Check out the Protonaut alpha.

The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. During the day Mike and I have been hitting Liferaft pretty hard and on the nights and weekends I’ve been chipping away at Protonaut with Andy. I’m having a ton of fun on both projects though, which is why things are so booked.

Andy’s been burning through his lists ever since he wrangled in a Box2D bug that was holding him up, so we’ve got tons of stuff going on now, including a working level editor, places to share levels/ideas and much more. Right now we’ve got a handful of dedicated alphanauts [as I call them] creating awesome levels and giving continuous feedback on the game. If you’re interested, check out these links below to get involved! This is a community based game so we need all the help we can get.

If not, you can at least give the alpha a quick glance here at http://protonaut.net. Do know that this is an alpha, bugs might be present, features will be missing, levels could be empty, and fun may be sparse. The object of the game at this point is to collect all the gases [circular objects] in any given level. We’re still growing the game, experimenting with different objectives, but I think these basic rules are fairing pretty well so far.

• Play Protonaut
• Browse levels [sorted by rating]
• Chat with us: irc.coldfront.net @ #protonaut
• Protonaut forums
• Andy’s devlog

Also, I came up with this website mockup for protonaut.net. It should replace the placeholder site fairly shortly.

Can you conquer the Liferaft Slalom Challenge?

Liferaft is coming along, it’s been a bumpy road for a number of reasons, most of them due to the design and its ethereal nature. But recently it’s really been shaping up and making levels is a snap now. So today I set out to start my idea for Act I of Liferaft. Our hero starts out imprisoned or forgotten in a pit somewhere isolated. Magically a rope drops and you have to use it to get out of the pit. So that’s what I started with. The first iteration was too easy and boring, the next few were probably closer to realistic but I wanted to make something crazy challenging that would reflect how hard it would be to get out of this immense pit she’s been living in all her life.

I was thinking about Driver actually and how much I loved the starting sequence/tutorial of that game [as well as the entire thing]. You were stuck in this garage pressed with what seemed like monumental challenges at the time. But eventually you got out of there and you felt unleashed. Like you were a kickass Driver ready to own the road with all your newly learned moves.

So the level I set up is a much more condensed version and really just to get a starting point for what I’d like this to be. It’s waaay too hard and not really all that interesting at the moment, but I spent most of my day trying to beat my own challenge. I took it a step further and tried to make a slalom out of it by limiting “victory” to something only that was completing a true slalom course. I’ve only really made it to the top a handful of times and only once with the “slalom” in mind.

Play the Slalom Challenge [choose level 1].

Using the fishbowl to your advantage.

This has been sitting around in the dusty Drafts section for ages now. I haven’t posted in a while so I thought I’d give it the nod and send it to the Majors. You’ve been warned.

Fishbowling is a concept well-known to people that take on projects under a certain time-frame. Urban dictionary failed me with a proper definition, but basically the idea behind fishbowling is that if you are given a certain amount of time to complete a set of tasks that you’ll take the entire time to do it. Lots of things feed into this. Procrastination, perfectionism, feature-creep and so on and so forth. In terms of game development, fishbowling can be very bad. But it doesn’t have to be.

Admitting this tendency is the first step to overcoming it. Once you admit that you’re powerless to the “just one last little thing” disease, only then can you begin to harness its true power. It’s actually pretty easy if you’ve got the willpower. I’ll forgo the Frodo reference here [even though its perfect] and yield to my better judgment.

Armed with this knowledge, it’s time to setup your plan. And this coicides with the “sprint” ideology behind Agile or Scrum, but those often get lost in the shuffle because they are far too sterile. Getting shit done is messy, it’s a ton of work and an elaborate plan is ultimately a waste of time you could have spent doing shit. DISCLAIMER: I work in a small team, like sometimes it’s just me [smallTeams > bigTeams]. But even if you do wield a big team that needs constant management and clear meetable goals, a huge plan and project management software doesn’t get to the real issue about what’s hard about either finishing a project or letting it finish you. It’s finding the will to do what needs doing that’s tough.

The problem with project management software [for me] is that it’s too specific. Each sprint has a reasonable amount of items contained within it. If it gets overloaded it’s specifically designed to stop you from making a mistake and overloading. On the surface, that would seem to work really well for projects. All you need to do is know every last little thing that you’ll need to do. Oh. Whoops. I guess I don’t, I mean I have an idea, in fact a pretty clear idea for the most part. But those clear ideas cannot be broken down into smaller tasks, sub-tasks, dependencies and so on [let alone how many hours each one will take].

So… say I’m redesigning a website, the intuition website to be exact, and I’m estimating how long it will take. It should probably take a couple weeks of work, max.

1. Make up a quality mockup.
2. Refine the mockup into finished graphics.
3. Restructure the CSS and implement the new tags and graphics.
4. Setup any extraneous plugins and other features we want.
5. Then take another pass and polish up any rough edges.

Seems pretty straightforward. Of course, within all of those items there are a plethora of tasks that may take quite awhile on their own. Polish being the main offender. If I were to plan this out over 2 weeks, the early stages may take way longer than they really need to. I could make up 20 mockups because I’d have the time to do so. Or maybe I’d get satisfied with the mockup early on and call it a day because I got that checked off. Regardless, what really only needs to take a day or two might end up taking 5 days because I’ll give myself that amount of time in the plan. A low percentage of that is quality time spent working.

Instead, I’ll pick out each of these guys. I’m going to start and finish the mockup by the end of the day, that way I’ll have the website finished in three days total. Now, that’s wholly unrealistic, but it turns the big fishbowl problem into an advantage. Instead of the project growing into the time allotted, you’re fitting the project into a fishbowl it can’t fit into. Some things get cut, but the beauty of this method is that it’s all temporary. It’s all a huge lie to yourself.

Because in reality, I really do have two weeks to make this site. If the fish can’t fit into the far-too-small bowl I take it out and make the bowl a bit bigger. No big deal. Now it took 5 days instead of 3 and I’m still ahead of the curve. The key to this is to be completely and ridiculously unrealistic about your estimates. You’ve got to believe it too. Suspend the two opposing ideas in your head, knowing that it’s never going to happen in this lifetime, but that it’s also most certainly is going to happen. Or you could just go all the way down the rabbit-hole and delude yourself into truly believing you can pass through solid matter. That’s a bit weird though and people might stare. ;)

Once the mockup is done, I jump right into the next thing, make a lofty claim that I will part the Red Sea and move forward with a blind energy that can only be explained by “temporary insanity.” That’s the entire basis for this “strategy” of getting stuff done. Sure it’s not the healthiest, nor is it calculated in the least, but it works really well for me. Give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, you’ll at least have seen the other side of the fishbowl equation and maybe you’ll think twice next time it comes up.

Interactive Sermon Tool Prototype

Over the past few months, I have received a vision for 3 types of interactive experiences. I just finished a prototype for one of them - an interactive tool that could be used to supplement a message to help visualize the concepts being discussed in the message.

I imagine this tool most often being used to help visualize a sermon being delivered to a church congregation. The goal of the tool would be to present an environment that someone on the media team - a “player” if you will - can interact with.  The player would interact with the environment in a way that matched up with the speaker who is delivering the message.  One example would be if that speaker was telling a story.  The player would explore the environment and trigger events to match up with the timing and emphasis of the speaker’s story.  If the speaker was emphasizing a certain part of the story, the player could trigger events to help emphasize that part.  The final result would be an expression of the story experienced simultaneously through the mediums of virtual interactive experience (of which I consider computer games to be a subset) and oral tradition.

Here’s a run-through recording of the prototype.  It’s based on a story given to me by Chris Petrick, Perry Ross, and Richard Webb at Lutheran Church of Hope, with music and sound design by Paul Gratton (one of my partners from the Napkin Sketch collective), and voice acting by Julie Bull.

Here’s a recording from the production room while I, err….performed it during the last of 4 worship services at Lutheran Churh of Hope.  It kind of shows how the whole thing would fit into a traditional Christian church service. In this case, it was between two songs and presented on the screens. I imagine a “final version” being like this, but with a speaker telling the story live up on stage and a more developed interactive environment.

I’m starting work on a new collaboration with Andy Moore.

Andy contacted me a bit ago with a snazzy game idea that he could use my help on. Per usual, I’m taking up the visual duties of the game while he does all the hard work. The game could be described as a level-based platformer puzzle game using box2D. We’re not sure what to call it, but for now it’s Chemistry Game. Let’s hope the name doesn’t stick.

In this mockup the player assumes the role of the purple space dude on the right. He’s a micronaut and ready to start solving the caffeinated case in the only way he knows how. Through platforming and stuff…

Sorry for being obtuse, it’s pretty early still and I’m not sure if we want to get into a lot of detail right now as the design is subject to change.

Golf is a single player physics game.

I attended a talk by Jason Rohrer at this year’s GDC titled “Beyond Single Player” [Click on the first link at this page to watch it]. It was very good and the ideas posed in the talk were sound and also very exciting. There was a tone to it though. The kind of tone that must accompany progressive ideas in order to move forward and shed the past. In this case, single-player games.

He makes the point that multiplayer is unique to our medium, so why not celebrate that? Investigate it in relation to meaningful games or “art games” as some call them. I think it’s an interesting idea, so I’ve been mulling it over, and I guess what I’ve come up with is not so much a counterpoint, but more of an abstraction as to the “why.” And that starts with the best case for a meaningful single player game I’ve ever come across: golf.

I’ve talked about this very subject before on here, but I think I’ve come up with something a bit more applicable to games. You see, I started playing golf a long time ago at a very young age and there is nothing multiplayer about golf. It is the most single player “real life” game I’ve ever played. Instructors, mentors, pros or anyone who’s played long enough will tell you it’s a battle between you and the course. Of course it’s more than that. It’s an internal battle as well. To withstand the unforgiving and impossible physics of it all you’ve got to keep your eye on the horizon, unfazed by the weather, wind and that last shank into the woods. Things will go wrong, and if you’ve ever seen a tournament on television you’ll notice most of the pros drive it into the trees more often than you’d think. But somehow they keep their composure, line up their shot, and make it out of their with a chance for par.

I consider golf to be the hardest game [I don't like to consider it a sport] on the planet. Not the most athletic, the most strenuous, [that's for sure] or even the most competitive, but certainly the most challenging. The difficulty is baked into the laws of physics. “Get this tiny ball into that tiny hole 450 yards away in 4 strokes with this piece of metal.” Of course you won’t get it in there in 4 strokes without years of practice, and even then making par is a victory over the course. By scoring par on any hole, you’ve met the challenge and can hold your head high, because the odds were entirely stacked against you. It’s this insurmountable challenge with hundreds of variables, many of them mental, that makes golf such an intriguing game. All of these things pose an illusive, yet massive challenge to the player so that he might go out to the same golf course hundreds of times and find new challenges every time.

Sounds a lot like traditional multiplayer games actually. Instead of the system being incomprehensibly complex, it is relatively simple. Games like Chess, Go, Counter Strike and Starcraft are all played within a relatively restrictive simulated environment. There are no fluid dynamics, weather models, elaborate sets of muscle memory, friction issues and so on. The real world provides something incredibly desirable when it comes to designing a game in it. It’s so complex that instead of experts “gaming it” down to a series of procedural maneuvers and tutorials, it must be felt. The player uses their intuition. [Cha-ching tagline! ;) ] If I’m facing someone in Starcraft there are a million things running through my mind and none of them could be read off of a ready-made laundry list. The human being is actually the incredibly complex portion of multiplayer games. You’ve traded the real life laws of physics for a real life human being.

When these real life human beings get together in a head-to-head game using real life physics we usually call them sports. No big news flash there. But sports have historically had a big leg up on traditional games [table-top] until the internet came around. The games that have gripped me over there years have been consistently those that must be felt [due to their multiplayer modes]. The real-time gameplay of Halo, Starcraft, Counter Strike, and Street Fighter is so intangible and unpredictable that it allows for an unparalleled depth of experience. These aren’t my all-time favorite video games, because others might have secondary elements that provided a sense of nostalgia that the others couldn’t match. Though, I think that cuts to the core of what a single player experience can be. Because it’s played alone, there are certain experiences and feelings that could not be felt if there were other people playing with you. The intimacy of the single player experience has a tendency to reflect certain truths about oneself, just like it did with me during all those years on the golf course.

Preview of An Unnamed Crawfishing iPhone Game

A couple months ago, Neil Roberts showed me a game he started in high school, and he said he always wanted to take it further and was considering porting it from an old version of Flash to the iPhone.  I met Neil because I work at a coworking space called Impromptu Studio in the lovely small city of Des Moines, IA.

Coworking is an awesome concept and I love working here.  A cool benefit of coworking is the ability to collaborate on projects, and that’s what is happening with Neil and I.  A couple weeks later after I saw his simple Flash game, he showed me a prototype of it working on the iPhone, and before I knew it, it was completely ported and more fleshed out.  The game is nearly complete in functionality and design, but he wanted better art for it and help smoothing out a couple kinks.  So I decided to help him out with the art and a little design.