untoldentertainment.com » Blog

Manufacturing Alexes: The Secret of Indie Game Success

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:18:38 +0000

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:

SpaceChem developer Zachtronics Industries emailed Valve to try to get the game distributed on Steam. It didn’t happen.
Zachtronics handled their own distribution and began to sell the game directly on their own website.
Zachtronics (presumably) emailed a number of game industry publications about SpaceChem. One of these was Rock Paper Shotgun.
Then-RPS writer Quintin Smith reviewed SpaceChem, calling it “an incredible game”.
Valve approached Zachtronics two days later, and agreed to distribute SpaceChem on Steam. Fancy how that happens.
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.
An impressionable Alex read that article, was infected by Quintin’s ridiculous enthusiasm, and downloaded the demo.
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:

Get in the club.
Make something excellent.
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.

E for Everyone, or N for Niche?

Ryan Henson Creighton — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:28:58 +0000

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:

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
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
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.

Spellirium Sneak Peek: Fighting the Fnoo

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:24:56 +0000

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.

It’s Not an Educational Game

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:46:05 +0000

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!

Spellirium Sneak Peek: Shearing Scrunches the Sheep

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:21:52 +0000

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.

Spellirium Sneak Peek: Brother Doug Dies

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:19:45 +0000

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.

Introducing the Combo/Chain System in Spellirium

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:53:31 +0000

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:

It’s one letter short of a 50-point BINGO (Scrabble’s point bonus for using all your letters).
You may not reach one of the bonus tiles with it (most notably Triple Word Score).
The letters in “TETHER” are all low-value, worth one point apiece.
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.

It’s Not Piracy – It’s Free-to-Play

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:47:11 +0000

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.

Spellirium Then and Now

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:24:32 +0000

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.

Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial (Part 5)

Sina Kashanizadeh — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:54:38 +0000

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:

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.

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.
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.
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:
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.

Navigate to the Apple iOS Provisioning Portal within the Dev Center.
Log in with your developer account and click on Certificates.
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.
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.
Click the Browse button and navigate to the OpenSSL bin folder.
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.

Within the Provisioning Portal website, click Provisioning in the sidebar.
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.
Click on New Profile.

Note: You’ll only see this option if you are the fee-paying Team Admin.
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.
Your Profile Name is the name that you want for your Provisioning Profile. The Distribution Certificate that you created should be visible here.
Finally, you have to choose which App ID with which you want to register your Provisioning Profile.
Click Submit.
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.

Within the Provisioning Portal website, click Provisioning in the sidebar.
Click the Distribution tab.
Click Modify on the Provisioning Profile that you want to reuse.
Switch to either Ad Hoc or App Store. The distinction between these two options is explained in the preceding section.
Click Submit.
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.

Click on the Certificates section in the sidebar.
Click the Distribution tab.
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.

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:

Open up your command prompt.
Navigate to your Open SSL bin folder.
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.
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”.
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.
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!

Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial (Part 4)

Sina Kashanizadeh — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:43:56 +0000

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:

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.

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.
Click the Project Properties button at the top of the Properties Panel (alternately, you can use the menus to navigate to Project>Properties).
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.
Click on the SDK tab, and click Manage.
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.
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.
Once you have clicked the ellipsis button, a Windows File Browser appears. Navigate to the merged SDK directory. Select that folder and click OK.
Click OK again to exit the InstalledSDK Collection Editor window.
Click Close.
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.
Click Apply.
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.

Ah – this is truly the .ipa of a FlashDeveloper.

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.

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.)
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

Copy your Mobile Provisioning Profile and your .p12 Signing Certificate into the certs folder of your project. If you’ve been following along with this tutorial from the beginning, you probably saved these two files in the bin folder of your OpenSSL install.

Once the files are in the right place, they should show up in your Project sidebar:

To create the .ipa, you have to edit a couple of lines in a batch file so that the app compiles properly. Don’t be scared: a batch file (.bat) is simply a text file that runs a script when you double-click it in Windows. You can open up a batch file by using a text editor of any kind. Since you’ve already got FlashDevelop open, it makes a lot of sense to use it to edit the batch files.

In the following screenshot, I’ve opened up the ReadMe file that describes the iOS compilation steps. Step 5 talks about editing a batch file. Take a read if you’re nervous.

In the sidebar, find the bat folder and expand it.

Double-click the SetupApplication.bat file. The file should open in FlashDevelop.

In the batch file, you should see some green text that says ios packaging, and a bunch of set options beneath it. This is where you have to add or adjust some text. In the IOS_DEV_CERT_FILE line, type the path to your .p12 Signing Certificate file (the one you just copied into the certs folder). You only have to use a relative path (one that describes where the file is in relation to the compilation target), so just copy what I have and you should be fine:

cert\iphone_dev.p12

In the IOS_DEV_CERT_PASS line, you have to enter password that you set when you made your Signing Certificate. (Don’t come crying to me if you don’t remember it – i told you to write it down – Ed.)

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.

Double-click the SetupSDK.bat file to open it in FlashDevelop.
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!
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.
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.
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.

In the sidebar, right-click the PackageApp.bat file and select Execute.
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.
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.

Plug in your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/iEtCetera and let it sync in iTunes.
After it’s synced, go to Library -> Apps.
To add your Mobile Provisioning Profile, click and drag it from your folder into the iTunes Library.
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.
In the left sidebar, click on Devices -> Your iPad/iPod/iPhone.
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).
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.
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.

Buy This Book! Buttonless: Incredible iPhone and iPad Games and the Stories Behind Them

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:59:32 +0000

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.

Ponycorns and the Fluffification of GDC 2012

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:08:02 +0000

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.

If Miyamoto Went Indie …

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:32:11 +0000

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.

Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial (Part 3)

Sina Kashanizadeh — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:25:16 +0000

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:

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.

Download the latest AIR SDK (which, at the time of this writing, was v3.0)
Download the Flex SDK.
These two packages download as .zip files. Extract them wherever you like on your computer – just make sure you know where you put them.
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.

Open up FlashDevelop and hit F10 or go to Tools->Program Settings in the menus.
In the Program Settings menu, click on AS3 Context.
Find the Language section, and the Flex SDK Location line within it.
Click the ellipsis button at the end of that line, and navigate to the merged SDK folder.
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.

Create a new project by clicking Project -> New Project in the menu.
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.
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.)
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.
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.

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);

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.
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.
Use CTRL+SHIFT+1 on the TextFormat word and you should see this:
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

Ryan Henson Creighton is a Solid Speaker

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:24:41 +0000

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!

Civilization, Ponycorns Creators Named Among Backbone’s Top 15 Canadians in Digital Technology

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 06:25:02 +0000

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 .

Untold Entertainment Winter Internship Program 2012

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:44:31 +0000

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.

Movember 2011

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:42:14 +0000

i participated in the Movember event to promote men’s health awareness this year by growing a most exemplary moustache. Regard:

We didn’t actually ask anyone for money, as i’m plagued with conspiracy theories about the efficacy of cancer research and the heaps and gobs of money people are throwing at it with no cure, vaccine, or pissed-off mascot in sight. i will, however, wear my moustache proudly for the sake of awareness, and will pass on any tidbits about dickrot or ballsarrhea that i find interesting.

For example, the news that wifi scrambled your man-juice was particularly salient.

Anyway, this audacious display of facial hair reaffirms the eternal question: Don’t you wish your video game vendor was hot like me?

Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial (Part 2)

Sina Kashanizadeh — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:09:49 +0000

This is the second 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:

Drudgery

Without a doubt, this section of our tutorial series on bundling your Adobe AIR App for Apple’s iOS platform is the pits. You have to use a complicated command line interpreter, you have to juggle what may feel like a million different certificates and profiles, and you have to jump through a dizzying array of hoops just to get everything set up … and you’re not even going to start building your app at all! But trust me: once you’ve cleared these hurdles, the rest of the process is gravy.

Thick, delicious gravy.

The first goal of this tutorial is to create a signing certificate, which is used very much like a hot brand on cattle. It’s the digital signature of you or your company that identifies an app as your own. We need to use a program called OpenSSL to create this signing certificate.

Install Open SSL

In order to turn your future AIR project into a native app, you need to create two important files: a Signing Certificate and a Mobile Provisioning Profile. If you are working on a Mac, you actually use a program called Keychain to do some fancy voodoo magic and get the certificate you need. We are working on a PC and we do not have that luxury, so there are a couple of confusing steps that we must go through.

The first thing you have to do is go to http://www.slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html. Scroll down, and then download the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributables and install the resulting file. Next, download the Win32 OpenSSL v1.0a Light file and install that after you have installed the first package. These two files will help you create the Signing Certificate Request you so richly deserve.

Be sure to keep track of where you installed those last two elements. Next, visit this site:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/iphone/index.html.

These are Adobe’s help files for generating your signing certificate and then converting that certificate into a .P12 file. If you get lost in this tutorial, that page will be your safety net.

On that Adobe support page, you will see some instructions for Mac machines. Ignore them. Scroll down to the Windows instructions and give them a once-over.

The instructions say that you have to install Open SSL. You’ve already done that. Open a command prompt window. You can do this by going to your Start button and typing in cmd in the search field. (You can also hold the Windows key on your keyboard and hit the “R” key (for “Run”), then type cmd and hit Enter.)

Once you are in the command prompt, travel your way to your Open SSL bin folder. Depending on where you installed it you will have to travel to a different path than in this example. (For your sake, i hope you installed Open SSL in a location that you can remember!)

If this is your first time using the command prompt, here’s a quick primer on the commands that will help you get around:

cd This command means “Change Directory”. If you are in a directory and you want to go into one of its sub-directories, use this command plus the directory name (example: cd directoryName)
cd.. This command will pull you up one level in your directory structure
dir Type this command to see a list of all of the files and folders within your current directory
dir /w The /w (wide) switch spreads a directory listing across multiple columns. This is useful for seeing all the folder names at a glance, instead of in one big long scrolling list.

You may have some problems getting some of the following commands to work. A fine commenter (and Ontario resident!) named Dan Zen mentioned on the Adobe guide’s comments section that you may need to input set RANDFILE=.rnd in your command prompt before the following commands will work properly.

Generate a Signing Certificate Request File

With all of that taken care of, you can start inputting some commands to create your Signing Certificate Request file. Once you have that file, you’ll use it to ask Apple for your proper Signing Certificate file that you’ll use to identify your app.

Punch this command into your command line interpreter and hit the ENTER key when you’re finished:
```
openssl genrsa -out mykey.key 2048
```
You should see this response:

Next, type (or highlight the line, right-click, choose “Copy”, and right-click/”Paste” in the command line interpreter):

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. Then 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 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 Development

You have to upload your Signing Certificate Request file to the Apple Provisioning Portal to get your signing certificate.

Note: There have been instances where this upload does not work with Google Chrome. Just to be safe, use another browser like Firefox.

Navigate to the iOS Provisioning Portal after logging in with your developer account and click on Certificates.
Click Request Certificate.

Note: If you are a team member and/or you have not paid the annual developer fee of $99 dollars, then you cannot request a Signing Certificate. Only the Team Admin – the person who has paid the development fee – will be able make this request.

On the next screen, you will upload the Signing Certificate Request file that you generated in the previous section.
Click the Browse button and navigate to the bin folder located within your OpenSSL folder.
Once you have selected the Signing Certificate Request file, click Submit. Your next screen should show this:
Just hit Refresh a couple of times on your browser and you should eventually see this:
It’s your Signing Certificate! Go ahead and download it. Just to make things easier, you can save that certificate in the bin folder in the Open SSL folder, where your Certificate Signing Request file is sitting.

Convert the Signing Certificate to a .p12 File

Are you having fun yet? Yeah, me neither. We are making good progress though. The next step is converting that Signing Certificate to a p12 certificate, because Apple loves certificates.

From the Adobe help page, visit the link describing the process of converting a developer certificate to a p12 file. You get a list of more commands that you’ll have to punch into your trusty old command prompt.
Copy the first command (highlight the text, right-click and select “Copy” from the context menu):
```
openssl x509 -in developer_identity.cer -inform DER -out developer_identity.pem -outform PEM
```
Open up your command prompt as I showed earlier, and navigate to the bin folder of your Open SSL directory.
Once you’re there, paste in the first command (right-click and select “Paste” from the context menu), and press ENTER.
Skip ahead to Step 3 of the Adobe help guide and copy that command. (The command in Step 2 is for Macs only.)
```
openssl pkcs12 -export -inkey mykey.key -in developer_identity.pem -out iphone_dev.p12
```
Once 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 in that folder if you’ve got a lousy memory like me – Ed.) When you are typing in your password, the command prompt does not give you the luxury of seeing dots or asterisks to indicate how many letters you are typing in. Rest assured that the command is accepting your input.
Note: 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.
Go into the bin folder in your Open SSL directory and you should see your .p12 file. Hooray!

Create an App ID

Now that you have the precious file you need, it’s finally time to create your Mobile Provisioning Profile. You’ll start by setting up a unique ID for the app you’re creating.

Navigate back to the Provisioning Portal in your web browser to create an App ID for your app. Log in, click on Provisioning Portal, and click on App IDs.
Click New App ID.
Note: If you have not paid the developer fee, or if you are just a team member of the Team Admin, you will not see this option. Ask your Team Admin to complete this step.
On the next screen you’ll start by writing a Description for your app, which can be anything you want. (This is what the player will see when he sees your app in the App Store. Obviously, there’s a whole marketing concern here that’s outside the scope of this tutorial. Since we’re just building a test app, i recommend you punch SOME CRAZY NONSENSE in there for your description. Take THAT, marketing. -Ed)
Within the Bundle Seed ID (App ID Prefix) you will have various options, depending on your account status. If you are the Team Admin, you’ll have a “Generate New” option. Team Members will only see a “Use Team ID” option. (If this is not your first App, you could also choose the Bundle Seed IDs for previous project). Either way, leave it at the default.

The Bundle Identifier lets you create a specific package for your App. The standard way to make this package is to reverse the name of your website domain. I used com.sina.ipadtest. (Our team uses com.untoldentertainment.whatever – Ed.)

Alternately, you can use a generic Bundle Identifier by just putting an “*” in the field.

Note: There have been cases where the asterisk does not work for some people. It is a safe bet you make a specific namespace like the examples above.
Click Submit.
Voila – you have now created your App ID! On the next screen you will see all of the app profiles you’ve created.

Create a Mobile Provisioning Profile

Now that you have an App ID, you can now create your Mobile Provisioning Profile. This is the crowning touch to everything we’ve done in this tutorial so far. The Mobile Provisioning Profile glues your developer(s), your Signing Certificate, your app ID and your testing device together. Once you have this file, you’ll be able to test an app on your device.

Within the Provisioning Portal website, click Provisioning in the sidebar.
Click on New Profile.
Note: You only see this option if you are the fee-paying Team Admin.
Give your provisioning profile a Profile Name.
Choose the Signing Certificate(s) that you want to use with this profile.
Use the drop-down list to indicate the app for which you’re creating this profile.
Finally, indicate the testing device you want to test it on.
Click Submit.

You’ll be taken to a screen that says your Mobile Provisioning Profile is pending. Just click your browser’s refresh button a couple of times until the Downloadbutton appears, and download your precious, hard-fought profile. Make sure to save it in a location you’re likely to remember.

Are We There Yet?

That was a big pile of hoops to jump through just to test an app on your device, and we haven’t even begun building the app yet! Here’s what you just accomplished:

You used the command line and OpenSSL to create a Certificate Signing Request file.
You sent that file to Apple. Apple responded by enabling you to download your Signing Certificate file. This file identifies you as the developer of your app.
You converted your Signing Certificate to the .p12 format.
You created an ID for your app.
You created your Mobile Provisioning Profile, the glue that holds all these elements together and enables you to test your app on an iOS device.

The good news is that you DO NOT need to repeat the steps to create your Signing Certificate for additional apps. Now that you have that file, you’ll use it to sign all of your iOS apps from here on in. Similarly, you won’t have to re-enter your developer ID or device ID for future projects (unless, of course, you gain a new team member or device). The App ID and Mobile Provisioning Profile are the two pieces that are unique to your app – you WILL need to repeat those steps for additional projects.

The next part of this tutorial series will cover the process of creating your actual Adobe AIR app using FlashDevelop, bundling it up with this mess of certificates and profiles you just built, and deploying the app to your testing device.

Continue to Part 3

Gamercamp Lvl 3: Day 1

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 01:40:52 +0000

Gamercamp, now in its third year, is an annual festival in Toronto that celebrates video game culture, uniting local fans and developers under an orgiastic umbrella of game-loving. Here’s my take on Day One.

I Fold

It was a stretch for me to arrive at Gamercamp for 9:30. It’s a good day when i can drag myself to the bathroom of my own house by 9:30. i’m not an early riser. But when i saw that the conference’s keynote speaker was Seth Cooper, who worked on FoldIt, i knew i’d have to strain myself and make it there on time. i’m a big fan of using games to do useful things. (Note: that’s NOT the same as “gamification”, which is an attempt to make mundane things more interesting using trophies and leaderboards.)

i sharted! Where my points at??

FoldIt is a game out of Cornell and the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science. It uses crowdsourcing (lots of people doing stuff for you, like the Egyptian pyramids) to solve scientific puzzles by squishing 3D protein models down to more efficient forms. This is a task where humans can produce better solutions than computers, because we have better spatial reasoning than our future Robot Masters (blessings and peace be upon them). i’ve known about FoldIt for a while now, but whenever i see it being played, i can’t for the life of me figure out what in the Hell is going on.

i … what? Is the answer on GameFAQS?

Cooper said the possible applications of crowd-sourced FoldIt research included curing diseases and discovering alternatives to plastic. Indeed, the big story recently was that FoldIt players solved in three weeks a problem that had scientists scratching their heads for ten years – something to do with AIDS research and monkeys. The other two Center for Game Science initiatives Seth talked about were Photocity, where people taking pictures of real-life buildings can contribute to point cloud models (the hope being that some day, we’ll have an insanely detailed 3D model of our planet), and Refraction, part of an initiative to use A|B game testing to discover the best way to teach fractional mathematics to young students. (Photocity was a bit of a bust for me … the resulting point cloud model of four buildings was largely unimpressive and missing huge chunks of geometry, and it took 3 weeks and 40 000 pictures to produce. A skilled 3D artists could have produced a far more complete set of models in less time. So i was left wondering whether the initiative was such a hot idea.)

Photocity players produce sort-of-impressive point cloud models … just don’t walk behind or above them.

i found the talk was decent, but a little self-serving. Cooper covered only UW/Cornell-produced projects, without ever talking about the myriad other projects that use game crowdsourcing to solve problems. In future iterations, Seth could give a nod to Google Image Labeler and reCAPTCHA to level out his talk.

Seth was shooed off the stage without taking questions in an effort to keeping the morning moving; i had a question for him that would’ve made me look like a complete tool (but what else is new?). With the proliferation of so-called slot machine games on Facebook, and companies turning huge profits “gamifying” mundane experiences, there’s a lot of talk about reward systems. Folks like Chris Hecker and Jesse Schell debate about extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation in games, and about the things that successfully motivate us; at least one study shows that for high-level knowledge work, monetary rewards just don’t cut it.

Sure, you’re paying me a sweaty fistful of cash, but how much JOY are you paying me?

Using FoldIt results to develop an alternative to plastic, or to develop an AIDS vaccine (note: not a cure, because there’s no business model in a cure) are multi-bazillion dollar propositions. Everyone roots for initiatives like FoldIt when they think it boils down to the goodness of people’s hearts, but as soon as someone starts cranking some serious coin based on results garnered from these crowdsourced games, the participants will want to see their work rewarded financially. Just look at the story of Box2D creator Erin Catto, and wealthier-than-God publisher Rovio of Angry Birds fame.

The Remains of the Day

Most of the rest of the morning’s presentations were a joy. Jim McGinley gave the talk he’s been dreaming of, “Digging Through the Trash”, where he discusses game ideas that could be salvaged by modern game developers from the Radio Shack TRS-80 (AKA the “Trash-80″).

Honey, are you beating off to ascii porn?

i loved the talk, and i really want to see more talks like it. i feel i have a distinct advantage over today’s younger crop of game developers because of my history playing ColecoVision, Intellivision and Atari 2600 games back in the day, because they were such simple games with simple mechanics that cut to the chase, and got to the fun FAST. One of my former students couldn’t even pronounce “ColecoVision” this afternoon. i firmly believe these kids should be made to sit in a room with guys like me and Jimmy, and forced to study classic home console games. Then we can pull our pants up to our nipples and tell them what’s wrong with the government.

If we wanted to have fun, we’d go to a CLIFF and jump OFF. And that’s the way it was, and we LIKED it!

Young Folks

i wasn’t all that enamoured with graphic designer Cory Schmitz’s presentation. It had a little too much pretentious hipster “Scene Kid” stuff going on in it for my liking, as Cory tore down design choices for various movie posters and video game box covers, providing examples of compositions that would have made them “better”. All of his examples had a real design smell to them, and he seemed a little too green to present his preferences as subjectively better, rather than objectively better. (If it doesn’t have a stark palette, odd angles, and gobs of negative space, it’s crap.) Still, there were a lot of art students in the audience, and they may have appreciated his talk.

Srsly you guys – my nipples are SO HARD right now.

There was a presentation by some industry up-and-comers about what they’re working on. While these mini-talks themselves tended to be rough, i enjoyed the effort as a whole, because it gave some of the student- and grad-level Toronto developers an opportunity to polish their public speaking skills. It’s an opportunity Prez Lesley Phord-Toy and i have been trying to give people throughout the year through the IGDA Toronto Chapter events like Straight Out TOJam and the Open Mic Night.

Building a Game (sorta) in Three Hours (ish)

The afternoon was a mish-mash of various workshops, including board game development, “physical” game design, playtesting sessions, and the Iron Game Developer Challenge. When i heard that Michael Todd dropped out due to ninja training or whatever, i jumped in and took his place. i wound up using UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System), the same engine that powers Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure and Spellirium, to produce Frankentoy in just over three hours :

Get a better browser!

(this is not a jpg! Click the title screen to play)

As with Iron Chef, the Iron Game Developer Challenge had a secret ingredient that we had to incorporate into our games: bug-eyed plastic wind-up chattering teeth, which rank on the Creighton Terrifying Toy Spectrum somewhere between Cymbal-Smashing-Chimp-On-A-Tricycle, and this little nightmare:

The game is called “Frankentoy” and it has a Tim Burton-esque aesthetic, likely because Burton’s first film was Frankenweenie, and with very little time on the clock, i was lazily free-associating. The game is based (only partially) on a true story – my mom, a single parent, used to leave me alone in toy and book stores all the time, and would occasionally not make it back in time to pick me up until after closing time. Terrifying.

We developed UGAGS to help us create graphic adventure games quickly, but it feels like three hours was a little nuts. i hadn’t even played the game by the time the buzzer went off, and it’s plagued by some bona fide jankiness. i have no idea why the kid walks backwards. i probably should have spent less time shooting Jon Remedios in the head with Nerf bullets. But whatever. Let’s see YOU make a game.

Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial (Part 1)

Sina Kashanizadeh — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:33:33 +0000

This is the first 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:

Dead Wrong

There’s a lot of FUD floating around about Flash these days. Ever since Steve Jobs took to the mic and sounded the death knell of at least the perception of Flash, there’s been heaping gobs of misinformation about what you can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do with Flash. i chalk it up to the fact that death is news. It’s BIG news when Michael Jackson dies, BIG news when Steve Jobs dies, and equally big news if you can be among the first to report on the death of a technology or company – RIM, Flash, Palm, HP – take your pick. If it bleeds, it leads.

Saying stuff is dead, is dead. You heard it here first.

This hyperbolic and sensational misreporting is particularly damaging for those of us who have made our living developing with Flash and Actionscript. Back in 2000, when i first got into Flash, i chose it because the alternative was HTML. HTML appeared and performed completely differently depending on a number of different factors:

The platform (Mac, PC or Linux)
The screen resolution (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, etc)
The browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari)
The browser version (HTML could render completely differently from IE6 to IE7)

Meanwhile with Flash, i could build something inside the little Flash Player box, and it would look and behave reasonably identically across platforms, resolutions, browsers, and browser versions. (Subsequent versions of the Flash player complicated things a smidge, but we were still WORLDS away from the pain of HTML). What’s more, as a visual person, i could actually lay things out within the tool, instead of coding them abstractly and waiting to see how the browser would render them. If i wanted something to appear over there, i picked it up and put it over there. No futzing around with padding or align tags for hours.

The push towards HTML5 doesn’t scare me – more accurately, it makes me feel ill. It’s a step backwards. Without proper tooling, i see myself banging my head against the wall picturing absolutely everything in codespace (rather than concretely laid out in front of me in designspace), and programming all kinds of exception cases so that my content performs properly depending on platform, browser and version. You know what? No thanks.

Thank God Flash is dead! Now we can finally move forward.

Prying Flash from my Cold, Dead Hands

As long as the tools for other technologies stink, and as long as i can keep making and monetizing projects in Flash, i’m going to stay the course until there’s a compelling technological /creative/workflow reason to make a jump. Untold Entertainment has deployed two games written in Actionscript (Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure and Heads) across two different mobile platforms (Apple iPad and the BlackBerry Playbook), and we’re just getting warmed up.

Here are the facts, at the time of this writing:

No one really wants to play a game in a browser on a phone. Native apps are where it’s at.
Yes, you CAN put Flash- and Actionscript-created content on an iPhone, in native app format.
You can even do it without having to buy Flash Professional or Creative Suite.
You can develop entirely on a PC until the very last step (uploading content to the App Store).
Untold Entertainment is about to show you how.

What You’ll Need

While buying Adobe’s tools is optional, you’ll still need to spend a bit of money (or mug the right people) to pull this off. Here’s what you’ll need:

An Apple Developer account, which is $99 USD/year. Once you start down this path, you’re in it for the long haul … if you let your developer account lapse, they pull all your products off the store. For realsies.
A Mac (not free) running the latest version of Xcode (free).
An iOS device (optional, but obviously recommended).
FlashDevelop v4 or better (free, PC-only)

A Mac: not free.

Introducing Sina

He’s the spitting image of this guy – i swear.

Sina Kashanizadeh is a Sheridan College computer programming student and an intern here at Untold Entertainment. He’s done all the legwork in this process, and has written this step-by-step guiding on porting your Actionscript projects to iOS. Take it away, Sina!

Flash on iOS? So You Want to Be a Hero…

With the mobile world expanding at a crazy rate you may have had the crazy idea to try making an App yourself and putting it on the iPhone. Well, you’re a brave soul, because it can be a confusing task. This is why I have scoured the internet and composed a step by step tutorial of this process. This tutorial would not have been possible without the fantastic people that maintain FlashDevelop and the wonderful community behind it. I would also like to thank Lee Brimelow and Adobe for putting out some great tutorial videos that helped me out a lot. Last but not least, I would like to thank CodeandVisual.com for putting up a fantastic comprehensive guide that inspired me to move forward whenever I had trouble writing this tutorial.

I just want to be clear that this tutorial is not the “be-all, end-all” of this process. There are many different ways of transferring your Flash App to iOS, and the problems I cover are specific to my method. Also, the process I cover is PC-specific.

Getting Started

Before we begin, I would like to recommend a very good video resource by Adobe Evangelist Lee Brimelow, in which he explains the basics of adding an app to the App Store when using Flash. If you do not know how this process works, I highly recommend this video, as it breaks down the somewhat painful process of adding an AIR App to the App Store when using a PC (thanks again, Lee!). The good news is that if you go through this once, you’ll understand the ins and outs of the process. You only have to do the most painful parts once.

The video covers a myriad of stuff but the basics boil down to this: Your end goal is to create an .ipa file, which is what you’ll upload to the App Store. To do this you will require:

An App
An iOS developer ID from Apple ($)
An iPad or iPhone ($)
A Mac ($, but required for one step only … borrow one from a friend!)
A Signing Certificate
A Mobile Provisioning Profile
YOUR SOUL

Sounds like fun? Well it isn’t, but let’s get cracking anyway!

Any Club that would Have Me as a Member

As I mentioned above, you’ll need a developer ID from Apple. Head over to the iOS Dev Center and register for “free”.

“Free” as in “Free Beer … that you have to pay for.”

Go through the steps of signing up and the email verification and you will acquire an Apple ID. Now, the unfortunate thing is that you get the Apple ID for free, but if you want to develop anything with it on a device – even a silly test app that you will never release – you will have to pay $99 a year. You’d better be positive that your Angry Birds clone will be worth at least a hundred bucks a year in revenue. You can sign up for a free student account, but again you can’t really do anything with it unless you drop some cash. If you are helping someone develop an App for the iPhone/iPad and they are paying the developer fee, they can add you as a partner to their project.

Adding a Device to Your Developer Account

If you want to test and ultimately launch this App, you will need an Apple device such as an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. You will also need to register your Apple device with your Apple ID. Follow these steps:

Go into the iOS Developer website and log in with your new account info. Here, you will see the iOS Provisioning Portal. Click on it to see further options.
click Devices in the sidebar.
Click Add Devices.Note: if you are a partner developer with a team member profile, you will not be able to add a device. The option will only appear for the master account holder.
On this screen, you can add up to 100 devices to your account. Start off by adding your Device Name. Nothing fancy here – just enter something that will help you identify it – ie “Sina’s iPad”, or “iPhone what i stole from that guy that one time”.
Enter the Device ID (40 hex characters). This is the serial number that is associated with the device that you are trying to register. To find this Device ID, open iTunes while your device is connected. On the main screen, you will see all the information about your device, including a field called Serial Number. It doesn’t look clickable, but click on that field anyway and the number changes to a hex code. That’s your device ID.
Once you’ve filled in those details, click Submit and the device will be added to your Developer account. Now you can build an Adobe AIR application and test it on your device.The next tutorial will take you through the process of requesting and creating a Signing Certificate, converting that certificate to the p12 format that Apple requires, and generating a Mobile Provisioning Profile for your new app.
Continue to Part 2

Ponycorns at the IGF Awards: Not Wanted on the Voyage?

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:49:14 +0000

When we released Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure earlier this year, gamers and non-gamers alike were delighted at the unique collaboration between a kids’ video game developer and his five year old daughter. Scads of journalists, bloggers, developers and fans called for Ponycorns to be named Game of the Year. Following a successful showing as a finalist at IndieCade, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is now a 2011 IGF (Independent Games Festival) Awards entrant. Many early predictions have it sweeping the show, actually beating out every game in every other category (including Technical Achievement and Best Use of 3D).

We’ll need new shirts that say “i have all the awards”.

It’s absolutely certain that Untold Entertainment is poised to take home a LOT of hardware from the Game Developers Conference in March, but there’s one little snag: according to the GDC website,

due to safety concerns, no one under the age of 18 (including infants in strollers) will be permitted on the show floor at any time during the Game Developers Conference®.

What this means is that when Ponycorns does win every single IGF award (including Most Memorable Explosion and Most Tasteful Deployment of a Nude Patch), the game’s five year old co-creator may not be permitted to attend her own awards ceremony. It’s likely that conference organizers did not anticipate this problem when they drafted the rule, but the question remains: should they make an exception? Should five-year-old game developer Cassandra Creighton be permitted to attend GDC in order to claim her inevitable armful of IGF Awards?

Update

Meggan Scavio, GM of GDC (who kicks ass, and has helped me out of a conference-related jam in the past), says that the proviso is insurance-related. If Cassie is nominated, she can attend once i fill out a waiver. Hooray! Of course, the only problem i have with this is “IF Cassie is nominated.” Clearly, she is poised to take not only the IGF award for Best Fractal Raytracing Shader Navmesh AI Programming, but ALSO the special “Chancellor’s Choice” award for Most Instructive Game in the Art of Ladycraft. (Now if only i could scrape together the airfare.)

Ryan Henson Creighton Just Won’t Shut Up

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:21:36 +0000

You’ve tolerated my textual tomfoolery on the blog, but if you’d like to hear it all from the horse’s mouth, i have three upcoming speaking dates:

FITC Screens Festival

November 14-15 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre

Session: Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar
Time: Tuesday at 4:30 PM in Room 203 AC

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. With Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, game developer Untold Entertainment Inc. was struck by lightning. In this exciting and surprising session, Ryan Henson Creighton talks about how to turn your project into a lightning rod to attract success, and how to capture that surge of success without letting a single spark go to waste.

This is the hour-long Director’s Cut version of the talk i gave at the 100th meeting of the FlashInTO user group. It’s an absolutely crazy story that begins with me desperately craving attention at GDC 2010, and ends with a hit viral game with worldwide appeal.

DIG 2011

November 16-17 at the London Convention Centre

Session: Games: a Hit Driven Business
Time: Wednesday at 11:45 AM

This panel session features four small-to-midsize game companies in Ontario, including Untold Entertainment (THAT’S ME!!), Big Blue Bubble, Antic Entertainment and Red Piston, discussing the importance of developing a hit to sustaining a business. i’m especially interested to hear what Damir Slogar of BBB has to say … his company took the slow, deliberate “manufacture a hit” approach by essentially throwing a bunch of games at the wall to see what stuck. What stuck was Burn the Rope (not to be confused with You Have to Burn the Rope), which had its day in the sun at the top of the iOS charts.

Gamercamp Lvl 3

November 25-27 at the Toronto Underground Cinema and Hervé Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined

Session: Sticking The Landing—Strategies On Shepherding The Next Big Project
Time: Sunday at 4:30 PM at HVSDI

From big projects like X-Men: Destiny, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, Mega Jump and N+, everyone is wondering what’s next? Panelists will talk about those last project experiences and the lessons learned for their next big projects.

i plan to say less about Ponycorns in this session, and more about Spellirium, which is gonna rock your socks off.

Dumber than Advertised: 5 Half-Baked Technologies that Failed to Deliver

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:41:21 +0000

The purpose of technology – flush toilets, smart phones, the wheel – is to make our lives easier. When technology is foisted on the unsuspecting public with the promise of being awesome and actually ends up causing us grief, i vote FIRE. Throw it all in a smouldering heap, and stick with what works. Here are five not-ready-for-primetime that either need to go back in the oven for another decade, or set ablaze and used to heat our homes while our lives are made easier by the stuff that actually works.

1. Wifi

Wifi? Thaaaaat’s right. i’m gonna open with a bang. i’m going to argue that the reality of wifi has fallen far short of the promise of wifi. This reality was never more clear a few years ago, when you had the choice of buying a wifi-only, or cellular version of a gadget, and you thought “why pay for an expensive telco contract, when i can just use this thing anywhere there’s a hotspot?” By now, in the future, we should have a land flowing with milk and honey and wifi. Connectivity should be dripping off the lamp-posts and sparkling off the tops of our houses. Entire cities should be blanketed in the stuff – a thin layer of wifi as technological icing, settling into every crevice of civilization like freshly-fallen snow.

Aaahhh – the first wifi of the year.

What we’ve got for viable wifi hotspots are your house, Starbucks, and an open hotspot owned by a private utilities company that costs two dollars a minute on your credit card. The rest of the hotspots you see, if you see them, require a WEP password, because the FBI thought it would be a great idea to hold people accountable when strangers surfed child porn on their open networks.

Open the door. We’re here to let one person spoil technology for the rest of humanity.

Nowhere is the failure of wifi more heart-breaking than at a technology conference. For years, i’ve been attending conferences like GDC, an international conference staged in the heart of Internet-land, and throughout the show have been required to sit immediately next to a single consumer-grade Linksys router jury rigged to a lighting stand, or to sneak into the press room, to check my email. And that’s been my best-case scenario. From Casual Connect in Seattle, to Indiecade and E3 in Los Angeles, to whatever the heck goes on in the Toronto Convention Centre, all the way to visiting someone else’s school, home or office and feeling like a dork for sheepishly requesting the password, wifi as a life-changing technology has a long way to go before it functions as advertised.

And just to add insult to injury, the World Health Organization thinks it gives us cancer. Well done, scientists. Well done.

Fluoroscope foot X-ray machines used to be installed in shoe stores across the country. What could possibly go wrong?

2. Motion Controllers

The Wii sold like hotcakes on the promise of a new type of input system for video games: one where you move the controller like a sword, and your on-screen character mimics those motions, hacking and slashing his way through enemies. You hold two controllers and use them like drumsticks. You use a controller like a baton to conduct an orchestra. People loved the idea that they could play a video game in a way that felt much more natural than clawing a complicated controller packed with abstractly-mapped buttons.

Now i can play video games with my arms up over my head, just as God intended.

That’s the myth we were sold. What we actually got was a stick which, when waggled vaguely in the direction of something sort of, in a general kind of maybe way, something on-screen possibly happened. i guess. The accuracy of the input was so underwhelming that Nintendo had to release a “hardware patch” in the Wii Motion Plus dongle, which was a lot like saying “thanks for your money – here’s how it was supposed to work.”

Introducing the Nintendo Oops™, pictured here at the base of the Nintendo Sorry About That™.

The Kinect system is equally disappointing. It allows you to use your entire body as the controller so that you can operate a video game one half-second into the future. If you want to move your hands to pop on-screen balloons slightly later than you expect them to react, run and grab a Kinect. If you want a true 1:1 motion experience like you saw in that exhausting UX nightmare scene from Minority Report, you’re gonna have to wait a while. More than half a second, anyway, until companies like Microsoft put this bun back in the oven and fully bake it.

i can’t WAIT to use my computer STANDING UP with my ARMS OUTSTRETCHED for seven hours straight.

And the Playstation Move controller looks like a buttplug.

Paging Dr. Dover – Dr. Ben Dover.

3. QR Codes

i still don’t understand why marketers think we’ll all get tremendously excited about technologies that exist solely to sell us more crap. QR codes have essentially become an alternate method of typing in Proctor and Gamble website URLs. If you want a faster way to reach Tide.com, photographing a QR code is your best bet.

This magazine isn’t filled with enough advertising for my taste. Let me go buy a 400 dollar gadget so that i can photograph a QR code to see where else i can piss away my money.

This technology is another example of marketers going nuts over something while the rest of us squeeze our eyes shut tightly and wait til it’s over. Like the Lambada. What galls me about this particular gimmick is that it reeks of fifty-year-old, technologically unaware ad and marketing execs thinking it’s especially cool that you can take a picture of something that’s NOT a website, and it magically becomes a website. It’s as if the whole concept of interpreting pits and peaks as digital information is entirely new and fascinating to them, so they have to go slapping QR codes on all of their billboards in the hopes that consumers will be equally mystified and dangle themselves out the passenger-side windows of their cars on the freeway trying to snap pictures of these mystical pots of technological gold.

It may not have dawned on them that a) nobody cares, and b) this type of technology isn’t actually new or interesting, because we’ve seen it all before in stuff like optical discs, cassette tapes, bar codes, computer punch cards … and mother-flipping player piano rolls.

It doesn’t LOOK like music, but an expensive device turns it INTO music! The future is here!

4. Augmented Reality

Most people like the idea of augmented reality, but i’d be amazed to find that anyone has enjoyed the implementation of it. The gimmick is that you can point a screen-enabled camera at some sort of marker, and a 3D model or text label will pop out of it, giving you an “enhanced” version of reality that exists inside your cell phone. In practice, what it actually gives you is a glitchy, janky Playstation 1-era graphic suffering a grand mal seizure with the slightest twitch of the marker.

The piece of paper with a car popping out of it inside the computer is WAY better than just a regular piece of paper. Waaaay better.

i’ve never looked at a street filled with restaurants and thought “man … i WISH i could aim my phone at this street to see which of these restaurants has bought into a promotion displaying their dinner specials tonight”, or “holy SHIT, do i ever wish i could drum on my own FACE.”

AR is an example of technology where both the quality of the experience AND its proposed uses have stirred in me a big steaming pile of “no thanks”.

5. Stereoscopic/Polarized 3D

Make no mistake: there are two reasons entertainment companies are pushing 3D on consumers so desperately: 1. big teevees, home theatre systems, and BitTorrent have rendered astronomically expensive nights out at the movie theatre largely inviable, so cinemas need an only-in-theatres gimmick to put bums back in seats, and 2. in the absence of a media shift from DVD/Blu Ray to something new, the not-only-in-theatres crowd like Sony Home Entertainment needs a reason to re-sell our entire movie collections to us. The best way to get people to buy a new copy of Steel Magnolias is to release Steel Magnolias 3D.

Now, Tom Skerritt’s moustache is in YOUR face!!

Forget the fact that it annoys me when someone says “the new Batman movie is in THREE-DEE!” and i think “so … it’s animated?”, but they actually mean stereoscopic 3D. Practically, the technology just stinks. i took my young family to a sterescopic 3D showing of How to Train Your Dragon. The glasses were eight times the size of my youngest daughter’s head, and she got tired of holding them up to her face after five minutes. An uninvolved toddler is an unhappy toddler, so my wife had to take her out of the theatre to entertain her while my eldest and i finished watching. That was fifty bucks in theatre tickets largely down the tubes.

How to Train Your Audience

Just the other night, i was playing the new Motorstorm 3D Rift game on one of Sony’s aggressively-priced-and-marketed 3D teevees. Both players wear a set of glasses that make them look like they’re 90 years old. The polarity is adjusted for each pair of glasses so that one player races a dunebuggy while the other races a motocycle, with each player’s version of the game superimposed on the same screen. It’s likely being marketed as the evolution of split-screen, and definitely solves the problem of dividing the screen in half like we do now. However, while fixing the problem of diminished screen estate for each player, it inflames a rash of new problems:

Both players look like absolute tools.
No one in the room without glasses can watch the race.
The player’s filtered view is dimly lit and inferior to an unfiltered image
The game likely runs at a lower framerate than a dedicated single-player experience.
The glasses take batteries.
The glasses can be sat on and/or lost in the couch cracks
You need to buy a 3D teevee and glasses.

Any technology that solves one minor problem while causing a crop of new ones AND costs consumers more money is not worth our attention. Die die die in a fire fire fire. We’ll shield our eyes from the fearsome blaze with enormous black world-dimming glasses.

(and we’l look like geezers doing it)

With Thanks to Prometheus

These so-called technological “advances” are, in certain cases, a step back. My proposed solution is a technological advance that actually has improved our quality of life: fire. We should use fire to either fully-bake these half-baked ideas before charging $199.99 for them at FutureShop, or let them be consumed in the flames. Then, from their ashes, may arise technologies that actually do make our lives better, from universal Internet access, to accurate motion controls, to g-d FLYING CARS ALREADY.

SERIOUSLY, men and women of science: i’ve been patient. Get on it.

Screw you, George. Stop waving that thing in my face.

Untold Entertainment’s Work Nominated for a 2011 Digi Award

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:34:30 +0000

NextMEDIA has announced its list of 2011 Digi Awards Nominees. While our viral hit Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure was overlooked, Corus Entertainment placed in the Best Cross-Platform: Kids category with Babar and the Adventures of Badou. Untold Entertainment worked with Corus to develop a preschooler-friendly patterning game for the show’s website.

Congratulations to Corus. Our trunks are crossed for a win!

A Lotta Dessert

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:43:44 +0000

Untold Entertainment produced A Lotta Dessert, a simple patterning game for preschoolers, for TVOntario’s TVOKids.com site.

Click to play Lotta Dessert at TVOKids.com!

The game design document, graphics of Lotta’s house and face, and her voiceover, were provided by TVO. Untold Entertainment produced the remaining assets and created the game based on TVO’s specifications.

UX Jr.

If you’re curious about the conventions of preschool game development, A Lotta Dessert showcases a few tricks:

This is a preliterate audience. The only text in the game is the title, and absolutely everything is voiced over.
There is no “play” button on the title screen. After a brief countdown, the game automatically begins.
Mice are lousy input devices for preschoolers, who often struggle to use them, so the game doesn’t require any drag n’ drop actions. Everything boils down to a single click with generously-sized hotspots. (See Mouse Control for a game we developed to help small children practice using a mouse)
Visual patterning is reinforced through sound.
The “answer” is entered twice, to confirm comprehension (otherwise, the player could just be clicking around and “winning” coincidentally).
Little-to-no chainsaw violence.

Untold Entertainment is an industry leader in preschool game development. Contact us to talk about your upcoming project.

F&$king Spellirium!

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:59:59 +0000

WARNING: Swears and general ribaldry

It’s really frustrating when you make a word in a game, and it’s not recognized by the game’s dictionary. It’s the worst when the word is a perfectly natural English word like “PUCE”, but a game like Jumbline doesn’t accept it. (Hear that, Jumbline devs? Ahem. AHEM.)

But in other situations, you punch in words like “bazooms” with a childish grin on your face, and when the game doesn’t recognize it, you click your tongue in mock outrage.

How DARE they rob me of 150 points for BAZOOMS! It’s in the Oxford!

Triple Word Score for “BLEEP”

The Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary prides itself on being the most complete and fair collection of words suitable for tournament play, but it ran up against some controversy when a player complained about the listing of non-capitalized “jew” as a verb, with the accompanying definition “to bargain with – an offensive term”. The Jewish Defamation League got involved, and the next version of the OSPD removed the offending word, along with a big list of other words for good measure, including (but not limited to):

boobie
cunt
faggoty
the almighty fuck
fubar
hebe
jesuit (i’m really not sure why? Unless there’s a pejorative verb form, as with “jew” … ?)
nookie
poo
wetback

The Seattle SCRABBLE® Club has a complete list of expurgated words in case you’re up for a giggle or gasp.

(Of note, the word “frigging” was de-expurgated in OSPD 4, which is as good a reason as any to get it printed on a T-shirt.)

When the neutered list was released, the players revolted, many of them upset at not having been consulted. There were threats of event boycotting and … rioting? i dunno. What do Scrabble players do when they’re enraged? Spell “GRR”?

If the 80′s are to be believed, retribution begins with underwear theft.

Caving to the pressure, the Scrabbleati released an unexpurgated Official Tournament and Club Word List.

Somebody Set Us Up the F-Bomb

All this to say, i’m at a point now where i’m considering the word list for Spellirium, and whether or not it should contain naughties. As i’ve said before, the game is not necessarily for kids, so we can take “WILL SOMEONE CONSIDER THE CHILDREN??” handily out of the equation.

The difference between Spellirium and Scrabble is that while you have the option to spell various words in Scrabble, Spellirium may actually require you to spell certain words. For example, you may come to a point in the game where you meet a character who won’t let you pass unless you’ve spelled every word beginning with “Q”. i think this makes a big difference in deciding whether or not to include certain words on the list. When the word list is all up in your bidness, i don’t want to force a player to spell a word he is uncomfortable spelling.

Spell “nookie”. DO IT!!!

Degrees of Depravity

We can sort the expurgated words into these general categories:

Swears
Euphemisms for swears
Racist/Prejudiced terms
Puerile words for body functions/parts (impolite words that mostly kids would use)
Crass words for body functions (impolite words that mostly adults would use)

So we could go a number of different ways with Spellirium. We could include these words, and complaints be damned. We could, as some have suggested, give the player an optional switch to flip that’s off by default – when you turn it on, you get the complete word list. And the “complete” word list could be everything but swears and racism, everything but racism, or even plain old everything … (but i have a gut feeling that of any of the words on the list, most people are most likely to take most offense at the racist/prejudiced stuff).

What do YOU think? Should we include a content switch? Should we include all the naughty words, or just some of them?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

When you answer, imagine yourself playing Spellirium, making one of these words, and reacting when the game does (or doesn’t) acknowledge it. And imagine your reaction if the game required you to make one or all of the words on the list.

Thanks, everyone!

Word.

Fettering Facebook: Should We Put a Cap on Capitalism?

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:11:30 +0000

Meaty arguments break out from time to time on Twitter, but the 140 character limit cramps my long-winded style. Most recently, UK game dev Iain Lobb and US game dev Adam Saltsman were discussing Adam’s article Contrivance and Extortion II: Clarifications, Feedback & Suggestions, in which he condemns certain game design styles as “unethical”. Iain countered by saying “I think we should save the word unethical for things like credit default swaps, MP’s expenses, etc.” (note to my non-UK readers: an “MP” is sort of a gnome-like creature that inhabits England’s Houses of Parliament). Iain continued, “I think to worry ethics over a few dollars amongst people who can afford it is over dramatic.”

But what if players actually can’t afford it? i referred both gentlemen to my article “Do Social Games Exploit the Mentally Ill?“. Iain posited one possible solution, to which Adam agreed:

Seventy years ago, that kind of talk would land you on a Communist Blacklist, and you’d never make games in this town again. (taps cigar)

Get stuffed, pinkos.

i mention the Twitter thread, because this very topic came up at IndieCade 2011 a few weeks back, during the Ethics of Big Game Design panel. (Okay – admittedly, i brought it up.) Panelist Brenda Brathwaite spent an earlier part of the discussion talking about the disease of alcoholism in her family, and how banning alcohol would remove a lot of the temptation and social pressure surrounding alcoholics, potentially making life easier for them … but added that prohibition is a ridiculous idea, and that it’s not the rest of society’s responsibility to keep alcoholics from drinking.

NO, Timmy. You have a PROBLEM.

During question period, i asked whether or not game developers (or the government) had a responsibility to protect players by preventing them from paying too much money in their games. i had asked the same question at GDC earlier in the year, and was met with a similar response here: no … that’s crazy … how would you even … what would the cap be … how would you enforce … is it really up to us … etc etc etc.

The discussion inevitably eschews corporate ethics and focuses on government enforcement. Just as the government enforces certain limitations on alcohol and gambling, and even stronger limitations on drugs, the question becomes would/could/should the government impose such a spending cap on games? Bar owners in Canada are required to deny booze to patrons who they feel have had too much. Companies that hold holiday parties are on the hook to provide cab rides to their employees, because if those employees drive drunk and something goes awry, the company could be liable. i’ve been told that in many places, casinos turn away townies. One of the panelists mentioned that, in fact, South Korea does enforce a game curfew on its citizens to help fight game addiction, one of its societal woes.

i want YOU … to clean up your room and eat all your veggies.

It’s funny to me that in a discussion about ethics, we turn to what the government mandates, legislates and requires of us. i’m no philosopher, but don’t issues of ethics supersede Earthly rule? i hold that certain things are right and wrong – that certain things benefit and damage my fellow members of society – and i hold those convictions apart from any laws my government may make. (Thankfully, my convictions are largely in harmony with my government’s laws.)

The Evil Get Richer

The suggestion of capping spending in a game no doubt flies in the face of ‘Murrican values of Freedom and Liberty and the Free Market System (a system which, as we’ve seen, has so thoroughly hosed a good many people in that country). But i wonder: do you think it’s a good idea? Have we come to the point that Korea must have reached, where the problem of overspending real money fo virtual goods is so widespread that a limitation is actually necessary? Should we nip it in the bud before the freemium model causes a problem? And do you think companies and game developers should act ethically apart from anything their governments require them to do?

Let me know which country you’re from in your response!

5 Cardinal Sins of Children’s Entertainment

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:14:30 +0000

i recently watched the Sesame Street flick The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland with my tiny little girls. i managed expectations by paying a requisite visit to MrSkin.com to learn that there are no nude scenes in the movie (although several characters spend the entire running time not wearing any pants).

(tickle him where, exactly?)

With Jim Henson long passed, the Sesame Street and Muppet brands have really felt the loss. Some people feel Elmo epitomizes a Henson-less Sesame Street (in fact, Elmo was sanctioned by Jim, and even shared some skits with a Henson-performed Kermit). i’m not a big fan of modern-day Sesame Street’s more child-like Zoe, Rosita, Abby Cadabby, and Baby Bear (versus the old school street’s grown-up Herry, Kermit, Bert & Ernie, Sully & Biff and Grover), but the inclusion of more female Muppets is probably a change for the better – even if most of the new characters annoy the piss out of me.

Monsters beat princesses any day.

What i found unforgivable, though, was the flagrant rule-breaking the crew engaged in, where one hard-and-fast law of the Sesame Street Universe was trodden and sullied for fans everywhere (even as Sully himself was nowhere to be found). Outraged, I conjured up four other examples in which the “laws” of certain children’s entertainment brands have been broken, and the caretakers of those franchises have yet to be brought to justice.

1. Showing the Interior of Oscar’s Can

The crime committed by the Sesame Street writers in Elmo in Grouchland was filming the interior of Oscar the Grouch’s garbage can. Longtime fans (or anyone even casually acquainted with Sesame Street) can tell you that the magic of Oscar’s Tardis-like garbage can home, which houses (among other things) his pet elephant, was a silly unsolvable mystery and untouchable canon in Sesame Street lore.

Look away!

Why untouchable? Because if you show the inside of Oscar’s can, the elephant jokes of decades of Sesame Street seasons no longer work. Watch Elmo in Grouchland, and then go back and watch a gag where Oscar tinkers with his grouch jalopy somewhere inside his garbage can. You’ll say to yourself “oh yeah – that’s entirely possible. i’ve seen the inside of his can, and it’s quite spacious.”

It was a wretched, wretched idea to break this law, and worse – it was entirely unnecessary to the film’s fiction. As per usual, Elmo could have described the inside of the can in an echoey voice-over, and tell the viewer how he discovered a portal to Grouchland inside. But “show, don’t tell”, right? There’s apparently no room for imagination in a post-Henson Sesame Street.

Just … dammit.

2. Poochifying Paddington Bear

The original Paddington Bear adaptation was an unbelievably charming and unique blend of stop-motion animation and classical 2D, where the very Pooh-like title character would interact with paper cut-outs of the show’s less interesting supporting cast. Here’s an episode, in case you don’t remember or have never seen it:

Recently, Cookie Jar Entertainment produced an unnecessary and awful Paddington Bear upgrade. They stripped out the narration, the stop-motion, the wit, the charm, and the Britishness. We’re left with a vanilla Paddington show that looks and feels like any other daytime filler material built to keep the little brats entertained. Watch, if you dare:

Rastafarianize him by 10%!

Ugh. After that, sticky Paddington and i both need a shower.

(For the record, the intervening Hanna Barbera take on Paddington was also crap.)

3. Naming the Man with the Yellow Hat

The Curious George series of children’s books chugged along for sixty bloody years being content to call the monkey’s friend “the man with the yellow hat”. When the film version came out in 2006, the geniuses in charge named him “Ted Shackleford”.

Why? God only knows.

Anonymity is verboten in this post-911 environment. Let’s see some i.d.

4. Voicing the Peanuts Teacher

The adults in Peanuts teevee specials are voiced by a muted trombone. Is this a law? Yes. Yes it is. And is it a crime to deviate from this? Yes. It most certainly is.

Stop! In the name of the wah wah wah woh wah wah wah!

And why? Because we never see grown-ups in Peanuts, and teachers sound like muted trombones. That’s the way it is. The kids are important – the adults are not. This creative decision, paired with the decision to hire real kids to voice the Peanuts characters, cleverly conveyed that a child’s domain is often worlds apart from an adult’s, to the point where they even speak a different language. This helps to make the Peanuts characters’ adult-like antics, like Lucy’s psychiatry booth and Sally’s obsession with Linus, even funnier.

And … oh – what’s this? Here comes She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown to dump all over that.

5. Making the Cat in the Hat a Safe, Friendly Science Tutor

Dr. Seuss’s bastion of kid poetry, The Cat in the Hat, was recently adapted to television. The book is about two young children who are who are conspicuously abandoned by their mother, and who find themselves bored out of their skulls on a rainy day. They are visited by the titular cat who barges in and promises them a good time. He then proceeds to trash the house, alarming their neurotic pet fish who constantly warns them that their mother is going to lose her shit when she sees the place. With every destructive suggestion the Cat puts forth, he assures them that “your mother will surely not mind if you do.”

He certainly LOOKS like a respectable fellow …

And just when the kids think things couldn’t get any worse, the Cat unleashes his two frat buddies, Thing 1 and Thing 2, who demolish everything in sight. The Cat is not a nice, friendly character. For 3/4 of the book, he’s a villain, and the story builds towards this impending doom as we draw nearer and nearer to mom’s return. The Cat in the Hat is essentially a horror story for preschoolers.

Lock the doors, honey.

Sounds like a fun concept for a teevee show, right? So what’s the premise for The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That?

First of all, the boy is brown. Whatever. i’ll let it slide. i always thought that “Sally and I” were brother and sister. If you’re going to muck with race, why not make them both brown? Because it would alienate white kids? Then why didn’t they make the fish Asian? i dunno. i don’t care too much about it.

The Cat is an equal opportunity shit disturber.

What i do care about is that the Cat in the Hat, anarchist, tormentor of fish and destroyer of private property, is now a friendly character who teaches the kids about science. Naturally. The show is so-titled because the Cat is ever-so-knowledgeable about aquatic life, the water cycle, the seasons, and any number of other natural phenomenon.

You know what Seuss’s Cat knew a lot about? Flying kites inside the house.

Here’s what you need to know about science, kids: GRAVITY.

The most awful part of this show is that the kids’ mom is always home when the Cat shows up, and when the Cat suggests they “go go go go … on an adventure” to learn about colour theory or some bullshit, he says (as in the book), “your mother will surely not mind if you do!” And you know what the kids do? They ask their mom for permission. i can’t think of anything more antithetical to the spirit of the book than taking the teeth out of it and making it that safe. It’s a true testament to modern-day paranoid parenting.

Thing 1 and Thing 2 make an appearance in every episode, usually to help the kids when they’re in a jam. Because, as we know from the book, that’s what Thing 1 and Thing 2 love to do: help little children get a grasp on science.

Oh – thank goodness Thing 1 and Thing 2 are here to explain SONAR.

No. You know what? NO. Thing 1 and Thing 2 are not preschool science teachers. They’re here to FUCK SHIT UP, and that’s ALL that they’re about. If you want your kids to watch a kids’ show that teaches science, the pickings aren’t exactly slim. You’ve got Curious George (makes sense – he’s curious, and he’s a monkey, and we use monkeys in scientific experiments), Peep and the Big Wide World, Sid the Science Kid, Dinosaur Train, Wild Kratts, and Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies. Thanks to a big STEM push by the US government (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), we have preschool science shows in spades.

If you’re going to teach anything using the Cat in the Hat, you might try ethics and morality as a more brand-appropriate topic. Or teach kids what to do when people – particularly grown-ups – put them in situations that make them uncomfortable. i’m not suggesting every episode be about molestation, but rather assertiveness, communication, and self-awareness. Here’s how Seuss ended his book:

Then our mother came in
And said said to us two,
“Did you have any fun?
Tell me. What did you do?”
And Sally and I
did not know What to say.
Should we tell her the things
that went on there that day?
Should we tell her about it?
Now, what SHOULD we do?
Well…
what would YOU do If you mother asked YOU?

i’d tell her about animal migration and the light spectrum!

The US government doesn’t have a vested interest in preschool shows that teach morality or self-awareness. Being tops in science helps the country subjugate the rest of the world and remain a superpower. But being a morally sound or independently thinking nation doesn’t pay.

Crapping on the Shoulders of Giants

Henson, Schulz, Bond, Geisel and the Reys. We can posthumously mess with their creations and make everyone completely forget what was charming, subtle, and valuable about their work to begin with. This is what we get when men and women in ties have say over the creations of men and women with pencils.

Sissy’s Magical IndieCade Adventure

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:49:51 +0000

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, the game i co-authored with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra, was a finalist this year at IndieCade 2011. You’ve seen plenty of pictures from E3, GDC, Tokyo Game Show and other more well-known video game industry events, but what’s IndieCade like? Come with me – it’s my magical IndieCade adventure!

Our Arrival in LA-LA Land

IndieCade takes place in Culver City, a close suburb of Los Angeles California, the Most Horrible Place on Earth. i don’t care for it. Ever since getting dumped out of a cab at two in the morning somewhere in LA, and asking some nearby police officers to help point me towards my hotel, and being denied, i don’t much enjoy traveling there. Culver feels a little bit smaller and a little bit homier than LA proper, but it’s still carved up by vicious six-lane mini-highways threatening to Frogger you at every crossing.

i traveled to IndieCade with fellow indie game developer Michael Todd (@thegamedesigner), whose antics i hope you’ve been reading about on my Twitter account (@untoldent). In case you missed it, here’s a taste:

Good times.

Despite the chaos, Michael Todd managed to spot someone on the plane who was going to IndieCade as well, zeroing in on a guy who was playing SpaceChem on an iPad. That’s how we made friends with Matt from NVIDIA, who agreed to split a cab to Culver with us.

Michael Todd, looking like he’s going to set Matt from NVIDIA on fire.

Michael Todd, after setting Matt from NVIDIA on fire.

We stayed at the historic Culver Hotel, an early 20th century joint situated just up the street from the former MGM (now Sony) studios. Apparently Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr and Jack Haley used to whoop it up there while filming Showgirls.

The Culver Hotel by day …

… and by night.

Travel-weary and hungry, our first order of bidness was to beeline for the nearby In-N-Out Burger, which certain folks on Twitter can’t stop raving about. My hopes were high for what many were calling the best fast food burger in existence. My concierge told me to order a “double double, animal-style” from the secret menu. This being LA, i made absolutely sure that we were both referring to a burger.

My meal. Thankfully, my chASStity remained intact.

Of course, no Earthly burger could live up to that amount of hype. You couldn’t find a more pedestrian burger. And American cheese sucks. i took special note of the burger wrapper:

If the very best thing you can say about a burger is that it’s been wrapped in paper since 1948, you’ve got yourself a shitty burger. Here’s a list of other bullet points the restaurant could have printed on the wrapper:

Since 1948, In-N-Out Burgers have been

round
legal in 48 states
made from 100% stuff
found only at In-N-Out
edible

Aim high, burger joint. Aim high.

Spectacles, Testicles …

The night we arrived, IndieCade held its big awards show. It was much bigger than i expected it would be. The invite suggested we come dressed in “cocktail” attire. This was the best i could muster:

i’m ready for my cocktail, Mr. DeMille.

Many of the other indies, being primal savages, managed to squeeze themselves into pants for the event (which is more than i think most of us hoped for). At the awards show, we were met with a bona fide red carpet entrance.

Jim and emmie McGinley from BigPants games were agog … but not as agog as they’d become when they won the Audience Choice Award for The Depths to Which I Sink a few days later.

You never really get to see a red carpet photo from the perspective of its intimidated subjects, so here you go:

G4TV’s Rob Manuel does his best impression of an Oreo.

Inside, the place was lit up like a Christmas tree. A … Chinese-lanterned Chinese Christmas tree from China.

IndieCade assembled a list of Hollywood actors from geek-related movies and shows to present the awards, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Freaks and Geeks actor Samm Levine (famous also for his leading role in Showgirls) brought his A-material, including “programmers never shower” and “gamers live in their moms’ basements and masturbate a lot”. i mean, granted, but i’m sure there were one or two folks in the audience who resented being lumped in with the rest of us.

i swear this guy’s been cryogenically frozen since his show got cancelled.

At one point, two young starlets joked that they should start making out at the podium. i could feel the room bristle uncomfortably. Know your audience, kids.

Ponycorns got a few unexpected shout-outs from the mic, and was nominated for the Community Impact award, but ultimately lost to Johann Sebastian Joust. But it’s an honour just to lose bitterly.

As the party drew on tipsily into the wee hours, more than a few people asked me where my daughter – my five-year-old daughter – was. i had no response. My Twitter pal Ian Bogost cooked up an appropriate comeback:

“Fuck if I know. She got trashed and went home with some 8 year old.”

The Lay of the Land

Aside from the Santa Monica-staged awards ceremony, IndieCade took place within a 3-block radius of our hotel. In the parking lot across the street, they’d erected some neat puzzle buildings designed by a local artist, whose nearby gallery hosted some of the finalists.

They’re cool and all, but i’d hate to see the IKEA instructions.

One of the venues was the Ivy Substation, a local theatre:

The park on the way to the Ivy had a really kickass climbing tree, if you’re into that sort of thing. i mention it in the off chance that you are:

Most of the finalists’ games were on display at a nearby firehall which, to my surprise, continued to operate throughout the weekend.

In front of the fire hall, you can see people playing the cardboard box-based “real” game Ordnungswissenschaft.

Alienware donated the equipment for the showcase. Somewhat unfairly, certain developers were assigned desktop machines with proper monitors, while others of us were assigned little 14 inch laptops. Ponycorns was squished on to one of these diminutive little screens, and shared a cramped table with an interactive geology textbook. “HELL naw,” said i, and grabbed an extra table. Then i proceeded to pimp my table out, Untold Entertainment style:

Thaaaaat’s RIGHT.

After the first day, the IndieCade organizers shut down my merch sales, claiming that i couldn’t sell anything because the firehall was a public place and i didn’t have a vendor’s permit. At first, i was asked to remove the two price tags from the shirts and plushies, and was later asked to remove the T-shirt rack entirely. It was kind of a bummer, but one day of T-shirt sales was enough to pay for my cab rides and meals at the event. i can’t help but think that if i had produced a valid vendor’s license for the organizers, they still would have asked me to shut down my merch sales … but that’s just conjecture on my part.

Patty Wagon

i was asked to speak on a Family Friendly Games panel on Sunday, which was a real thrill. Soon after, some of us piled into a car with my friend Joel from Riot Games (@lowpolycount) to hit up the rarified East coast burger joint Five Guys.

i washed the In-N-Out taste out of my mouth with a proper burger from this place.

Everywhere you go in California, there are these vague “shit be causin’ cancer” signs:

(They must be talking about Cinnabon?)

Conferences are exhausting, and IndieCade was no exception. After being on my feet for twelve hours on the concrete firehall floor, i was wiped. Thank goodness – three tall, frosty glasses of Cherry Coke came to my rescue.

Kids Play the Darndest Things

On Saturday and Sunday, the firehall was open to the public to just wander in, try out the games, and meet their creators. This was, by far, my favourite aspect of the festival. i just loved talking to Joe and Jane Community Member, and it was especially exciting whenever a little kid played the game:

i caught this girl petting each of the ponycorns in turn, giving their manes a test drive. Protip: Fluffybuns has the nicest hair.

Next to our booth was Johann Sebastian Joust, the game that edged us out in our award category. It drew large crowds with lots of clapping and laughter.

Okay, sure – if all you’re looking for in a game is for it to be fun and exciting for large numbers of people.

Each player gets a Playstation Move controller. The players must move around the arena in time to the Bach soundtrack – if you move too quickly, you’re out. So the game is all about swatting someone else’s remote to make it move too quickly and knock that player out of the game. It’s a neat idea, and people loved it.

i met a fellow wearing a paper tie whose father was the subject of Deepak Fights Robots, a Pac Man/Bubble Bobble mash-up that took home the award for best game design.

They really managed to *curry* favour with the … no, never mind.

That’s a Rap

The festival concluded with the Audience and Developer’s Choice Awards. A stunned Jim and emilie McGinley accepted their Audience Choice award, but not before the crowd tried a few rounds of Local No. 12′s the MetaGame.

In the MetaGame, each player gets a deck of cards. Most cards depict video games, while some cards pose a comparison question, like “Which game is a better waste of ten minutes?” or “Which game deserves to be locked in a vault for 1000 years?” The challenger chooses a discussion card, and both players throw down a game card. Then they debate. It’s all very Socratic.

Never debate a man in a moustachioed shirt.

i squared off against Myles Nye here on the left, who wound up trouncing all comers. He later brought down the house while defending Parappa the Rapper by freestyle rapping his rebuttal.

Indiecade 2011 – Dragon’s Lair vs Parappa the Rapper from Sokay Man on Vimeo.

IndieCade 2011 was capped with a backyard barbecue at Robin Hunicke’s house. Robin is a producer at That Game Company (Flow, Flower, and the upcoming Flowest: Flow Harder).

Set phasers to “mingle”.

Ed from Twisted Tree Games (Proteus) toasts a marshmallow, while other bearded men and women make s’mores nearby. The non-bearded gentleman in the background was quickly expelled from the party.

Phil Fish, developer of the Best in Show winner Fez, spun tunes with Richard Lemarchand, of Uncharted fame

i sat down next to Richard to reclaim my key drive, which Phil had borrowed to transfer some music. He introduced himself, and then said “i loved Ponycorns.” i had to admit that i got stuck somewhat early in his game when i was shot repeatedly in the face. He assured me i could play Uncharted 2 without missing important plot details.

Richard is a very nice guy. Very British. This is confusing, because his last name is “Lemarchand”. He makes frequent, almost self-conscious references to Dr. Who. i have a sneaking suspicion he’s an imposter – a Frenchman posing as an Englishman for some bizarre reason. You can’t fool me, Lemarchand. Blood will out.

The Voyage Home

It was an exhausting five days. By the end of it, Michael Todd had learned that hotels not only charge exorbitant amounts for in-room phone calls, but also for in-room death threats.

E is for Enderman

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:36:41 +0000

At your house, and in schools across the country, “E” might stand for “Elephant”. But this is how we roll in my family: my daughter Cassandra, co-creator of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure and a big Minecraft fan, created this fridge/fan art of the game’s latest enemy:

The lower-case “e” looks like a “g”, but we’re working on it. First things first, we have to educate her as to the proper colour of an enderman’s eyes. Priorities – you know.

Unity Game Development by Example gets an Update!

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:49:11 +0000

Last week, Packt Publishing released the second edition of my seminal and important work, Unity 3.x Game Development by Example: A Beginner’s Guide, which helps fledgling game developers learn Unity through a serious of bad puns and dick jokes.

What’s New in Version 2?

Absolutely nothing! The Unity 3.x version is identical to the first edition, save for the fancy new cover by UbiSoft Toronto game artist Dan Cox. The occasional errata from the first edition have been corrected, and the screenshots have been updated so that they match Unity’s subtle interface changes. i’ve included two new spaceship models by Dan in Chapter 11 (the same ones you see on the cover), which i’ll make available to owners of all versions.

The first chapter was updated to discuss the BootCamp demo instead of the original Island Demo, which stopped working reliably as of version 3. Then, just as we were ready to release the book, Unity launched v3.4, which included yet another demo and more subtle UI changes. So Unity 3.x Game Development by Example has been lovingly (?) re-written TWICE to bring it in-line with what those nutty funsters at Unity have been up to.

Should i Buy It?

Yes you should.

i made the rather bold claim that the first edition of the book may very well cure cancer. i realize now that this was entirely irresponsible of me, and i regret my error in judgment. i can say now with all certainty that version two is guaranteed to cure cancer, or your money back. Please contact Pack Publishing for all refund inquiries, including a post mortem certificate from your next of kin.

Praise for Unity 3D Game Development by Example (from actual people)

“A great resource for learning Unity.” – Michael Todd, indie game developer

“Creighton’s book teaches both Unity and good design practices while staying hip, funny, and even controversial. A must read!” – Ryon Levitt, Game Designer

“I went from unemployed to working full-time in California!” – Mohammed Al-Sahaf, game school graduate

“I didn’t loose brain cells when I read this book.” – Brent Arnold, Mobile Developer

Know Your N’Audience

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:57:04 +0000

Sometimes it’s just as important to know who’s NOT going to buy your product than who IS.

Spellirium is a story-based game with a word puzzle mechanic. Many people have asked me “Who’s the target audience? Kids?”, or have cocked a skeptical eye, implying that it will never succeed in the mainstream marketplace … but maybe i should try selling the game to schools?

Breaking from Untold Entertainment’s core competency, we’re not developing Spellirium for kids. It’s a game for grown-ups. That’s because, simply put, kids hate word games.

H8

Back when i was working at YTV, i developed a series of games called The Sitekick Saga. It had an episodic release schedule, and each chapter contained a game. To progress through the story, you had to finish the game sandwiched inside.

The second chapter’s game was called Four Letter Words, because i’m subversive like that. It had four slots at the bottom of the screen. Letters would cascade down from the top. You guided them into the slots to form four-letter words. You needed to meet a quota of words before time ran out to proceed.

It was an extremely easy game. The clear strategy was to line up “ALL” at one end, and then plunk down letters to form “BALL”, “MALL”, “CALL”, “FALL”, “TALL”, etc. You could do the same thing with “OTE”, “ELL”, “ATE” or any other common letter formation. i figured any kid who’s read a Dr. Seuss book knows this. Or maybe i paid just a little too much attention to Sesame Street when i was younger, while other kids were busy imagining what’s up Prairie Dawn’s skirt?

Hey, baby … do those legs go ALL the way up?

At any rate, i overestimated the ability of nine and ten year olds to spell simple words. i received more hate mail about that game than anything i’ve ever done. The vitriol poured in over the message boards:

YTV how daer you made a game that maks us spel words?? what is this shool, if i wantd to learn i nad go sit in Miss jenkins class

While that’s not an actual quote from the site’s boards, please understand, dear reader, that in no way am i exaggerating the grammatical prowess here.

For the Love of the Queen’s English

So i don’t have plans to foist Spellirium on the school system. It’s a game for people who enjoy spelling words – who do it for fun rather than out of obligation. My players will be people who hold Scrabble matches, who adore Words with Friends, who hunch over newspaper crossword puzzles, and who cruise around WordGameWorld.com on their lunch break – during their adult job for adults.

Er … that’s not quite what i meant.

It’s important, then, to know who your audience isn’t, so that you don’t waste marketing time and effort talking about your game to people who couldn’t care less. Beyond that, if you’ve really done the legwork to identify your target audience, don’t let folks who haven’t done the research convince you that you should be selling to someone else.

Word.

Ponycorns Storm IndieCade 2011! Yaaaaaay!!

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 05:21:11 +0000

The news is out: the IndieCade 2011 jurors made their choices from a list of over 400 hopefuls and have put together a knock-out lineup of finalists for the festival this year, and Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure made the grade!

It’s an honour just to be nomerated.

I’ll be flying out to the event in Culver City California next month to bring sunshine, love, and high-pitched screaming to a state famous for its short days and dreary cloud cover. While there, i’ll be able to try out some of the year’s most talked-about indie titles, and i’ll get to hang out with an absolutely stellar group of independent game developers, many of whom i’ll likely have regrettable and unfortunate sex with. i’m creeping all their Facebook photos right now, trying to weed out the ugly ones.

Let’s try hair down, glasses off. And lose the fez.

Also in the running are Toronto’s Capy/SuperBrothers with Sword & Sworcery, who developed the game directly across the hall from the Untold offices under our meddling eye. And you may not yet have heard of BigPants or their selected stereoscopic game The Depths to Which I Sink, but that’s another Toronto game by none other than Jim and emilie McGinley, co-founders of the weekend-long TOJam event where Cassie and i developed Ponycorns. Finally, Gamercamp co-founder Jaime Woo had his “real” game Gargoyles selected to be part of the expo.

i think *somebody’s* been testing out the Photoshop SexyFace Filter.

And it won’t just be Toronto finalists attending – there’s a whole gaggle of us from the TDot flying out, including Mathew Kumar, the indie journalist behind EXP, Shawn McGrath, who’s currently building the trippy PS3 game Dyad, and indie dev Michael Todd, who gets a front row seat to my orgiastic debauchery because we’re splitting a hotel room. This just further solidifies Toronto’s reputation as the hub of indie game development in North America, and perhaps the world.

While i’d love to bring Cassie to the event, one of the drawbacks to being an indie is that you’re constantly down at the blood bank trying to sap enough haemoglobin to make rent. i could get her a plane ticket, but then of course i wouldn’t be able to act up at IndieCade, so i’d have to bring her mom … and if i brought Cheryl, i’d have to buy a ticket for Cassie’s little sister … and if you’ve ever seen our family pack for a 2-day stay at Grandma’s, you’d know that we couldn’t stop there – we’d have to charter our own cargo plane to transport all the “necessities” that two little girls require so that the day doesn’t devolve into a competition to see who can shriek the loudest. In short, i don’t have the means.

Ask Me About Loom™

While i’ll be happy to talk Ponycorns and its upcoming Japanese translation, i feel the game has about as much press and attention as any indie title will ever get. As IndieCade fast approaches, we’re working hard on playable demos of our upcoming games, Putty Crime: On the Trail of the Foxy Badger, a puzzle game modeled entirely in clay, and Spellirium, a post-apocalyptic word puzzle adventure game.

Putty Crime: on the Trail of the Foxy Badger

Spellirium

See you at IndieCade!

TIFF Nexus Difference Engine

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 04:00:23 +0000

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure received a mention off the top of this Torontoist article about the Difference Engine, which is a component of TIFF Nexus. Nexus is the umbrella name for all the stuff the Toronto International Film Festival does that’s not pure film. The Difference Engine is an initiative headed up by Jim Munroe (of Everybody Dies fame) and Mare Sheppard (part of the Metanet team behind the ninja game N+). The idea was this:

Ain’t no ladies in the games industry.
If there were, i wonder what kinds of games they’d make?
Let’s find out.

Mare is a lady, so her involvement is understandable. Jim Munroe, however, is definitely NOT a lady, as evidenced by the following diagram:

Nothing escapes the probing journalistic eye of Untold Entertainment.

Jim is involved because of his work on the Artsy Games Incubator, a somewhat similar concept, where he led a group of non-programmers on an odyssey of game creation. One of the interesting things i learned when talking to Jim and crew about the Difference Engine: Ladies Edition is that it’s important to have only ladies in the room, because men – even only one man (see above) – can skew the dynamic in the room and tilt the power balance. Weird, huh?

EVEN WEIRDER is this photo from the article, where we can clearly see Jim, who is a man, in the room with the ladies. What i love about this photo is that the unshaven man-legs on the right likely belong to Jim, it actually looks he’s poking his head through that little cubby hole at the other end of the room, spying on the proceedings (perhaps because someone put a “GIRLZ ONLY” sign on the door?).

i’m in ur Nexus, creepin’ ur ladygames

The other TIFF Nexus events this year include the Peripherals Intiative, which pairs game developers up with hardware hackers, and another mash-up involving “sequential artists”, as comic book folks sometimes call themselves just to make me giggle. Nexus kicked off last night at a swanky TIFF Bell Lightbox rooftop party in the midst of the film festival. Untold Entertainment was there. The tiny yorkshire pudding appetizers were to die for.

Ryan on the Run

Ryan Henson Creighton — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:03:35 +0000

i was thrilled to record a Reviews on the Run segment for Electric Playground last year. The segment didn’t get aired until the following summer – if you’re wondering why i don’t have any burn scars and still have both my arms in this clip, that’s why.

i still stand by my recommendation! Sword & Poker is a fun little toilet game in the spirit of Puzzle Quest and our own upcoming game Spellirium, in that it marries a casual game mechanic with some ideas from core games – in this case, RPGs and their hit points, levels, spells, etc. The mechanic itself isn’t actually poker, but a clever little puzzle game that uses the concept of poker hands for scoring. This game got me through many poops. Try it out, or buy the sequel!

Welcome to the Untold Entertainment Offices

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:35:55 +0000

We were honoured when respected causal games site Gamezebo decided to include us in their “cribs” series, asking us to take pictures of the Untold offices in downtown Toronto – presumably so they could case the joint and send someone in to steal our expensives.

Nice try, fellas – we’re broke!

Check out our shrine to classic LucasArts adventure games, our fabulous social media pillows, and the industry’s most unfortunate plantlife in Gamezebo Cribs: Untold Entertainment Edition.

Where It’s At

What the article doesn’t mention is that the Untold offices are situated in a very special building. Untold is directly across the hall from Capybara Games, who recently hosted and teamed up with Craig D. Adams (AKA Superbrothers) to create the iOS hit Sword and Sworcery EP. Untold occasionally shares space with world-traveled indie dev Michael Todd, creator of such arty fare as Broken Brothers and Silent Skies. Two levels up on the sixth floor in the same building is Jon Mak’s Queasy Games. You’ll remember Jon’s Everyday Shooter; Queasy is hard at work on Sound Shapes for the Playstation Vita.

So if you want to wipe out a lot of Toronto indie talent, send your angry anthrax-laced letters to our building. But better yet, if you’d like to be involved in the perfect storm of creative energy swirling around downtown TO, give Untold Entertainment a call to partner with us on your next exciting project.

Dear Lady Gamers: What Do You Want From Me?

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 04:38:12 +0000

i was about to begin this article by saying “all my life, i’ve tried to make sense of the opposite sex”, but it sounded too trite and cliche. The truth is, i think – i honestly do think – that i have a pretty good grasp of women. i grew up the only child of a single-parent mom, and have lived a pretty estrogen-infused existence. i know what it is to toll paint. i have stenciled. i’ve knitted. i’ve made a macrame owl. These are things i can not unlearn.

Or unsee.

A very interesting conversation very nearly broke out on Facebook today, when i made the wild claim that our upcoming game, Spellirium, is for the ladies, and that i think “chicks’ll dig it”. The game was designed from the ground up to be female-friendly, in ways i will enumerate shortly. But something was eating at me: recently, when i made that same claim to a colleague, he said “Women will enjoy it, eh? Why? Does it have any romance in it?”

The blood drained from my face a little. We’re still not too late in the game to pivot, but no, Spellirium does not actually have a romantic thread running through it, nor does it have a female lead. i wondered: would these two shortcomings doom it? Would women not be interested in my game because the lead character is a young white male who doesn’t romance it up at any point in the story?

Help me, Fabio. You’re my only hope.

Chick Magnet

First, a brief primer. Spellirium is a graphic adventure game, which means that the gameplay and the writing go hand-in-hand. It’s set in the future, after a cataclysmic event has left civilization buried under a thousand feet of earth. It tells the story of a young apprentice tailor named Todd living a sheltered life in a society where reading and writing have been outlawed, on pain of death. But Todd and the other tailors have a secret: they’re actually Runekeepers, secret curators of an underground library filled with forbidden writing. A short time after the Runekeepers set off on a mission leaving Todd alone, one of them turns up dead. Brother Todd sets out on a quest to find out why.

Spellirium was originally designed to be a casual downloadable game, the kind of title that a portal like Big Fish Games might carry. When we were making a case for the game to our funders, we had to demonstrate that Spellirium would be a hit with a female audience, because Big Fish and their ilk cater primarily to older female customers.

Here are the pro-female elements we felt the game had going for it:

It’s story-driven. If we compare games to porn, they say that women prefer story and character development, while men just enjoy visceral close-ups of gnashing genitalia. If Gears of War is analogous to visceral, visual man-porn, something like Spellirium is far more gentle and female-friendly, with a focus on why the pool boy is visiting on that particular day.

Did somebody whose boss just fired her under suspicion of corporate espionage order a pizza?
It’s a word game. i’ve actually been warned against admitting this – indeed, Big Fish Games and friends dumped all over Spellirium at Casual Connect two years ago because it’s a word game. Some of the portal reps called it “too cerebral”, and others cautioned that women don’t like to think when they play games – they just want to sit down and zone out (hence 50 different flavours of bubble-popping, jewel-matching and hidden object-finding on those sites).
But i can’t deny it: Spellirium is all about making words, Scrabble/Boggle-style, to solve puzzles. And my intuition was vindicated when we brought a very early build of the game to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival two years ago; every guy who swung by the booth said “my girlfriend/wife/daughter would really enjoy that”, while every girlfriend/wife/daughter who passed by did a double-take and stopped to check it out. And that’s when it was purely a word game, with no sign of plot or character development in sight.

Women to letter tiles: like moths to a flame.
It’s dark fantasy. Fact: women enjoy this genre. They like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal and Pan’s Labyrinth and City of Ember and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and His Dark Materials and the Spiderwick Chronicles and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and (perhaps unfortunately) Twilight. Women read those huge 10-book-long fantasy chronicles like Dragonriders of Pern. In particular, i think there’s something about dark fantasy that women prefer over straight-up elf-ridden high fantasy. Women are drawn in by stories that have an air of mystery, seduction, evil, or … for lack of a better word, purple.

Quoth the raven, “Enter your credit card number.”

But It’s a Straight-Up Sausage Party

The two main characters in Spellirium are male. One is a young man. The other is a big blue monster. The third member of the group is a woman – a hard woman they call The Hunter, who dresses in the pelts of the animals she kills and skins. She has a big red scar through her left eye, because i was self-conscious about making her too pretty. She’s self-sufficient and vindictive, and is motivated by revenge. She doesn’t take any crap from the main character. i wrote her this way because i wanted a strong female character who isn’t subdued by the boyish charms of the male lead, and who doesn’t succumb to his wily advances, and who will put a bullet up his nose if he tries to come any closer.

Three concept sketches of The Hunter. We went with the one on the left. The blunderbuss was non-negotiable.

Will women like her? i have no idea. Will they still enjoy the game, even though the two leads are male? No clue. Will they be less interested in Spellirium because there’s no love story? i really don’t know. That’s kind of why i’m writing this article. i want to hear from women who play games. Is any of this stuff important to you?

The only other significant female character is The Mystic, who is an old fortune-teller, which i do realize is the female equivalent of the Magic Negro. Part of the fun of Spellirium is that it breaks the fourth wall on a regular basis; any time i (the author) introduce a stock character, Todd and company are going to call me out on it in the game dialogue.

Indie dev Michael Todd introduced me to the Bechdel Test today while we were discussing this. In order to pass the test, your script has to have:

at least two women in it,
Who talk to each other,
About something other than a man.

As currently scripted, Spellirium fails the Bechdel test at point #2. Women: have i fallen out of your good graces, or is there still a chance that you’ll play this game and others like it?

Word.

Sign up for the Spellirium Newsletter. The newsletter contains new screenshots and juicy game gossip that you won’t find anywhere else. Tuesday is Ladies’ Night.

Are We Headed for a Second Video Game Crash?

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:00:58 +0000

Who doesn’t remember 1983? It was the year that Thomas Sankara became the president of the Republic of Upper Volta. It was the year McDonald’s debuted the “chicken” McNugget. And it’s the year that video games, once a viable and promising business, went (in economic terms) completely tits-up.

Quoth Wikipedia:

There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence.

Confession: i actually loved this game when i was a kid.

Because i hail from the copy/paste school of online research, i’ll allow Wikipedia to elaborate:

Unlike Nintendo, Sega, Sony, or Microsoft in later decades, the hardware manufacturers in this era lost exclusive control of their platforms’ supply of games. With it, they also lost the ability to make sure that the toy stores were never overloaded with products. Activision, Atari and Mattel all had experienced programmers, but many of the new companies — rushing to join the market — did not have enough experience and talent to create the games.

Think you might want to add some – you know – *stuff* to this one, fellas?

Essentially, when Activison cracked the nut that allowed them to make games for the proprietary Atari 2600 system, that opened the floodgates for inferior knock-offs and low-quality carts. If there’s an Atari or Activision game on the shelf selling for $60, and a bin full of carts selling for $1 apiece right next to them, Joe Uneducated Mom is probably walking out with an armful of shovelware than a copy of Pitfall II.

Doomed to Repeat It?

Can you think of another period in history when there was a “supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games?” Can you name a time when we have $60 games competing with a bin full of titles selling for $1? i can. It’s called “NOW”.

We’ve transcended figures of speech: at some points the selection becomes, quite literally, shitty.

i’m no economist, but i have heard the phrase “supply and demand” bandied about. What we have now is an oversupply and an under-demand. There are too many people making games, and not enough people to play them – and more importantly, not enough people willing to pay fair market value for them. When the president of Nintendo takes to the stage at GDC 2011 and implores people not to sell their games for a buck, something alarming is happening. And when you get a trend of people reducing the cost of their games from $1 to FREE because $1 was too expensive, it’s time to consider jumping ship. And then setting that ship on fire.

When you have every community college boasting a over-subscribed video game program of one kind or another, but recent reports suggest that graduates’ success at landing an industry job is 12%, there’s a problem. Something ain’t right. The dam’s got to burst.

Am i out to lunch here, or are we headed for another catastrophic, landfill-full-of-E.T.-carts crash of the industry? And if we do crash, what will that crash look like? If you are an economist and you think i’m out to lunch, please tell me why.

Fame.

Ryan Henson Creighton — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 04:18:53 +0000

i took the family to IKEA today, as a weird potty-training reward for my youngest. The store offers free child care in a room with a ball pool; we told Izzy that they wouldn’t take kids who weren’t potty trained. Before a week was out, she was pooping on the can like a champ. But this isn’t the story about a 3-year-old’s bowel movements.

And this isn’t a picture of a 3-year-old’s bowel movements (though you wouldn’t know it.)

This is the story of how Izzy was two inches shy of the height cut-off, so we dropped Cassie off at the ball pit and took Izzy secretly to get a frozen yogurt cone to stop her from crying inconsolably. i was wearing my “I Am an Evil Lemon” shirt, one of the fine items we sell for fans of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. The cashier looked at it and said “cool shirt!” This was exciting to me. “Do you know what this is?” i asked. “No,” he said.

Oh. What a let-down.

i said “It’s from this game i made with my daughter.” His face brightened up. “You were on the news!” Then my face brightened up as well.

The World Over

What i found remarkable about the exchange was that he was a young guy, supposedly part of a generation that didn’t watch teevee any more – and especially not the 6 o’clock news (or the nation-wide morning show Canada AM).

But that didn’t beat my experience a week ago. We had rented a cottage in Haliburton, a patch of cottage country three hours Northwest of Toronto. The map to that area of Ontario has exactly one road running through it; the rest is very very green, and spotted with lakes. The village closest to the cottage was a place called Gooderham, which i hesitate to call a “one-horse town”, because i got the feeling they likely had to borrow a horse from the next town over. The only commercial buildings in Gooderham are a diner, a gas station, and a convenience store.

Three hours Northwest of Toronto? Not convenient.

We went in to buy marshmallows, popsicles, and snow cone syrup – you know, all the camping staples – and i was wearing my Evil Lemon shirt. As with the IKEA story, the guy behind the cash register remarked at my shirt. “That’s a strange shirt,” he said. “Oh – it’s from this game i made with my daughter,” i replied.

And then, this guy who worked his parents’ convenience store in the middle of B.F. Nowhere in Ontario, three hours Northwest of Toronto, and three months after the fact, said “Oh – you were on the news!”

i’ve had people write to me to tell me how they’ve shared the game around. You’ll remember the teacher who dressed up as the Ponycorns game and went to an anime convention. At the cottage, we spent some time with an old friend of ours, who is also a teacher. Before school ended, he shared the game with his high school students, who went absolutely nuts for it. Come exam time, his students (unprovoked) doodled ponycorns fan-art on the backs of their papers:

IMPORTANT NOTE: My friend does not teach art.

Tiny Voice, Enormous Head

Many people ask me how Cassie is handling her notoriety. A few weeks back, we wanted to have brunch at a place downtown. The waitress politely told us it would be a five minute wait for a table. Cassie looked up at her and said, in a rehearsed manner, “Hi! My name’s Cassie. i’m five years old. i made a game called Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, and almost everyone in the whole world has played it.” Then she waited, expectantly. This, of course, was all to my utter horror.

“Cassie … are you trying to get us a table more quickly?” i asked. Then, to salvage the situation with humour (as i am wont to do), i chuckled uncomfortably and said to Cassie (for the waitress’s benefit) “No, sweetie – this is how you do it: you say ‘DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM??’”

i’m not sure the waitress appreciated that approach either.

Every so often, i’ll catch Cassie smugly saying to her sister “i’m the famous girl”, and i’ll bark at her from another room “KNOCK IT OFF. You’re NOT famous.” She just continues colouring, and humming to herself contentedly.

We’re far from having created a monster, but my wife and i do have to issue occasional reminders about humility vs. conceitedness. We told Cass that “almost everyone in the world” had played her game, only to help frame it for her. She wouldn’t have appreciated the scope of the game’s virality if we had said “GREAT news, sweetie! Your game is huge in Michigan, and in select parts of Western Mexico!”

Still, the fact that folks remember us from the news remains a thrill. It’s a far cry from getting mobbed in a shopping mall by squealing preteen girls, but hey … we can’t all be Wilford Brimley.

This November, i’ll be talking about the whole roller coaster ride of creating a viral game, and the steps we took to maximize our exposure and reach during the peak of the craziness, at the Screens festival in Toronto for my presentation “Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar“.

How Little Things Escalate

Ryan Henson Creighton — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:09:44 +0000

“Escalation” is the term game developers use to describe the ways in which a video game gets progressively more challenging. There are many different ways to escalate a game. Here are a few:

decrease the amount of time the player has to complete a goal

at the climax of Super Metroid, the player has to escape the ship before it explodes
increase the speed or power of obstacles

Pac Man’s ghost enemies speed up as the game escalates

Bubble Bobble introduces the invincible Baron von Blubba when the player dawdles
decrease the number of “chances” or “tries” the player has to complete a goal

Donkey Kong gives the player a set number of tries (“lives”) as the game escalates before the machine requires another quarter and the player has to start from the beginning
increase complexity

as Bejewelled escalates, it introduces extra gem colours, which makes finding matches more challenging
increase the grind – an action the player must perform repeatedly to be successful

Gran Turismo introduces endurance races where the player must race for a set number of real-time hours to win

World of Warcraft confronts the player with increasingly more difficult monsters, which forces the player to repeatedly kill weaker monsters to improve his stats
decrease the amount of visual information available to the player

The Legend of Zelda periodically turns out the lights, and requires the player to doggedly re-ignite lamps
increase the quota – the number of small goals the player must complete within the time limit. This is really just a variation on decreasing the time limit.

As each level progesses, Diner Dash increases the number of customers you have to serve

Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!

i learned an interesting tip about escalation. i wish i could credit my source, but i have a memory like a sieve . (Mother Nature escalates my life by increasingly turning me into a doddering old fool.) The tip is to escalate your game with a lightning bolt graph, rather than a smooth incline. Regard:

In an old-school arcade game, the levels get progressively more insane, until you lose the game and have to feed the machine more quarters. This makes sense for a coin-op that exists to devour your hard-earned pocket change, but it doesn’t make sense if you’re designing a more modern game where you want your player to be engaged for as long as possible. A freemium game, for example, lives and dies by retaining players; a linear escalation curve increases the likelihood that the player will quit out of fear or exhaustion. If he just barely makes it out of level 10 by the skin of his teeth, he may not even want to attempt level 11. He’d sooner quit while he’s ahead.

Is that all you got?? BRING ON THE WATER TEMPLE!!

A modern game that strives for retention might use a lightning bolt or stair-step graph. Here, level 10 was insanely difficult, but level 11 gives the player a bit of a breather. One of the early examples of this approach that i can remember is the coin-op beat-em-up Final Fight. After brawling your way through a preposterously crime-ridden city as the roid-raging mayor or one of his two ninja buddies, you get to smash a car. No bad guys, no chance of death, no risk of losing – just a time-limited opportunity to smash a car.

Because nothing says “tough on crime” like the mayor engaging in a little senseless vandalism.

A more modern example is Little Things, a hidden object game on the iPad that i’ve been playing this week. The levels in Little Things are, refreshingly, NOT rooms in a Victorian mansion in which a child ghost has murdered a wealthy detective. Instead, they’re little pictures composed of even smaller pictures. The player has to complete his quota by finding the items on the list.

i was trying to keep this article classy, but they had to go mentioning shuttlecocks.

Some of these pictures make it easier to find the little things within. The umbrella’s striped design makes it easier to compartmentalize sections of the image and limit your focus. In contrast, the hideously jam-packed cupcake is a real challenge to sift through.

Little Things beagle: easy. Little things hamburger: not-so-easy. (This is somewhat of a reversal of real life.)

If Little Things were to escalate linearly, you’d unlock the easy pictures at the beginning of the game, and the denser pictures towards the end. But Little Things has a staggered escalation; the densely-populated hamburger is introduced before the cinchy electric guitar. If the escalation was linear, you’d complete 10 missions in the beagle picture before moving on to complete 10 further missions in the wheelbarrow picture. Instead, Little Things bounces around from picture to picture, shuffling in the easier images to give the player a break. Even the missions themselves are staggered: in one instance, you’ll find yourself scouring the level for 15 objects under distinct time pressure; the very next level, you’ll need to point at four pairs of sunglasses in one of the easier pictures.

Serously – there he is. He’s RIGHT THERE. Just click on him. 50 points.

The net effect is that Little Things held my attention much longer than it would have if its escalation were progressive. Give consideration to staggered escalation if you count player retention among your next game’s goals.

Untold Entertainment Goes Forth

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:50:34 +0000

When Untold Entertainment Inc. turned three last year, we were reeling from the fallout of the global economic collapse. It’s been a slow, difficult recovery, and we still have a lot of work left to do, but i’m happy to say we’ve nosed out of the tailspin. This was a landmark year for Untold; we are poised to have an absolutely incredible fifth year going forward. If last year was our Empire, this year is our Jedi. Bring on the Ewoks, baby.

Yub nub, motherf*cker.

Here’s a look at the Year That Was.

2010

August

Last fiscal ended on a dark note. We were struggling through Spellirium, our post-apocalyptic puzzle adventure game, as various production problems saw the budget sapped with very little to show for our efforts. The year ahead had us planning to complete service projects in the hope that we’d bank enough margin to continue working on the game.

September

My book was published! Unity 3D Game Development by Example: A Beginner’s Guide is a great introduction to game development, computer programming, and Unity 3D itself, which is a super-powerful game engine for creating on a wide variety of platforms. Thanks to you all for buying a copy, or for recommending the book to your friends.

Fall

We launched Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two on YTV.com. Jinx 3 was the first game to use UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System. It supported multiple playable characters, an inventory system, a subtitle system, game variable control, and a “puppet” guidance system, which enables the developer to write commands to build in-game cutscenes. Jinx 3 was the first UGAGS game we developed, but the second one to launch, after Heads.

i spoke about UGAGS at Gamercamp Level 2.0, a Toronto convention celebrating the joy of video games.

October saw the publication of a now-infamous article about the Vortex Game Development Competition, where the previous year’s winners were revealed to have never worked on the winning game.

i experimented with a feature called Linkbait Tuesdays, where i used the Linkbait Generator to spit out randomized titles for blog posts. It wasn’t much appreciated by my readership, and didn’t appreciably increase blog traffic, so i killed the feature.

On Hallowe’en, we launched our second free games portal called ZombieGameWorld.com. If you know the song about the old woman who swallowed the fly, you’ll understand our challenge with these portals. We built WordGameWorld.com in order to attract a word game-playing audience, so that we could control the site’s ad inventory and find an audience for Spellirium. When the site suffered from flagging traffic, i decided to build a network of game portals; ZombieGameWorld.com was ostensibly created to help drive traffic to WordGameWorld.com, which should drive traffic to Spellirium.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. i don’t know why she swallowed the fly. i guess she’ll die?

To round out the fall, i grew a beard to win hockey tickets, despite not enjoying hockey. i spoke at an interactiveontario luncheon. And i wrote an article for Mochiland.com on the disgraceful refusal by contracting companies to credit their Flash game developers.

Why wouldn’t you want your game to be associated with this guy?

Winter

As the cold weather set in, i took a position at a private college teaching Unity 3D game development. i had hoped for a better experience than i had at Hervé Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined, but no such luck: halfway through the course, which was dubbed Programming II (the students had supposedly been taught Flash/Actionscript for four months prior to my arrival), i had to dial everything back and re-teach programming basics to them. And by basics, i mean stuff like “What does the ‘=’ symbol do?” and “What is a variable?”

What … is your NAME?

The class was only eight students, but i had no fewer than two of those students’ parents call or email me to ask why little Billy was getting low grades on tests. YaRly.

In this, i further proved the thesis in my contentious What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges articles (Part 1 and Part 2). Helicopter parenting and failure aversion have created a generation of non-functional kids, which i later dubbed The Most Useless Generation. My diagnosis is that many college undergrads have escaped high school without ever understanding How to Be a Student (an article i wrote while teaching last winter, which i’ve only just posted now that i’ve put some distance between myself and the situation).

In the interest of helping young people be more successful, i offered My Prescription for (More) Successful Students, which my students all ignored, and i wrote a serious of articles called Understanding Programming to explain programming basics, which my students also ignored. Oh well. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but sometimes you just have a retarded horse.

2011

Spring

In 2011, we launched an exciting blog series called Pimp My Portal, detailing our struggles to drive traffic to ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com. The hook here was The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget, a pot of just $100 that i spent on Fiverr.com to buy testimonial videos to promote the site, the rationale being that search loves video. The Old Lady who Swallowed the Fly reared her ugly head again, as i found that i had no audience to watch the videos to go to the portal to go to the OTHER portal to find out about Spellirium. The Pimp My Portal series is ongoing.

Around this time, we were commissioned by The Centre for Skills Development and Training to produce a series of games to help teach workplace skills to 15-30-year-olds. The resulting game, Summer in Smallywood, enabled us to make a number of improvements to UGAGS, including auto-save, debug tools, navigation meshes, saved game profiles, and threaded conversations. We’re looking forward to working further with The Centre in the coming year to expand our educational gaming experience.

In March, i admit i was feeling a little bit desperate and squirrely. Work was trickling into the shop in fits and starts, and i was really wondering whether renewing our lease would be wise. Wild-eyed and hungry at GDC, i was overcome with the need to let the world know i am here, like the tiny Whos living on a speck on a clover stalk, who ultimately issue a resounding YOPP! to show the jungle animals that they exist (and to keep from getting boiled in beezlenut oil).

A game dev’s a game dev, no matter how small.

To that end, i pulled some shenanigans at the conference, which came to be known as the famous GDC Coin Stunt. The resulting press on most major online games sites greased the wheels for what was to be our greatest victory yet.

Over the years, we’ve found it so difficult to drive enough steady Flash game development work that we haven’t been able to bank enough time or enough money to do our own thing. To date, the only chance we seem to get is TOJam, an annual weekend-long Toronto game jam, during which we always produce a complete and original game. Indeed, nearly every title in the Original Games section of our portfolio is a TOJam game, completed in one weekend by me alone.

This year, we used UGAGS to create Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. i worked on the game with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra. It was no accident that i was wearing my “I have all the coins” T-Shirt in the TOJam group photo this year. After the game went live, it went viral, initially being featured on many of the same sites that covered the coin stunt. In the few months since its launch, the ponycorns game has gone on to become an international sensation (i just granted an interview to a Japanese newspaper this week!).

[photo by Brendan Lynch]

With the ponycorns game, we took a very important step to improving our viability as a dev studio by launching the game on the Apple iPad and the BlackBerry Playbook. On the third day of its launch week, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure was featured by Apple in its New & Noteworthy section.

Ponycorns also drove us to develop our first alternate revenue stream based on our original IP. We launched the Untold Booty merchandise store with a number of different ponycorns-based SKUs, and have been very happy with the results.

Throughout the year, i remained active with the IGDA Toronto Chapter, organizing some well-received events including the speed dating-style Game.Set.Match, the Open Mic Night rant session, Straight Outta TOJam: Pint-sized Postmortems, and the Fund in the Sun workshop.

Through the spring, we developed a great puzzle/platformer game called Spladder, which currently runs on a number of kids’ broadcaster sites – YTV.com. TVO.org and CBBC.co.uk among them.

We launched a new games portal called TowerDefenseGameWorld.com and filled it with free tower defense games, because it’s difficult to prove a theory about a network of games portals lending each other traffic if you only have two portals. We also gave a major upgrade to ZombieGameWorld.com by expanding it to feature zombie games and goodies on other platforms.

i know an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course.

Summer. Future.

We’ve come full circle. Spellirium remains unfinished, but we’re finally spending time on it again. We poked Kahoots with a stick to see if it was still twitching. Thankfully, it is! We’ve made some creative changes to it to spare a fellow indie game dev company some unpleasant legal strife; look forward to a Kahoots-related announcement in the coming months.

i’m writing the 3.x update to my Unity 3D book, which will be ready shortly (send me an email and i’ll add you to our notification list when the update is released).

Going forward, our plan is to leverage the success of the ponycorns game to make major in-roads into game development and education for kids (see our article on CBC.ca). i’m preparing a pilot project with Cassie’s elementary school this fall. We’re preparing the unstoppable UGAGS engine for a business-to-business, and then consumer, release – expect it to have a kid-friendly interface. We’re polling people for their interest in an iPhone/iPod version of the game (send us an email!). i’ll be delivering my conference session Ponycorns: Lightning in a Jar at the Screens festival this fall, and at other conventions throughout the year. Ponycorns is being translated into Japanese in anticipation of the Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Games Show.

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. Thanks so much for your support, everyone! i’m really looking forward to writing an amazing recap next year.

How to Be a Student

Ryan Henson Creighton — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:24:57 +0000

The current crop of teens and early 20-somethings in Ontario (and perhaps elsewhere, but i can only comment on Ontario) is being derided for its poor work ethic and its sense of entitlement. In my notorious articles What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges? (Part 1 and Part 2), i boiled it all down to certain decisions made by the Ontario Ministry of Education that persisted for about 13 years:

No deadlines. Students are free to submit assignments whenever they feel like it. So an assignment that was due in September can be submitted in June with no penalty.
No failing. As of the 1996 intake, students could not fail the ninth grade.
Social promotion. While students could still fail individual courses throughout high school, every effort was made to “socially promote” them in order to keep them with their peer group. So a student in his fourth year of high school, who was working at a grade nine level or below in various subjects, was still considered a grade twelve student.

Note: The Ministry of Ed has recently reversed its experiment on late penalties. Teachers can once again dock marks for late assignments. A teacher friend of mine thinks it will take another 5-10 years to see the benefits of an improved work ethic in our graduating students, as current grade nine students are brought up under this regime.

That leaves us with a group of kids who are book-ended by more effectively-educated generations.

The result of these decisions, in conjunction with permissive parenting, is that the current crop of high school grads (which i’ve dubbed “the Most Useless Generation“) has turned out foolish, lazy, and entitled. Not to mince words.

We Don’t Need No Education

When i was teaching a Flash course earlier last year, this exchange took place between a student and me:

Me: You need to understand this concept in order to program a game.
Student: Well that’s your job.
Me: What is?
Student: Making us understand.

“Students” today expect some sort of Matrix-like solution where their responsibility ends with showing up to class. It’s there that the instructor somehow jacks a cable into their necks to inject knowledge into their brains. If the student leaves that 3- or 4-hour class without new knowledge, it’s a failing of the instructor.

Whoa. I know small business management.

That’s the fantasy. Here’s how it actually works:

The responsibility of the instructor is to disseminate information. The very worst instructors do this by standing at the front of the room and talking. The very best instructors do this by combining a variety of stimuli – they speak, they gesture, they sing, dance and play music, they use call-and-response to engage the class, they have the class members participate by doing (typing the code, touching the fabric, operating the drill press, tabulating the survey results). They try to gauge the students’ UNDERSTANDING of the material as they teach. (Although, despite what Dead Poets Society taught you, it’s not the responsibility of a teacher to be entertaining.)

Robin Williams: ruining education for decades.

As a student, you have a number of responsibilities. The first is ABSORPTION. You need to come to class on time, fill a seat, and soak up the instruction. It’s all about using your senses: hear the instructor’s voice, look at the visuals, repeat the terminology, touch the equipment (type on the keyboard, operate the drill press, hold the notepad). Your learning increases exponentially when you use two or more of your senses at the same time: touch one of your fingers while repeating a key term, write a note while listening to the lecturer’s voice, or ask a question while looking at a visual aid.

You, in class.

Through your ABSORPTION of the material, you need to reach UNDERSTANDING. If you don’t understand the concepts, you can ask questions of the instructor, your classmates, or the Internet (which knows pretty much everything, so i’m not sure why you’re acting like your Google Fingers are broken).

The Old College Try

Once you have (or think you have) UNDERSTANDING, you need to convert that into KNOWLEDGE by way of PRACTICE. This is especially important in a technical or a vocational pursuit like learning to program games, learning to play the piano, or learning to make a hope chest out of pine wood. The reason you need to gain KNOWLEDGE is because the instructor is going to test you on your knowledge through tests, quizzes, exams and assignments. This is how you get marks in a class: by demonstrating your KNOWLEDGE in these situations.

So PRACTICE is the way you convert UNDERSTANDING into KNOWLEDGE. Okay – i get how to use a tablesaw to cut a piece of wood … now i actually need to use a tablesaw to cut a piece of wood. Because if the instructor gives me a test, and one of the steps is cutting a piece of wood with a tablesaw, and i’ve never actually practiced that, i may be on thin ice during the test.

i’m pretty sure i start it up by putting my face on the spinny thing … Man, i wish this test was open-book.

Likewise, if the lecture was about writing a custom class to program a game, i ABSORBED the material, and gained UNDERSTANDING of how to write a custom class. On the test, the instructor will require me to demonstrate my KNOWLEDGE of how to write a custom class. In order to convert my UNDERSTANDING into KNOWLEDGE, i need to PRACTICE … that means i actually have to write a few custom classes. If you just listen to the theory behind writing a custom class, but never bother to actually write a few on your own, you won’t fare well. (But that’s exactly what most of my students have done. And then their mommies call me up to ask why they’re failing tests. Seriously.)

PRACTICE may require some back-and-forth. You may think you understand the material, and then fall flat on your face when you go to practice it. That’s when you return to the instructor and say “i tried this and it didn’t work – could you help me improve my understanding?”, or “could you clarify what you meant by X?”

You’ll know you’ve gained KNOWLEDGE when you can demonstrate the material without having to ask questions or refer to your notes. Someone with a KNOWLEDGE of how to saw a board does not need to check the tablesaw manual or refer to a list of steps on sawing a board. Someone with a KNOWLEDGE of how to write a custom class does not need to call up past assignments, or Google a tutorial on it.

I’m going to begin your skydiving session today by checking a book out of the library.

Prove It.

Finally, back in class on test or assignment day, you DEMONSTRATE the KNOWLEDGE you have gained through PRACTICE. That is what is required of you as a student.

The approach that the no-fail generation takes to education is lazy and firmly rooted in fantasy. They think “If i take a course in X, then at the end of the four months, i will be able to get a job doing X”. (Of course, only people with KNOWLEDGE of X will be in any kind of position to get a job doing X … and it’s only the people with KNOWLEDGE who compete for that job. If you have no KNOWLEDGE of X, you’re automatically out of the running, unless you have a well-connected uncle. )

A better attitude is “If i take a course in X, they will provide me with the information i need to learn X. If i take the responsibility to learn X well enough, i may be able to compete for a job doing X.”

Pocket Ponycorns and Chinese Brainwashing

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:27:39 +0000

i try my best on this blog to give you sneak peaks at my strategies and the methods behind my madness, lest i come off as just plain crazy. My schemes to launch a media empire may appear misguided. What’s up with ZombieGameWorld.com? Why did i come back from New York with a puppet? And how are the two related?

Elmo want braaaains. (photo by Nora Warens)

(Rest assured, all will be revealed in due course.)

One great tip i heard for getting along with people and resolving problems is that people don’t do things for no reason. Almost always, there’s purpose behind our actions, even if it’s a bent purpose. Here, then, is a little glimpse at my ongoing strategy to market Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on mobile devices.

P’thetic

i named the launch day for the iPad version of ponycorns “Ponycorn P’toosday”. This is an absolutely ridiculous name. It doesn’t really make any sense, and probably sounds stupid to most people. The reason i gave it a frustratingly insipid name is not because i thought the name itself was terribly clever. It’s because i wanted something memorable, and stupid can be memorable. That’s the clever bit.

It’s the same premise behind subtitling Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 “the Squeakquel”. That’s an absolutely retarded word that everyone i know absolutely despises. But it’s memorable. And people repeat it, angrily, while fighting back smiles. It’s detestably dumb. And oddly likable.

Hollywood pockets a LOT of our cash with the detestably dumb and the oddly likable.

So i released the game on the iPad. It took a lot of backflips and crying and asking friends and strangers for help, but it finally launched on Ponycorn P’toosday as planned. i reconfigured the Twitter hashtag to #touchPonycorns, which is still cute and weird, but i may have diluted my message. “Pocket Ponycorns”, keeping with the “P” alliteration, is the move to put the game on the iPhone. Enough people wrote to me during the iPad release claiming they’d like to purchase the game, but gosh-darnit, they don’t have iPads.

Putting ponycorns on the iPhone requires some extra work, because i have to resize all of the game’s graphics down to the smaller format. i have to do a bunch of testing, because the memory profiles of the phones and music players are slimmer than the tablets. And i don’t own an iPhone, which makes testing more difficult. i could buy one, but all of this of course takes time and money – time and money i’m not keen on spending unless i can be assured i’d at least break even on my efforts.

(or i could make games out of the goodness of my heart, and let my family die of starvation)

Have Me Committed

i read a famous book last year called Influence by Robert Cialdini … if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, you’ve read many of the same case studies Cialdini talks about; the books cover a lot of common ground (although Cialdini predates Gladwell by decades).

In Influence, the author lays out six “weapons of influence” that advertisers, marketers and salespeople use to control us. The book’s conceit is that if we understand these weapons, we’ll have power over them. It always struck me as a spurious excuse to teach these techniques. “i’m going to teach you how to build a bomb, so that if you ever see one on the street, you’ll know how to dismantle it.” Yeah, right.

i’m so glad we have the Anarchist Cookbook to teach us to watch out for all that anarchy.

So being an advertiser/marketer/salesperson in the context of the ponycorns game, i decided to use one of Cialdini’s weapons of influence to ensure i don’t waste any time on an iPhone game that nobody buys. i’ll quote directly from Wikipedia here:

Commitment and Consistency

If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment because of establishing that idea or goal as being congruent with their self image. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement. For example, in car sales, suddenly raising the price at the last moment works because the buyer has already decided to buy. Cialdini notes Chinese brainwashing on American prisoners of war to rewrite their self image and gain automatic unenforced compliance.

My bright idea was to create a “petition” that people could sign, to convince us to release the ponycorns game on the iPhone and iPod. Really, it’s just a mailing list sign-up form, but i like the connotation that the word “petition” bears. i’ll have people commit to purchasing the iPhone version. Then i’ll know if there’s enough interest. If there IS enough interest, i’ll build the game and send everyone an email. Cialdini’s Commitment and Consistency principle promises that those people will buy the game, having committed. It’s like a small-scale Kickstarter program, which is the digital equivalent of bumming change.

In For a Penny, In For a Ponycorn

How’s it gone so far? Following the initial announcement on Twitter, we’ve had 14 sign-ups. Do the math with me:

14 purchases (best-case scenario, if Cialdini’s claim is bulletproof) @ $0.99 = $13.86
Subtract Apple’s 30% cut: $9.70

Is nine dollars and seventy cents incentive enough to resize all the graphics for the game, do a bunch of testing, and possibly purchase a testing device? No. No it is not.

So! As it stands now, unfortunately we won’t put the game on the iPhone or iPod.

… or i could use another one of Cialdini’s weapons of influence:

Social Proof

People will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, in one experiment, one or more confederates would look up into the sky; bystanders would then look up into the sky to see what they were seeing. At one point this experiment aborted, as so many people were looking up that they stopped traffic.

Rewriting History

(ahem) Holy cow! Our Pocket Ponycorns petition has been SO POPULAR, we’ve had to upgrade our hosting account to keep up with demand! Sign up for our mailing list NOW so that you, along with so many other people, will receive an email on THAT GLORIOUS DAY when Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, beloved of millions, is released for the iPod and iPod touch.

YES! I WANT TO JOIN THE RANKS OF HAPPY iPHONE OWNERS EAGERLY AWAITING THE GAME!
NO! I DON’T WANT TO BE LEFT OUT. TAKE ME TO THE SIGN-UP PAGE NOW!

These veins bleed Barnum.

Spladder

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 20:01:41 +0000

Untold Entertainment was commissioned by marblemedia, one of our preferred clients, to create a game for Splatalot! Splatalot! is a kid-targeted mash-up of American Gladiator and Japanese obstacle course game shows like Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. The program airs on YTV in Canada, on BBC in the UK and on ABC in Australia.

Click to play Spladder at CBBC!

The second segment of Splatalot! has the contestants assembling a ladder to escape a pit, while the adult Defenders (think “Gladiators”) shoot goop at them. marblemedia called the game Spladder (splat + ladder – you see?). They wanted a more puzzle-oriented game than the catapult and obstacle-based games in the show’s suite, so we built the fun puzzle platformer game that you see above, in the style of Abe’s Oddysee or Lost Vikings.

(What ever happened to the Lost Vikings developer? Meh – probably faded into obscurity.)

It’s Been a Slice

We used the Citrus Engine to build Spladder. It’s a framework of classes that speed up platform game creation. Citrus uses Box2D for its physics bodies. It gives you some great customizable character control and a level editor out of the box. The engine wasn’t quite set up to handle tiled platforms (in the examples, every platform is a discrete art asset) – strong-arming that to work was probably the most challenging aspect of development. That, and the level editor eventually became more of a hindrance than a help, to the point where i wound up hand-coding most of the levels in xml. The latest version of Citrus Engine drops the level editor so that you’re free to use your own solution.

Juicy.

The art and animation in Spladder are by veteran Canadian kids’ game artist Elizabeth de Fazio, who was an absolute joy to work with. marble’s Johnny Kalangis and i hammered out story details together to build an enjoyable game that we’re quite proud of. i hope you like it!

Anchorage Brings the Funk

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:17:17 +0000

The Alaska Airlines logo.

What i’m supposed to see.

What i actually see.

i cannot be the only one.

What is Untold Entertainment? Read Me First!

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:27:04 +0000

i’ve finally arrived in Seattle after being bounced out of customs for a soon-to-be expired passport (although they managed to treat me like i swam across a river with a belly full of smack-filled balloons).

Ryan Henson Creighton: NOT a drug mule. (Photo by Brendan Lynch, also not a drug mule. The little girl looks suspicious.)

If you meet me at Casual Connect this week and want to know what Untold Entertainment is all about, here’s a cheat sheet:

We just released Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on the iPad. It’s a game i made in a weekend with my 5-year-old daughter Cassie. The iPad version is selling well, and has been featured by Apple. We continue to ship ponycorns merchandise around the world. We’ve received an insane amount of press for the game.
Ponycorns was made possible by UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System), our internal game engine that we use to make games quickly. We’ve built three other games with UGAGS, and are working to prepare the engine for an eventual commercial release, for which we’ve seen a lot of interest. Ask me (Ryan) about investment or licensing opportunities with UGAGS.
The service side of Untold is alive and well. We specialize in web and mobile games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers. Our clients to date have mostly been kids’ broadcasters and teevee production companies. We’re happy to talk to you about your upcoming projects.
DID U KNOW that Canada is home to a number of tax incentives for video game development? Partnering with Untold Entertainment on a co-production could unlock a sizable labour rebate. Untold has successfully procured government funding for a number of projects and initiatives. Ask me how you can save money by working with us!
While the original productions side of our business is still growing, we have a number of interesting projects in development, including a puzzle/adventure game called Spellirium, and a mobile game modeled entirely in clay.

i hope to meet as many of you as possible this week. Have a great show!

- Ryan

An Education.

Ryan Henson Creighton — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:54:49 +0000

Big news today as Adobe evangelist Lee Brimelow points out that the iPad version of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure has been featured by Apple in their New & Noteworthy section:

Heck yes!

I’ll Buy THAT For a Dollar

i’ve heard a little murmering about the game’s price point. For your education and edification, here is a list of five things to occupy your kid that are more expensive than Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure:

A pound of brussels sprouts.

A ticket to the Terrifying Clown Bros. Circus.

A haircut.

A pack of smokes.

A jar of peanut butter.

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is $2.99 on the iTunes App Store. i leave you with The Oatmeal. Seacrest out.

Hooray! It’s Ponycorn P’toosday!

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 04:12:54 +0000

Today marks the iPad release of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure! Now you can take Poo-Pants, Fluffybuns, Lady Fuzzwuzzle, Orangeboy, and (inaudible) with you wherever you go. Impress your extended family! Accost sour-looking strangers in waiting rooms! Play it for a pick-me-up when the boss isn’t watching!

To celebrate, we’re showcasing the work of some dyed-in-the-wool ponycorn fans.

Ponycorns at Anime North

Mike Barltrop is an educator who showed Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure to his high school students so they’d be without excuse – if a 5-year-old could pull off a game, he can expect a lot more from them. Mike enjoyed ponycorns so much that he painstakingly re-created a number of Cassie’s drawings and dressed up as the game for the Anime North nerdfest in Toronto:

For serious.

To put Mike’s ponycorns passion into perspective, the game was released on May 25th. Anime North started the following Friday and ran the length of the weekend. And people at the conference recognized Mike’s costume. Awesomazing!

The Star’s Crayon Forgery Shenanigans

We spotted one piece of fan art that was no less hilarious than Mike’s costume, but unbelievable for a different reason. When the Toronto Star posted its story about the ponycorns’ meteoric rise to prominence, the online piece had two images in its gallery: a shot of Cassie playing the game, and THIS:

Also for serious.

It doesn’t take a keen eye to see that this image is actually a forgery, created by an adult employed at the Star. When we saw this image on the site, we were a little baffled. We have a stack of original crayon art from the game that we could have sent to the newspaper at a moment’s notice. This kind of thing is in keeping with some of my other dealings with news media, like my interview with CityTV from a while back where they grabbed one tiny soundbite from me to prove the point they were trying to make, and completely discarded everything else i said. Hilarious! If you don’t already watch the news and read the paper with a cocked eye, i hope you’ll start today.

We asked the Toronto Star to correct the article, and the picture was removed in short order.

UPDATE

Now it’s ME doing the retracting. The wacky lads over at Shh-Mom.com have confessed to penning the offending artwork which, in its original context, isn’t offending at all. The folks at the Star must have grabbed it, thinking it to be genuine. i’m glad we got to the bottom of this. Has it restored my faith in traditional news media? No. Question everything!

Flannery’s Fanfic

We’re saving the best for last on Ponycorn P’toosday. 9-year-old Flannery, proud owner of a plush ponycorns mega-pack, sent us this fantastic storybook featuring the extended adventures of the ponycorns gang. Enjoy your face off!

Get Some

If this is your first exposure to ponycorns, pick up your copy on the iPad today! The game is also available on the BlackBerry Playbook and in your browser.

Ponycorn P’toosday Approaches

Ryan Henson Creighton — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 05:01:57 +0000

With the help of Intern Chris (@CBAnims) and Intern Sina (@sinaKash), we’ve cut together a really cool trailer for Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, the game i authored with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra:

(any regular Untold reader will figure out how i commissioned such a great trailer voice-over without breaking the bank! :)

This is all in anticipation of the release of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on the Apple iPad next week, on a momentous date we’re calling Ponycorn P’toosday (July 12 2011).

Pricing and Strategy

The game is priced at $2.99. When pricing, i followed this reasoning;

iPad versions of games usually sell for more than their iPhone/iPod counterparts. Why? Because. (you pay more money for your iPad, so you should pay more for its software? i guess? *shrug*)
the lowest paid price for an iPhone/iPod app is 99 cents, so following the rule, that brings the iPad price to $1.99
i have heard tell from people who have researched it more heavily that curiously, people don’t seem to differentiate between the $1.99 and $2.99 price points. If you go $3.99, they fly off the handle and you sell zero copies. But given the choice between selling at 2 bucks or 3 bucks, you may as well go with 3.
Generally, it’s much easier to lower the price than it is to raise it, so you may as well start high. Some companies have claimed to launch at a low “introductory price” and have raised it from there – that’s really the only way i’ve seen of getting away with those sorts of price-raising shenanigans. (Although Tommy Refenes famously raised his price every time he got a sale. That was hilarious. And tough to duplicate.)

The average donation amount to Cassie’s Education Fund on the ponycorns website was $10, so it’s not such a wild stab.

Why Buy the Cow?

Now, of course, the real interesting bit will be to see if folks will buy the game on a mobile platform even though it’s available for free online. Here are a few reasons why the mobile version is more appealing:

it runs ad-free
there’s no download wait – the game instantly starts up
it’s easier for the kids in your life to access … they just have to tap the game icon (instead of you having to type in a url for them to play)
kids prefer touch interfaces over mouse-driven ones (and have more success with touch)
the touch interface even lowers the minimum play age down from 2 years old to zero years old
the audio is uncompressed and crystal-clear

The Importance of Being iOS

The indie game developers i know, who have had varying degrees of success on the iOS platform, have lovingly cautioned me that i’ve entered a lottery, and that i shouldn’t get my hopes up. i’m running somewhat of a different business than they are. It’s not crucial for an original Untold game to succeed on iOS, but it is crucial for Untold to have launched a product there.

The reason is that most of our kids’ production and broadcast clients are presently putting all their eggs in the iOS basket, for better or worse … i think that, as with most people, their eyes are all a-twinkle at the prospect of actually selling their kids’ games. Many of my clients treat these kids’ teevee brand extensions into video games as a marketing expense, and the interactive departments don’t generally turn a profit. When the axe comes down, as it often does, it comes down hardest on departments that are non-revenue generating. iOS represents a faint hope to many of these folks that they can become a money-making operation to gain more sway and security within the larger organization.

So! Now that Untold Entertainment can offer both online web game services AND mobile game development services (including Android, Playbook and iOS) to our clients, we’re very well situated. Don’t get me wrong – i’d LOVE for ponycorns to take off on the iPad and warrant an iPhone/iPod version. There are a whole lot of people out there whose days have not yet been brightened by the rainbow-coloured land of ponycorns, so we have some work left to do.

P’too Long; Didn’t Read

Did i mention the game comes out on the iPad on Ponycorn P’toosday, July p’12th? Mark your calendars!

Tower Defense Game World Rounds Out Untold’s Game Portal Network

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:47:16 +0000

5 JULY 2011 – TORONTO

Untold Entertainment is excited to announce the latest addition to its network of free-to-play game collections with the release of Tower Defense Game World. Over 120 games are ready to play, with new additions posted every week. Tower Defense Game World is the newest member of Untold’s suite of free game networks, which currently includes Zombie Game World and Word Game World.

“Tower defense” is a game genre that has become immensely popular in the past five years. Most tower defense games have the player protecting a fortress or base from incoming “waves” of enemies. The player can purchase and place turrets that fend off the hordes of invaders. Through careful placement and upgrading, the player can emerge victorious with an unscathed fortress.

Tower Defense games have proven to be one of the most popular game genres available today, with varieties that appeal to casual gamers, core players, and everyone in between. Plants vs. Zombies by Popcap Games is one of the most well-known tower defense games. Tower Defense Game World offers a curated experience, bringing the best free Tower Defense games currently available into one website.

About Untold Entertainment

Untold Entertainment Inc. is a boutique game development studio in Toronto specializing in games and apps for kids, teens, tweens, and preschoolers. Untold developed Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure which was co-created by a five-year-old girl, and its upcoming post-apocalyptic puzzle adventure game Spellirium.

How the Graphic Adventure Video Game Genre Can Save Your Kids’ TV-to-Game 360 Transmedia Strategy

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:30:36 +0000

UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System, is a framework and toolset that we use to create graphic adventure games.

A graphic adventure game often adheres to these conventions:

Third person perspective (you can see your character’s body), rather than first person (you can see through the eyes of your character)

Full Throttle (left) is a third person adventure game, while MYST is atypically first person
Emphasis on story and character
Inventory system (the player can carry objects)
“Puzzles” … these are choke points in the game which can be overcome through various means (read: The 12 Types of Puzzles in Graphic Adventure Games)
Dialogue. Characters “speak” either through on-screen subtitles, or voice-over, or both.
Conversations. Many graphic adventure games use branching dialogue trees for character interaction.
Humour. This is one of the only video game genres that consistently uses humour as a selling point and main attraction.

Some famous examples of graphic adventure games are The Secret of Monkey Island, King’s Quest, and Simon the Sorceror. (Note that games involving adventure, like The Legend of Zelda, are often called “adventure games”, but the “graphic adventure” moniker applies only to this very specific genre we’ve outlined.)

The graphic adventure game genre suffered its demise in the mid-90′s at the hand of more popular action-oriented games like DOOM. The criticism of graphic adventure games, at the time, was that they were too expensive to produce and didn’t provide the player with enough replay value. Games like LOOM could be completed in a single day, and carried a $50-70 price tag.

Advantages of the Genre

The causes of the graphic adventure game’s fall from grace have, in a strange way, become its new strengths – particularly in the context of extending children’s brands to new platforms.

Replayability and Kids

Graphic adventure games are not very replayable for adults and older, because the experience is the same every time; adults are constantly seeking something new and challenging. But this is actually a strength when it comes to children’s entertainment. Young children will watch a movie or a teevee show again and again, with each viewing immediately following the last. In fact, certain teevee properties have acknowledged and leveraged this fact: Nickelodeon aired each new Blue’s Clues episode five times in a row from Monday to Friday, and test results found that this increased viewers’ attention and comprehension. Every episode of Teletubbies contains a live action segment of children performing an activity. This exact same live action segment is repeated within the same episode.

(It’s a real shame kids have to relive this.)

To a young child, everything is new and challenging. There’s a distinct comfort in knowing the answers. Just as a child will proudly repeat a newly-learned task to demonstrate his mastery (standing on one leg, clicking his tongue, drawing the letter “A”), children delight in playing and replaying graphic adventure games because they’re predictable. Children like knowing that they can play a game from beginning to end, predictably experiencing the same events and confidently overcoming the same challenges.

Development Costs

The entire aim of UGAGS is to reduce the cost to develop graphic adventure games. While it was once true that graphic adventure games have demanded high budgets for low value, the cost of developing games in other, more action-based genres, has skyrocketed.

Brand Extension

Very often, we see kids’ television brands being extended to other areas, most notably video games. The mistake people usually make is to figure “well, teevee shows are about story and character, while video games are about defeating enemies and jumping on platforms … so we’ll take our teevee character and make her defeat enemies and jump on characters.”

This errant thinking stems from a very narrow understanding of video game genres. The result is games like That’s So Raven for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance:

This game is the epitome of lazy and uninformed content development for kids.

That’s So Raven was based on the Disney show of the same name. The game’s genre is best described as action … as Raven, you have to navigate the halls of your school, dodging book-throwing baddies and spraying your enemies in the face with perfume.

On the Disney site itself, you also have That’s So Raven Pinball:

What do these two games do to extend the That’s So Raven brand to video games? As a That’s So Raven fan, is this how you want to interact with the brand? It’s the equivalent of just throwing That’s So Raven on a sleeping bag or a pencil case and calling it a day. What does That’s So Raven have to do with sleeping, colouring, or pinball? Are there any moments in the show where Raven has to make it from one end of the school to the other, while dodging thrown books? Nope.

HERE is an excellent pinball game brand extension:

The Wizard pinball machine extends the Tommy brand, which is all about pinball.

HERE is a great sleeping bag brand extension:

The Taun Taun sleeping bag unzips to reveal guts, just like in The Empire Strikes Back.

What’s That’s So Raven all about? Well, she can see the future. How about a That’s So Raven Tarot Card deck? Fortune cookies? A magic 8-ball?

As a fan of the show, i want to play as Raven (they got that part right), but i also want to do the things that Raven does. i want to talk to all my friends, crack jokes, use my future-seeing powers, and get up to zany hijinks. The Game Boy Advance game pays lip service to this, by relegating your hijinks to cutscenes (non-interactive segments that play between levels). This game treatment is the equivalent of slapping a logo on a toothbrush. It’s essentially a white label game with an irrelevant brand make-up job.

The good news is that you can extend the brand logically to video games with a That’s So Raven graphic adventure game. Instead of hijinks being tacked on superficially, the entire plot of the game can unfold like an episode of the teevee show, with the player as the central character. You can even produce a few games, and release them episodically, just like the show. It’s a mode of production that teevee people understand, and it can even employ the show’s writers and actors in its development.

Lost in Translation

When considering how best to parlay your teevee show into video game format, consider how your show’s fans may want to engage with your brand, and try to match the genre to the show. If you have a boys’ action series, it might make sense to do a top-down space shooter with lasers and power-ups. But since a majority of kids’ content is about story and character, a graphic adventure game is going to give the audience what they want, and will make for a much smoother transition into games if you don’t fully grasp their nuances.

iCarly: I Dream in Toons is a hidden object game where you have to search for items on a list. The iCarly show is about a girl who has a popular web series. i spy with my little eye: a brand disconnect.

Slaves of the 80′s

Again, here’s a scenario i see all the time, and it’s a perfect example of what not to do: your show’s lead character doesn’t ride a skateboard, but you once heard of a popular game franchise called Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (your nephew plays it … or he used to, a few years ago. You can’t remember – you don’t follow this video game stuff too closely).

So you cook up the idea to put your character on a skateboard, jumping pylons and ducking seagulls, because you figure you’d basically be producing the same effect as the Tony Hawk game and reaping that popularity for your own brand.

There’s a (hopefully) obvious disparity in development time and budget here (a Tony Hawk game costs millions, and has a bona fide cool factor, celebrity endorsements, and legacy of prequels wherein the gameplay was refined over the course of a decade). Then there’s the brand disconnect: you feel your character should ride a skateboard in the game, simply because it’s more “gamey”; your show doesn’t have enough video game-like action in it, so you need to manufacture some. The good news is that if you understand game genres, and are aware of the graphic adventure genre in particular, you don’t have to squeeze your characters into genres and scenarios that aren’t a good brand fit.

You’d never market a Smurfs Chainsaw. You’d never redraw Martha Speaks anime-style and have her punching and kicking as a ninja in feudal Japan. It’s just as inappropriate and off-putting to have a Suite Life of Zack and Cody Pac Man clone:

i know exactly what happened here: a group of folks who don’t fully understand video games got together in a board room to decide on a video game concept for the Zack and Cody. The most recent frame of reference they had was Pac Man (25 years ago), so that’s what the game was modeled after. i’ve seen this situation unfold time and again. By leaning more on the understanding and expertise of game developers, you can avoid this brand disconnect and still end up with a fun video game that engages and entertains your players. Building a graphic adventure game from a show property is the most straightforward way to avoid this brand disconnect.

If your show is about putting on shoes and going on adventures, like in Frannie’s Feet, you can do exactly that in a graphic adventure game. If your characters have to visit planets to learn new things, as they do in Rob the Robot, a graphic adventure game makes the perfect brand extension. In fact, i’ll go so far as to say that the genre works with any narrative kids’ teevee show on the market today. Give the graphic adventure genre a shot for your next teevee-to-game project!

For more information on UGAGS, please contact ugags@untoldentertainment.com.

Here is a list of games that have been made to date with UGAGS:

And here are some movies and teevee shows that have been logically extended into the video game realm within the graphic adventure game genre:

Dr. Who

Beavis and Butthead in: Virtual Stupidity

Duckman: the Graphic Adventures of a Private Dick

Star Trek 25th Anniversary

Blade Runner

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Back to the Future

Study: Video Games Can Make You Less of a Cock

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:14:00 +0000

i write a lot about violence in video games, and i’ve spoken to the press a few times about it. People who are anti-game-violence are always looking for that smoking gun – the kid who shoots up his school, and leaves a note at home that says “Halo made me do it.”

i’ve never claimed the effects of murdering hookers for 40 hours straight in Grand Theft Auto are 1:1. i don’t think that murdering video game hookers means you’re going to go out and murder a real hooker. i do however believe very strongly in the garbage in/garbage out concept: playing violent games may not turn you into a rampaging murderous psycho, but it’s not very far-fetched to believe they may turn you into a bit of a dick. Cutting people off on the highway, treating wait staff poorly, raising your voice more often … i think these are the results of practicing aggression and putting your brain on constant offense.

True story: i keep pictures of Chet from Weird Science on my desktop for whenever i write blog posts about a-holes.

Four Dead in O-Hi-O

It looks like i may have my smoking gun to back up my wild claims. A study out of Ohio State shows that playing calming games may make you a better contributor to your society, while playing aggressive or violent games may make you more of an asswipe.

During the first experiment, participants were asked to compete against another player — who did not actually exist — in pushing a button as quickly as possible. The winner would be awarded a small financial sum; the loser would be punished with a brief noise blast. Before each trial, participants could determine how much their competitors would receive if they won, and how strong a noise blast they would receive if they lost.

“Those people who had played violent games punished their partners the most and rewarded them the least,” Bushman said. “Those who had played relaxing games gave the lowest levels of noise and most amount of money.”

Before you go all knee-jerk on this (as gamers are wont to do), chill out: no one’s going to take your crappy violent games away. You may still freely choose the way in which you feed your brain. It’s very satisfying to me, though, to have a study that not only extols the virtues of gentle fare, but also demonstrates the real risks involved in meditating on aggression.

Flew the Coop: Playing Chicken with Indie Game Marketing

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:42:28 +0000

Toronto is developing quite the reputation for being a hub of indie game development, and for good reason: the city is packed with small teams and individual devs making games, some to great acclaim. But for all our creative strength, i worry that a number of our devs are doomed to failure because we, as a community, lack the business sense required to get our games noticed … and sold.

We’re running a lot of game jams in the city. In addition to TOJam, we’ve had Clam Jam, library jam, and the ongoing Game Prototype Challenge led by Jason P. Kaplan, which runs almost monthly. So a lot of small games and prototypes are getting made, but how are they selling? Are they even being sold? Who knows about them, or their creators? If you’re living outside of Toronto, how many Toronto game devs can you name?

Here’s one:Kaptain Kaplan himself. (Photo by Brendan Lynch)

Stop Building, Start Selling

i can’t remember who to credit this idea to, but recently someone suggested that instead of running game jams, Toronto should have a marketing jam. The need for us to get better at business was never more clear to me than when Jason announced the release of his first indie game, Flew the Coop, on iOS. i asked him “what’s your marketing plan?”, and he just kind of shrugged sheepishly.

i can haz farm puns?

i know where he’s coming from. The rule of thumb i’ve heard is that for every dollar you spend on game development, you need to spend a dollar on marketing. To begin with, very few indie devs actually bother putting a dollar value to their time. “What was your budget on that game?” “Nothing! It was all sweat equity!” Well, fine … but it costs you a certain amount of money to LIVE and EAT, Mr. Clever. From there, you can find out your annual cost of living. Factor in the number of hours you work in a week, on average, and you can determine your hourly rate. Multiply that by the number of hours you sunk into your game, and that’s the game’s budget.

Let’s say your game took $5000 to make. That’s $5k in sweat equity – “free” money – because you didn’t actually have to produce cold hard cash for development. But if the marketing rule of thumb is to be believed, you now have to cook up five thousand real, actual dollars to market the game … Facebook and iAds don’t accept a service barter. Cooking up that marketing cash is often beyond the ability or appetite of small indie devs. The result is that they release their games, hoping they will somehow magically catch like wildfire through word of mouth because they’re so good, and they’ll be the talk of the town. If you’ve spent even an hour reading articles on the success rates of iOS developers, you’ll know that there are thousands of devs out there still waiting for their ships to come in.

The Holy Grail of 3-Figure Sales

The challenge, then, is to come up with marketing plans that don’t cost any money. You’ve already seen what i’ve done to promote my game portals with The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget – a miniscule $100 pot and a LOT of sweat equity. My pal Matt Rix, the successful developer of Trainyard for the iPhone, set up a great David vs. Goliath battle when he asked the Reddit community to help him dethrone Angry Birds in the App Store. Zero marketing money paired with a good story (and a GREAT game) rocketed him to the top of the charts.

(and it doesn’t hurt that his beard is dead sexy)

i took a look at Jason’s Flew the Coop and thought “if this was my game, how would i market it with zero dollars?” The game is a Canabalt clone that pits you as a baby chicken running away from a farm, bouncing on the backs of animals and avoiding the inappropriate grasping of farmers. The first thing that came to mind is the involvement PETA had with Super Meat Boy, where they created a parody game called Super Tofu Boy. So i tweeted PETA about Flew the Coop:

i don’t think they noticed.

Make a Suggestion, Win a Free Game!

So! Maybe i’m not the free marketing master i thought i was. Or maybe i’m just not trying hard enough because it’s not my game. But have a promo code for a FREE COPY OF FLEW THE COOP for the reader who can cook up the best free marketing idea for the game by next Wednesday June 22 2011.

Can you really market a game with no money? Or are those who have done it just incredibly, incredibly lucky? Post your best idea in the comments section below, and let’s see what Jason can do for Flew the Coop on a … ahem … wing and a prayer.

i Touched Ron Gilbert

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:16:52 +0000

You wouldn’t know it, but this is a story about ponycorns, and how something really amazing happened.

One Life, No Continues

One of the best things about being a game developer (aside from having a job that’s ALL FUN ALL THE TIME, with NO HARD WORK INVOLVED WHATSOEVER), is that all of my heroes are still alive. If you’re a mathematics fan, most of the biggest names in your movement have been pushing up daisies for centuries; if you’re into philosophy, your guys have been gone for millennia. (But what is death, really?)

We’ve lost a few folks: there’s Gary Gygax (but i was never a big D&D player), and Dan Bunten (but again, i could never figure out how to play my friend’s cracked C64 copy of M.U.L.E. without an instruction manual). Whenever i mention this, my 1337 gaming friends bring up a Japanese designer whose name escapes me … i only really follow Miyamoto, who’s still alive and kicking, with that almost unnerving Peter Pan grin.

He believes in fairies.

Da-Doo Ron Ron

One of my favourite developers is Ron Gilbert, who created Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island (as well as The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, which happens to be my favourite game of all time). He went on to develop a number of kids’ games with Humongous Entertainment. That makes us both kids’ games designers, so i feel there’s a certain affinity there. He worked on the first Penny Arcade game and designed DeathSpank with Hothead Games. After leaving Hothead, he eventually fell back in with Tim Schafer, a former LucasArts intern who worked with Ron on the Monkey Island games.

Back at Game Developers’ Conference 2011 a few months ago, i shamelessly geeked out when Ron delivered his Maniac Mansion postmortem, and he agreed to pose for a picture:

i would have been satisfied just touching the hem of his garment.

What’s more, he even deigned to sign my two original Amiga 500 Monkey Island game boxes from the games i actually played as a kid in the early 90′s. They’re hanging on my office wall right now:

… opposite the gigantic plaque-mounted Monkey Island posters:

It Began, Fittingly, With Piracy

What’s the big deal about Gilbert’s games? As i explained to him, here’s how it went down:

i didn’t have my own computer growing up in the 80′s because we were cash-strapped, and at that time home computers were toys of the idle rich. In one of the few times when i saw him, my father bought me an Atari 2600 for my birthday a few years after the crash, when 2600 shovelware was filling the bins at $1/cartridge (it’s actually not far off the situation in the App Store, actually. History repeats itself.)

i got a lot of play time in at The Twins’ house … that’s where i’d go to fill in the gap between the end of the school day, and the end of my mom’s work day. The Twins had a C64 and a massive treasure trove of over 400 pirated games. i used to love flipping through those big plastic floppies, reading the cryptic names written to the disk labels in the handwriting of multitudes of mysterious people, using a variety of pens.

Me: What’s ‘Whirlinerds’?

Twin #1: (from the other room, where they were playing with G.I. Joes) Oh – it’s this game where you’re a guy with a propeller on his head. It’s really hard.

(flip flip flip flip)

Me: What’s ‘Transformers’?

Twin #2: Sucks.

(flip flip flip flip)

Me: What’s ‘GEOS’?

Twin #2: Educational.

Twin #1: Sucks.

Always heed the wisdom of The Twins.

From there, it was just a quick LOAD *.*, 8 (load load load) CTRL+CURSOR UP,CTRL+CURSOR UP,CTRL+CURSOR UP,CTRL+CURSOR UP, LOAD, CURSOR OVER, 8, 1 ; , (load load load load load) (rainbow vomit-coloured pirate screen) (glitch) (load load load load load) (title screen), and i was playing a game!

(Did i mention how much i hate the command line … ?)

Twitch games were okay (Whirlinerds was actually pretty difficult), but the games i really took to were the text adventure games. There were a bunch of them in that disk tray. i didn’t get to play any of the best-in-class Infocom titles (The Twins had Leather Goddesses of Phobos, but we weren’t allowed to play it. Here are a few games i came back to time and again:

The Dallas Quest was based on the popular prime time soap drama Dallas. Oh yes it was.

Windham Classics was a series of text adventures based on kidlit. Even though the Wizard of Oz displayed all of the relevant parser commands in a sidebar, i still couldn’t beat it.

Some people really went gangbusters for Windhan’s Alice in Wonderland and Below the Root, but i found the graphics so low-fi that i had no idea what was going on. (That’s an umbrella? … Seriously?)

Law of the West was a game about moral choices that ah hear tell still influences game designers to this very day.

QuestProbe was a trilogy of text adventures based on the Marvel license. The games had terrible graphics and a really primitive parser, but they were awesome cuz superheroes.

In the early days of Sierra, before King’s Quest, they released a few adventures like The Wizard and the Princess, and Ulysses and the Golden Fleece. (They’d obviously never cracked a Classics text book … Ulysses/Odysseus never touched that fleece … it was Jason.)

The schtick was the same with all of these games:

> get shovel

(wait wait wait)

You pick pup the shovel.

> dig hole

(wait wait wait)

(slow-ass graphics refresh)

You dig a hole in the ground. There is treasure here.

> get treasure

(wait wait wait)

I don’t understand “treasure”.

> well, sssssuper.

Enter the Maniacs

i’ll never forget the day The Twins came home from their friend’s house, breathless and sweaty, and recounted the incredible things they’d seen on another C64.

Twin #1: It’s this GAME, and you get to pick like three people …

Twin #2: from a list of TEN …

Twin #1: Yeah, and you have to break into this mad scientist’s house and rescue your girlfriend …

Twin #2: and you get chased out of the house by this nurse with a knife …

Twin #1: … and later you have to call her on the phone and she teaches you how to make a dirty phone call …

Twin #2: … and you have to ring the doorbell and this guy comes down to the front door while you hide in the bushes, and you have to switch to another kid and break into his bedroom …

Twin #1: … and steal his hamster and put it in the microwave …

Twin #2: … and it’s totally …

Both Twins Together … AWESOME!!

It was pretty clear to me that The Twins had been enjoying some hallucinogens at their friends’ place. What they were describing wasn’t even possible in a video game.

Me: So you … so you type out your commands, and all this stuff happens in text descriptions?

Twin #2: NO! It actually happens on the screen. And it’s like …

Twin #1: It’s like animated, and stuff.

Twin #2: It’s like playing a MOVIE.

Me: (after a long, thoughtful pause) … You guys are full of CRAP.

Maniac Mansion: the fever-dream of 10-year-old boys

Legacy of the Tentacle

As it turns out, they weren’t full of crap. It was some time later that i actually got a chance to play Maniac Mansion for myself, but since that day, i’ve been enthralled with the graphic adventure genre and the possibilities it pioneered. Now, nearly a quarter century later, i run my own video games studio making games in the same style, using UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System), a tool very similar to SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) that ran those wonderful old games.

We just released a game that i made with my 5-year-old daughter called Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. It’s a graphic adventure game that went viral, and eventually found its way to Ron Gilbert, who talked it up on Twitter:

Shit just got real.

Friends … dear readers, you have to understand … i’ve never cried tears of joy in my LIFE – not even on the day that Cassie herself was born – but when i saw that tweet by Ron, my living game dev hero, my face leaked. If Cassie’s ponycorns day in kindergarten was the best moment for her in all of this, Ron’s shout-out has been the absolute highlight for me.

i wasn’t the only one at Ron Gilbert’s GDC Maniac Mansion postmortem to credit him with my career in the games industry. He heard the same story numerous times that day, and whenever someone would tell him “you’re the reason i got into the video games industry!” his response was always the same: “i’m sorry.” Don’t be sorry, Ron. It’s largely because of you that i’m here to begin with, making the things i make, and striving for the things i strive for.

i touched Ron Gilbert, and he touched me.

i mean, i don’t want to kiss the guy on the mouth or anything. i just wanted to say thanks.

Ponycorns Come to Kindergarten

Ryan Henson Creighton — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 03:41:22 +0000

If you’ve been following the ponycorns saga, you know that i made a game with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra at a weekend game jam, and it went viral. This isn’t the story of its unexpected success … i’ll save that story for another time. It’s still unfolding. This is the story of how my highest hope for Cassie (for the time being, anyway) came true.

Visualization FTW

Have you ever imagined how a scene in your life would play out, and when you reached that moment, everything went exactly as you envisioned it, as if you and everyone around you were following a script?

Actually when i pictured it, it was more of an octopus ..

When i originally had the idea to work on a TOJam game with my daughter, i knew the ultimate pay-off would be the day she walked into her kindergarten class with our Blackberry Playbook, and showed the game off to the other kids. Short of “Daddy and i built a jetpack”, it’s probably one of the coolest show n’ tell sessions ever.

In the days after TOJam and all the fun Cassie and i had there, she would excitedly tell her classmates about the experience. True to form, her fellow five-year-olds actually started mocking her, saying “TOJam isn’t REAL. You’re making it up!” They even doubted the existence of “The Boss”, TOJam co-founder Jim McGinley, who took on a Santa Claus-like mystique following the jam.

He does have a magical twinkle, doesn’t he? (photo by Paul Hillier)

Eat THIS, Five-Year-Olds

All this doubt floating around at school, and Cassie’s Snuffleupagesque insistence that it really did happen, paved the way for a truly magical show n’ tell session today in her kindergarten class. There we were, just as i’d pictured it, showing the Playbook version to a formerly disbelieving group of kids as they sat, spellbound, on the storytime carpet.

Cassie’s finest hour.

Wit a grown-up telling the class all about it, there was no way the little TOJam-deniers could object. We told them all about how you get to stay up way past your bedtime there – even overnight – and that lots of people brought pillows and slept on the floor. We told them about the kitchen full of candy, where you could grab as much as you wanted and still go back for more. Cassie regaled them with the tale of how she ate two and a half bagels, and they made her fart, so i told her to stand in the designated “farting corner” to keep our work area bearable. (This is a story she gleefully repeated this evening when we were interviewed by BulletProof Radio.)

“What did you learn in school today?” “Ponycorns friggin’ RULE!”

The kids watched, transfixed, as Cassie showed them how to collect the first two ponycorns. We left it on a cliffhanger, but i wrote a little note that will go into each student’s Wednesday envelope that tells their parents how they can access the game to play the rest of it with their children. i also wrote that if the parents were interested in making games with their children, they could check out the fabulous Scratch.

Games for Change

To wrap it up, we did a “question” period. The questions were “Um, Cassie, i like the green ponycorn,” and “i like the colour purple that you used in your rainbows.” Then Cassie showed the children the plush ponycorns that her mom made for her, and we gave each of the students a little ponycorn button.

i really, truly hope that this will spark a desire in the kids and their parents to get more involved in technology, an area which is tragically stagnant in elementary-level education due to the age of the teachers and a lack of funding. This is the same school where i’m working with the principal to offer Scratch instruction to the grade three class, which may yet become a lunchtime program that all of the students can enjoy.

The ponycorn revolution is turning out to be more than just the story of a little girl making a game … i’d like it to be the story of kids, everywhere, using technology to create – not just to consume.

5-Year-Old Girl Makes Video Game

Ryan Henson Creighton — Tue, 24 May 2011 14:00:14 +0000

As planned, i took my five-year-old daughter Cassie to TOJam, the three-day Toronto independent game jam, to make a game with me. And here it is:

Play Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure

Cassie drew all the pictures, wrote all the titles, and recorded the voice of the main character. She also came up with the NPCs (including Mr. Turtle, the Mean Tiger, and the villainous Lemon), and designed some of the puzzles (including the one where you [SPOILER ALERT] have to read a sign to justify your need for a coconut to throw at the Lemon).

Cassie and Ryan [photo by Brendan Lynch]

Send Cassie to College?

i used Mochimedia’s ad service to inject ads into the game, which is fitting, because Mochi was a TOJam sponsor this year. i threw ads in there with the hope that the game might drum up a little bit of cash, which i will put toward the education fund that Cassie’s grandma started for her. Wouldn’t it be cool if Cassie’s game paid for college? (Sadly, it won’t happen. See the Pimp My Game series for more reasons why.) For kicks, i added a PayPal Donate button beneath the game.

With your help, maybe we can send her to get some etiquette training? [Photo by Paul Hillier]

Alert Child Services

Dragging your kid to a weekend-long game jam, eh? Before you call Children’s Aid on me, please understand that i didn’t actually keep Cassie captive at TOJam all weekend long. She came in with me at 9:30 Saturday morning, and was the most excited i’ve ever seen her. We’d been preparing her for MONTHS so that she’d be emotionally ready for TOJam. After the organizers expressed concern that my rotten kid would be running around the place pestering people and making noise (an entirely likely scenario, if you’re familiar with my insane children and my lousy parenting style), i spent every evening coaching Cassie.

Me: Remember, you’re the first little girl who’s ever made a game at TOJam. And everyone’s worried you’re going to run around screaming and making noise and wrecking things.

Cassie: (shocked face) No i won’t!

Me: *i* know you won’t. (totally lying here – i was as nervous about it as anyone) But you have to prove to everyone that little girls can make video games too. If you’re very well behaved, then next year if another little girl wants to come and make a game, the TOJam people will say “the little girl who made a game last year was SO wonderful, we’d LOVE to see more little girls making games.”

Cassie: i’ll be have. i will!

Cassandra, “being have” [Photo by Paul Hillier]

Yes, Cassandra, There Is a Game Jam

The morning of TOJam was like Christmas for her. i’m not kidding. In the days leading up to the event, she told everyone she knew that she was going to TOJam. Naturally, they had no idea what she was talking about, but the strangers in the elevator and in the grocery store smiled and nodded politely all the same.

By the end of the day on Saturday, Cassie had spent 10 hours at TOJam, and was begging me to let her stay overnight. She had put in about 6 hours of actual colouring work, and sunk at least another hour into voice acting later that evening at home, where it was quieter. i tucked her into bed and returned to TOJam late Saturday evening, and then pulled an all-nighter scanning her crayon drawings and integrating them with the game logic using UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System).

[Photo by Paul Hillier]

Family Jam

Sunday morning after church, the whole family joined me at TOJam with a bunch of instruments in tow. My wife Cheryl and the two little girls sat together on the carpet down a quiet hallway. Cassie grabbed the harmonica, i took the drum, Cheryl took the ukulele, and little Isabel used the thumb harp and the Happy Apple. We recorded some music tracks together. The one that made it into the game intro is just Cassie and Izzy playing together. It was really nice to have everyone involved like that. Here’s the family track that didn’t quite make the cut:

Sunday evening, the family regrouped at TOJam. The game, while still unfinished, was set up in a hallway where Cassie excitedly ran up to any interested passers-by, snatched the mouse out of their hands, and said “I MADE THIS! LEMMIE SHOW YOU HOW TO PLAY!”

i think it was a really valuable life lesson for Cassie to see that all her hard work and effort went into making a product that brought smiles to the faces of her players. The next step is to brave the hairy Playbook process to get it on the device so that Cassie can bring it to school for Show & Tell.

[Photo by Paul Hillier]

Correcting History

i really hope you enjoy Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. In all of this, our goal as parents is to give our kids the kind of childhood we would KILL to have had. i can’t imagine how different my life would have been if i had made a real working video game with my father at age 5. In fact, i can’t imagine how different my life would have been if he hadn’t left when i was eight months old.

But no matter. Some day, the ponycorns will get him.