Sentimental Gamer

Well, I finally caved in and bought Spore. It should arrive within a couple weeks.

In a lot of ways, it’ll be like playing it for the first time. When I started at Maxis last summer, I got to play the current version for a bit, but then moved onto another project. I was a bit surprised at what I played; as many have noted, the actual gameplay is more…. well… “shallow” may be a harsh term… more casual…than many had supposed it would be. Sims Universe it was not. So in a lot of ways, having played it already and knowing the lukewarm reception others have given it, I was hesitant to lay down the price for a new game for it.

But, on the other hand, if I do end up working at Maxis, you can bet I should know the game inside and out! Besides, I only got an hour or so on Space phase, which is really where the meat of the game is said to lie.

buh doo chh..

Somewhere out there, somebody just got the Raph Koster reference.

So I enter my final semester at Cornell, a bit world-weary. Ok, not world-weary, but perhaps jaded? A bit of a trick of memory: the past couple years are a blur, while my life before then seems more clear. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Stage IV (which supposedly will be on the GDIAC site soon) was really stage 1, I hope. Yeah, it was pretty worthless, but I’m not ready to go make GTA’s or Halo’s or even Spore’s for the rest of my life. The feeling is dimmer at the moment, but I still want to make things that are… awful, in the old sense. Spore is definitely in that direction, but I need something more personal, more human. I want to create dramatic, far-reaching, stunning games; heck, I’ll even settle for ponderous over another action fest.

A few problems:

1. I’m a programmer, not a designer
2. Related to #1, I’ve got grandiose visions of how I want my games to feel, but I’m sorely lacking in a consistent, fleshed out design to put together.
3. I aint got no job.

Maybe I’ll solve for all three (in inverse order?).

Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s the first instance of one of GDIAC’s games on my favorite indy gaming site that I can remember.

Wonder what it’ll do for Eat Your Young’s download #s…. I recall the game being pretty fun. It was one of the first that got me interested in GDIAC when I went to the showcase in the spring of 2006.

My sentiments exactly.
Note to universe: Hey you! Do you like playing games on your computer?!? Then you’re going to LOVE Vista 64 bit, where getting the blasted game to run is half the fun!

So, Macy got me The Secret for Christmas. If you don’t know about it, it’s a book published a couple years back. A nice way of looking at it would be to say that it is:

• A simple account of how you can affect your life.
• Filled with relevant examples of using thoughts to alter the world.
• A revelation of the deep mysteries of life that are understood by the world’s greatest people throughout history

My experience, however, would say that it is:

• An overhyped product of brand managers hoping to capitalize on the “secrecy” craze introduced by The Da Vinci Code
• A sad example of New Age misapplication of scientific vocabulary
• Composed of gaudy magazine-style glossy pages and illustrations
• Put simply, a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

But, ok, it was a gift. I can’t complain. I promised Macy that I’d a.) read it and b.) do so with  the greatest effort to take it seriously. 20 pages in, this promise is turning out to be much harder than I had thought…

*tries very hard to suppress critical thinking and opinions on scientific process of discovery and veracity*

Anyways, since I didn’t just want simply to laugh at the book and offer no specific response, I thought maybe I’d try to record my reactions to its propositions. So, here’s the chapter 1 summary points, along with my reactions: Read more »

Found here

Basically, it promotes the view that we shouldn’t be treating games just as we treat other software in terms of human interface. Other software is meant to emphasize efficiency and clarity, whereas most games are constructed to specifically create instances of inablity (challenges). I think the article’s argument is that it’s quite alright if we use interface awkwardness to create these challenges (ie: have shooting be slow and difficult rather than deadly efficient) rather than just modifying the game world to create challenge (ie: have opponents be more intelligent, faster, etc.).

I can understand that that might irk many people, and of course there’s a balance to be found (as always), but I generally subscribe to that view as well. In the case of Mirror’s Edge, I can’t say I know too much as I’ve only played the brief demo, but I was (at least initially) happy to find that gun combat was intentionally frowned upon by the designers. I think Halo, Half Life, Crysis, etc. give us a pretty exaggerated image of what handling a firearm is like; human’s aren’t robots that can maintain a steady line of fire as they run and jump and twist about. Not that my experience with guns is very extensive either, but the time I have spent with them tells me that they’re heavy, they give a heck of a kick and boom, and they certainly feel very little like you’d expect if you only play games. So if Mirror’s Edge incorporates this bit of reality into its design at the expense of simulated interface efficiency, sounds good to me!

Now, of course, whether or not that leads to frustrating gameplay in the actual implementation, I couldn’t say. The game certainly better offer a viable player alternative to weapons combat if it’s going it away.

And there was much rejoicing…

Huh… should I actually buy the game I got to play all summer for free ? Believe it or not, I’ve been wondering about this for the longest time. It feels kinda weird; I’m not used to paying for games of which I’ve been privy to the source code, but I guess that’s commercial game dev for ya.

It’s on sale for $40 at Direct2Drive now, but… *shrugs*. I have a policy of almost never buying games that are >$20… you’d be surprised how far your gaming dollar goes when you only buy indy titles and stuff that’s >1 year old.

Sweet…

Just emailed the final submission of this semester’s game, Comet. I’d tell you about it, but you can just go play it (if you’re got a pretty durn beefy PC… it’s originally made for the Xbox 360 and has no performance options ) from SendSpace (temporarily). In the highly likely chance that you can’t play it due to system reqs, it’s basically an arcade-y, abstract, planet-based shooter. And your’e a comet. It’s actually a fair bit of fun if you can run it, a fact of which I’m more than a little bit proud. After Stage IV, it was a relief to just work on something that is meant to be fun to play. Maybe we’ll be able to post a low-spec version later so more people that I know can download it. I tested the installer on a couple clean machines, and it seemed to do the trick just fine, so that component at least should be good to go.

So, with that done, I’ve now worked on and completed 4 student projects, and I’m pretty happy with the spread:

Fall 2006: Guardin’ the Garden, an RTS-lite game where you put down bug spray, scarecrows, and other silly garden defenses to keep out bugs.
Spring 2007: Music Monsters, an experimental platformer where you train little monsters called Zyks using musical input from your keyboard (my job was the music lab algs… yeah……)
Spring 2008: Stage IV, an pseudo-story-game where you experience the death of a man to cancer through the eyes of different characters.
Fall 2008: Comet, an abstract 2D shooter where you control a sentient cosmic guardian and fight back Spores, evil machines that produce deadly nanoparticle fog (don’t ask me… I just do the programming! ).

The latter two aren’t up on the GDIAC site as yet (though if I start bothering Walker about it twice an hour, maybe Stage IV will be, and Comet will probably be up in  few weeks). I’m happiest with the first and last; GtG turned out pretty fun and was a great start, and Comet I think is the most fun to play. Music Monsters…. eh…. it kinda got caught up on technical and time issues and so was buggy as heck when released. And Stage IV…. let’s just not talk about that, yah?

Anyways, now I can finally rest and relax and… wait…. what’s that you say? Three finals in three days?!?! Blast!

Glory glory hallelujah! Steam (as in, the Valve-created digital game distribution platform) hasn’t been running on my FX machine for a couple months! When I ran steam.exe, it’d totally suck up one of my CPUs for a couple minutes, then crash out, leaving just a memory dump behind.

I’ve been talking to Steam support for help, but I can’t say they really did much other than the standard “have you tried diabling blah blah blah blah…” that was already available on their FAQs. I was kinda surprised… I thought that they’d be able to look at the dump and find what exactly was crashing… *shrugs*. Guess that’s a bit too much effort to expect from free customer support.

So, since I couldn’t figure out what the heck was killing steam and really wanted to play my Steam games again, I of course took the sledge hammer approach finally and reinstalled windows (just the OS; didn’t blow away my hard drive). Voila; steam works once more. And there was much rejoicing…. *yay*.

Anyways, this fun little episode just made me think of the whole centralized vs. distributed system debate… the weaknesses and strengths of each. Sure, I like Steam because it’s a way to keep a lot of my games organized and accessible without searching about. On the other hand, if the Steam app goes down, everything connected to it is inaccessible. Just thought it was a fun example of this issue in action.

EDIT (12.13.2008) : Ahh! So the crashing bug returned again after I installed my Windows Updates (44 of them) and restarted… blast! So I just let it go for the night, but now (using what I can only describe as random and tedious trial-and-error), I’ve finally pinpointed the issue. If I enable the “AudioSrv” Service in Task Manager, which is described as “Windows Audio”, Steam crashes if I try to start it. If I disable, hey hey! Steam starts up just fine! Unfortunately, AudioSrv is pretty much exactly what it sounds like… my computer’s audio! So why the blazes does my computer’s audio service crash steam? God knows why…