i’m old.

i’ve been going to these events for at least five years now, and with every passing year, i am reminded with more and more clarity that the big video game titles are not for me. i’m a father of two now, and i run my own bidness. i spend my evenings working on great stuff to entertain you nice people – and that’s after i play with my kids, eat dinner with the family, tuck the tiny little girls safely into bed, and sit vigil for a few hours perched on the roof of my condo scanning the streets of Toronto for evil-doers. i do not have time for your Fable Threes, your Calls of Duty, your Fallout 3 New Vegases, or your Halo Reaches.

Not only that, but i don’t like those games. i can’t get past the cut-scenes. i know many people skip those, but i really like to be told a good story by well-animated figures. After the bar set by Pixar and others for 3D animated movies, the emotionless mannequins mugging and mouthing through toneless, dry dialogue just don’t do it for me. One glance around the room, and all of these games are starting to look more and more the same.

i really like a game with a bold art direction. Give me Wind Waker over Twilight Princess any day. i enjoyed Crackdown, partly because they tried to do something unique and interesting with the style. When i saddled up to game after game at X’10, i couldn’t figure out what each game was by looking at it. Is that a knock against art directors? Identity and branding specialists? You’d think that games with these million dollar budgets would drop a few bones trying to differentiate themselves from the competition.

The one game on the mostly hardcore show floor that stood out for me was Shank. i’m not a fan of bloody, M-Rated games, but Shank has style. The new Mortal Kombat game also turned my head, because of a feature where you could pull off a special move and, in addition to the slow-mo shot of you hurting your opponent, you’d see an X-Ray view inside the opponents body depicting cracking ribs and rupturing organs. Definitely not my cup of meat, but at least it’s an interesting visual addition to a stylistically bland landscape.

Rock Band 3 FTFW

Because i have very little time to enjoy gOnames these days, Rock Band really turns my crank. i can get in and out in under 10 minutes, make a dent in the story mode, and enjoy myself. i got a chance to try out the RB3 keytar (which you should NEVER use as an actual keytar because it’s hella complicated). On Pro mode, you’re playing the piano line note-for-note. i thought i’d have a leg up because i’ve been playing piano most of my life, but the trickiest thing is that it’s very easy to lose where your hands are on the keys … and in order to fit the whole highway on the screen, the viewable area shifts around from left to right, making it even more difficult and confusing.

But it’s still a must-buy. It has drop-in, drop-out – a sorely needed feature. i played Bohemian Rhapody (finally!) and The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News. Both were very fun. i fully expect Bat Out of Hell, with its crazy keyboard intro, to appear on the platform now that there’s a piano instrument.

Windows Phone 7? Tasty.

The Windows 7 mobile platform was very enticing. Seeing the excellent Xbox Live social features, including ‘Cheeves, appear on a mobile phone raised my lusty dev hackles. i want in.

Kinect Will Bomb.

i got a chance to try a few Kinect motion-sensing games. i say it’ll bomb. i’m not saying it won’t sell well – it actually might – but i think that, like the Wii before it, there will be this big media scramble and we’ll hear a lot about it, but the technology is doomed to collect dust in a corner.

The first game i tried was Kinect Sports. My friend Emily and i limbered up for the track & field event, and when the starter pistol was fired, the demo jockey said “run!” So of course, we both started doing this weak little jog, pantomiming the act of running. Our characters weren’t really going anywhere. The demo jockey said “No – actually run. Get those knees up in the air.”

Uh … there i was in a light-coloured shirt, because i was out of black ones, and it showed off my natural curves a little more than i usually like them to be shown. i started running on the spot – hauling actual ass, trying to get my on-screen character to move. It was a lot of effort. And then came the hurdles. That’s right, friends – hurdles. i did a feeble little hop, and my character tripped over the hurdle, knocking it over. i ran on the spot some more, feeling like a kid at fat camp, and tried to jump the second hurdle. No good. This went on for more hurdles and more running and more grunting … and then, eventually, the sweat came. It came first in small rivulets trickling from my temples, and soon started gushing out of my armpits like the levee broke. My repressed memories of gym class came flooding back to me, and all i wanted to do was escape to the safety of my rec room and play some video games.

Oh, wait – i was playing a video game.

In my youth, when i went to my friend’s house after his mom bought him the Nintendo dance pad because he was a fat f*cker, we learned how to game the system by sitting on the floor and slapping the dance pad sensors with our palms. It became an exercise in speed drumming. (And i’m sorry, but no human being is able to run as fast as Nintendo’s track & field game demanded.) There’s no obvious way for fat kids to cheat at Kinect, which i count as a victory for disapproving moms everywhere. Maybe wheel a paint shaker machine into the living room? i’m not sure.

Ubi Soft has a fitness game that looks interesting. i never liked how the exercises in Wii Fit worked. It would tell you to do push-ups, but since the game could only sense when you were applying pressure to the balance board, you may as well have been enthusiastically humping the device. (At times, i know i was.) The Ubi game puts you alongside a yoga guru. The shape of your on-screen character is exactly what Kinect “sees” – a purply blob more or less shaped like you, down to details like the flared hems of your shorts. When you follow the guru’s motions, the game overlays a skeletal system that turns white when you’re doing it wrong, and green when you’re on the money. It looked interesting, because if one leg is out of place, you can nudge your knee into a better position to correct your posture.

i asked the demo jockeys if the game was accessible to amputees (or freaks of nature). They didn’t know. i was surprised to learn that i was the first to ask the question.

i took a brief look at Kinectimals. A player was running as a lion cub through an obstacle course. Same story there – she was doing a gimpy sort of pretend jog-run, and the lion cub was stumbling around like it was drunk. i called out from the sidelines “you gotta haul ass!” She did, and the game went better for her.

Here are my main concerns with Kinect:

1. You need a 10×10 square feet of floor space. The track & field game kept telling me to “move back” … i couldn’t help but think that if i was in my tiny condo right now, moving back would put me inside the concrete wall.
2. Even if i did have the space, i’ve got two tiny little girls who litter our living room floor with jacks and Legos and other foot-demolishing traps and hazards that would land me in the hospital faster than the balls-out sprinting that the game required of me.
3. Very tiny kids, like my murderous toy-strewing daughters, may not be able to play, because there’s a certain degree of calibration and patience required to start games. There are moments when you need to stop moving, or to move slowly and deliberately – two skills my 2- and 4-year olds are nowhere near mastering.
4. A few times, while we were trying the bowling game in Kinect Sports, some wait staff crossed the room behind us, causing our characters to throw their bowling balls up in the air. Depending on your game room setup, you could be primed for some background interference douchebaggery from your so-called friends.
5. The system allows me to run, jump, throw, box, dance, catch, and gesture wildly. When i finally do eke out some come-down time, my chosen activities more often encourage me to sit, scratch, space, munch, and snooze.

Much like the Wii, the technology is promising, but it’s not quite there. It’s juuust inaccurate enough to be unfun. Just as game critics have taken to using the word “waggle” to derisively describe interactions with the WiiMote, i predict that the new watchword for the Kinect era will be “flail”.

As i mentioned in my post about the contest last week, it can be difficult for a small shop to afford all of the awesome software it needs to do Awesome Things. And putting a game on the iPhone is, indeed, an Awesome Thing. It’s not that we’re going to make a ton of dough on the platform or anything, but here in Toronto, there’s a definite cachet attached to companies who create content for mobile devices.

There’s a hierarchy to the impressiveness of the tech you use, and the more street cred your tech has here in Toronto, the more cool stuff you get to do – speak at conferences, advise the government, talk on television, hookers plus blow, etc etc. It doesn’t even matter if the cool tech makes you any money. In Toronto, just by saying you’re going to develop triple-A console games, you get mentioned in every single newspaper article, industry whitepaper and ribbon-cutting ceremony our fair province of Ontario has to offer. But if you’re a multi-millionaire toy mogul adding to his boatloads of cash by creating an online virtual world for your customers’ stuffed animals, you don’t rate – probably because your virtual world was build in Flash. And, like smoking or doing drugs on Saturday morning in the 1980′s, Flash isn’t cool.

But HOO BOY! Just wait until we launch a failed iPhone app, folks. We’ll in the “it” crowd then!

My apologies to our international readers. The Toronto people know what i’m talking about.

Learn On Me

After a botched attempt at completing Unity’s platformer tutorial, which taught me nothing except how to mindlessly link pre-written scripts to pre-fab 3D objects, i’m excited to learn Unity 3D in earnest. And like i’ve said before, the trouble with teachers when they get to know something really really well is that they forget what it’s like to know nothing. i will likely have Unity3D lightning bolts shooting out of my fingertips by this time next year, but i am committed to writing down every bump, snag, roadblock, and WTF that crops up while i’m learning, so that when and if YOU decide to learn Unity, you’ll have one more good resource to turn to. So watch this space for Unity tutorials!

And i hope the pioneers who have gone before me will throw me a life preserver if Unity ends up sinking me.

It all makes me wonder how the guy who wrote the first book on How to Write a Book ever managed. Very chicken/egg.

Microsoft’s XNA Framework for XBox 360

The not-so-big news at the Microsoft keynote on Wednesday (aside from the Gears of War 2 announcement – whatta shocker!) was the removal of the membership wall to their XNA Game Creators Club. You’ll still have to be a Club member to push your game from your PC to your XBox 360. But now, once the Club members have vetted your creation (handily removing the burden of policing content from Microsoft’s plate), XBox owners at large will be able to play your game.

i say that this is not-so-big news because it falls in with the likely “what if” scenarios that Microsoft has been discussing for its XNA project all along. The next step, predictably, will be the integration of the Creators Club games into the marketplace, so that XBox 360 owners will be able to buy the indie games with their Billy Bucks, with Microsoft naturally taking a cut.

Kongregate

i caught a small panel with a Kongregate member early this week, having attended a much higher-profile talk by site head Jim Greer at last year’s conference. Kongregate is a site where Flash designers can upload their games and get a cut of ad revenues based on the popularity of their creations. Kongregate also funds developers a lot of money in limited doses to create products that integrate with their multiplayer API.

Sims Carnival

The people behind the outlandishly successful and ubiquitous Sims series have released a series of tools enabling players to build their own games and upload them to the Sims Carnival site. The complexity of their tools ranges from prefabricated formats where you choose a game genre and adjust variables to change gameplay – gravity, number of enemies, etc – to a much more complex tool that uses hierarchical nodes to manage gameplay elements.

Metaplace

This is the flagship product from Raph Koster’s Areae startup. i don’t know anything about it. Wikipedia says, cryptically, that worlds and games created with (in?) Metaplace will be accessible by any device that connects to the web.

Multiverse

One of many create-your-own-MMO tools, Multiverse is a mediocre-looking tool with very a permissive rights structure that enables you to create your own virtual world. The 3D worlds that have been created with the tool range in utility, from a straight-up shooter MMO to a virtual office simulation for new hires and a game that teaches astrophysics to graduate students in Florida.

The artwork in most of these projects rivals mediocre-looking 3D games from 2002, which is more than a little disappointing. Sulka Haro of Habbo Hotel fame always extols the virtues of his project’s retro-pixel art style by arguing that time is not kind to 3D artwork. i’m with him all the way on that. 3D does not age well. 2D has far longer legs.

Whirled

Puzzle Pirates microtransaction millionaire and all-around crazyperson Daniel James apologized that his newest project, which he announced last year, was still in closed alpha. Whirled is a very post-modern approach to virtual worlds, enabling participants to tool up basically anything in Flash to integrate in a visual space that includes mermaids, moustaches, mech suits and talking jars of marmalade. i can’t see it appealing to all tastes, and i’ll be interested to see if “design cliques” form, where fans of the medieval content band together, while the furries stick to their own corner of the virtual space (as furries most definitely should).

Like Kongregate and Sims Carnival, Whirled team Three Rings is hammering out revenue-share model for its creators.

Everything Else

That’s to say nothing of all the games that support player-created content, including but by no means limited to

Lego Universe
IMVU
Lord of the Rings Online
Second Life
Little Big Planet
APB

Admittedly, that’s not much of a list. The point is that there are many, many games doing this. i can’t seem to remember them all. After four days at GDC, i think my brain is full.

Game Creation Tools Even Mom Can Use

The key tip i’ve heard for creating tools that anyone can use is to build them with simple interfaces like household appliances. In other words, building an object should be as easy and straight-forward as making toast.

While it takes a lot more time to build a creation tool like a level builder that’s friendly and intuitive enough for all the toast-adept out there, it’s well worth the effort. Suddenly, you have a community of people willing to do the heavy-lifting of content creation for you. i can’t be bothered creating the game – here, YOU create the game. Sounds alright to me.

i wish other jobs were perceived to be as enjoyable as game design. Cab drivers could sit in the back seat while their fares drove themselves around. Students would throw themselves into their studies while their teachers kicked back in the staff room. Dogs would scoop their own poo into little baggies. What a utopia.

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.