This is the fourth part of our tutorial series by Intern Sina on creating an AIR application for free on a PC using FlashDevelop, and deploying it as a native app on an iOS device like the Apple iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

Jump to other parts in the series:

• Part 1 – Sign up for an Apple iOS Developer Account
• Part 2 – Obtain your Signing Certificate & Mobile Provisioning Profile, and create your App ID
• Part 3 -Use FlashDevelop to build your mobile AIR app

In this section of the tutorial, the rubber meets the road. You’ll make all the finicky adjustments to FlashDevelop and the AIR bundling files to get your Hello Planet app up and running on your testing device.

Point FlashDevelop to the Merged SDK Folder

Now that your (cr)app is successfully up and running, you have to make a few tweaks and adjustments to FlashDevelop. You’ll start by telling FlashDevelop all about that merged SDK folder you created in Part 3.

1. In the Project panel on the right, you’ll see a file called AIR_iOS_readme.txt. Double click that file to open it.

   This txt file lists a number of settings needed to get your ipa file working. The ipa file is the Holy Grail- the native app file that you’ll send to your testing device to see everything working properly. A window pops up with a bunch of options.

2. Click the Project Properties button at the top of the Properties Panel (alternately, you can use the menus to navigate to Project>Properties).

   

3. Change the version of your AIR SDK from 2.7 to 3.0 because (at the time of this writing), that is the latest version.

   

4. Click on the SDK tab, and click Manage.

   

5. On the next screen you will see list of installed Flex SDKs. Click the ellipsis (…) button at the end of that line. An InstalledSDK Collection Editor window pops up.

   

6. You’re going to point FlashDevelop to the location of our recently-downloaded Flex SDK (the same folder that contains both the Flex SDK and AIR SDK that you created earlier in this tutorial). First click the Add button, and then click on the Path line to get another ellipsis. Click on THAT ellipsis to browse your computer.

   

7. Once you have clicked the ellipsis button, a Windows File Browser appears. Navigate to the merged SDK directory. Select that folder and click OK.

   

8. Click OK again to exit the InstalledSDK Collection Editor window.
9. Click Close.
10. In the drop-down menu, you should see the Default option. Click on the drop-down list and choose the SDK location you just told FlashDevelop about.

    

11. Click Apply.
12. Click OK. Voila! Your SDK is now setup for your FlashDevelop Project.

    Let’s just test it out quickly to see if it works. The code you pasted in the previous tutorial prints out the words “Hello Planet” within your app. Well, I’m going to change mine to say “Sina is Cool”, just because I can, and also because I AM COOL. (You may be tempted to replace “Sina” with your own name. Please don’t, because uh … your code won’t work.)

    Your resulting app should look like this:

    

    A beautiful sight, isn’t it?

    (At this point, Sina actually is pretty damned cool. – Ed.)

Delete the Extra Icons Folder

Now you have FlashDevelop set up to create mobile-formatted AIR apps. Your app compiles, and you have your Mobile Provisioning Profile and your .p12 Signing Certificate waiting in the wings. All you need to do is combine all these amazing files together to create the Holy Grail .ipa file.

An .ipa file is like the program file – the Windows executable (.exe) – that you need to test your iPhone/iPad App on a device, and ultimately upload it to the Apple App Store.

The creators of FlashDevelop 4 made a minor error when they created the Mobile App template: the template generates a duplicate icons folder that will cause a conflict when you try to bundle your .ipa file. You need to get rid of this extra folder to make sure your .ipa file to builds properly.

1. Look in the right sidebar that lists your files and folders. You’ll see a folder called bin. (This is one of the folders that FlashDevelop created for you automatically when you created your project.)
2. Click on the little plus sign beside the bin folder to expand it. You will see a folder called icons tucked inside. Right-click the icons folder and click Delete. Problem solved.

   

Integrate Your Cert Files

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.

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).

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.

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.

• #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.

This is the third part of our tutorial series by Intern Sina on creating an AIR application for free on a PC using FlashDevelop, and deploying it as a native app on an iOS device like the Apple iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

Jump to other parts in the series:

• Part 1 – Sign up for an Apple iOS Developer Account
• Part 2 – Obtain your Signing Certificate & Mobile Provisioning Profile, and create your App ID
• Part 4 – Modify your project settings and test your app on an Apple device

Luke Loses His Hand

Part 2 of this tutorial was like The Empire Strikes Back. It was the crisis moment in the story of deploying a Flash project to the Apple iOS platform. It was dark, it was difficult, and Han Solo wound up frozen in carbonite. Part 3 is redemptive: with all that command line and certificate red tape out of the way, you can finally build our AS3 app using FlashDevelop. Watch closely, friends: you may spot some ewoks.

Install Flash Develop

As I mentioned earlier in the series, FlashDevelop is a FREE, PC-only coding environment that is used throughout the industry and loved by many. If you haven’t installed it, head here to download the latest version.

FlashDevelop is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) where you can create many different types of applications from scratch. The most amazing thing about FlashDevelop is that you don’t actually need to buy Adobe’s Flash Professional software to create Flash (swf) content. FlashDevelop has amazing, time-saving features like importing code libraries on the fly, and numerous awesome templates. At the time of this writing, the latest edition of FlashDevelop is 4.0.0. This version of FlashDevelop contains a template for Mobile AIR applications which you can use for iOS and Android development. In this tutorial, you’ll use the iOS version of the template.

Create a Merged SDK Folder

There are two SDKs (Software Development Kits) you’ll need to deploy Flash content to the iOS platform: Flex and AIR. Depending on the version of FlashDevelop you install, these two SDKs may already be included in the download. You’re going to download them both anew and put them in a single folder. That way, if you mess anything up, you can take off and nuke the site from orbit instead of messing up your main FD install. It’s the only way.

1. Download the latest AIR SDK (which, at the time of this writing, was v3.0)
2. Download the Flex SDK.
3. These two packages download as .zip files. Extract them wherever you like on your computer – just make sure you know where you put them.
4. Once you have both SDK’s extracted to separate folders, copy everything in the AIR SDK folder into the Flex SDK folder. Windows will ask you if you want to overwrite certain files. Say “yes” to everything.

   

   You now have a folder with the Flex SDK and the AIR SDK merged into one. This is a Good Thing™.

Point FlashDevelop to the Flex SDK

In order to compile (build and execute) your app, you have to point FlashDevelop to the merged SDK folder that you just created.

1. Open up FlashDevelop and hit F10 or go to Tools->Program Settings in the menus.

   

2. In the Program Settings menu, click on AS3 Context.
3. Find the Language section, and the Flex SDK Location line within it.

   

4. Click the ellipsis button at the end of that line, and navigate to the merged SDK folder.
5. Click Close to commit the change.

Set Up Your Mobile AIR Application

Once you have downloaded and installed FlashDevelop, open it up and you should see it in all its glory:

To begin with, you’ll need to create a new FlashDevelop project, which is a group of folders governed by a file filled with metadata about your project.

1. Create a new project by clicking Project -> New Project in the menu.
2. Now you will see a screen with a multitude of options. These are all project starter templates that FlashDevelop has for you to use. The one you want is the AIR Mobile AS3 App. Select this template, choose a location on your hard drive to save it, give a name to your project, and hit OK.

   Note: A package name is not required but the option is there if you’d like to use it.

   

   After you hit OK, FlashDevelop creates a number of folders and files for you, including:

   • The .as3proj file, which is a FlashDevelop project file filled with metadata that keeps track of various aspects of your project.
   • The bin folder. This is where your finished files end up.
   • The lib folder, where you can put your “construction” files and artwork.
   • The src folder, which contains your .as AS3 code files.
3. Once you’ve created your project file, FlashDevelop starts you off with a blank screen. To open up your code, click on the src folder in the Project sidebar on the right. (The Project sidebar lists your computer’s actual directory structure so that you can access your Actionscript files quickly and easily.)
4. Inside the src folder, double click the Main.as file to open it. This is your project’s point of entry, where you can start writing the code for your app.

   

5. Push the F5 key on your keyboard, or the click the little play button at the top-middle of FlashDevelop to compile and run your project.

   

   The first compile will take little bit of time, but any compile after that should be quick, because the compiler builds on an as-needed basis, compiling only your most recent changes (as opposed to Flash Professional, which compiles your ENTIRE project every single time. Bleh!). Once you run your new project, the FlashPlayer should pop up and you should see a blank screen. Luckily, this is exactly what we want. As of right now, this is your App.

   

Hello, Planet

This is nice and all, but let’s try to the write a simple message on screen so that when we are testing, we know it actually works. Let’s write “Hello Planet” on-screen.

1. Just below the green commented line where it says //entry point in your Main.as file, copy and paste these lines into your code:

   var tf:TextField = new TextField();  
   var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();  
   format.font = "_sans";  
   format.size = 48;  
   tf.defaultTextFormat = format;  
   tf.text = "Hello Planet";  
   tf.width = stage.stageWidth - 20;  
   tf.x = 10;  
   tf.y = 10;  
   addChild(tf);

   

2. Click the compile button (or press F5). Did it screw up? Good. There are a couple more things you have to do before you are ready to compile without errors.
3. In your code, click to place your cursor carat on the word Textfield and hit Ctrl+Shift+1 on your keyboard. The word turns blue. If you scroll to the top of the class, you’ll notice that there is an extra import line at the top of your code. CTRL+SHIFT+1 is a special feature of FlashDevelop that does code completion. In this instance, CTRL+SHIFT+1 automatically handles your import statements for you. You need to import the TextField code with this statement if you want your TextField to work.
4. Use CTRL+SHIFT+1 on the TextFormat word and you should see this:

   

5. Now click Compile (or press F5).

   

   Thar she blows!

   (It works, but it’s no Angry Birds. – Ed.)

Bust Out the Hardware

This is moving along nicely. You:

• Installed FlashDevelop, a free and open-source IDE for creating Flash and AIR content
• Downloaded and sunk the latest AIR SDK and Flex SDK into a single, merged folder
• Pointed FlashDevelop to the Flex SDK to use its superior compiler
• Created a new FlashDevelop project using the Mobile AIR application template
• Wrote and compiled a new Hello Planet AIR app that you can deploy to a testing device

In the next part of the tutorial, you’ll fine-tune FlashDevelop and modify a number of settings and batch files to create the magical, mystical .ipa file, and you’ll see that file running on your testing device.

Continue to Part 4

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!

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 .

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.

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?

Further reading:

• Movember 2010 – “The Blustery Day”

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:

• Part 1 – Sign up for an Apple iOS Developer Account
• Part 3 -Use FlashDevelop to build your mobile AIR app
• Part 4 – Modify your project settings and test your app on an Apple device

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.

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.

1. 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:

   

2. 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"

3. 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.

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

   

2. 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.

   

3. Click the Browse button and navigate to the bin folder located within your OpenSSL folder.
4. Once you have selected the Signing Certificate Request file, click Submit. Your next screen should show this:

   

5. Just hit Refresh a couple of times on your browser and you should eventually see this:

   

6. 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.

1. 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.

   

2. 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

3. Open up your command prompt as I showed earlier, and navigate to the bin folder of your Open SSL directory.
4. Once you’re there, paste in the first command (right-click and select “Paste” from the context menu), and press ENTER.
5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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.

1. 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.

   

2. 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.

   

3. 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.

   

4. 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.

1. Within the Provisioning Portal website, click Provisioning in the sidebar.

   

2. Click on New Profile.

   Note: You only see this option if you are the fee-paying Team Admin.

   

3. Give your provisioning profile a Profile Name.

   

4. Choose the Signing Certificate(s) that you want to use with this profile.
5. Use the drop-down list to indicate the app for which you’re creating this profile.
6. Finally, indicate the testing device you want to test it on.
7. 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:

1. You used the command line and OpenSSL to create a Certificate Signing Request file.
2. 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.
3. You converted your Signing Certificate to the .p12 format.
4. You created an ID for your app.
5. 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

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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″).

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.

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.

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 :

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.

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:

• Part 2 – Obtain your Signing Certificate & Mobile Provisioning Profile, and create your App ID
• Part 3 -Use FlashDevelop to build your mobile AIR app
• Part 4 – Modify your project settings and test your app on an Apple device

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.

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:

1. The platform (Mac, PC or Linux)
2. The screen resolution (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, etc)
3. The browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari)
4. 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.

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:

1. No one really wants to play a game in a browser on a phone. Native apps are where it’s at.
2. Yes, you CAN put Flash- and Actionscript-created content on an iPhone, in native app format.
3. You can even do it without having to buy Flash Professional or Creative Suite.
4. You can develop entirely on a PC until the very last step (uploading content to the App Store).
5. 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:

1. 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.
2. A Mac (not free) running the latest version of Xcode (free).
3. An iOS device (optional, but obviously recommended).
4. FlashDevelop v4 or better (free, PC-only)

Introducing Sina

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”.

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:

1. 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.

   

2. click Devices in the sidebar.

   

3. 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.

   

4. 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”.
5. 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.

   

6. 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

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

And the Playstation Move controller looks like a buttplug.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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:

1. This is a preliterate audience. The only text in the game is the title, and absolutely everything is voiced over.
2. There is no “play” button on the title screen. After a brief countdown, the game automatically begins.
3. 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)
4. Visual patterning is reinforced through sound.
5. The “answer” is entered twice, to confirm comprehension (otherwise, the player could just be clicking around and “winning” coincidentally).
6. Little-to-no chainsaw violence.

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

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.

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.

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”?

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.

Degrees of Depravity

We can sort the expurgated words into these general categories:

1. Swears
2. Euphemisms for swears
3. Racist/Prejudiced terms
4. Puerile words for body functions/parts (impolite words that mostly kids would use)
5. 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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

See you at IndieCade!

1. Ain’t no ladies in the games industry.
2. If there were, i wonder what kinds of games they’d make?
3. 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:

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?).

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.

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!

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.

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?

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:

1. 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?

2. 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.

3. 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.

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.

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:

1. at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. 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.

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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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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:

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“.

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. increase complexity

   

   as Bejewelled escalates, it introduces extra gem colours, which makes finding matches more challenging

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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).

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!).

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.

1. 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.
2. No failing. As of the 1996 intake, students could not fail the ninth grade.
3. 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.”

(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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

The Alaska Airlines logo.

i cannot be the only one.

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

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:

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

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:

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:

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.

(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:

1. it runs ad-free
2. there’s no download wait – the game instantly starts up
3. 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)
4. kids prefer touch interfaces over mouse-driven ones (and have more success with touch)
5. the touch interface even lowers the minimum play age down from 2 years old to zero years old
6. 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!

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.

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.

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:

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:

HERE is a great sleeping bag brand extension:

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.

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:

• Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two
• Heads
• Summer in Smallywood
• Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure

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

Summer in Smallywood is an online educational game built with UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System.

The project was funded by the Government of Canada’s Office of Literacy and Essential Skills, and was produced by the Center for Skills Development and Training in Burlington Ontario. It aims to teach three workplace skills to 15-30 year olds. Here’s how the project came about:

All Thumbs

Ontario employers have apparently had as much trouble hiring young people as i’ve had teaching them. They’ve identified nine “Essential Skills” they want the Ministry to help instill in young people, so that those young people can thrive in the workplace. What are these “Essential Skills”, you ask? Poetry recitation? Wire-walking? Differential calculus?

‘Fraid not. It’s stuff like “thinking.” Really. This is where we’re at. We need to teach thinking.

Historically, these Essential Skills have been taught via somewhat dry worksheets and booklets – the kind you’d see in a typical guidance councilor’s office (next to the 1986 Ziggy desk calendar and the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels). Summer in Smallywood presents the information in a far more interesting format: as a video game.

What Went Very, Very Right

Teaching three of the nine Essential Skills in video game form was the brainchild of the Center, and our client Matt Markowiak in particular. The Smallywood project was the perfect example of everything that can possibly go right on this type of project:

1. Video games are very much a generational thing – you either grew up with them in your life, or you didn’t. Matt was asked to take the reigns on this project because he understands games. It was an excellent decision.
2. The Center involved a game developer (us!) very early in the development process. Often, we’re approached to pull the trigger on a project long after the stakeholders, who may not have a strong grasp of video games (“i used play Pac Man”), have decided on every minute aspect of the project … without benefit of a game developer’s involvement. Hiring a game developer to consult at the beginning of a project is a very smart move! It keeps your vendor invested and interested in the project, and often results in a better final product.
3. The Center wasn’t completely hyper about hammering home the message. There’s a real fine line to walk when you use a game as a teaching tool. If there’s too much preachy instruction, it becomes a complete bore and you might as well have put the info in a 3-ring binder to begin with. If it’s too gamey and not learny enough, the stakeholders might kick up a fuss. Summer in Smallywood strikes a really nice balance between its “edu” and its “tainment.”

i do feel the game is too dialogue-heavy, but it’s difficult to convey this information in this genre without having a lot of lip-flap. It would be amazing if Summer in Smallywood could have received a full voice-over treatment, if time and budget had permitted.

I Don’t Have Time To Play It – Give Me the Gist!

Summer in Smallywood pits you as a shift supervisor at a low-rent amusement park called Smallywood, where the rides and attractions are upsettingly tiny. One exhibit features miniaturized versions of Canada’s largest roadside attractions (Sudbury’s Big Nickel is an actual nickel).

The boss, an eccentric entrepreneur named Mr. Wood, challenges his employees to learn three essential skills: Oral Communication, Thinking Skills, and Working with Others. Master these, and you may be up for a raise and a promotion at the end of the summer.

Matt’s obviously played a lot of Pokémon. in the Oral Communication module, you face off against customers against an anime action background. Instead of choosing combat moves from a list, you choose helpful customer service responses.

There are other classic video game references to spot. The dialogue window is pure Final Fantasy. Mario’s 1-up mushroom makes an appearance. Matt even had class NES-style video game boxes and instruction booklets printed to play up the initiative’s unique format:

Matt’s love of retro gaming came out in the video he produced to promote Smallywood to schools. Check out this trailer, dripping with “Zelda rap”-esque cheese:

UGAGS Enhancements

Summer in Smallywood made possible a handful of important new features for UGAGS version 3:

FUN FACT: Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure was made using UGAGS v3, adding character voice-over, which brings the framework to v3.5.

Maybe it’s a weird quirk in my brainthoughts, but i really enjoy the challenge of presenting bone-dry material in an interesting and engaging way. Summer in Smallywood was Untold Entertainment’s first foray into educational gaming. i’m definitely interested in working on more games like this one, with great clients like Matt.

For up-to-the-minute news on edutainment and educational games, follow @smallywoodgame on Twitter.

Credits

For The Center for Skills Development and Training:

• Project Coordinator, Game Design, Script:Matt Markowiak
• Script Editors:Christine Prieur, Lorna Hart and Maria McDonald
• Graphic Designer:Rita Ladjansky
• Project Assistant: Dawn Walker

For Untold Entertainment Inc.

• Art, Animation, Additional Game Design and Programming:Ryan Henson Creighton
• Character and Title Art:Kelly Conley
• Additional UGAGS Programming:Jeff Gold
• Script Editor: Chris Clemens

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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:

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.

Further Reading:

• Indie Gamedevs: You’re (Probably) Doing it Wrong

Our entry for TOJam 5 (the Toronto independent game jam) was Heads.

The jam theme was “missing”. Heads is about a fellow who wakes up one morning missing … well, his head. The first puzzle in the game sees you constructing a makeshift head before you can leave the house. From there, we introduce a somewhat novel mechanic where you can switch heads with other characters to use their abilities. The game was the second title we created with UGAGS – the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System.

Worth 1000 Words

Heads was one of the games on Untold’s “Games to Build” wiki. The intended scope was much larger than what we ended up with, but the advantage of creating Heads at a weekend game jam is that we finished it and got the idea out to the world. The innovation we attempted with Heads came directly out of the first UGAGS game we created, Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two. Jinx 3 had a LOT of character dialogue and was very wordy. Heads was a reaction to that; we tried to create a game with absolutely no character dialogue whatsoever.

The resulting challenge was that everything we needed to communicate to the player required a new animation. The unique Heads style required us to draw every frame 3 or 4 times to achieve a Squigglevision-style effect. This all added up to a very time-consuming process that tested the limits of what we were able to pull off in a single weekend.

Acclaim for Heads

Heads won “Best Use of Theme” at the public TOJam Arcade exhibition. It was featured in the START video game show at the Ontario College of Art and Design. You can play Heads for free on the Blackberry Playbook.

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.

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:

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.

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!

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 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.

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:

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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).

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.

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!

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).

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:

[display_podcast]

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.

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.

Thank you for sending me a Playbook. i like it very much. i didn’t very much like the steps involved to put my work on the device, though. It was the most needlessly complicated thing i’ve had to do in all my life. i’d like to see the Playbook succeed, but you need to put more effort into helping your developers succeed first.

Here are a few of the issues i ran into while porting my game Heads to your platform:

1. i had to download Many Things, and sign up for Many Accounts. Each Thing and each Account came with 15 pages of legalese with an “I Agree” button at the bottom. I Agree … that this stinks.
2. One of the Many Things i had to download was Adobe AIR 2.5. i followed the link on your site to Adobe AIR 2.6, which i downloaded instead. When i tried to follow your workflow, i was told that only AIR 2.5 would work, so i had to cast about the Internatz to find the 2.5 download, which wasn’t made immediately and obviously available on the Adobe site. If i’m creating something for your platform, everything i do should ideally be immediate and obvious.

   

3. i downloaded VMWare and your VMWare Playbook profile so that i could run a virtual Playbook. But the emulator stalled at the startup screen for a very long time. i checked message boards, and found two possible solutions:
   1. Leave it overnight.
   2. Alternatingly restart your computer or VMWare multiple times (some reports said “six or seven”) until it works.

   i opted to restart VMWare and my computer multiple times until it worked. This was very frustrating. i’m not the only one who experienced this problem, as evidenced by this web comic by my Twitter pal @IQAndreas:

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

4. In order to deploy my game to the virtual Playbook, i had to know its IP. To get that, i had to swipe the “development” option into the “on” position and punch in my password. i had to use the software keyboard to punch in my password, because my computer keyboard didn’t work. And worse than that, it took about 4-5 tries swiping the slider and punching in my password before the Developer hammer icon would appear on the home screen … for whatever reason, that slider kept undoing itself.

   

   Somebody call Jerry O’Connell, cuz this slider be busted.

5. When it came time to bundle my files together in a .bar file, i was dismayed to find that since i don’t use Flash Builder (but, rather, FlashDevelop), i would need to use the command line to continue. i hate the command line. HAATE it. i know that eggheads love it, and that you employ Many Eggheads at RIM, but you have to understand that even though the command line is useful and powerful and 1337 and everything, i absolutely can’t be arsed with it. Like, not at all. So knock it off.

   Here is what i had to type into the command line in order to bundle my project into a .bar file:

   C:\dev\BlackBerryTabletSDK\blackberry-tablet-sdk-0.9.3\bin\blackberry-airpackager -package MyGame.bar -installApp -launchApp MyGame-app.xml blackberry-tablet.xml MyGame.swf blackberry-tablet-icon.png -device 192.168.58.128 -password 123456

   This is not a fun thing to have to type. Know what i want to do? Click a button. Can you make it so that i just click a button? Buttons good, typing bad. It may not be 1337, but it also doesn’t eat up my entire afternoon.

6. i am currently rocking three Blackberry accounts: one to develop my game, one to sell my game, and one to talk about my game on your forums. This is Too Many Accounts. Know how many there should be? One. Know why? Because it’s easier. Know what’s not easy? You.
7. When i signed my application, i had to download a file that you sent to me two days after i emailed you and asked you for it. That’s Too Many Days. That’s because you also took two or three days to approve my vendor account. Why not do this in one step instead of two? Clearly, a vendor is always going to need the application signing file. See how you don’t make things easy, when you potentially could?
8. Then i had to use the command line (which, as we’ve already established, is bad) to create a file that i could send to you so that my computer could sign files. At least i think that’s what i was doing. Here’s what the command looked like:
   

   blackberry-signer -csksetup -cskpass DesiredCSKPassword

   Then i had to use the command line (bad. BAD!) to send you my .csj file to receive permission to sign my other file. i think. i’m not quite sure what was going on, because it was tough to interpret the command, which looked like this:

   blackberry-signer -register -csjpin PinEnteredWhileRequestingCSJ -cskpass PasswordEnteredWhileGeneratingCSK client-RDK-XXXXXXXXXX.csj

   Next, i had to create a .p12 certificate using this command:

   blackberry-keytool -genkeypair -keystore DesiredCertificateName.p12 -storepass NewPassword -dname “cn=MyCompanyName” -alias author

   Then i had to get you to sign the file using this command:

   blackberry-signer -verbose -cskpass CSKPassword -keystore CertificateName.p12 -storepass StorePassword BarFileNameForRIMToSign.bar RDK

   Then i had to sign the file myself using this command:

   blackberry-signer -keystore CertificateName.p12 -storepass StorePassword RimSignedBarFile.bar author

9. When i finally went to upload my file, in the web form you asked me for an additional icon in some bizarre size (243×717 or something like that). i went away and produced that icon, and by the time i returned, the web form had timed out. Know what would be easier? A checklist!
   

   YOU WILL NEED:

   • A swf
   • An xml file called whatever.xml – download it HERE!
   • A thumbnail icon – download a template HERE!
   • A second icon – download a template HERE!
   • A brief description of your application – max X words
   • A long-form description of your application – max Y words

   And HERE’S an image of how all this stuff looks when it’s in the Blackberry App World! We’ve LABELLED everything for you, so you know where the descriptions and icons appear and how they’ll look to the user.

   Really, though – how long does that kind of thing take to set up? An afternoon? Why does this not exist yet?

10. To add insult to injury, my game was initially rejected because it did not contain the icon.png. i figured i must have forgotten to include the .png filename when i created the .bar file, so i went through all of those horrible steps again. For a second time, my game was rejected. Same reason.

    Know what the problem was? i hadn’t added this to the xml file:

    <icon>
        <image>whatever.png</image>
    </icon>

    N’awesome.

i didn’t enjoy doing this, and i don’t want to have to do it ever again. Know what i want? i want a big blank area where i can drag and drop my file, with a huge shiny juicy button that says “GO BITCH GO” which, when i click it, does all the bullshit i just described above. Please get your eggheads on that.

In addition to all of the brilliant software and hardware engineers you employ, you simply need to hire more people to evaluate this process. An egghead will tell you that using the command line is cool and awesome and that everyone loves doing it. A person will tell you the actual truth: using the command line blows, and you need to put that shit on a button.

Please let me know if and when you plan to put that shit on a button, and i’ll gladly continue developing for your device, because it’s pretty cool.

Sincerely,

Ryan Henson Creighton

President, Untold Entertainment Inc.

Following the Greatest Generation, we had the Baby Boomers, and then Generation X (which is lazy naming), followed by my people, Generation Y (which is even lazier). i have a feeling we’ll eventually take to renaming Generation Y “the Internet Generation” if we haven’t already.

Rare Sandwich Filling

The interesting thing i’ve noticed about the Internet Generation is that it’s sandwiched between two generations of people who are completely crap at using technology and computers: the kids who are now 45-50, who went to high school in the 80′s, and their kids, who are currently in – or graduating from – college and University. The difference between the kids of the 80′s and their kids is that while the parents arguably didn’t need to know how to use computers effectively in the workplace while they were being hired, their kids absolutely do. But since the parents weren’t immersed in the Internet and computers, they raised their kids to be similarly disconnected. The result is a generation of kids who absolutely do need to know how to use computers and the Internet, but don’t. i dub them the Most Useless Generation.

Simple Pleasures

i can honestly say that one of the biggest thrills, one of the most memorable times in my life, was when i sat down at my friend’s computer while he launched mIRC, an Internet Relay Chat client. These were the early days of home Internet usage … the 14.4 dial-up days. My friend, a year older than me, had convinced his parents to get access because he wanted to use the Internet at home. Universities across Canada were providing Internet access to their students, right in their own dorm rooms.

Until then, the only real access high school students could get was on ONE machine in the school library, IF their school was progressive. And that computer was treated like a rare and precious angel fart – you had to book it in advance, and the whole time you used it, you’d have the head librarian breathing down your neck making sure you didn’t “hack NASA” or whatever.

But here in my friend’s room, and in Universities across the country (it was one agonizingly long year until i’d get my chance), we had unfettered, gloriously unsupervised access to the Internet. The thrill – the unbridled thrill of chatting to complete strangers in a text-only chat channel was a magical moment i’ll honestly never forget as long as i live. i’m not being cynical here: it absolutely blew my mind.

Denerdification

All through grade school, only the nerdiest kids learned to use computers because it was a niche interest that effectively turned you into a social outcast. But in high school, with the advent of the Internatz, everyone learned how to use computers – often under their own initiative – because computers became that damned interesting.

Flash forward to today, when i discover while teaching group of college students that they don’t know how zip a file and send it as an attachment in an email. This is email we’re talking about – the Internet’s killer app – and it was causing anxiety attacks in students enrolled in a computer art program.

This is the generation of kids who were horror-stricken that i’d been teaching Sunday School using Wikipedia as a research guide. Their teachers have long told them that Wikipedia is absolutely unreliable, and they’re not to use it. This is the generation that can’t Google worth a fat damn.

This is also the generation, incidentally, that doesn’t offer the courtesy of a phone call or an email when they don’t come into work. This comes from both personal experience and from anecdotal word-of-mouth, as i’ve heard that many employers are frustrated with The Most Useless Generation. Instead of giving notice, they just don’t show up. If they don’t want to do something because they don’t find it fun or interesting or engaging, they don’t do it. i once had an intern quit on me by phone call, with zero notice, and i suspect it’s because he wasn’t having any luck with the CSS task i’d given him. Based on all i’ve been hearing, i’m frankly surprised i received a phone call at all.

Let’s Get Out of Here

i’m not sure how to solve this problem, or even if we need to? Maybe we just have to put up with a generation of unemployable kids, until the next generation can put us back on track? Perhaps we can wage a special, separate World War III and draft everyone between the ages of 15 and 25 to fight it? But there’s a good chance they’ll find war either too difficult or too uninteresting, and will lay down their guns so they can butcher the English language in undecipherable text messages to each other.

Or maybe we should just build a spaceship to somewhere else? Everyone is freely invited to board it and get off this rock. We’ll send the invite by email.

• Interview With Untold Entertainment’s Ryan Henson Creighton

A few things to point out:

1. The site used Brendan Lynch’s pic of me from TOJam 5 without crediting him. Since Lynch is prone to fits of terrible rage, i felt i should give him credit, rather than to wait for him to pay me an unpleasant Godfather-style visit.

   

   Photo by the blessed and powerful Brendan Lynch, peace be upon him

2. All other photos used in the interview were stolen from Google Image Search by me without credit. He who sends the angriest email will shoot to the top of my todo list for adding attribution.
3. i’ve landed in a bit of hot water with Unity 3D Game Development by Example, ever since a high school teacher demanded the publisher remove the “obscene” material from it to make it appropriate for high school students. Now the publisher has turned around and scoured my contract for a legal excuse to sue. You can read all about that torrid saga here:

• High School Teacher Moves to Ban Unity Book from High Schools

So if you’d like a copy of my book before it ceases to be, or before all references to nipples n’ dicks are replaced with ponies and rainbows, pick up a copy before it’s too late!

Check out this vector graphic of a sun. Sure, you can individually copy and rotate all those flames and then meticulously hand-position them, but life’s too short and you’ve got too much other awesome stuff to do. There’s a faster, easier way!

Step 1: Draw your graphics

To begin, I’ve just drawn a circle and a little flame graphic. I filled them both with a gradient so they look less junky.

Step 2: Symbolize your graphics

Select the circle and press F8, or click Modify > Convert to Symbol. Enter a name for your symbol – anything you like – and make sure the Registration point is in the center. Press OK when you’re finished.

Step 3: Create an Empty Movie Clip

Press CTRL+F8 or click Insert > New Symbol … to create an empty Movie Clip. Again, call it whatever you like and click OK. Then click the Scene 1 tab to jump back out to the main timeline.

Press CTRL + L or click Window > Library to bring up the Library. Click and drag the empty Movie Clip you just created and drag it to the Stage. The empty Movie Clip looks like a white dot.

Step 4: Align the two Movie Clips

Press CTRL + K or click Window > Align in the menus to bring up the Align panel. Click and drag to range-select both Movie Clips at once. Click the “Align horizontal center” and “Align vertical center” buttons (highlighted in red in the image) to align the center points of the two clips.

Step 5: Cut and paste the repeated element into the empty Movie Clip.

Select the artwork for the repeated element and press CTRL+X or Edit > Cut in the menus to delete it and copy it to memory in the clipboard.

Now, double-click the empty Movie Clip (the white dot) to edit it. If you accidentally double-click the circle, click the Scene 1 button to jump back out to the main timeline and try again. Alternately, you can double-click the empty clip from the library to edit it.

Finally, press CTRL+V or Edit > Paste to paste the repeated element artwork from the clipboard into the empty Movie Clip. Position the artwork where you’d like it to appear; in the case of our sun graphic, we’ll move the little flame to the edge of the circle. Click the Scene 1 button to jump back out to the main timeline when you’re ready.

Step 6: Prep the timeline.

Select the repeated element (in this case, the flame Movie Clip) and press CTRL+X or Edit > Cut to delete it and copy it to the clipboard.

Click the New Layer button at the bottom left of the Timeline window. Click on the first frame of the newly-added layer, and press CTRL+SHIFT+V to paste the repeated element in exactly the same place.

Step 7: Spin the clip.

Click on frame 30 of the main timeline in the newly-added layer. Press F6 or click Insert > Timeline > Keyframe to drop a new Keyframe there. You’ll see a black dot on frame 30.

Click on Frame 1 of the new layer. Right-click and select Create Classic Tween. An arrow with a blue background appears to indicate that Flash will interpolate the position, rotation, scale and color effects of this Movie Clip across the frame range.

Open the Properties panel (Windows > Properties or CTRL+F3). Select the repeated element Movie Clip. The context-sensitive Properties panel updates to show Movie Clip properties.

Under the Tweening heading, choose CW (clockwise) from the Rotate: dropdown. (You may need to click the little triangle to expand the Tweening section). This makes the repeated element rotate around its registration point for the duration of the animation span.

Step 8: Adjust the animation with Onion-Skinning.

Click the Onion Skin button at the bottom of the Timeline window to turn on Onion Skinning. Click and drag the grey animation range gizmo at the top of the Timeline window to stretch across the entire animation range.

Now you can clearly see how your repeated element is distributed around its registration point. If the distribution is too sparse, click the pink rectangular Playhead at the top of the Timeline window and hold down the F5 key (or repeatedly click Insert > Timeline > Frame if you’re a sucker) until the distribution is to your likely. If the distribution is too dense, press SHIFT+F5 to delete frames until it looks good. If you’re deleting frames, make sure you either lock the lower layer, or move away from Frame 1, or else you’ll delete the lower layer artwork!

The following images show how differing frame range lengths can affect the distribution of your repeated elements:

Step 9: Turn the interpolated frames into symbol instances.

Right now, those repeated elements may look exactly the way you want them, but they’re not “real”. What you’re seeing is just the motion trail of a single Movie Clip instance as it revolves through its animation.
To turn these phantoms into actual symbol instances, click and drag to select the entire range of animated frames, and press F6 to convert them all to keyframes. Now, each frame contains an actual “physical” instance of the Movie Clip.

Step 10: Gather the elements together on one frame.

Click the Edit Multiple Frames button at the bottom of the Timeline window.

Click the dot beneath the Lock column on the lower layer, to keep from messing with the graphics on the lower frame.

Press CTRL+A to select all of the (unlocked) repeated elements. The Edit Multiple Frames mode enables you to select all of the instances across the frame range.

Press CTRL+X or Edit > Cut to delete all of the repeated elements and copy them to the clipboard.
Uncheck the Edit Multiple Frames button. Click on the first frame, and press CTRL+SHIFT+V to paste the repeated elements in place.

Step 11: Tidy up.

Click and drag to select the animation range from frame 2 to the last frame. Press CTRL+F6 to delete all of the empty, blue animated keyframes. Press SHIFT+F5 to delete the frames so that your timeline is back to a single frame.

Click and drag the top layer below the bottom layer to swap their z-depth order. This put the repeated elements behind the circle. Looks pretty good!

This trick works for more than just straight lathe effects. You can animate a MovieClip along a path and add scale effects to it before F6-ing the whole affair. Check out the tail scales on this super-realistic dinosaur:

While he was giving a series of lectures,

[Nye] brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children.

The way in which this story was reported, and the way folks in my social sphere are having a gleeful field day with it, rubs me the wrong way. Here’s why.

Intolerants

Very recently, game designer Dan Cook asked his Twitter game dev followers if they were “religious”. He was presumably looking for a correlation between game design and godlessness. i offered up my list of “religious” (read: Christian) game devs (a number i can count on one hand), but i also made sure to mention that there’s a rampant anti-religious (read: anti-Christian) vibe out there among the people in my social sphere – namely, game devs and tech types.

Over the years, we develop shorthand when referring to or thinking about groups and types of people, because we can’t be arsed to do proper research or to practice empathy. This is how stereotypes work, and they’re quite useful.

What do we know about Waco and its people? Well, first and foremost, Waco is only a few letters off from the arbitrary English word “wacko”, meaning “crazy”, so logically, Waco’s residents must all be nuts. That’s the easy part.

We also know that Waco is home to religious zealotry. A few years back, there was a religious cult in Waco led by David Koresh. The FBI surrounded his compound, which was eventually burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances, and everyone inside the place died.

Now we’ll delve a little deeper to pull in everything we know about Waco’s people in order to properly judge them. First, Waco is in Texas. Texas is full of Christians, because George Bush. Christians don’t believe in science, because it contradicts the Bible. Since science is the exclusive domain of smart, educated people, we can deduce from this that Christians are stupid. And they’re warhawks. And they don’t like gays. They’re a pretty detestable lot, so it’s pretty great that we get to make fun of them.

A Working Model for Ridicule

So! We have a city packed with stupid Christians, in a town known for its religious zealotry, attending a Bill Nye lecture. Put it all together, and we get the following read on the story:

Science hero Bill Nye, in the proud tradition of Copernicus and Galileo, descended upon Christian backwater Waco, Texas, to enlighten the locals about a scientific fact that contradicts their creation myth. In response, the attendees decried his assertions as witchcraft, rejected his blaspheming, re-affirmed their love for their invisible and scientifically unproven deity, and stormed out of the venue, kids in tow.

The “kids in tow” bit is important. It’s conspicuously mentioned in the article. We don’t get the demographic breakdown of the other dissenters, but we do know that one woman led her three children away. This is mentioned because it’s important to know that Christians reject the findings of science, and that they pass that ignorance on to their children. (And who has children these days, anyway? Pfft. Breeders.)

Let There Be Reflection

Just as a side note, i’ll defend the Genesis verse for kicks. Does it matter if a something described as a “light” is self-illuminating? If you were trapped in a dark place, and you said “Hey Bill – can you shine a light on this keyhole so i can jimmy the lock?”, and Bill – for lack of a light – ingenuously angled a mirror to bounce a beam across the room to the dark keyhole, would you say “Dammit Bill, i said shine a LIGHT -not ‘reflect a beam of light’?”

Let’s edit the verse so that it’s needlessly specific:

God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser reflector to govern the night.

There. Does God exist now?

A Different Read

Christians are so stupid that, when faced scientific fact that humankind has long held to be true, they reject reality and cling to ancient superstition. Then they pass that stubborn idiocy on to their offspring. We’ve figured this all out thanks to the magic of stereotypes, and our own actualignorance.

Here’s another way to read this incident, from someone who is a practicing Christian:

Bill Nye is a massive cock. He’s a very bright guy and an experienced speaker – you don’t land your own teevee show otherwise (Glenn Beck notwithstanding). One of the first rules of public speaking is “know your audience”. Nye knew full well that, being in Texas, there was a high probability that he’d be speaking to at least a few Christians that day.

Nye also knew that some aspects of science are at odds with, and at times appear to completely contradict, scripture. He knew that there is an ongoing tension between the realms of faith and science. He was aware that this is a touchy subject.

Yet, despite knowing all of this, Bill Nye had an axe to grind with Bible-believing Christians. Instead of simply stating the fact that the moon reflects the sun’s light, he deliberately put that fact at odds with a verse in the scriptural account of creation in order to stir up shit. There’s no other reason why he decided to frame that fact in that particular way. i haven’t heard this piece of his presentation in context, but it’s clear that he wasn’t innocently invoking the Judeo-Christian creation myth with an absent-minded frivolity, as scientists often do (??)

No, Bill Nye intended to provoke. And he got what he wanted: the devout, practicing Christians in the room booed him. It’s important to realize here that they weren’t booing science. They weren’t necessarily rejecting the evidence that the moon is not self-illuminating. They were rejecting the callous approach of a speaker who unnecessarily invoked the debate between science and faith in a known hotbed for Christian adherents.

You don’t book a speaking tour in wine country, take the podium in front of hundreds of vineyard owners and wine enthusiasts, and start off by saying “You know what i hate? Grapes.”

Taking a Stand

When an industry pal of mine gleefully retweeted this story, i gave him this more fair-minded read on it. He said fine and dandy, but was it really an appropriate response to boo the speaker and storm out of the auditorium? If you’ve ever believed in something as strongly as Christians believe in (and love) their fantasy God, then you’ll understand that, yes – it is entirely appropriate to stand up for your beliefs when one among you launches an attack on those beliefs. In other words, if someone is being a dick, it’s alright to call him out on it.

Of course, Christians aren’t the only people who believe in this creation story. The concept of an omnipotent god speaking the sun, moon and stars into being is shared by Christians, Jews and Muslims. But no one would dare attack Jewish people for their religious conviction, because many of them were killed in the holocaust, and any criticism of Jews is seen as insensitive. And you’d better not ridicule Muslims, because they’ll burn your embassy down and put bombs on your airplanes. This is the easy shorthand we’ve developed when dealing with those two groups.

But Christians? They’re a safe, easy target. They’re ignorant, backwards-thinking, and simple-minded. More importantly, they’re powerless to stop you from saying whatever you damn well please about them. They love God, “hate fags”, and despite the likes of noble Bill Nye trying in vain to re-educate them, they think the moon is self-illuminating because the Bible tells them so.

Ah. Thank God for stereotypes.

…

Oops. Did i say “thank God“? i’m such an idiot.

i’m ready to declare holy Jihad on anyone who botches it. Being a Christian, i’m not really sure how holy Jihad works, but if it means you get to harm people who annoy you, then yes. That.

Further Reading:

• 5 Words You Probably Misspell
• Words We Have Invented

My last experience with a Fiverr seller from New Jersey had him supposedly driving the ZombieGameWorld.com logo around on his car for a week. i spotted another seller on Fiverr who vowed to shoot a “Jersey Shore-style testimonial”. i took a look at his sample video, and was impressed with his confidence, glasses, and hilarious accent:

i decided to buy this guy’s gig, which meant i’d have to write a ZGW-style script for him. i didn’t know much about Jersey Shore, except that it was a) popular with the kids and b) deplorable. i took a quick spin around YouTube and, after watching a few highlights, felt i had the show pretty much figured out.

Here’s the script i sent to the seller:

What’s up, everyone … it’s The Happenstance comin’ at you with a comPLAINT, for real. The zombie apocalypse is cramping my style. This shit’s gotta get SOLVED.

So i’m at the club, straight-up guido, you know – killin’ it – dancin’ all up on these two girls like them bitches like it, and the living dead come busting ass through the dance floor cuz some asshole forgot to barricade the back door. I was about to get with these bitches, and then these zombies tear their heads off and start eating their livers out of their bodies.

ZOMBIES BE UP IN MY SHIT, and I’m SICK of it. Go get a shovel, ima go get my hair gel, and we’re gonna kick these motherfuckin zombies in the TEETH, if they got any.

For real. We’re gonna kill it. Literally.

i can’t tell you how badly i wanted to hear this guy say “zombies be up in my shit”. Many Fiverr sellers will clarify in their gig description whether or not they’ll perform a script with profanity in it. This guy stayed mum, so i figured it was alright. What he delivered to me was not only profanity-free, but stripped of every single Jersey Shore nod i’d written into the script:

A Buyer Scorned

i asked the seller if he could do a re-shoot, because he was way off the script. i explained that profanity, the hair gel gag and the guido thing were all bits i’d gleaned from watching Jersey Shore clips. “The Happenstance” was a spoof of the Jersey Shore character “The Situation”. i said if the profanity or anything in the script bothered him, i’d gladly work with him to do a mutually acceptable re-write.

As with many other Fiverrers, i didn’t get a response. Once these guys get their five dollars (four dollars after Fiverr takes their cut), there’s no incentive to respond to a buyer. Best to just wait out the twelve days beyond which a buyer’s customer service complaint will be ignored.

If you’re planning on working with people on Fiverr, my best tip is this: if the seller doesn’t deliver the goods to your satisfaction, request a redo. Give the seller a maximum of three days to respond, and then hit up customer service. The whole process favours Fiverr and the seller (except for the fact that it’s a measly five dollars). You need to get your claws out to keep from being bilked out of your money – even small amounts of it.

Blood from a Stone

Continuing along on this trend of milking the most value i possibly can out of these videos, i gave this one a long think. i decided that if it was truly a Jersey Shore-style video, it needed Jersey Shore-style profanity – otherwise, what’s the point? Was it a funny or entertaining video as-is? Not really.

So taking a tip from Jimmy Kimmel, i jazzed the clip up with a little unnecessary censorship:

Down to Shiggity

My return to Jersey dented The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget to the tune of another five bucks. Here’s the shopping list as it stands:

Original investment: $100

Spent:

* ZombieGameWorld tagline voiceover – $5
* Show Us Yer Bewbz! – $5
* Zombie Funk – $5
* Advertising on Some Dude’s Car – $5
* Zombie Self-Defense: American Version – $5
* Zombie Self-Defense: Russian Version – $5
* Zombies Attack the Jersey Shore – $5

Remaining: $65

Spielbergin’ It Up

With my Fiverr video experiment, i expected to be able to post the clips as-is with no need to doctor them. Things changed dramatically when i found i had to add animation and sound effects to make the movies halfway watchable. The next Fiverrer i contacted told me she could shoot in front of a green screen. Without considering how much work i was about to create for myself, i said “sure!” The resulting video is in the next post.

Here’s how to animate a bouncing ball convincingly using Flash CS5 (though these steps will work in most – if not all -iterations of the Flash software).

Step 1: Create the Ball

1. In the tool palette, click and hold the mouse button on the “stroke” swatch.

   

2. Select the strike-through swatch. Our ball art won’t have a stroke.

   

3. Optionally, click and hold the mouse button on the “fill” swatch and choose a colour for your ball. i went with classic cherry red (#0xCC0000).
4. Again in the tool palette, Select the Oval tool. If you can’t see it, press and hold on the Rectangle tool – the Oval tool is hiding in a fly-out. You could also press the “O” key on your keyboard.

   

5. Click and drag the mouse to draw a circle on the screen. Hold the SHIFT key to constrain the circle’s proportions so that you don’t end up with an oblong ellipse.

   

6. Click the selection (black arrow) tool. You use this one a lot, so why not learn the keyboard shortcut? It’s “V”. (Pointy, like an arrow. Get it?)

   

7. Either double-click the raw circle artwork, or range select it (drag a selection box around the artwork). It goes “fuzzy”. (And it wouldn’t be an Untold Entertainment tutorial without some mention of fuzzy balls.)

   

8. With the artwork selected, choose Modify>Convert to Symbol in the menu, or press the F8 key.
9. In the resulting pop-up, type “Ball” as the MovieClip’s name.
10. Choose the bottom-middle for the registration point. This is key to animating a bouncing ball properly!

    

On or around the Flash MX release, the Flash engineers added a feature where a MovieClip can have its registration point in a certain place (ours is at the bottom of the ball), but there’s a second point – an anchor point – that can move around according to the needs of our animation. i don’t know why the anchor point doesn’t move to the bottom of the ball when we clearly want it there. Anyway, the last bit in this section is to move the ball’s anchor point down to the bottom middle, where its registration point is.

1. Make sure that snapping is turned ON. The Anchor icon in the Tool palette should be depressed (cheer up, little icon – things can only get better). You can quickly toggle snapping with the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + /.

   

2. Click on the Free Transform Tool. In addition to rotating, skewing and scaling things, this tool lets us move our anchor point around.

   

3. The anchor point is the white dot in the center of the ball MovieClip. Click and drag it to the bottom-middle of the ball. Since snapping’s turned on, it should snap into place.

   

With the anchor point snapped to the bottom of the ball, we can properly squash and stretch it. “Squash n’ stretch” is one of the principles of animation laid out by Disney’s Twelve Old Men in the indispensible book The ILLUSION OF LIFE: DISNEY ANIMATION.

If you’re interested in animation, i highly recommend studying that book and the Disney principles: arc of motion, squash n’ stretch, anticipation, secondary motion, follow-through … fantastic stuff!

Step 2: Rough-In the Animation

Thanks to the magic of computerized interpolative animation (AKA “tweening”), it’s a pretty quick job to get the ball bouncing. Getting it bouncing convincingly takes a tiny bit more effort.

So let’s rough it in first:

1. Click on frame 5 in the Timeline.
2. Click Insert>Timeline>Keyframe in the menu. If you’re going to do even a smidge of animation in Flash, you should really learn the Timeline shortcuts:

   – F5: insert a blank frame
   – F6: insert a keyframe
   – F7: insert a blank keyframe
   – SHIFT + F5: delete a blank frame
   – SHIFT + F6: delete a keyframe
   – SHIFT + F7: delete a blank keyframe

   

   Inserting a keyframe copies everything from the previous keyframe (the first one Flash finds travelling backwards along the timeline). In the case of our Ball MovieClip, Flash copies the ball’s position, rotation, scale, and colour effects. This is a Good Thing.™

3. Click on frame 10 of the Timeline, and press F6 to add another keyframe.

   

   Now we have three instances of the Ball, on frames 1, 5, and 10. Frames 1 and 10 will depict the Ball in its “up” state, and frame 5 will be the “down” state.

4. Click on frame 5.
5. Click on the Ball MovieClip, and move it down the screen. i moved mine about 90 pixels down, and my Ball is 50 pixels in diameter. Don’t worry about botching this step – you can easily adjust your animation later.
6. Click on any frame in the Timeline from 1-4.
7. Right-click and choose “Create Classic Tween” from the context menu, or choose the same option from the program menu – Insert>Classic Tween.

   

   Flash offers two different styles of interpolative animation: the new Motion Tween, for designers who want full spline control over every axis of an animation, and Classic Tween, for us old-schoolers who can’t be arsed. (Guess which kind of developer i am?)

8. Similarly, add a Classic tween between frames 5 and 10.

The first tween we created tells Flash to figure out the in-between drawings (“tweens”) from the Ball’s “up” keyframe and its “down” keyframe. Likewise, the second tween tells Flash to calculate the in-between drawings from the ball’s “down” keyframe to its “up” keyframe.

Play your animation by pressing the ENTER key on your keyboard, or better yet, click Control>Test Movie>Test in the menus, or hit CTRL+ENTER. Your Ball should animate up and down, crappily.

Our Ball is moving, but it’s not animating. The Illusion of Life isn’t there. We’re going to change that.

Step 3: Breath Some Life Into It

The type of ball we’ve got bouncing right now is very very stiff. It’s a cue ball or a bowling ball or a brass ball. It isn’t a very fun ball. It’s not soft or squishy. It has no personality. By adding a tiny bit of squash n’ stretch, we can eke a lot more verve out of it.

The squash n’ stretch principal is this: squishy, bouncy, rubbery things are more fun to watch on screen than rigid things. You’re “allowed” to squash or stretch something as much as you like, even to extremes, as long as the body’s volume stays the same. So if you stretch something up very tall, it has to simultaneously get very thin, or else it appears to gain mass, and it just won’t look right.

By the same token, if you flatten something by making it short, all that stuff has to seep out somewhere, so the shape has to simultaneously become very wide.

It makes sense to add a squash to the ball on the frame when it hits the ground, and maybe a slight stretch when it’s up in the air. Let’s do it:

1. Click on frame 5.
2. Click on the Free Transform tool.
3. Select the Ball MovieClip.
4. Drag the handles around to make your ball short and squat. Try to conserve the ball’s mass. For every inch that you flatten it, you’ve gotta squash it by the same amount.

Now test your movie.

Uh-oh … this isn’t good. Something doesn’t quite look right. Sure, the ball squishes when it lands, but … what’s going on?

The reason it doesn’t play well is that Flash is interpolating the squish from frame 1, when the ball is up in the air, all the way down to frame 5, when it hits the ground. Of course, the ball’s only going to squish when it actually makes contact with a hard surface.

Pres CTRL+Z or choose the Undo options from the Edit menu to undo the last few steps, until the ball on frame 5 is unsquished, and there are no Classic Tweens in the timeline. (If you undo too many steps, you can choose CTRL + Y or Edit>Redo to undo your undo

Step 4: Protect the Squish

In order to prevent Flash from interpolating the squish all the way through the animation, we need to “protect” the squish frame. We can do this by placing two keyframes, one on either side of frame 5. By doing this, we ask Flash to tween only the ball’s position on the way down, and only its position on the way up. Then, on the “protected” 5th frame, we squish the ball.

1. Place a keyframe on frame 6. This copies the ball in its “down” state from frame 5.
2. Press CTRL+C on the keyboard, or Edit>Copy to copy the ball in this position.
3. Place a new blank keyframe on frame 4.

   

4. Press CTRL+SHIFT+V or choose Edit>Paste in Place to paste the ball in its “down” position, exactly as it is on frames 5 and 6.
5. Re-add the Classic Tweens leading from frames 1 and 6.

   

6. Now that the squish frame is protected, you can go back and add the squish to the ball on frame 5.

It’s better with the squish, but it’s not perfect. Let’s try adding a stretch to the “up” positions.

1. On frame 1, stretch the ball out a touch using the Free Transform tool.
2. Since the animation loops, the first and the last frames have to match. Copy the ball from this frame.
3. Click on the last frame, frame 10.
4. Delete the ball from frame 10. This breaks our Classic Tween, and we get a dotted line leading to a blank keyframe.

   

5. Press CTRL+SHIFT+V or select Edit>Past in Place to paste the stretched ball. The Classic Tween is back to normal, now that it has something to animate towards.

Okay! Almost there! It’s looking better with that stretch. You may wonder why i’m not asking you to “protect” the stretch frames like we did with the squashed frame. That’s because while the ball shouldn’t squish until it hits the floor, it actually should lengthen as it travels up through the air.

The worst thing about our animation right now is the timing. The ball moves pretty robotically, and it has a real “computer animated” feel to it. In order to soften this up, we’ll apply some timing to the animation.

Step 5: Apply Timing

To make the ball a little more phyiscally believable, we need to slow it down on the way up. If you’ve ever seen super-slow-motion footage of someone hitting a baseball, or if you’ve studied Newtonian physics, you’ll know that the baseball actually comes to a dead stop as its energy is transferred to the bat. The bat, in turn, applies force in the opposite direction to the ball.

Similarly, there’s a point at which our ball hangs in the air and stops moving, before heading back down towards the ground. It decelerates (moves increasingly more slowly) as it reaches the apex of its bounce, and accelerates as it reverses direction and heads towards the ground.

We need to apply some easing to the ball to imitate this real-world behaviour.

Easing can front- or back-load a tween animation so that it’s slower or faster at the beginning or the end.

Here’s a picture of a tweened box animation with no easing:

The box’s in-between frames are evenly distributed between the start and end points.

And here it is with “Ease In”:

The box appears to move more slowly at the beginning of its animation, and it speeds up as it reaches the end point. We can see this is because the box’s in-betweens are bunched together at the beginning.

Finally, here’s what “Ease Out” looks like:

The box appears to slow down at the end of the animation, because its in-between frames are bunched together there.

So we return to our bouncing ball. We want the tween coming out of frame 1 to Ease In, so that it accelerates towards the ground. We want the tween coming into frame 10 to Ease Out, so that the ball slows down when it reaches the top of its bounce.

1. Click on frame 1.
2. In the properties panel, drag the number 0 next to the “Ease:” label all the way to the left, until it reaches -100 and the word “in” appears. You can also single-click on the number and it becomes an input field. Type “-100″ into the field and press ENTER.

   

3. Click on frame 6.
4. In the properties panel, slide the Ease: to the right until it reaches 100/out, or single-click the field and type “100″, then press ENTER.
5. For the finishing touches, i decided to slow the squish down a bit. First i added a frame on either side of the squish:

   

6. … and then i added Classic Tweens coming into and going out of the squish.

   

Test your movie.

The combination of easing and squash n’ stretch give the ball a lot of spunk and life! Instead of a ball that looks like it was animated by a robot, we’ve got a spunky, squishy object that’s a lot more fun to watch.

Seriously, if you want to attend TOJam and you haven’t signed up yet, i don’t know why you’re over here reading this crummy blog. Space is limited. Go sign up now. Like, right now. i’ll wait.

Party of One

This’ll be the first TOJam that i haven’t done all by my lonesome. After creating Two By Two, Here Be Dragons, Bloat., and Heads single-handedly, i’ve finally roped someone into spending an entire weekend with me in a room full of sweaty nerds building video games. And better than that, she’s a girl. How did i do it?

i’m her legal guardian.

This year, i’m teaming up with my five-year-old daughter Cassandra to create a game called Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, which is a magical adventure game featuring ponycorns. (At this point, i usually have to stop and explain to people what a “ponycorn” is, which dismays me … a ponycorn, clearly, is a single-horned pony – a pony/unicorn. A ponycorn. You see? Was that so difficult?)

Cassie, who is a great little artist, will be drawing the game’s pictures in crayon, and i’ll be scanning them in and trying to shoehorn them into a sensible game experience. Because the handicap is so high on this one, i won’t be building the whole thing from scratch. i didn’t approach my first TOJam this way … i was determined to build Two By Two from “scratch”, starting with nothing and using Flash to build the game from the ground up.

Having proven that i can do it, over the years i’ve grown less and less dogmatic about TOJam. For last year’s game, Heads, i used UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System), as a sort of proof that the time and money we spent building the engine wasn’t a total waste. (It wasn’t! Heads was our very first release on the Blackberry Playbook, and we’ve gone on to use UGAGS in other projects). When i got thinking about it, even using Flash is a bit of a cheat. i didn’t write that software, and it does a lot of heavy graphics lifting for me. i also didn’t build the computer, or smelt the metals used in its creation. There’s only so much “scratch” that you can start from.

So this year, Cassie and i will be using the Citrus Engine to make our ponycorn-themed puzzle platformer game. i’m not even starting from scratch with the Citrus Engine – i’ll be re-skinning an existing game that i completed for a client. i’ll even be using some artwork that Cassie already drew months ago, because it’s adorable. (“What’s that, honey? An alien? A slug? A jelly bean?” “No – it’s you and me and Mommy.”) As is required for any weekend game jam, we’re keeping our ambitions reined way in; if we come out the other side of this thing with a title screen and one functional level, i’ll be happy.

i’ve also got Cassie slated to do some voice acting for the game, which will toally rock. Unless someone’s planning to one-up her, Cass will be the youngest developer ever to attend and work on a game at TOJam.

And i’ll be the sexiest elf in the room.

Hey kids! Are you a post-secondary student, recent graduate, or a wretched layabout looking for an opportunity to work in a real live video games studio? Untold Entertainment, a boutique game development studio in the heart of downtown Toronto, is looking for a summer intern.

Qualifications

Since we’re small, we’re not looking for a cog in a gigantic machine. An Untold intern has to wear many hats. If you haven’t worn that hat before, you need to be willing to try it on regardless, and wear the shit out of it. If the hat doesn’t exist, you need to be resourceful enough to Google a tutorial on how to hand-craft that hat, and cast about for resources that will enable you to construct it.

Who Are You?

Here’s a list of qualities that make you a perfect candidate. They may look like vague HR nonsense, but we’re serious about them:

• 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?

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, and OBJ-C. (C++/Python/Ruby/Java, not so much.)
• Web Development. CSS, HTML and PHP. We 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.)
• 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?

Here are some of the roles and tasks that past Untold interns have taken on:

• Content co-ordination. Populating Untold’s game portal sites with game content, descriptions, and reviews.
• Game programming. Building simple games from scratch – quizzes, simple point n’ click interactivity.
• Punching stuff up. Jazzing up game writing and descriptions with hot word juice.
• Fixing the coffee maker. (Actually, all of our interns wimped out on this one. Do you have what it takes to tackle the broken K-cup single brewer?)
• Photocopying. Because we can’t call it a proper internship unless you pay your dues.
• Site wrangling. We run a number of WordPress-based sites which regularly require new features and tweaks.
• Researching. Our best interns have strong Google-fu.

And finally, here are a few random things you may find yourself doing this summer, depending on your skillset (no promises):

• Making things out of plasticine.
• Building sets and costumes for a zombie puppet.
• Operating a video camera.
• Editing videos.
• Talking to the press.
• Playing and evaluating web games.
• Entertaining toddlers during playtesting sessions.
• Fixing a broken computer.
• Writing trivia.