For those of you that haven’t gotten sick of hearing me go on about Windows Phone development yet, here’s a full 60-minute session with the low-down on Windows Phone Game Development, including what’s new for game developers in Mango.
All the details, downloadable slides, and a larger video are available here: Windows Phone: how to build a game
Time to take XNA and Windows Phone goodness to the Washington State Convention Center this coming Monday and Tuesday!
For those that are registered for the event, I hope you’ll join me for the Windows Phone track; I’ll be giving two talks on Day 1:
MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2011
10:00 AM to 11:10 AM
“From The Ground Up: Windows Phone Game Development”
ROOM 620
2:35 PM to 3:30 PM
“Shiny New Features for Windows Phone Developers”
ROOM 620
We’ve got ten more fantastic talks lined up for Windows Phone game development afficionados, from game studio postmortems, to independent developers sharing the secrets of ad revenue in games, to tech luminaries in Xbox LIVE and the Advanced Technology Group outlining brand-new features arriving on Windows Phone that are sure to delight.
If you haven’t signed up already, online registration closes this Friday, so be sure and get registered if you plan to attend this event!
For all the details, see www.microsoftgamefest.com. See you there!
With a week’s worth of retrospection, I feel like I can look back on Seattle Startup Weekend and try to distill some lessons down from it.
I suppose it’s worth saying that these lessons come hard-earned; my company of eight people produced a viable prototype, but failed to land any prizes in the final competition against the twenty-one other startups at the Weekend; I have some ideas as to why.
For those that haven’t been, the Weekend is a little surreal. It’s entirely based around tech startups – and a surprisingly homogenous class of web-app-like technology at that. I suspect that the negligible cost of remixing today’s information economy has allowed something of a gold rush mentality, complete with the shabby chic and messenger-bag cultural tide that carries tomorrow’s gurus.
My own part was as makeshift team leader – I had a dream of starting up a game company and racing to a first prototype in 48 hours, using a mixture of the Unity engine and backend metrics through an analytics engine like MixPanel.
I found out quickly that games weren’t really represented during this weekend. Information mashups, yes, automated forms, sure, but not games. Maybe they weren’t known, maybe nobody cared. Whatever the case, our initial team of three were the only game developers willing to represent there, when all was said and done.
Undaunted, I pitched the game company idea during the Friday “speed-dating” portion of the weekend, and it stuck well enough – out of the 60 ideas that were looking for teams, mine made the final cut of 20. By Friday night, my initial team of three had become a team of eight. By Saturday at noon, I promised, we’d have our game idea chosen and coding started.
It took us until Sunday afternoon to have everything done; we’d fought through idea changes, tech failures, sickness and absences, and a metric ton of conflicting priorities to come up with something viable – and a business plan around it – to show off to investors Sunday evening.
Thinking back on it, we really made a lot of mistakes.
The Agency: Razor One, Main Gameplay Screen
April, the year 2000. The COBOL-powered machines that still ran the world had just weathered the storm of the millennium’s crossing over. The first Xbox was more than a year away. And I was eighteen years old, hard at work learning how to write code for video games. Doesn’t that sound sterile to you? It does to me. “Coding games”. “Game programming”.”
Yuck.
It sounded just as bad to me back then, even though I knew it was my only chance to do what I’d always dreamed of – don the metaphorical articulated trumpet, cymbal hat, and bass-drum backpack belonging to the one-man band of game design and coding together, just as I knew my predecessors had done.
Sometime during the spring break of my freshman year at Digipen Institute of Technology – my Alma mater and my only claim to any academic prowess – I had a years-long romance with text-based game design and coding. Maybe it was because text output was the technical limitation I’d started with (Ed Fries, by the way, has a nice piece about the merits of designing for constraints), or perhaps it was a ZZT-laden nostalgic stumble (Tim Sweeney, too, has his own thoughts on design limitations) that left me collapsed, dead-drunk in ASCII alley.
The Konami Code. You’ve seen it for years, dialed it in on your favorite emulators uh, vintage consoles, and the recent resurrection of the code all over the web has plucked at our nostalgic heart strings – even going so far as to make us grudgingly accept a new lease on the life of the dreaded lens flare effect.
The Code, as it is officially accepted:
…followed, of course, by hitting START if you’re playing Contra. (though some of us have sworn a blood oath from our childhood days that there’s an extra B, A in there and then SELECT, START. It’s superstition, I know.)
Not too long ago, KonamiCodeSites.com reworked their page to accept the code in a form that works with iPhone gestures. Their version goes something like this:
(SWIPE) UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT
That’s all well and good, but that’s a website, and I do games. I also know there are plenty of people out there creating games on Windows Phone 7 using the XNA Game Studio 4.0 Beta that deserve to have the code for themselves. So I figured I might as well throw some code together and present – for your consideration, the Konami Code for WP7 and XNA.
One thing that keeps popping up as the development of the game continues is the notion of spatial granularity. It’s amazing what we take for granted in even a rudimentary 3D first-person shooter.
Quake, an early example of honest-to-God 3D gaming (and not the 2.5D skewing-and-billboard Wolfenstein clones) was among the first to begin the modern gamer’s training to recognize small deltas in position, rotation, and scale as markers that the action in their vicinity was about to change. It was an exercise of surprisingly complex pattern recognition.
The human brain is tuned to a fine nuance at 60 Hz, and the difference of a few degrees of any game entity can clue a wired brain off to a potential perceived future. You know the columns and stairways and arches of a place, and it is wired into the mind to accept a sudden breaking of any of those planes as the signal that something is about to go down.
It can happen in elements of a fraction of an inch: spotting a gun muzzle telegraphing around a corner, or a subtle color shift in the otherwise unbroken pattern of a wall – the difference of just a few pixels marks the transition from the static world to the dynamic world.
What’s our text-based equivalent?
You hear a sound to the south!
A notification of the above kind is chunky, not gritty; even though it can still maintain the appropriate “don’t open that door” aesthetic, the abstract notion of “south” leaves to the first-person-shooter mind an unsettling notion that for all the liberties taken with licensing, this is not a similar game to its spiritual parent at all.
The Inauspicious Beginning
It’s been something I’ve wanted to do since I started with Inform those many months ago – no, not finish Industry. I’ll get to that later (with all due respect to my waning credibility on the finisher’s market, there’s nothing quite like a lifetime of projects in various states of in-progressness-ness).
I’ve wanted to experiment with the abstraction of modern video game titles into text-based forms, preserving aesthetics and feel while developing new, text-friendly gameplay mechanics.
You heard me right. I’m making text-based versions of modern video games, because that’s the kind of self-flagellating logical exercise that passes for fun with me.
The first one is going to be Left 4 Dead – starting with the “No Mercy” episode.