Author Archives: Martin

What am I even working on!?!

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I have too many projects going right now. I wrote up these descriptions earlier, so I decided to post them. These are roughly in order of priority. (Although the last three are essentially just “on the backburner” for now.)

1) I want to get an update to Root Down pushed out that adds an AI player, as well as universal support. The AI isn’t good in any sense of the word, but it’s good enough to surprise me when I’m not looking too hard. I’m not sure if I’ll try and improve it, or if (more likely) I’ll just release it as is to move on to the next thing. (The universal support is about 80% there, and I should have that submitted sometime tomorrow or early next week.)

2) Last year I did some preliminary work and got my very first game (Go-Tetris) playable on iOS. It’ll be called ActionGo. Since the new AppleTV announcements yesterday, I now hope I can push this out sometime in the near future, with AppleTV support.

3) Similar to Root Down, I’ve had an update to ActionChess in progress for several years. Not taking the time to do it right means that I’ve got to untangle a large pile of spaghetti code to get it done, but the update will add 1) Universal support, 2) One or two minor added game modes, 3) A major new game mode that is more of a “static puzzle” game. I’m calling it puzzle mode, and may also release it as a stand-alone app.

4) I’ve got another action puzzle game in the works that is currently without a title. This is not a board game mashup, but does mash another game genre into the mix. I have an artist (possibly two) I’m collaborating with there.

5) I’m rather slowly trying to learn Unity. I have a project I’m going to make in it, since I agreed to work on a touchscreen version of Entrapment, (the great abstract strategy game by Rich Gowell). So far, I’m a bit hung up on some of the Unity best practices, but I can’t wait to make some progress when I can focus on it.

6) Finally, I have a series of playground games I’m working on. Don’t want to go into too many details, but essentially it’s a playground video game.

Hopefully I can bang out some of these app updates in the next couple of weeks, and focus on ActionGo until the new Apple TV comes out. I’m also experimenting with some cross-platform frameworks. I’ve played a bit with OpenFrameworks, and have also spent some time looking into OpenFL (HAXE). In theory either would allow me to publish games for iOS & Android at least, and whatever other platforms they support.

Abstract Strategy Game Description Generator

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So, I made a webpage/toy to generate a pseudo-random abstract strategy game description. It’s pretty much just mad-libs style text substitution, but randomly chosen from arrays of strings I’ve brainstormed. I started with a short paragraph and now it generates three paragraphs for each game. There’s a lot more I’d like to do with it, including maybe generate actual playable games. (That would be a lot of work though.)

Awe-full important

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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been citing an offhand comment some eyeo presenter made about the importance of experiencing “awe” regularly in your life. After getting over that slight discomfort I always feel when citing sources whose sources I absolutely don’t know, I’ve been finding it an easy justification for all kinds of actions and decisions I make.

So I did some googling. This interesting slate article by an “emotion scientist” suggests that the state of awe provokes thoughtful reflection and skepticism. This makes sense to me because I think one thing I find so appealing about “awe” are the big ideas. And big ideas give you perspective. If I’m contemplating the nature of the cosmos, that bug I’ve been working on for the last few hours seems rather less important. (Which I’d argue often helps to solve it, but that’s another blog post.)

This Atlantic article cites a Stanford study published in 2012 whose title says it all: “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being” This huffpost piece cites a paper written in 2013 with another telling title: “Approaching Awe, A Moral, Spiritual And Aesthetic Emotion.”

This quest for awe is absolutely why I made it a priority to go to eyeo festival this year. It’s why I went to Northern Spark last night, and stayed up ridiculously late looking at art. The eyeo presenter that I quoted said it’s why we go to museums. Finding awe is often what drives my decisions around what to work on when I have spare time, and what to spend my recharge time doing in my evenings and off hours. Now I just need to figure out how to trigger it with the games I make.

Entanglement – a new board game

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entanglementI had a strange idea this morning. “What if every time you moved a piece in a game, you were also moving one of your opponent’s pieces?” I don’t know of any other games that have this same mechanic. I present for you here, a very simple abstract small-grid game I’m calling Entanglement.

Entanglement Rules (1MB PDF)

BGG discussion thread

Edit: A bit more details about how this came about and playtesting (over lunch) with my friend Nate. Usually when I have an idea for a new game, I enter some minor details in a google-doc/journal I keep for that purpose. I make sure to record the date, and what I was doing when I came up with the idea. In this case, it was such a simple idea, the game came to me practically fully formed, and I went straight to a new file to write out the rules. I jotted them down in about 20 minutes, and got back to work. Then over lunch I played the game a couple of times with Nate, and immediately it felt too complicated. (Which felt weird, because it was already SO simple!) So then I revised, and we played a few more games (without the variant rules listed in the .pdf).

Overall, I don’t think this is one of my better games, it feels likely to be “solvable”, but it has some interesting decisions to make, and I was quite happy with my 10-minute prototype. If you play it, please let me know!

Asynchronous Turn Notification Thoughts

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I was recently asked by a friend my opinion about how often is too often to notify the player that it is their turn to play. I personally feel a player should not get more than two or three reminders total. I also feel like email notifications should be opt-in. (Push notifications are already, at least on iOS, but collecting an email at registration should not be license to send email turn notifications, IMO.)

I’m not sure if there are other options other than email and Push. It might be interesting to try an experiment where you make turn notifications tweets. I wonder if there are already any asynchronous games playable entirely on twitter.

So, sending a notification immediately when it becomes the player’s turn is a must. I also believe it’s a “best practice” to time out your games, and send a notification before that happens. I know I’ve seen other devs (who host their own games) post about how not having async games time-out also means there are thousands of abandoned games on their server that will essentially never go away. So when this notice is sent could be based on the time-out period, maybe when the game would auto-boot them in another 24 hours.

What Playdek has done is to allow the user who creates the game to specify a length of time for the game. This works like a chess clock, and the timer starts when you get the notification that your opponent has played their turn. (The options are 10 min, 30 min, 1 hr, 2 hrs, 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, and 28 days.) They only send one push notification when it becomes your turn. If the game times-out, you only find out after you log in again.

That solution actually feels a bit overly complicated to me, and I’ve recently started playing Star Realms, which has a similar but slightly simplified scheme where you choose a “time per turn” limit when starting a game. (The options are 3 minutes, or 48 hours.) With the 48 hour turn limit, you get a notification twice, once when it’s your turn, and another when you have 24 hours left to play. (They don’t badge the app when you’ve got pending turns though, which is just PAINFUL.)

For Catchup, I’m using the simplest possible implementation of GameCenter, which is not to have timers at all. (Timers were only introduced in a later version of the API anyway, and I wanted to support versions of iOS farther back than that.) The way their push notifications for async games work is super opaque, (and they come from the GameCenter app, not your app, which is also annoying), and one of the biggest limitations of using GameCenter, in my opinion.

One other thing I have seen, (but don’t necessarily endorse), is the ability for the user to nag the player whose turn it is. I can’t remember what app it was that did this, (maybe Trivia Crack?), but there was essentially a button that you could press in the app to send a notification to the other player.

I certainly don’t know what the best choices are, but I do know that there are different categories of asynchronous player with very strong opinions about how to play. For instance, vocal proponents of short timers who only want to play games that last less than an hour or so. Whereas I personally prefer to play games with the maximum timer limit, because, for me at least, I tend to batch all my asynchronous game play in one or two sessions a day. (And some days I skip entirely!) So player choice seems important.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to play with Parse for the first time. (Essentially migrated a project from using Google Analytics to Parse objects in a day.) I never knew it was so easy, and I have to admit that now I sort of want to use it for an asynchronous game. We’ll see.

Tetris hardware hacking

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted any Tetris stuff on here, and I ran into some interesting hardware implementations today that reminded me I hadn’t posted about L3D Tetris yet. So…

L3D Tetris

Last week at the bar after our monthly igdatc meeting, I was showing off the L3D, and took this vine of CubeTube user hape’s L3D Tetris. (Shortly thereafter, the official CubeTube youtube channel also posted a much better/longer video of it in action.)

Frankly, this existing was a load off, since I had already said I was going to write Tetris for the L3D. Now that I don’t have to, I’m focusing on some more original game designs. I should have one I’m calling Match-L3D playable later today. (Though I’ve been saying that for a few days, and I spent most of this morning cleaning up code I wrote last night when it was too late for me to have been realistically coding.)

My impression of actually playing it was basically that there are far more satisfying 3D tetris implementations, unfortunately. It’s just plain HARD, and can be really difficult to “line up” the pieces, especially the farther into the cube you’re looking. The L3D has a pretty serious problem with reflections off the plexiglass, and that didn’t really help with the playability either.

tetris_breadboard

LED Tetrises

Over at the HackADay blog, they posted yesterday about user Alex’s Arduino Tetris on an LED Array. That one was pretty plain looking, (not to diminish Alex’s efforts, I’m sure he learned a lot putting the project together!) That post links to a previously posted project (shown above) called Breadboard Tetris, as well as another running on an oscilloscope. But their blog is actually a cornucopia of LED Tetris links! Many more are findable by searching their website, including Tetris wearables, like this LED tie, and a sweet looking arduino bracelet.

tetris_and_dinoIf you want to build your own LED Tetris, there is an instructable you can follow, (although comments imply it’s incomplete, so maybe you’ll have better luck with this other one). Anyway, hardware hacking is getting easier and easier all the time.

Many of these projects post their Tetris code, and it would be a fun exercise (though not one I’m about to undertake just now) analyziing how they all go about implementing the various challenges inherent in writing Tetris. (Piece rotation would probably be the most interesting to analyze, although 2D grid storage would also be worth comparing and contrasting.)

I’ll leave you with this custom LED Tetris project next to an inflatable dinosaur. It’s a tossup which one is a bigger waste of space. At least you can deflate the dino. ;)

2014, a year of new platforms

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2014 was the first year I spent almost entirely working on games. (One or two freelance projects didn’t qualify, but the majority of them were games, which is very exciting!)

As usual, I tried to split my time about 50/50 between freelance work and product development. I spent a lot of that product development time in 2014 working on Catchup. And, as expected, I still spent the majority of my time this year in Xcode, working on iOS apps. iOS is definitely the platform that it is still easiest for me to prototype in, simply because I am most familiar with it, and to some extent because I can re-use code from previous projects. I think I did less iOS prototyping this year than in previous years, but there are still a few new projects sitting around that I would love to give more attention to (and release) in 2015.

But the point of this article is that I also spent a lot of time thinking about different platforms. And when I started thinking back on this, I realized there were a lot of them. So here is a rough list:

  • Unity – I’d “played around” with Unity before, but early in 2014 I spent a weekend at the Global Game Jam working with a rather large team on several games in Unity. Since I was such a newb, I ended up just playing pinch-hitter, helping out where I could, and in general learning as much as I could from the other more experienced Jammers. I left the game jam feeling like I could code a Unity game from scratch if I had to, which was far more skill than I’d had when I started.
  • PuzzleScript – In the middle of the summer sometime, a few of us at #Doughvelopment (game dev co-working on Fridays from a donut shop) started playing with PuzzleScript. Mostly this was Ian’s fault, but several of us ended up working on PuzzleScript games. I was intrigued mostly because PuzzleScript is a language written to encode a particular type of game (box pushers in the Sokoban family) as simply and flexibly as possible. I got a couple of levels into a pretty derivative design before abandoning it, (in PuzzleScript it takes a lot of extra effort to be original, I think), but I spent at least a day working in the web-based editor, which is just very different from most of the coding I’ve ever done before.
  • Board Game Development – I’ve designed a lot of board games over the years… but very few of them have had the sort of iteration usually associated with a polished (or better yet published) game design. Board Game Development is the process of playing and testing your design, then iterating on the rules (or as in my case, specific cards), playtesting again, and iterating again, etc.. The actual work involved ends up being quite different from game design, and this year was the first time I actually spent any time and effort at it during work hours. I’ve sort of put that game away for the near-future, but I do hope to get back to it again in 2015, possibly in a publishing context.
  • Physical Games – This year I had some ideas for playground-sized games, including one idea that stands out above the rest. That game is something that I now consider to be a long term goal to actually see played / implemented. It will be expensive though, which is why it’s a long term goal. Incidentally, I can think of very few projects that qualify as “life sized” video games. There are a few, but nothing like what I’m envisioning. There is a blurry line here, for sure (is laser tag a life sized video game, for instance?), but the point is that I am moving slowly toward a real life implementation of this game. There will be programming involved, for sure, but that is only a small slice of the project in this case.
  • Unreal Engine / Oculus – I do occasionally have ideas that are “bigger” than the 2D puzzle type games I typically make. Adding the 3rd dimension is not something I’m excited about, but sometimes I have designs that feel like it’s probably necessary. I subscribed to Unreal Engine ostensibly to start working on some Oculus games. (As usual, I’ve got lots of ideas.) I made a tiny bit of progress toward that goal, (got some of the sample projects working with my Dev Kit 2, as well as watched a bunch of Unreal tutorials), but ultimately haven’t really started coding anything yet.
  • Processing / Arduino / L3D – I’ve always been peripherally aware of and interested in the Arduino / hardware Maker movement. In the fall of this year, partly as an extension of the physical game I eluded to above, I started thinking a bit about prototyping games with simple LED arrays. Then the L3D project fell onto my radar, and now I’m super into creating games for it. There is a Processing plugin to stream signals to the L3D, but in my testing so far, it’s relatively bandwidth intensive, so while I’ve done a bunch of work in Processing already (a platform I’d only dabbled in years ago), I’m now moving the project to “native” code running on the Spark core that powers the L3D. This means taking a step backwards in terms of functionality, but assuming what I want to do is possible, (reading Xbox controller input from controllers plugged into a USB hub that also powers the L3D) it should be much faster, and has the added benefit of not requiring a laptop/computer to run it on. I’m waiting for a powered USB hub from amazon, then I should have a quick test for this shortly thereafter. Anyway, in the mean time, I’ll be playing with some L3D visualizations needed to help “juice” the games anyway.

There are of course infinite things to learn and do, even limiting your activity to “game development”. I made a deliberate decision when I went independent to continue working in iOS so as not to lose the “depth” of skill needed to pick up a full-time job again if Abstract Puzzle didn’t work out, and I’m definitely not going to abandon that decision in 2015. That having been said, dabbling in new platforms gives you perspective! And as hot as IoT is right now, it probably won’t be a bad thing to have some microcontroller programming on my gamedev resume.

Game(s) of the Year

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I’ve seen a few posts and tweets by game designers about their favorite games of the year. I thought I’d collect those and comment. (Maybe even compile my own list!)

It’s hard to believe that Threes! came out this year. Amazing really, considering how much time and effort was spent thinking about it, re-imagining it, not to mention playing it, of course. It probably gets my vote for game of the year.

I almost didn’t mention A Dark Room because it came out last year, but wanted to say that it’s well worth playing (as are all of these, now that I put it that way). Any game designer will especially like the “extras” that are unlocked after the first playthrough.

I got Stellar Smooch after reading this post, and LOVED it. It’s very short, and I was able to finish it in less than an hour, but everything about it made me happy. I did also pick up Woah Dave! on my 3DS, and played it for a few hours. Don’t think it would make my top 10, but it was worth $.99, for sure.

Monument Valley would also make my list. It was too easy, and I’d have liked MORE, but neither of those are reasons to deny yourself this absolutely amazing experience. It’s the best Escher inspired 2D puzzle game I’ve ever played. (I believe I also played Antichamber for the first time this year, although it came out in early 2013.)

The linked MetaCritic list is definitely worth reading. Cavanagh’s VVVVVV does take slot number one, and I would put it near the top of my list as well. I’d never played the game before (on any of its many platforms) and was absolutely blown away when I downloaded it earlier this year. I’m not even all that huge a fan of platformer games in general, but VVVVVV is definitely a game worth playing for the sheer number of ways platforming is re-invented (mostly around the central mechanic of reversing gravity at will).

After I read Adam Saltsman’s post in bed a few nights ago, I picked up Alcazar and played it until I fell asleep. Also, I’d completely forgotten that I wanted to buy Framed, so picked that up, as well as Hitman Go, (which I had been resisting, but is on sale currently for $.99).

Saltsman also mentions Michael Brough’s Helix, which I have played for a fair share of hours, and would probably make my top 10 (especially if limited to iOS).

Finally, after thinking about this long enough to write this post, I said:

Here’s the list with links: Threes!, Fantasy Life, Monument Valley, Dream Quest, Hoplite, VVVVVV, Poptile, Helix, Galaxy Trucker, & Catchup.

Hoplite came out December 21st, 2013, but that may as well have been 2014, I think. Galaxy Trucker has been around for years, but I’m speaking specifically of the iOS port that came out this year. We’ve already talked about VVVVVV. Anyway, off to play some more games!

L3D Games

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Screen Shot 2014-12-23 at 11.39.59 AMIf you haven’t already seen the L3D kicksterter, head on over there and check it out. As of this writing, there are still 13 days left to get one of these awesome LED cubes.

I’m excited to announce that I’m working on some games for the L3D. As of last night, I’ve got a project with 4 game controllers working with the L3D “simulator”. You can see one controller working with my sample project here:

I’ll be posting the code in the next week or so, after I get my cube in the mail and test on some actual hardware. The L3D library (including primitive simulator shown in the video above) is all written as a plugin for Processing, (which, incidentally, I’ve wanted to work in for AGES), so it was a relatively simple matter to get the L3D plugin working with the Game Control Plus plugin.

Now that I’ve got them working together, I’m planning on working on the following projects:

  • L3D Snake — a 3d version of this classic game, for 1-4 players — this one is practically done in my example code, just needs some auto-movemet, and an array of previous spaces for each player, and end-game conditions.
  • text library — I’ll be helping write a general library for scrolling “marquee style” text. This should help with displaying who won once the game is over, along with maybe showing the score, or even game selection, if I get around to wrapping up several games into a package of some kind.
  • some games of my own design — I’ve already got a simple color-selection territory game ready to go. This should look really pretty, as well as (hopefully) being fun to play. For 2-4 players. There are some other ideas I’m floating around also.
  • L3D Tetris — This just needs to happen. I’ve written a lot of tetris variants, but never a 3D one (though I’ve always loved 3D tetris), so I think it’s finally time.
  • L3D Invaders — A 3D space invaders could also be really fun.

I’m also really interested in the possibility of designing some turn-based “board games” using the L3D. I haven’t written anything down yet, but there are some ideas percolating in the back of my head.