Archive for the 'opinionated rants' Category

DS, Frames & iPhone

Published on January 9, 2011 in ds, games, iphone/ipod/ipad and opinionated rants. Closed

A DS and a good game is such a lovely little package. A modern game and nothing more, complete and contained within its little japanese clamshell. No downloads, no updates, no facebook status, no-in app purchase and no highscore achievement leaderboards.

I tend to think that to some extent the frame makes the art. It says, “this is it, this is a thing, here is the extent of it, consider it”. From that point of view a DS game is very well framed. The DS is modern, if limited, hardware featuring all sorts of input, good quality output and technical capability, but all of it balanced within a certain scope.

By contrast an iPhone makes for a large and very fuzzy frame. The hardware is technically very powerful, but capabilities varies between model. Even on a given device, resources are shared between many apps at once, always being available for cellphone calls, meanwhile checking your email in the background.

The internet encroaches, scores, open feint, game center, advertising or social media. Download an update, purchase the second episode. The game leaks into everything else and everything else into the game.

The incredible retina display is put to use displaying some bland 3D model, downloaded for free by a developer, sparsely animated if at all and clumping round a poorly thought out game. You can feel the game barely inhabiting the pixels, its hardly there. A strong breeze and it may just blow away, replaced with one of its 200,000 friends.

Finally and unavoidably, the only dedicated hardware button on an iPhone game is the one that says “go elsewhere”.

I’m currently playing “Might and Magic, Clash of Heroes” on the DS, and it feels like a very thoughtful gift. Given, once and wholly, from the developers to me (thanks Cabybara you guys are great). The sense of enjoyment, delight and investment in the game grows on the strongly given message, “this is the game, this is it, the whole thing is here, right now, in front of you, we worked the whole thing out and its all here waiting for you”.

However to make games and distribute them myself the DS is not really an option. Unfairly, but understandably, Its homebrew is closely associated with pirated games and there is only unofficial development tools available. By contrast the iPhone gives me easy access to an official SDK and a monetised distribution channel, both greatly appreciated gifts by me and a giant hoard of other developers.

So its seems like a challenge, how to cultivate the same sense of a packaged, complete and fully present game within a frame of such broad and fuzzy scope.

Programs, Ideas, Decisions

Published on July 27, 2010 in opinionated rants and programming. Closed

If the ideas expressed here abuse otherwise well understood terms in vague and inconsistent ways or are just flat out wrong, please feel free to copy and paste this post into your word processor and change it to be more agreeable to you.

Actually that sounds too harsh like I don’t care what you think, which is not strictly true. What I mean is there are plenty of holes and vagaries here to warrant correction or disagreement and you shouldn’t let my wrongness get to you.

Programs are ideas not code.

Programming is arranging systems to express ideas. The quality of the result is determined by the clarity and understanding of the ideas that inform those decisions.

Sometimes a distinction is made between systems and application programming. The idea is that systems programming produces programs for use by programmers or other programs (such as operating systems, libraries and tools) and that applications are produced for users. I think this is a false distinction. All programs appear as abstract systems to their users, application is the act of using those systems. The work of a programmer is to take a set of more abstract systems, shaping and hiding the possibilities inherent in the base systems to produce a simpler, more concrete system closer to the users need.

Application of systems producing more systems. Its turtles all the way down.

Programming is irreducible, there is no silver bullet or tool that can remove the programming from programming. Good tools, libraries and languages only help to clarify the task of programming and remove obscurities. They may reduce the lines of code you write but do not reduce the act of programming.

Libraries and components that are completely configurable do not contribute to your program. Their use and configuration is an equivalent act of programming to working without them. Complete and perfect abstractions belong to mathematics, not programming.

Code can be a liability that stands in the way of our ideas as much as it is the only way to give them shape and life.

Programmers, Hubris, Technology, Game Design

Published on July 22, 2010 in games, opinionated rants and programming. 2 Comments

(in which I argue for and against hubris and a focus on technical nonsense in game design)

Programmers are famously victims of hubris, arrogance and pride. Many of the symptoms are common enough as to be well worn cliches amongst programmers such as the infamous NIH (not invented here) syndrome, that drives programmers to re-create all manner of wheels ad-nauseam under the delusion that their wheel will be better than the many others available.

So naturally when I first got an ipod touch and began working with the SDK I immediately started implementing my own sprite library for 2D graphics on top of OpenGL. It was not better or faster than any number of other 2D graphics libraries implemented on top of OpenGL. Well, it did do batched draw calls, interleaved vertex data and was essentially fill-rate limited, but um, I digress.

These foibles, as well as a natural tendency to get completely sidetracked on minor technical details, are supposedly the enemies of game design. We are supposed to not be limited by technical aspects, instead thinking of interaction models, themes, and gasp, maybe even fun (don’t worry, that last one’s obviously a joke).

Historically though, games have always been closely tied to their technology. The first computer game designers were by necessity programmers (they generally did the graphics too). Simply getting primitive computers to create something compelling as a game required someone who could draw a bit of magic directly out of the machine. As machines got more powerful there was so much new ground to cover, scrolling, animation, 3D and advanced rendering techniques as each game strove to be better than the last, constant technical innovation was an integral part of each new game.

Now is really the first time in history where game design can be untangled from technology. Artists can create games using technology like flash, allowing easy development and deployment. Modern consoles are powerful enough to allow middle-ware to be used as the basis of cross-platform games, avoiding deep technical integration with the computer all-together. Large games are built by teams in the hundreds, most producing art, scripts, level design, interaction design all separate from a small engine team who deal exclusively with the technical details.

But I’m not quite convinced.

I still have the nagging feeling that the best games are built closely intertwined with their tech. I don’t know if I can quite put my finger on why but I think it may be something like this. No matter what game you’re playing the machine never completely disappears (essentially a manifestation of the law of leaky abstractions). Since you can’t pretend the machine is not there, acknowledge it, embrace it. Let its limitations and details shape the game as it has for so many before. Not to suggest that any game must be a technical tour-de-force, coded in raw binary etched by hand directly on the metal. Rather that you should allow an understanding of the technology to permeate and flavour the game, because it will, whether you intend it to or not.

Or perhaps am I simply just an incurable programmer and a victim of hubris?