abstract

Afer looking at jeff minters stuff im thinking maybe the visuals should be abstract and maybe I need to try making a trance level.

Jeff Minter on tutorials

" Back in the day discovering the nuances of an arcade game was part of the journey to mastery. You learned the basics from the label on the cabinet and the brief attract mode, but you learned the elite skills through exploration and experimentation, and also by watching and learning from other gamers.

Nowadays it seems that players expect every little detail spoon-fed to them in excruciating detail by enormous great handholding tutorial modes, and even though SG does contain a tutorial mode, a couple of goes of of which should be enough to teach any reasonably sentient individual the basics of the game, it seems that some people feel that the game requires altogether too much thinking, one website describing the experience of playing as being like trying to do sudoku under slightly unusual and stressful conditions."

from http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/blog/index.php?paged=2

Space Giraffe

Space Giraffe has some interactive audio, at 4:15 on this video you will see the bonus round, in which the player must collect flowers with "hoovers" eachof the flowers you collect makes a sound and they play out a little tune its all very relaxing untill Barney Gumble starts burping, I'd expect nothing less form Jeff Minter, creator of Revenge of the mutant camels.



in one of his talks Jon Blow of braid fame criticised the games graphics saying they got in the way of the gameplay, in respnse the PC version has the option of having toned down back grounds (see video below)

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6d367097-c280-43db-844b-9e092626c3e2&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Space Giraffe - level 22(NUXX remix)">Video: Space Giraffe - level 22(NUXX remix)</a>

Jeff Minter did a talk about his games and being an independent game developer at google here's the video

Art games and Not games

I found a cool blog post over at http://bluewyverntea.blogspot.com/ in which shows some cool art games and not games, check it out http://bluewyverntea.blogspot.com/2008/09/art-games-and-not-games.html



one of the ones he looks at is Echogenesis (http://www.echogenesis.com)a flah art peice that lets you travel through five scenes that you can interact with, the snow stage has music that reacts to your actions. I like the art style of this interactive peice and the wat it uses photographs along with vector graphics.

just had an idea for a story, you play a song backwards on a record player, and a portal to the afterlife opens up. in a serious non funny kinda way. as you go through the game you get lost and cant find your way back to the life you knew. you wonder if your dead, and consider the people you left behind......its a bit grim.

Kandinsky-inspired Little Big Planet Level

I've been playing Little Big Planet recently. If you don't know Its a PlayStaion 3 physics based platformer that allows the player to create there own levels and share them with other players. It's a very good game the jumping can be a little floaty and not being able to use the D-pad to move is a it annoying but otherwise its great, and its good to see a 2d platformer getting such a strong backing by a big company like Sony.

You can have up four players playing sanctimoniously which is great fun, I dont think my game would work so well in co-op as each player would be setting off difrent sound boxes and the reulting audio would be a bit of a mess. I guess I could make it so the player in the lead or the player with the most collectibles controls the music. I think ill concentrate on getting a good single player game done before thinking about multiplayer.

I have been looking at a lot of user generated levels for inspiration and I found one by
Richard "KirbyKid" Terrell he has created a musical platform level in Little Big Planet inspired by Kandinsky's Improvisation #1 painting.

Heres a liknk to his blog where he elaberates on the creation process.

http://critical-gaming.squarespace.com/blog/2008/11/24/improvisation-1.html

A video of the level.


In order to make the level sound like it does he had to put sound objects into the playfeild, here is a diogram he made showing where all the sound elelments are placed.



He also has some good tips on making platform levels

" * Check Points: I think everyone can learn from the example I set in Improvisation #1. Though I didn't put a single hazardous element in the entire level, I still added 3 checkpoints. I did this for a few reasons. 1) Especially in LBP, players will always find a way to kill themselves. The game is just too emergent to eliminate death altogether. 2) If the player ever fell to the bottom of the level, they always have the option of trying again and teleporting back up.
* So, if your level is more dangerous than Improvisation #1 by any degree, then you need to be sure to place check points that demark gameplay ideas.

* Level Boundaries: Make sure that you take extra precautions to seal off the "level from the level." What I mean by this is, we're given a very large space to create a level in. If you don't use all of that space, be sure that the player can't escape into the "no man's land." Remember, LBP is very emergent. Just because you don't think players can slip through the cracks doesn't mean they won't.
* Also, if you have an "elephant graveyard" of spare bits and broken bobs hanging out in your no man's land, then be sure to delete them. There's no point in wasting server space or prolong the download times. Just because it's electronic doesn't mean we should be wasteful."

Tetsuya Mizuguchi Interviews

Tetsuya Mizuguchi joined SEGA in 1990 and has worked on notable games like SEGA Rally and musical games such as Space Chanel 5 and Rez in 2003 he left SEGA, He felt that sinse SEGA merged with sammy he had not been given the freedom he desired, so he formed his own company Q entertainment who are responsible for musical games such as Lumines. Here are some interviews with him.







In this video he talks about Rez and how he was influenced by kandinsky it sounds like he struggling to say what he wants to in english.

Audiosurf is awesome

My first level

MY first level was going to use the track "my violent heart" by nine inch nails.




but its not going to be for two reasons my first is that I think having a rock song as the starting point might put them off and make poeple just dismiss the game as just another sidescroller. The second reason is that thease music boxes dont work the way I want them to. Check out this demo of a "my violent heart"

http://jackuchu.net/mediajack/plectrum/platform024v8.swf

as you can see when you enter one box the music plays fine but if you have another box inside that box and you exit one of them both peices of music stop.

I tried to figure out a solution but after many atempts at trying I figured the best thing to do was to leave it and concentrate on getting a level finished, conviniently that decition coinsided with me hearing this song on a friends Ipod.



Hide and seek by Imogen Heap, a perfect song to use as there are distinct gaps in the audio which I could cut up and place in difrent music boxes.

I found this live version of the song on youtube, seeing her extravegent set up is pretty cool you can tell she has telent cos shes doing it all on her own. I chose to use this version of the song in my game as it has a piano section that I think would add variety to the gameplay.

heres the video:



I ripped the audio from the youtube video using http://www.flvto.com/

I put it into premiere and cut it up adding short fade in and outs where apropriate, then put it in the game.

and here it is: http://jackuchu.net/mediajack/plectrum/platformx06.swf

heres a version with the music boxes visable http://jackuchu.net/mediajack/plectrum/platformx04.swf

These music boxes play the audio once and then dont play them again. The rotating stage was inspired by "and yet it moves" that I saw on the 1up GDC 2008 show I posted a while back. The audio that plays while the level is directly on the timeline.

My big pile of Video Game Library books

Jonathan Blow

Braid is a fantastic game and one that has influenced me in my game design perticularly this level entitled jumpman where as the player moves from left to right in the stage time goes forward and the music plays.



Braid was created and prgramed by Jonathan Blow with art by David Hellman (http://davidhellman.blogspot.com)

Jonathan Blow's blog is a great reasorse for infomation about game development he has made numerous apearences at gaming festival, he regularly puts up videos Mp3s and powerpoint presentations of his talks.
Jonathan Blow's blog: http://braid-game.com/news/
His apearences and talks: http://braid-game.com/news/?cat=3

Time management by Randy Pausch

Another lecture by Randy Pausch, this time about time management, wich I watched when I should have been doing work.

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch, a 46-year-old computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, a pioneer in virtual reality, a Disney Imagineer, an innovative teacher, and the co-founder of the best video game school in the world, , delivers one last lecture entitled “How to Live Your Childhood Dreams” on his life’s journey and lessons, as he expects to live for just a few more months from pancreatic cancer.

(words from khoapham.wordpress.com)

some choice quotes from the lecture:
- “And as you get older, you may find that “enabling the dreams of others” thing is even more fun.”

- “…so one of the expressions I learned at Electronic Arts, which I love, which pertains to this, is
experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted“.

- [flashing up rejection letters] “…the brick walls are here for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the
people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people."


Although its not 100% about interactive media it does have some cool stuff in it about virtual reality and the vitrual reality peice he shows about creating a world and it not wanting to be shut down is great.

He also mentions Alice an educational software that teaches students computer programing in a 3d enviroment.

"In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course."
from http://alice.org

World of Goo creator's rules for levels

While reading an interview with 2D Boy (World of Goo), Kyle Gabler said this

"1. No level can rely on luck or randomness. Luck causes frustration!
2. No level can be like any other level. Always introduce something new.
3. Every level must be visually distinct and iconic. Helps build them fiction of the world."

I shall consider these rules when creating my levels for Plectrum.

Full interview http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5839291477479315906

Today looking at indie games

1UP GDC Impressions: Indie games

This video form 1up shows some indie games from gdc 2008 including everyday shooter which I mentioned before as being a big influence another game which really cought my eye apears at 4:25 on this video "And Yet It Moves" a platform puzzler in which you can rotate the world, I think i may steal that feature and use it in some levels of my game.

John Mac the creater of everyday shooter mentions his influences which include rez and lumines he also mentions a game called poursec 47 as being an influence on him heres a video of that game



it looks like more of a shooter influence than an audio one.

finaly heres a thred on 1up discussing lots of indie games

http://boards.1up.com/zd/board/message?board.id=games&thread.id=550036

What I've been looking at today

Tokyo Game Show Sense of Wonder Night 2008

http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/sown/en/

--
Archive of multimedia theses papers.

http://dt.parsons.edu/thesis_archive/

untitled dystopia website

Alongside my game and critical paper that goes with it. I also do interactive media work that is not directly related to my course my latest time consuming endeavor is for Martin Lejeune's phoenix media bursary film "Untitled Dystopia" Which I make a cameo appearance in. One of the coolest things I fond while making this site is that you can load a webpage inside another webpage using iframes.

see it at http://dys.thebiscuit.org/

Will Wright and Brian Eno

Will Wright creator of Sim City, The Sims and Spore and father of ambient music Brian Eno Talk Talk about generative music and graphics. If you've seen any of Will Wrights other Spore demos from GDC or TED there's not much new here so you might want to skip that bit, but the rest of the talk is very interesting, I was hoping they would talk more about music in games but its still a good watch.

This is a video about human computation. At one point the speaker is talking about the ESP game a game google made that lets people play to label images in there image search, you have to try and type the same word as the other person and if you both type the same word you both get a point. Adding a simple message that said your partner has entered a name kept people playing for 4% longer, it shows how such a little thing can make people enjoy your game more and make them want to play for longer.

Super Mario Galaxy - Music

One of the things that inspired me to make a platform game with interactive music was this small bonus level from Super Mario Galaxy on Wii. As Mario collects the notes a note in the music track is played, I may do something similar in my game.

Latest version

http://jackuchu.net/platform015.swf

Why games are fun

When a game designer (or student) first starts trying to define why games are “fun” they have trouble even conceptualizing it beyond “I know it when I see it.” Then they encounter Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and/or Koster’s Theory of Fun and have this huge epiphany: Eureka, all fun comes from learning a new skill! Then after awhile, they enter another stage of questioning this: wait a minute, if all fun comes from skill mastery, why aren’t students driven by the promise of fun to get straight A’s in all their classes (even the poorly taught ones), since that involves mastery of the material? Why is sex fun (by some standards), and yet doesn’t involve mastery (ahem, again by some standards)? At any rate, you could think of this as three stages of evolution of a game designer, and different designers are going to be in different stages, and when they encounter one another there will be chaos when they start discussing the nature of “fun.”

Teaching Game Design: Lessons learned from SIEGE.

Latest version with music boxes

http://jackuchu.net/platform014.swf

My Game has a name

Plectrum

The little plastic thing you use to play music on a guitar.
I think it has a nice sound to it.

Plectrums could be the rings/coins substitute that you collect along the level.

Johnathan Blow Keynote

Johnathan Blow is creator of Xbox live arcade time altering 2d side scroller Braid, which personally I think is one of the best games of this generation.

He did a keynote at Australian gaming event Free Play 2007. In it he talked about prototyping and how should always be prototyping but dont worry about polish or looking fancy just concentrate on the core gameplay then you can see if it works or not, this was very inspiring as I was getting to cought up in the coding side of things and wanting to have the best prossible engine. I now realise that its the idea and gameplay that matters.

You can see the talk on youtube its 80 minutes long

heres the second part where he talks about prototyping

I have a new direction

Im going to contiue using the basic art based flash engine I have, insetead of using complex physics. I saw a talked by braid creater johnathan blow who talked about prototyping and how you shouldnt get cought up in the most complex physics or using the very best newest engine.

I was going to use box 2d, lll get more in depth about that later. I got a bit excited about it before realising how complex it is to edit and add code to it.

I need to look more about gameplay than code.

im going to look a theory of fun and mihaly csikszentmihalyi who is an expert of flow.

My father knows a bit about sports psychology (sports being games albeit athletic as apose to electronic) so im going to talk to him about that.

aparently there is a creative sound and music person who is looking to be involved in aking dynamic music for games, so im going to get in contact with him.

mars racer

http://jackuchu.net/racer/marsracer.swf

only random levels

Idea 3

Musical platform game.

Art based

http://www.jackuchu.net/platformer

Tile based

http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2008/10/24/new-tile-based-platform-engine-part-11-slopes-part-b/

Raytrace/vector/phisics

Idea 2

Create a game for multi touch table.
twin stick shooter could translate well.

Ideas

Finish Sparrow interactive storybook,
add more game elements.

tutorials

Is Jimi Hendrix a good level designer?

A few years ago at Game Developers Conference The guys behind guitar hero, Harmonix did a talk about how they made guitar hero they talked about how choosing the right song was importand and how some songs our great but just wouldn't be fun to play because because of too much repetition and lack of veriety in the song. This has made me think about what music I want to use in my game and how have to listen to the songs a difrent way and think about how they could be transformed into interesting game levels.

You can hear the talk at GDC radio http://www.gdcradio.net/2007/04/is_jimi_hendrix_a_good_level_d.html

VG maps

www.vgmaps.com is a great resource for finding maps of videogame levels when you see a whole level all at once you realize how complex some of these game stages are.

Here's one of my faverate platform gaming levels Flying battery zone from Sonic&Knucles


It's a lot more complex than world 1-1 form Super Mario Bros, possibly the most famous game stage ever.

Earthworm Jim 2

This level in earthworm jim 2 has music that is suited to the music very well you can see the sections of the level relate to bit of the music track although they cant match completely as each player plays the level differently but i can defenetly see a concection between level design and music.

Earthworm Jim 2 final level, See Jim Run, Run Jim Run.
Music, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata mvt. 3

MusicVR

Mike Oldfield famous for creating tubula bells the music used in the exorcist, created some virtual reality music "games" in the earley 90s the graphics are a little crude by todays standards but they still offer a rather unique expericnce, you can download a demo of the games at http://www.mikeoldfield.com

I found these threds on Rllmuk forum about the idea of games based on music albums.

http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=47771

http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=164513

An interesting Post by Talk Show Host

Radiohead's Kid A.

It would be a platformer in a world that is being destroyed as you play. Pastel colours, 2D scrolling with puzzles and action elements.

There would be a level where you have to construct a jigsaw ("Everything in its Right Place"), an escort a la Lemmings level ("Kid A"), an escape the destruction level ("The National Anthem"), an invisible level where your actions make it reappear slowly ("How to disappear completely), a level where you must plant trees to restore nature balance ("Treefingers"), a level where you have to escape Dinosaurs ("Optimistic"), a chill out level ("In Limbo"), a chaotic level where you shoot political figures that are destroying our world ("Idioteque"), a level where you must take care of small children and help them to live a productive life ("Morning Bell") and finally another chill out level with a maze where you are trying to find your way amongst the stars ("Motion Picture Soundtrack").

It would be an astonishing game.

The Fancy Pants Adventure

Just looking around the internet for platforming insperation and i found this

http://fizzlebot.com/TheFancyPantsAdventure.swf

Featured Blog: Hand Circus

http://www.handcircus.com/

"Handcircus is a micro-studio creating games and exhibits. Please bear with me as this site is very much in a state of flux!

At the moment it contains information about upcoming Handcircus games, such as the iPhone and iPod touch game Rolando, but also a lot of my previous work and projects over the years. (I’m Simon Oliver by the way, hello.).

If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to email me at simon [at] handcircus dot com"

Music in motion

I found this musical flash platform game called Music in Motion on youtube.

the first level isn't really that fun, no challenging jumps or item collection, but it does go to show that platform games and music can go together.

I looked at fan music videos and remixes to see how different people interpreted Nine Inch Nails' music.

Looking for music

On nine inch nails' website (www.nin.com) they have garage band files that include all the stems (different instrements, vocals etc)from each of there songs, released for remixing perposes, Im now looking trhough them and listening to the songs working out which ones would fit best in a game level.

a Platform game with musical elements

I want to make a platform game with musical elements simolar to rez, everyday shooter, audio surf etc.