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

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 Toronto IGDA committee, hand-picked by Josh in recent years to help keep the ball rolling, recently elected a new president at the wild-eyed urging and general rabble-rousing of TOJam founder Jim McGinley. The new prez is Lesley Phord-Toy, an Ubi Soft employee and Montreal ex-pat who officially takes over in 2011. Lesley will be speaking at GamerCamp Lvl 2, discussing her plans for the IGDA Toronto chapter, and eliciting feedback from the attendees on what they’d like to see from what is arguably the most well-known video games association in the city.

Lesley’s been taking the time to meet with each member of the IGDA Toronto chapter steering committee one-on-one. We had a cup of coffee at Toronto’s new board game cafe Snakes and Lattes, and I took the chance to ask Lesley a few questions to help introduce her to Toronto.

[distraction: check out my review of Snakes & Lattes]

Q: What’s your role at Ubi Soft?

I am a Producer at the Ubisoft Toronto studio for an unannounced project. As a Producer, my primary responsibility is to ensure the successful delivery of a high quality game, and to build and foster a team of people who have the skills, experience, and talent to execute on that objective. In the special case of the new studio in Toronto, I am also involved in areas associated with studio-building such helping to define policies and processes, and establishing and promoting our values as a studio.

[read all about the Ubi Soft Toronto grand opening shindig]

Q: Have you always worked at Ubi?

I’m actually pretty new to Ubisoft. I joined in February as (I believe) the first official production employee! Prior to Ubi, I worked at Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M) in Montreal for 6 and a half years. And before that, I was a software engineer at Sony Electronics in the special effects industry in Los Angeles.

[Did U Know? According to the characters in Clerks II, you never do A2M.]

Q: Why did you run for IGDA president? Was it a directive from Ubi, or was it your own initiative?

I’ve been a member of the advisory board of the Montreal chapter for the past two years, and I’ve always felt that a vibrant community of peers is a valuable part of being a game developer. I really enjoyed sharing with, and learning from others in the Montreal community, and I was hoping to find something like that in Toronto.

After attending a few IGDA Toronto meetings, I was left both pleasantly surprised, and disappointed at the same time. On the positive side, I met some really interesting people, and it was clear that there was a contagious enthusiasm for making games. On the negative side, it seemed that many of the local game developers don’t actually go to the IGDA, thereby creating a huge gap in the local community.

Knowing that the committee was looking for a new president, I felt it was a great opportunity to try to mend that gap. Together with the committee, I hope that we can strengthen Toronto’s IGDA so that it can become a valuable resource for the community, and be inclusive to all who are interested or involved in game development.

Q: There has been a lot of uncertainty in the Toronto game community – especially the indie community – about the ramifications of Ubi Soft moving into Ontario. What do you think the move means? How do you think Ubi’s presence will affect the Ontario games industry?

A healthy industry is one that is diverse, sort of like a natural ecosystem. Speaking with people at Ubisoft, it’s clear that there is a motivation to learn about what is already in place so that they can add to the diversity, and continue to help strengthen the local industry. I’m really excited about that idea because I feel that when there is a stronger industry, it can lead to a stronger community. With a growing population of game developers, there is an increased potential for our community to be more supportive of each other, learn from each other, and collaborate together. It’s really more a question of whether the community will be able to embrace this idea, capitalize on their diversity, and apply it to their craft of game development.

Q: If everything works out perfectly, what will a typical IGDA Toronto chapter meeting look like?

In the most ideal case, you would show up at a meeting and feel a sense of awe that you belong to this great community of peers, all sharing in the same passions that you do. You would also have a sense of relief that you are not the only one struggling to make your project work, and that everyone has similar challenges as you. You would spend an hour or so learning about something that could help you in your own project, and maybe be able to share a little of your own wisdom with others. You might make some new friends, but you would definitely catch up with some familiar faces. And at the end of the evening, you will come away feeling lucky for being a member of an incredibly diverse game development community.

(Ryan says: i have a slightly different vision of a successful chapter meeting…)

Q: You’ve lived in every major city in Canada, and you’ve seen this industry from different angles. What are some of the differences between the Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto game scenes?

I can’t really comment too much on Vancouver. When I was working there in the late 90s, there was really only EA and Radical and maybe a few other small companies.

For Montreal, one of the unique things is that many of the studios are actually within walking distance to each other. In the case of Eidos and A2M, they practically share a wall! With that kind of close proximity, it makes it easy for individuals to get to know each other. You always get this feeling that everyone knows everyone even though there are in fact thousands of developers in Montreal! There is competition between companies to attract the best talent, however, there is also a collective sense of grief if you hear that a company or project is not doing well.

Considering Toronto, the geography is vast in comparison, and everyone here faces some amount of commuting. Despite this, there seems to be a shared passion for games here that I had always thought reserved for only a few select hard-cores. I think it’s really a defining characteristic of the Toronto game industry and it really is contagious! On the down side, it simultaneously feels like the community is very divided between some indie hard-cores, and others who are also trying to make a living while pursuing their passion.

Q: What’s your favourite game of all time?

Of all time? It would have to be Super Mario Bros. on the NES. In terms of modern games, however, the games that have captured my imagination the most are Bioshock, Portal, Braid, and Limbo.

Q: What are you playing right now?

<sheepishly> About 150+ hours of Bejeweled Blitz. </sheepishly>

Do you have a dream game that you’ve always wanted to make? Can you tell us anything about it?

There are two diametrically opposed games that I would love to make. One would be something silly and funny (kind of like the humour from those old LucasArts adventure games). The other would be some sort of intense psychological “game” that would make you question whether you were actually sane or not in real life. Ultimately however, my dream project would have a strong focus on creativity and be something unique and different from the status quo.

Q: What non-game-related things do you do for fun?

If I had the time, I would be traveling the world. Short of that, I like visiting modern art galleries and installations and getting lost in their surreal environments. If I could, I would spend a whole afternoon squishing my feet into those millions of sunflower seeds at that new exhibit at the Tate Modern.

Have Your Say!

Catch Lesley Phord-Toy, 2011 president of the IGDA Toronto chapter, at GamerCamp Lvl 2 in November. Don’t forget to check out the IGDA in its new and improved format, and thank Josh at the next social for all the hard work and effort he’s put into the group for the past ten years!

i’ll never make that mistake again.

People came back positively RAVING about GamerCamp. i knew this year that i just HAD to be involved.

Thus Spake Ryanthurstra

i am thrilled that Jamie and Mark, the awesomazing organizers behind the event, invited me to speak (after a teensy bit of grovelling). (… from me, not them.) They wanted someone with experience in educational game development, and Untold Entertainment’s got it. In addition to the educational preschool games we’ve built for Sinking Ship Entertainment, we’re currently working on a project funded by a high-ranking ministerial body of educational governance. i admit it sounds a little dull, so i wanted to spice it up a bit.

Here’s the advice the event organizers gave on titling my talk:

You can call your talk whatever you want and by no means self-censor. Try and make your title a declarative statement or provocative question.

(For example, Dragonette has a song called “Get Your Titties Off My Things” and if they wanted to speak at Gamercamp and call it that, I’d high-five them.)

So without very much deliberation, and because i absolutely love high-fives, i decided to call my talk “Get Your Titties Off My Things : Adventures in Educational Gaming.”

Titties and Education Don’t Mix

In updating the site, the organizers had a last-minute change of heart and decided to censor the talk title. Since it didn’t make much sense any more (not that it made any sense to begin with), i decided to re-title the talk “SCUMM-Sucking : Adventures in Educational Gaming“.

What do you do when you LOVE building LucasArts and Sierra-style graphic adventure games, but you have to take boring educational service work to pay the bills?

>Get MONEY.
>Use MONEY on GAME.
>Give PRESENTATION to GAMERCAMP.

The educational project is an experiment in teaching deadly-dull guidance counselor material by speaking the students’ language – the language of video games!

i’ll also be talking about how i leveraged the educational project to add features to UGAGS (the Untold Entertainment Graphic Adventure Game System), which is my attempt at building a Flash version of the LucasArts SCUMM engine. (They used SCUMM to make Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island and others.) The client benefits from our increasingly feature-rich engine, we get a better product that we can use to make awesome games in the future, and everybody wins!

Including you! Come out to GamerCamp in Toronto November 13-14 to hear the tremendous line-up of speakers, eat some cupcakes, jam out to a crazy nerd party, and battle your hangover to hear about UGAGS the afternoon following the big bash.

ZombieGameWorld.com is the newest portal in Untold Entertainment’s growing Game World Network, a group of sites packed with free-to-play web games catering to niche audiences. The key difference between ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com is quality: WordGameWorld.com is a curated site, where we hand-pick only the best or most enjoyable word games available online.

But we’ll throw any old piece of trash on ZombieGameWorld.com. Our reasoning is that zombie fans historically have a lower quality bar than the rest of us. With a few notable exceptions, their favourite movies and books are largely low-budget schlocky affairs where concept trumps execution. An audience accustomed to consuming entertainment that’s a little rough around the edges may be interested in the more … strained attempts of amateur game developers trying to cobble together a zombie game. The Featured section of the site highlights the rare online zombie games that are good-looking and great fun to play.

All new game content is cross-posted to the ZombieGameWorld.com Facebook fan page, as well as the ZombieGameWorld Twitter feed. The Twitter feed adds zombie-related news that gets cross-posted back to the main site.

Future plans for the site include community-based game-on-game elimination battles, badges, and possibly even an online loyalty system. The current model is advertising rev share through MochiAds and Google Adsense. Our immediate business goal is to earn enough ad revenue to cover hosting – both ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com are currently operating at a loss.

If you know zombie fans, or you have a GREAT idea for how we can promote the site without spending any money or digging up any corpses, i’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment and tell me if you think ZombieGameWorld.com has any potential, or if we’re just not using our braaaaaains.

The panel was moderated by Jason MacIsaac of Electric Playground fame, late himself of a small Ontario game studio from the Niagara region called Cerebral Vortex Games.

My fellow guests on the panel were (from right):

• Ian Kelso, head of interactiveontario
• Leslie Phord-Toy, a producer at UbiSoft’s new Toronto Studio
• Ryan MacLean, formerly of Pseudo Interactive and a founder of Drinkbox Studios (also both the second Mac and the second Ryan on the panel)
• Philippe McNally, from Longbow Digital Arts, who recently released their PC RTS Hegemony: Philip of Macedon

i was thrilled to see that the line-up for the talk was substantial. A Fan Expo staff member asked us if we were okay with people sitting on the floor when we ran out of seats. Of course, Ubi Soft was the big draw, as many of the audience members wanted to know how to get a job there working on their favourite triple-A console franchises. i made a point to mention that UbiSoft also developed the Nintendo DS Babiez/Petz/Horsez games, as well as a number of cash-in movie licenses that have failed to pull in the same acclaim as their more well-known blockbusters.

i’m doing my best to end this (apparently prevalent) notion that working in the video game industry is the ultimate fulfillment of this masturbatory Tom Hanks in BIG fantasy everyone has. Bills gotta get paid, and you may be asked to (gasp!) work on something you don’t like, such as a (shock!) video-heavy bank website instructing visitors on the various retirement products available to them (as we did last year).

Half-Remembered Q & A

i admit, i’m having a hard time remembering what went on at the panel. There was a girl in the second row wearing an incredibly distracting Slave Leia costume, so i think most of what i had to say was along the lines of “hummina hummina hummina.” (Slave Leia costumes don’t usually do it for me, but this one was worth strangling your hutt over.)

So the pro reporters will definitely cover the panel better, but here are a few questions and answers that i can recall:

Q:Why develop games in Toronto?
A:Lesley’s answer was no secret – Ubi was attracted by the tax credits and government funding. Ian hinted that interactiveontario and the government are trying to secure at least one more “whale” to move into the province. For the three small developers, the answer was “intertia”. Our families are here, we live here, and for folks like me who have young kids and ties to grandparents, it’s very difficult to seek our fortunes elsewhere. Ian added that the work they’re doing to attract big companies helps heal the brain drain; if Lesley were to leave UbiSoft (for example), he wants enough studio muscle here to retain top talent in the province.

Q:Does your choice of school make you more or less employable?
A:Ryan M seemed to be more impressed by educational pedigree, saying that it was not the only thing he looks for, but that it is an indicator of a qualified applicant. The only “good” Ontario schools mentioned were Waterloo, Sheridan, and University of Toronto. There are many, many schools that aren’t on that short top-of-mind list, including yours. Reflect on that.

i took a few digs at the International Academy of Design and Technology, saying that nearly everyone i’ve known from that school – both students and faculty – bad-mouthed the place (and forgetting that the moderator had been an instructor there – oops). Despite the school’s rock-bottom reputation, i’ve hired two programmers in my stint as a studio owner, and they’ve both been IADT grads. For me, individual excellence beats a school’s bad rep.

Q: Why aren’t more studios embedding themselves in schools to cherry-pick the best talent?
A:(no one really weighed in on this, but i gave it a shot at a local community college this year with disastrous results)

Q:How do you get a job in the industry?
A:The panel agreed that portfolios were really important. Ryan M said that demonstrated capability trumps a fancy CV. Philippe liked to see evidence of problem-solving ability. i said i’d much prefer a candidate with a portfolio of a few finished games he’d created himself, rather than a student project he completed with a number of classmates.

Q:Why don’t more companies take interns?
A:The three indies – Philippe, Ryan M and myself – said that interns were a risky proposition for small studios, due to the resources they demand. Leslie said that Ubi takes interns (theirs was in the front row taking pictures), but that the intern would have to have something valuable to commit to the organization.

One thing i didn’t get a chance to say was that people should be very wary of schools that offer internships. Picture it: you’re a college program head, and your school has guaranteed this placement program. You’ve got a few great students, a handful of middling ones, and two or three absolute morons who have barely managed to squeak by. Do you really want your school’s reputation stymied by those guys? Do you really want to risk damaging your relationship with industry by sending them out on a placement? No, you don’t.

Add to that the fact that there are very few shops in town, compared with the number of schools cranking out game-trained grads (Humber, Waterloo, George Brown, Durham, U of T, UOIT, Ryerson, Trios, Sheridan, Seneca, York, and Max the Mutt off the top of my head). Some schools churn grads as often as every six months. There’s a clear internship supply-and-demand problem here.

That’s why in my personal experience (and from what i’ve heard anecdotally from others), when you enroll at a school that promises a great placement program, they’re lying. It’s often a marketing ploy to get you in the door. You’ll certainly have to complete a placement to earn class marks, but you’ll have to hunt down the placement yourself. When i was a student at Seneca College here in Ontario, the school had two or three placements in industry for their favourite sons, and the rest of us scrambled. One girl got a job at her uncle’s trucking plant. i found an internship on my own at the Durham Board of Education, working in the computer lab with students in junior kindergarten. This was the final program requirement for 3D computer art and animation students.

The type of school you really want to attend is one that has high entrance standards, and that fails students early and often. There are very few that do this, but i heard an apocryphal tale that Sheriden will refuse to graduate a 4th-year student with a weak portfolio/art thesis presentation. (Note that Sheridan was on the panel’s very short list of prestigious schools.)

Q:How do you choose the right school?
A:Most of the panelists were too political to answer frankly. i don’t toe the same line, because i feel that many of the schools in this province – particularly the community colleges – are doing the industry and their customers a great disservice, and should be held accountable. i warned against schools with very new programs (which is most of them), because they often work out the kinks at the expense of their initial student intakes. i also took issue with schools whose teachers have very tenuous connections to industry. i was speaking to a colleague of mine not long ago, who suggested that every two years, the colleges should kick their instructors back out into industry to ensure they’re keeping their skills up to date.

Ian mentioned that organizations like io in other countries have partnered with (bullied?) schools into an arrangement where the trade association has to approve its course offering in order for the school to earn a passing grade from industry. As a prospective student, you just look up which schools the association recommends, and apply there. i like that idea, but i worry it’s prone to abuse in the name of politics and playing nice.

Party On and Be Excellent to Each Other

If there was one main takeaway from the conversation, it was to focus on personal excellence. The very best stand out, while everyone else falls to the wayside, as in all things. You wanna make games? Then the barrier to entry is so low, as Jason said and as Ian reminded us, that you should already be making games. Don’t wait on UbiSoft or some small indie shop to give you your big break. There’s a golden opportunity for you right here, right now that didn’t exist when the rest of us were getting our start.

The panelists spoke about a number of groups, technologies and resources. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:

Groups

• Hand Eye Society Where Toronto’s indie developers meet.
• IGDA Toronto Chapter This group places more emphasis on professional development than the HES.
• Artsy Games Incubator Artists who want to make games, but have no programming ability, get together to … make games! Closely tied to Jim Munroe’s efforts at the HES.
• TOJam The Toronto Indie Game Jam, an annual event where the city’s pros and hopefuls get together over one weekend to make games. A fantastic event.
• FlashInTO The Toronto Flash user group.

Technologies

• Unity 3D Create 3D video games in the browser, with a (comparatively) low learning curve.
• Adobe Flash A relatively inexpensive program for creating 2D and quasi-3D browser games. Lots of books and tutorials – join our ranks of over two million developers!
• Game Maker A free game creation tool, and the favourite of many indies.
• Scratch An easy-to-grasp game creation tool from MIT
• UDK The consumer version of the Unreal Engine. i don’t recommend this one because of its eventual high cost (despite an initially free download)

Resources

• Unity by Example, a book written by me that is coming out very shortly. It’s a great resource for new game developers that teaches you how to make small, simple games, and how to approach your game dev career so that you don’t give up on it. Send an email to info [the at symbol] untoldentertainment.com and i’ll send you a note once it’s available.
• MochiMedia, Kongregate, FlashGameLicense, HeyZap Four places (of MANY) to distribute and monetize games you create with Flash.
• Wooglie A unity game portal.
• TIGSource The de facto site for indies.
• Pimp My Game Our own series on making money (or not) with Flash games. Includes tons of sites that spill the beans about the financials on their games.

Were you at the panel? Do you have anything to add? Was there anything you wanted to ask that you didn’t get a chance to ask? Leave me a comment and we’ll have a great discussion.

Thanks to dendritejungle and Jason MacIsaac for the pics!

There were plenty of people in costumes, and that’s fine. But you only ever see pictures of people who are dressed up, and you rarely get to see images of the people walking around beside those people. These are the people who hold the cosplayers’ stuff – who adjust their straps and re-adhere the little foam skulls to their papier maché battle axes … the people who help tuck all their bulging bits back into their belaboured spandex confines.

Here, then, is my gallery of non-cosplayers: the unsung actual heroes of any comic book convention.

The first two days of the show are Summits days, with clusters of panels and talks in certain narrow or niche segments of the industry. This year, the casual games and virtual worlds summits were combined and enhanced to form the Social & Online Games Summit. There was also an iPhone summit (which last year was called the Mobile Games Summit … telling?), the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Summit, and the Let Me Tell You Summit, which was for British people.

Generally, i was disappointed. This is the fourth year i’ve been at the show, and i almost worry i’m getting too smart for GDC. I don’t want that to sound pompous … i’m just wondering if, having spent an entire year reading and researching, following excellent Twitter posters like @retrogamer4ever, and cramming so much stuff into my brain, that i’ve outpaced the more general-interest tone of the conference?

It’s also … this is kind of weird, but i think it’s valid … the few Indie Games Summit talks i attended are in a cavernous and very dimly-lit room, as opposed to last year’s brighter, cheerier room. The mood in the place is almost ominous or sombre. But i could very well be crazy.

Click on the headers that interest you to read more about the sessions i attended!

Meeting with Push Button Labs

The State of Social Gaming: Industry Overview and Update

From Big Studio to Small Indie: Guerilla Tactics from Hello Games

Postmortem: The Design & Business Behind Fantastic Contraption

Standing in Line for a Free Phone

Rapidly Developing Farmville: How We Created and Scaled a #1 Facebook Game in 5 Weeks

i’m hoping there’s more in it for me during tomorrow’s Summit day. Wednesday also culminates in the Canada Games party – your tax dollars hard at work. It’s there that Canadian game devs can get industry folks liquored up and ready to shake on some deals, and/or eat poutine. i, for one, will be there for the poutine.

UUG

This is last call to buy tickets for the Toronto Unity Users Group, which runs tonight at the Gladstone Hotel. Here are some fast facts about Unity 3D to refresh your memory:

1. The game engine has been around for a number of years, but the recent port to the PC and the price reduction to FREE has garnered a boatload of attention.
2. It’s kinda like Flash, except it uses 3D graphics, and it’s actually tuned to make games. So instead of bending it to your steely will as Flash requires by adding 3rd-party physics, for example, Unity comes with many crucial game features right out of the box.
3. There is a world of opportunity in marketing for folks that can use Unity. Unity 3D games can be played directly in the browser. Advertisers looking for something shiny and new (“new”) will be plenty impressed by the technology.
4. Can’t do 3D? If you live in Ontario, there’s plenty of under-utilized, inexpensive talent coming out of the colleges and universities. It seems every school has at least one 3D art program, but the demand for these graduates is rock-bottom in the province.

Here’s an example of what Unity 3D can do in skilled hands:

MUG

On Wednesday, there’s a double-shot of Unity goodness. There’s a half-day workshop at George Brown College. After that, i expect most of the participants will pub crawl a few blocks over to Kensington Market, where the Rich Media Institute is holding the monthly Mobile Users Group for Games and Apps. They’ll be talking about (among other things) the u3dobject framework, which enables you to communicate between Flash and Unity.

When i read the MUG description, i was worried that it stepped on the UUG workshop. Then when i read about the content of the meeting, i was really concerned – not only was it stepping on the other event, but it was about Unity 3D! As it turns out, one event begins as the other ends. i know that the UUG organizers, DimeRocker, had met with Shawn Pucknell at the Rich Media Institute, so i’m glad that everyone is playing nicely together.

Streaming Colour Studios’ Owen Goss is a regular at the event. Here’s his latest vblog developer episode:

No Elbow Room

It wasn’t the case last week, when the Vortex Game Competition ran concurrently on top of the DIG London conference, which split a few loyalties. But as anyone who’s tried to organize a Christmas party in December can tell you, sometimes there are just no openings. Other times, the event has to happen because it’s reliant on a funding schedule – that was the case two years ago when interactive ontario’s GameON: Finance conference ran the week before GDC in San Francisco.

i am THRILLED that gaming is so red-hot in Ontario that the calendar is so packed with events. i sincerely hope that we all stay well-connected enough so that there’s enough breathing room in the schedule to give everyone a break. If you’re running a game-related event in Ontario, please check the calendar first to ensure that you’re not encroaching on another initiative. And if you know of any game-related events – in Ontario or abroad – that should be on the calendar, please feel free to add it to our events page and we’ll update the calendar PDQ.

i love big lists of articles like this that are grouped by topic! We’ve made a few of our own here on the site:

• Flash and Actionscript 911 – An ongoing series of articles and tutorials, including common error messages and what to do about them
• News For You ue_newspoodle compiles a daily list of interesting stories on game development and related topics. Feel free to add your own links!
• Pimp My Game Our feature about monetizing Flash games has been updated with a GREAT list of articles on the subject – scroll to the bottom of the page to find them
• Conjure, a group of ETS students in Montréal, maintain a whopping pantsload of great game industry links (thanks @jeanpierflash!)
• Smashing Magazine offers 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources (thanks @danmartell!)
• Flash Game Blogs – A Who’s Who of the Flash game dev world and links to their blogs, maintained by the folks at GamerSafe/Flash Game License
• Top Indie Developer Blogs – We were delighted and honoured to find ourselves among such great sources on this list, which was posted by the buys at Gambrinous
• How to Raise Start-Up Financing – We prefer to bootstrap wherever possible, but Ben Yoskovitz has a series of articles on building a bidness with Other People’s Money
• Blender Resources – lanzoma composed a list of links to help developers who are new to Blender, a free 3D software package
• Business Resources for Startups – a FANTASTIC list of links across the full spectrum of concerns for start-up companies, game studios included
• Awesome Sources for Game Music – a list of links and mini-reviews for various music stock & service providers
• 50 Awesome Open Courses for Web Writers – Make your corporate game blog sing!
• All the Developer’s Books You Ever Wanted – A great list from Jeez.com of free pdf instructional books on a variety of languages and technologies.
• Indie Game Developer Links – Gaming Horror maintains his own superb list similar to this one.

If you have lists of links that you want to share, leave a comment and i’ll add them to this list!

Dear Ryan Creighton,

The actions of IGDA board member Tim Langdell since his election in March 2009 have raised questions regarding his suitability as our elected representative. As you no doubt know, the IGDA’s mission is: To advance the careers and enhance the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community.

Tim Langdell’s company, Edge Games, has trademarked the word “edge” and they leverage this trademark against any media that contains this word–threatening legal action should their target not enter into a licensing arrangement with the studio. Such targets have included David Mamet’s film The Edge, Marvel’s comic book Edge, EA’s Mirror’s Edge, and Namco’s Soul Edge, which was released as Soul Blade and later, Soulcalibur in the west as a direct result of Edge Games’ actions. Most recently their actions have resulted in the removal of the indie game hit, Edge, from the iPhone app store.

Meanwhile, Edge Games has not been associated with the direct production of an original video game in the last fifteen years.

After his election to the IGDA board, in a lawsuit against Cybernet regarding Edge of Extinction, Tim Langdell presented himself to the court like this: “Dr. Tim Langdell is considered to be a pioneer in the field of computer gaming and is widely publicized on the Internet and has been engaged as a legal expert in the field of computer gamin.” He adds “He presently serves on the Board of Directors of the International Game Developers Association, which is the largest game association worldwide”.

Many of us believe that this is a gross misrepresentation and feel that Tim Langdell is able to use his position on the board of the IGDA to work directly against the mission of the organization. As IGDA members with voting rights, it is our responsibility to elect a board that we can trust to represent us. But no election system is perfect and sometimes corrections need to be made.

We are asking that you take some time to consider this issue, do a little research online, make up your mind how you feel about it, and take action.

Under the IGDA bylaws, we are able to call for a special meeting of the membership to vote on the removal of Tim Langdell from the board of directors. In order to do this, we need 10% of the membership to request the board call the special meeting.

Thank you for your consideration,

Concerned Members of the IGDA

The Plot Can’t Get Any Thicker

It’s definitely an interesting and currently-evolving story. If your interest is piqued, here’s some additional reading:

• Derek Yu’s Summary of the Controversy
• Langdell’s Threats Prompt Gamasutra to Remove Their Article
• The Edge of Reason? (Eurogamer)
• Tim’s Hotly-Disputed Wikipedia Entry
• Adam Saltsman claims further evidence of treachery

There are two ways we could go here –

1. Is the IGDA a relevant, effective organization?
2. As with America’s 2nd Amendment granting citizens the right to bear arms, is current copyright law an inflexible artifact of history that needs to change with the times, or is it effective in protecting the financial and creative interests of content creators?

If you feel passionate about either of these questions, let’s get a discussion going!

Untold Entertainment Inc., the Ontario-based start-up, has been creating online Flash games for a year and a half. Prior to starting the company, Creighton worked a cushy job at a large Canadian media conglomorate, creating web games that sold sugar cereals to increasingly obese children. When we interviewed Ryan Henson Creighton a month ago, the cracks were already starting to show.

“I started this business to find myself, you know?” The video game designer tapped his foot nervously against the secondhand Herman Miller Aeron chair that he purchased from a seller on Craigslist. “But, I mean, if you run out of money, what are you supposed to do then? I see banks and car companies lobbying the government for assistance, saying if they don’t get the money, they’ll go out of business. Is that what the government wants? Do they really want me to go out of business?”

Looking around Untold Entertainment’s Yorkville headquarters, it’s easy to see where Creighton went wrong. High overhead costs, coupled with an apparent penchant for shelled pistachio nuts – the carcasses of which littered the floor of the tiny 110 square foot office – have driven the game company’s profit margins into the red. The insistence of Untold’s clientele to use their own internal artists, many of whom were hired directly from art school or enticed from the street with half-eaten bag lunches, strip Untold Entertainment of control over the games they produce. The result is a portfolio comprised of client-led game designs propped up with lacklustre junior-level artwork. Many of the company’s finished projects are notably absent from their portfolio site.

A Focus on Original Content

When the client worked dried up due to the economic downturn in early 2009, Creighton devised a new strategy. “We’re going to develop original content,” he said with an unsettling flash in his eye. The company’s only original content to date has been comprised of a handful of titles built for the free-to-play online model, where the game developer either releases the product freely without receiving compensation, or scrapes ad revenue leftovers from various online monetization schemes like Kongregate and MochiAds.

Creighton’s trademark ambition quickly materialized as he described his upcoming game. “It’s called Kahoots!” he said wildly, his left eye twitching as he pronounced the “K” in the game’s title. “And it’s all made in clay, see?” At this point, Creighton held up a lump of modelling clay that resembled a folding chair – or a dragon – and continuned, “We’re gonna release it for the PC and the iPhone. And the main character is going to be voiced by this African choir, all talking at once, so it sounds all freaky, you know? Then we’re going to film some explosions and put them in the game in spots where you earn extra points. Cause regular games, they use particle systems, right? But we’re gonna use real explosions, ’cause real explosions are better.”

The increasingly enthusiastic developer went on to describe Kahoots for an additional two hours, explaining the symbolism behind the game characters’ moustaches, and his justification for importing all of his modelling clay from Iceland. When we finally left the tiny office, Creighton was still talking, and apparently didn’t notice we were gone.

Request for a Bail-Out

By April 2009, Creighton’s ambition remained strong, but his funding well had run dry. Somewhere between hiring a famous troupe of New York kickline dancers to record foley sound effects for Kahoots, and starting into a full-scale clay model of the city of London, one of his cheques bounced. It was the first tangible sign that Untold Entertainment was in dire straits.

We caught up with Creighton in front of the Ontario Legislative buildings at Queen’s Park in Toronto, where he had asked us to meet him to cover what he called his “bold gesture”. Within minutes, the frail and defeated mass of Creighton’s body laid shivering on the cold stone steps. A protest sign, scrawled with the slogan “Please give me $3047.62″, sat discarded on the lawn.

No one else seemed to take account of, or even notice, Creighton’s break-down. At one point, an officious-looking man in a camel hair coat strode from the front doors of the building and stepped over Creighton’s body without noticing he was there; when interviewed later, he explained that he had been there applying for a photography permit for his daughter’s wedding on Saturday.

A Social Responsibility

Ryan Henson Creighton’s request for government funding – a sum totalling in the thousands – raises the question of whether or not it is the Canadian government’s responsibility to provide assistance to tiny, arguably insignificant companies, even as it faces pressure from the media and automotive sectors. Despite his request falling on deaf ears, Creighton has resolved to bring the dispute as far as Ottawa, where he’s pledged to bring a box of tissues to carry him through his next daring indictment of the flagging Canadian free market economy.

Step 1: The Sketch

The Captain – the blustery, jowly, and slightly daft head of Londonton’s Spotland Pond municipal police force – began his life as a sketch on our office whiteboard. From there, our Art Director Mark created a doodle to use as a placeholder in the game:

i didn’t feel like this rendition was quite on the money, so i offered my own take:

What i meant to convey with this stellar rendition is that the captain should be older, with a big white poofy moustache. The brown-moustachioed Captain was too young-looking and friendly. Mark took another crack at it:

This sketch was much closer to what i pictured the captain looking like. But the eyebrows seemed too meek, and the moustache looked like it had given up all hope and was about to jump off his face and out of a fifth-story window. Still, we worked with this sketch in the game for a few weeks and got pretty used to it.

Step 2: The First Model

When it came time to model the Captain in clay, blue was an obvious choice for a police officer. We used a different, lighter blue than the one we used for the criminals. Mark also suggested the bullet body shape for the Captain and the two other irregular characters, again to distinguish them from the rabble who appeared in the rest of the game. We modelled the Captain long before we were ready to use him, most likely because we were sick of modelling interface pieces. The interface stuff was very straight-edged and meticulous. You can really stretch out your legs when you model a character or a prop.

This was our first clay version of the Captain:

He sat on our props shelf for weeks on end while we modelled, photographed and integrated the interface and props. At long last, once most of the essential game elements were complete and integrated, it was time to build the Spotland Pond HQ set that would house the Captain. (We’ll do a separate diary entry to tell you all about the sets!)

i had a few problems with our first clay Captain:

1. Too much blue – i decided i wanted a black cap.
2. The moustache was too flat and not billowy enough. (It’s hard to see here, but from other angles, the moustache became a pancake)
3. The eye-to-moustache-to-eyebrow ratio, and the gap between the eyes, were off. Eye placement is absolutely crucial to my concept of good character design, and there was no way i could convey this to someone else. It’s just a very personal, particular thing.
4. The eyebrows were too stern.
5. Overall, the Captain was too angry and not appealing enough.

The sternness issue came up again as we auditioned voice actors for the role of the Captain. Many of the vocie tests came back sounding angry and unfun. The type of character i wanted was comically gruff – a kind of vaguely silly Monty Python-esque bag of hot air that you couldn’t take too seriously. Finally, one of the voice actors we auditioned came back with the PERFECT take on the Captain. His read actually inspired me to remodel the character to suit the voice. Here’s what we came up with:

This was the Captain i wanted for Kahoots. His eyebrows are somewhat stern, but you can’t take him too seriously with that poofy moustache. The enormous star on the cap is more cartoonish. And the eye-to-moustache-to-eyebrow ratio was just what i pictured. This is the Captain who will appear in the final version of the game.

End Cap

Here’s the evolution of the Captain seen all together:

For more insider info on the creation of Kahoots, be sure the check out the Kahoots™ Designer Diary! You can talk about Kahoots™ on our Message Boards.

Canadian game studio strives for something different

TORONTO, ON – March 17 2009 – Untold Entertainment Inc., a Canadian game studio specializing in online casual games for kids, happily announces the development of Kahoots™. Kahoots™ is a challenging game of nonsensical crime and silly intrigue, modelled entirely from plasticine.

The game is set in Londonton, a fictional and foolish vision of London England. Drawing its inspiration from British board games like Cluedo (AKA “Clue”), and absurdly humorous series like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The League of Gentlemen, Kahoots™ immerses the player in sepia-tinged Edwardian (fake) England at the height of a crime wave. As Spotland Pond’s newest detective, the player must track down cabals of criminals, all in pursuit of the evil mastermind behind their reign of (mostly harmless) terror.

A Very Hands-On Approach

Kahoots™ is being modelled from top to bottom in plasticine. Every character, set and prop is lovingly (and squishingly) hand-crafted by the team at Untold Entertainment. The world of Londonton is being brought to life through careful photography and digital image manipulation, resulting in a seamless (but smudgy) game experience. The creators hope that the game’s clay graphics will set it apart in the unfaltering flood of casual game titles. Kahoots™ is set to launch online and on the iPhone and iPod Touch in Q2 2009.

About Untold Entertainment Inc.

Untold Entertainment is a fresh new venture formed by Toronto’s leading casual kids’ game experts. Primarily an interactive service shop catering to kids’ television production studios, Untold Entertainment is thrilled to be embarking on its first original casual game title with Kahoots™. Untold Entertainment privately owned, proudly Canadian, and seeking distribution partnership for its wonderful and wholly-owned IP, including Kahoots™. The company is also seeking strategic partnership with an equally energetic television production team.

To follow the Kahoots™ developer diary, or to learn about Unold Entertainment’s interactive services, visit http://www.untoldentertainment.com.

###

Worldwide Media Contact:

Ryan Henson Creighton
(416) 944-8290 x5281
info *at* untoldentertainment *dot* com

Screenshots

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i’m quite happy with the degree of coddling the Canadian government is doing to ensure that Canuck companies – particularly small start-ups like Untold Entertainment – fare well at GDC 09. Last week, the feds put on a GDC prep camp. A half-dozen speakers were simulcast between the Toronto and Montreal offices in a somewhat awkward setup, preaching about presentation skills, tax breaks, PR and marketing, and a social subtleties of Southeast Asian business meetings:

1. When you accept a Japanese person’s business card, take it with both hands
2. Look at it respectfully for exactly three seconds
3. DO NOT put it in your pocket – instead, leave it on the table or on your lap
4. Never write on a Japanese person’s business card
5. If you break any of these rules, immediately locate a katana blade. Place it at your navel, and drive it deep into your stomach. It is the only way.
6. If you cannot find a suitable blade, head directly for your robotic lion. Find the other members of your team, and unite to form Voltron. Defend your company’s honour by firing laser cannons from the giant robot’s mouth and fingertips.
7. Bow politely.

What’s the Opposite of Alliance?

On the way through the bar, i had to elbow past a wall of Alliance Atlantis folks, some of whom i knew from back in the day. They were having a farewell party for an outgoing colleague. i spoke with them briefly, and picked up on an odd mood. Alliance is owned by Canwest, Canada’s largest media conglomorate, which is drowning in 5 kajillion dollars of debt. While my wife and i still struggle to pay off her student loan, i guess it’s comforting knowing that someone has it worse than you: 3.7 billion dollars worse, to be precise.

So it was strange to me that they would have a shindig for someone, when they could all be chopped by Canada’s largest axe in reasonably short order – kinda like a group of Titanic passengers putting one guy on a lifeboat and toasting him as he floats off into the Atlantic, wishing him the best of luck. Regardless, if the Canwest ship goes down, there will be a major media shake-up around here. i won’t even begin to pretend that i understand it. i will say that it’s a very interesting time to be alive in Canadian media.

Intrigued? Keep an eye on the Fingerprints tag, or get the inside scoop on the development by following our Twitter page.

We’ll be announcing the name of the game and more details shortly.

Let’s see … what more can we say? Fingerprints is a puzzle game (but NOT a Match-3 game) with multiple modes and variations. It’s being built in plasticine, as you can see.

The game will be released for the browser in Flash initially. Then we’re porting it to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Click the fingerprints tag to keep up with progress on the game, or for the ultra secret inside track, follow our tweetage on Twitter. We’ll be announcing our alpha test phase soon, and you won’t want to miss it!

1. Towningham
2. East Westinghamshireham
3. Nobswallow
4. Flooming-on-Smimsbee
5. Tinklesmith
6. Vicar’s Bottom

Thanks so much to everyone who helped us out by responding! To track progress on this project, follow the Kahoots tag. We’ll be running a closed alpha in a short while, so if you’ve ever wanted a testing credit on a game, here’s your chance!

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

The folks attracted by our Client Services ball are generally patient, eager, and willing to pay fair market value for excellent work. On the flip side, they’re not always game-savvy (which is why they come to us), but they do have very specific ideas about what they’d like us to build. Many of the client games on our site arose from client concepts. So this customer provides us with financial freedom, but not a lot of creative freedom.

The Original Development ball is being juggled for the benefit of game-players. This crowd is impatient, impulsive, and (in the casual games space) not generally willing to pay for our work. This customer needs to be encouraged, coerced, enticed, or downright hoodwinked into purchasing our product. i’m not a big fan of coercion or hoodwinking, so we’ll have to stick to enticement and encouragement. This group is very game-savvy, and has a fairly good idea of what will and won’t make for a great game experience. We have complete creative freedom with this customer. But there’s a very big problem with the financials.

Bargain Basement

Increasingly, we find ourselves competing with free. Literal armies of hobbyists, most often the proverbial teens in their moms’ basements, grab a cracked copy of Flash and go to town, creating games and cartoons and submitting them to portals like Kongregate and Newgrounds. They don’t get paid for their work, or are paid peanuts by “sponsors” who pony up between $25 and $2000. This kind of cash seems like a real steal to a 17-year-old, who can’t believe he’s getting paid for creating “Fart Boob Slayer 69: The Ass Fart Boobs Chronicles”. They don’t often do the simple math, dividing the money earned by the hours spent, to realize that a menial job at a carwash is more lucrative. Most of these creators don’t see a penny on their work, uploading stuff for free in the hopes of garnering high views and 5-star ratings from community members.

That’s all fine and good. But once your mom finally sells the house to vacation in Moosejaw and kicks you to the curb, you eventually realize that 5-star ratings from other 17-year-olds don’t put food on the table. Money does. And as long as you’re competing with free, ain’t no money.

When Fun is Not Fun

The other problem is that the demands of the average casual Flash game player on sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds is impossibly high. There’s an unwritten rule about how much lasting enjoyment a free game needs to provide, and if it falls short of that benchmark, the game is ignored. What’s more, the bar is raised periodically by creators who sink an inordinate amount of time into their games, offering hundreds of levels, multiplayer modes, user-creation tools, and other goodies, all for free. Any game falling short of the perceived benchmark is “not a good game”.

If a game provides two minutes of enjoyment, rather than the golden five-minute benchmark, it is poorly received.

If it has a fun mechanic, but lacks levels, it’s no good.

If it has levels, but not enough of them, it languishes in obscurity.

If it has enough levels, but no high scores, it’s dismissed as pointless.

And so on.

It takes a lot of trial, error, and experimentation to find the right game balance to meet this invisible benchmark, which is slowly creeping up all the time. And if your game doesn’t make the grade, you’ve wasted your effort: even in the land of Free, casual games are a hit-driven business.

It’s for all these reasons that iPhone development, for us, appears as a shimmering oasis in a desert of unprofitability.

iSalvation?

We’re brand new to the platform. We’ve never developed a mobile title, or a Mac app. We’re not even a Mac shop – we run Windows PCs exclusively. The barrier to entry for us goes like this:

1. Buy a development Mac
2. Buy a device (iPhone or iPod Touch)
3. Sign up to be an Apple developer (free)
4. Apply for special developer status ($99 non-renewable, with a hefty wait time of two months or more)
5. Learn xcode, the development tool, and Objective-C, the programming language
6. Build games
7. Deploy games
8. Market games
9. Return to “Build games”, and repeat

This is a simplified flow, of course. Along the way are various snags, like the lack of community support (due to the newness of the platform), the approval process (there’s an outside chance that Apple will reject your game or app, after it’s completed and submitted), learning Objective-C (a difficult, weird language in my opinion), obtaining certificates to deploy to the iPod/iPhone (easily the most convoluted process i’ve seen in a lifetime of developing), and finally figuring out a way to stand out among the 10000 apps (and growing) that customers can buy.

Bring it.

Despite these potential pitfalls, we’re up to the challenge. Software for the devices can be found and purchased in ONE PLACE, rather than all over Hell’s http half-acre. Apps can be self-published and self-priced, rather than adhering to a casual game publisher’s arbitrary $20 price point. And while some accuse Apple of devaluing games and apps just like they did with music at 99 cents a song (apparently the sweet spot for App Store offerings is also $.99 – read all about it in Trouble in the (99 cent) AppStore), we’d still be happy to make 70 cents on the dollar for a game with such a focussed demographic and great ditribution, as opposed to our as-yet failed adventures in online free game self publishing (see Pimp My Game).

The very best part in my mind is the barrier to entry. For a non-Mac shop terrified by the oddities in Objective-C, it’s a daunting prospect … but then i imagine how much more daunting it must be to the Basement Army of Flash teens, and i suddenly find myself sleeping a little easier, and walking with more of a spring in my step.

We announced that we were throwing our hat into the public funding ring back in June (Ontario Government Backs Up the Money Truck), and hinted a little at what we’d submitted a few months later (Untold Entertainment Goes for the Gold).

It was our very first application. We were a long shot. It was still a worthwhile exercise. We don’t really have oodles of experience planning and preparing budgets, so it was nice to get a little more financing and administration experience under our belts. An industry friend tells me that we made it to the final round, because most of the applicants he knew received their rejection letters weeks ago.

Needs More Zazz

It would be helpful to have a little more feedback explaining how we fell short. Otherwise, we’ll just keep making the same mistake with every application. My gut instinct is this: our app centred around XBox Live Community Games as a distribution platform. The platform was a big unknown while i wrote the application, and the app was reviewed as the platform launched and fizzled. The industry friend i mentioned was approved, but his distribution platform was the iPhone, which is sexy sexy sexy.

iPhone! Convergent media! Interactive TV! Two-box initiatives! Flying cars! i think you have to play a bit of buzzword bingo to get these funding types excited about your project. From what i’ve seen, the focus tends to be much more toward the type of content and the innovation in delivering that content, rather than the quality of the content itself … which is why, in my opinion, we see a lot of terrible content coming out of Canada. There seems to be no pressure to make good content – it’s more about who the content appeals to, and how the content is experienced.

i limit my criticism to the age 4+ crowd. There’s a lot of great preschool stuff coming out of Halifax that i watch with my daughters. The rest is Anne of Green Gables: Beating a Dead Horse and The Comedy Network Presents: A Brutally Unfunny Comedian Laugh-Tracked Within an Inch of His Life.

Man, these sour grapes are delicious!!

Word.

Sign up for the Spellirium Newsletter to go even deeper into the creative process behind the game. The newsletter contains a first look at exclusive artwork and juicy details about Spellirium that you won’t find anywhere else!

And lo, what havoc it hath wrought on our traffic:

It didn’t take long for Mark to figure out that ditching the second-most-popular section of our site (next to the index page) caused our traffic to shrivel up and die.

To remedy this, we’ve added a Games section to our main nav, and we hope to see our stats gradually improve over the next few months.

Your Visitors Want Games

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting the power of Games on the Internats. Games have this uncanny ability to spike your site traffic, encourage repeat visits, and some say they can even cure scurvy.

If you want to see the kind of magical pep that casual games can bring to your website, contact us here at Untold Entertainment!

info theAtSymbol untoldentertainment.com

The Untold Entertainment offices actually received more screen time. If this exhaustive look into my take on video game violence and parental involvement doesn’t sate you, be sure to read some of my other articles on the subject:

• Me and Miyamoto: Lamenting Fallout 3
• Lest We Reset
• Kids Eagerly Await Nickelodeon’s Next Shipment of Ass
• Video Games Teach Kids to Gamble

Behind-the-scenes commentary follows:

Reporters see what they want to see. My interview with Dr. Karl was on the light side of three minutes long – here’s what they decided not to use:

(transcript approximated from memory)

Dr Karl: Do video games cause people to act out violently?
Ryan: You’re always looking for the smoking gun – that one incident where someone plays a violent video game, and then runs out and kills people, and there’s a direct link there. My take on it is a bit more subtle. i don’t care to find a direct link. i think that if you’re filling your head with violent imagery all day, it may not lead to you killing people, but it could result in you being a surly jerk to people.

Everyone says “the children! We gotta protect the chiiildren!” Anything that we try to protect children from is usually dangerous for adults, too – pornography, gratuitous violence, smoking, gambling … none of this stuff is good for you, no matter how old you are. For me, it comes down to this: if you’ve just spent your entire weekend shooting cops and murdering hookers with a chainsaw, you should take a long hard look at your hobby and re-evaluate how you’re spending your time on this Earth.

Dr Karl: But what about the research? What does the research tell you?
Ryan: The research is conflicting. One report came out last week linking video game violence to aggression. Another study links listening to sexually explicit song lyrics to increased sexual activity among teen girls. But over in the UK, they’ve done studies that link game violence to aggression, and then another study refutes that claim, and a year later the next study makes the link again. They watch this kind of thing very closely in the UK, because they’ve had a number of incidents where young people have tortured and killed each other. It all depends on who’s funding the study, because you can always manipulate the data to prove your point.

(note: in his report, Dr. Karl fails to mention the conflicting studies, opting only to say that a recent study links video game violence and aggression)

Ryan: (still talking a mile a minute) Gamers get their backs up about this issue, because none of them want their video games to be taken away. Gamers will try to dismiss and disprove these studies, because they think that finding a link between video game violence and real-life aggression means they can’t play Halo or Grand Theft Auto any more.

People say that we’ve got all this extreme content because it’s a young industry that needs to mature. And when they say that, they’re not talking about the age of the game industry – they’re talking about the age of the people in it. This industry is run by a bunch little boys – men with Peter Pan complexes like me, who still read comic books and collect toys, and who love zombies and think violence is great. Those are the people who have to mature, and it’s not until more women and older people and people from younger generations get involved that the type of content in video games will change, i think for the better.

Dr Karl: Is there any way to tell whether a video game is appropriate for younger players?
Ryan: (wondering if he’s being serious, or playing inquisitive for the sake of his viewers) Uh – yes. Nearly every game sold in North America has been rated by the ESRB. Those ratings are on the back of the game packaging, and they very clearly list the objectionable content in the game.

Dr Karl: The ES-what? We’re not up on all the acronyms and lingo.
Ryan: (still wondering if he’s just playing dumb) The ESRB. Entertainment Software Ratings Board. They handle the game ratings for North America. Different groups rate games for the UK, Australia, and other regions.

And before you even walk into the store, you can go to their website and look up a game’s ratings. The games receive a rating before they even ship.

Dr Karl: (the camera is off now) Can you show us that site?
Ryan: (realizing Dr. Karl is doing a segment on video game violence and is learning for the first time that games have content advisory ratings) Uh .. sure.

i then proceeded to walk Dr. Karl through ESRB.com, showing the newly expanded game content descriptions for games like Fallout 3. The descriptions list the asterisked curse words that are used in the game. Dr. Karl asks his camera man to tape me pointing at the words – f*ck, sh*t, g*sh d*rn, etc.

The camera remains off while i urge Dr. Karl to go talk to Bedlam Games, a Toronto studio that’s actually building one of the violent titles his story is talking about. i thought it was important for a reporter to look at a story from various angles, especially the opposing viewpoint. Alack, no – the only two sound bites are from me, and a guy who works with Dr. Karl at the Centre for Addition and Mental Health. [edit: industry pal Gavin Friesen points out that it's the Centre for ADDICTION and Mental Health. i always thought there was something crazy about mathematicians. - ed.]

i realize that as a reporter, you can’t be an expert on absolutely everything you cover, but it might suit CityTV to hire someone more media savvy to produce segments about media influence, and leave Dr. Karl to the segments on doctorin’.

Still, it was all worth it to see our receptionist Norma swoon when Dr. Karl came into the office. She has a tiny little doctorcrush. :)

Untold Entertainment cares about the environment! After setting up our office, we set these boxes and chunks of styrofoam adrift in the Arctic Ocean to provide homes for orphaned fur seals.

The Ontario Media Development Corporation, who are reviewing the apps and doling out the money, have been dropping hints along the way that this fund will be “very competitive”. Eligible candidates include those companies who need the funds to develop screen-based content (ie film, television, interactive, video games, radio [when said radio is behind a window], screen door manufacturers, olympic athletes subjected to drug screenings and silk screen T-shirt artists), as well as just about anyone else in the provice running a fairly regular pulse.

When i walked into the OMDC office, i really hoped to see enormous towers of folders, boxes and bind-o-files looming in impossibly-piled stacks, their twisted silhouettes blotting out the sun, their stratospheric summits encircled by seagulls. Alas, no. Instead, i walked into a fairly calm and organized office.

Then i was greeted by Application Checker Lady, who thrust out her oak staff and blocked my path. She deigned to ask me a series of two questions before our application would pass muster. Answer them correctly, and she would spirit the app away to her treasure hold. Get the questions wrong, and she would … i dunno. Eat my face or somesuch.

Her questions were these:

ONE! Does your submission contain four separate copies?

“Y-yes!” i stammered.

TWO! Are the copies collated??

This last gave me pause. Were the copies “collated”? i knew what the word meant, but hadn’t i just answered that yes, there were four separate copies? Did she assume that i had shuffled all of the pages together and left it for the Corporation to sort out?

Or was this some kind of trick question, upon which the fate of our application hinged?

Like a fool, i grunted “W-what do you mean ‘collated’??”

Application Checker Lady was not impressed. “Separated and bound together in their proper order”, she said firmly.

“Uh … yes! Yes they are!” i said.

Application Checker Lady nodded curtly and turned on her heel. i was safe.

On my way back to the office, i tried to brainstorm other question combinations that would have thrown me off in a similar manner:

ONE! Do you live in a house?
TWO! Do you live in a home??

i dunno. At any rate, i’m disappointed that i didn’t get a chance to glimpse the mysterious Chamber of Wonders where all of the funding applications were being stored. i’m picturing the piles of gold you see shored up around sleeping dragons in airbrushed high fantasy artwork, but probably only because the app we submitted was for a high fantasy-themed game.

High fantasy with, naturally, a twist.

Aside from the volume of submissions, what i was really curious to see were the myriad ways in which people bound their applications. It was a bit of a trick to find just the right combination of plastic presentation folders and clips at Stipples; i wanted to see what everyone else had come up with. The next time i need a file folder, though, i’m going to hit up the OMDC – i can’t imagine how many folders and folios they’ve got cluttering up the place … some probably inlaid with find goldleaf and scented with lilac.

i won’t say what we actually presented until i find out our application status in about three months. This was our first funding application, and we’re a young company, so i realize we’re a long shot. Still, it’s nice to entertain thoughts of going into full production on a high-quality game that’s entirely our own.

Word.

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When i bought my wife a knitting class for her birthday years ago, i picked her up after the session and she was in tears. She thought she’d be a total pro, but her project looked like someone had had a grand mal seizure while playing cat’s cradle.

My whole life, i’ve adored the work of Jim Henson, to the point of changing my middle name to “Henson” (while on the run from Colombian authorities during my tomb-raiding escapades searching for the legendary South American jewel of Toh-Tallei). i finally had my chance to try it out during a workshop with the Nanalan’ / Mr. Meaty puppet troupe The Grogs, only to find that my arthritis and inflexibility kept me from lifting the puppets far enough over my head. It never dawned on me what a physically demanding job puppeteering was. Acting, puppet construction, improv – i could handle all that. But lifting my arm and keeping it straight? Impossible. Another dream crushed.

Down but not Out

Another dream of mine is to create a video game that uses physical, photographed objects as graphics. i want to either make some kind of game from clay, or to build a graphic adventure-style POV game (think MYST) where the whole set it made of physical stuff, and i just drop a camera inside the set and take pictures that serve as the graphics. The player would feel as if he’s inside a dollhouse, i think. i dunno. i haven’t done it yet. Maybe it would just stink?

i’ve also been burning to do a game in clay. “Like, Claymation?” everyone asks. No – not exactly. Stop-motion animation is incredibly time consuming. i just want the look of clay. i need a game with static graphics that are programmatically animated. That way, i can build the elements in clay and simply photograph still shots – no animation needed.

Clay Achin’

i got my chance a few weeks ago while building a game for the Chumby. It’s a simple card game, and all the cards have symbols on them. Why not build the cards and their symbols in clay? i could scratch the itch in the course of a weekend!

My family was taking a trip away, and i had a bachelor Saturday ahead of my, so i siezed my chance. i ordered a pizza, turned on Goodfellas, and set up the camera and tripod. i took a little desk light from my office and shone it on a white piece of paper – that was the extent of my set. Then i modelled nine little shapes and photographed them all. In a few hours, i was able to knock out all the backgrounds and lay the pngs down in my Flash game.

Here, friends, is the assy result:

It’s embarrassingly bad. Like really, really horribly awfully bad. And bad, bad, bad. Just – just no. Just a failure. A horrible, horrible embarrassingly bad failure. But i decided to write a post about it, warts and all, in the hope that some readers would offer advice, or that i’d encourage someone else who was facing the same challenges.

Here’s a short list of things that went wrong:

1. a poor workman blames his tools, but my camera – particularly with its macro focus – is not that stellar
2. i don’t know a thing about lighting.
3. the shadow cast by the yellow clay shape was also yellow, which made it very tough to separate it from the background. i somehow expected a grey shadow (?) Clearly, my scientological understanding of optics is flawed.
4. i’m not the best hand at Photoshop. Whenever i tried to change the colour of the shapes, they’d lose all the wonderful texturing that made them look like clay (that’s why all the shapes are yellow. They’re actually supposed to be different colours)

Ply, ply again

Unlike puppetry, knitting, and championship weiner-eating, i’m determined to keep at this until i get it right. i think my main stumbling block is the photography. If you have any advice or tales from the trenches, speak up! Meanwhile, enjoy a few screenshots from some games made out of clay:

The Ontario Media Development Corporation announced last week its Screen-Based Content Initiative, aimed at putting cash in the pockets of Ontario corporations to develop content for film, television, the Internatz, cell phones, handheld gaming devices – anything with a screen. Note that the money is for developing something. You don’t have to actually arrive at a finished product. This is great news for those of us in the (ambiguously-named) media industry, because most often, paid work takes a back seat to developing new products, as new products are often researched and developed at a loss.

Given the choice between taking a work-for-hire contract to build someone else’s games for someone else’s property, and running on fumes while we create an original product that might become economically viable and could possibly break even … or turn a profit … or not … the survival instinct kicks in, and we sign the work-for-hire contract. We’re very optimistic that we’ll end up in the running for this funding. It’s amazing to think that we’ll have something to call our own.

Everyone and His Dog

The OMDC itself admits that this initiative will stir fierce competition. i’m even wondering how far certain people will try to stretch the “screen-based” requirement. Maybe silk-screen artists will try to make a grab at the funding? Or screen door manufacturers? Or people who screen their phone calls?

The screen-based development activities that the OMDC lists as elligible include:

The top prize is $100 000, up to 75% of the project budget, until the OMDC burns through up to 2 million dollars. The rest of the details are on the OMDC site.

Word.

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We were very excited to receive our Chumby today in the mail. Chumby is an adorable, squeezable bean bag with a cuddly creature-shaped charm on it. You can hold it, cuddle it, or toss it around the room, though that might not be a great idea because it has a computer inside.

The device pulls wireless Internatz content through the ether to display a chain of Flash Lite 3 displays, called “Widgets”, that can do anything from displaying the time and weather to updating you on the latest Chuck Norris legends. The designers built Chumby so that owners can very easily develop content for it, which is then uploaded to the Chumby network to enjoy privately or to share with other Chumby owners. Chumby Industries even actively encourages its userbase to hack the device, providing Chumby schematics and specs on their site.

Long before the Chumby was released, i knew it was right up my alley. i’ve long been looking for a device that will run Flash that i could show off to my friends, and the fact that this thing is encased in a cozy beanbag drove it way beyond “Daddy Wanty” on my “Vapid Materialism Metre”. Unfortunately, the Chumby isn’t the answer to my portable device fantasies that i was hoping for.

Crumby

No device is perfect, and i hate obsessing over the flaws of a device once it’s in my hot little hands, so let’s get this part over with quickly. The trouble with the Chumby, as most online reviews attest, are as follows:

1. Unresponsive touch screen
2. No hardware volume control
3. Wall power required.

This last point absolutely killed me. The Chumby has to be plugged in via its AC adapter and cable to function. My dreams of running through idyllic meadows, spinning my battery-enabled Chumby around in my arms and collapsing into a bed of fluffy dandelions was shattered. The need to plug in your Chumby precludes all kinds of interesting uses, not least of all carrying on a polite conversation with someone about all the magical things you can do, and then proving it by pulling a bizarre touch screen-enabled beanbag out of your pocket and demonstrating your software.

i haven’t owned the Chumby long enough to comment on the missing volume dial, but i immediately noticed that the touch screen was not very sensitive. Regardless, folks with meatfingers like mine are probably best off using a stylus. i can’t even wrap my sausage-digits around the P2 interface to play a lousy song or two.

Untold Entertainment

So with its mandatory wall-tether, the Chumby makes for an expensive, gadget-lover’s alarm clock replacement. i’ll wait until the hardware hackers come up with a cool Chumby Mech Suit that lets your little beanbag walk around the house shooting tiny layzzor beams at your cats. Until then, the Chumby can download and play Widgets for free from the Chumby Network.

i’m still in the process of reviewing the 50-odd games available on the Network to figure out where my Chumby ambitions lie. i am excited to exploit the more unusual features of the device, like the squeeze sensor and the accelerometer.

The Cure for the Common DJ

Even if the Chumby is destined to sit dutifully by my bedside for the rest of its life, i was more than thrilled to unplug my old alarm clock and all but hurl it out the window. For the past few months, i’ve been enduring Toronto radio DJ Bill Carroll talking about how much he hates cyclists. Just this morning, he was talking about the current Toronto police campaign to improve cyclist awarness, and complaining about the fact that he’ll now have to signal before making turns in his car just for the benefit of cyclists, because the police are watching. A few weeks ago, after a cyclist was killed when someone opened a car door in his path, Carroll put the blame on cyclists.

As a cyclist who commutes with his 2-year-old daughter to day care every morning, i don’t enjoy waking up to this guy dangerously misinforming his listeners, tacitly defending motorists who maim and murder adults and children on bicycles. Good riddance, Carroll! Say … perhaps the Chumby could use a “Punch Your Detested Morning DJ in the Face” app?

But no! i must not use my Chumby for evil. i will most likely tool up a quick little game get my feet wet with the Chumby, before embarking on something more ambitious.

If i develop anything that can be played properly on your computer, i’ll be sure to make it available on the Untold Entertainment Games Page. If i build stuff that uses the squeeze or motion sensors, you’ll have to consider getting a Chumby!

The third annual TOJam event wrapped late last night. This year, around 125 developers crammed into a scary warehouse at the edge of town to spend one weekend creating all kinds of video games about cheese. Cheese was this year’s theme. Some developers, like Shawn McGrath and myself were gung-ho to create non-cheese-related products (though for my part, my game contains poetry which is – at its core – terribly cheesy.)

Click to play the fruits of my labour, Here Be Dragons.

Due to some project-related obligations, i wrote to the organizers on Friday and cancelled my participation, forfeiting my spot at the Jam. But fairy tales can come true, and by the end of the day, all the fires had been put out on the project. i packed an extra monitor into my knapsack and biked it down to a dodgy part of the city apparently dubbed “Corktown”, but better known by locals as “ugh.”

Building Games in a Mafia Dumping Ground

When i rolled up to the derelict factory, it was immediately familiar. i had been there before, for a meeting with a pair of Facebook app developers called Refresh Partners. Back then, the place reminded me of the warehouse where Batman knocked Jack Napier (AKA the Joker) into a vat of acid. Apparently, scenes from Chicago were filmed there, as it offered that perfectly gritty bleak brick prison motif.

By luck of the draw, i had one of the better rented chairs in the building, because it had working wheels and armrests. Well – armrest, really, because one of the armrest cushions was missing. The chair owner had jury-rigged a new armrest by binding bunched-up bubble wrap to the chair with electrician’s tape. This assembly, as functional as it was, betrayed the danger of a hidden nail sticking straight up through the wrap. Thank God that my tetanus shots were up to date. i’m willing to suffer slings and arrows for my craft, but i draw the line at lockjaw.

We came and went via a back stairwell, which was home to a dead mouse and numerous other unmentionables that, fittingly, i won’t mention. The hundred-odd (and i do mean “odd”) participants were spread out between two rooms, one of which was stiflingly hot and the other which was freezing cold, thanks to windows that wouldn’t close. i was set up much better than most folks, some of whom were clustered around a shared folding table beneath a fluorescent lighting fixture that hanged precariously from one bolt.

Sleep When You’re Dead

After riding home for some sleep at 2:30 Friday morning, i stayed awake from Saturday morning at 9:30 to Sunday night at 11:00 PM, when the event ended. Being without my air mattress, which i found indispensable last year, i tried to take a nap while lying across three chairs lined end to end, but i was constantly awoken by the carpenter downstairs who spends his early mornings loudly slamming piles of wood together arhythmically. i troddled off to the hotbox room to snooze there, but that part of the building was emitting some strange beeping noise loud enough to keep me awake. At last, there came a vacancy on one of the dodgy couches in the nearby makeshift lounge, but by that time i was too tired to sleep.

That said, i was much more relaxed this year than last, although i think i stayed up the same number of hours. Compare and contrast this year’s photo from last year’s (also by Lynch):

The key difference, i think, is that last year i was determined to prove myself. i wanted to show the world – and particularly my team supervisor – that locking me up writing game documentation for two years was a waste of my talents. To that end, i was dead-set on creating a finished, functional game if it killed me. And it nearly did.

My success this year started with my cancellation. i figured that having missed a day, there was no point in even showing up. With the pressure relieved, i was able to really take my time and tune into the game design process, without worrying so much about being perfect.

The Game

The game i chose to build was one from our internal game ideas wiki called Here Be Dragons. Here’s what the wiki entry looked like:

Sea Monster

It’s Like
That spider game in the junkyard where you pull the spider back like a slingshot to grab flies.

Overview
You’re a sea monster eating ships.

Not much to go on. The entry was in there just to remind me that i really wanted to make a sea monster game. Simple concepts make for simple games. Simplicity is crucial to turning out a finished title in a weekend.

The spider game i referenced was a great little Flash game i remember playing a few years back. You play a daddy long legs in a junkyard. You click and drag the spider’s body to jump up in the air and eat insects. The game was technically very impressive; the spider’s legs programmatically contoured to the shape of the terrain. The artwork was also quite nice. If anyone has a link to the game, please let me know!

i figured the same pull-back-and-release mechanic would be great in a sea monster game. Your monster waits at the bottom of the sea. Pull back and release to swim up breach the water. If there are any boats in your way, you eat them. Bonus points for eating one boat on the way up, and another boat on the way back down.

This all sounded good in my head until i actually started looking at pictures of sea monsters. Somehow, i had forgotten that they were all slinky and snake-like. A mathematical springy game mechanic is one thing, but add to that some chain physics, and suddenly the task seemed daunting. i’m no math wizard, and i never took trigonometry (though i’m aiming to fix this gaping hole in my understanding within the year).

i thought about the game for weeks leading up to TOJam, and eventually conceived of a game where the sea serpent is stationary and the boats move past it. All i’d need is a locked chain mechanic. This seemed a lot more reasonable.

Math for the Numerophobic

i started with an excellent Flash chain physics tutorial by Alejandro Quarto. His example contained all the trig i’d need to find the distances and angles between the sea monster’s neck segments.

In Alejandro’s example, the chain segments detect and prevent collision against each other. This was the first aspect i dropped, because it wasn’t important for my monster’s neck to collide with itself. Instantly, my chain moved much more smoothly. The trouble was that i needed a chain anchored to one point, but Alejandro’s chain was free-floating.

Here’s how Alejandro’s chain works: the last ball in the chain follows the mouse. As it’s being pulled around, all subsequent balls look for a larger-than-acceptable gap between themselves and the previous ball in the chain. If the gap is too large, a ball will tighten that gap by moving along the angle between itself and its companion ball. The gap that Alejandro set is the distance between the balls’ centrepoints, so you get a nice tight chain. (For the sea monster game, i tightened the chain even further so that the segments had more overlap.)

In order to affix the chain to one spot, i had to reverse Alejandro’s logic. First, i told the end segment to stay put. Then i told all subsequent segments to follow the mouse. Finally, i reinstated Alejandro’s logic to keep the each ball from straying too far from its parent segment. i kept the ball shape for the segments because circle segments look the most fluid when bent.

The end result is a really fantastic-looking and -feeling segmented sea monster neck. Thanks, Alejandro!

Programming in a Snap

Finishing off the rest of the game logic was a piece of cake. i made an early decision to angle the sea monster’s head as it followed the mouse, which players really reacted to. There was no magic to it:

i just chose a line down the middle of the sea monster, and chose a distance to either side. If the head was within that threshold, it showed its “forward” graphic. Otherwise, it showed its “left”- and “right”-facing graphics depending on which side of the threshhold it was on.

For the y axis, it was the same deal. When the head is within the middle threshhold, show the “straight” graphic. Otherwise, show the “up” or “down” graphic.

This provided the illusion of the sea monster looking around as its head follows the mouse. It’s not a technically brilliant scheme, but it is graphically labour-intensive, requiring nine pictures of the head (six actually, because the “left” pictures could be flipped for the “right” side). Then double that, because each head picture had to have a “mouthOpen” and “mouthClosed” state. Then add a few more pictures of the head with pursed lips for when the sea monster spits out the ship rigging. Finally, i lost the benefit of mirrored images when i added some shadows and highlights later.

Here are all the head images:

Gameplay Polish

The game was pretty well finished by Saturday night, and i had the rest of the weekend to add polish and to playtest. i had a few TOJam organizers sit down with Here Be Dragons. Jim thought the sea monster’s tongue was a laser, and so he didn’t grasp the fundamental game mechanic or goal. To fix this, i took his suggestion and changed the monster’s tongue from purple to pink. Then i added a chunk of code to depict the things the monster was eating being retracted into its mouth; until then, you’d tongue-lash items on the boat and they’d disappear, leaving a more laser-like impression.

Emily wondered why she had to click to spit stuff out. Then i started to wonder that too, and i took it out – now you just have to look up to spit. Both Emily and Jim didn’t understand why the sea monster could eat the mast, sailors and crow’s nest, but not the sails. So i created a rule where anything fleshy was edible, and anything not-fleshy had to be spit out. (One exception is the ship’s hull, which is implied to be full of delicious, crunchy sailors).

Originally, there was only one sailor pacing around the deck. Jim wanted a whole pile of things to eat, so i added a sailor in the crow’s nest, a sailor belowdecks, and a captain in the stern of the ship. Interestingly, most players focus only on the pacing sailor, even though he’s more difficult to catch. i think this is because he’s the only sailor with a sound cue – footsteps on wood. Testament to the power of sound.

Early play tests revealed that it wasn’t clear that the sea monster was spitting anything out, so i added animation of things being spat and landing in the distance. i animated this programmatically, which took much more time than it would to hand-animate it.

When i conceived of the game, i thought the passing ships would shoot harpoons at the sea monster, and that i would have a lives/death/game over system. i asked the other developers whether the challenge of filling the monster’s stomach with hard-to-snag sailors was enough, and they said “sure”. “No scoring?” “Nope.” “No timer?” “Nope.” i came to regret listening to those opinions.

Graphical Polish

i had the luxury of sprucing up my flat graphics with a few more gradients and highlights. Here are some comparison shots:

The Result

The Big Reveal on Sunday evening is always exciting. You have some teams kicking back, relaxing and adding the finishing sparkle to their title screens, while other teams frantically, desperately try to get their core game mechanic to function properly. It’s the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat everywhere you look. When you cruise around to different stations looking for games to try, it’s always a little sad when you find an abandoned station with nothing to show for a weekend’s worth of toiling.

As usual, there were a lot of games that were too complex for their own good. You’d roll up to a station, and the developer would be there, looking all nervous, unable to abandon his post because his game was too complicated for people to figure out on their own.

“Okay okay! So, you put your fingers on the WASD keys to control the movement of the black triangle. Move the mouse to kiss the zombies. Click the mouse button to increase the number of units on the screen, and shift-click to make a sandwich. If you need to drop your superbomb, step on the Rock Band drum pedal. And to look around the room, tape this Wii remote to your forehead.”

i was determined to let my game speak for itself, so i wandered away from my station and kept an eye on players from a distance. i did have to tweak the sailors’ deliciousness level for the demo, because it was taking too long for people to get to the end of the game. Players would abandon the game in the middle of a session, and the next person would sit down in the middle of the game and miss out on the silly poetry that bookended the experience.

In the end, the changes that came from that late-night playtesting served the game very well, but i should have added a scoring system. i implemented the “YOU ATE:” tally screen within the final hour, hoping that the “hulls eaten” tally would inspire people to go back and try to eat an entire ship (the most difficult task in the game), but no dice: there were just too many other games to play.

Tips for Future First-Time TOJammers

Designing a game to hold someone’s frenzied attention span in a room full of nerds n’ noise is slightly different from designing a game to captivate and engage the player across many hours and repeat visits.

i recommend a dead-simple control scheme. Mouse is preferable to keyboard, and single-clicking trumps click-and-drag. i’m already not a fan of clicking and dragging, especially for kids’ games, although all my kids teevee clients ask for it. Interestingly, in the two second timespan it takes for you to sit down to a game and then abandon it, all but one of the TOJam3 games that required clicking and dragging were too obtuse for me to figure out on my own, and i didn’t spend any time with them.

The one exception was Happy Goat Lucky, which used the pull-back-and-release spring mechanic that i had initially planned to use for Here Be Dragons.

And lo, it comes full circle.

Working with the DCC has definitely been educational. Key to a successful relationship is etiquette, which i don’t always handle well in the hearing world. Here are a few cues to follow when interfacing with Deaf culture:

Considerate/Acceptable

• waving your hands in front of someone’s face to get his attention
• stomping your feet or banging on a table to get someone’s attention with vibrations
• walking between people who are having a signed conversation

Inconsiderate

• turning someone’s face with your hands to get his attention
• holding someone’s hands to keep him from speaking
• guessing at signs. You never know what you’ll accidentally say!

This is not to say i’ve learned all this stuff the hard way. i had a conversation with a friend who’s taught at a Deaf school for a number of years, and she clued me in to a few of these.

i’ve been to the Centre a few times for meetings, and they’ve hired an interpreter. i’ve been very careful to maintain eye contact with the signing person, instead of appearing to carry on a conversation with the interpreter, but etiquette is a different world with sign language. If the interpreter was translating an oral language, i think it would be entirely appropriate to face and lock on to the original speaker. But since sign language is so visual, and facial expression is so important to convey meaning, the speaker signs to the interpreter instead of to me. This is a little awkward, because i don’t quite know whether to face the speaker or the interpreter. i made an early decision to face the speaker, and it seems to work out alright.

Our Foray into Quadrilingual Game Development

The games we’re creating for the Centre are challenging, because they’re in four different languages: English, French, ASL (American Sign Language) and LSQ (Langue des signes québécoise). Both signed languages have to be filmed with actors in front of a green screen. Additionally, the videos have to have voice-overs for players who may be hard of hearing, but not completely Deaf. They also have to be captioned.

If that weren’t tricky enough, the Centre has requested that the games be playable by blind and low-vision players. Since one of the games is a custom skin of Jigsaw!, this wasn’t going to fly. But it is possible to accommodate blind and low-vision players in the larger game, a feat that we feel assured of pulling off. Years ago, i worked on a multiplayer Battleship-style game for blind and low-vision players with the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind).

The LSQ shoot last week was probably the most complicated set i’ve ever been on:

If i wanted to talk to the actor, i had to speak in English. The interpreter would translate my request into ASL and relay it to the acting coach, who would translate the ASL signs into LSQ, and sign them to the actor. The process had to be reversed if the actor needed to communicate with me. To simplify things, communication occasionally devolved into facial-signing pidgin, where through broad, clown-like mugging and angled eyebrows, we were able to get by.

Of course, the nice thing about doing a shoot at the Deaf Culture Centre is that you don’t have to worry about sound. While we filmed, the GO Transit train rattled by on the tracks outside the building, people scraped chairs and dropped things, and a newborn baby cooed and cried while its mom cuddled it. There were even two shoots happening simultaneously, with only a thin curtain separating the green screen space between groups. It was a nice change from having the “QUIET ON THE SET!” guy jumping down everyone’s throats, or killing the shot because he could hear a plane taking off two towns over.

i really quite enjoy the accessibility challenge of developing these games. i know we haven’t perfected the formula by any means, but we’ll be listening closely to player feedback this time around to bolster our expertise, in case projects like these come up again.

Untold Entertainment’s games for the Deaf Culture Centre will debut at their gala on May 10th.

i took just a look at the NOW magazine article:

If anyone understands the draw, it’s Ryan Henson Creighton, a former video game reviewer who’s currently a senior game developer with Corus Entertainment in Toronto.

i’m not sure how i could have avoided this. i thought that since i was emailing the writer from my untoldentertainment.com address, and since my email signature says “Ryan Henson Creighton – President, Untold Entertainment“, and because i said during the interview that i am the president of Untold Entertainment, that the proper credit would appear in the story. Perhaps not.

The most i can hope for now is that when i do get my face on the cover, they’ll accidentally throw in Andy Kaufman’s mugshot. To be fair, we do look a lot alike.

Here’s NOW Magazine’s full article, anyway – Hero or Zero.

*** UPDATE ***

Evan was good enough to change the online article copy, and is looking into correcting in the next print issue.

i tried this whole schtick last week. i wrote a “clips show” post linking to some of Untold Entertainment’s more interesting articles to pacify the throngs of visitors charging to this site from ICE 08. Unfortunately, i was only a last minute replacement on the ICE panel, and i think i mumbled my own name into the microphone. i also had my back to the audience, and had accidentally dropped the mic down my shirt. i was in the middle of fishing it out when they asked me to introduce myself. i think most of the audience thought my name was “Murphy McFurfle.”

Hopefully there’s a more fruitful throw to this website in the latest issue of trendy urbanite rag NOW Magazine, in which Evan Davies picks my brain about Guitar Hero and Rock Band. i haven’t seen the article. It probably contains no more than a passing reference to me and a single quotation, because really, who the heck am i? Just a dude who creates and plays video games. But i’m a dude who’s only about a year or two away from getting his face plastered all across the front of that mag, mark my words. And when that day comes, i hope to High Heaven that i have the sense to stay away from any bloody Atari 2600 joysticks.

i was ten years old in 1988, a year when the Atari 2600 was well past its prime. i was enough of an outcast for digging video games so much. i wasn’t even an outcast playing on a current system. My friends were hacking and slashing their way through Bard’s Tale on their x86es, and i was still driving an excrutiatingly slow tank in Combat.

If idle hands are the Devil’s playground, the idle mind of a ten-year-old is a recipe for pure shenanigans. i was probably the last kid on Earth to discover that 1. you could pull the rubber sheath off an Atari 2600 joystick and suction it to your own skin. 2. The funniest place to stick it to yourself was, naturally, the middle of your forehead. And 3. – the suction lasts a really long time.

Thank goodness this whole Mentos and Diet Coke revelation came so late in my life. i shudder to think how i would have taken to that in 1988.

After about an hour of fun with the joystick sheath stuck to my head, pretending i was a Dark Unicorn or whatever, i pulled the little leech off. It had left an enormous welt smack dab in the middle of my forehead – a big red throbbing face hickey that bleeped “L-O-S-E-R” in Morse code.

No worries. i’d just go to bed and it would be gone in the morning, yeah?

Nuh.

The very next morning, there it was. Bright as the blessed noonday sun. A behemoth Bindi. The Japanese flag on my forehead. My mom tried to put cover-up on it, but that didn’t work. It resisted all attempts to soothe it. It would not heed reason. So off i went to school, bracing myself for an inevitable beating. After all the teasing and name-calling was done, it would turn out to be just another average day, right?

Yeah. Just another average picture day.

Mr. Lepp’s 1988 Grade Four class picture is an anomaly. Scientists don’t recommend that you look directly into the photo. But on a snowy night, when all the children are asleep, it’s rumoured that a certain jolly old elf uses the picture to guide his sleigh through the blizzard.

God bless us, every one.

ICE is also an acronym for the International Congress of Entomology, and a trade show for the gambling industry. So if you lose your house in a business deal or you feel something unpleasant crawling up your leg, you may still be at the right conference. *drum fill*

If you came to the site from the conference and clicked on the Blog Monster, you most likely want to see what we’re all about. Our Games gallery is slim pickins these days, because all the interesting development is going on behind the scenes:

We’re creating five games for a Canadian kids’ teevee production company. The site will launch this summer.

We’re building two games that will be accessible to both deaf and blind players (that is to say, players with one disability or the other … Helen Keller would have a bit of trouble).

Additionally, we have been invited by two different companies to create two massively multiplayer online game demos. One of these companies wrote the book on the genre. We are extremely excited to be working with them!

If you’re here in the midst of a boring panel (hopefully not the one i’m on), here are a few Untold Entertainment articles for your interest:

The Democratization of Game Development

This year’s trend at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco was the sit back, relax, and let your players build the game for you. i approve.

Prince of Persia, Prince of Peace

A mercifully brief jog through the history of Christian video games, and why i’m thankful that Jesus forgives.

Ryan Creighton on The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Steve grills me on gaming for the elderly, mass market video games and how EA’s Rock Band will save the music industry.

Kids Eagerly Await Nickelodeon’s Next Shipment of Ass

How a supposedly legitimate children’s broadcaster shovels schlock to its young audience, right under parents’ noses.

Canadian Game Journalism: Not Worth It

A serious number-crunching leads to the conclusion that Canadian game journalism rivals a McJob.

Video Games Teach Kids to Gamble

Twenty hours into every Pokémon game, the (likely) pre-teen player walks into a full-fledged casino. At a time when bashing video games is en vogue, this topic is conspicuously missing its fair share of outrage.

Freak-out time: it’s for old people. i don’t mean 30-year-olds, either, who used to be the epitome of old until i turned 30. i’m talking bona fide grey-hairs. Their sponsor is a company offering car insurance to the elderly. On Monday’s show, Steve was interviewing a very stodgy, well-spoken author and military man in Washington who wrote a book on the Iraq war. My heart sunk deeper and deeper into my chest as i fast-forwarded through the show. How was i supposed to follow this? It’s like hiring a clown at a funeral.

In the end, it didn’t go too badly. i couldn’t name the game industry’s third largest publisher, and i inadvertently told the host he looks like a troll.

i also acted like an anti-semetic Jew the way i bashed Nintendo, calling the majority of the Wii library “garbage”. i actually quite like Nintendo (and Jewish people, for that matter – no emails please). Still, there’s no denying that Nintendo’s game consoles constantly disappoint when it comes to third-party software support. You just have to pop over to Metacritic’s Wii section to see a list of yellow and red review scores ranging from “mediocre” to “horrible”, along with a long list of games that were too insignificant to review.

Anyway, here’s the interview:

We talked about gaming for the elderly, about the big business of electronic entertainment, and about how Guitar Hero and Rock Band could save the music industry. At the end of the interview, Steve asked what my favourite game was, and the supressed geek inside of me proved impossible to reign in.

i’ve pulled double-duty at every conference i’ve attended, being both a delegate and a member of the press for an online kids’ gaming magazine. This commitment has seen me hauling a one-man arsenal of recording equipment across gaping conference halls, eating bag lunches on the floor near electrical outlets to recharge my batteries, and experiencing everything through the limiting lens of a video camera.

i’m a nervous traveller – one of these types who has trouble juggling his passport, plane tickets and doffed shoes at airport security. i could do without having to futz with camera bags and headphone cables everywhere i go. i remember one year at E3, i was with a small group of reporters interviewing Peter Moore, then marketing manager for Microsoft’s XBox. i couldn’t take interview notes to save my life, so i’d brought along a mini-disc recorder. After playing cat’s cradle with the tangle of microphone cords, i finally wrangled the little omni-mic onto the table and started the interview. The recorder issued a “Battery Totally Dead” beep before i could slip it into my pocket and pretend that everything was okay.

One of the other journalists called my bluff. “i don’t think that thing’s recording,” he said. “Sure it is.” He looked doubtful. “How come the LED on the mic isn’t lit?” “i uh … i turned it off.”

“There’s an independant toggle switch for the power LED?” The chinks in my armour were starting to show.

The interviewee’s time was short, so we started into it. And all the while, i pretended stubbornly that the recorder was working, not fooling anyone.

Another time, i managed to get pro skater Tony Hawk to give a quick shout-out to my camera. i was ecstatic! When i reviewed the footage later, i saw one long shot of my shoes. The camera panned up to Hawk’s face. There was a cut. Then Tony Hawk disappeared into a crowd of handlers and hangers-on.

Later in the show, i was nearly murdered by a very large bodyguard who didn’t want me taking any footage of the back of Steven Spielberg’s head. i quickly calculated that my grainy footage of Spielberg’s yarmulke wasn’t worth a cracked spine, so i put the camera away. But i still used the half-second of footage i caught before chickening out in my final piece!

So this year, with my ties to the press voluntarily severed, i head off to San Francisco a free man. The Matt Cassamassinas of the world can lose their hair over live-blogging the minutiae of every keynote address. i, for one, am going to kick back and relax. i’ll meet a few people, learn a few things, and leisurely report back with my findings when it suits me.

i do, however, promise to report on which employees of your favourite Canadian media companies pick up underaged strippers and take them to night clubs that hand out free Ecstasy at the door. True. i had heard stories of the wily things men get up to when they’re away at conferences, but i thought these tales were artifacts from the 1970s.

No, friends. Male chauvinism and philandering is alive and well, and in full effect at shows like GDC. The carrying-on i witnessed at GDC 07 has helped to steer and shape my business decisions over the past year.

Dear Folks of Untold,

We´ve seen the post about iChords and Sheet Happens! Thanks for the nice words about our software.

We just released a gadget called iChords Gadget, you might find it useful.

Find chord fingerings quickly with iChords Gadget – Ed.

If you’re instereted in learning more about music software, we have an open source project, Free Clef (www.freeclef.org), a multiplatform notation editor.

Freeclef – Free music notation software. Take that, Cakewalk. – Ed.

Thanks,

Américo Amorim

Getting this email was like being beaten fair and square in a wrestling match, and after shaking hands, my opponent comes back and gives me a few kicks to the ribs. Oh well … all’s fair in love and software development.

i’m not above profiling the mistakes i make as i bring my new business to its feet. It’s possible some of you are budding entrepreneurs planning to follow the same path. So here’s my hot entrepreneurial tip of the day: DO YOUR RESEARCH.

Two months ago, i hunkered down to learn Actionscript 3, and i needed a project to practice on. i chose Sheet Happens!, a hobbyist sheet music app that allows you to transpose the chords in a Notepad-like environment. A good long while into production, i thought “Hey … i wonder if there’s anything like this on the market?”

As it turns out, there is one teensy tiny product out there called iChords. It doesn’t do exactly the same thing as Sheet Happens!. You can actually feed it an MP3, and iChords will dynamically “listen” to the song and display the chords as the song plays.

If Sheet Happens! is a car, iChords is a spaceship that transforms into a robot that eats cars for a mid-day snack.

To add insult to injury, iChords ships with D’Accord Chords Notepad, which looks exactly like Windows Notepad, with two extra menu additions: Transpose Up, and Transpose Down. That’s right – not only does iChords have a far better feature set than Sheet Happens!, it actually replicates the entire Sheet Happens! feature set as a footnote.

Sheet Happens! was also an excuse to launch an Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) app, which integrates Flash with the user’s desktop. This brings up a second, equally excellent tip for small business owners: start with what you know. Untold Entertainment Inc.’s bread and butter is making Flash games, deployed to the browser. i haven’t heard a lot of demand for AIR apps, but i thought we could be on the bleeding edge. The trouble with that is after two months, Untold Entertainment’s games library stays the same size, and we have this music software anomaly that probably won’t interest our core clients.

All told, developing Sheet Happens! wasn’t a complete waste of time. i have a much better handle on AS3 now, and will be periodically posting SNAFUs and programming tricks to help anyone else transitioning from AS2 to AS3.

i recently had to step back into old Actionscript 2 code, and it was like sliding my foot into a well-worn, mildewy sports sock where the sweat dried and mummified the sock into the shape of my foot. i was amazed at how quickly and easily i could program in AS2. i almost closed my eyes as i typed, and the code just flowed out of me. Contrast that with AS3, where i have to pay careful consideration to each line, and every time i compile i get a truckload of errors.

i worry that delving into my old code will undo all of the AS3 training i’ve done. i need to limit my exposure, like an 8-year old sneaking tiny glimpses at the sun, wondering how long it’ll be before he goes blind.

iChords can be purchased for an amazingly low price at finer download sites everywhere. Sheet Happens! can not.

This Movie has 42 Hours

When uber-famous and once-chubby film critic Roger Ebert claimed that video games will never be viewed as art, he was only defending his best interests. If games were considered art, as movies are, then maybe he’d be asked to review them. And if Ebert reviewed games, he could no longer spend a simple hour and a half with the source material. No, Ebert would be like the rest of the schlubs in game journalism, sweating his way through a 40-hour first-person shooter in his rec room, while throngs of drunk Southerners on XBox live hurled racial slurs at him.

Not only is the rec room a far cry from an empty theatre, but the time Ebert puts into his job makes economic sense. i myself make $75 for a one-page magazine article. i used to write online reviews in exchange for used copies of review games at a rate of about 3 reviews per “free” game. Your average (new) video game in Canada costs $70. That works out to $23 per review.

Let’s look at what went into writing that review:

It’s All About the (Absence of) Benjamins

The writing itself took about an hour. So far so good – $23 per hour is a fair wage for a freelance writer.

Now let’s factor in the time it took to view the source material. Today’s console games clock in at 20-40 hours. We’ll take the minimum – 20 hours. $23/20 hours works out to $1.15 an hour. A buck fifteen? Uh-oh. Suddenly, this is turning into a losing game.

At this rate, the freelance reviewer can’t afford to finish a game before submitting his review. And here’s my dark secret: i never did finish the games i reviewed. The game companies would send review copies one week before street date at the very earliest. With a full-time job, it was next to impossible to beat these games in that time limit. And as we’ve seen, it didn’t make economical sense to do so anyway.

So what’s fair? Let’s say a stingy reviewer spends 2 hours playing the game. 2 hours to play + 1 hour to write = 3 hours. $23/3 is 7 bucks an hour, which you could also earn slinging hash at the local burger joint.

Sounds grim? A colleague of mine revealed that his magazine paid him $2 for a capsule review. Two dollars. Mind you, capsule reviews go something like this:

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

Shoot bugs and space pirates with a cool gadget arm. i liked the explosions, but some parts were short. In summary, gimme mah two dollars, bitch.

They’re a lot less effort to write. But if you sip a three-dollar Starbucks while writing them, you’re basically paying for the privilege of being a game reviewer.

Peer Review

When i first got into game journalism, i couldn’t understand why all the local game reviewers were dicks. They’d either try to sell me on their experience and ask if they could write for “my” publications, or they’d openly ridicule me. After a few years, i now understand why. It’s hard to be friendly when you’re competing tooth and nail for $7/hr freelance work.

The industry is very competetive, but it’s more a battle of personalities than anything else. A reviewer won’t excel because his writing is better; he’ll get work because he has work. Success begets more success. The ability to schmooze with the PR agencies representing the big game companies is paramount. Without that, you’d better see that your homeless shelter offers free wi-fi.

There’s a particular Toronto reviewer who writes for every publication in town because he writes for every publication in town. He’s universally despised by the other journalists for being slim on talent and guaranteed regular work. And he’s also a dick. Like any other industry, it’s not what you know. It’s who you know. But in the microscopic Canadian game journalism racket, it’s an all-or-nothing game. Knowing someone means the difference between getting all of the work, like that guy, or getting none of the work.

The Junkets

By far the worst part of the business is attending the press junkets. The big game companies pay their PR agencies to throw lavish parties to preview their products. If you hope to get anywhere in the industry, you have to attend all of them, from the fancy Gears of War launch party to the Hannah Montana Adventures karaoke night. Many of these events drag on for hours as you shuffle from game console to game console, straining to hear the audio, trying to get a good sense of the gameplay while roving waiters constantly foist cheesyweeners on you, and PR people whisper Satanically into your ear.

The events’ raison d’etre is for PR reps to spew a string of positive game buzz into your ear in the hopes that some of their phrases will wind up in your review. They’ll blab on endlessly about the very worst back-of-the-box blither you’ve ever heard. Regard:

You: (trying to figure out how to control your character)

Rep: Crash Bandicoot: Smashypants is the latest in a long, proud series of games starring the loveable daredevil marsupial.

You: Uh-huh.

Rep: You can see that the developers spent most of their time really livening up the spectrum of colours in this game, and ensuring that the gameplay appeals to fans of squad-based go-kart party shooter titles.

You: Right. It’s uh … it kind of sucks.

Rep: (face falling for an almost imperceptible moment) Well, the developers really listened to fan feedback and wanted the control scheme to be challenging enough for some players, but not so challenging that it was too difficult to play.

You: No – it really sucks. It sucks worse than Crash Team Cook-off. It’s not even as good as Crash Bandicoot’s Brain Blenders. It’s really, really bad.

Rep: Well, it supports 4-players in a local splitscreen match, and you can choose the colour of your character’s hat.

You: Why doesn’t it support no players? Cuz that’s how many people are going to enjoy this thing. Can you tell me why i have to press START to see my health metre? Or why my character only moves forward when i eat a berry? Or why the problems with the last Crash game haven’t been addressed at all in this piece of nonsense?

Rep: …

You: Do you have any developers here? Is there an artist here who can defend the decision to make my character look like a warmed-over salami? Is there an animation director here who can talk about why these characters have three frames of animation in their run cycles?

Rep: Uh … no. But we have the producer here.

You: Okay … send him over.

…

Producer: Hi! Crash Bandicoot: Smashypants is the latest in a long, proud series of games starring the loveable daredevil marsupial.

You: …

Producer: And you can change the colour of your character’s hat!

You: …

Waiter: Would you like to try a cheesyweener, sir?

—————–

You’ve essentially spent hours at this junket – and there are multiple junkets every week – so that you can write a $2 preview piece on a game you barely played. That’s what i was always doing at the junkets – asking to speak to a member of the production team. But the junkets are never stocked with people responsible for building the game – only people responsible for spinning the game. i really wondered who would fall for these transparent tactics.

The year that Nintendo debuted their DS system at E3, they made a few points clear in their presentation: “it’s all about the power of two. You have two screens. Two media slots. Two ways to connect.” Et cetera. Fine.

A day later, as i was wandering around the show floor when i overheard a couple of exciteable young bloggers (due to the likes of whom E3 was eventually cancelled). One blogger was enthusiastically telling the other blogger “it’s all about the power of two. You have two screens. Two media slots. Two ways to connect.”

i see.

The Relationship

A big part of the job is building up relationships with the game companies. The current Big Three – Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo – should be your first stop. The goal is to convince them to send you a steady stream of review copies ahead of the street date so that by the time you post a “news” item, it’s actually news.

How hard is it to convince a PR company to send you games? Well, i wrote reviews for the website of a national kids’ teevee station. A third-party metrics company tracks the site at around 1 million unique visitors per month – mostly kids, one would presume. i had to pound the pavement and build the relationship with one of the Big Three, the one who launches a lot of family-friendly entertainment – for over two years before they’d send us review copies. A game in Canada costs around $70 – considerably less if you’re the company pressing the discs – yet they didn’t consider a game review promoted to 1 million viewers a month to be a viable exchange. Not to divulge my former employer’s precious secrets, but an ad banner on their site goes for a price tag considerably North of 70 bucks.

Even after you’ve convinced the Big Three that you’re worth the effort, you have to chase down all of the third parties. Activision, Ubi Soft, Namco, Atlus, Konami, Koei … you fight tooth an nail to find the contact people for these places. Maintaining that many separate relationships for your $7/hr is like working the counter at McDonald’s and having to call up all of the farmers who supply the various types of food to the supply distributor. And then you have to convince Farmer Tucker to send you a Chicken McNugget.

But You Get Free Games, Right?

Easily the biggest perk for a game journalist is getting games before anyone else does. But that sneak preview comes at a dire price: you have to play the game like a maniac, plowing through it as fast as possible to get that review ready for launch day.

From October to December, which i’ve dubbed Video Game Season, you have to make bitter sacrifices or risk burning out completely. You’ve got Mass Effect, a 40-hour game, in one hand, and The Orange Box, containing five separate games, in the other. Do you kill yourself playing and reviewing both of them to keep up your PR relationship to continue receiving games? Do you play one in its entirety and do a review, hoping you’ve earned enough cred with the other company to let one slide? Or do you take the time to enjoy Thanksgiving with your family?

One of my most eye-opening experiences was in New York City, at the pre-release press junket for the Nintendo Wii. Sitting in the front row was a young guy hunched over his laptop, madly pecking away at 80 words a minute before the event even began. His face was ghostly pale, might not have shaved for weeks, and his hair was like straw. When the Nintendo reps took the stage and started the presentation, his fingers flew faster than ever. He was live-blogging the event, posting a live online play-by-play of everything the reps were saying.

That young man was Matt Cassamassina, a prominent game journalist at IGN. Matt, if you’re reading this, listen to me: you need to eat some broccolis. You need to go outside, peel off all your clothes, and let the sunshine hug you. i feel badly for you.

Matt is clearly earning more than the $7/hr scraps we Canucks are scrounging for, but at what cost? He asked his questions, and he got nonsense political PR doublespeak back. i don’t know how he does it. He must really enjoy it. Me? PR doublespeak just makes me angry.

Here’s the kind of PR idiocy you can look forward to as a games journalist. Back when Phantasy Star Online was being launched for the Nintendo GameCube, there had been no other online games for the system. i wondered how Nintendo was going to enable the online functionality. Here’s how the conversation went:

Me: So, Phantasy Star Online is launching soon. How’s that gonna work? Is Nintendo releasing a modem adapter for the system?
Rep: No.
Me: “No”, or “you can’t say”?
Rep: Nothing’s been said, and we’re not supporting online capabilities with the system.
Me: But you have a game launching on it called “Phantasy Star Online,” right?
Rep: That has been announced, yes.
Me: But there will be no online capabilities for the system when it launches?
Rep: That’s correct.
Me: … So uh … let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Phantasy Star Online, released exclusively for the GameCube, AND TITLED PHANTASY STAR ONLINE, will be … offline?
Rep: That’s correct.

Matt, i don’t know how you do it. You may look like an underfed scarecrow, but you’re a stronger man than i.

The Rundown

See, Roger Ebert’s a clever cat. He puts in his hour and a half (sometimes three hours – damn you, Peter Jackson!), and saunters out of the theatre, dusts the popcorn from his silk ascot, and wonders what he’s going to say about it. It’s in his best interest to slag video games til he’s blue in the face – God forbid he’d ever have to sit through one to write a review.

“Game journalist” is one of about three game industry jobs that outsiders think are awesome: game journalist, game tester, and game designer. The layperson thinks “aw, sweet – you get to sit around and play games all day!”

The game journalist gets to sit around and play games all day. Spending time with the family or earning money for rent? As far as Canada’s concerned, it’s a dicey proposition.

The game tester gets to sit around and play game all day. One game. Singular. And he has to play it for months on end, taking notes as it constantly breaks. But at least he gets to pay his dues and move up in the industry, perhaps being promoted to:

Game designer. This guy has to play the same game over and over again too, but he’s got the added burden of fixing all the problems himself. Still, if he’s an independent, he can license his titles to a casual games portal and go home to sleep on a pile of money-coated money.

“How callous”, you say. i often warn people about turning their hobby into their career. All too often, you’ll end up hating both. But if your hobby/career brings in enough money to buy the games you want to play, instead of forcing you to play That’s So Raven 3, so much the better. If your job, be it testing toys or shovelling goose poop off the parliement lawn, funds a trip to the zoo with your daughter, and the occasional escape to the Caribbean with your family, i’d say you’re doing alright.

… provided we’re talking about the real zoo, and not Microsoft’s Zoo Tycoon 2: Marine Mania.

We are pleased to announce this month’s release, The Hardest Video Game Quiz Evar!

Use the picture clues and your sense of humour to figure out 50 video game titles. Clues range from current titles to stuff you haven’t played since 1983. And if you weren’t yet born in 1983, use the Send to Friend button to call in the assist from a veteran gamer.

Temporary Sheet Happens! logo

Pre-production on Sheet Happens!, a hobbyist sheet music app build in AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is in full swing!

The final product is being planned for an open-source release so that the Flash/Flex development community can learn this exciting new technology. For those of you just joining us, AIR allows devlopers to create cross-platform desktop applications using Flash, Flex, or HTML. (Yes – HTML.)

In keeping with our open philosophy on this project, we have opened the Sheet Happens! Development Wiki to the public! You can check in to see how the project is coming along. You can also watch us track things like hours spent and milestones on the wiki calendar to get a sense of how speedy (or not) AIR is for development. If you are a student or are just getting started in the industry, you might pick up some do’s and don’t's for your own project.

We will also post developer diaries on this blog from time to time to update you on our progress.

Sheet Happens! gives users an iTunes-style interface to manage their lyric and chord charts. Songs can be transposed on the fly. A number of viewing options allow you to customize your songs to help you play them more easily.

Sign up to test this exciting app by emailing us at info at untoldentertainment.com!

The presentation format is also new, borrowing from a Japanese concept of moving-it-right-along and shutting-the-hell-up called Pecha Kucha (pronounced “puh CHAH chka”, which sounds like something that goes great with cabbage rolls and coffee).

The Pecha Kucha rules are as follows:

1. Show 20 slides at 20 seconds each

That’s basically it. There’s something to be said for simplicity.

Naturally, i couldn’t resist reserving a slot on the evening’s roster. Untold Entertainment’s Pecha Kucha presentation is called, predictably, Mama Spanks a Fat Flapjack (ver 3.1).

Software should solve a problem, or endeavor to make a task easier to do. In this early concept phase of the Sheet Happens app, i’ll outline a few problems, and then explain how i intend to solve them by building this software.

Problem #1: Sheet Music Search and Organization

i’m a hobbyist musician, and can play well enough from a “fake book”, which has song lyrics accompanied by chord descriptions, with a melody line for the vocals. More often than not, the sheets i find on the Internets are even more bare-bones, consisting of only the lyrics and chords. These compositions assume that the musician already knows the melody.

Here’s a comparison between full notation, “fake” notation, and chords-only:

Whenever i want to play a song, i look it up on the Internets to hunt down one of these fake sheets. Then i either print it out, or i memorize the chord progression (if it’s simple) and play away. i never bookmark the music. Only very rarely will i copy/paste the music into a text file.

It’s not a very solid system i’ve got going. i have to hit the Internets and re-search for a piece of music every time i want to play it, because i can’t be bothered fishing through a bunch of text files. The Sheet Happens app is going to solve this problem by organizing fake sheets using AIR’s included database. Imagine being able to store your sheet music songs with an interface like iTunes:

You’ll be able to sort by year, genre, artist, etc. You can also search your song list.

Problem #2: Inaccuracies

The trouble with many of these fake sheets is that they’re written by other hobbyists who fiddle around, learn the chords, and stick them in a text file against the song lyrics. Sometimes, the lyrics get written as the hobbyist hears them – for example:

Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix – “Scuse me, while i kiss this guy”
Bad Moon Rising, CCR – “There’s a bathroom on the right”
What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong – “The bright blessed days, the dogs say goodnight”
Tiny Dancer, Elton John – “Hold me closer, Tony Danza”

You can usually work around these mistakes if you know the proper lyrics, but since i view these sheets on a webpage, i can’t get in and fiddle with the bits.

It’s more challenging when the chords are incorrect. i have a hard time remembering that the Dm is actually supposed to be a Dmaj7 when i’m in the middle of singing and playing, say, Every Rose Has its Thorn by Poison. It’s frustrating when my soulful crooning gets interrupted.

So! To sum up this point, the Sheet Happens software will allow you to edit lyrics and chords. But let’s go farther than that.

When people write these fake sheets, they’re not always careful to put the chord changes in the right place. The next chord should really be written above the word where the chord changes, but this isn’t always easy or accurate when you write the lyrcis in Notepad. So Sheet Happens is going to turn the chords into draggable icons that you can position precisely over the proper lyric so the changes happen in the right place.

Ideally, you’ll be able to import a text file or HTML file into Sheet Happens. The software will strip out the HTML tags. It will automagically recognize the chords, and will convert them into programmatic chord icons. Then we can have fun, fun, fun. (That is, until daddy takes the proverbial T-Bird away.)

Problem #3: Transposition

So far, Sheet Happens isn’t going to change the world. It’s basically Notepad attached to a database for easier file management. Let’s crank it up a notch.

When i play a song from one of these fake sheets and it’s too high or too low for me to sing, i cheat. My keyboard has a “transpose” button that lets me adjust the key up or down. A keyboardist can do this very easily, but a band can’t. Pianists, guitarists, tuba players – they’re all out of luck if they can’t transpose the music on the fly with sheer mind power.

Since the Sheet Happens chords are already magical, draggable and programmatic, let’s give the user a “transpose” button to change the sheet music’s key up or down on the fly. NOW we’re talking.

Problem #4: Tabs, Chords, Fingering

There are a few differences when musicians read music. Sometimes, fake sheets will have split chords, like F/C. This means that the pianist or keyboardist should play F with his right hand where the high notes are, and the C chord with his left hand where the low notes are. Guitarists can’t really do this. When they reach a split chord like F/C, they have to remember to play only the F chord.

It sounds pretty easy, but i work with a lot of new guitarists, and this trips them up every time. They usually try to play F first and then C, when they should only play F.

To solve this problem, Sheet Happens will include a split chord toggle to show either the split chord, treble chord only, or bass chord only. So you’ll be able to set “treble chord only”, and then print off a few sheets for the guitarists in your band.

Pianists and guitarists also read chords differently. Guitarists sometimes use tab notation, which shows a little diagram depicting which strings they’re supposed to hold down to play a chord. Pianos and keyboards have keys instead of strings, so guitar tabs are useless. Beginner pianists might like to see fingering charts that show them which keys to press.

Since the chords in Sheet Happens are all juicy and programmatic, we’ll throw in an option to show chords, tabs, and keyboard fingering. We can even build in options to choose different chord intervals (different ways of playing chords), and if we go REALLY crazy, we can throw in support for other instruments like trumpets.

Problem #5: Not Enough Love in This World

i’ve often heard the complaint that there are too many men, and too many people making too many problems, and not much love to go round. Truly, this is is a land of confusion. To solve this problem, Sheet Happens will love the user unconditionally and will listen to his or her problems. To accomplish this, i’ll use an associative array. Or something. i dunno.

On to Phase Two!

Phase Two of the project design is to sort out what kinds of classes i need to build to serve the program. As i am brand new to object oriented programming, i expect to make many mistakes in this phase, but i’ll share them all as i make them. i am halfway through Colin Moock’s Essential Actionscript 3.0 book, and i have the O’Reilly Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook at my side, so i’ll soldier through and record my progress. Stay tuned for the next update.

This is a simple jigsaw puzzle game from the player’s perspective, but there is a bit of fancy tapdancing going on behind the scenes. i mentioned in an earlier post the security issue that was hampering the Custom puzzle feature. It’s all solved (thanks, John!). Now, players can load any online image into the app, and it will be dynamically carved into a jigsaw puzzle.

This flexibility makes Jigsaw! a very attractive option if you are looking to license content for your website. The gallery of images is entirely dynamic. You or your content co-ordinator just has to drop an image into a special folder on your web server, and it will appear in the Jigsaw! gallery.

This allows you to easily add and announce new content on your site with very little time and effort involved. You can also change up the images so that your theme changes monthly (or weekly). For example, you could drop spooky pictures into the folder to give your visitors a Hallowe’en-themed experience.

You can play Jigsaw! here. Enjoy!

A memory game is my project of choice whenever i learn a new language or technology – C# in this case. Memory games require you to learn loops, arrays, random numbers, input control, game states, branching statements … many of the basic building blocks of simple game construction.

The biggest challenge with this project, aside from the syntax, was making the controls respond properly. Since the “update” code is in a loop that runs every billionth of a second or whatever, you’d push the control stick and the game cursor would fly to the end of the row of cards at lightning speed. i eventually came up with a delay condition to make it behave properly, but the control still needs work.

The project is super simple, but if you think you could learn from it, grab the source code here.

i drew the button graphics myself and used free NASA images for the backgrounds.

Coming from a Flash background, the idea of having one master loop and programming “game states” was completely foreign to me. This “game” was just an excercise in creating different game states to flip through. If this is useful to you, grab the source code here.

The company is going through some major restructuring. A few months ago, the Interactive department general manager left amid a series of announcements about executive-level shuffling. Two weeks ago, the Financial Post Trading Desk reported that the president of the Television division had dumped all of his Corus shares. The very next day, fp trading desk reported that CEO John Cassaday had made a similar move.

i’ve seen the writing on the wall for some time now, but when the company cut 53 jobs on Tuesday, a number of people were taken off-guard. The Interactive department was rent asunder, to put it dramatically, and Corus lost a lot of great talent. If you are a Canadian media company, and you are looking for game developers, interactive project managers and producers, or even an entire independant television production arm (!!), get thee to Monster.ca and make your best offer!

i’m not sure if Corus is finished “consolodating”. The trades are calling Tuesday’s layoffs the “latest round” of restructuring. There’s still some juicy talent left in that company! i hope to be in touch if Corus leaks more folks in the future.

 Anyway, the site is up, which you know, because you probably click’d on the friendly orange Blog Monster to get here.  Or you Googled “click’d”, which is the olde English way of describing how peons serfed the web in the Middle Ages.

Wit!!  The wittiness!  Will it cease? Nay!

The Untold Entertainment Inc. site is not complete at this point, because i was silly enough to put a launch date on the front page, beneath a phony logo of a duck on a ball juggling chainsaws.  Here’s that logo, so you can pine for what could have been:

Looks dangerous. Special emphasis on “duck”.

At any rate, i’d hate for anyone to hold me to graphics and gameplay that i cooked up while coasting on 30% less sleep than is recommended by the Canada Food Guide.  Still, enjoy the game as a horribly confusing twist on your standard flip-n-match fare.

And enjoy the site and the blog!  i’ve committed to releasing at least one game or application per month.  You’ll get all the news about what i’m working on here, so click the Blog Monster whenever the mood takes you. 

- Ryan