My daughter Eliza, who is four-and-a-bit, is starting to help around the house. I’m proud that she, without being asked, removes the depleted toilet paper roll from the holder and fits on a fresh replacement before either throwing the old cardboard tube in the bin or, more likely, using it as a didgeridoo or decorating it with stickers.

I’m particularly proud because someone in the building where I work isn’t capable of doing this, and they’re all growed up.

Rather than going through the simple, obvious steps (unhook toilet roll holder, slide off used cardboard tube, pick up fresh roll from the convenient stack within arms reach, thread it on the holder, rehook the holder, take the empty cardboard tube out when you’re done to throw in the bin), they’ve chosen some not-so-obvious ones (start rationing the last remaining scraps of paper in the hope that you’ll avoid the hassle of being the person to replace the toilet roll by leaving one tiny dangling ripped piece of paper on the roll, thereby signalling that it’s Not Quite Finished Yet, or, in the worst-case scenario, retrieve a fresh roll only to balance it precariously on top of the fucking empty cardboard tube, resulting in a completely non-functional toilet paper dispenser).

This obviously annoys me, as small things often do. It’s annoying mostly because it’s not obvious why this strategy benefits the individual whom practices it. You see, it doesn’t require any less effort than the strategy which has a beneficial outcome for every (man) in the building, so why do it at all? When presented with two actions of comparable cost, why not choose the one with greater utility? Isn’t there an Occam’s Razor for responsible human behaviour?

Equally annoying are drivers who choose to signal that they’re changing lanes, turning the corner or moving into the freeway exit ramp while they’re in the act of doing it. I can understand why people choose not to signal at all – they’re actually saving themselves a modicum of effort. But why go to the same effort (of moving your hand to the signal lever and pushing it up or down) while, at the same time, completely removing any beneficial effect to other drivers on the road (that is, actually giving us fair warning of your intentions)? I know that when you were seventeen you were taught how to move the signal lever by moving it while turning the steering wheel (up for anti-clockwise, down for clockwise), but that doesn’t mean you should still be doing that. It’s not a rule, you know.

I try to give these people the benefit of the doubt, I really do, but it’s of no use. I think they’re just passively evil.

Research can be speculative or applied. Artificial Intelligence research is often both, trying to solve real-world problems while at the same time testing theories about how the human brain works.

A branch of the AI research crowd are interested in games both as a testbed for theoretical work and as a market for applied AI. Unfortunately, these are conflicting goals.

People play games to be entertained, and any AI present in the game must contribute to this. I personally think that AI enhances player enjoyment when it is both surprising and relevant. That is, it should result in an experience which feels new, yet which is consistent in the current context.

This regrettably suggests that AI is synonymous with NPCs, which is a mistake that both game players and researchers make. There are plenty of opportunities for non-NPC AI in games, and yet there is scant research being done in these areas. I’m referring to things such as

• a cinematic camera that responds realistically to game world events and player movement;
• dynamic set pieces, including chase sequences and fights;
• story events that fit the overarching narrative but which adapt to a sandbox environment;
• an audio score that foreshadows unscripted events and announces the presence of hero characters;
• large-scale crowd and vehicle simulation;
• adaptive character animation and movement;
• accurate matchmaking algorithms for multiplayer online games;
• elegantly handling dropouts with automatic AI takeover;
• automatic navmesh generation from a polygon soup;
• predicting player behaviour to counteract controller and network lag; and
• automatic exploit detection and prevention.

The problem is that the role of the (usually lone) AI programmer on a game development team often involves many tasks that get in the way of performing research, including asset acquisition, audio and animation integration, data production, tool implementation and support, multithreading support, optimisation, debugging and so on, leaving a perfect opportunity for academia to supply the research chops. What’s needed are robust, efficient, designer-tweakable techniques that are easy to debug, and which scale with available CPU and memory. Sadly these requirements are not a priority for researchers, and yet researchers remain perplexed that game developers don’t use some of the inefficient, unpredictable techniques that they develop.

You see, the problem is that your neat little algorithm might perform well 95% of the time, which may be a great improvement over the state-of-the-art, and which may justify publication, but 95% is not good enough when you have an audience of 5 million game players (as hundreds of thousands of them will see broken behaviour).

But the biggest point of contention between game developers and researchers is that we gamedevs think that cheating is acceptable. After all, a game is just a Turing Test, with the player deciding whether intelligence exists based on the behaviour they perceive, so why not use all available information to deliver on that promise, instead of placing artificial restrictions on what data can be used based on whether or not it would be available to a human player? It just doesn’t matter how the behaviour is achieved – we’re not looking for insights into how the human brain works – it’s all down to player experience. This behavioural approach is out of favour with researchers (and has been ever since Chomsky defeated Skinner), but is the core of pragmatic game design. Perhaps never the twain shall meet.

I’m not in the business of reviewing games, or even caring whether anyone else likes the same games that I do. Having said that, I wanted to share my thoughts on LIMBO, the new XBLA title by PlayDead, which is precisely the kind of game I want to be making. I had my RROD’d XBOX repaired especially to play LIMBO, after having my interest piqued by the video. Style-wise it’s right up my alley, but I also love the physics and animation, and the similarities to Another World and Flashback (two “cinematic platformers” that I enjoyed playing on the old Amiga 500 many moons ago).

The reason why I feel compelled to share my thoughts on LIMBO is that several friends have made statements to the effect that the demo was boring and that it’s just an average platform game with great lighting and artwork. I respectfully disagree, but I no longer find it important to convince everyone else they’re wrong (turns out you eventually grow out of that), and I appreciate having friends who have different opinions to me (I gave up wanting to be surrounded by clones of myself when I turned 8). So, rather than explain why everyone else is mistaken, I thought that I’d just try to explain why I like LIMBO, and why I think it’s more than a run-of-the-mill platformer with a pretty face.

Background

I’ve been playing games for 30 years or so. I used to be able to play Elite on the Commodore 64 from 5pm on a Friday to 5pm on a Sunday with few interruptions, but these days I have a wife and two small kids, which means I need to grab a spare 30 minutes here and there. The longest gaming session I’ve had in the last 5 years was playing Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube for 8 hours straight with the curtains drawn and the surround sound turned up, and only a six pack of beer and a few packets of chips for company, but that was Before Kids, and the wife was interstate at the time. The games that shaped me are Exile, The Sentinel and Zarch. I love puzzles, text adventures, the old LucasArts games and new games that favour atmosphere, exploration and narrative over precision, action and competition. These days I mostly play iPhone, XBLA and online Flash games. Yes, I’d like to try Red Dead Redemption, but I don’t think I can make a commitment to completing it. And no, I’m not a fan of the FPS genre in general. I do find many contemporary AAA titles repetitive and boring. Heck, I even thought Half-Life 2 got repetitive, and that’s supposed to be pretty good.

All of which means: perhaps it’s just me?

Style

The first thing you notice with LIMBO is its style. The animation, art, lighting and sound are all spot-on. Everything appears in silhouette, and a subtle vignette means that objects lose detail towards the edges of the display. In general, it looks like foreign arthouse cinema, and the typography used on the credits screen is consistent with that look. Everything contributes to an overall sense of foreboding. This puts you on the edge of your seat from the get-go. Something’s about to happen, and you don’t know what it’ll be.

Controls

The second thing you’ll notice is the controls. Or, should I say, the lack of controls. It’s the stick to move, one button to jump and a second button to manipulate stuff. Couldn’t be easier. No, I don’t want to spend time learning a complicated control system anymore; I don’t want that to be a barrier to entry. My time is precious, so I’d rather learn by doing. Character movement is fluid and natural, and platforming is as satisfying as it was in the original Prince of Persia.

Insta-Death

The third thing you’ll notice is the insta-death. Now, that’s often a sign of bad game design. But here I think it’s great. It never sets you back very far, and, although some instances (like the water) are unpredictable, you quickly learn the rules. All drops are fatal if you can’t see the bottom, so no leaps of faith are required. And many insta-deaths are forecast, and are therefore avoidable with careful play. When they’re not, the results are sometimes used to foreshadow a similar situation that occurs later in the game (one red herring is used to great comedic effect), or to form part of an intricate puzzle (such as turning the death traps against others).

Puzzles

These are what I really enjoyed about LIMBO. They’re so well designed. There’s no repetition, which is always so common in other games (as if the designer, happy with themselves for inventing a cool puzzle, decides to reuse it throughout the game, turning an original and fun idea into a chore). All objects that you can manipulate have a use, so there’s no blind alleys. And many objects have multiple uses, which is often really clever. Great puzzle design means that situations that initially seem impossible are surmounted after a little bit of experimentation, exploration and thinking. You get to experience that moment of insight throughout the game, which is very rewarding.

Game Length

I’m not an achievement whore, and I don’t care much for leaderboards, so, although they’re present in LIMBO, they’re not going to compel me to play through again. I’m very happy to have experienced LIMBO in 5 or 6 sessions of between 30 minutes and an hour each over the course of two weeks, and I found myself anticipating the next play session, as I do with the episodes of a great TV series. That synchronised pretty nicely with my wife watching some Mindless American Drama on the TV after the kids were put to bed, and didn’t hinder my ability to do other stuff after hours. Finally, the ending is really well done, and worth seeing. I will play LIMBO again, for the same reason that I watch great movies again; simply to re-live the experience. The short game length and lack of repetition benefits replayability greatly.

LIMBO is pretty, immersive and lean to the bone. An almost perfect game.

People like cleaning up. Well, not always literally, and not quite everyone. But, for whatever reason, there seems to be something that’s intrinsically enjoyable about reducing entropy. I enjoy actual, real-life cleaning up once I get into the swing of things, and then I can’t stop until it’s “done”. But getting motivated enough to start in the first place is difficult, which is why I wait until I can’t stand the mess anymore. Or perhaps I just want to give myself a challenge?

As far as games are concerned, cleaning is a common metaphor. Tetris is perhaps the best example, as are match-3 games such as Bejeweled. In Tetris you interlock falling tetrominoes in very pleasant, satisfying ways in order to remove rows of blocks, while in Bejeweled et al you remove gems of the same colour by shifting them around. In both cases, the essence of the game is arrangement and removal. There’s something addictive about sorting like stuff into groups, identifying patterns, planning for what may happen next and progressing by removing groups of stuff to leave behind smaller collections of stuff.

Postal Worker, the game that I was intending to work on at the beginning of this year (and which suffered ludus interruptus due to the Global Game Jam and the Interzone Fiasco, and is yet to fully recover) was based around this concept of sorting things into groups. I do plan to return to it eventually, once I finish the Kranzky Engine for iPhone. But, I digress.

I started writing this blog post because I was thinking of two important issues that both involve cleaning in some form, and which are both inspired by recent events. I don’t want to make a federal election out of it, but I have been thinking about both the government’s proposed mandatory ISP-level filtering of RC content, and of the shelved emissions trading scheme.

I first learned about carbon trading about seven years ago when I read, I think, “The Armchair Economist“, by Steven Landsburg, which is a study of how incentives change behaviour (with famous examples including the fact that mandatory seatbelt laws result in an increased number of car accidents – you’d minimise accidents by requiring everyone to mount a metal spike on their steering wheel which is aimed directly at their heart). In essence, the intent of carbon trading is to incentivize individuals and corporations to look for alternatives to their energy supply by creating a marketplace that will inflate the cost of carbon-producing energy to the end user. That is, the operators of coal-fuelled power plants will need to pay more to continue polluting the environment, and will pass this cost on to their customers, who will then have an incentive to consider other means of fulfilling their energy needs. This will create a market for greener (in the sense of lower CO2-emitting) energy production. Along similar lines, wouldn’t it be interesting to introduce a cholesterol trading scheme, to improve the overall health of the population and thereby to reduce the strain on the health care system? I kid.

The proposed Internet filter has proven unpopular, as so many of us are opposed to censorship of any form. It is difficult, however, to have a proper discussion around a subject that threatens to raise the spectre of child pornography (which is a core reason for wanting to implement a filter in the first place). Child pornography is quickly replacing Godwin’s Law as a means of nipping any debate in the bud. It’s similar to accusations of racism making any measured debate of policy regarding asylum seekers difficult. The truth is that censorship simply limits exposure to offensive material that needs to be deliberately sought out anyway, and won’t prevent those who deal in such material from continuing to do so. In fact, it may make it onerous to identify and bring to justice those who produce such material, as it will only serve to encourage them to go deeper underground, obscuring any handy evidence that would have been left behind had they traded the stuff online. The fact that the production of images of child abuse is a multi-billion dollar criminal industry is under-reported, and the success rates of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice are unknown. I want to know; we should all be in the business of protecting children everywhere. Just not  via censorship.

Enough with the depressing thoughts. Just cleaning out my brain. Please don’t get all Nazi on me in the comments :)

OK, I promise, last of these historic posts! The title was inspired by Andrew Braybook’s game diary in ZZAP!64 magazine, which you should immediately read. I wrote this 13 years ago, when I was young and stoopid…

Football

I went to a football game the other day with a few friends. One of them commented that the oval looked smaller than he had expected. I said, “What do you mean? It’s 100 metres wide and 200 metres long! Of course”, I added, “that’s only a ballpark figure.”

Axe Murderers

There was this news story on TV a while back about a young man who murdered his parents. When the reporter asked the obviously shocked neighbours about the man, they told him how quiet and harmless he seemed. Then one of them remembered how he had made constant death threats against his parents. Another chipped in with stories of him shooting cats with an air rifle. And then pandemonium broke out, as the neighbours started yelling about how he was a crazy freak, and how they all hated his guts.

Indian Food

Did you know there was an Indian version of The Beatles? They even went through a weird stage, hanging out with the Archbishop of Canterbury and playing acoustic guitars instead of their sitars. Here’s the lyrics to one of their most enduring songs:

Dear Sir and Madam, here’s your vindaloo
It took me days and days to cook it up for you
It’s based on a recipe I got from my mum
And it’s very very hot, so you’ll need to have some
Cucumber raita!
Cucumber raita!

It’s a lovely curry, with some lovely naan
(there’s some popadoms in the frying pan)
Sir, you appear to be turning pale
You’re an unsteady sod; so instead of beer
Cucumber raita!
Cucumber raita!

Words

Isn’t it interesting how words change their meaning with time? I was reading a book from 1895 the other day, and I came across a passage which read: “The chambermaid rushed sobbing from the room, followed by Mr. Dawkins, who was ejaculating wildly.” I was very offended, until I realized that the word “sobbing” has changed meaning drastically in the last hundred years.

Hollywood

I really hate those corny romantic American movies where, at the end of the film, the two lovers embrace in a public place and the crowd of onlookers break into spontaneous applause. I was in a restaurant once and this guy kissed his girlfriend, so I started clapping and whooping. But nobody else joined in. And then the guy said “Hey, what are you doing, buddy?”, so I said “I’m clapping man, can’t you see that?”, and then came on over and punched me in the nose. So that’s why I hate those movies.

Clothes

I was in the city with a girl, and she said to me, “Do you like the sarong that girl over there is wearing?”. I bellowed out, “What sarong?”, and a passing ethnic stereotype yelled back “Nothing’s a-wrong, mate! What’s da matter with you, eh?”

Ties

I have always found it rather odd that businessmen affect to wear their ties on their shoulders when outdoors in the city. I think someone should do a study on it.

Smells

I think the next big leap in technology will be smells. It will take just one geek to come up with some big breakthrough, and in no time at all everyone will be talking about the great new “smell chip”. Sony would develop a sleek smell machine, with their own smell format, but the other manufacturers would band together and develop an inferior smell format which would become successful through clever marketing campaigns. Televisions would be made “smell compatible”. If you wanted to smell in private, you could wear little “nose-olfactors”. Musicians would play special smell instruments at gigs, and you’d better watch out for the door-to-door smell salesman. Smell lovers would complain about synthetic smells, and they would harp on and on about the good old days, and how great the natural smells were back then. Computers would come with an optional “smell card”, and software for mixing smells. You could customize your desktop to have your favourite smell, and you’d be able to download new smells. When an error occurs, a special smell would be emitted.

Tattoos

The other day I pointed out a tattoo on a man’s arm to a friend. “That’s a Swastika”, I said. “You mean its not a real tattoo?”, she replied.

Body Piercing

I reckon if you’re lucky enough to have a big sticky-out mole on some weird part of your body, you should paint that mole silver and pretend that you’re into body piercing. People would express amazement at how you managed to get that part of your body pierced, and they would admire your impressive looking stud.

I’ve been lurking on a thread over at the Pigmi Discussion List that’s been debating the pros and cons of Game Classification, in the wake of the news (reported on Kotaku) that the Australian Government is working to close a loophole that allows unclassified games and applications to be downloaded and used on mobile devices. Coincidentally, I was contacted yesterday by Ben Grubb, a journalist with the The Sydney Morning Herald, for comment on the very same issue. I wrote this blog post partly to express my thoughts to Ben (his article has now been published online), and partly to respond to Nick Lowe, who expressed some opinions in the Pigmi thread which irked me. Nick has since written an opinion piece that suggests he had a change of heart before I’d had a chance to change it for him :)

Classification exists to allow consumers to make informed choices. The Classification Website states that games are classified to “provide consumers, especially parents, with classification information to help them choose a … game to play”. This implies that game classification exists to help us protect our kids, which makes it especially annoying when games clearly only intended to be played by adults are banned from sale in this country. Besides which, I believe that these kinds of recommendations are of limited benefit, and are often ignored by consumers. When deciding whether or not to allow my child to play a particular game, I’d much prefer to base my decision on my previous experience with the game, or on the recommendations of my friends and family.

The Classification Website states that “every film and computer game, whether produced locally or overseas, has to be classified before it can be made legally available to the public”, which means that most of the games I’ve ever created, including my GameJam entries, and the iPhone and iPad games released on the App Store by RocketHands, are illegally available in Australia.

Apart from causing some titles to be banned, this mandatory classification system, which requires game developers and publishers to pay to have their games classified, has resulted in some content just not being available at all in this country (presumably because publishers/developers choose to forego the expense of getting a game classified if it is not forecast to generate a large return in this market). This robs us from experiencing small, independent offerings which, for mine, are where the fun’s at. These classification requirements mean that many smaller WiiWare and Virtual Console titles don’t get a release down here, and have prevented Microsoft from making the Indie Marketplace on XBLA available to Australians. This is a regrettable state of affairs.

On the other hand, countless downloadable games and online Flash games are readily available, and, due to their entirely unregulated nature, sometimes contain highly objectionable content. The behaviour of the Australian Government makes it easy to accuse them of revenue-raising (by fining Apple, and requiring them to pay for classification) rather that performing their stated duty of protecting the kiddies (although I’m presuming that they assume their proposed Internet Filter will take care of everything else).

I think Apple should be applauded for flaunting the letter of the law, allowing countless applications and games to be available to Australians via the App Store, while satisfying the spirit of the law, by policing the App Store themselves, ensuring that violent, pornographic content is not available, and rating all games and applications to allow consumers to make an informed choice. Rather than complying with the Australian Government, Apple needs to fight for a shake-up of our classification laws. At the very least, games should be treated the same as TV, where the commercial stations self-regulate based on an industry code of practice (which is essentially what Apple has been doing until now).

What I’d like to see happen is for the classification process itself to be deregulated and crowd-sourced, with each game initially released as unclassified (and, therefore, unavailable to minors), and for adult users to submit the age threshold that they deem appropriate after experiencing the game for themselves. I’d predict a wide standard deviation of responses (which begs the question of why we allow one or two public servants to make these decisions for us), but it’d be great to be able to see the average recommended age for a game as taken from members of my social circle.

P.S. Note that “Plants vs Zombies” has been classified as 9+ by Apple, but that I’m still happy for my 4+ daughter to play it :)

Another historic article, from the 1990′s. Of course, these days you’d just look it up in Wikepedia, but that didn’t start until 2001.

Introduction

My fascination with Solresol began when I recently watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. My PhD research is focused on Language Processing, and I found the concept of a musical language interesting. I wondered whether Spielberg had made the whole thing up, or whether such a language existed.

I read all of the reviews on the Internet Movie Database, and I was surprised to find that none of them mentioned the musical language at all. Strange, given the part it plays in the movie.

Coincidentally, I picked up the “Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language” the day after watching the film, and read a paragraph on an Artificial Language called Solresol which uses musical notes as elementary symbols. My fascination had begun.

A web search turned up scant information. The only web page dedicated to Solresol didn’t exist anymore, and its author, Greg Baker, had changed jobs. After a few email exchanges with his former work colleagues, I tracked Greg down. Most of the information in these pages is based on the email he sent me.

History

Solresol, or “Langue Musicale Universelle”, was invented at the beginning of the 19th century by Jean Francois Sudre (1787-1864), a music master who realized that the seven-note diatonic scale could provide elemental symbols for a universal language.

The French versions of these seven symbols are do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and si, although in this document I use so in preference to sol, and ti instead of si. So, in truth, Julie Andrews should have sung:-

Do, a deer, a female deer
Re, a drop of golden sun
Mi, a name I call myself
Fa, a long long way to run
Sol, the closest star to Earth
La, the note that follows sol
Si, the Italian word for “yes”
Which brings us back to Do!

The words in Solresol are short melodies. I’ll represent words as a sequence of characters taken from the set {D, R, M, F, S, L, T}. For example, the word solresol will be written as SRS, which corresponds to the three notes so, re and so. The word itself translates as “language”.

Solresol may be spoken, sung, whistled or played on a musical instrument. It may be written compactly, simply by representing each symbol by its first letter. It may be signed, which is reminiscent of “Close Encounters” yet again; it may even be represented with the seven colours of the rainbow.

As with all a priori languages (languages which use an invented set of elements which stand for basic concepts and are grouped into supposedly universal logical classifications, based on scientific and philosophical issues), Solresol is difficult to learn. Even so, it became very popular in the mid-19th century, and won several prizes.

It was so popular, in fact, that the French army toyed with the idea of using Solresol as the official means of communication when on the battlefield. This is presumably due to the fact that pure tones may be broadcast over further distances than articulated speech, and the confusion it would cause the enemy!

Design

The words in Solresol consist of sequences of notes. Sudre planned to use seven words of one note, 49 words of two notes, 336 words of three notes, 2268 words of four notes, and 9072 words of five notes.

Words need to be separated in some way if they are to be decoded uniquely; for this reason Sudre decided that word boundaries would be denoted with brief pauses. This requirement tends to break up the “melody” in an unpleasant way.

It is also interesting to note that Sudre didn’t use all combinations of three and four notes. It has been suggested that this was intentional, in order to avoid repititious sequences of notes. In fact, in the information I have, only 42 two-note words are defined—the seven repititious ones are omitted.

Combinations of one or two notes form the participles and pronouns, while three-note words are used for the most frequent words. There are seven classes of four note words, called keys, according to the initial note. For example, the key of do contains words which represent the physical and moral aspects of man. Finally, combinations of five notes furnish the names of the three categories: animal, vegetable and mineral.

To allow future expansion, Sudre included an encoding of the letters of the alphabet.

Grammatical categories may be distinguished by the position of an accent over the notes, which means the note should be lengthened to indicate stress. The verb is unstressed throughout, the noun is stressed on the first note, the adjective on the next-to-last, and the adverb on the last. The feminine is also marked by final stress.

The opposite of an idea is often expressed by reversing the order of the notes in a word.

Dictionary

This copy of the Solresol dictionary began with a version sent to me by Greg Baker. I HTMLised it, and converted the representation of Solresol notes to an unambiguous one. I also changed the ordering of the words to Solresol order, which makes their grouping into classes more obvious.

One Note Words

These seven words cover the most frequently used words in the English language.

Two Note Words

Although Sudre planned on using 49 two-note words, this list omits the seven repititious ones. These words form the particles and pronouns.

Three Note Words

Sudre planned on using 336 three note words; this list has only xxx of them. These words are used for common words.

Four Note Words

The four note words are divided into seven classes, called keys, which depend on the initial note of the word. Each class represents some philosophical category. Sudre planned on designing 2268 four note words, although there are only xxx listed here.

Key of Do: Physical and Moral Aspects of Man

Key of Re: Family, Household and Dress

Key of Mi:

Key of Fa:

Key of So:

Key of La: Industry and Commerce

Key of Ti:

Five Note Words

Sudre planned on using 9072 five note words, although there are none known at this stage.

Acknowledgements

Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which got me interested in the idea of a musical language in the first place.

Some information about Solresol was obtained from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language.

Greg Baker was kind enough to pass on to me all the information he had about Solresol, after I found that his web page on the language no longer existed.

My recent work on Solresol has been aided by the information made available by Steven Rice, including his English translation of Boleslas Gajewski’s Grammaire du Solrisol.

John Schilke has mailed me hardcopies of all the information he’s obtained about Solresol in 20 years of searching.

My 4 year-old daughter loves playing “Plants vs Zombies”. So much so that she used watercolour paints to dress up as a zombie, frightening her parents when they arrived home from work. We use the game as a reward for being good, and a five-minute session sometimes replaces storytime before bed. It’s amazing to me that a little poppet who can’t yet read can grasp so much of the strategy, and can create a consistent narrative for herself that explains how and why she’s playing the game. I couldn’t resist capturing her in action. Take a look!

Another Perth Game Jam has come and gone, and what a huge bag of fun it was too! The mighty Simon Wittber once again outdid himself, making a fantastic venue available for the 20-or-so participants, who banded together to hack up nine games from nothingness over a period of 45 hours or thereabouts.

For me, this event was totally different to the Global Game Jam held earlier in the year. Due to the lack of other sites around the globe, I wasn’t spurred on by a sense of competition. It was more a case of manufacturing inspiration and enthusiasm by surrounding yourself with like-minded people and imposing constraints in the form of a deadline, a theme, and a “significant asset”. Also, the non-presence of that Louis Castle douchbag removed hate as a motivating factor, so I wasn’t keen to develop an evil game with Louis as the antagonist, as I did for GGJ.

Mr. Wittber chose to announce the theme and significant asset well in advance of the jam, giving everyone ample time to think about what they wanted to do. This was a great decision, as the amount of dithering about was reduced almost to zero, replaced with interesting discussions about several really promising game concepts. I went into January’s Global Game Jam wanting to make a flash-based game, which I’d never attempted before, and I used the time to learn how to write a game in ActionScript, using the FlashPunk framework, from scratch. This time, I knew I wanted to create a fluid simulation, similar to this one. I was pretty happy when I found out that the significant asset was a bubble, because that fitted what I wanted to achieve. As for the theme of “choose two at the expense of the other”, my first thought was the old project management adage “cost, quality, time: choose any two”. Kudos to Simon for choosing a much, much better theme than GGJ2010.

During the pre-Jam BBQ (during which Simon proudly revealed his massive cheese kransky, which both honoured and humbled me), I discussed two concepts with Jack, Nick et al.:

1. A resource management game called Gusher, whereby you send out geologists to explore land and sea, them choose a suitable spot to drill an exploratory hole, then build an oil rig to extract the crude, then refine it, store it to manipulate the market, then pipe or ship it to sell. You’d need to manipulate the media and the authorities, and there’d always be the chance of an incident (either deliberate or accidental). Each choice would allow you to fix two of the three cost, time and quality constraints, so, for instance, you would get an inaccurate report of where to drill if you sent your geologists out on a tight deadline and didn’t pay them very much.
2. A fishing game called Floater where you paddle your wooden boat across a turbulent ocean, choosing to stop and fish, bail out your vessel or move it left and right (only being able to do two of these things at a time).

After I began coding, I quickly realised that the fluid simulation would take a long time to code, and wouldn’t run at a decent framerate in Flash (I coded up a quick demo in C++ and in Flash, both using Box2D, to find big performance hits with more than 100 physics objects at once in Flash). So I started doing a little bubble simulation instead, using Box2D’s built-in support for buoyancy. This quickly led to an idea of a chef cooking a pot of soup on the stove, with ingredients being thrown in to raise the water level, and a game mechanic of merging like-coloured bubbles both to increase score (the deliciousness of the stock) and decrease heat (hence reducing the likelihood of losing an ingredient due to the intensity of bubbling, which would be the lose condition).

This worked out pretty well. Jack helped out with the graphics and playtesting, and the game mechanic came together nicely. You can have a go yerself on the RocketHands web site. Comments and feedback welcomed!

So what now? As I mentioned to Jack, Simon, Anthony and others at the end of the Jam, I treated things this time around as a great way of getting started on a project, rather than as a great way of finishing something off. So I plan to keep working on the soup-making game, which I’ve called Gusher2, until it’s at a point where I’m happy with it. With that in mind, here’s my to-do list:

• Ask Simon Boxer to draw some lewd cartoonish graphics, inspired by Muscle March. We need an attract screen, the main game screen in the same style, a win screen, a lose screen, and five distinct ingredients (celery, tomato, carrot, onion and kransky sausage).
• Add an egg-timer, and constrain playtime to 3 minutes, with a new ingredient going in every 30 seconds.
• Make the ingredients change the water level when they go in, and change the tint and alpha of the stock, to ramp up the level of difficulty as the game progresses.
• Display the current score somewhere on screen, and tweak the scoring mechanism to favour multi-merges.
• Continue to improve the game mechanic. Some playtesters have said they’d prefer to click on bubbles, rather than click-and-drag. So I’ll try that out.
• Animate some fire under the pot, some particles in the stock, some steam on top of it and so on.
• Add suitable sound effects, musical stings and… voice acting. Oh yeah: “My soup… she’s a-ready!”

After all that, I’m going to perform an experiment with online flash games:

1. Integrate with mochimedia. to experiment with in-game advertising as a revenue stream, to get analytics information, to keep online high scores, and so forth. Did I mention I want 5 different win screens, depending on whether you’re the top scorer, in the top 10%, and so on?
2. Integrate with Kongregate, to do much the same thing with a different API (mochimedia and Kongregate have an agreement to stay off each other’s turf, so to properly experiment you need to do both).

I’m hoping that integration with these services will increase re-playability. After all, competing with members of your social network for high scores seems to work. I’d like to give it a shot.

I want to get all of this done in the next four weeks. I’m working on three other projects. I have two small children. I’m building a house. We’ll see how it goes!