing Minecraft and you build an awesome lava-filled house with no back door, and at night it’s besieged by a big throng of zombies. You have no weapons, and your house is flooded with lava. But you had built a platform above the house entrance, and you climb up the platform and drop a bunch of gravel on the zombies, killing the entire crowd. Pretty cool.

   

   i’ll be logging out now. Tell me when it’s morning.

   That’s a thing that happened to you while playing Minecraft. It was an experience, not a story. It doesn’t become a story until put story parameters around it – isolating that one 12-minute experience from the rest of your 5-hour Minecraft play session – and then you’re at the office water cooler the next day and you optionally recount your story-forumlated tale.

   In that recounting, you’ve put a structure around the experience – a very familiar storytelling structure: the premise (house besieged by zombies), the conflict (zombies gonna killya), the crisis (nowhere to go cuz lava), the climax (triumphant zombie-gravelling) and the denouement (presumably picking up a whole lot of dead zombie loot outside the house). Every aspect of your experience that doesn’t fit the story structure (ie the 3 hours of gathering materials for your house) doesn’t make the cut. That’s because you’ve edited it out in your brain – decided it wasn’t story.

   

   The story only exists in the telling – whether to yourself, or to others.

   Sharing is Caring

   This zombie victory story is the same story – one of only a handful that humans ever tell – that you’ve been told in books and movies and other video games. And the telling is likely successful because it’s relatable. In fact, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever recount an experience from Minecraft as anything other than a relatable story to your listeners’ ears, because if they don’t get it … if they can’t empathize … they’ll stop listening. And then you’ll become that guy at the water cooler.

   If your listeners are Minecraft players, so much the better. There are only so many stories that humans tell. We repackage them, remix them, and retell them, but they have the same core themes and structure. Other Minecraft players can relate, because they’ve all had similar (not identical, but similar) experiences: the narrow escape, the lucky shot with an arrow, the hours-of-building-only-to-be-undone-by-an-exploding-creeper. The storytelling is pleasurable or edifying because we’ve all had the same, or similar, experiences.

   

   Observational humour is funny because we’ve all been there.

   Water cooler retelling is also very pleasurable if we’ve had the exact same experience. Back when scheduled teevee viewing was more of a thing, everyone would go to work the next day and talk about who shot J.R., or did you catch that crazy movie The Duel about the guy facing off against an unseen murderous truck driver?

   The Point of a Shared Experience

   A game with a linear story affords us that pleasure. In the past few months, i’ve heard different people describing the LucasArts time-travelling classic Day of the Tentacle, and each person has used the same example to convey the game’s brilliance: “There’s something stuck up in a tree, so you go back in the past and cut down the tree so that the object is freed up in the future.” And then someone who has played the game chimes in “I remember that part!” And it feels good. Human beings have made a pleasurable connection through storytelling and the remembrance of a shared experience.

   

   (and WHAT a shared experience!)

   Co-operative linear games like Journey, Battletoads and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time enable players to be told the story together, much like circle time in kindergarten, except with more jumping and punching. (Okay … so maybe exactly like circle time in kindergarten?)

   

   Where can i find the brass knuckles?

   Games with a linear story are interactive like crossword puzzles are interactive: the game designer has set up this elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that the player has to connect together to get the whole thing working. In the end, multiple puzzle solutions notwithstanding, the whole contraption functions identically to my friend’s completed contraption, but we can meet up the next day and compare notes and talk about the completed contraption and how it came together, and how we solved each piece and in what order, and where we needed help, and where we got stuck … and we tell our stories to each other about how we made it through that game, or crossword puzzle.

   And we don’t, generally, feel badly that we both finished the game with identical contraptions – in fact, that was the whole point of the exercise … and indeed, we have less in common and less to talk about and to delight in if we both finish the experience, and my crossword puzzle solution is completely different from his. That’s not as exciting to us humans, who like empathizing and retelling the same stories. We want the solutions to be the same. We want to have ended up in the same place.

   

   Enjoy.

   Even in a series like Mass Effect, where despite which of the three paths we interactively chose leads us to essentially the same place, we tell a story to each other about how bogus that story was. And we revel and delight in agreeing with each other that Mass Effect’s ending was shite. (or not! And in THAT case, we delight in disagreeing with each other. But in either case, we delight in the fact that we’re connecting over a shared experience.)

   

   Who’s ready to waste 120 hours of their lives?

   Game-by-Numbers

   Shawn and i shared the experience of hearing Mary DeMarle talk about linear storytelling in video games, and Shawn thought one thing and i thought another, and now we’re delighting in the disagreement and revelling in the connection we have over the fact that we’re both opinionated and sentient and we both think things, and through our blogs and Dork Shelf interviews and chats at parties and Shawn’s inevitable refutation, we’re telling each other the story of how we arrived at our disparate conclusions. Here’s mine:

   A video game with a linear story does not defeat the purpose of interactivity, because the purpose of interactivity in that case is not for me to be a rare and precious snowflake and to discover my own unique path in life. It’s that the game developer is telling me a story, and i’m jumping through fun and interesting interactive or thought-provoking or muscle twitch-challenging hoops to reveal more and more of that story, until i’ve heard the whole thing (or as much as i’ve been able to hear based on my capability during the interactive bits). By then, i have shared the experience of that story with the game developer who told it to me, whereupon i can retell bits of the story to others and we can revel and delight in our shared experience of it.

   

   Remember that part in Monkey Island 2 when you get the guy fired from his job? Never played it? It’s hilarious! Let me tell you about it…

   Just because the solution to the crossword puzzle will be the same no matter how i go about solving it, it’s not to say that i should just seek out a completed crossword puzzle to read instead. The solving, the grinding, the platforming – these are the pleasurable interactive bits that justify our medium. The prefab story is pure reward, and it’s one that players like me value far more than points or leaderboard rankings.

   Shawn admits that even his dirty hippie psychedelic game DYAD has a story. Whether he admits it or not, he as the game developer has structured that experience, the same as any other game with linear storytelling. You progress linearly through DYAD’s levels, as Shawn the storyteller doles out new moves and goals and new bits of interactive capability, which are all pleasurable activities that lead the player down the game’s foregone conclusion: completion. Shawn leaves more to the player in terms of interpretation – allowing the player more freedom to explain away what it all means, man. *toke* Some games afford players less room to interpret and creatively retell their story, but that fact does not deserve Shawn’s harsh, unnecessary and incorrect value call: that a more rigidly-told story is “idiotic” and has no place in an interactive medium.

   

   Remember that part in DYAD where there’s this purple swirly thing, and the tunnel turns orange? Never played it? Let me tell you about it … AND BORE YOU TO FUCKING TEARS.

   Sometimes i want the freedom to paint my own picture. Sometimes i want to follow a pattern, as with a paint-by-number or knitting a sweater or building a papercraft model from print-outs. The process in both cases is interactive and enjoyable. In the end, it’s not accurate or fair to say that the sweater i knitted from my imagination is more valid or worthy than the sweater i knitted while following a pattern, which was idiotic and pointless because it left no room for interpretation. That kind of attitude, my friends, is just pure snobbery, and HE’S WRONG HE’S WRONG HE’S WRONG!

   

   Via XKCD.

   Further Reading

   • >fall in love with Annah by Ben 304
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/12/07/wrong-mcgrath-why-linear-storytelling-in-games-matters/feed/ 22 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/11/28/5-steps-to-organically-growing-your-games-portal/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/11/28/5-steps-to-organically-growing-your-games-portal/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:56:22 +0000 Ola Rogula http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4734

   This guest post is by Ola Rogula of Doll Divine Dress Up Games, who i met a few years back at the Casual Connect games conference. A lot has been written about the so-called “big” successes in the games industry; certain titles and developers get the lion’s share of the press, the fame, and the love. But meeting Ola and others like her has taught me an extremely valuable lesson: that even while flying under the radar with a product that many people have never heard of (or would even care about), you can still lock into a niche audience and provide a high quality, valuable product or service to them … and make bank.

   Sit back, and let Ola showya how it’s done. (Text by Ola, pictures by Ryan)

   There are, of course, multiple ways to grow a successful Flash games portal. However, I’m pretty proud to say that I grew mine with a $0 advertising budget and no link building. The site grew entirely from organic referrals. Links and ad campaigns are great too, but if you want to know how to give your portal the ability to grow itself organically, here are the things that worked for me:

   1. Mind-Blowingly Good Content

   I hate to say this, but if you can’t make games yourself and you don’t have thousands to play with, you face quite an uphill battle. Great games are hard to come by and they are going to be both the biggest source of free advertising for you, and the biggest reason for people to come back to your site.

   If you have a lot of money, you can make aggressive bids on games. This is the most straight forward way to fill your site with quality content. Of course, you’re paying the developer to place your link and logo into the game, so that word of your site spreads with the game. Flash Game License is the logical place to start, although I personally have had more luck with seeking out amateur developers through deviantArt. The biggest downfall of this strategy is that you’re always at the mercy of other people. I could never operate my site fully this way because I haven’t been able to find enough good developers to hire for my needs.

   

   Thank you for joining us today for the Consortium of Developers who are Worth a Damn. Please fill in all the rows.

   Alternately, you can be dirt poor as long as you know how to draw and program. Being able to create your own quality content is, in my opinion, the best way to make a splash. Of course, it’s also implied that you don’t just do these things; you’re good at them.

   There is also an elegant middle road solution. If you have some money to work with, and are a good programmer, it is very cost effective to hire out for artwork. There is literally a world of amazing artists out there who would love to get paid for their drawings. If you are an artist who needs a programmer, the situation is a bit trickier, and usually more expensive. I recommend biting the bullet and learning to code in Flash yourself.

   

   Do not heed words spoken with plastic lips. – Confucius

   I must stress that this is the most important point by a long shot. I grew my site almost entirely on my in-game links and word-of-mouth; both products of quality content creation.

   2. Dabble

   I have come to accept that it is impossible to predict what will be a “hit”. The only thing you can do is try, take notes, and try again. I can very much attest to what my friend, Andy Moore, calls the “1 in 10 rule”, asserting that about one in ten games is a hit. A lot of the rules he mentions for getting a game sponsored apply just as well for creating games for your own portal. Some will spread like wildfire across other sites, while others are left to rot.

   

   Andy Moore: always a hit.

   For example, I was very disappointed when my Vampire Maker was a total flop, despite having been successfully timed with Twilight! The Kitten Maker, however, took girl gaming sites by storm. Before these, I had attempted two adventure games which got an even worse reception. In these cases, the amount of time spent on development had no correlation to success. You have to be prepared to put out multiple projects, and you have to be prepared for most to flop. However, this is a beautiful time of self-discovery… It’s the time when you and the world flirt to figure out exactly how you best fit together and what type of projects you should be putting out.

   

   (Vampire Maker may be missing the ability to chew the living foetus out of a labouring mother’s stomach with your fangs? You know – for Twilight fans. Just sayin’. – ed.)

   3. Create a Brand

   Once you complete #1 and #2 and create a game that has spread to other sites, people will click on your logo to get more of the same. What is “the same” in your case? What do you offer? Based on which of your games resonated best, you need to decide on an adjective and a noun. Are your games funny? Very polished? Imaginative? Accessible to the visually impaired? You have to pick an angle and promise to continually deliver it to users. What are you making? Political satires? Intriguing puzzles? Tower Defense games? Match your adjective with your skills and your noun with your interests. In my case it is: intricate, fantasy doll makers because I love fantasy and pay intense attention to detail. If your interests lie in an already expansive genre, you’d better have a good adjective to go along with it. Of course, you can span multiple genres and wield multiple adjectives, as long there’s a united theme.

   

   Is “shitty” a viable descriptor?

   Create your site around this theme. Choose the name and colours accordingly. Contrary to popular belief, the site doesn’t have to be fancy or complex. A lot of people lose money on site design early on which is silly. All you need is a banner, thumbnails, and pages for the games. Anyone can make this happen, especially with the amount of templates online. Orisinal.com is a great example of a simple yet effective layout. The #1 need of users is to find what they’re looking for quickly. Cater to that first.

   Quite appalling, in my opinion, are the free scripts that abound which auto-fill your site with games from external sources. How exactly is using a script found all over the internet that fills your site with games that everyone else is posting supposed to give you an edge over the competition? After reading this article, are you itching to get back to playing games on that awesome auto-filled site you love? No? Think about that.

   We’re using a purchased WordPress theme the includes one of those scripts, because website design and coding are not Untold’s strong suits. We’re not using that script to automatically siphon games, but have instead been selecting and inputting each game by hand. The problem is that the the theme we purchased was poorly built, and it opens multiple unnecessary connections to our database. The end result is that when a small handful of people visit our portals, our server traffic and memory usage go bananas. This fact alone (and my inability to fix it myself) is the reason why i haven’t worked more diligently to grow traffic on Untold’s games portals. Caveat emptor. -ed.

   4. Be Nice to Your Search Engine

   (At the time of writing, “search engine” is synonymous with “Google”) The main advice usually given for optimizing Flash websites is: stop using Flash. This, of course, is useless advice for running a Flash games portal, although you should certainly avoid using a Flash-based navigation system. Google can’t see or play your game so it is your job to translate its greatness to the bots. Yes, Google can now crawl the text inside files, but how are the words “Next”, “Play” and “Jump!” supposed to emulate your top-notch graphics?

   

   As for any site, first complete all your basic SEO. Use descriptive text, not just images, when linking within the site. Use a descriptive, yet to-the-point, meta title that includes two good key phrases. Write a robust meta description. Name your pages with descriptive file names so the URL is people-friendly. And finally, find a way to include a large chunk of appropriate text on the page. Describe your game.. the creation process.. the inspiration. Include a set of instructions. You have to put into text what Google cannot see.

   

   Allowing fans to leave comments is a double-edged sword. Users can be an SEO godsend, filling the site with golden keywords and extensive commentary. They can also be a source of unprofessionalism and negativity. You must analyze your demographic and decide if they’d hate or relish the babble of other users. I took the unique approach of only allowing paid members to leave comments. This hasn’t removed unprofessionalism nor negativity, but it has completely removed all external advertising. It seems even as little as $1 per month is enough to detract spammers. It has also kept the community much smaller and respectful of each other.

   

   This moment of clarity courtesy of xkcd

   5. Monetize That S***

   Or rather, don’t over-monetize that s***. I know it can be tempting. Flash portals make very little money per user. Mine pulls in about one cent per user per month. When attempts to expand aren’t working, it’s tempting to shift to maximizing profits from the existing users. Over-monetizing the site can drive users away, further lowering revenues. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why increasing income through something that decreases traffic is the beginning of the end.

   

   Flash portals make their money mainly through advertisements around the site and in-game ads. Flash developers can make a lot of short-term cash by putting their games up for bid, but you’d better kiss that avenue goodbye if you want to grow your own portal.

   Website ads must be placed with taste. I recommend no more than one ad unit above the fold on the main page. The Google algorithm agrees. You care about the games first and the money is just a nice bonus, right? Hopefully this is true, but even if it’s not, it’s how you want your site to look. Placing an ad unit above or beside your logo exposes where your priorities lie. You want to make sure that all the things on your site that the user might find interesting are clearly visible, and the ad is just a last case scenario for their clicking pleasure.

   But Ola – how am i going to earn a steady seventy-three cents a month without placing ads absolutely everywhere? -ed.

   People have grown accustomed to one preloader ad and will generally sit through it. However, if you’re just starting out, you need every edge over the competition and sparing the users the annoyance of video ads is a commendable one. The big advantage of in-game ads is that they spread along with your game as/if it goes viral. But again, even on other sites, I recommend giving your games the ad-less advantage. A static, silent, in-game ad that is visible during the true duration of the loading is acceptable (many ads simulate a loading bar which makes the user wait even after the game has loaded). And don’t even think about layering multiple loader ads over each other. It’s a lovingly hand-crafted creation, not an onion.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/11/28/5-steps-to-organically-growing-your-games-portal/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/31/6-year-old-girl-gives-a-ted-talk/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/31/6-year-old-girl-gives-a-ted-talk/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2012 16:43:17 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4724 You can complain about the weather, but few things are more unpredictable than a 6-year-old girl. My daughter Cassandra has earned the nickname “Hurricane Cassie” around our home, both for her passionate mood swings, and for her habit of upending the living room to build increasingly elaborate furniture forts.

   Last year, Cassie and i made a video game together, and it struck a chord with many folks. This year, Cassie and i were invited to give a talk at TEDx Toronto about our game Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, and i took the opportunity to get people thinking about how technology is being taught (or not) to our kids, and at what age.

   
   
   

   When it came to the line “My hope is that one day …”, our speaker coach Chris Tindal suggested i add the word “soon”. i couldn’t do it, in good conscience. It feels like we’re light years away from a world in which people are on top of technology to a point where they’re in the driver’s seat, to cop a metaphor from Douglas Rushkoff. It may sound laughable for a grown man to be worrying about the advent of Skynet, the fictional computer network from the Terminator movies that one day suppresses all of humanity, but i really am concerned that we’re headed for a future where we’re controlled by our machines (or, at least, by the corporations that create them).

   “Consume” is a Con to U and Me

   Forget heady theoretical thinking. Here’s how this stuff plays out in everyday life: just yesterday, our Cisco Linksys router stopped pulling an IP address from our modem, after some repairmen were working on the lines outside. We called Cisco, and after a series of rather invasive and unnecessary questions (eg “At which store did you buy the router?”), the overseas support agent told us the device was too old to troubleshoot (we’d bought it two years ago). He gave us two options: we either buy a new router, or we pay for support – the cost of which is equal to the price of a new router.

   

   Hmm. Sounds like a fair shake to me!

   In turn, i gave the Cisco support agent two options: he can take ten minutes to troubleshoot the perfectly functional device and prevent it from going into a landfill, or i could mention the incident to my thousands of Twitter followers and blog readers. He said there was nothing he could do. i asked him to escalate my support request to his supervisor. He put me on hold. The call disconnected.

   And here we are.

   

   This poor customer service anecdote has been about Cisco. Please shop accordingly.

   The Geeks Shall Inherit

   What does Cisco’s lousy customer support have to do with helping kids to become creators, not consumers? While many are predicting the collapse of the middle class well within our lifetime, not much is being said about the emergence of a new class – a technological elite class. This is a class of people who are wise to the machinations of corporations and their methods of control. These aren’t people who know how to use software -these are people who know how to write software. They aren’t people who buy hardware. They’re people who build hardware. They’re the programmers, hackers, makers and NERDS who can see the Matrix for what it is, and the world could use a lot more of them.

   

   Whoa.

   The way we increase this class of people is by teaching kids how to control computers. Not how to use computers – how to control them.

   Think back to the pre-1990′s, if you’re of sufficient years. When you bought a car, you used to be tasked with the care and maintenance of that machine. Keep it gassed up, well-oiled and clean. And if a part broke down, you could either bring the car into the shop, or buy the part and replace it yourself.

   

   Cars today are black boxes. Many of their systems are computer-controlled, and without the expensive diagnostic equipment and know-how, people are at a loss as to how to repair them. We have no choice but to bring our cars back to the dealership. Auto repair used to be a common hobby, like gardening. Today, modern cars can’t be easily tinkered with. By and large, the corporations that design and build the machines are the only people who have access to their guts.

   Far From the Tree

   The first six drafts of our TEDx talk were far more critical of Apple. i’ve owned many gadgets in my life, but with Apple, never before had i paid so much for a device that died so quickly. Two years into owning a 2nd generation iPod touch, which ran me close to $500, the battery died. The device was built so that i could not simply open it and replace the battery myself (as i’ve done with every other piece of battery-powered technology i had owned throughout my lifetime).

   

   Dead man walking.

   When i brought the device back to an Apple Store (as i was programmed by them to do), the “genius” there said in a very patronizing tone “Well, the batteries in these devices ARE consumable.” Since the warranty had expired, they said i could pay them eighty dollars for a new one. i said there was nothing wrong with the original device – it just needed a new battery. Could they just charge me eighty bucks for a battery replacement, and give me my original device back?

   Nyope.

   

   My perfectly functional Nintendo Entertainment System, purchased in 1987.

   Gotta Fix ‘Em All

   Cassie has been playing an iPad game called Mino Monsters, which is heavily inspired by Pokémon. It’s a freemium game, and a bad implementation of the model. That means that Cassie has to wait a prescribed number of hours to heal her monsters after battling. So i thought “nuts to that”, and charged up an old GameBoy Advance so that she could play an actual Pokémon game. i described it to her like Wilford Brimley describes the alien planet in Cocoon: “You can collect HUNDREDS of monsters, you don’t have to wait to heal them, you never get old, and you never die.”

   Unfortunately, the battery in the game cartridge had died. Cassie could still play Pokémon Ruby, but the special timed events would no longer run.

   

   A drained Pokémon Ruby cartridge, manufactured sixteen years after the NES pictured above. The NES’s battery-reliant cartridges still function.

   i could easily have saved time and money by throwing the game cartridge in the garbage. But don’t you see? THAT’S HOW THEY WIN. A little more consumption, a little more waste, until one day we’re scavenging for food and supplies in the landfills we created while the slave-master machines soak up their energy from an exploded sun.

   

   Today, i throw out a functional game cartridge. Tomorrow, Skynet.

   So instead, i damn well got a tiny screwdriver capable of loosening the proprietary tri-head screw that Nintendo doesn’t want me to open, and i used a soldering iron to melt off the metal strips that metallurgically (and unnecessarily) bonded the battery to the circuit board. Then i bought a replacement battery at an electronics supply store and used electrician’s tape to hook it up to the game. i hammered it all back together with thumbtacks and spit, and when i turned the game came on, the “depleted battery” message was gone.

   

   When i was finished, i stood dominant over the device with my fists raised to the sky and bellowed my terrifying man-ape alpha male father-of-the-year YAWP. Machines may one day rule my life, but i’ll be God-damned if i’m going to lose the first skirmish to Pokémon.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/31/6-year-old-girl-gives-a-ted-talk/feed/ 10 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/28/linkedsin-the-unprofessional-social-network/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/28/linkedsin-the-unprofessional-social-network/#comments Sun, 28 Oct 2012 19:37:15 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4719 Social networks come and go, proving themselves useful (or not) in various areas of our lives. i know i can count on Facebook to tell me all about what that girl i knew in sixth grade is knitting for her newborn. Twitter is where i can crack wise to three thousand people i met at various game conferences, and get into protracted public battles about freedom of expression while quoting Saturday morning cartoons from the 80′s and retweeting articles written by people who are smarter than me. These two networks have replaced MSN Messenger and Fark, which in turn replaced usenet and irc.

   

   (which in turn replaced talking to someone in the face)

   The one “current-gen” social network i can’t quite figure out what to do with is LinkedIn. Whenever i get an email saying “So-and-So wants to connect with you on LinkedIn”, it’s usually someone i sorta know or someone i worked with ten years ago, and i’m not sure about the ramifications of clicking that “Accept” button, so i often don’t. If we connect, does that mean i’m vouching for that person’s professional skills? As someone who’s not particularly interested in building a resume and getting hired, what value does the network hold for me?

   

   i used to find value in LinkedIn’s groups – essentially message boards populated with professionals sharing a common interest – until aggressive marketers and scammers discovered them, and every other message tried sell me boner pills. LinkedIn has been a write-off to me for a number of years now. i only engage with the site about once a month, to begrudgingly approve the handful of accumulated connection requests.

   Tomfoolery Is My Friend

   A new feature on LinkedIn is called one-click endorsements. These are like tags for a person’s profile, much like Klout, that enables people to affirm each others’ skills. It’s a welcome feature; prior to one-click endorsements, endorsements on LinkedIn started with an awkward “Will you endorse me?” invite, which the recipient had to answer by writing a little blurb on how useful or amazing the requester is.

   One-click endorsements are simple. LinkedIn asks “Does this guy know about welding?” And you think “yeah … come to think of it, he DOES know about welding”. So you click the “I guess so” button, and voila – you’ve endorsed this guy as a welder.

   This single feature has renewed my interest in LinkeIn – not because i can lazily provide someone a professional pick-me-up, but because i can creatively defile someone’s profile with nefarious endorsements.

   Here’s a list of unflattering recommendations i’ve been able to cook up with LinkedIn’s new system so far:

   

   Mo, we hardly knew ye.

   By applying the right amount of mischief to LinkedIn’s new one-click endorsements, the net’s most boring social networking site now has a special place in my heart. If you manage to find any amusing endorsements that are already in the system, don’t be selfish – please share them in the comments section below.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/28/linkedsin-the-unprofessional-social-network/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/27/learn-fractions-with-frog-fractions/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/27/learn-fractions-with-frog-fractions/#comments Sun, 28 Oct 2012 02:43:28 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4715 In the TEDx Toronto talk that i delivered with Cassie yesterday, i took a shot at school boards’ use of ancient educational software, which many teachers use to placate their students while they catch up on marking and class prep.

   

   Note to schools: math hasn’t changed, but graphics, sound, teaching methods and children all have.

   In the nail-biting stress-a-palooza leading up to the talk, i read a review of Frog Fractions, a parody of kids’ educational and entertainment software of a (supposedly) bygone era. Now that i have a short time to relax, i took the time to play the game. It’s brilliant and hilarious, and well worth your time (and donations). It’s one of the funniest short-form games i’ve ever played. Enjoy it!

   

   Play Frog Fractions by twinBeard studios

   (note: The game’s not appropriate for kids. If you’re stuck in a rut for a while like i was, don’t stop playing until you’ve found your way out of the pond.)

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/27/learn-fractions-with-frog-fractions/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/23/men-helping-women-use-computers/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/23/men-helping-women-use-computers/#comments Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:26:55 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4707 Computers are hard. Right, ladies? Math, too. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves … the female brain can really only handle thinking about one thing at a time.

   My 6-year-old daughter Cassandra an i are doing a TEDx Toronto talk at the end of the week. While trying to source an image of a woman using a computer at her job, i discovered an interesting trend: computers are obviously really difficult for women to grasp. Thank goodness they’ve got a bunch of men hanging around who can show them what’s what.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   (woman not pictured – out of frame)

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/23/men-helping-women-use-computers/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/05/6-simple-rules-for-hiring-my-teenage-daughter/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/05/6-simple-rules-for-hiring-my-teenage-daughter/#comments Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:53:22 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4674 PROVISO: IANAAL (i am not an anal lawyer), this post does not constitute a legal opinion, and it pertains to mushy rules laid out by the Ontario Ministry of Labour; your level of confusion with the mushy rules expressed in your own state or province may vary.

   Do You Hear the People Sting?

   Sometimes the law makes it very difficult to do the right thing.

   Jean Valjean was sentenced to hard prison time for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. (But then he learned to hold a note in a wicked falsetto and everything worked out in the end.)

   

   If i could solve my own problems with falsetto singing, i’d have exactly zero problems. Except maybe shattered windows.

   i was recently personally attacked on Twitter by law school grad Andrew Langille, who runs a website advocating for young workers’ rights. Andrew is not a fan of unpaid internships, and regularly points out their illegality to corporations that offer them.

   

   i asked him if i’ve earned some sort of trophy or something, to which he replied:

   

   How rude.

   Where’s the Beef?

   i run an internship program at Untold Entertainment from my gold-plated throne sitting atop Asshole Mountain (where the air is somewhat shitty). With very few exceptions, the interns i hire are completing co-op placements with accredited post-secondary institutions, which the Ontario Employment Standards Act allows. So everything is hunky dory and on-the-level.

   Very occasionally, i’ve brought on individuals who are not in school to complete internships. This is where things get sticky. i want to lay all that stickiness out on the table so that we can all try to parse it together.

   

   Of note: this sticky-mouthed Spellirium monster unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Jean Valjean.

   Problem, Meet Solution

   Here are the facts about Untold Entertainment: unlike some of the other companies offering unpaid internships that Langille (rightly) bemoans – like ad agency Taxi and media juggernaut Bell Canada – Untold is a very small, very struggling shop with three fully-computered, fully-softwared office seats that we don’t yet have the means to fill with paid employees … not even at the Ontario minimum wage of $10.25/hr. (We do contract out some piecemeal work, and pay for it – but that work is sporadic, not steady.)

   

   One of these things is not like the others.

   At the same time, Ontario colleges are all clamouring to offer video game design and development programs because they’re a big fat milky mooey cash cow. These colleges and universities are pumping out unqualified grads at an alarming rate, flooding the market with inexperienced hopefuls who can’t find employment.

   i started offering the Untold Entertainment Internship Program to help alleviate both problems: we have a lot of empty office space, software, hardware, and my twelve years of expertise that are not being put to good use, and a great many grads are stuck in that familiar work/experience catch-22. i prefer to run a lively office filled with people making games, learning about the industry and gaining valuable experience, so i will occasionally bring in non-student interns.

   Due Dilligence

   When i first brought on an intern who wasn’t part of a school co-op program, it dawned on me that i needed to check the legality of unpaid internships in Ontario. Here’s what i found out: if someone at your office is an employee, you need to pay him minimum wage at the … you know, at the minimum.

   However, the Ministry lays out six guidelines under which an individual can be considered an unpaid trainee, rather than an employee. Here are those guidelines:

   1. The training is similar to that which is given in a vocational school.
   2. The training is for the benefit of the individual.
   3. The person providing the training derives little, if any, benefit from the activity of the individual while he or she is being trained.
   4. The individual does not displace employees of the person providing the training.
   5. The individual is not accorded a right to become an employee of the person providing the training.
   6. The individual is advised that he or she will receive no remuneration for the time that he or she spends in training.

   All six guidelines must be met – you can’t hit them a la carte. By my own interpretation, the Untold program meets five out of six requirements handily. Five out of six.

   The Third Law

   The tricky one is number 3. If the trainee is providing absolutely no benefit to the trainer, why is the trainer even bothering? Under what crazy circumstances would you just train someone for free, making sure that none of the work they did during their training was at all usable or functional?

   Langille (who deleted his attack tweets when i casually mentioned Ontario’s rigorous libel laws), involved the Ontario Ministry of Labour Twitter account so that they could teach me what for. The exchange was frustrating:

   

   (the link at the bottom of the tweet leads here, to the six rules i just outlined)

   The word that got my goat was “generally”. In an ideal world, law should not be general. Something’s either legal or illegal. Law should not say “Sue Me Maybe”. So i poked at the Ministry, who responded with this:

   

   The Ministry likes to play dodgeball.

   Whoever’s running that account really knows how to push my righteous indignation buttons. i, as a conscientious tax-paying citizen of sound mind, should reasonably be able to read and interpret my government’s laws in order to obey them. i should not have to pay hundreds of dollars to a lawyer to obtain a legal opinion. But unfortunately, law doesn’t work like that. You do what you do, you take your chances, and you pray that you don’t get sued.

   Who You Gonna Call?

   The @OntMinLabour twitterer suggested i call the Ministry to clarify things. i called their bluff and rang them up. The first lady i spoke to, Bernadette Ward (who curtly identified herself only as “Mrs. Ward”, prompting me to withdraw the offer of my first name in retaliation … how playground of me) was unable to find anything in the Ministry’s interpretation manual that could help. (Interpretation manual?? Gah!) So she forwarded me up the bureaucratic food chain to someone with presumably sharper teeth.

   The second lady, a long-time veteran of the Ministry, was more helpful in clarifying that the rules, as written, are entirely unclear. She provided me with one single example – her only example – where she felt those six rules were being properly adhered to: bus drivers. A bus driving company takes on an unlicensed trainee who sits in a classroom learning about how to drive a bus.

   

   1. The training is similar to that which is given in a vocational school. (Check – driving a bus is a vocation.)
   2. The training is for the benefit of the individual. (Check – the trainee learns how to drive a bus.)
   3. The person providing the training derives little, if any, benefit from the activity of the individual while he or she is being trained. (SPURIOUS! See below. But according to the Ministry lady, the company derives no benefit … since the trainee can’t drive a bus, the company is not allowed to put him to work doing bus-driving work.)
   4. The individual does not displace employees of the person providing the training. (Check – you can’t displace an employee if you’re not legally licensed to drive a bus)
   5. The individual is not accorded a right to become an employee of the person providing the training. (Check … there’s no right to become a driver, but again, i find this one pretty dodgy. See below.)
   6. The individual is advised that he or she will receive no remuneration for the time that he or she spends in training. (Check.)

   i hope it goes without saying why i take umbrage with points 3 and 5 above, but i’ll say it anyway: the entire purpose of the bus company providing free training is so that they can create qualified workers to have an experienced pool of potential employees to draw from. So the company does derive benefit from offering the training, and while the trainee has no right to employment, i’m willing to wager that a decent number of those trainees find themselves driving a bus for the very company that trained them. That is, unless i’m mistaken, and bus companies provide free training so that newly-licensed drivers can go accept jobs from their competitors.

   

   Have i completely missed the bus on this point?

   The nuance that the Ministry lady pointed out was that the bus driving trainee provided little or no benefit while he was being trained … any benefit provided after the fact, when the trainee becomes an employee, does not enter into it.

   If the provisions for an exception case are so narrow that the Ministry can only identify one acceptable exception, why make the exception to begin with? Just call it illegal, plain and simple, and cut out the ambiguity and confusing language.

   Entering Into It Lightly

   To make matters more subtle, the Ministry expert brought up volunteering. Obviously, i can happily put in volunteer hours at my church and never be entitled to compensation. Ministry Lady talked about golf courses who take on retirees whose “job” it is to schedule grounds times for club members. They do this in exchange for free golf time. In this situation, the volunteer is doing work, is not receiving training, and is not being paid the minimum wage … yet is somehow neither a free trainee (as above) or a paid employee. Ministry Lady said that it all has to do with how the company and the individual entered into the arrangement.

   

   When i enter into an arrangement with rare non-student interns, i actually show them the six Ministry of Labour guidelines, and i say that we need to adhere to those guidelines in order to make it work. i do usually ask them to sign something, although i’m well aware that you can’t contract yourself out of your rights. The signed agreement is to document how we entered into the arrangement – as trainer to trainee, as employer to non-employee, as volunteer in exchange for coaching.

   As for the tasks i ask non-student interns to complete, they could possibly be construed as work. Past non-student interns have never worked substantially on paid client projects. They have chipped away at unreleased games, and have futzed around with Untold’s side projects, like our web game portals. i suppose that in order to be completely in line with that 3rd proviso, the “work” i ask these non-student interns to do should just be stuff that i throw away.

   

   Hey, New Guy. i’d like to teach you some programming. You’re going to work on a video game that i will later discard. No one will ever play it or even know of its existence. How’s that sound?

   Who wants to sign up for an internship where they’re just given pointless busy work that gets discarded? The vast majority – and by that i mean 100% – of experience-seekers would like a credit on a released game, because that’s the standard by which they’re judged at any game studio where they apply for work. It’s a real shame that there exists this disconnect between the needs of industry and its young workers, and the nebulous rules of the Ministry.

   How to Be An Apparent Scumbag

   Untold Entertainment plays by the rules, to a fault. We buy all our software, we remit payroll taxes, we sign contracts, and we do right by people. Our internship program is an attempt to help people and to give back to the industry – not to cynically exploit young people for our own selfish gain (and don’t be fooled by the jokes we crack about our busted coffee maker). Based on what i learned from Ministry Lady’s “clarification” of these mushy rules, here’s what i recommend (obviously, do not take this as legal advice):

   If you want to help someone out by offering an unpaid internship, go for it. The two situations where you may get hurt for all your do-gooding are:

   1. The Ministry of Labour randomly pegs you for an investigation, finds you in violation of their Act, and slaps you with a fine. (After all of this, i may be due for a “random” visit from the Ministry.)
   2. A jilted ex-intern files a claim with the Ministry, demanding back-pay.

   If you treat your people well, and if those people don’t want to get themselves blacklisted in the industry they’re trying so desperately to break into, the second case likely won’t crop up. Just roll the dice. If you’re worried, set up some sort of Emergency Lawsuit Fund where you’ve saved up the amount of back-pay someone might try to dig out of you (but naturally, if you can shore up that amount, you should just be paying that out in wages to the intern to begin with).

   The Ministry investigation is interesting. Ministry Lady told me that the investigator looks at the company employee records that i am compelled by the Act to keep, and makes a judgement. i said “but if unpaid interns aren’t employees, i don’t have to keep records on them?” In a Douglas Adams-esque twist of bureaucratic logic, she replied that no, i’m not required to keep records on non-employees … but if an investigator deems a non-employee to have been an employee, i will have been required to keep employee records.

   

   Get your head around THAT one.

   i asked her how that actually plays out in a claim. She said that if an intern kept records saying “i worked from 9-5 every day for 4 months”, and the employer kept no records, it’s possible that an investigator may side with the only party who purportedly kept records (even if those records are dodgy). So the safest, most ass-covering thing you can do, is to have unpaid non-student interns log their hours in your corporate system.

   BUT … this point is moot unless a jilted ex-intern files a claim. If an investigator “randomly” came to my office and asked for employment records, i don’t know if i’d volunteer the intel that i worked with people on whom i wasn’t required to keep records. That strikes me as lunacy.

   People Are Starving. Let’s Steal Some Bread.

   

   The point is this: with their golf course volunteer and bus driver examples, the Ministry’s guidelines are clear as mud, and can only be proven out in a claim situation. The spirit of the guidelines as i read them, without paying hundreds of bucks to a lawyer, is that the Ministry doesn’t want companies firing paid employees and replacing them with free labourers because of a crowded market where people are desperate to work for free. That’s not what we’re about. If absolutely no one in this industry was willing to take an unpaid internship, Untold Entertainment would not just bite the bullet and hire paid employees. We can’t do that right now. We’d just keep an empty office until such a time as we could hire.

   Aside from our successful co-op partnerships with Ontario schools, what we’re doing at Untold is occasionally taking inexperienced recent grads or industry hopefuls, providing them with work experience at a small studio, teaching them the ropes of how a small business is run (into the ground), placing them on secondary or non-mission-critical unpaid projects, and sending them out into the world with a far better leg up than when they started.

   If that’s greedy or selfish or wrong, then sue me.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/05/6-simple-rules-for-hiring-my-teenage-daughter/feed/ 15 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/01/untold-entertainment-fall-internship-program-2012/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/01/untold-entertainment-fall-internship-program-2012/#comments Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:33:25 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4657 Untold Entertainment is a boutique game development studio in downtown Toronto. We specialize in games and apps for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers. We’re looking for two interns for the months of October – December 2012:
   • a 2d artist/animator
   • an Actionscript 3 programmer

   Deadline

   Please submit your application (see below) by Friday October 12, 2012 at 9:17 PM Eastern Standard Time.

   Eligibility

   Ideal candidates will be hungry for experience and committed to producing quality products. These are attributes we’ve prized in past interns:

   • Self-starter. Take initiative and produce work effectively and on time.
   • Team player. Collaborate and communicate openly with team members, act on constructive criticism and constantly do what’s best for the project and your team.
   • Detail oriented. Be your own toughest critic and focus on delivering your work with as much detail and care as possible.
   • Problem solver. Be prepared to think outside the box and find solutions to challenges that may appear.
   • Life-long Learner. See every fork in the road as a way to expand your skillset and continuously strive to improve at what you do.
   • Positive attitude. No whining. Move forward and get things done!
   • Humorist. Anyone caught wearing a suit will be shot.

   What Will You Be Doing?

   Here are the major tasks you will be performing at Untold Entertainment (other related tasks may crop up as projects call for them):

   • Programming. Laying down code in Actionscript 3 for Flash-based projects based on design documentation.

     OR

   • Art and animation. Designing, creating, and animating 2D characters, backgrounds, and other visual effects according to project specifications.

     AND

   • Collaborating. Working with a small team to ensure deadlines are met with an end product worthy to carry the name Untold Entertainment.
   • Testing. Providing quality assurance for various game projects that you have helped create.
   • Coffee machine repair. Seriously, how is this thing still broken?

   How Much Do i Get Paid?

   This is an unpaid internship. It is an opportunity to gain great experience and to put some real game development studio work on your resume, along with the chance to get your name in the credits of a shipped title. Many former interns have remarked that they understand the business of game development and the entrepreneurial side of the industry much better after completing their internship at Untold Entertainment. Working at a small studio is a far different experience from working at a big triple-A juggernaut. As an additional perk, we offer No-Pants Fridays.

   How Do I Apply?

   Email info [the curly at sign] untoldentertainment [the little dot thingy] com. Please put way more attention into an interesting email and samples of your work than your resume. Give us a sense of your personality, and why you think you’re a good fit. Cookie-cutter applications with business-suit-wearing cover-letters and resumes describing your evening shift at Shopper’s Drug Mart will be stabbed and burned.
   Successful candidates will be contacted for interviews in early to mid-October.

   Is It Worth It?

   Here’s what some former interns have to say about their experience:

   Having had no idea what to expect from my summer internship, and, more importantly, my first real studio experience, I was greatly relieved to land a job at Untold Entertainment with programmer, animator, teacher, comedian, lion-tamer, and self-made astronaut, Ryan Creighton. I was provided with a bounty of knowledge, a plethora of fun tasks to sink my artistic teeth into, and the respect to freely give and receive feedback on projects. Not only did working at Untold open my eyes to new possibilities, give me an opportunity to expand my skill set, and introduce me to a number of lovely people currently working throughout the entertainment and game development industries, but there was also a steady supply of candy, and occasionally we were rewarded with tacos. Untold is a brilliant studio with a clever, innovative, and genuine captain at the helm. 10/10, would intern again.

   - Intern Sarah Davis, Summer 2012

   I couldn’t have possibly broken into the game industry with what they taught me in school alone – It definitely takes a lot more than a strong 3D modelling portfolio. Ryan Creighton taught me the real value of hard work, imagination and a positive attitude. Oh, and that “Nordic Berries” are DEFINITELY not a suitable substitute for Swedish Berries.

   - Intern Chewie (Cassandra Chui), Winter 2012

   Also, pants required.

   - Intern Sina Kashanizadeh, Fall 2011

   I learned more about making games at Untold than I ever did at school.

   - Intern Cale Bradbury, Academic year 2010-2011

   The stuff I learned from Ryan is the stuff I’m currently getting paid for in California. The effort to reward ratio is incredible.

   - Intern Mohammed Al-Sahaf, Winter 2011

   Want to play games all day? Go home and play. Want to discover the stress, struggle, and ultimate satisfaction of making games for a living? Apply for this internship.

   - Intern David S. Gallant, Fall 2011

   Working with Ryan Creighton has been eye-opening. If Untold had taught me anything as an intern, it’s open your mind to new creative ideas.

   - Intern Chris Aaron Broadfield, Summer 2011

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/10/01/untold-entertainment-fall-internship-program-2012/feed/ 6 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/09/17/keep-it-unreal/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/09/17/keep-it-unreal/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2012 21:09:21 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4643 Like any green-blooded video game nerd, i was excited to hear that 2KGames was remaking the X-Com series. One of the very best games i’ve ever played, the original X-Com: UFO Defense enabled me to play out an Independence Day-esque scenario, leading my underpowered soldiers into battle as we slowly researched and stole alien technology to defeat the invading extraterrestrial horde.

   

   The gameplay of the original title was so good, and the visuals were so charming, that when Warballoon appeared on Kickstarter with Star Command, which had a similar aesthetic and tactical play style, they got funded. Twice.

   

   Fund me once, shame on you …

   X-Com’s visuals are so distinct that you can take one look at an original X-Com screenshot and immediately say “that’s X-Com.” But take a look at a few screens from the upcoming remake:

   

   … euh?

   

   Ugh.

   i see generic space marines fighting through generic-looking environments. The gameplay mechanic may be the same, but gone is the brand recognition and, more importantly, the visual charm that X-Com had in spades.

   Zel-out

   

   Duh na na NAAAA!!

   Similarly, when Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with a bold new art direction, many game fans balked. When the company succumbed to fan outcry and returned to a more “realistic” depiction of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, i had far fewer moments of awe. i remember just sitting and staring at certain Wind Waker scenes because they were so breath-takingly simple and gorgeous. But with Twilight Princess, eye candy had become eye broccoli.

   

   Duh na na … nerp.

   While there’s no accounting for taste (unless you work for Accounts Receivable at a restaurant), i’m not a big fan of the video game industry’s relentless pursuit of photorealism. Give me charm, character, and unique eye-pleasing visuals over faithful representations of boring old real life any day.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/09/17/keep-it-unreal/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/17/ryan-and-cassie-at-tedxtoronto/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/17/ryan-and-cassie-at-tedxtoronto/#comments Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:10:47 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4639 i feel incredibly honoured to have been asked to give a talk at the upcoming TEDxToronto conference.
   
   
   

   The fun hook here is that TEDxToronto crew has also asked my 6-year-old daughter Cassandra to take the stage with me, to talk about the game we made together and the work that has grown from it.

   i’ll admit i’m somewhat nervous about giving a talk with a little kid. The last time the spotlight was on Cassie (at 7 in the morning on live national television) things went a little sideways. But she’s a year older now. Cassie is precocious and talkative as ever. She has absolutely steeped herself in video games, to the point where she has vivid dreams about them. She woke up this morning and showed me the real-world game she had drawn out on stacks of paper in crayon when she was supposed to be in her room sleeping. She couldn’t wait to get to daycamp to show her friends how to play it. It involves frogs.

   My KID Knows More About Technology Than *I* Do!

   The follow-up to Ponycorns for Untold Entertainment is a site called GamesByKids.com, which is actively under development. It’s meant to help bridge the gap between children’s passion for games and technology, and grown-ups’ fear or lack of understanding of the same. Grown-ups are responsible for teaching our kids, at home and at school, about how all this marvelous technology works … but because they themselves feel overwhelmed, i worry that kids aren’t receiving the training they need to excel in a knowledge-based (as opposed to manufacturing-based) working world.

   That’s what Cassie and i are planning to share at TEDxToronto in October: we want to encourage grown-ups to take the wheel and get messy with technology, taking kids by the hand and leading the charge into a wondrous sea of unknown buttons and features and functions and doo-dads.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/17/ryan-and-cassie-at-tedxtoronto/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/16/the-games-industry-vs-the-mainstream-press/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/16/the-games-industry-vs-the-mainstream-press/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2012 16:26:19 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4632 i was relieved to read an interview on Gamasutra conducted by industry reporter Leigh Alexander, about the Project Overboard team and our upcoming graphic adventure game, Head of the Gorgon. Through wincing, trepidatious eyes, i read an article in which the points written about the project were accurate, in which the quotations from me were things i actually said, and in which the reporter made a concerted effort to present the material in a positive light.

   

   Why is this remarkable? i guess i’m just used to the state of affairs over in mainstream media, where reporters with a very flimsy grasp of the industry have driven a truck through the place, smashing a hole through the public perception of our trade.

   YOU … SHALL NOT … ASK!!

   Last week, a reporter from the mainstream media hit up the Toronto Video Game Community Facebook group asking for connections to female gamers for a piece he was writing. Industry reporter Shaun Hatton (Electric Playground) jumped in front of the bullet immediately, citing botched reports by the “lamestream media”:

   

   Copywriter and ladygamer Lori Dance chimed in, and soon links to our past ham-handed mainstream interviews were posted to the thread. In each interview, the reporter clearly had an agenda to push (respectively: video games tear relationships apart, and violent video games make children kill). The reporters asked leading questions of us until anything remotely resembling or supporting their theses emerged from our mouths. These inadvertent talking points were then seized upon and selectively featured in each piece.

   
   
   

   In poor Lori’s case, lax editing made the usually intelligent woman appear a rambling goofball. In my case, my point about the need for parents to educate themselves about kid culture was sliced into the alarmist sound bite “GET INVOLVED IN YOUR KIDS’ LIVES!!”

   
   
   

   Lori and i were both quick to write our own articles clarifying our positions, revealing how the mainstream news media did their best to put Baby in a corner. Both articles embed the interviews in question:

   What You Don’t Know About Gaming Can Kill You – Lori Dance

   Ryan Creighton on City News at 6 with Dr. Karl – Ryan Henson Creighton

   Filthy-Faced African Ragamuffins Make Good

   i was recently speaking with Andy Smith from Get Set Games, the local Toronto success story responsible for the hit iOS games Mega Jump and Mega Run – Redford’s Adventure. Andy told me how the news media crafted a rags-to-riches story of two brothers raised in Zambia who are the “creative driving force” behind the studio they founded:

   
   
   

   What can we learn from CBC’s report?

   1. That the iPhone is a gold mine promising untold riches to whoever ventures there
   2. That the reporter doesn’t listen when her sons tell her about video games either
   3. That Rob Segal, one of the studio’s four founders, is a spectral figure who haunts the Get Set offices, whose ethereal voice and opinions cannot be captured by standard news recording equipment

   Contrast all this with Leigh’s bang-on report about Project Overboard this week. While it might not seem like something to celebrate, it certainly is. Thanks, Leigh!

   Fair and Balanced

   Though the situation looks grim, the mainstream media does boast a handful of reporters who actually know a thing or two about the industry. A commenter in the Facebook thread i mentioned above gives credit to Marc Saltzman and Steve Tilley for knowing their stuff, and i’ve had good interviews with Jonathan Ore (A father and daughter’s excellent gaming adventure – CBC.ca) and Daniel Kaszor (Toronto’s littlest video-game designer – National Post). The big difference is that these four fellows actually play video games and understand the industry a great deal more than your typical nervous-parent-cum-news-reporter.

   Show Me on the Doll Where They Misquoted You

   Have you ever been interviewed by the mainstream press about video games, only to have your words twisted to their populist purposes? Tell Uncle Ryan all about it in the comments.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/16/the-games-industry-vs-the-mainstream-press/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/07/rise-my-minions/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/07/rise-my-minions/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2012 21:08:41 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4623 It’s a fact: i wrote a book on Unity, and lots of people have pretended to read it. But every once in a while, i meet someone who has actually read the whole book, down to the shocking twist ending (SPOILER ALERT: the butler coded it).

   So what’s life like for people who have finished the entire course of their prescription, instead of just taking two doses of antibiotics and letting the rest of the pills collect dust in a bottle in the medicine cabinet? Today, i received a wonderful email from a reader who had both the drive and the tools to make good.

   TO THE EASILY BORED: the email contains a free game code. Leave a comment if you’re the lucky redeemer!

   Hello Ryan,

   Last year, I purchased “Unity 3.x Game Development by Example” as an iBook for my iPad. I lost my full time position around the econ crash of 08 so my wife and I started our own company. I am usually found working on servers and routers; game development is totally new for me. At some point in early 2011, I decided to try to make a game to sell in the iTunes App Store. I came up with an idea and began researching how to go about things. Unity seemed to do anything I would need and I started at page one of your book. I went through every page and every example. I learned a great deal and found your book and examples easy to follow. Almost 1 year later, Vector Tract was born. Apple approved the app last night! I am including a link and promo code if you would like to check it out.

   Thank you for creating such a helpful beginner’s guide to Unity!

   

   Play Vector Tract by Total Edge Technology!

   Promo Code: YP4K4YXT3T7W

   Phillip Coppedge – Owner, Lead Engineer
   Total Edge Technology, LLC
   Microsoft Partner – Silver Messaging

   www.totaledgetech.com

   As an aside, Phillip absolutely insisted that if i posted the free game code, i had to also post the accompanying license terms, which i thought was completely adorable, so i’ll oblige:

   Code expires on

   Tue Sep 04 06:00:36 PDT 2012

   and is redeemable only on the iTunes Store for United States. Requires an iTunes account, subject to prior acceptance of license and usage terms. To open an account you must be above the age of 13 and in United States. Compatible software and hardware, and internet access (fees may apply) required. Not for resale. Full terms apply; see www.apple.com/legal/itunes/ww/. For more information, see www.apple.com/support/. This app is provided to you by

   Total Edge Technology, LLC

   D’AAWWWW!

   Anyway, it strokes my cockles to see folks using my book to fulfil their own game development dreams. Just be sure to remember me when i stumble up to your front door at 4 in the morning, soused and penniless.

   

   You can get your own copy of the fantastic game development book Unity 3.x Game Development by Example Beginner’s Guide by Ryan Henson Creighton (that’s me!) for the low, low price of [whatever Amazon is currently charging]. Be sure to compare against [whatever the publisher is currently charging] to get the best deal.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/08/07/rise-my-minions/feed/ 5 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/25/untold-entertainment-alive-at-five/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/25/untold-entertainment-alive-at-five/#comments Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:46:45 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4609 We’ve reached our fifth year of operations at Untold Entertainment! All the hoorays!

   

   In last year’s milestone post, i made some predictions about what the coming year would hold:

   Untold Entertainment’s fifth year will be filled with low-life panda bears, daily word puzzles, gamesByKids, and more great articles about game development and education, peppered with rude jokes and stolen LOLcat pictures.

   Let’s look back at the Year That Was to remind ourselves why i should never take up fortune telling as a second career.

   Ponycorns Aftershocks

   

   Hot off the rampant success of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on the web, we had just released the game on the iPad and the BlackBerry Playbook. Since then, RIM’s business has imploded, and no one’s really heard much from Apple (can someone please check in on them? i’m worried).

   i told the story of Ponycorns at the 100th Flash User Group meeting. My presentation was calle Ponycorns: Ride the Lightning, and was very well received. The talk was so-titled because it was about how i tried to harness the initial buzz and excitement around the game and spin it into an even bigger success, but then it dawned on me that “ride the lightning” was a euphemism for living wild and then dying in the electric chair. Maybe not the most apt title.

   So when i was asked to speak at the 2011 Screens Festival, i revised the talk and titled it “Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar”. If you’ve played the game (or not), that title makes a lot more sense. i was encouraged by the response at Screens, and submitted the talk and the game to various conferences.

   We were honoured as a finalist for Indicade 2011, which we attended in September. While there, i pitched our upcoming game Spellirium to a small, interested audience.

   March saw me delivering Ponycorns and the Price of Popularity at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco, and Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar the very next day at the Game Developers Conference. At FGS, i revealed all of the financials for the project, including the cost of merchandising and marketing. All told, Ponycorns has cost Untold Entertainment roughly $7000, but it’s a small price to pay for the notoriety it brought.

   Cassie and i were named among Backbone Magazine’s Top 15 Canadians in Digital Technology, alongside Sid Meier, the developer of Sim City. Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure was featured in Buttonless, a book about iOS games.

   

   Watchoo talkin’ bout, Creighton?

   Ponycorns was a finalist for a Mochi award and two Canadian Videogame Awards earlier this year. The game was exhibited by the Digital Game Museum at Maker Faire.

   We continue to ship Ponycorns merchandise – T-shirts, buttons and limited-edition plushies – to fans worldwide.

   GamesByKids.com

   The follow-up to Ponycorns is a site called gamesByKids.com. Announced last year in an interview with the CBC, the site is still in development. It will be a resource for parents and educators to learn about video game design so that they can sit down with a child and make a game together.

   

   Before i launch the site, i want to make sure i’m actually a subject matter expert. i need to know what kids at different age and ability levels can actually do with the software. To that end, i taught a six week course in Scratch, a free visual programming language, to grade three students at an elementary school. Earlier this year, i visited another school and volunteered a few weeks to another class of grade threes. Next week, i’ll be facilitating a video game camp for 10-14-year-olds at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

   All Kids Love Blog

   The Untold Entertainment Blog remains one of the most active and engaging blogs in the industry. Here are some post highlights from the past year:

   • Welcome to the Untold Entertainment Offices – Gamezebo.com takes a look at our cozy digs in downtown Toronto.
   • Know Your N’Audience – On the importance of knowing who you’re not marketing to.
   • 5 Cardinal Sins of Children’s Entertainment – Inside Oscar’s can, the Man in the Yellow Hat gets named, and other assorted sacrilege
   • Fettering Facebook: Should We Put a Cap on Capitalism? – Raising the spectre of spending limits in freemium/free-to-play games
   • Dumber than Advertised: 5 Half-Baked Technologies that Failed to Deliver – Segway not included.
   • Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial – Intrepid intern Sina outlines, in gory detail, the process of bringing a Flash game to the iPad/iPod/iPhone using a Windows PC and free software.
   • Movember 2011 – My facial hair creation for wang cancer awareness was called “Balls on Chin”.
   • If Miyamoto Went Indie … – Twitter musings over what would happen if the Zelda and Mario creator quit his job at Nintendo.
   • It’s Not Piracy – It’s Free-To-Play – Examining the parallels between microtransaction-supported games, and stealing shit.
   • It’s Not an Educational Game – A rant explaining the vast difference between a educational games and quizzes (hint: it’s “teaching”).
   • E for Everyone or N for Niche? – Is it better to bank on a broad audience, or to go all-in on a specific target? Untold Entertainment investigates.
   • Manufacturing Alexes: The Secret of Indie Game Success – How do you engineer a rabid fan? No – seriously. How?
   • Double Fine’s Kickstarter Windfall: Will Patronage Supplant Traditional Game Publishing? – My game development heroes rake in 3 million bucks in crowdfunding. Was it an anomaly, or has the game changed?
   • Five Graphic Adventure Game Goofs (and How to Fix Them) – PUT bad game design IN garbage
   • The 5 Funniest Moments in Graphic Adventure Games – Sadly, the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle is criminally overlooked.
   • The Six Most Infamous Puzzles In Adventure Game History – Putting the “grr” in “graphic adventure”
   • Could Scratch be the Key to Maintaining Canada’s Video Game Lead over the UK? – In the game industry, the Brits are getting left in the dust. But they’ve got a blue shell.
   • Fatherhood in the Age of Games – Parents, teach your kids to program.
   • Stocking Your Office with Human Props – Step One: Stuff 30 pairs of pants and shirts with hay …
   • Why Kickstarter Scares the Crap Out of Me – The downside of being an over-eager entrepreneur at age 8.

   Service Work

   Untold Entertainment continued its fantastic track record of service work for the kids’ teevee and advertising industries.

   

   Spladder

   At the height of summer, we completed the puzzle platform game Spladder to support marblemedia’s Splatalot, a kids’ teevee program that mimics those insane Japanese obstacle course game shows like Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.

   

   A Lotta Dessert

   In October, TVOntario launched A Lotta Dessert, a game we developed that teaches simple patterning to preschoolers.

   

   Summer in Smallywood

   The Centre for Skills Development and Training were so pleased with Summer in Smallywood that they returned to us requesting three big upgrades. The game is now localized in Canadian French, completely voiced over in English, and playable on the iPad.

   

   Man vs. Beast

   Award-winning ad agency Target Marketing commissioned us to build an extremely silly fighting game to promote Newfoundland Travel and Tourism’s hunting and fishing campaign. Under any other circumstances, our company policy against violence in video games would have precluded us from taking the job, but the concept called for a guy punching out a moose. AND a giant fish. It was impossible to say no. Impossible, i tell you!

   

   Cake Artist

   Presumably pleased as punch with A Lotta Dessert, TVOntario returned to commission us to build Cake Artist. It’s a game for their school-aged audience, which helps kids practice following instructions, and ties into Ontario’s visual arts curriculum. Players learn about hue and value while decorating cakes for jolly customers.

   

   Samsung Galaxy Note

   Working from ad agency Cheil Canada’s designs, we wired up the Samsung Galaxy Note minisite in the hectic week before launch! The site simulates some of the Note’s unique features; visitors can doodle on the screen with the stylus and upload the resulting image to Facebook. They can clip and modify artwork from the phone, and tweet their friends about their excitement over the biggie-sized phone.

   

   Samsung Galaxy Note

   Secret Location made use of our consultation services and research capabilities. True to their company’s name, those projects are so secret that i can’t even talk about them. But i always enjoy working with the wonderful Secret Location team, whatever the project.

   Spellirium

   

   Spellirium

   Spellirium, our graphic adventure/word puzzle mash-up game which you’ll totally love, saw a flurry of activity in Q4 2011. New monsters, new environments, and even some early video of the game in action surfaced through February. When we’re not delivering best-in-class game development services to our clients, we’re hard at work building out the ruined trashpunk world and surprising storyline that will make Spellirium a game to remember.

   One of this year’s best designer diary articles about Spellirium is Spellirium Then and Now, which tracks our progress from the concept stage to the absolutely gorgeous final artwork.

   Project Overboard

   

   Eager to outdo myself after last year’s Ponycornucopia at TOJam, i gathered some industry pals together, and they helped me assemble the largest game jam team in history for Project Overboard. The resulting game, Head of the Gorgon, is currently in alpha. Proceeds from the game will send at-risk Toronto youth to computer/technology camp for the summer. To date, the project has already sent six kids to camp thanks to some donations from our sponsors and some early supportive fans.

   

   Gorgon is not an Untold Entertainment game – the dev team is Project Overboard (of which i am the lead developer), and Untold is taking publishing duties. It felt more honest to structure it that way, rather than subtly suggesting that those 38 people were all Untold employees.

   A wonderful side benefit from Project Overboard, though, is that i’m now able to prove that i can ramp up a large team very quickly – a fact that some prospective clients have doubted when i tell them that Untold is (for now) just one guy. One very well-connected guy …

   Social Media Juggernaut

   

   i continue to win Twitter. This year, i passed the 3000 followers mark, which is a healthy indicator of my personal worth as a human being. More appropriately, it means that i can tweet at any time about a company who’s doing something stupid or infuriating, and that company’s intern who runs their Twitter account will reply immediately with a very nervous and clumsy attempt at brand control. #cokeKillsChildren

   The Untold Internship Program

   i haven’t made much mention of this in past year-in-review articles, but now that it’s a thing, it deserves a write-up. The Untold Internship Program was born out a need to address a few problems:

   1. i didn’t have enough momentum (read: hot stinky cash) to grow the company.
   2. i had extra desk space.
   3. Ontario colleges do an absolutely terrible job preparing young people to work in the video game industry.
   4. Oh snap.

   A few people recommended i downsize Untold by losing the office and somehow continue operations from my tiny condo, where there are wide-eyed young children asking me if i can come and play with them every five minutes. No … thank you, but no. It’s very important to me to have an office so that i don’t lose the opportunity to build that tidy five person shop i’ve always dreamed of.

   So instead, i began taking interns a few years ago. Many of the distracting side projects Untold has undertaken in recent years have been built on the backs of hard-working, well-worn interns. The interns were responsible for feeding content into our three web portals WordGameWorld, ZombieGameWorld, and TowerDefenseGameWorld, which together average about 1 unique visitor per month (although that’s mathematically impossible). Interns have supplied content for ontarioInteractive.com (see below). They have worked on an unreleased non-Spellirium word game. They have watered the plants. They have failed, repeatedly, to fix the coffee machine.

   

   i’d like to use this space to personally thank and name all of the Untold Interns that have … oh, look – i’m running out of space.

   ontarioInteractive.com

   

   Why build games when there are so many shiny objects to chase? A few years back, i tried keeping an events calendar to track all of the amazing goings-on in the interactive industry, but no one thought to look to us for that. i gave it another shot recently with an entirely separate site called ontarioInteractive.com. The site aims to list all of the interactive digital media companies in Ontario, places them on a map, and sorts them by city. So if you’re a student and you have no idea which game companies actually operate in Ontario, a quick filter on the site will reveal this Hidden Knowledge. The site also lists past and future industry events so that you can get involved in the community.

   There have been other sites that tried to do similar things, but they eventually fell by the wayside. Even the website for Interactive Ontario, the trade association that should be running a resource like this, lists companies that are now defunct, or that have been shut down for a number of years (!). The key advantage to our site is that visitors can upload their own events and company profiles, and the site nags them every 6 months to keep those profiles up-to-date. If a profile isn’t confirmed, it gets deleted. This means that everyone listed on the site is guaranteed to have existed within a six month window.

   So by all means – please add your IDM events and profiles to the site. Let us know if this resource is useful to you, and we’ll make a commitment to maintain it over the coming year.

   Looking Ahead

   

   What will our sixth year hold for Untold Entertainment? i’m so bad at these predictions that i feel like a fraud for even trying. In the short term, we’re building a suite of three games for a Canadian broadcaster that i can’t wait to show you. We’re committed to finishing Spellirium before the end of 2012 (fingers crossed for the Mayan apocalypse). i hope to make gamesByKids.com a reality next year.

   As for the remains of 2013, the future is less clear. The vision i have in my mind is, and has always been, of a company of about five employees – two artists, a programmer, and a producer/project manager/administrator – all working together harmoniously to produce top-notch humorous video games that players adore, with a white picket fence and a bird bath on the lawn. i can’t clearly see the path from here to there at all, but i’m reasonably assured it has something to do with robbing a bank.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/25/untold-entertainment-alive-at-five/feed/ 4 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/13/why-kickstarter-scares-the-crap-out-of-me/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/13/why-kickstarter-scares-the-crap-out-of-me/#comments Fri, 13 Jul 2012 12:51:22 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4605 If i had a dime for everyone who suggested i set up a Kickstarter campaign for Spellirium, our upcoming graphic adventure/word puzzle mash-up game, i wouldn’t need to start a Kickstarter campaign. Because i’d have a lot of dimes. Dimes from those people i just mentioned.

   

   Anyone remember THIS? Eh? … no? Okay.

   But aside from the relative inconvenience of starting a Kickstarter campaign when you’re Canadian (the process involves befriending and placing your complete trust in an American. What is this – Fantasyland??), i am very wary of crowdsourcing funding for my games. To understand why, i have to take you aaaaall the way back to 1985. Codpieces were the height of fashion, Gorbachev was in the White House, and an eight-year-old Ryan Terence Creighton (née Bagley … honestly) was wearing a bank teller’s visor.

   

   Awwww yeah. Time for some muhfuggin’ BIDNESS.

   i was wearing the visor because that’s what people wear when they handle money (and they live in the 1920′s). And i was about to handle a lot of money.

   There Goes the Neighbourhood

   i got it in my head that i would write a book – an adventure story about two kids who discover a mysterious egg that hatches into a baby dragon, which they have to care for and keep hidden from their parents. i was so positive that this was a Great Idea™ that i decided to raise money for the endeavour through pre-sales. So i put on my green visor and loaded some scrap paper into my clipboard, because clipboards also have something to do with collecting money. But i wasn’t sure what, exactly.

   i began canvassing the neighbourhood, pitching my prospective product to neighbours i’d never met. i explained that i’d be selling the book piecemeal for 25 cents a chapter, and that there would be around 30 chapters. Those neighbours who were quick with math figured out that the book would cost over seven dollars, which in 1985 money was, like, a thousand bucks, based on their reactions. So some neighbours bought one chapter, some bought three chapters, and one or two folks went all-in for the whole book.

   

   i collected the loose change in a large plastic bag, being very careful to record the relevant details of the transaction. i knew it had something to do with writing down who gave me money, but i hadn’t quite figured out how street addresses worked, so i think i wrote down stuff like “Smith. 1 Chapter. Green Fence.” and “Jenkins. 2 Chapters. Has a dog.”

   In Which My Mother Has Another Baby

   When i arrived home i was hot and tired and sweaty, but i considered the day a success. My single-parent mother came through the front door and, beaming, i held up an enormous plastic bag filled with coins.

   Mom freaked.

   “Where did you get all that MONEY, Ryan??” she demanded. i told her all about my brilliant pre-sales plan, and showed her how successful i’d been. She took a look at my clipboard and gasped in horror. “How are you going to give people a book if you don’t know where they live??” i … i didn’t know.

   She demanded to see the actual book i was selling. “But … there’s no book, Mom” i said. “i collected all this money on the promise of writing a book.” That’s when Mom confiscated my hard-earned coins, sat me down at the kitchen table, and though i wouldn’t be able to get the product to most of the people on the list (it’s possible she knew how to find “Thompson. 1 chapter. Black sports car in driveway”), she made damn sure that i knuckled down and wrote the first chapter of that book.

   

   Angry moms: nature’s perfect bonerkillers.

   So i did. i worked for, like, a whole half hour, until my hand cramped. The first chapter ended with the kids discovering the egg. i clearly remember the amazing dialogue i had written for the characters as they gazed on in wonder at the mysterious orb:

   “What is it, Jenny?” asked Clark.

   “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

   This was all in the Days Before Mom Could Afford a Computer, so i wrote and illustrated the thing by hand using pencil crayons. i finished the first chapter – two whole pages – pleased as punch with myself, and presented it to my mom with an “i told you so” air. “Great work,” she said flatly. “Now how are you going to do 27 more copies?”

   This was also in the Days Before Colour Photocopies Were Available to Regular Human Beings. My hand was sore, my pencil crayons were worn to nubs, and my money had been confiscated. Tomorrow was a new day, and i had to face it with a product i could not deliver to people whose money i had already collected.

   

   OYA?

   What the Ancient 80′s Can Teach Us About Today

   Flash forward to now. Codpieces are still in fashion (i find them quite fetching, anyway), and everyone i know is urging me to venture back out into the streets with my bank visor and my clipboard, knocking on the doors of unknown neighbours and asking them for money for an as-yet incomplete project. The sting of letting those people down, my mother’s consternation, and the abject guilt of collecting money and not delivering linger with me, and i can’t yet bring myself to do it. i’m not saying i won’t ever start a Kickstarter campaign, but it might take a few hours talking to a bearded man while lying on a couch to work up the courage to try pre-sales again.

   

   Tell me about your mother … flipping shit when you tried to pre-sell that non-existent chapter book.

   And for those of you would-be backers: beware of little kids in visors asking you for money for products that may never materialize. Sure, the clipboards they hold may lull you into a false sense of security (because clipboards, after all, all the hallmark of a pro). But whatever you do, just make sure they’re writing down your address correctly.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/13/why-kickstarter-scares-the-crap-out-of-me/feed/ 8 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/09/untold-entertainment-at-casual-connect-seattle-2012/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/09/untold-entertainment-at-casual-connect-seattle-2012/#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2012 16:39:56 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4599 The kind folks at the Flash Gaming Summit have invited me to speak at Casual Connect in Seattle. My topic is AS3/AIR to iOS in 157 Easy Steps. During the talk, i’ll be clearing up a few misconceptions. My hitlist of shocking revelations is as follows:
   1. You can target Apple’s iOS devices with Flash as your development platform.
   2. You can develop Flash content for Apple devices for free, without even purchasing Flash.
   3. You can do all of this without even owning a Mac (except for the very last step of the process).

   The talk goes on to back up these wild claims. Attendees will leave with knowledge of the process of porting Flash content to iOS and Android using FlashDevelop, an open source Actionscript IDE.

   If you’re attending Casual Connect, you’ll be thrilled to hear that Untold Entertainment will have the playable demo of Spellirium to show, as well as the alpha version of Head of the Gorgon, a charitable game which we’re publishing for developer Project Overboard.

   About Spellirium

   

   Spellirium

   Spellirium is a point n’ click graphic adventure game, in the style of LucasArts classics like The Secret of Monkey Island. This genre is mashed up with the word puzzle genre, so Spellirium has players spelling words to defeat monsters and to discover secrets. The game takes place in a gorgeously rendered “trashpunk” world, where the world is rebuilt from the discarded garbage of the 21st century.

   (Spellirium) just shot to the top of my “can’t wait to play” list. – Gamezebo.com

   beyond gorgeous … gloriously grim and quirky. – JayIsGames.com

   About Head of the Gorgon

   

   Head of the Gorgon

   This is a retelling of the myth of Perseus, the hero of Greek mythology who slew Medusa the gorgon, a snake-haired monster whose mere gaze could turn a man to stone. The game is refreshingly told in the style of ancient Grecian pottery. It’s a short, simple adventure that’s fully voiced by professional actors and comedians, with a dramatic orchestral score and sharp, funny dialogue. All proceeds from sales of the game will send at-risk Toronto youth to computer camp.

   Both Spellirium and Head of the Gorgon are built on UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System, which powered the company’s break-out hit Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. Send an email to book a meeting with Untold Entertainment’s president Ryan Henson Creighton at Casual Connect in Seattle: info (att) untoldentertainment (dott) com.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/09/untold-entertainment-at-casual-connect-seattle-2012/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/05/stocking-your-office-with-human-props/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/05/stocking-your-office-with-human-props/#comments Fri, 06 Jul 2012 01:26:20 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4596 One of the biggest challenges of trying to bootstrap a video game studio like Untold Entertainment (in the midst of a global recession, no less), is that prospective clients are drawn to service providers that appear to be able to handle their project in a no-fuss, turnkey fashion. Untold has been passed over for a number of projects because we try to keep our overhead low, which means hiring on an as-needed basis according to our workload.

   These days, when someone at a conference asks “Untold Entertainment? How big are you?”, i’m inclined to answer “seven inches, sof.t” i get a little tired of the question. The number of employees you have has no actual bearing on the quality of the work you produce, the speed at which you can turn around a project, or the value you deliver as a service agency. Yet it’s become this quick litmus test of worth whenever men excitedly sniff each other’s butts at conventions.

   

   Smells like you’ve had a good year, Pete.

   Many clients expect to walk into Untold and see a swarm of expensive employees chewing through money like locusts, waiting to pounce on whatever new project they’re thrown. It seems to be only the studios that can do this – or, better yet, the ones that can fake it – that are able to properly grow.

   Use Your Illusion

   In the early days of Untold, i met with a man who ran his own studio, who said he wanted to contract me to consult on and design a kids’ virtual world. He said his American clients were due to arrive any week now, and he wanted me to come in and help him sell his studio to them. After many false starts, when the day finally came that the prospective clients were due to arrive, the owner seated me at one of the desks in his small office, and asked me to work on whatever until he brought the clients in. Meanwhile, he met with the clients down the hall in the shared boardroom.

   i sat in this guy’s office for three hours before it dawned on me: i wasn’t there to meet with his clients or to help design the game. i was an office prop – a warm body filling a desk to pad out the scene, to make it look like he was running a thriving operation. i packed up my laptop in disgust and stormed out of the place. The guy’s been on my shit list ever since.

   

   Stacking the Deck

   i spoke to a few colleagues last night who confirmed that office stocking was common practice. One friend said that he worked at an agency that developed teevee commercials, and that also developed series. Clients from the commerical side would be brought in to see the dozens of warm bodies toiling away at their desks, leaving them with the impression that their project was in many, many capable hands, when in reality it was one lonely dude and an intern working on the project – the rest of the employees were contracted for something completely different.

   Another colleague told me the story of an animation studio in town that invited a number of fourth year animation students in to do a drawing test, “because they were hiring”. When the students arrived and asked what they were supposed to draw, the employees were evasive and weird about it. They were assigned to what amounted to busy-work. In the midst of this “test”, some company bigwigs brought clients through the area and, indicating the students, said “well, here are our animators…”

   i have another colleague who didn’t have an office or employees, but on his website he’d list a number of freelance colleagues as if they were his own salaried employees. It was a little white lie that i believe helped him to grow his company to the point where he does currently have an office and employees.

   

   Meh heh heh.

   Honesty Undoes You

   This “fake it til you make it” approach runs counter to the first of Untold’s core principles, “uncompromising honesty”. No, we don’t have an enormous farm full of employees of all stripes and skillsets ready to take on anything you throw at them. And no, i’m not particularly keen on producing a smoke-and-mirrors effect to make it seem like we do.

   

   Sorry – the giant floating head in the middle of the office will be able to answer all of your game development questions.

   The fact is that if you want Untold Entertainment to work on your project, we’ll take care of it. We are extremely well connected, and we can assemble the absolute best team for your project needs. Don’t buy it? Check out Project Overboard, where i assembled a team of forty people from a multitude of disciplines to build a game in a single weekend.

   Have you ever been used as an office prop? Or do you know other tricks of the trade to make it appear as though you’re running a Fortune 500 company when you’re really running Buck-Ninety-Five Incorporated? Let me know in the comments! Please also indicate your penis size, so that i can properly determine your worth as a human being.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/07/05/stocking-your-office-with-human-props/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/06/18/fatherhood-in-the-age-of-games/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/06/18/fatherhood-in-the-age-of-games/#comments Mon, 18 Jun 2012 16:15:30 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4590 The Verge posted a nice article over the weekend just in time for Fathers’ Day.

   

   Photo by Alex Hayter

   i was thrilled to be able to share my views along with developers from PopCap and Double Fine. Untold Entertainment has a stated commitment to education – particularly computer education of young children at the early elementary stage (grades 1-3 here in North America). We’re not just whistling Dixie, either. Behind the scenes, i’ve been volunteering my time teaching game development to third grade students at various elementary schools. i’ll be at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto this summer teaching their video game camp, and i’m volunteering to teach Scratch at a Mozilla-run event this weekend.

   Untold Entertainment is also publishing a game by Project Overboard, the largest game jam team in history. Proceeds from sales of the game will send at-risk Toronto youth to computer camp.

   All of this game education experience we’re gaining will culminate in a very special project that’s near and dear to my heart, that i can’t wait to announce later this year.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/06/18/fatherhood-in-the-age-of-games/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/30/head-of-the-gorgon-preview-on-innerspace/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/30/head-of-the-gorgon-preview-on-innerspace/#comments Wed, 30 May 2012 19:59:04 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4585 i can tell just by looking at you that you’re dying for a status update on Head of the Gorgon. The old-school graphic adventure game based on Greek mythology was created by the world’s largest game jam team, Project Overboard, a few short weeks ago at TOJam.

   This past week, SPACE Channel dropped by to shoot a segment on the game for InnerSPACE. The show’s host, Ajay Fry, voices Perseus in the game. You’ll also get your first glimpse at Medusa, who is voiced by Toronto comic Hunter Collins.

   

   Watch the Head of the Gorgon interview at SPACE!

   Head of the Gorgon is due out soon. All the proceeds go to sending kids to computer camp. Donate now before it becomes cool!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/30/head-of-the-gorgon-preview-on-innerspace/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/28/gallery-ponycorns-at-maker-faire-2011/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/28/gallery-ponycorns-at-maker-faire-2011/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 00:29:34 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4582 Here’s a nice little selection of pictures from the Digital Game Museum’s exhibit of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure at Maker Faire 2012 in San Mateo, which included two playable copies of the game, Cassie’s original crayon drawings, T-Shirts and limited-edition Ponycorn plushies (in jars, natch). Big thanks to the Museum for including our game!

   

   

   

   

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/28/gallery-ponycorns-at-maker-faire-2011/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/23/mcclone/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/23/mcclone/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 05:14:51 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4569 My more mature colleagues warn me not to be too “precious” about my work. i get my back up at that, because to me it’s akin to saying “don’t be too passionate” about it. But i’ve seen preciousness in the capital-I Indie scene lately, and i now feel i have a better sense of what my colleagues are warning about.

   This week, yet another capital-I Indie game developer – one of the Elite – has had their game “cloned”, and the community has become butthurt on their behalf (as i write this, the developers themselves haven’t officially commented).

   The game was Johann Sebastian Joust. In it, each player holds a Playstation Move motion controller and must move through the physical space in time to a Bach piece. If a player moves out of time with the music, his controller blinks off and he’s “out”. So the game is a challenge to swat at each others’ controllers to send those players out of the game, while still moving in time to the music yourself.

   

   Joust co-creator Doug plays his game at Indiecade 2011 while i sit nearby with Ponycorns, butthurt and criminally un-awarded (not pictured)

   i Hate All the Things

   Here’s a bit of disclosure: i didn’t particularly like Joust when i saw it at IndieCade (after it beat out my own game for the Community Impact award), but it was clear that lots of other people did. When i played JS Joust at GDC this year, i waited a long time for a turn, and then was swatted “out” almost immediately by someone who had been in for a few rounds. i don’t like a game where i instantly fail my first time and then have to wait a long time before i can try again. As a day camp counsellor in my youth, i tried to avoid playing eliminate-and-wait games with my group, where kids would get killed early and would wait around starting small fires while everyone else played and had fun. Remember that our own games press absolutely destroyed Silicon Knights because of Too Human‘s overlong resurrection sequence. “Just let me play again already!”

   

   Sitting out: the very definition of unfun. (Photo by Amanda Summerlin)

   While i’m at it, i didn’t enjoy World of Goo, i was bored by Fez, and i thought the writing in Braid was utter tripe (although i did enjoy the rest of the game … except for the special stars, because they were so much bullshit). i didn’t play past the first chapter of Sword and Sworcery because it didn’t grab me, and i felt The Graveyard and Passage were supremely pretentious. But that’s okay. The fact that i didn’t go nuts for these games doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy them, and it shouldn’t taint your own view of them. Feel free to dump on my upcoming game Spellirium if it’s not your cup of tea. Different people like different things, and that’s fine: media is never objectively good. i hope we can agree to that, at least.

   

   The exception, of course, is Rushmore, which is OBJECTIVELY the greatest movie ever made.

   The Slimiest Form of Flattery

   What we may not be able to agree to is my opinion on the fact that there’s a new game on the iTunes store that is similar to JS Joust, and that that, too, is perfectly alright. What’s happened is that a game that i’ve only ever seen at festivals and conferences, being closely overseen (or downright babysat) by one of its creators, with a setup requiring special equipment that not a lot of people own, AND a laptop, AND an external sound system … a game that don’t think i can even purchase ? (i checked the developers’ site, and their store is closed. Let’s say i buy 16 Move controllers and get all my friends together and hook my laptop up to an external speaker that i’m inexplicably lugging around … can i buy Johann Sebastian Joust? i don’t think i can. Please let me know if i’m mistaken here.) Anyway, what’s happened is that a game similar to THAT game has now been made available on the iPhone, a device that magnitudes more people own than they do Move controllers. These players can now access the similar game and play it wherever they want, and it’s far more likely their friends can join in with them … and when they’re finished, there’s no special tear-down. Just put the game back in your pocket.

   

   i got the festival game! i put it in my pants.

   As an aside, i see shades of piracy justification in this story. One of the most common excuses people provide for justifying stealing movies and music is that the content has not been made available by the rights holder in the time and place and for the price that the consumer so chooses. How many of us have watched “Game of Thrones”, vs the number of us who are legit HBO subscribers or (one-year-later) iTunes purchasers? People have heard about JS Joust, and likely want to play it … but for lack of a vast pile of Move controllers, or airfare to California or Cologne to attend a conference or festival where the game is being played, they can’t experience it. Thanks to Papa Quash, now they can, and with stuff they already own. People want to experience media they’ve heard about and that critics are lauding; Die Gute Fabrik has garnered a lot of press and many accolades for their game. Now, people want to play it. But Joust is not convenient (or possible) for them to play.

   Fight for Your Right to Parlay

   To be clear, this is not an issue of legal rights. Game mechanics or styles of play cannot be copyrighted (though frighteningly, like the ghost racer from Hard Drivin’ or the compass arrow pointing to your destination in Crazy Taxi, they can sometimes be patented). A trademark infringement would have the iPod clone being called Johann Sebastian Fight, or Ludwig Von Joust, and that’s not the case here. Some of the folks i bickered with on Twitter today said that while the “clone” was not legally infringing, it was morally infringing. Again, i disagree, and that’s where being too precious comes into it.

   Someone asked me how i would feel if another developer cloned Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on some platform other than the web, the iPad or the BlackBerry Playbook. My answer? “Litigious”, because that would be an infringement of both my trademark and copyright. But i didn’t invent the point n’ click graphic adventure game genre … (in fact, i “cloned” it for Ponycorns) … so if someone wanted to team up with one or more 5-year-old little girls and make a game using scanned crayon drawings and adorable voiceovers, how angry could i possibly get? As has been proven time and again, it’s the execution, not the idea, that matters.

   

   Alright: who wants to be the first jackhole to release Suzie’s Mystical Horseyhorn Escapade?

   McExecution

   It’s possible that Henry Ford would have been precious and felt butthurt if he’d lived to see Ray Kroc apply Ford’s concept of assembly line efficiency to assembling hamburgers at McDonald’s. It’s more likely that Kroc himself was butthurt when the likes of Colonel Sanders, Dave Thomas, and John Fitzsimmons Burgerking had success with their operationally identical fast food chains (Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendy’s, and Fitzsimmons’s Meaty-time Corral, respectively). Burger King is a “clone” of McDonalds, from the concept of franchised food, down to the signature sandwich. Rather than decry Burger King as a rip-off, sometimes i’m happy to have the option, and i can really go for a Whopper.

   

   Clones are bad! (nom nom nom) i’m (glorm!) so offended right now! BRAAPPP!

   Pepsi is a cola drink. Coca-cola is another cola drink. So is Cott’s cola, for times when i’m feeling frugal. These are similar expressions of the same concept. And i’m awfully glad that they all exist.

   Imagine that only three McDonald’s restaurants existed before Burger King franchises swept the nation and became available everywhere. And those three restaurants were in Illinois, far from where you live. (Illinois people, you’re going to have to use your imaginations here.) You could hold out for that McDonald’s experience, because you believed the hype and the press, and you think that Burger King is a moral abasement and that they really screwed over McDonald’s when BK went nation-wide with the franchised fast food burger concept. OR, you could STFU and go get a Whopper. Perhaps you could enjoy something from McDonald’s if you ever happened to swing the airfare to Chicago?

   OR, if you’re McDonald’s, you could finally get around to building restaurants where everyone can access them, and spin your marketing to position yourself against your clone as the original, best experience. (Count the number of times Coke used the word “original” in its ads during the cola wars of the 1980′s.)

   OR you can keep McDonald’s to those three restaurants in Illinois, and continue perpetuating the elite mystique about your product with your nose in the air. Looking at a print of the Mona Lisa is fine, but true art fans have travelled to the Louvre to see it in person. Die Gute Fabrik has lots of options here, and they’re all marketing related.

   The Choice of a New Generation

   The tack i hope they don’t take is to rally the captial-I Indie scene troops to their cause, and blacklist the developers of Quash Papa as if the indie community is the goddamned Illuminati. Yeti Town is a clone of Triple Town, but being a reluctant Canadian, i don’t like winter – and i DO like teddy bears, so i can make my choice as a consumer to play Triple Town. Dream Heights is a clone of Tiny Tower, but i don’t want to play either of those games, because the clone Lil’ Kingdom has adorable baby dragons and i’d rather spend my money on them. i don’t care that Nimblebit, the concept’s progenitor (arguably), isn’t getting my money, because Nimblebit didn’t give me the baby dragons that i so richly deserve as a consumer.

   

   Dragons up! Skyscrapers down!

   Pepsi tastes better than Coke, in my subjective opinion, and i prefer a Whopper to a Big Mac. Two Snow White films are being marketed simultaneously right now. i’m more interested in watching “Snow White and the Huntsman” than “Mirror Mirror” because i don’t care for Julia Roberts in the latter, and the dramatic treatment – the execution – of Huntsman is more appealing to me than the comedic treatment of Mirror Mirror. Marvel Comics has better heroes, while DC Comics has better villains.

   

   Spider-man fights a guy named Kangaroo? Srsly?

   Dear capital-I Indies: welcome to the world of creating media for worldwide audiences. You’re not fourteen any more, and while some of you may still live with your parents, you need to stop listening to them when they tell you you’re a rare and precious snowflake. You’re going to get ripped off – that’s bidness, baby – and sometimes audiences will prefer the clone to the original. Your excellent and once-unique ideas can and should and will be spread far and wide – tinkered with, reconstituted, explored, and backwards-engineered. Just as Braid is Super Mario Bros. with time reversal and Machinarium is Gobliiins with different artwork, you have hacked and cloned and explored game mechanics and ideas throughout your careers. If your game gets ripped off, don’t bitch. Be flattered, be angry, and execute better.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/23/mcclone/feed/ 27 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/19/these-ponycorns-belong-in-a-museum-and-at-maker-faire/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/19/these-ponycorns-belong-in-a-museum-and-at-maker-faire/#comments Sat, 19 May 2012 05:24:32 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4565 The kind and gentle folks at the Digital Game Museum have a booth at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire, and are prominently featuring Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure as a great example of digital making in action. i co-created the game with my then-5-year-old daughter Cassandra at TOJam 2011, and it has since become a worldwide sensation. Ponycorns has since gone on to become an Indiecade 2011 finalist, a Mochis Awards finalist, and a finalist for two Canadian Videogame Awards.

   

   Ponycorns will be featured prominently in the center of the exhibit during the show.

   The Maker Faire exhibit includes two playable Ponycorns displays, a few fun tidbits about the process of creating the game, and a full complement of Ponycorns T-shirts and plushies (which were, appropriately, hand-crafted by my wife Cheryl, using Cassie’s drawings as sewing patterns).

   

   Photo by Ian Bogost, from his private collection.

   The follow-up to Ponycorns is another TOJam experiment called Project Overboard, which saw me leading an entire studio’s worth of 38 people on a weekend-long project to create a game called Head of the Gorgon, the proceeds of which will send at-risk Toronto youth to computer camp.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/19/these-ponycorns-belong-in-a-museum-and-at-maker-faire/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/15/toll-jam/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/15/toll-jam/#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 06:43:11 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4560 Five minutes after the clock struck eight, signalling the end of TOJam, i broke out in hives. Itchy little bumps erupted on my hands and my feet. As i walked around in a daze, manouevring myself to the first floor for a slice of well-earned pizza, the hives crept up the sides of my neck to my cheeks.

   During the weekend-long game jam, i suffered a litany of physical afflictions. While staying up around the clock on Saturday night, i blew a blood vessel in my left eye. i discovered a number of impacted, ingrown hairs on my bum from sitting, intensely, and not switching positions often enough. i had a few regrettable bowel movements – the less said about those, the better. And somewhere around the time my eye blew out, i started feeling my chest constrict.

   The thought crossed my mind, more than fleetingly, that i may have been having a heart attack. And that worried me … less because of the attack, but more because i was having one alone in an empty room at a community college, while pulling an all-nighter making a video game. When i DO have my first heart attack, i want to be near my family, cuddling them while clutching my chest and gasping in pain. Instead, i’d forsaken my family that weekend to become that chubby idiot who dropped dead in his chair at TOJam and ruined 24-hour access for the rest of us.

   It couldn’t possibly go down like this – could it? i started to think of the times people said to me “don’t work so hard – you’ll give yourself a heart attack!”, which i always equated with “don’t pull faces, because your face might stay like that”. It was only then, reflecting on the greasy food i’d been eating and the insane pace i’d been keeping, that i began to think that yes – this body fat percentage and this amount of stress could very well cause a heart attack for a guy in his mid-30′s. 30-something men do have heart attacks. That’s totally a thing.

   It likely wasn’t one, though. i figure the culprits were the 2 litre bottle of Pepsi i’d sipped slowly the day before, and the rest of the caffeine i’d ingested during my “3 Coke Night”. That’s kind of like the supposed “Three Dog Night” that the band named themselves after, wherein (apocryphally) Inuit (or “Eskimos”, if you’re American and ignorant) endure nights so cold that they have to cozy up to three sled dogs for warmth. i cozied up to three cans of Coca Cola Classic that night, and all i got was this stupid ersatz heart attack.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/15/toll-jam/feed/ 5 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/summer-in-smallywood-launches-on-the-ipad/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/summer-in-smallywood-launches-on-the-ipad/#comments Sun, 06 May 2012 01:12:47 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4555 The educational graphic adventure game we produced for The Centre for Skills Development & Training, Summer in Smallywood, has gone mobile!

   

   Download Summer in Smallywood for FREE from the iTunes app store!

   Now you can work at Canada’s most lacklustre amusement park while learning about essential workplace skills, all on a device that fits in your pocket! (provided you have a very big pocket).

   The iPad release of Summer in Smallywood was developed with Adobe AIR, from the all-new “talkie” web version that launched weeks earlier at summerinsmallywood.ca. Smallywood is powered by UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System, which runs our most popular and anticipated adventure games, including Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure and the upcoming Spellirium.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/summer-in-smallywood-launches-on-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/cake-artist/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/cake-artist/#comments Sat, 05 May 2012 23:39:22 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4550

   TVOntario asked us to execute their concept for a game for early elementary school-aged children to help them follow instructions, and to learn certain art terminology (colour, texture, shade/value). TVO took care of the coding, concept, script and audio, while Untold Entertainment delivered the art and design (taking our cue from TVO’s existing characters and live action set).

   

   Play Cake Artist at TVOKids.com!

   Cake Artist was a fun little project that demonstrates our ability to deliver on any aspect of game production. You can trust Untold with your entire project, or focus us where you need us the most.

   Give us a call and tell us about your next project!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/cake-artist/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/man-vs-beast/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/man-vs-beast/#comments Sat, 05 May 2012 23:23:08 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4540

   Target Marketing and Communications is an award-winning agency based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. They asked Untold Entertainment to build an expandable web banner game for their client Newfoundland Travel and Tourism, to promote hunting and fishing on the Rock. We don’t often do a lot of ad banner stuff, and are morally a little torn on the concept of hunting for sport … but Target’s concept was so delightfully bent that we had to take the project!

   Depending on where the ad banner is displayed, Man vs. Beast allows you to choose a hunter or angler character, and square off against an animal in a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game. This meant that the usually 8-foot-tall moose had to be cut down to human-size, and the Atlantic salmon and trout had to be … scaled up a tad.

   The result was a fun little diversion with some light blocking strategy – a perfect time-waster for the mostly middle-aged men the province hopes to attract for hunting trips. The intended audience is not packed with core gamers, so we wound up cutting our idea for the “finishing move”, where you punch the moose and it turns into a plaque-mounted trophy and a chest freezer full of steak.

   Untold Entertainment took on both the build and the “Field & Stream”-style art direction for this project.

   Got a game idea for your online ad campaign? Untold Entertainment brings the fun, turning your humdrum web banners into engaging interactive content. Give us a call and tell us about your next project!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/05/05/man-vs-beast/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/29/ryan-goes-overboard/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/29/ryan-goes-overboard/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:28:02 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4528 Feeling the pressure to top last year’s TOJam collaboration with Cassie on Ponycorns, i’ve cooked up something new for 2012 that could bring joy to many more people. It’s called Project Overboard:
   
   
   

   The opinions i’m about to express are my own, and haven’t been filtered through or approved by the Project Overboard team.

   Spreading the Love Around

   Project Overboard is great, because it benefits lots of people. It benefits folks in and around the Toronto game scene who can’t ordinarily participate in a game jam, because they don’t have art or programming abilities. It benefits the at-risk children and youth who get to go to summer camp with the money we (might) collect from game sales. It raises the profile of TOJam (although, at 400 participants this year, they probably don’t need the exposure!)

   But what am i hoping to get out of the experience? Project Overboard is going to be a ton of work, and it would be a lot easier for me to find some five-year-old somewhere and make another crayon game.

   

   Black van + candy = new game jam partner.

   i’ve run Untold Entertainment for five years, and the company still has only one full-time employee: me. i left my corporate job on the threshold of being groomed for management, but i came away particularly ungroomed. i’ve always wanted to see Untold grow to a team of people, but it’s almost a blessing that it hasn’t, because i wouldn’t know how to properly manage that team.

   There’s No “Ay Yi Yi” in “Team”

   My first big flop as a leader, and a manger of people, came when i took my first stab at developing Spellirium. Armed with some government funding, yet tied to some government time restrictions, i had to assemble my team of artists and programmers in a scant six weeks – all while holding down a work-for-hire project as the sole employee of Untold Entertainment. i cobbled together a group of complete strangers with whom i’d never worked before. What could go wrong?

   

   Let’s make a game, random truckload of migrant Libyan workers!

   Those initial four months of development were like a slow-motion explosion in a munitions factory, really. i’ll tell you all about it later in a Spellirium post-mortem.

   i learned many lessons that summer, but one key lesson was that i’m a lousy manager. i’m too nice, too permissive, too easily pushed over. i lead people into the fray without a clear enough battle plan. i also don’t trust people enough to delegate tasks to them, because i’m afraid they’ll screw things up. But that last one is not a lesson in learning to better delegate; some of the folks i’ve worked with really would have screwed things up. The lesson there, i’m convinced, was to somehow find people i could trust so that i would feel comfortable delegating to them.

   Finnegan, Begin Again

   Project Overboard is, for me, a do-over. As with Spellirium, i’m slapping together a team (a much larger team this time) of people i’ve never worked with before, and in a very short timeframe. i’m putting humility and brotherly love aside for this project: i’ve christened myself Creative Director, and i’m calling the shots on the game. Project Overboard is a dictatorship, not a democracy.

   A colleague of mine clued me into the difference between artisans, who make creative decisions in their work, and craftsmen, who are told what to do, but who are charged with doing it very very well. One of the expectations of the Project Overboard team that i communicated in our planning document is that ours is a team of craftsmen, not artisans. i’m the designated artisan on the team. We’re all going to be craftsmen, by building a game together very very well.

   

   Hand-crafted video games: you can feel the old-timey goodness.

   My chief reason for claiming creative control of the project is that many jam teams waste their time trying to be nice to one another, without designating a single person who has veto power to choose a direction and run with it. The results are often telling of a design-by-committee approach. Not to pick on them too much, but at last year’s TOJam, friends of mine created Bacon Shark: a shark made out of bacon wearing a jetpack who is from the future reverses through a ruined platformer level, trying to un-crash himself through broken objects to avoid causing a time paradoxes (announced by the burrito-eating Paradox God), after having set off an atomic mayonnaise bomb.

   

   Bacon Shark: a strong case for appointing a Creative Director on a jam game.

   The plan with Project Overboard is that i will develop a full GDD (game design document), break it all down by task, and assign those tasks to my game production team. When TOJam starts, we’ll all begin burning through our respective lists, building assets and integrating them into the build. It’s the difference between following a set of Lego instructions, and building your own Lego monstrosity.

   

   Letting Go

   Project Overboard will also help me with my issue of not trusting people enough to delegate to them. i really have no choice: i MUST delegate to people. The audio team is going to be halfway across town recording voice over, and even though i’d really like to be in the studio directing, i have to be on-site with the dev team building the game. i’d love to spearhead our marketing effort, but i’ve put together an entire marketing unit for that; every marketing effort i put forth is an opportunity i take away from them.

   

   Behold, my wildest fantasy. (Er … cloning, i mean. Not a menage-a-trois with two sheep.)

   By the end of Project Overboard, someone will have screwed up. (It might even be me!) Another colleague told me that one out of every ten employees is good. 1 in 10. That’s an extremely bad ratio if you’re like me, and you constantly need to hire contractors for projects. (To put a fine point on it, i initially hired only six people to work on Spellirium. Those are bad odds.) But since we’re all working on Project Overboard for free, i now have a financially risk-free opportunity to work with thirty other people, to figure out who’s worth working with on future projects when the stakes are higher, and the money’s coming out of my pocket.

   Once i know who i can count on, after seeing everyone in action on Project Overboard, i’ll be able to get past that reluctance to trust people enough to delegate. The trust will be there. Delegation will follow.

   

   Free your mind and your ass will follow.

   That’s the self-improvement benefit that Project Overboard holds for me: i’m tightening up control and authorship in one area, while relaxing my sphincter a bit when it comes to enacting the plan and leading the team. When the project is finished, and we’ve (hopefully) built whatever it is we’re gonna build, i’ll loop back and let you know how it all turned out.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/29/ryan-goes-overboard/feed/ 9 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/22/drunken-tropical-meandering-defeats-childs-imaginative-dreamscape/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/22/drunken-tropical-meandering-defeats-childs-imaginative-dreamscape/#comments Sun, 22 Apr 2012 15:56:03 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4519 Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, the weekend-long game i co-authored with my five-year-old daughter Cassandra, has proven to be noteworthy, but not awardworthy. After being an Indiecade finalist and a Mochis nominee, Ponycorns has suffered two more awards show defeats.

   Last night at the Canadian Videogame Awards, in addition to losing the Best New Character award to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Ponycorns was bested by Margaritaville Online for the best Casual/Social Game prize. Margaritaville Online is a Facebook game based on the debaucherous, alcohol-soaked lifestyle of professional hobo-minstrel Jimmy Buffet (not to be confused with multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffet, a mistake can’t be the first to have made).

   

   Only ONE of these men made his fortune singing about piña coladas. Can you guess which one?

   The Margaritaville developers Exploding Barrel Games showed incredible grace and poise by taking the stage to accept their award, and opening their blazers to reveal “i friggin’ love Ponycorns shirts” (get yours in the Untold Store!) The shout-out was much appreciated, and was the best possible way to not win an award.

   

   (Photo by Scott White)

   It was a very heart-warming gesture. Of course, since these are clearly bootlegged Ponycorns T-shirts, we have duly sent Exploding Barrel Games a notice of copyright infringement insisting on the removal of the shirts from their bodies forthwith.

   The 2011 Canadian Videogame Awards show airs on City TV and G4TVCanada on April 28th and 29th.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/22/drunken-tropical-meandering-defeats-childs-imaginative-dreamscape/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/12/ponycorns-pulls-in-two-cva-noms/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/12/ponycorns-pulls-in-two-cva-noms/#comments Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:36:33 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4512 We’re tickled to announce that Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is a finalist for TWO categories in the Canadian Videogame Awards!

   

   Yaaaaaaayyyyy!!!

   Ponycorns has placed in the following categories:

   • Best Social/Casual Game
   • Best New Character (Sissy)

   With the launch of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on the Apple iPad and Blackberry Playbook last June, 5-year-old Cassandra Creighton became the world’s youngest commercial game developer. Ponycorns became a viral hit and has won fans worldwide with its hand-drawn crayon art, voiceover, characters and puzzle design by the imaginative kindergartener. Ponycorns players have donated generously to Cassie’s college education fund, and have flocked to the Untold Store to pick up Ponycorn swag. Cassie continues to dream up new game designs with mixed media design documents that incorporate crayons, markers, glue, buttons, and feathers.

   The Canadian Videogame Awards ceremony takes place on Saturday, April 21st, 2012.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/12/ponycorns-pulls-in-two-cva-noms/feed/ 4 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/02/sissys-magical-ponycorn-adventure-2/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/02/sissys-magical-ponycorn-adventure-2/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:16:52 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4504
   

   

   Play Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/04/02/sissys-magical-ponycorn-adventure-2/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/03/28/could-scratch-be-the-key-to-maintaining-canadas-video-game-lead-over-the-uk/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/03/28/could-scratch-be-the-key-to-maintaining-canadas-video-game-lead-over-the-uk/#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:55:09 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4495 In 2010, Canada overtook the UK as the world’s third-largest video game developer, thanks in large part to an ecosystem of government grants and tax breaks. This support has angered some critics who see it as wasteful government spending, but smart people know which way the wind blows: since we don’t manufacture things any more, it’s in wealthy countries’ best interest to stimulate industries with well-educated and highly-paid knowledge workers who pay a lot of taxes and generally raise the property value of the entire nation.

   

   Nerds: good for the economy.

   The UK’s recently-announced 2012 budget makes new allowances for animation and video game tax breaks – a move clearly made to help the United Kingdom regain its foothold and, possibly, the coveted third place spot. But the Brits have another ace in the hole that i think puts them in a better position to leave Canada in the dust in a few decades: Scratch.

   

   Scratch is a programming language from the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s designed for kids, but it’s primarily a learning tool, and has seen use in first-year Computer Science programs. Scratch allows you to snap together LEGO-like blocks of code (computer instructions) to control graphics, sounds, and interactivity. (Indeed, the man who led the development team behind Scratch, Mitchel Resnick, also built the original programmable bricks that eventually became the foundation of the LEGO Mindstorms robotics sets.)

   You can upload your creations to the Scratch website, along with the millions of projects that are already there. Best of all, you can download anyone else’s Scratch project and take it apart, remixing any of the project’s code, sounds or assets into your own file. Scratch is free, and it runs on Mac, PC and Linux computers.

   Enter Skynet

   i’ve said, time and again, that i believe kids should be taught how to program computers from a very young age. It’s looking more and more like the children of developed nations will exclusively use computers as their primary windows into the worlds of work and pleasure, and i’d rather see a generation of people who can make computers work for them, rather than a terrifying dystopia where the machines themselves gain more and more control (see Apple) until we’re just banally pushing a single button like George Jetson, unable to harness the amazing power and possibility these machines provide. The more kids learn to tinker with machines and write computer code, the less likely we are to flip the script on this master/slave relationship between humans and machines.

   (If that all sounds a bit dire, talk to any mechanic who used to tinker with cars prior to 2000. You can’t tinker with cars any longer, because their systems are controlled by computerized instead of mechanical processes. If we don’t keep up, we get left in the dust.)

   

   It starts with putting all of our information on the cloud …

   The Livingston-and-Hope of a Nation

   Finding that in two short years, the UK had slipped from #3 to #6 in world video game development rankings, the UK’s Minister for Culture commissioned a report from Ian Livingston (President of Edios) and Alex Hope (Co-Founder of Double Negative, an effects shop) last year to figure out what was going on and how to fix it. The resulting findings determined that the problem was seated squarely in (mis)education:

   

   Twelve percent is a lousy number. And i defy Ontario to run a similar report on its schools and get a better score. As anemic as the UK’s placement rate is, anecdotally, i guarantee you it’s far worse here in Ontario. i can’t vouch for the rest of the country, but what we have here in this province is a system akin to jacking a wounded football player up on painkillers so he can finish the game. Eventually, the torn hamstring of a weak education system will bring us down, and Canada will feel its cushy #3 position slipping just as the UK recently has.

   

   And then the UK will do a touchdown dance or something. i dunno … my metaphor doesn’t cross the pond all that gracefully.

   Half of Livingston and Hope’s twenty recommendations pertain to elementary-level schools, the first among them being

   Bring computer science into the National Curriculum as an essential discipline.

   We have no such concept here. i’ve spoken with a number of companies who are developing material for the Prometheus Smartboards that are present in many of the Toronto District School Board’s classrooms, who have told me that they’ve met with resistance from parents and educators if they mistakenly called any of their projects “games”. There’s a sensitivity to the word “game” here that suggests games are an anathema to learning – that somehow games are preventing kids from getting a good education. You need to trojan-horse your way into many schools by using terms like “interactive storytelling” and “interactive digital media” to fly under the anti-game sentiment radar.

   

   It’s a um … interactive physics simulation with a protagonist from the skilled trades that explores the Quiller-Couch conflict of man vs. nature.

   Conversely, here’s what the Livingston-Hope Report says:

   Recommendation 3: Use video games and visual effects to draw in greater numbers of young people to computer science and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

   Among the learning languages and toolsets the report recommends for schools is MIT’s Scratch. Get ‘em while they’re young – don’t wait until they’ve graduated high school. Ontario’s colleges do a great job of using video games to draw in great numbers of young people, but to what end? Our strategy is more akin to Honest John luring Pinocchio to Pleasure Island so the boy can smash windows and smoke cigars and make 3D models in Maya with impunity. But we wind up with the same result: a big pile of jackasses who are only fit to work in the salt mines.

   

   We thought we were going to call the shots on the next Splinter Cell game for UbiSoft! Hee-HAW!

   Artificial Intelligence

   Will the UK regain its #3 video game industry position two decades from now by investing in education? It’s possible. But i think the UK’s efforts should serve as a cue to Canada to investigate its own education system to ensure that the video game economy we’ve nurtured through funding and tax credits isn’t just serum flowing through an IV meant to keep the patient alive, while we fail to feed the patient or change his bedpan … or show any care or concern over whether the patient will one day leave the hospital and walk on his own.

   Canada needs its own Livingston-Hope report, with a commitment to act on its findings. The Ministry of Education in Ontario in particular should take a hard look at schools’ programs and success rates, and start denying accreditation to diploma mills in both private and public colleges. The Minstry should audit the use of technology in elementary schools, rather than the existence of it. (You can put a Smartboard in a classroom, but you can’t make it drink.)

   

   We’re paid actors! Handheld devices like Smartphones are banned in most elementary schools, and the Ontario teachers’ union wants to ban wifi too!

   Baby Steps

   The good news is that we’re taking some steps in the right direction. The joint OCAD/U of T program, which pairs the University of Toronto’s game programmers with the Ontario College of Art’s artists, is having its second annual student showcase soon. The game developers from UOIT (the University of Ontario Institute of Technology) a few towns over are once again joining forces to present their games as well, along with students from Seneca College, Humber College, and the Hervé Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined. Eventually, i would like to see ALL of the schools in the region combine their graduate shows into one big event, which could double as a job fair and a one-stop shop for Ontario (and even national and international) companies seeking to hire new talent. This show means we’re almost there!

   

   In April, the TIFF Nexus group is holding a New Media Literacies conference to try to get kids and educators who give damn about this stuff to meet up and learn from each other. There are lots of great components to this day, including panels and talks from developers, funders and researches. The highlight of the day (for me, because i’m teaching it :) will be a hands-on Scratch workshop geared at introducing the tool to teachers so they can bring it back to their classrooms or kids’ groups and start mucking around with it right away. (TDSB teachers: did i mention that Scratch is on the Board’s approved list of software, and that getting it installed in YOUR lab/classroom/library is just a phonecall away?? Run, don’t walk!)

   

   The UK might be feeling the sting of losing a leading position in the video games industry, but with the recent incentives announcement and the education recommendations in the Livingston-Hope Report, they’re on the right track to building a sound infrastructure. i worry that Canada, generally (and Ontario specifically) is building a house of cards that’s only one election away from pulling funding and seeing it all topple over.

   The incentives and funding the country and its provinces have offered are an important component to accelerating Canada’s lead in the industry, but education is a crucial pillar that is being largely overlooked here. i firmly believe that the first step to investing in the future is sitting down at a computer with an eight-year-old, and showing that kid how to make a cartoon cat walk across a computer using a snap-together code loop in Scratch.

   

   UPDATE

   • Estonia Develops Programming Curriculum for First Graders – Wired
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/03/28/could-scratch-be-the-key-to-maintaining-canadas-video-game-lead-over-the-uk/feed/ 3 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/03/02/the-six-most-infamous-puzzles-in-adventure-game-history/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/03/02/the-six-most-infamous-puzzles-in-adventure-game-history/#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:18:22 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4456 1. Getting the Babel Fish into Your Ear

   The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984

   Probably the most well-known puzzle of any on the list, the babel fish puzzle is renowned for walking the fine line between fun frustration (or “funstration”), and pure seething evil. Displaced Earthling Arthur Dent has been zapped aboard a hostile alien ship. In order to understand alien languages, he has to put a babel fish in his ear. In the book on which the game is based, Arthur’s friend Ford just hands him the fish. But in the game, a few more steps are required.

   

   The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, co-authored by Douglas Adams, puts the fish in a vending machine and gives the player a limited number of turns to acquire it before the game becomes unwinnable. From the Everything2 entry on the puzzle:

   After the player presses the button, the fish is vended, but with such force that it flies across the room and into a hole. The sequence of events for the novice player goes as follows:

   Above the hole is a hook, from which the player eventually decides to hang his dressing gown; this causes the vended Babel Fish to hit the gown and drop to the floor…

   … where it falls down a drain (‘press button and catch fish’ is not a valid input). The player may then decide to block the drain with his handy towel, which causes the fish to hit the gown, drop to the floor, and land on the towel…

   … where it is cleaned away by a cleaning robot that dashes into the room, and dashes out again via a small panel. At this point the player realises that the game is toying with him or her. Undefeated, he or she may choose to block the panel with Ford Prefect’s satchel*, at which point the Babel Fish flies into the gown, drops to the floor, the robot picks it up, runs into the satchel, and throws the fish in the air…

   … where it is cleaned away by another cleaning robot, one tasked with maintaining the upper half of the room. It is this additional puzzle that caused players the most anguish, as the solution is not at all obvious – it involves placing some junk mail on Ford Prefect’s satchel, which, when sent flying through the air, occupies the second cleaning robot enough for the Babel Fish to arc gracefully into the player’s ear.

   The game’s publisher, Infocom, actually sold T-Shirts for people who managed to solve the puzzle:

   

   It’s a small sadness that, thanks to the Internet, a phenomenon like this couldn’t really happen again.

   2. Guessing the Gnome’s Gname

   King’s Quest, 1984

   1984 was apparently a good year for infuriating adventure game puzzles. In the original King’s Quest outing, Sir Graham meets a gnome who challenges him to guess his name. The obvious answer is “Rumplestiltskin”, since most of the game’s characters and story elements are cribbed straight from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. But no – that’s not the answer. Written on a piece of paper in the witch’s house (the witch from Hansel and Gretel, whose person, house, and note have nothing whatsoever to do with the gnome), are the words “sometimes it’s wise to think backwards.”

   

   That’s what you get for NOT MAKING ANY SENSE.

   Connecting the gnote to the gnome requires more than a small a leap of faith, to say nothing of logic. But no matter: many intrepid adventurers made that leap, strode boldly up to the gnome, and guessed “nikstlitselpmuR”, which is “Rumplestiltskin” spelled backwards. But “no”, the parser responds – “that’s not the correct answer”.

   A million things go through your mind at this point. Does the game have it wrong? Did the creators of King’s Quest forget that oft-unpronounced “t” in “Rumplestiltskin”? Or did you get the verb wrong? You try “ANSWER NIKSTLITSELPMUR” and “SAY NIKSTLITSELPMUR” and “TRY NIKSTLITSELPMUR”. Or maybe you were wrong the whole time? Maybe the note has nothing to do with it? And if that’s the case, then what’s the answer??

   

   This had better be good, old man.

   “What is the gnome’s name?” was, by far, the most-asked question of the Sierra Customer Service Hotline. That’s because the solution to the puzzle is unfair and infuriating. Here it is. You’re supposed to write the alphabet forwards and backwards:

   ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
   ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

   For each letter in RUMPLESTILTSKIN, you need to find the corresponding letter in the backwards alphabet. So R maps onto I, U maps onto F, and so on. The gnome’s name – obviously – is IFNKOVHGROGHPRM.

   

   Guessing the gnome’s name is a great example of how unfair, unpleasant and unforgiving puzzle design could be in the early days of adventure games. It’s very telling that in future releases of King’s Quest, NIKSTLITSELPMUR was accepted as a valid answer. Back in the day, the biggest difference between the approach of Sierra designers like King’s Quest’s Roberta Williams and designers at the rival Lucasfilm/LucasArts shop is that the Lucas designers seemed to want the player to actually succeed!

   3. Microwaving the Hamster

   Maniac Mansion, 1987

   

   In the original Maniac Mansion, you could steal Weird Ed Edison’s pet hamster and, as either Razor or Syd, put the little critter in the microwave and make it pop. If you hand the resulting goop back to Ed, realization of what it is slowly dawns on him, and your character spends the rest of the game as a tombstone in the backyard.

   

   What did i just say about LucasArts designers wanting you to succeed … ?

   When the game was ported to the NES, LucasArts endured a rigorous censorship process that is fascinatingly chronicled by Douglas Crockford in The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System. While the word “pissed” and the Michaelangelo statue had to go, the hamster-in-the-microwave schtick stayed … that is, until the wrong person at Nintendo caught wind of it. The puzzle was excised from the European version, and all future pressings of the cart.

   4. Drinking with Boos

   Return to Zork, 1993

   Before Internet memes made arrow-in-the-knee jokes ubiquitous, another memorable line from a video game lodged itself in the minds of gamers like a Rick Astley tune. This puzzle involves getting Boos to repeatedly pour you a drink, dumping it in the plant, and waiting until he’s soused enough to steal his keys. Each time Boos pours, he asks “Want some rye? COURSE ya do!” It’s Boos’s exuberant Silliwood performance and the puzzle’s repetition that makes the moment stand out.

   
   
   

   Here’s the rest of Boos’s toast, which i thought was a Zorkism, but have now discovered that it’s an old Rabbie Burns drinking song:

   Here’s tae us
   Wha’s like us
   Damn few,
   And they’re a’ deid
   Mair’s the pity!

   5. Reading the Creation Account

   The Neverhood, 1996

   Mair’s the pity that for its amazing visuals, The Neverhood wasn’t a better adventure game. One of its most maddening puzzles wasn’t really a puzzle at all. Early in the game, Klaymen discovers The Chronicles of Neverhood, a Biblical-ish account of the creation of the game’s clay universe. Comprising eight books, the Chronicles sprawl out across 38 separate screens in the game. Most dutiful adventure game players brought up on Infocom’s “feelies” were convinced that the Chronicles must contain important information about how to solve certain puzzles in the games, and read each and every section of the wall.

   

   Well, gosh – THIS is gonna be fun.

   The horrible truth is that the Chronicles exist only to flesh out the game’s backstory, and have nothing whatsoever to do with any in-game puzzles. The player is merely supposed to walk to the far end of the 38 screens to pick up an object, and then hoof it back to the beginning of the hallway.

   6. Creating Fake ID

   Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, 1999

   Much has been written about the death of graphic adventure games, but one of the most influential articles on the subject is Who Killed Adventure Games? by Old Man Murray, who details an idiotic puzzle in the third Gabriel Knight adventure that has the player assembling a fake ID of a man with a moustache in order to impersonate a man who doesn’t have a moustache.

   

   Hmm … i’m clearly gonna need some double-sided tape, and a cat.

   Concludes Murray:

   Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.

   USE mouse ON comments section

   What are the most interesting, shocking, funstrating or memorable puzzles from your adventures?

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/03/02/the-six-most-infamous-puzzles-in-adventure-game-history/feed/ 4 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/24/the-5-funniest-moments-in-graphic-adventure-games/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/24/the-5-funniest-moments-in-graphic-adventure-games/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:08:43 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4401 One of the areas in which graphic adventure games have most other games beat is that they’re actually funny. Reliant on plot, character, and writing in general, graphic adventure games have provided some of the most solid laughs in video game history. These moments have stuck with me through the years, and are as funny and enjoyable as any oft-quoted line from any famously comedic movie or teevee show.

   5. Inspector Hector Wakes Up Pantsless

   Hector Badge of Carnage Episode 1: We Negotiate with Terrorists

   Humour is very subjective, and while fat foul-mouthed Inspector Hector might not be everyone’s cuppa, i found him hilarious. Here, Hector intercepts a shady deal in the park, and tries to claim the cash with no idea what he’s supposed to be exchanging. The fun begins at 4:40 (remember to cue it up):

   
   

   4. Ben Gets Some Answers

   Full Throttle

   After a decade of playing Mr. Nice Guy in adventure games and finding non-violent solutions to problems wherever possible, along comes tough biker Ben. After kicking down the door, Ben shows the bartender who’s boss in no uncertain terms (gag ends at 0:15):

   
   With head-ripping fare like God of War to taint a modern-day gamer’s viewpoint, it’s easy to miss what was so surprising and funny about this moment. But if you had spent your gaming life playing characters like King Graham, who would lose game points for violently resolving problems (like stabbing the goat in the first King’s Quest),
   the first two interactions in Full Throttle definitely put a smile on your face.

   3. The Freelance Police Save the Day … Sort Of

   Sam and Max Hit the Road

   The original outing of the freelance police strikes a tone that the subsequent teevee series and later 3D Telltale installments failed to regain. Half of it is in Bill Farmer’s sarcastic, lackadaisical Bogart voice for Sam (the character has been voiced by two different actors since, and neither of them quite nail it), and the other half is in the writing. The Telltale games boast Sam and Max-esque writing, but they never quite reach the bar that the comic’s creator Steve Purcell sets with the original.

   Max: Mind if i drive?
   Sam: Not if you don’t mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.

   This intro cutscene sets up the utterly original cheerily psychotic pair of thugs, letting us know for damn sure that we’re not in Daventry any more.

   
   

   2. Larry Wins a Cruise

   Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places)

   Larry Laffer bluffs his way into a teevee studio with a forged lottery ticket, and accidentally winds up on the set of The Dating Connection. And his luck doesn’t stop there. (the gag ends at 4:08)

   
   

   1. Guybrush gets a Job

   The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge

   After being mugged for all his riches, mighty (and now bearded) pirate Guybrush Threepwood needs money to charter a ship. The only paying job in town is already held by a talented sous-chef who shows no sign of quitting. After some crafty inventory work with the local vermin, Guybrush arranges a staffing change. The whole puzzle culminates in one of those hilarious off-screen conversations that LucasArts games are famous for, and ends in a killer punchline delivered by the restaurant owner. (the gag ends at 2:30)

   
   What are some of your favourite funny moments from graphic adventure games?
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/24/the-5-funniest-moments-in-graphic-adventure-games/feed/ 5 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/22/i-left-my-slides-in-san-francisco/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/22/i-left-my-slides-in-san-francisco/#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:07:34 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4406

   San Francisky? Well how did you get there? Did you walk n’ did you flew?

   i’m very, very excited for all the shenanigans i’m about to get up to in the big windy apple that never sleeps – San Francisco – in less than two weeks’ time. Here’s what’s on my plate:

   Flash Gaming Summit 2012

   

   This will be my third time at the Flash Gaming Summit, a great niche mini-con that precedes GDC by a day (Sunday March 4th 2012) . Last year, i moderated a panel on game monetization. This year, i have a talk all to myself:

   Ponycorns and the Price of Popularity (4PM in the Fisher Room)

   For many indie game developers, having a hit viral game sounds like a dream come true. The reality is that, especially in the ad-supported free-to-play Flash marketplace, rampant fame comes at a price. The overnight success of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure brought with it temporal, financial and emotional costs that were difficult to predict. Ryan Henson Creighton from Untold Entertainment talks about what success actually looks like, and what it’ll cost you. Learn how to prepare for tomorrow’s success today!

   Fabulous Prizes

   Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is a finalist for a Mochi Award! This is a great honour. Past winners have included Machinarium, Canabalt, and some web game about stickmen shooting zombies, most likely.

   

   i’m pretty sure this is what a Mochi award looks like.

   Game Developers Conference 2012

   

   i’m thrilled to be speaking at GDC 2012 during the Independent Games Summit.

   Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar (1:45 PM on Monday)

   The ponycorns fanfare could easily have died off within a week, but Untold was determined to make as much noise as possible, given that initial spark. Attendees will learn about launching alternate revenue streams like the ponycorns merchandise store, preparing press kits, attracting mainstream media attention, entering contests, marketing with a non-existent budget, and following up with franchises or brand extensions, all in the name of amplifying initial interest in a project. When many speakers tell their success stories, they essentially talk about how they were struck by lightning. The take-away for the audience is to go out and somehow get struck by lightning too. Indie game developer Untold Entertainment Inc. was struck by lightning when their game Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure went viral, receiving worldwide attention and acclaim – most notably because it was co-developed by a five-year-old girl. In this exciting and surprising session, Ryan Henson Creighton reveals how to turn your game project into a lightning rod to attract success, and how to bottle that surge of success without letting even a single spark escape.

   Note that (as per my speaking contract :), this talk is completely different from the one i’m giving at FGS. The GDC talk is about attracting and amplifying attention, while the FGS talk is about what to do with that attention once you’ve got it (and, specifically, how much it’s gonna cost you).

   Spellirium Will Be Playable at the GDC 2012 Expo

   (Esplanade Ballroom, South Hall – GDC Play Kiosk #K13 – Wednesday from 12pm-3pm)

   My final piece of great news is that Spellirium, the little graphic adventure/word puzzle game mash-up that could, will be exhibited during a very brief window Wednesday afternoon on the GDC show floor.

   

   Since the event hasn’t happened yet, i travelled into the future to take this photo for you.

   If you haven’t Liked Spellirium on Facebook or followed @Spellirium on Twitter, please help us out by doing so! We have a meeting with Steam during GDC 2012, and we’d love to show them how many people are interested in the game. Here’s all you need to know about the game.

   Ryan Henson Creighton to be Awarded San Francisco’s Key to the City

   … no. i’m making that part up.

   But one day, San Francisco. One day.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/22/i-left-my-slides-in-san-francisco/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/20/monster-mondays-spellirium-stone-creature/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/20/monster-mondays-spellirium-stone-creature/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:57:03 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4397 It’s Monster Monday! Well, technically, the monsters in Spellirium are called “creatures”, but Monster Mondays has a nice alliterative ring to it.

   

   This is an inked creature design by Darren Ward. We’re considering giving this guy a pair of legs to replace his spectral booty, and maybe reducing him to only two eyes. In combat, he’ll probably petrify your letter tiles. Stone tiles can’t be swapped – you have to either build a word around them to eliminate them, or use a “thaw” power-up.

   Word.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/20/monster-mondays-spellirium-stone-creature/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/18/help-put-spellirium-on-steam/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/18/help-put-spellirium-on-steam/#comments Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:27:33 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4381 Listen up!

   We’re making a really cool graphic adventure / word puzzle mash-up called Spellirium. It totally kicks ass, and it has an amazing post-apocalyptic “trashpunk” aesthetic that looks like this:

   

   Do you want to play this game? Do you want to play this game on Steam?

   Untold Entertainment has its first-ever meeting with Steam two weeks from now at GDC (the Game Developers’ conference) and to be honest, we don’t want to blow it. We’re nervous that Steam is going to take one look at our 31 Facebook Likes and 18 Twitter followers and think “hmm … this game that looks like it’s made from garbage is also going to sell like garbage.”

   i’d love to get these follower numbers up to a level where the nice folks at Steam are gonna say “Hey! People are actually interested in this game! We’d like to distribute it on our platform.”

   Are you interested in Spellirium? Do you realize it’s going to be the greatest graphic adventure/word puzzle hybrid game you’ve ever played? Please help us out:

   1. Like Spellirium on Facebook!
   2. Follow Spellirium on Twitter!

   In return, we’ll roll out a whole development plan to keep you updated on how we’re doing, including special glimpses at character artwork, concepts, background designs, scripts, storyboards, and secrets about Spellirium.

   If you want to know more about the game, ask me about it! i’ll answer all of your questions in the comments section, and have posted more detail below. Thanks SO MUCH for your support! We’re working very, very hard to make Spellirium a great game that you’ll enjoy.

   - Ryan Henson Creighton
   President and Founder of Untold Entertainment Inc.
   (and the guy who’s going to delete this post before Steam sees it ;)

   More About Spellirium – Read Ahead Only if You Care!

   Q: How do the graphic adventure and word puzzle bits interact?

   A: Instead of throwing a lot of item-based puzzles at you, Spellirium gives you a Boggle-like grid of letters on the right side of the screen. On the left, you see an enemy or a challenge that you have to solve by spelling words. Every challenge has a different solution.

   Sometimes, you might have to make words with certain coloured tiles (GREEN words defeat the green creature). Or in certain directions (spell a word from left to right to move a character from left to right in a maze). Or maybe the words themselves matter (spell FIRE, FLAMES or INFERNO to torch something). Sometimes, you’re not allowed to move the tiles around, and you have to make words based on what the grid gives you. Other times, you may have to make words with double letters (to defeat twin creatures), or spell palindromes (to defeat a two-headed foe), or find rhyming words (to crack the code on riddle etched in a mysterious stone).

   

   In this challenge, each brick in the wall corresponds to a letter tile in the grid. Spelling a five-letter word at the top-left eliminates the five top-left bricks in the matching area of the wall. The goal is to knock out all of the bricks to escape the area.

   You’ll walk around beautifully-drawn scenes, just like in a graphic adventure game. The game has a great story. You talk to characters, pick up items, and travel around the map … but every significant interaction boils down to a neat puzzle-within-a-puzzle where you spell words to succeed.

   Q:So it’s educational, right? It’s a game for kids?

   A:Well, kids don’t really enjoy word games very much. And there’s a difference between a game that’s educational because it teaches you something, and a game like Spellirium that requires you to be educated to really enjoy it. If you liked the idea of a mash-up game like Puzzle Quest, but grew tired after your 8000th game of match-3, you’ll like the variety that Spellirium offers. It’s a great game for old-school graphic adventure fans, and for people who enjoy games like Scrabble, Boggle, Words with Friends, Scramble, Text Twist, Wurdle, Spelltower, Scrabulous, Bookworm Adventure, and Puzzlejuice. If you like doing the newspaper crossword, or if you like games that demand more from your brain than from your muscles, you’ll rather enjoy Spellirium.

   

   If you have a pulse and a pocketbook, you’ll enjoy Spellirium.

   Q:You mentioned a great story? i’ve heard that claim before.

   A:So have we! In fact, we’re so disillusioned by lacklustre game stories that we set out to write one that doesn’t suck. Here it is:

   Spellirium takes place in the future, after a mysterious apocalyptic event that left the world buried. The survivors can have “modern” technology, as long as they can dig it up … but with no gas, electricity, or enriched uranium, they can’t do much with what they find. So they build houses with it. They use cars as walls, and satellite dishes as spittoons. This gives the game its neat-o “trashpunk” aesthetic, and it’s why parts of the world look like they’re medieval. The survivors have been busted back to the Dark Ages.

   

   “Ruins” in Spellirium are actually buried skyscrapers.

   Their biggest problem is that all forms of reading and writing are outlawed. If you dig something up with writing on it, you have to scrape/scratch/burn the letters off, or your findage will be confiscated and you’ll be put to death. You can’t write on anything, or even invent a new form of writing. You can’t even communicate with pictograms, because that’s a form of writing. So the people are technologically poor, and bound to stay that way.

   You play a young tailor named Todd who’s holed up in a cloistered community with four men who call themselves the “Runekeepers” – a secret society that curates an underground library filled with junk with writing on it. When the Runekeepers leave on a mysterious mission and one of them turns up dead, Todd discovers a mysterious device that affects reality when he uses it to spell words. Todd teams up with an oddball clan of adventurers including a big blue monster, a hard-edged hunter, and a foppish bard. Together, they set out to find the missing Runekeepers and to save them from danger.

   Q: Sounds pretty serious?

   A: Humour is a hallmark of everything we do at Untold Entertainment. Spellirium is wry and witty. Just as the Monkey Island series is very dark thematically and graphically but is betrayed by a great sense of humour, Spellirium is similarly a dark fantasy game infused with sly, winking writing.

   Q: This is your big chance. Anything else i should know about?
   A: Spellirium is a feature-rich game with a lot of wild ideas. Here’s a feature list of stuff we haven’t talked much about (but we will on the Facebook/Twitter accounts that you’re about to click on! :)

   • build, collect and track over fifty thousand words in an unlockable Dictionary
   • gather non-biodegradable landfill items and craft them into power-ups
   • buy new items using collected words as your currency
   • battle a variety of creatures, and store their info in your Bestiary
   • scavenge different items from creatures by bribing, scaring, or defeating them
   • learn special spells like ZAP and DELUGE to electrify or drown your enemies
   • share your best words on Twitter, and add your Twitter pals’ words to your Dictionary
   • discover the shocking secret that holds the Land in thrall

   

   An early Bestiary concept.

   Q: Where’s the trailer?

   A: We’re building out the story as we go – “shooting in sequence”, as the film term goes. That means we don’t have enough footage to make it appear as though the game takes place beyond the same three locations! We’re also trying to get the rights to a certain song to use in the trailer.

   In the meantime, we have a few short, soundless video clips. This is probably the most informative one:

   
   Thanks SO MUCH for all your support! We’re looking forward to showing you tons of great new stuff about Spellirium, and we hope you like us enough to make an impression on the folks at Steam!
   1. Like Spellirium on Facebook!
   2. Follow Spellirium on Twitter!

   Word.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/18/help-put-spellirium-on-steam/feed/ 8 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/16/5-graphic-adventure-game-goofs-and-how-to-fix-them/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/16/5-graphic-adventure-game-goofs-and-how-to-fix-them/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:09:09 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4360 It’s no secret that i love graphic adventure games. They’re the reason why i’m in this industry today. i’ve worked on a number of them (including Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two, Heads, Summer in Smallywood, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, and the upcoming Spellirium), and have devoted considerable resources to developing UGAGS: the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System (our company’s answer to SCUMM), which has helped me to build that list of games. i’ve also written lots of articles about the genre (check the “Further Reading” section at the bottom of this post!)

   

   The UGAGS oeuvre to date.

   Call me a snob, but i like graphic adventure games for the mere fact that their characters have something going through their minds other than “shoot”. i like that their plotlines boil down to more than just “kill mans” or “glorm points”. And i like standing in a room in a graphic adventure game, alone with my thoughts, without having to worry about time limits or pyrotechnics wizzing past my face every few seconds. As Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert put it during his Maniac Mansion postmortem at GDC 2010,

   The magic of an adventure game is staring at the screen, wondering what to do next. It’s that quiet contemplation.

   With the massive Kickstarter windfall for an unspecified graphic adventure game, Tim Schafer, Ron Gilbert and Double Fine proven that there is still a market and a fondness for the genre. That being said, there are some legitimate and persistent problems with graphic adventures. Here’s a short list of the most common ones, and my thoughts on ways in which we, as graphic adventure game designers, can fix them.

   1. Not Knowing What to Do

   True, it’s magical for a video game to leave you guessing, instead of ramming a tutorial down your throat at every turn like most modern games do. But if you get stuck enough, long enough, that magic turns to salty poop and you really just want to get unstuck. If the only recourse for the player to get unstuck is to consult GameFAQs, you’ve failed as a designer. i’ve abandoned numerous graphic adventure games because i “cheated”; solving the rest of the game became a lot less enjoyable and i gave up, thoroughly racked with guilt-derived stomach cramps.

   

   Throw the bridle on the snake to turn it into Pegasus. Why oh WHY didn’t i think of that??

   But if the game gives you a way to cheat, or to get a hint, it’s somehow legit and i don’t feel as bad. It’s game-sanctioned cheating – a subtle, but powerful, difference. Modern graphic adventure games like Machinarium use an in-game help system.

   

   Machinarium puts you through a twitch-based minigame before giving you a hint.

   Another interesting way to handle this is to design your game such that the player can never get stuck. You just plod through the game, missing cues left and right, until you crash into the inevitable, unsatisfactory ending. But if you’re keen and clever and aware, you can strike out off the beaten path, do all the difficult things, and get a much better ending. Games that use this approach include Kult/Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess, The Last Express, and The Colonel’s Bequest.

   

   It’s possible to coast through The Last Express without ever figuring out whodunit, whatsgoingon, or whosthatladywiththegun

   One year at GDC, i heard a woman speak who was an advocate for female gamers (if you know her name, speak up!) Her heartfelt conviction, ladies, is that if you buy a game and you can’t access all of the content on the disc because the designer won’t let you, take the game back to the store and ask for your money back. Years ago, this struck me as utter blasphemy … and yet here i am, developing Spellirium so that all of the challenges are no-fail, and you can sail through the game from beginning to end without the game requiring you to be awesome. It’s awesome-optional. But for those players who DO excel, there are treats and rewards.

   2. The Pixel Hunt

   When graphic adventure games moved from using text-based parsers to entirely mouse-driven interfaces, they were distinguished from their parser predecessors by the term “point n’ click”. This term was later twisted to the pejorative “hunt n’ peck” because numerous graphic adventure games, in lieu of offering clever and interesting puzzles, would hide important items in a 2-pixel-square hit area so that the player’s only recourse was to slowly scan each and every location by trawling the cursor slowly over the screen in rows, like he was a human dot matrix printer.

   Listen: i could be a very rich man today if i had built HOGs (Hidden Object Games). They’re immensely popular. But the entire genre is based on this one terrible flaw of graphic adventure games. HOGs, by definition, are pixel hunts. i can’t do it. i just … no. You know?

   

   Finding the pair of tweezers in the messy bedroom is not my definition of a fun time – it’s my definition of every goddamn day of my life

   How do you fix this problem? The obvious answer is to make bigger hit areas. But i’ve seen other games go even farther. Telltale’s Back to the Future on the iPad enables you to multi-finger diddle the screen to make all of the location’s hotspots light up. Like the “every player’s a winner” strategy i mentioned above, this seemed too broad and too giving. i mean, the game might as well be playing itself at this point, right?

   

   The more i thought about it, the more i thought back to adventure games where the only reason i got hopelessly stuck was because i didn’t know that that part of the screen was an exit to another location. The joy of an adventure game should be in being a character, playing through a story, and feeling clever for solving some problems – not in discovering that you can click that plant that looks like it’s part of the background.

   3. Cock-Blocking

   One of the most despised phrases in the annals of graphic adventure gaming is “you can’t do that — at least not now” which, if you’ve played through the King’s Quest series, you’ve read at least a few hundred times in your miserable existence. Graphic adventure game cock-blocking occurs when the designer has not thought through enough interaction possibilities, and has thrown up a vague, generic message to the player. This is essentially computer programming error code handling, with messaging that’s barely more helpful than actual computer programming error codes.

   

   The reason why cock-blocking is so common is that it takes a lot of effort to account for every possible thing the player might try to do. Indeed, for games with a text parser, it’s nigh-impossible for the designer to anticipate every single combination of words, including gibberish, the player may hurl at the parser. With verb-based adventure interfaces like the one in Maniac Mansion, the permutations shrunk significantly.

   

   Sidenote: this is the exact moment in Maniac Mansion when the majority of players wet their pants.

   A corollary to item use cock-blocking is a situation where the player tries to use a long, rigid item to pry something off another something, but he doesn’t use the correct long, rigid item that the designer was thinking of. Stick – no good. Pole – no good. Broom handle – ding ding ding! Here’s how graphic adventure developer and wittily snarky pundit Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw puts it in his Depressingly Common Adventure Game Design Flaws series (the rest of which i’ve avoided reading, for fear of being wittily snarked at for plagiarism):

   The best game I have ever played for intuitive puzzles has to be the aforementioned Zak McKracken And The Alien Mindbenders. There’s a whole horde of inventory items in Zak McKrack, and I could give a thousand examples of puzzles with several alternative solutions. How about using a monkey wrench to wake up the bus driver, but also being able to do the same with any other long, hard item in your inventory, AND having the option of waking him with a merry kazoo interlude instead? You can use a butter knife to get a cashcard from under a desk, but you can also use any of the several pieces of paper, all of which can also be used for drawing maps. Then, when you try to lever up floorboards with the butter knife, it’s obviously too flimsy, and you get left with a bent butter knife. Having so many possibilities and so many avenues to explore not only constantly rewarded the player’s intelligence but provided the vital encouragement needed to make them push through to the very end.

   Before Spellirium, UGAGS games got right around this problem by not offering any item interaction whatsoever. If you clicked on a hotspot, and you had the inventory item that interacted with it, you automatically used the right item. In Jinx 3, if you were carrying the spork, you could tap on the prison wall with it. If you held the banana, you could flush it down the toilet to create a flood. This covered off any puzzle design blunders that i may have committed. Left to his own devices, would the player really know he should tap on the wall with the spork? With auto-item use, i never had to worry about it.

   

   Why force the player to say “use keycard on door” when the interaction is obvious?

   Since you can use items on hotspots in Spellirium, i’ve developed a new system to minimize cock-blocking. Given a hotspot like a locked door, i can obviously define what happens when you use the iron key on it. But i can also list other items the player might try to use, like the metal pole (to bash the door down?), and i can have Todd respond in kind: “This metal pole is too flimsy to bash the door down.” That makes the player feel good, because i’m acknowledging that he had a good idea, and it’s so much more satisfying than “i don’t understand that” or “i can’t do that.”

   The next line of defense is generic item commands. If i haven’t written an item-specific response, the logic falls through to the hotspot’s generic response, like “i can’t use that to get through the door.” This is a little more frustrating than a specifically-written response, but at least it’s something. One game that i noticed did a LOT of work to provide an item-specific response for every imaginable item/hotspot combination is The Whispered World. Very well done.

   

   4. No – Not THAT Paper

   A very common and frustrating mistake that adventure games make is to send the player off in search of something that is represented in the background artwork, but the background element is not wired for interaction. While it’s not a graphic adventure game, i was recently playing the abysmal Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and a character asked me to go find a piece of paper – “ANY piece of paper”. The setting for this fetch quest was an academy packed to the teats with books, parchments, scrolls and papers of every imaginable kind … but i couldn’t pick any of them up. i had to go hunt down the exact piece of paper the game wanted me to find.

   

   Don’t surround the player with non-interactive books, and then ask him to find “any” piece of paper.

   A related problem is the too-damned-interesting-background-art error. This is where you have something in the background that every player clicks on, but you haven’t written a description for it. And the player figures there MUST be something up with that video camera hidden in the plant. But there’s not.

   In an attempt to address this, we’re developing a heatmap system for Spellirium where we can analyze players’ clicks. If we notice enough heat on a particular area of the screen that we haven’t wired up for interactivity, of if there’s a hotspot that gets clicked non-proportionally to its relevance, we know we have some splainin’ to do to the player.

   

   Heatmaps: they’re not just for Halo any more.

   5. The Pointless Conversation Option

   Again, while it’s not a graphic adventure game, there’s a lot we can learn from the steaming pile that is Skyward Sword. Throughout the game, non-player characters ask you to make a choice. “Link! Will you save my kitten from the tree?” You know that, as the hero, you kind of have to save the kitten. Yet you’re given the option to say “No.” And when you do that, the story does not move forward. You MUST re-engage the NPC. You MUST say “Yes” this time. You MUST save the kitten. What was the point of the interaction, other than providing the illusion of interactivity?

   

   The reason why designers do this is, of course, to save work – a LOT of work. If, whenever you made a binary decision, the ramifications spun off wildly into two alternate timelines, you’d be building an impossibly large game. But i can’t stand it when it’s obvious during a conversation that no matter what i “choose” to say, the conversation is always going to go a certain way.

   The solution is a trick of good creative writing. It’s fine for the conversation to always lead into the same funnel. It’s not fine for the player to know that. Through clever writing, you can make the player think he’s affecting the conversation, even when he’s not. If you’re crafty, you can even give the player a binary decision with two seemingly opposite inputs, but steer them both around to the same outcome. Consider this conversation snippet from Spellirium between Todd and Lorms:

   Todd:

   • Uh … okay. You can tag along, I guess. [C1]
   • It’s probably better if I go alone. [C1]

   [C1] (Todd walks to the edge of the screen)

   Lorms: Where are you going?

   Todd: I dunno. That way?

   Lorms: Do you have a plan? Do you even know how you’re going to find your friends?

   

   With one option, the player decides that Lorms can come with him. With the other option, the player decides to go it alone. Lorms is one of Spellirium’s main characters. Make no mistake: he’s coming on the journey. But despite what the player chooses, he feels like the game is honouring his choice, and the conversation and actions that flow from that point feel natural – even if the player chooses two completely opposite responses.

   The Sins of Our Fathers

   The graphic adventure game genre is far from perfect, but there are many things we can do as savvy designers to account for the crimes perpetrate on players past. We have been bad, but we will atone. But will it be enough to resurrect a genre that’s been on life support for the past twenty years?

   Further Reading

   • How the Graphic Adventure Video Game Genre Can Save Your Kids’ TV-to-Game 360 Transmedia Strategy
   • i Touched Ron Gilbert
   • Six Ways to Tell Stories in Video Games
   • 12 Types of Puzzles in Graphic Adventure Games
   • Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess
   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/16/5-graphic-adventure-game-goofs-and-how-to-fix-them/feed/ 8 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/09/double-fines-kickstarter-windfall-will-patronage-supplant-traditional-game-publishing/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/09/double-fines-kickstarter-windfall-will-patronage-supplant-traditional-game-publishing/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:54:40 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4353 There’s one photograph from my past i desperately want to find, but i fear it was lost to the voracious pagan god of bits and bytes years ago – another case for printing your digital photos as soon as you take them. It’s a picture of a fresh-faced young me, Ryan Henson Creighton, posing next to Tim Schafer, almost ten years ago. Tim has his jaw twisted up in his best Bill Murray impression, possibly trying to hide the fact that he’s uncomfortable being in the photo. i’m standing there with my best” OH MY GOD I’M GETTING MY PICTURE TAKEN WITH TIM SCHAFER” face on.

   i can’t find the photo, but i scoured the internet for the closest thing to it:

   

   (except that neither one of us was wearing a hat)

   It was E3 circa 2003, during the little-known GDC-like conference portion of the event. Shamelessly geeking out by taking pictures with your long-time game design heroes was NOT the order of the day, but friends … i just couldn’t help myself. If you’ve seen pictures of the Untold Entertainment offices, you’ll know it’s a veritable shrine to the glory days of LucasArts graphic adventure games, back when story and character development and humour ruled the day (in stark contrast to today, when all three of those elements are routinely botched and butchered – almost deliberately, it sometimes seems).

   

   No, visitor, i didn’t create those two games. But thank you for asking.

   

   Ron Gilbert signed my original Monkey Island game boxes in a similar surprise geek attack at GDC last year.

   Before i accosted Tim, he was on a panel talking about the difficulty of financing video games in his new venture, Double Fine. This was pre-Psychonauts. i asked him a question from the gallery: “The graphic adventure genre had clearly tanked, and action games ruled the day. But if you look at the free-to-play Flash game ecosystem, you’ll see a lot of young designers creating graphic adventure games, and they’re quite popular with a certain niche. Would you ever consider building another one?”

   Tim screwed up his face in thought. i paraphrase: “I … yeah, I’ve seen that. Those little adventure games are great. And it’s tempting, but … I think we need to move on from that genre, and do something different. We can make games with graphic adventure-like elements, like character dialogue and picking up items, but as for those old-school adventure games, i … i don’t think we can go back.”

   Tim Goes Back

   On Wednesday February 8 2012, Tim went back. Double Fine Productions launched a Kickstarter project asking for $400k to produce an old-school graphic adventure game and a making-of documentary, with creative involvement from Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert. In 2 hours, the project had crossed the $100k mark, and Tim remarked on Twitter that that was more than the budget of the original Secret of Monkey Island. In just under 12 hours, donated funding had shot up past $500k: half a million bucks in good will and high hopes, built on a legacy of some of the most enjoyable and fondly-remembered moments in video game history.

   These games, friends – these games are why i am in the industry today. The graphic adventure genre is far from dead, and i hope this groundbreaking experiment proves it. It’s a great comfort to me to see these guys pump life and attention and revival into the genre, even as we work to release Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on new platforms, and toil away on Spellirium, our trashpunk graphic adventure/word puzzle game mash-up.

   

   God bless you, Timothy.

   Fame = Money. Who Knew?

   But what does this all actually mean? Have Double Fine proven that the standard publishing model for funding video games is dead and buried? It’s certainly coughing its death rattle, but i don’t think that’s the take-away here.

   Is it that graphic adventure games are alive and well, and that we’re going to see a huge resurgence in the genre? Selfishly, i hope so. But the fact remains that the problems that sunk the genre to begin with are still present: lack of replayability, high cost of development for content players can chew through in a chicken minute, pixel hunting, nonsensical puzzle design, verbosity, randomly rubbing items together in the hopes of discovering a solution, and just plain ol’ getting stuck with no hope of moving the game forward. Imagine if, in a first-person shooter, your gun jammed, and you couldn’t keep killing Nazis unless you learned how to take your whole rifle apart and put it back together, which inexplicably required some knowledge of colour theory. That’s what we’re dealing with.

   

   “You can’t do that – at least not now.”

   i think the take-away here is that the video games industry has honest-to-goodness celebrities, and that we will pay those celebrities money to build games for us. It’s the dawning of a new age during which the video games studio system, a la the Hollywood studio system, is finally born, and personality becomes a business model. Here’s a short list of personalities and games that i would personally help fund:

   • Rand Miller, creator of MYST, and one of the other heroes i accosted at E3 2003. Go create a Kickstarter and create a new IP, and i will give you my money.
   • Cliff Johnson. Your game The Fool’s Errand was awesome, and it made me feel smart whenever i solved one of your puzzles. You’ve been accepting pre-orders for the sequel, A Fool and His Money, since 2003, presumably to help you fund the game. You say you’re launching September of this year, but Wikipedia maintains a chart of your scheduling slips, and it’s embarrassing. What’s the problem, Cliff? Money? If so, then i think we’ve found your solution.
   • Ken and Roberta Williams. Come out of retirement and do something non-King’s Quest-related. i’ll toss you some dough.
   • Jane Jensen. Old Man Murray blames Gabriel Knight 3 for sounding the graphic adventure games death knell. Why not work on a fourth adventure, with help on game and puzzle design from someone else, while you take care of the story, characters and atmosphere that you write so well? (Check out Jane’s Gray Matterto see what she’s been up to lately)
   • Brian Moriarty. You’re teaching at Worcester Polytechnic, and from the brief response to the fan email i sent you a year ago, it seems like you feel your game development days are over? LOOMwas a major influence on Spellirium, and it shows – from the robed protagonist, to the post-apocalyptic-but-it-looks-medieval setting, to the weaving and shearing puzzles (i actually made my hero a tailor, in honour of LOOM). LOOM ended on a down note. It was supposed to be a trilogy, taking us through the Guild of Shepherds and the Guild of Blacksmiths in the next two installments. Go build a Kickstarter project. Buy the sequel rights from LucasArts, and MAKE ME MAH GAMES.
   • Ron Gilbert. You left us with one Hell of a cliffhanger with Monkey Island 2, before the franchise went in a different direction without you. How much money do you think it would cost to wrest the MI rights from TellTale, treat Monkey Island 3 and every game thereafter like Guybrush Threepwood’s fever dream, and built a direct sequel to your game? Put that amount of money on your Kickstarter project, and witness how much fans will pay to discover the real secret of Monkey Island.

   Game designers are my celebrities. i’m far more interested in the work of Al Lowe, Jordan Mechner or Eric Chahi than i am in Michael Bay, Charlie Kaufman or Steven Spielberg (The Dig/Boom Blox notwithstanding). And just as Joe Public will pay money for tabloids full of photos of their favourite celebrities, will pay to see their movies, will pay to buy their clothing lines, i will pay you to build games for me.

   Who are your game design heroes? What do you want them to create for you, and how much will you pay? Thanks to Double Fine blazing the trail, you may well get your wish.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/09/double-fines-kickstarter-windfall-will-patronage-supplant-traditional-game-publishing/feed/ 7 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/01/manufacturing-alexes-the-secret-of-indie-game-success/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/01/manufacturing-alexes-the-secret-of-indie-game-success/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:18:38 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4347 Alex approached me, wild-eyed, at an IGDA meeting one night. We had never really carried on a complete conversation, but we were acquainted with each other. On this particular evening, Alex had something very important to say to me. Judging from his expression, i could only surmise that the Russians had bombed Princess Diana.

   

   What’s that, Alex? Archduke Ferdinand is stuck in the well??

   But my predictive powers had failed me. i was wrong. When Alex opened his mouth, with a little foam forming at the corners of his lips – possibly rabies, i thought – it was to say the following:

   “You have to play SpaceChem.”

   He wasn’t kidding. Alex was just making a game recommendation to me, but the fervour with which he said it made me know he was serious, and that my family was quite probably in danger if i didn’t listen to him.

   “You have to,” he said. “It’s BRILLIANT.”

   He went on to describe SpaceChem as this smart little puzzle game that had you, essentially, programming solutions to problems. It sounded right up my alley. i couldn’t speak for the other people in our little group, but Alex wasn’t being selective with his recommendation – he was spraying it like a gatling gun, hoping to take a few of us out in his frenzied fire. Okay, okay. i told him i’d check it out.

   When i got home after the IGDA event, there were incoming tweets from Alex. “Did you try SpaceChem yet??”

   

   The Power of Christ Compelled Him

   i didn’t buy SpaceChem that night. i didn’t buy it after i met one of the developers in person at a conference in Seattle. i didn’t buy it until months and months later, during the Christmas sale on Steam.

   But in the end, i bought SpaceChem. Sight unseen. And i bought it because of Alex.

   Alex was an evangelist. We used to reserve that word for Protestant Christians who, by feverish word of mouth and big revival tents pitched in the desert, would win people over to their cause. Today, tech companies like Adobe have carved out actual job descriptions for evangelists to ballyhoo their brand message worldwide.

   

   SpaceChem can HEAL yeh. Be HEALED-a!

   As an indie gamer working on a new title, i’ve been thinking back to Alex’s recommendation that night. i want guys like Alex to run into a crowd of people at an IGDA event and rant about how amazing Spellirium is. But that’s impossible, right? Alexes happen because someone tries your game, and likes it a lot, and decides to tell other people about it. It’s a grassroots thing. It’s like a game or a video going viral. You can’t exactly manufacture that kind of thing.

   OR CAN YOU??

   

   Spreading Your Seed

   i’ve read some articles and have attended some lectures that purport to teach you how to generate virality, and they all came off as hokum. (Matter of fact, i think i’m GIVING one of those lectures at GDC this year) But i’m a bit of a dreamer, so i decided to do a little legwork to find out how Alex, this usually mild-mannered and affable fellow i’d see at IGDA meetings, caught SpaceChem Fever.

   After my lazy-ass sleuthing (Columbo could have saved SO much time with Twitter and Wikipedia), i pieced together this timeline of events:

   1. SpaceChem developer Zachtronics Industries emailed Valve to try to get the game distributed on Steam. It didn’t happen.
   2. Zachtronics handled their own distribution and began to sell the game directly on their own website.
   3. Zachtronics (presumably) emailed a number of game industry publications about SpaceChem. One of these was Rock Paper Shotgun.
   4. Then-RPS writer Quintin Smith reviewed SpaceChem, calling it “an incredible game”.
   5. Valve approached Zachtronics two days later, and agreed to distribute SpaceChem on Steam. Fancy how that happens.
   6. Quintin wrote another SpaceChem article, in which he said this:
      

      Anyone who hasn’t yet tried the demo should physically drop what they’re doing to do so immediately. Yes, even if it’s tea. I don’t care if it’s tea and you’re drinking it directly above your child.

   7. An impressionable Alex read that article, was infected by Quintin’s ridiculous enthusiasm, and downloaded the demo.
   8. Agreeing with Quintin’s assessment, Alex stormed up to us at the IGDA meeting, and attempted to infect us with his enthusiasm.

   

   Note: it helps that Zachtronics is behind Infiniminer, and that Infiniminer inspired Minecraft. This is analogous to AMPAAS overlooking Cuba Gooding Jr. for his performance in Jerry McGuire one year, and then giving him the Oscar for Snow Dogs the next.

   

   “I’d like to thank Dog … ”

   (i don’t mean to say that SpaceChem is the game equivalent of Snow Dogs … i only mean that Quintin may have felt that in addition to building a brilliant game, Zachtronics deserved a little more attention for their general briliance, Infiniminer included.)

   This all confirms something that i learned about the indie game dev scene a few years ago at GDC. i was getting tired of listening to the Casual crowd year after year – same speakers, same topics, same takeaways. i had never sat in on the Indie Games Summit because i mistakenly thought it would be a room full of students sharing tips on where to find cracked copies of Maya. It wasn’t until i actually broke down and attended the Summit that my eyes were opened.

   It was there that i learned the secret to Indie Game Success.

   The Secret to Indie Game Success

   The indie game scene is a club. If you’re in the club, you get certain opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise – namely, you don’t get to attend the parties. So getting into the club somehow is the first step.

   What’s so great about the parties? The parties are where the indies rub elbows with the games journalists. (And let me be clear, because i absolutely hate that designation: there’s a vast difference between a reporter exposing genocide in Malaysia, and a college student complaining about the drift mechanics in the latest Mario Kart game. In most cases, journalists they ain’t. But i’ll use that term here for ease, if nothing else.)

   

   There’s a massive difference between reporting from inside a war-torn country, and reporting from inside Call of Duty.

   Here’s the thing about those journalists: they’re the king-makers. They are the love that covers a multitude of sins – and by “sins”, i mean complete lack of a marketing budget, a lousy distribution plan, and no localization strategy to speak of … all the bush-league errors that we indies make because we are, quite literally, three guys in a garage, and the garage is rented.

   i’ve become convinced that it’s the journalists who make the most successful indies fabulous amounts of money. That’s partly because games “journalists” have this characteristic penchant for hyperbole that you don’t find in mainstream media. You’d never hear Roger Ebert say “OMG n00bs I JUST SAW HOWARDS END AND UR GONNA FILL UR PAMPERS OVER THIS ONE”, but it’s not out of place in a games magazine. If Roger Ebert ever told me “get ready to drop motherfucking TEA on your baby’s FACE because Tree of Life is AMAZING”, i’m sure my impression of Tree of Life would be higher than if Ebert hadn’t said anything. And i’m sure Ebert’s silly enthusiasm would be infectious, and i’d HAVE to run up to a group of people and scream “GO SEE TREE OF LIFE RIGHT NOW OR i’LL SHANK YOU IN THE KIDNEYS!!”

   

   Listen to the man. Ebert will mess you up.

   Games journalists are the vehicle by which mainstream gamers hear about (what they think are) worthwhile indie titles. They have an incredible amount of power. That’s how Ponycorns made the rounds. i never would have seen the same amount of success with that game if the journalists hadn’t run through the streets with it impaled on a flaming stick.

   Take This, Brother – May it Serve You Well

   So the secret, once more, if you want to be a successful indie developer:

   1. Get in the club.
   2. Make something excellent.
   3. Buddy up with journalists and convince them to talk about your game as enthusiastically as possible.

   THAT’S how you manufacture Alexes. Organic word of mouth is great, but the effort you’d need to expend to personally seed enough people with infectious enthusiasm to make that fire catch is immense, and it’s probably an impossible task. You need a firestarter log. You need to spray butane on it. Games journalists are made of butane.

   Spellirium is a great game, so i’ve got that hurdle out of the way. Now i just need to run up to a group of games journalists at a GDC party and splatter my enthusiasm all over them … Alex-style.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/02/01/manufacturing-alexes-the-secret-of-indie-game-success/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/30/e-for-everyone-or-n-for-niche/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/30/e-for-everyone-or-n-for-niche/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:28:58 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4328 tl;dr – i continue to make concessions for a non-word-gamer crowd in my latest word puzzle/adventure game Spellirium. Check the poll at the bottom if you think that’s a good idea or not.

   Here are the FACTS that i’ve learned about game pricing:

   If your game has a broad appeal, you can charge a relatively small amount of money for it and hope to make it up in volume.

   If your game appeals to a small group of people – and, i mean, it REALLY appeals to that small group of people – you can charge a higher price, to make up for lost sales to everyone else, and to capitalize on your audience’s undying love of whatever.

   Angry Birds? 99 cents. Sean O’Brien: Pro Windsurfer? Ten dollars.

   

   Pay up, bitches.

   So here i am developing Spellirium. It’s a graphic adventure game, in the style of those LucasArts/Sierra Online games from the 90′s, that have been relegated to a very narrow corner of niche gamedom – nestled in-between train simulators and Japanese child-rearing games.

   

   Pay up, bitches.

   But more than that, Spellirium is an experimental mash-up – a graphic adventure game mixed with a word puzzle game. It’s LOOM meets Boggle. Niche meets niche. Narrow audience carved down to an even more narrow audience. It’s like building a train simulator where you raise your train to be a little lady.

   

   Pay up, b… well, you know the drill by now.

   Born 2 Spell

   So this game, on paper, is very very niche. Like many indies do, i’m making the game that i would want to play. You see, i grew up doing crossword puzzles. At eight years old, when other boys were thumbing through their dads’ copies of Oui, i was floundering through PennyPress variety magazines, trying to solve the Fill-Its. Other boys knew they had come of age when they finally beat up their old man after he lost the family car in a drunken poker game. My big coup was finally beating my mom at Scrabble.

   

   This is all quite possibly a function of growing up without a father.

   i ran into a lot of trouble when i presented this game to the Casual crowd in Seattle. The most common reaction i received was that Spellirium was “too smart” for the middle-aged mom audience that Casual catered to. This was a huge blow, because the game was originally designed for that exact crowd, with nods to the dark fantasy that nerdy moms love.

   

   Think moms don’t like dark fantasy? Guess again.

   i learned quickly that my biggest challenge with Spellirium would not be building the game, but marketing it. How would i find the niche audience that would adore the game, and pay a little more money for it than usual because it so suited their needs?

   My first attempt was to build a web game portal packed with word games, which i called Word Game World – the idea being that i could learn from the hundreds of other word games out there, meet and talk to my audience, and most importantly, control the ad inventory so i could push that audience to Spellirium. My plan failed when marketing Word Game World became as big a marketing challenge as marketing Spellirium ever was.

   This all led me to face some tough questions. Chief among them: did i overestimate the word game market? Is the group of players who will enjoy my game really too small to support the cost of developing it?

   

   Players camp out for the midnight launch of Spellirium.

   The success of Scrabulous, Words with Friends, Text Twist, and the critical success of indie games SpellTower, PuzzleJuice and Wurdle seem to suggest otherwise. i was even wrong about Bookworm Adventures, Spellirium’s kissing cousin and the game upon which this entire project was predicated. When the Casual crowd told me that word games didn’t “do well”, i thought for sure they were pointing to Bookworm Adventures, with its astronomical $700k budget, as a financial failure.

   But get this: i learned recently that Bookworm Adventures has had two sequels. Generally, the existence of sequels indicates the financial success of the original, or at least projected financial success of future installments.

   

   Er…

   But What If i’m Dumb?

   Before Spellirium was playable and i’d describe the game to people, common objections included:

   • What if i don’t know what words to make?
   • i’m bad at spelling.
   • i’m slow at making words.
   • How do you (or i) know there are any valid words in the grid?
   • Longest words are best words, right?
   • What if you just can’t make a word?

   Based on these fears, i’ve made a LOT of concessions in gameplay to cater to a crowd that wouldn’t really consider playing word games, and that doesn’t count “word game” as a preferred genre.

   Q: What if i don’t know what words to make?
   A: There are two features – the Dictionary and the Quicklist – that mitigate this. The Dictionary stores all the words in the game. You can add words from the Dictionary on to your Quicklist, which hangs off the side of the grid while you’re playing. This way, Spellirium becomes sort of a build-your-own-word-search. And of all the activities in the Pantheon of Word Games, even the (self-described) dumbest players can complete a word search.

   

   Q: i’m bad at spelling.
   A: In an early Spellirum challenge, you have to shear a sheep by spelling words that have to do with cutting: SHEAR, CUT, CHOP, CLIP, TRIM, etc. i’ve only completed five playtests, but 2/5 players have spelled “SHEER”, a homonym for “SHEAR”. And they were confused when it didn’t work.

   This led one tester to suggest i modify the game so that when you lasso a group of letters (like “BAED”), the game anagrams it until it finds a valid word in the Dictionary (“BEAD” or “BADE”). So it doesn’t matter whether you can spell or not -if you know there’s a valid word in the letters you lassoed, the game will accept the letters.

   

   Yes. Yes, you are.

   Q: i’m slow at making words.
   A: This was a very early concession i knew i’d have to make. Many players hated the time pressure in the game, so i modified Spellirium to be turn-based. The Spellcaster has a “health bar” at the top. Whenever you swap letter tiles, your health goes down. The farther apart the letter tiles are, the more health you lose when you swap them. Guessing at bogus words also dings your bar. This turns Spellirium into a much more methodical, strategic game, and the time pressure has been removed completely.

   

   Q: How do you (or i) know there are any valid words in the grid?
   A: Obviously, this is a question that only non-word-game-players would ever ask. A few people have suggested that i run an algorithm in the game to highlight a valid word if a player can’t find one, much the same way that Bejeweled highlights a valid match after a few seconds of inactivity have elapsed.

   Here’s the deal: the grid is 7×7 tiles, and it uses a Scrabble-like distribution, favouring common letters (RSTLNEAIOU etc – all the 1-point tiles in Scrabble). So essentially, you’re starting at a 49-letter anagram puzzle. If you can’t make a single 3-8-letter word given FORTY-NINE TILES, there’s really not much i can do for you. Go play Gears of War, and stop wasting my precious oxygen.

   

   How spell “GRUNT”?

   Q: Longest words are best words, right?
   A: Here’s another classic objection from non-word-game-players. This one is so pervasive that even the creators of PuzzleJuice conceded and make longer words worth more points. As any proper Scrabble player knows, certain words are more difficult to make than others. “MUCH” is a higher-value word than “ROOSTER”, because the letters “M”, “C” and “H” are found in fewer English words than more common letters like the ones that comprise “ROOSTER”.

   

   MUCH ROOSTER

   But in his GDC 2011 keynote, Sid Meier revealed that if the odds were 60/40 that a player would win a given battle, and the player lost that battle, the player would complain. “i had more guys”, the player would say. Mathematically, it made sense. Mathematically, the player should lose 4/10 times. But it felt unfair to the player.

   Likewise, most players don’t care a fig for letter distribution and probabilities. To them, it takes more mental effort to make a long word than a short one – Z’s and Q’s be damned. Even worse, many players feel that the more obscure a word is, the more points it should be worth. So PARSONS, which is an odd and somewhat outdated word, should be worth more points than the more common word PUNCH. But in Scrabble scoring, PARSONS is worth 9 points, while PUNCH is worth 10 points (P3 + A1 + R1 + S1 + O1 + N1 + S1 = 9 vs P3 + U1 + N1 + C3 + H2 = 10).

   

   PUNCH PARSONS

   Logistically, it would be very very difficult to award the player extra points for “obscure” or “clever” words. “Clever” words, really, are the ones you can spell using as many high-value letters as possible (think “BUZZ”, “QUENCH”, and “JAVA”). But the people – and i mean the E for Everyone people – want long words to trump challenging letter combination.

   Q: What if you just can’t make a word?
   A: i really bristle at this. It’s like if i were building a first-person shooter, and i had a lot of non-FPS fans asking me “what if i can’t shoot a guy?” There’s no such thing as not shooting a guy in an FPS. You SHOOT GUYS in an FPS. That’s what you do. That’s like asking “what if i can’t jump?” in a Mario platformer,
   or “what if i can’t make car go?” in a racing game. Spellirium is about MAKING WORDS. You MAKE WORDS. What if you can’t make a word? There’s NO SUCH THING. That’s what you DO in this GAME.

   

   i’m Down On My Niche

   (Note: that heading doesn’t make a lot of sense if you pronounce it “nitch” .. but if you pronounce it “nitch”, living does not make a lot of sense, so please go directly to the nearest suiciditorium and kill yourself. Thanks kindly.)

   As of now, i’ve only ever tested the game with non-word-game-players. i love them all dearly, and i don’t want them to be offended, but for the sake of this article, i’m going to call them the dumb players (in the same way that someone who doesn’t know how to strafe in an FPS, or how to handbrake-turn in a racing game, is “dumb”). The dumb players are not the target audience.

   

   i was concerned because the game ground to a halt at the sheep challenge when the “dumb” players played. Many of them couldn’t think of enough synonyms for “CUT”. This led me to make the biggest and most controversial gameplay concession of all: you can’t lose If you play the game and can’t pass it for lack of ability, your energy eventually runs down and you win anyway. This is based on something i heard one of the Casual folks say at GDC many years ago, while advocating for women gamers: “If you buy a video game and you can’t access ALL of the content on that disc, go ask for your money back.” So in Spellirium, you’re never “stuck”. You can always proceed through the game, see all the story bits, and play through all the challenges – even if you fail at them.

   

   A Word From the Wise

   i’ve had one lengthy email conversation with a die-hard word game fan. In stark contrast to “i can’t think of any words that mean ‘cut’” and “that’s how you spell ‘SHEER’, right?”, here’s what the target audience wants:

   if the challenges are a little more difficult than three- and four-letter words for SHEAR, then it could be a new adventure for traditional logophiles (like myself).

   Say, something like… “Save the equines by naming all of the varieties”… HORSE, ZEBRA, COLT, DONKEY, ZEBRASS, JACKASS, CAYUSE, EQUID, ZEBRINE, NEDDY, ZEBROID, BRUMBY, ASS, MOKE, BURRO, CUDDY, JENNY, AIVER, FILLY, etc. Or maybe instead of shearing a sheep in a hurry, you can say “Save the sheep from getting sheared by giving up all of its buddies”… BUCK, DAM, EWE, RAM, HOGG, HOGGET, WETHER, LAMB, MULE, TEG, TUP, DOWNS, SLINK, BELL, SHEARLING, etc.

   The “dumb” players, after trying Spellirium, have all said to me “gee … i didn’t think i would enjoy that, but it’s quite fun, and i don’t usually like word games.” So there’s a small victory. But when the game is out in the wild with only its trailer and my under-funded marketing strategy to support it, how am i going to get non-word-game-players to even pick it up and try it? One glimpse of those letter tiles, and they’ll be headed for the hills.

   i’m at a crossroads. Do i:

   1. Continue to make concessions to “dumb” players and make Spellirium playable by Everyone, and then risk “dumb” players not even bothering to try the game because it doesn’t LOOK like the kind of thing they’d enjoy
   2. Go hardcore and court the logophiles, making the game challenging and interesting (as above), and then risk not finding nearly enough hardcore wordies to buy the game and help me break even
   3. Strike some kind of balance. And what IS that balance?

   i leave it to you, dear readers! Please help me figure this one out, and clarify your stance in the Comments section!

   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

   Word.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/30/e-for-everyone-or-n-for-niche/feed/ 14 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/27/spellirium-sneak-peek-shearing-scrunches-the-sheep-2/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/27/spellirium-sneak-peek-shearing-scrunches-the-sheep-2/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:24:56 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4331 Today’s sneak peek video clip is a twofer: we’re showing off a bit of combat with a creature called a “fnoo”, which can only be damaged when you spell words with blue tiles. Later in the clip, you can see the Companion System in action:
   
   
   

   As various characters join your party, you can choose to bring one of them into battle with you. Your Companion Character hangs out in the corner of the screen and, when clicked, unleashes some cool special power. In this case, the Hunter blasts individual tiles out of the grid as you click on them. This helps you set up better combos and chains in case you get stuck.

   The Hunter is unique, because she has TWO different abilities, and this is her back-up one. We won’t reveal her primary ability until later, but just like everything in Spellirium, it’s totally cool.

   What do you think it could be??

   Word.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/27/spellirium-sneak-peek-shearing-scrunches-the-sheep-2/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/26/its-not-an-educational-game/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/26/its-not-an-educational-game/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:46:05 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4320 Now that we’re in a sort of golden era of video game idealism, when wild-eyed evangelists are spouting that games can change our lives, i think we should get a little tougher on our definitions so that we really can become a better industry. In particular, i’d like to drive attention what some people pass off as “educational games” which are, in reality, quizzes.

   

   ¿Qué?

   There’s a vast difference between a game that educates a player, and a game that requires a player to be educated. In the past year, i’ve sat down in front of a number of “educational games” which, right from the title screen, require me to prepossess certain specialized knowledge in order to succeed. These game offers no training or instruction. The only way i could learn anything from them was to guess and, if i was incorrect, hope that the game would show me the correct answers. While there’s something to be said for learning-by-failing, i’m not convinced it should be your first line of defense while educating.

   Here’s a great example: Financial Football. This “educational game” is sponsored by Visa and the NFL, and the production values (for an educational game) are through the roof.

   

   In the game experience, you fill the role of an unseen coach. In order to successfully choose your team’s play from your playbook, you have to correctly answer a question about finances. The clock ticks down as you face a multiple choice questions about 401k plans and mortgage rates.

   B… but what if you don’t know anything about finances? Isn’t the game supposed to teach you?

   No!

   Apparently, a traditional schoolteacher is supposed to print out the traditional, dry-as-toast lesson plan pdfs linked to from outside the game and teach you the underlying concepts using (presumably) the age-old one-two combo of blackboard lectures and worksheet print-outs.

   

   The future is now!

   It’s a mistake to call something like Financial Football an educational game. It’s a rich media quiz, meant to be the carrot-on-the-stick to cap off a few classes of deadly boring traditional schoolwork. This game is the equivalent of signing up for a course and walking in the first day to an exam. We can do so much more with educational games!

   (Note: If you’re a cynic like me, you’re already suspecting that Financial Football isn’t an earnest attempt at creating an educational game, but rather something Visa developed as a defense against accusations of predatory or unfair lending practices – the equivalent of McDonald’s funding Ronald McDonald House … an organization to help children … while the food they sell hurts children.)

   Watch and Learn

   i played an educational game recently that i feel got it right in a number of ways. It’s Playful Minds: Math (5-8 years old) from Gameloft.

   

   A number of math-based mini-games – essentially quizzes – are scattered across different themed maps. The game runs a short tutorial video explaining each new concept as it’s introduced. It provides tools for interacting with the elements that aid in figuring out the answer; for example, in the counting game, you’re asked how many whatevers there are on the screen. As you tap each one, the voiced-over character counts them with you. If you get a question incorrect, the game doesn’t just throw a big red X in your face and move on … you keep trying until you’re correct. The game will repeat the instruction for you if you’re confused. It’ll replay that tutorial video. You can tap a speaker button at any time to hear the instruction again.

   

   Hey, kids: add up the number of dollars your parents will have to pay to buy you these cool virtual goods!

   Are you developing an educational game, or a quiz? Make sure that your game actually teaches something, and that it gives players interesting ways to explore and internalize the subject matter before you hit them with a time-limited gun to the head. Let’s strive to create more games that use all the advantages of an interactive medium to teach before we test!

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/26/its-not-an-educational-game/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/25/spellirium-sneak-peek-shearing-scrunches-the-sheep/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/25/spellirium-sneak-peek-shearing-scrunches-the-sheep/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:21:52 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4315 The challenges in Spellirium are ever-changing. Sometimes success will be based on the length of the words you spell. Other times, it’s all about colour. In another challenge, the direction of the word might be the key.

   Here’s an early production example of what we call a “word quality” challenge: spell words that have to do with cutting in order to shear a sheep.

   
   
   

   Check back on Friday for a first glimpse of the Companion System in Spellirium!

   Word.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/25/spellirium-sneak-peek-shearing-scrunches-the-sheep/feed/ 3 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/24/spellirium-sneak-peek-brother-doug-dies/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/24/spellirium-sneak-peek-brother-doug-dies/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:19:45 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4308 The folks at Telefilm were kind enough to include Untold Entertainment in their GDC 2012 showcase, which involves playing a video reel to promote participating companies’ work at the big Canada party in the middle of the week. Since i was producing a few short clips for the reel, i thought i’d share them around.

   First up is a little snippet from very early in the game. It’s early yet, so there’s no sound. Note that we’re following the writing rule “always put a body on page one.” :)

   
   
   

   We’ll be posting a few clips of word-making gameplay and the Companion System later in the week.

   Word.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/24/spellirium-sneak-peek-brother-doug-dies/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/21/introducing-the-combochain-system-in-spellirium/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/21/introducing-the-combochain-system-in-spellirium/#comments Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:53:31 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4304 As any word game fan knows, big words aren’t always big point-earners. You can drop a six-letter word like “TETHER” in Scrabble and, even though it’s somewhat interesting and will eat up a good chunk of the board, it’s not a spectacular move because:
   1. It’s one letter short of a 50-point BINGO (Scrabble’s point bonus for using all your letters).
   2. You may not reach one of the bonus tiles with it (most notably Triple Word Score).
   3. The letters in “TETHER” are all low-value, worth one point apiece.
   4. With a sprawling crossword, you’re opening up a LOT of options for your opponent to exploit.

   Often in Scrabble, it’s the tiny, well-placed words that win the day, enabling you to re-score two additional words that are already on the board via clever linking.

   

   These aren’t the vowels you’re looking for. (photo by thrig)

   A Word of a Different Colour

   The same goes for Spellirium. Spelling a 7-letter word is fine, but if you want to send your score into the stratosphere, you need to make solidly-coloured words.

   Here’s how the combo/chain system works:

   

   (click the image to see a larger version)

   Big scores are extremely important for dominating your friends and showing off your superior vocabulary and intellect. In Story Mode, you’ll need these points in order to craft power-ups. More on power-ups in a future post.

   Word.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/21/introducing-the-combochain-system-in-spellirium/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/20/its-not-piracy-its-free-to-play/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/20/its-not-piracy-its-free-to-play/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:47:11 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4299 i don’t want to chime in on this SOPA/PIPA stuff and sound ill-informed, alarmist, and adolescent like many of the current commentators do. (“SOPA is BAD because i can’t pirate movies any more … er … i mean, because it takes away my freedom!“)

   

   Who do you think you are – William Wallace?

   The truth is that i Am Not A Lawyer, and neither are you, and that makes us (and most laypeople) incapable of reading and comprehending legislation and bill proposals and legalese. We need our lawyer friends to do that for us, and since lawyers burn money to heat their homes, we have to put up with understanding these proposed bills with second-hand, filtered, and often distorted information.

   

   Obama’s new health care plan will boil elderly people down for craft paste!!

   As a lawyer friend of mine put it to me recently, anyone who does possess the skill and interest to read a bill like SOPA also brings with him an agenda, so you need to crank your bullshit filter up to High Alert (those last few were my words, not his. And, charitably, he didn’t charge me for his words.)

   POPE-A

   i liken the way we’ve heard about SOPA and PIPA to the way medieval peasants experienced the Bible. They were illiterate, and Mass was in Latin, so they relied on the liturgy to be retold to them after church let out, in the town square. As i tell my daughters: whenever you hear anything, think to yourself “Who’s speaking? Why are they saying what they’re saying? And what do they stand to gain or lose by communicating it to me?”

   

   It may sound like a cynical attitude, but hey – welcome to the postmodern age. (Also: get stuffed, Disney copyright)

   A bit of what drives me nuts about the current lay “discourse” on SOPA is the standard weaselly excuses people make to protect their ability to steal media. And i will call it stealing, for now, because that’s what it is … taking for-sale or protected goods without paying for them is called “theft”, or “stealing”. i’m not going to argue that. What i will suggest though, as i did to my lawyer friend, is that people constantly push against the boundaries of law in ways that, once the scale tips, those once prohibited behaviours become legally permissible.

   

   There oughta be a law.

   Here’s a short list of things you couldn’t legally do a few years back, and can now do thanks to enough people bumping against the boundaries long and hard enough:

   - fellate someone (oral sex was decriminalized in Alaska in 1971. True.)
   - marry someone of the same sex (boundaries are still being pushed on this one, as you well know)
   - sit at the front of the bus if you’re black
   - vote if you’re a woman

   (the key difference here is that these laws are all about people, whereas copyright and piracy are about ideas and things … and it’s offensive to many of us that theft of ideas and damage to things can be punished as much as or more severely than damage to people)

   With that key distinction made, digital piracy is another example of people pushing up against the limits of law, and in great enough numbers, that the law will eventually have to change to meet the demands and desires of the people. There’s a very interesting parallel between video game consumption and linear media consumption. Games can be pirated just like movies, music and teevee shows can. But the gaming industry is younger and more nimble than “Old Media”, and is constantly exploring new revenue models, because the game industry (perhaps uniquely) realizes it needs to Adapt or Die.

   

   Adapt or Die! Or Skate!

   F2P via P2P

   Free-to-play is one of these new-ish revenue models. It evolved out of a situation where players were being forced to pay a high price – $60 for maybe 20 hours of entertainment – with a sight-unseen product. They could only determine its value via reviews, word-of-mouth, and brand affinity. If they spent the cash and didn’t enjoy the game, they were out of pocket and out of luck – there was really no return policy. Their best bet was to hawk the disc at a Buy-And-Sell shop (about which the industry complained bitterly).

   But now there’s this free-to-play model. The game is free – anyone can have it, no strings attached, and perhaps the file is shared on a peer-to-peer network. You download it, and you play as much as you like. There’s no risk. If you don’t like the game, you get rid of it and try something else. People can pay extra money for added value: new weapons, different levels, and snazzy hats. The hope of the game developers is that the minority of paying customers will subsidize the game’s development costs. Good games float to the forefront, and the best developers who offer the best value are rewarded with the most money.

   Introducing Free-to-Watch

   Now, think about people who pirate movies, and check this out:

   Free-to-watch is one of these new-ish revenue models. It evolved out of a situation where audiences were being forced to pay a high price – $20 for maybe 2 hours of entertainment – with a sight-unseen product. They could only determine its value via reviews, word-of-mouth, and brand affinity. If they spent the cash and didn’t enjoy the movie, they were out of pocket and out of luck – there was really no return policy. Their best bet was to hawk the DVD at a Buy-And-Sell shop.

   But now there’s this free-to-watch model. The movie is free – anyone can have it, no strings attached, and perhaps the file is shared on a peer-to-peer network. You download it, and you watch it as much as you like. There’s no risk. If you don’t like the movie, you get rid of it and try something else. People can pay extra money for added value: the big-screen theatre experience, film festival premiers with actors and directors in attendance, 3D glasses, DVD extras, and a physical product that they can touch and display on a shelf. The hope of the film-makers is that the minority of paying customers will subsidize the movie’s development costs. Good movies float to the forefront, and the best film-makers who offer the best value are rewarded with the most money.

   

   Oh yes they’re couuusins, identical couuusins …

   If movie studios were less entrenched and more willing to try new things like the game industry does, it’s possible that this whole concept of piracy would fly out the window. Laws would be changed, and “piracy” would be seen for what it really is: the agile, forward-thinking film industry’s experiment with their pioneering free-to-watch monetization model.

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/20/its-not-piracy-its-free-to-play/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/17/spellirium-then-and-now/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/17/spellirium-then-and-now/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:24:32 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4294 It’s always exciting to look back across the lifespan of a project and marvel at how it’s evolved. The development cycle of Spellirium is close to three years now – not a steady three, but three years of struggling to move the project ahead while putting food on the table, and working through economic and corporate upheaval.

   That’s why it’s so rewarding to stand on the far shore and gaze back across that tumultuous ocean. Here are some screenshots illustrating how Spellirium began, and how far it’s come.

   

   The Dictionary Then

   

   The Dictionary Now

   

   The Runekeeper cottages Then

   

   The Runekeeper cottages Now

   

   The wheel challenge Then

   

   The wheel challenge Now

   Word.

   

   
   
   
   ]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2012/01/17/spellirium-then-and-now/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/21/flash-to-ios-a-step-by-step-tutorial-part-5/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/21/flash-to-ios-a-step-by-step-tutorial-part-5/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:54:38 +0000 Sina Kashanizadeh http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4272
   

   This is the fifth part of our tutorial series by Intern Sina on creating an AIR application for free on a PC using FlashDevelop, and deploying it as a native app on an iOS device like the Apple iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

   Jump to other parts in the series:

   • Part 1 – Sign up for an Apple iOS Developer Account
   • Part 2 – Obtain your Signing Certificate & Mobile Provisioning Profile, and create your App ID
   • Part 3 – Use FlashDevelop to build your mobile AIR app
   • Part 4 – Modify your project settings and test your app on an Apple device

   Distribution Certificate

   Now that you’ve tested your app and it’s to your liking, guess you want to put it up on the App Store? Never fear, my friend! I will now show you how to get your app uploaded on the App Store so the whole world can ignore it and buy Angry Birds instead.

   This process of distribution is a bittersweet one. It’s sweet because it’s extremely similar to the development process that you just went through, so you should be familiar with the convoluted certificates and hoops you have to jump through at Apple’s pleasure. It’s bitter because it’s extremely similar to the development process that you just went through.

   

   Something about this seems awfully familiar …

   Enough talk. Let’s get cracking!

   Generate a Signing Certificate Request

   Remember that OpenSSL program that you installed in Part 2 of this tutorial? You have to open that bad boy up again to create another Certificate Signing Request. Now, it is possible to just use your old Signing Certificate – however, just to be super clear and to avoid any confusion or difficulty, we’re going to create another one.

   Note: We’ll use this new Signing Certificate Request to get a Distribution Certificate rather than a Development Certificate.

   1. Open a command prompt window. You can do this by clicking the Windows Start button and typing in cmd in the search field. Alternately, you can also hold the Windows key on your keyboard and hit the “R” key (for “Run”), then type cmd and hit Enter.

      

   2. Once you are in the command prompt, navigate to your Open SSL bin folder. Depending on where you installed it, you will have to navigate to a different path than in this example. (i hope you installed Open SSL in a location that you can remember!) Check Part 2 if you need a refresher on Windows CLI (Command Line Interpreter) commands.

      

   3. Punch this command into the CLI and hit the ENTER key when you’re finished:

      openssl genrsa -out mykey.key 2048

      You should see this response:

      

   4. Next, type (or highlight the line, right-click, choose “Copy”, and right-click/”Paste” in the CLI):

      openssl req -new -key mykey.key -out CertificateSigningRequest.certSigningRequest  -subj "/emailAddress=yourAddress@example.com, CN=John Doe, C=US"

      Now, before you hit ENTER you’ll want to edit a couple of things. First, replace “John Doe” with your own name or company name. Then replace the “yourAddress@example.com” email with your own email. Press ENTER.

      You should get a message similar to this:

      

      You just generated the Signing Certificate Request file that you’ll use to ask Apple for your Distribution Signing Certificate. The Signing Certificate Request file is located in the bin folder of your Open SSL install. It has a .certSigningRequest file extension and should look like this:

      

   Obtain a Signing Certificate for Distribution

   You have to upload your Signing Certificate Request file to the Apple Provisioning Portal to get your Distribution Signing Certificate. Onward.

   Note: There have been instances where this upload does not work with Google Chrome. Just to be safe, use another browser like Firefox.

   1. Navigate to the Apple iOS Provisioning Portal within the Dev Center.

      

   2. Log in with your developer account and click on Certificates.
   3. Click on the Distribution tab.

      

      Note: In our previous tutorials, you requested a certificate from the Development tab. An app signed with a Development certificate cannot be successfully submitted to the Apple App Store.

      If you have an old Distribution Certificate because you’ve made a prior app, and you’d still like to follow along, you can go ahead and Revoke it. Revoking the Certificate will not affect your apps that are already on the App Store, because the Certificate is primarily used during the upload process so that Apple can identify you.

      Note: I recommend revoking an existing Certificate because Apple seems to issue only one Certificate per Team Agent. You must revoke any existing Certificate to be able to request another. Why is it set up like this? I have no idea.

      

   4. If you don’t have a pre-existing Distribution Signing Certificate, you can just go ahead and click Request Certificate.

      

      On the next screen, you will upload the Signing Certificate Request file that you generated in the previous section.

      

   5. Click the Browse button and navigate to the OpenSSL bin folder.
   6. Select the Signing Certificate Request file and click Submit. When you are finished, you’ll see your Distribution Signing Certificate ready to download from the web page.

      

   Don’t download your Distribution Certificate quite yet. You still need to create an App ID and a Mobile Provisioning Profile.

   Create a New App ID

   When deciding what you want your App ID to be, you have two choices:

   • Create an entirely new App ID
   • Use the Existing App ID that you create in Part 2

   If you want to use your existing App ID, then just skip to the next section. If for some reason you don’t like the name of your App ID, go ahead and make a new App ID, following the steps outlined in Part 2.

   Create a Mobile Provisioning Profile for Distribution

   Now that you have an App ID, you can create your Mobile Provisioning Profile.

   1. Within the Provisioning Portal website, click Provisioning in the sidebar.
   2. Click the Distribution tab.

      

      In previous tutorials, you created a Development profile for testing. You won’t be able to upload your app to the Apple App Store unless you create a Distribution profile, so make sure you select the correct tab.

      You can either create a new Provisioning Profile, or modify an existing one. Modifying an existing profile if you want to switch between App Store and Ad Hoc distribution. If you’ve never created a Distribution profile, read on. Instructions for modifying a profile are in the section following.

   3. Click on New Profile.

      

      Note: You’ll only see this option if you are the fee-paying Team Admin.

   4. In the next section, you’ll have to fill out a bunch of options. The first option is the Distribution Method. As you can see, you can choose between App Store and Ad Hoc.
      • Choose App Store if you are completely satisfied with your app and you want to submit it to Apple for review. If all goes well, then your app will be released whenever Apple deems it worthy.
      • The Ad Hoc option can be thought of as a closed beta for your app. When you choose Ad Hoc, you are able to release your app to a maximum of 100 people, and only they will have access to it. Your App will NOT appear in the public App Store if you choose Ad Hoc.

      Note: Notice when you choose App Store, the “Devices” option is greyed out. When you choose Ad Hoc, it allows you to choose a number of devices that you have registered. The App Store option releases your app on the public App Store, so it doesn’t make sense to target specific devices.

   5. Your Profile Name is the name that you want for your Provisioning Profile. The Distribution Certificate that you created should be visible here.
   6. Finally, you have to choose which App ID with which you want to register your Provisioning Profile.

      

   7. Click Submit.
   8. You should ee a list of the Provisioning Profiles that you’ve created. Click download on the Provisioning Profile that you just created, and save it to you computer.

      

   Modify your Provisioning Profile

   Note: If you’re not modifying an existing Provisioning Profile (say, from Ad Hoc to App Store), skip over this section.

   1. Within the Provisioning Portal website, click Provisioning in the sidebar.
   2. Click the Distribution tab.

      

   3. Click Modify on the Provisioning Profile that you want to reuse.

      

   4. Switch to either Ad Hoc or App Store. The distinction between these two options is explained in the preceding section.

      

   5. Click Submit.
   6. You should see a list of the Provisioning Profiles that you’ve created. Click download on the Provisioning Profile that you just modified, and save it to your computer.

      

   Download your Distribution Certificate

   You just need to download the Distribution Signing Certificate that you created at the top of this tutorial, and then you are ready to bundle your .ipa file to submit to the App Store.

   1. Click on the Certificates section in the sidebar.
   2. Click the Distribution tab.

      

   3. You’ll see that your Distribution Signing Certificate is ready to download. You can also see that it contains the Distribution Provisioning Profile that you just made.

      

10. Click download and save the file to your computer. Just to make things easier, you can save that certificate in the Open SSL bin folder, where your Certificate Signing Request file is sitting.

    

Note: Make sure not to get confused between your Development Certificate and Profile, and your Distribution Certificate and Profile. You won’t be able to upload your app to the App Store if you accidentally use the Distribution set of certs in these next steps.

Convert the Signing Certificate to a .p12 File

You’ll have to perform the .p12 conversion on your Certificate again, as you did in an earlier tutorial. Here are the steps:

1. Open up your command prompt.
2. Navigate to your Open SSL bin folder.
3. Copy and paste this command:

   openssl x509 -in distribution_identity.cer -inform DER -out distribution_identity.pem -outform PEM

   After you enter that command, you’ll see a .pem file show up in your OpenSSL bin folder.

   

4. Copy and paste this command in the CLI:

   openssl pkcs12 -export -inkey mykey.key -in distribution_identity.pem -out iphone_dev.p12

   Note: These are the exact same commands that you used for our Development Certificate in an earlier tutorial, except that the file name has been changed from “development” to “distribution”.

5. After you punch in the command, enter a password and then verify that password. Make sure the password is something that you will remember. (Save it in a .txt file! – Ed.)

   Note: Remember that you may get an error mentioning a “random state”. Just type in the command set RANDFILE=.rnd and it should fix the problem for you.

6. Navigate to the bin folder in your Open SSL directory and you should see your .p12 file. Hooray!

   

Hello, Planet

As we mentioned off the top, much of this is familiar territory. With all of your Distribution certs sorted out, you’re ready to bundle up your final .ipa file and foist it onto an unsuspecting public. In the next tutorial, you’ll follow familiar instructions to bind your certs to your .ipa, and experience that magical moment of uploading your app for Apple’s approval (followed shortly by that equally magical moment of getting your app rejected cuz BEWBZ.) Let’s do it!

This is the fourth part of our tutorial series by Intern Sina on creating an AIR application for free on a PC using FlashDevelop, and deploying it as a native app on an iOS device like the Apple iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

Jump to other parts in the series:

• Part 1 – Sign up for an Apple iOS Developer Account
• Part 2 – Obtain your Signing Certificate & Mobile Provisioning Profile, and create your App ID
• Part 3 -Use FlashDevelop to build your mobile AIR app

In this section of the tutorial, the rubber meets the road. You’ll make all the finicky adjustments to FlashDevelop and the AIR bundling files to get your Hello Planet app up and running on your testing device.

Point FlashDevelop to the Merged SDK Folder

Now that your (cr)app is successfully up and running, you have to make a few tweaks and adjustments to FlashDevelop. You’ll start by telling FlashDevelop all about that merged SDK folder you created in Part 3.

1. In the Project panel on the right, you’ll see a file called AIR_iOS_readme.txt. Double click that file to open it.

   This txt file lists a number of settings needed to get your ipa file working. The ipa file is the Holy Grail- the native app file that you’ll send to your testing device to see everything working properly. A window pops up with a bunch of options.

2. Click the Project Properties button at the top of the Properties Panel (alternately, you can use the menus to navigate to Project>Properties).

   

3. Change the version of your AIR SDK from 2.7 to 3.0 because (at the time of this writing), that is the latest version.

   

4. Click on the SDK tab, and click Manage.

   

5. On the next screen you will see list of installed Flex SDKs. Click the ellipsis (…) button at the end of that line. An InstalledSDK Collection Editor window pops up.

   

6. You’re going to point FlashDevelop to the location of our recently-downloaded Flex SDK (the same folder that contains both the Flex SDK and AIR SDK that you created earlier in this tutorial). First click the Add button, and then click on the Path line to get another ellipsis. Click on THAT ellipsis to browse your computer.

   

7. Once you have clicked the ellipsis button, a Windows File Browser appears. Navigate to the merged SDK directory. Select that folder and click OK.

   

8. Click OK again to exit the InstalledSDK Collection Editor window.
9. Click Close.
10. In the drop-down menu, you should see the Default option. Click on the drop-down list and choose the SDK location you just told FlashDevelop about.

    

11. Click Apply.
12. Click OK. Voila! Your SDK is now setup for your FlashDevelop Project.

    Let’s just test it out quickly to see if it works. The code you pasted in the previous tutorial prints out the words “Hello Planet” within your app. Well, I’m going to change mine to say “Sina is Cool”, just because I can, and also because I AM COOL. (You may be tempted to replace “Sina” with your own name. Please don’t, because uh … your code won’t work.)

    Your resulting app should look like this:

    

    A beautiful sight, isn’t it?

    (At this point, Sina actually is pretty damned cool. – Ed.)

Delete the Extra Icons Folder

Now you have FlashDevelop set up to create mobile-formatted AIR apps. Your app compiles, and you have your Mobile Provisioning Profile and your .p12 Signing Certificate waiting in the wings. All you need to do is combine all these amazing files together to create the Holy Grail .ipa file.

An .ipa file is like the program file – the Windows executable (.exe) – that you need to test your iPhone/iPad App on a device, and ultimately upload it to the Apple App Store.

The creators of FlashDevelop 4 made a minor error when they created the Mobile App template: the template generates a duplicate icons folder that will cause a conflict when you try to bundle your .ipa file. You need to get rid of this extra folder to make sure your .ipa file to builds properly.

1. Look in the right sidebar that lists your files and folders. You’ll see a folder called bin. (This is one of the folders that FlashDevelop created for you automatically when you created your project.)
2. Click on the little plus sign beside the bin folder to expand it. You will see a folder called icons tucked inside. Right-click the icons folder and click Delete. Problem solved.

   

Integrate Your Cert Files

cert\iphone_dev.p12

In the IOS_PROVISION line, type the name of your Mobile Provisioning Profile.

All in all your SetupApplication.bat should look like this:

Note: Make sure you have the path properly setup as well as the same exact filename. If you have any sort of typo, it’s not going to work.

Get Your Ducks in a Row

You’re almost there! All you have to do is edit the SetupSDK.bat file.

1. Double-click the SetupSDK.bat file to open it in FlashDevelop.
2. At the top of the file, you’ll see a line that says path to Flex SDK in green. Right under that line is the path to the SDK. However, it’s not pointing to the merged SDK folder that we created earlier. Replace the default path with the path to your merged SDK folder. It might look similar to this:

   

   Note: Remember to save often!

3. Open the application.xml file. This xml file is the descriptor file for your application. You have to double-check to ensure everything in there is correct. Everything from your App name to the version of your App is located in this file.

   

4. Change the version number at the end of the xmlns parameter of the root application node to the version of AIR you’re running. In this case (and at the time of this writing), it’s 3.0.
5. In the id node, enter the package name that you created for your Mobile Provisioning Profile.

   

   If you don’t remember what your Bundle ID was, go to the Provisioning Portal on the iOS developer website and click on Provisioning.

Compile Time

After all that, you’re finally ready to compile your .ipa file to test on an iOS device.

1. In the sidebar, right-click the PackageApp.bat file and select Execute.

   

2. You’ll see a bunch of options. Since this is only a test, you can pick the fast test option. This option will quickly create an .ipa file for you to throw onto your iWhatever. Once you choose fast test, sit back and relax.

   

3. Look in the dist folder in the sidebar. You now have an .ipa file!

   

Test Your New App

Take a moment and soak in what you’ve accomplished. You’re in the final steps of your epic journey of iEnlightenment. All you have to do now is load the hard-fought .ipa file up on your iWhatever.

I made a copy of my Mobile Provisioning Profile and my .ipa file and put them in a separate folder. I suggest you do the same as a backup measure … better safe than sorry. Now let’s get that sucker onto your device.

1. Plug in your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/iEtCetera and let it sync in iTunes.
2. After it’s synced, go to Library -> Apps.

   

3. To add your Mobile Provisioning Profile, click and drag it from your folder into the iTunes Library.
4. Follow the same process to add your .ipa file.

   Note: You have to add your Mobile Provisioning Profile before you add your .ipa file! If you add these files in the wrong order, you may get errors!

   

   After dragging your .ipa file into iTunes, you’ll see a generic App icon that FlashDevelop/AIR generated for you.

   

5. In the left sidebar, click on Devices -> Your iPad/iPod/iPhone.
6. Click on the little Apps button at the top of iTunes. You’ll see a screen that displays all your Apps. Within that screen, you should be able to find your App (you may have to scroll around a little to find it).
7. Click the Apply button to transfer everything to your device.

   iTunes will go through the syncing process, and will add your App to your device. You can click sync a few more times just to make sure everything is good – iTunes doesn’t always behave perfectly on a PC.

   Note: If you get an error saying that the App failed to install, your Bundle ID or something within your Application.xml may be wrong. Double-check everything! There is no harm in deleting your App and from iTunes and transferring it again. You can also overwrite your Mobile Provision Profile with a corrected one.

   DOUBLE NOTE: If you change anything in your project, you must compile your .ipa file again, because it contains all the new information necessary for iTunes to run your App.

8. Fire up your iPad/iPhone and BAM!

   

   It’s so … beautiful. *sniff*

To the App Store … and Beyond!

In this section of the tutorial, you:

• Pointed FlashDevelop to your merged AIR/Flex SDK folder
• Corrected an error with the Mobile AIR template by deleting an extraneous icons folder
• Copied your Mobile Provisioning Profile and your .p12 Signing Certificate into your project and pointed FlashDevelop to them
• Pointed the SetupSDK.bat file to the merged SDK folder
• Modified the application.xml descriptor file to match your project settings
• Compiled your project and created an .ipa file
• Copied your .ipa file and Mobile Provisioning Profile into iTunes
• Synced your app and ran it on your testing device!

With your project set up, you can continue developing your application until you have an amazing thing that you’re ready to foist on the app-buying public. There are still a few more things you need to know to deploy your app to the live iTunes store. What about that generic AIR icon? Wouldn’t you like to see something nicer in its place? And how do you get your .ipa file in front of the app-approvers at Apple to get it to show up in iTunes? And are we finished with certificates and profiles, or is there more to do?

Short answer? There’s more to do.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/14/flash-to-ios-a-step-by-step-tutorial-part-4/feed/ 9 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/13/buy-this-book-buttonless-incredible-iphone-and-ipad-games-and-the-stories-behind-them/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/13/buy-this-book-buttonless-incredible-iphone-and-ipad-games-and-the-stories-behind-them/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:59:32 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4239 A few months ago, an author named Ryan Rigney contacted me and asked if i would provide an interview about Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, the iPad game i created with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra. Ryan’s been collecting interviews from top iOS developers to create Buttonless: Incredible iPhone and iPad Games and the Stories Behind Them, which gives a behind-the-scenes look at the development of your favourite touch-based games:

The book includes interviews from the developers of these fine titles:

• Canabalt
• Sword and Sworcery EP
• Infinity Blade
• Angry Birds
• Words with Friends
• Plants vs. Zombies

It really is a remarkable collection of stories, and a very current must-read book for you if you’re currently embroiled in, or are considering, iOS development.

Ponycorns started life as an online Flash game, but now enjoys success on mobile platforms. For a lesson on how to port your Flash games to iOS, check out Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial right here at Untold Entertainment.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/13/buy-this-book-buttonless-incredible-iphone-and-ipad-games-and-the-stories-behind-them/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/09/ponycorns-and-the-fluffification-of-gdc-2012/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/09/ponycorns-and-the-fluffification-of-gdc-2012/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:08:02 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4226 HUGE news today, as Game Developers Conference 2012 announces the first of its summit sessions, including Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar. Ryan Henson Creighton (that’s me!) will share with attendees the story of how Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Aventure, which was co-developed by 5-year-old Cassandra Creighton, became a worldwide viral hit … and more importantly, how Untold Entertainment worked hard to sustain – and even amplify – the buzz.

The wonderful announcement came amid some grumbling and criticism from certain elements of the indie game dev community, who called foul because we’ve been selling merchandise to happy Ponycorns fans across the globe (GET YOURS TODAY!). Macaulay Culkin’s name was actually invoked (referencing the way his parents hoarded all the acting money he made as a kid).

They never should have forgotten him that one time at Christmas. (Or that other time in New York.)

Rest assured, friends, that not only has Cassie earned more money through donations to her college fund than Untold Entertainment has made on Ponycorns altogether, but she also has a legally defined percentage stake in the project. By the time we make Ponycorns 7: Ponycorn Harder, Cassie will be drying her tears on a fat stack of trust fund cash. And as any of the hundreds of people who attended TOJam can attest, she had a great time working on the game.

Behold: the tragically gaunt face of an overworked and exploited child labourer.

As IGF (Independent Games Festival) adjudication continues, what’s more important is that Ponycorns rightly sweeps the entire awards show, winning not only the Moustache Craft honorarium, but also the Glorm Juerven Award for Most Obvious Weak Spot on a Mid-Level Boss. Even a single nomination means that i can justify bringing Cass to GDC, as the youngest ever game developer honoured by the IGF. Once Ponycorns pulls in an appalling number of nominations, we’ll happily suffer an angry Twitter onslaught from disgruntled indies.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/09/ponycorns-and-the-fluffification-of-gdc-2012/feed/ 1 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/08/if-miyamoto-went-indie/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/08/if-miyamoto-went-indie/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:32:11 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4221 Wired reports that legendary video game developer Shigeru Miyamoto is stepping down from his role at Nintendo overseeing the company’s large video game projects. Miyamoto, who was behind some of the biggest video game franchises including The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Star Fox, Pikmin, Donkey Kong and Nintendogs, says he wants to work on smaller projects with shorter timespans. This led many Twitter adherents to comment that Miyamoto was going “indie”, joining the ranks of self-funded, hipster game developers. i took the concept and ran with it in this Twitter hash tag game.

• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Link would just … you know … wander around. No enemies, no struggle … just piano.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Every game stars Luigi.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Mario would walk RIGHT to LEFT. Doesn’t that BLOW your MIND??
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d crash on someone’s couch at #GDC, lobby-surf for the first few days, and only spring for an Expo pass.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie The smashable barrels in Donkey Kong would be labeled “hope”, “ambition”, “faith” and “mother”.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie After your first crash in ExciteBike, the rest of the game would be about your slow, painful road to rehabilitation.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie A Star Fox game would last five minutes, and involve a sub-plot about a stillborn son.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Ocarina of Time would pale in comparison to the series’ crown jewel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d be making this really awesome MMO but, you know – it’s not ready yet.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d make a twin-stick tower defense platformer for XBLiG using copyrighted spritesheets from an old Genesis import.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d show upto #IndieCade and give a meandering talk using words he remembered from his first-year Psych class.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Kid Icarus would say “fuck” a lot.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d accept his #IGF award by French-kissing Cactus and kicking over an amp on his way off the stage.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie The hookshot would be a metaphor for how we all need to cling to something.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Nintendogs would be essentially the same, except you could REVERSE TIME.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d release Stage Debut, and it would sweep the #IGF.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Samus Aran would take off her codpiece and reveal that she’s a DUDE.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Mario Extreme Unicycling.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Mario Power Hackey Sack.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d spent most of his afternoons in the “Mushroom Kingdom”.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie You’d be able to fly one beta mission in Starfox, and he’d charge twenty bucks for it. And then make 4 million dollars.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d give you naming rights to the monkey at the top of the level if you bid more than $1000 on Kickstarter.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Every Zelda game ever made would show up in a Steam sale for a dollar nintey-five.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie You’d take Super Mario down into a water level from which you’d never be able to escape.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie He’d grow his hair out, take up smoking, and start calling himself “the Moto.” But, you know. Whatever.
• #ifMiyamotoWentIndie Plaid goombas.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/08/if-miyamoto-went-indie/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/07/flash-to-ios-a-step-by-step-tutorial-part-3-2/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/07/flash-to-ios-a-step-by-step-tutorial-part-3-2/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:25:16 +0000 Sina Kashanizadeh http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4193

This is the third part of our tutorial series by Intern Sina on creating an AIR application for free on a PC using FlashDevelop, and deploying it as a native app on an iOS device like the Apple iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

Jump to other parts in the series:

• Part 1 – Sign up for an Apple iOS Developer Account
• Part 2 – Obtain your Signing Certificate & Mobile Provisioning Profile, and create your App ID
• Part 4 – Modify your project settings and test your app on an Apple device

Luke Loses His Hand

Part 2 of this tutorial was like The Empire Strikes Back. It was the crisis moment in the story of deploying a Flash project to the Apple iOS platform. It was dark, it was difficult, and Han Solo wound up frozen in carbonite. Part 3 is redemptive: with all that command line and certificate red tape out of the way, you can finally build our AS3 app using FlashDevelop. Watch closely, friends: you may spot some ewoks.

It’s a trap.

Install Flash Develop

As I mentioned earlier in the series, FlashDevelop is a FREE, PC-only coding environment that is used throughout the industry and loved by many. If you haven’t installed it, head here to download the latest version.

FlashDevelop is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) where you can create many different types of applications from scratch. The most amazing thing about FlashDevelop is that you don’t actually need to buy Adobe’s Flash Professional software to create Flash (swf) content. FlashDevelop has amazing, time-saving features like importing code libraries on the fly, and numerous awesome templates. At the time of this writing, the latest edition of FlashDevelop is 4.0.0. This version of FlashDevelop contains a template for Mobile AIR applications which you can use for iOS and Android development. In this tutorial, you’ll use the iOS version of the template.

Create a Merged SDK Folder

There are two SDKs (Software Development Kits) you’ll need to deploy Flash content to the iOS platform: Flex and AIR. Depending on the version of FlashDevelop you install, these two SDKs may already be included in the download. You’re going to download them both anew and put them in a single folder. That way, if you mess anything up, you can take off and nuke the site from orbit instead of messing up your main FD install. It’s the only way.

1. Download the latest AIR SDK (which, at the time of this writing, was v3.0)
2. Download the Flex SDK.
3. These two packages download as .zip files. Extract them wherever you like on your computer – just make sure you know where you put them.
4. Once you have both SDK’s extracted to separate folders, copy everything in the AIR SDK folder into the Flex SDK folder. Windows will ask you if you want to overwrite certain files. Say “yes” to everything.

   

   You now have a folder with the Flex SDK and the AIR SDK merged into one. This is a Good Thing™.

Point FlashDevelop to the Flex SDK

In order to compile (build and execute) your app, you have to point FlashDevelop to the merged SDK folder that you just created.

1. Open up FlashDevelop and hit F10 or go to Tools->Program Settings in the menus.

   

2. In the Program Settings menu, click on AS3 Context.
3. Find the Language section, and the Flex SDK Location line within it.

   

4. Click the ellipsis button at the end of that line, and navigate to the merged SDK folder.
5. Click Close to commit the change.

Set Up Your Mobile AIR Application

Once you have downloaded and installed FlashDevelop, open it up and you should see it in all its glory:

To begin with, you’ll need to create a new FlashDevelop project, which is a group of folders governed by a file filled with metadata about your project.

1. Create a new project by clicking Project -> New Project in the menu.
2. Now you will see a screen with a multitude of options. These are all project starter templates that FlashDevelop has for you to use. The one you want is the AIR Mobile AS3 App. Select this template, choose a location on your hard drive to save it, give a name to your project, and hit OK.

   Note: A package name is not required but the option is there if you’d like to use it.

   

   After you hit OK, FlashDevelop creates a number of folders and files for you, including:

   • The .as3proj file, which is a FlashDevelop project file filled with metadata that keeps track of various aspects of your project.
   • The bin folder. This is where your finished files end up.
   • The lib folder, where you can put your “construction” files and artwork.
   • The src folder, which contains your .as AS3 code files.
3. Once you’ve created your project file, FlashDevelop starts you off with a blank screen. To open up your code, click on the src folder in the Project sidebar on the right. (The Project sidebar lists your computer’s actual directory structure so that you can access your Actionscript files quickly and easily.)
4. Inside the src folder, double click the Main.as file to open it. This is your project’s point of entry, where you can start writing the code for your app.

   

5. Push the F5 key on your keyboard, or the click the little play button at the top-middle of FlashDevelop to compile and run your project.

   

   The first compile will take little bit of time, but any compile after that should be quick, because the compiler builds on an as-needed basis, compiling only your most recent changes (as opposed to Flash Professional, which compiles your ENTIRE project every single time. Bleh!). Once you run your new project, the FlashPlayer should pop up and you should see a blank screen. Luckily, this is exactly what we want. As of right now, this is your App.

   

Hello, Planet

This is nice and all, but let’s try to the write a simple message on screen so that when we are testing, we know it actually works. Let’s write “Hello Planet” on-screen.

1. Just below the green commented line where it says //entry point in your Main.as file, copy and paste these lines into your code:

   var tf:TextField = new TextField();  
   var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();  
   format.font = "_sans";  
   format.size = 48;  
   tf.defaultTextFormat = format;  
   tf.text = "Hello Planet";  
   tf.width = stage.stageWidth - 20;  
   tf.x = 10;  
   tf.y = 10;  
   addChild(tf);

   

2. Click the compile button (or press F5). Did it screw up? Good. There are a couple more things you have to do before you are ready to compile without errors.
3. In your code, click to place your cursor carat on the word Textfield and hit Ctrl+Shift+1 on your keyboard. The word turns blue. If you scroll to the top of the class, you’ll notice that there is an extra import line at the top of your code. CTRL+SHIFT+1 is a special feature of FlashDevelop that does code completion. In this instance, CTRL+SHIFT+1 automatically handles your import statements for you. You need to import the TextField code with this statement if you want your TextField to work.
4. Use CTRL+SHIFT+1 on the TextFormat word and you should see this:

   

5. Now click Compile (or press F5).

   

   Thar she blows!

   (It works, but it’s no Angry Birds. – Ed.)

Bust Out the Hardware

This is moving along nicely. You:

• Installed FlashDevelop, a free and open-source IDE for creating Flash and AIR content
• Downloaded and sunk the latest AIR SDK and Flex SDK into a single, merged folder
• Pointed FlashDevelop to the Flex SDK to use its superior compiler
• Created a new FlashDevelop project using the Mobile AIR application template
• Wrote and compiled a new Hello Planet AIR app that you can deploy to a testing device

In the next part of the tutorial, you’ll fine-tune FlashDevelop and modify a number of settings and batch files to create the magical, mystical .ipa file, and you’ll see that file running on your testing device.

Continue to Part 4

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/07/flash-to-ios-a-step-by-step-tutorial-part-3-2/feed/ 9 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/02/ryan-henson-creighton-is-a-solid-speaker/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/02/ryan-henson-creighton-is-a-solid-speaker/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:24:41 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4154 There’s no humble way to put this: i kick ass. i’ve survived Conference Season, having spoken at three conferences in two weeks (including FITC Screens 2011, DIG London and Gamercamp Lvl 3). Apart from hearing kind praise anecdotally from conference attendees, FITC brings the hard data.

The hard Data.

The presentation i gave at Screens, titled Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar, was the third-highest rated talk at the conference. Here are the ratings and comments from the feedback forms that the attendees filled out:

Was the speaker knowledgeable on the topic presented? 9.68
Did the session meet your expectations? 9.59
Did the speaker present the material in a clear and well-organized way? 9.77
Please rate the overall effectiveness of the speaker. 9.77
This session will affect the way I work 8.18
Overall average 9.40

Attendee comments:

• Funny and Entertaining REAL
• Awesome Story
• Inspiring
• Hilarious Magical, Thank You.
• Funny and fun. Great way to end the conference.
• Inspirational! Thanks!
• Excellent way to close out!!
• Very enthusiastic. Great end to the event.
• Hilarious, entertaining. A great story.
• AMAZING!
• Hysterical with creative, fun and useful
• Interesting.
• PONYCORNS!

Huge thanks to the conference organizers and to everyone who came to hear me speak. i’ve submitted bids in to tell the Ponycorns story to attendees at GDC 2012 and the Flash Gaming Summit next year, and this can only help. Fingers crossed!

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/02/ryan-henson-creighton-is-a-solid-speaker/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/02/civilization-ponycorns-creators-named-among-backbones-top-15-canadians-in-digital-technology/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/02/civilization-ponycorns-creators-named-among-backbones-top-15-canadians-in-digital-technology/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 06:25:02 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4150 It’s not enough that my daughter Cassandra created the artwork, puzzle design and voice work for her first video game at the tender age of five. Now, Backbone Magazine has named her as one of the Top 15 Canadians in Digital Technology.

Wanna know who else made the list? Legendary Civilization game developer Sid Meier, who keynoted last year’s Game Developers Conference.

i Got All the Awards

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is an entrant in this year’s Independent Games Festival, so she has a real shot at winding up at GDC herself to accept all the awards, including Most Prodigious Use of Invisible Walls and the Hervé Velasquez Memorial Award for Digital Inclination. It’s very possible that if Ponycorns is nominated, Cassie can actually meet Sid at GDC 2012. That’s incredible! Wouldn’t you have wanted that opportunity at five years old? IGF judges: you can make this happen.

Cassie’s game enjoyed international fame and critical acclaim after delighting fans the world over. Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure has been featured in digital and print publications as far away as Spain, Japan, and Russia. The game was a finalist in the 2011 IndieCade Festival, and many games journalists have hailed it as an early contender for Game of the Year 2011 since its release in March .

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/02/civilization-ponycorns-creators-named-among-backbones-top-15-canadians-in-digital-technology/feed/ 7 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/01/untold-entertainment-winter-internship-program-2012/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2011/12/01/untold-entertainment-winter-internship-program-2012/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:44:31 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=4145 Untold Entertainment is a boutique game development studio in downtown Toronto. We specialize in games and apps for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers. We’re looking for someone to take an unpaid internship for the winter months of January – April 2012.

Eligibility

In order to apply, you must be a student at an accredited institution that can sign paperwork and sanction your internship and all that fun stuff. (Unfortunately, we’re no longer hiring non-students for internships.)

An ideal candidate will be someone who is awesome. These are qualities we’ve prized in past interns:

• Self-starter. Can you begin a task with minimal teat-suckling?
• Problem solver. Do you like facing an unending string of problems that you need to fix? Are you motivated by checking things off a to-do list?
• Life-long Learner. If you don’t know how to do something, is that an excuse not to do it? Or is that an opportunity to add a new skill to your toolbelt?
• Can-do attitude. How do you respond if you’re asked to do something you don’t particularly want to do?
• Humorist. If you’re looking for a respectable, corporate workplace environment, this ain’t it. Anyone caught wearing a suit will be shot.
• Ox. When faced with impossible odds, do you give up? Or do you roll an impossible-sided die?
• Google Master. Do you know the difference between a question that should be answered by your mentor, and one that can be more easily and quickly answered after a brief query to the electronic compendium of all human knowledge at your very fingertips? You should.

What Can You Do?

Here are some professional capabilities that interest us. (You don’t need to have all of these – this is just a list of individual skillsets for which we have an immediate need):

• Writing. We’re not talking about the Gears of War fan fic you wrote last summer. We’re talking about real, solid technical or creative writing skills, with a fanatical devotion to preserving the Queen’s English. Have you ever been called a “Grammar Nazi”? Come to Papa.
• Programming. Particularly Actionscript 3, but we have an interest in Unity C# or javascript, HTML 5, Haxe, and OBJ-C. (C++/Python/Ruby/Java, not so much.)
• Web Development. CSS, HTML and PHP. We constantly have big needs in this area.
• Art and Animation. Character design, animation, and background/layout, particularly in the classical 2D North American style (think Disney, Warner Bros. and Bluth.) Do you know how to make a moody 3D level with pipes and bricks in Unreal Engine? We don’t care.
• Business Development. Do you like cold-calling, tweaking SEO, posting spammy blog posts under assumed names, writing press releases, building relationships, and monitoring usage statistics? Good, cuz we don’t.
• Photojournalism. Are you handy with a video camera? Can you cut stuff together in Premiere with skill and style? We could use you.
• Defeat Ganon in the original Legend of Zelda with only five hearts. Just kidding. We couldn’t care less if you’re good at playing video games. We’re about making them.

What Will You Be Doing?

• Watering the plants. Plants don’t water themselves. (The plants and i both learned this the hard way.)
• Researching. If i want to know how to do something complicated or obscure, but i can’t be arsed to look it up myself, it falls to you.
• Patching the drywall. There are always little CSS/HTML fixes to be made across our sites. Tinkering is very useful to us.
• Tools Development. There are a number of features of our internal toolset that need building – recent examples include a heat map, and an xml “script stripper”.
• Pretty pictures. If you’re a good artist, be damn sure we have stuff for you to draw.
• Video Developer Diaries. We’d like to make some of these, but we’re afraid that cameras will steal our souls.

How Much Do i Get Paid?

This is an unpaid internship. Interns are compensated with soda pop and coffee (our notorious coffee maker has somehow fixed itself). You may occasionally be taken to lunch, if there are coupons.

This is an opportunity to gain great experience and to put some real game development studio work on your resume, along with the chance to get your name in the credits of a shipped title. Many former interns have remarked that they understand the business of game development and the entrepreneurial side of the industry much better after having worked at Untold Entertainment. Working at a small studio is a far different experience from working at a big triple-A juggernaut. As an additional perk, we offer No-Pants Fridays.

Is It Worth It?

Here’s what some current and former interns have to say about their experience:

Working at Untold Entertainment requires three things: Hard work, a willingness to learn, and HARD WORK. If you have these attributes, Ryan will look out for you. Trust me – in this industry it is good to have a friend like Ryan.

Also, pants required.

- Intern Sina Kashanizadeh, Fall 2011

I learned more about making games at Untold than I ever did at school.

- Intern Cale Bradbury, Academic year 2010-2011

The stuff I learned from Ryan is the stuff I’m currently getting paid for in California. The effort to reward ratio is incredible.

- Intern Mohammed Al-Sahaf, Winter 2011

Want to play games all day? Go home and play. Want to discover the stress, struggle, and ultimate satisfaction of making games for a living? Apply for this internship.

- Intern David S. Gallant, Fall 2011

Working with Ryan Creighton has been eye-opening. If Untold had taught me anything as an intern, it’s open your mind to new creative ideas.

- Intern Chris Aaron Broadfield, Summer 2011

How Do I Apply?

Email info [the curly at sign] untoldentertainment [the little dot thingy] com no later than December 9 2011. Please put way more attention into an interesting email and samples of your work than your resume. Give us a sense of your personality, and why you think you’re a good fit. Cookie-cutter applications with business-suit-wearing cover-letters and resumes describing your evening shift at Shopper’s Drug Mart will be stabbed and burned.

Successful candidates will be contacted for interviews in mid-December.

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