GBGamesI just found out from z425 that flipCode has closed. Kurt, the primary editor, doesn’t say anything about why, but at least the site will keep an archive of articles and forums.
I always planned to submit a screenshot of one of my projects to the Image of the Day. I always enjoyed that feature.
Up until now I thought Jack Thompson was being very specific in his attacks against Rockstar and violent video game developers, players, and distributors. I’ve read some of his emails in the past, and I have to say that he’s much better at grammar and punctuation these days. I am sure he gets lots of hate mail from people, especially from kids who can’t do much more than repeat what they say when playing Counter-Strike.
While my opinion of him was never very high, I always tried to assume he at least believed what he was doing was right, that he was doing his best to make a difference in the world for the better. I never liked the idea of calling him an ambulance chaser or accusing him of just trying to make money off of the fears of parents. He was just uninformed or misguided, right?
So when I read that a Miami DJ had to get a restraining order due to harrassment from Thompson, when I read what he did at a public debate with Janet Reno, and when I read that he compared ESA president Doug Lowenstein to Goebbels, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein, I can no longer have respect for this guy. There are people who legitimately feel that video games are teaching children to kill. I can respect their opinion and respect them as people. But the moment people get hysterical and start spouting off nonsense as facts? That’s the point when I make my last statement and sign off.
Unfortunately, the media doesn’t care about Godwin’s Law. Thompson can make all the claims he wants, and it seems he will continue to be taken seriously. EA and Maxis are conspiring to peddle vile to children? Studies show that children’s brains can be damaged by violent media? Seriously?
And all of his (mostly unprovoked!) ad-hominem attacks against gamers and reporters? He claims that the agitated and emotional responses he gets in return are proof that video games have an adverse effect on attitudinal behaviors.
Jack Thompson as The Pot: Hey, Kettle, you’re BLACK!
I also can’t understand this at the bottom of his site “If you have kids, have them start shooting hoops instead of humans.” Why isn’t anyone outraged at the insinuation that parents are pushing their children to shoot people? I mean, if it is just a matter of parents pushing their children to play sports, what other interpretation is there? Or maybe it is just a sly way of admitting that it is the parents who let their children play these games, that the children aren’t just picking up Grand Theft Auto from the proverbial Streets?
I still don’t like the idea of calling him a nutcase or crazy or question his sexuality or anything personal like that. Why? Because I refuse to bend down to his level. Sure, in politics, emotion trumps reason, but maybe I’m just an idealist who thinks that that calling my opponent names isn’t going to help in the higher debate. I was able to communicate with the Illinois state governor’s office, and both parties were quite respectful. No one accused me of being a nerd or on drugs. We disagreed, but I didn’t send threats to kill anyone or sue them for contacting me back. We didn’t call each other names or question sexualities. Even when emotion did enter it, it was at least related to the damn issue. It was civilized.
It is clear that Thompson can’t handle this level of respect when in a debate. Either you must agree with him, or you’re an idiot. I’m waiting for him to call someone a doodoo head next.
So I won’t bend down to his level by calling him names that are unwarranted or irrelevant, but I will say he is disrespectful, dishonorable, and manipulative. Even if I ignore his opinions on violence in video games, his actions and his words have demonstrated to me that he is not worthy of real debate or real discussion. He can’t seem to handle a civilized discussion.
I have a free account on itsyourturn.com, which is a great site to play games like Chess and Jamble (a Scrabble-like game) among others. Basically, you can play against real people without requiring them to be there in real time. You make a move and an email will be sent to your opponent if he/she does not move within a few minutes. It’s a great way to keep up with people, too. You can send messages to your friends, startup new games, or just talk about whatever. There are tournaments and multiple variations on games. I don’t play against many people, so I almost never hit the free account’s move limit, but you can pay a membership fee to get more benefits.
I always suspected that IYT was a small team. I knew it couldn’t be some large corporation, but I always wondered if it was just a few people working out of an apartment or something. It didn’t seem like an overly complex website, either, so it didn’t seem to require much more than maintenance. The site never betrayed any information. There was never an about page, never any info on the people behind it, etc.
Then disaster struck.
Friday August 19, 2005
We have experienced a major disk crash, and our backup is also unusable.
While we are trying to retrieve what’s left on the disk, the prognosis does not look good. We will be down for a few days at least, and this may be as long as 2 weeks. If it takes that long, your membership will be extended by a similar time.
It’s still down as of this writing. More updates were posted periodically, but the best ones weren’t the cold/professional “We’re working on this issue as fast as we can. Thank you for your patience”. The best updates were along the lines of:
When these things happen, some of you email us and ask us why aren’t we smarter or why don’t we work harder. We understand that this is a huge inconvenience for you, that you paid for this product, and any abuse we receive is well-deserved. Please understand that we do not do this intentionally. Given a choice, we would prefer not to have to go through this. We experienced what was almost a “perfect storm” of events that destroyed both our main disk and our backup file (which are on completely separate RAID disk units) at the same time.
We are working as hard as we can to get the site back online as quickly as possible. Please check here for more updates (I will try to post updates several times a day, but please understand that we are spending most of our time trying to fix the system).
“…any abuse we receive is well-deserved.” When was the last time your game company admitted to a fault and said, “Yes, we were bone-headed, and nothing we can say will make up for that”? They even opened up a blog to let people not only know what was happening but also let them comment about it!
In the first couple of entries, comments were VERY negative; however, very supportive fans arrived in force. A number of people expressed anger over a number of a issues over the years (and some very personal attacks were made as well), but most of the people informed the company that they will be patient and will renew membership.
Wow. You can’t buy that kind of loyalty. Something goes wrong, and the team of IYT are honest and open about it. No hiding or trying to be “professional”. Some people get turned off by the company, but most people stand by it. IYT may have had a huge disaster, but they did the right thing by being open about it. It’s actions like this that result in the real fans standing up and coming to the rescue. That’s passion.
Usually when I talk to people about making games, I will say that I have plans to start my own game company. In general, I had the idea that I would start out by filing as an LLC, which is a limited liability company. I didn’t think that incorporating was necessary or even desirable, as I would be a one man company. An LLC allows me to keep it as simple as a sole proprietorship while getting the liability protection of a corporation.
Which is all well and good, but I haven’t really been doing anything about it. I can’t always plan to start my own game company. At some point I have to actually start it. Looking at my written goals, I don’t see anything that says, “Incorporate GBGames by MONTH DATE, YEAR”.
I think the reason why I didn’t put it up as a specific thing to do is because I just assumed I would handle it when I had games to sell. Why create a formal company when I’m still trying to make something for the company to make revenue from?
Then a friend of mine incorporated his company recently. I can see that many of his expenses can actually be applied towards his taxes, many expenses that I myself have. Also, he is really kicking into gear with his business. At the moment I can take my time since nothing is pressing me to make games or try to sell them, but if I had a formal company, it would force me to actually do something. I’d get a feeling of urgency since I have a business to run. So maybe incorporating now wouldn’t be too early.
I’m not sure of the answer, so I need to update my research on this topic. Did double taxation laws change this past year? Are LLCs still the best compromise? Any reason why a formal corporation would be better? Should I form a company before a product is actually created? What responsibilities do I need to take on if I do create a formal company? There are quite a few questions, but at the very least it gives me a new set of topics to blog about. B-)
Last year someone posted on a forum that they have hundreds of game ideas. At the time, I had set of game project folders that I setup for each idea I had. I thought that the point of having a game idea was to allow that idea to become a real game. Maybe the developer on the forum was exaggerating, but I still think that coming up with lots of ideas is better than coming up with fewer. Coming up with many ideas is something that has been repeated by quite a few people ranging from motivational speakers to successful authors. Of course, if I continued to do what I was doing when I came up with an idea, I would have a very large and mostly useless Projects directory on my computer.
I started to keep track of my ideas in a simple text file. I basically come up with a simple name of a potential project, and then give one line describing how it plays. I avoid using genre specific terms. I am not coming up with an RPG or a puzzle game. I basically say what the game is supposed to be like. Here’s 3 and 1/3 cents worth of examples from my Ideas.txt file:
It’s a completely random jumble of ideas, and I get inspiration from anywhere. Elevator Rush came about when I thought about Elevator Action and Sim Tower at the same time. When I was collecting eggs in Harvest Moon, I thought about how funny it would be to throw them at passerby, and so Egg Fight became an idea. Pedestrian is basically a real life game for anyone who leaves work at rush hour downtown in a major city, and I’ll admit to thinking about having samurai swords and fighting against hordes of the undead rushing upon me, but that’s a different idea completely. A lot of my ideas are just the result of random doodles, so I might suggest investing in a 35 cent notebook. The ROI can be great.
Anyway, while some of the simple descriptions might bring to mind specific genres that they fit best, nothing requires it to be this way. Spend My Money could be a game show, a turn based strategy game, or an action platformer. I’m not interested in the details like story or character design. These are just game ideas. When I am ready to make a game, I can look through my listing and pick one or three things that sound interesting and come up with a decent game design.
I don’t have hundreds of them yet, but whenever I update it, I try to add five ideas at a time. Even if I only came up with one idea randomly, when I record it, I try to get myself to make up four more to go with it. If I discipline myself to come up with just 5 ideas a day, that’s 35 new ideas a week. Hundreds of ideas doesn’t sound hard at all, and obviously having many ideas to choose from makes getting a winning idea more likely.
It’s long, but don’t let that fact turn you off. Read How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press And How The Gaming Press Wants To Use and Abuse You to get not only good tips on how to get better press coverage for your game but also to read some interesting anecdotes about Introversion Software, Peter Molyneux, and what it is like to work in the gaming press.
From my own experience working as a reviewer for Game Tunnel, I have to say that I was always impressed by companies that sent out packages, complete with press releases and hint guides. While most companies only offer a download option, receiving actual, physical mail was always cooler. I don’t usually get packages unless I order something, so receiving big packages filled with the latest gaming goodness always stood out for me. Of course, I’m not a member of a major game magazine who may receive lots of mail and think it is old hat. Still, sending your game means that it has a chance of getting covered. Why reduce your chances to 0% by not sending it at all?
I didn’t know that Donald Trump had a blog, and I never really paid attention to him anyway. “You’re fired!” was never really a catch phrase I cared about, and I always thought that he was just an incredibly rich guy. No reason to care one way or the other about him, right? I find it funny how many of the comments on his blog are just people throwing compliments left and right. Not just compliments, either. Worship is probably not too strong a word to describe it.
Anyway, I did enjoy reading Success with Style, where he essentially talks about how true beauty is deep. Success comes with style, and style isn’t something you can slap on as an afterthought. It has to be there throughout the design and development of whatever endeavor you are taking on.
While he wasn’t talking about game development, I think that if you were to make a game and try to add higher poly counts or orchestral sounds without truly paying attention to how it fits into the game, you would have something superficial, and people will know. Generally, it is understood that a good game isn’t just good graphics, although I have been surprised to find people who thought it was the most important thing in a game. Of course, it isn’t like there is a definite formula for making a good game since the definition is different for so many people. Still, I think that if you keep style in mind, how can you go wrong?
Now we just need to decide on exactly what style means, and we’ll be all set. B-) Maybe this is related to a timeless way of game design?
While working on Oracle’s Eye, I learned something new about the Kyra Sprite Engine. For some time I’ve wondered how I would load sprites from a script. Normally, I would load a sprite resource with:
GetSpriteResource( Char_Player)
where Char_Player is a constant defined in a .h file generated by Kyra’s Sprite Editor. While I could write a file to load the U32 that the constant referred to, it seemed unwieldy to have a script file that looked like:
Player 1 < < 0
Enemy 2 < < 0
...
I would think that updating such a file would be confusing, if not a nightmare.
So while perusing the code files looking for information on how to do something else entirely, I saw that the test programs provided with Kyra had lines that looked like:
bigRes = engine->Vault()->GetSpriteResource( "LARGE" );
medRes = engine->Vault()->GetSpriteResource( "MED" );
smallRes = engine->Vault()->GetSpriteResource( "SMALL" );
I was excited that I could apparently load sprites by name, but I didn’t remember seeing anything about how to do it in the documentation. I looked more closely and found something about how to refer to a sprite’s action by name, but not the sprite itself. After some more hunting through the code, API, and documentation, I figured it out.
The name of the constant Character_Player was made by creating a sprite called Player. Character_ was just a prefix I used for all characters. Kyra allows me to refer to the name of the sprite as “Player”, however. So:
GetSpriteResource( Char_Player)
is interchangeable with
GetSpriteResource( "Player")
and naturally that means that I can do something like this:
string name = GetEntityName();
GetSpriteResource( name.c_str() );
Voila! Sprite loading by script is possible! The only thing I need to do is make sure that the names that I give my sprites using the Sprite Editor are the same as the names in my script, but it is definitely better than syncing the names with things like ( 1 << 0 ).
I don’t play WoW, but I thought this thread on their forums was hilarious: Son owned by Mother
An iPod Sheep Fights Back at Creating Passionate Users made me laugh. It was funny to me because it was a shrill defense against the accusation that only sheep would pay so much more money for an iPod (or Mac hardware in general) just to look cool. The Ignorance Premium, as Hugh McLeod refers to it as.
Why is the iPod so successful when perfectly fine alternatives exist? I don’t pretend to know, as I am one of the three in the world who don’t own one. But as I understand it, it is supposed to be the best form and function. It’s not just cool. It’s sexy.
And almost everyone has one. That’s what is so mind-boggling about it. If everyone has one, then how can everyone be sexy? But there it is. And people are willing to play extra for it.
Nevermind the DRM. Nevermind the issues with replacing a battery. Nevermind the need to choose between hard drive OR music player. Nevermind the lack of .ogg support. Nevermind that you can’t transfer music between friends that the local band told you was perfectly fine to do. People will pay a premium for the “best” music player, best being defined somewhere, I’m sure.
I’m fairly cost-concious. I didn’t shell out extra for a Starter jacket when I was younger even though everyone else had one and they all made fun of me for it. I didn’t think much of “diamonds” in my gym shoes, especially since those shoes were always heavier than mine. I didn’t even want to pump on my shoes. And I didn’t rush out to buy an iPod, partly because I haven’t been all that into music and so didn’t exactly have a portable CD player to replace anyway, and partly because of the neverminds I list above.
But wait. There was one thing that I fell in love with when I first experienced it. When Starfox 64 came out for N64, I remember praising the Rumble Pak that came bundled with it. Friend didn’t “get it” when I told them about it. “Wait, let me get this straight. While you play, this thing makes the controller shake? Um…so?” Since only a few games had rumble compatibility, no one was rushing to get one. Of course, once I let someone play, they quickly loved it too. Today, if a console doesn’t have controllers that “just shake while you play the game” it would be found lacking. I even bought a Logitech joystick that had force feedback.
But hey, I’m totally different from those iPod sheep. Force feedback was cool. B-)