Holy Robot Empire

After the game jam last weekend and our happy moment of receiving the "Jammers' Choice" award, we decided to stick together and finish our game as well as make more games. It's funny how things like this just fall on you . . . when a few days before I didn't even think of myself as a game developer, just a guy with a whole lot of ideas about game design.

Well, we've got our company up and running now, and the website is up at: Holy Robot Empire. I haven't had that much time to populate our website, but there's just enough info up there to leave you wanting more :P

The main thing though is that our version 1.0 of Spy Wear is up there. This first release version runs a lot smoother without crashing on weird network stuff and has most of the bugs ironed out. If you give it a go (and if you're one of my close friends I'll probably force it on you at some stage) please buzz me in one way or another and let me know what the play experience was like . . . we're always looking to improve :)

Going to Rome

I'm headed to Rome for an iCinema exhibition in just over a week. It's really exciting :)

I took the liberty of taking a couple of days off and getting my flight there booked a little early . . . so I've got time to check out all those crazy Roman ruins in person (yeah, I blatantly stole the above image from wikipedia's Colosseum entry.

It should be a lot of fun . . . I'm just getting all my bits and pieces together. I have my flight itinerary and my hotel booking . . . most of my time at work at the moment is spent preparing what I'm going to be doing over there. We're going to be setting up an AVIE that will run for about 2 months showing some kewl immersive panoramic art pieces.

I've done my obligatory "Is anyone going to be in Rome?" status on facebook, and if all goes well, will be meeting up with one of my cousins there. Looking forward to it!

Jury Duty Part 2

In the end rather anti-climactic.

I went to the court, was inducted into the process of being a juror . . . sat around and waited for a bit, then I was excused because I'm going overseas in a couple of weeks.

I'm still on the list though, so maybe sometime this year I'll get to see a court case . . .

Resident Evil 5

What an interesting game.

I picked it up a bit later than it was released on a steam sale over Christmas. I'd played a bit of Resident Evil 4 on the Wii, but never finished it. Since I've started playing Mass Effect 2 and it's pushed all the other games on my list down a rung, I thought I should publish this post.

Resident Evil fits in such a strange genre of games . . . this "Horror/Action" where the only horror is the fact that you can't move properly while rather slow moving enemies crawl towards you at a snail's pace absorbing large amounts of ammunition. I guess I'd seen the play style before in Dead Space, but that was some time ago so I'd forgotten what it was like.

I keep wanting to be able to turn properly, aim and move at the same time and all those normalities you expect if you've played a lot of action or first person games. Having said that, the game is mighty compelling. There's something satisfying about it and the flow of the game, along with the variety of scenes and small challenges makes it quite an interesting game and worth playing . . . even if it doesn't get to the top of my list of current games.

I was struck again, however, by the Nvidia vs ATI (graphics card manufacturers) war that has been leaking into games recently. Batman: Arkham Asylum had it also . . . where it was developed alongside Nvidia and they helped them out a lot in making sure that the game looked absolutely stunning in their 3D system . . . but for some reason, ATI cards were unable to turn on Anti Aliasing (AA). AA is a reasonably simple graphics feature in pretty much all modern games that helps to soften the jagginess of pixels you can get when you try to draw a diagonal line using only a square grid of dots.

RE5 has an issue where if you are using an ATI card and have AA enabled, the ingame cutscenes (pre-rendered short video bits) don't display . . . you only get a black screen. It's another game that Nvidia specifically helped develop and that offers proper support for Nvidia's 3D Vision system. I don't really know whether this is Nvidia trying to drive the competition out by making sure things only work on their hardware or ATI being slack in implementing AA properly on their cards . . . but it's mighty annoying.

I'm not sure if it's too much to ask, but I'd like for software written for the PC to work on both kinds of PC graphics hardware . . .

Spy Wear - Jammers Choice, Global Game Jam Sydney 2010

Here's a screenshot of our finished product :)

It's a four player top down game called "Spy Wear". I am amazingly proud to announce that we won the "Jammers' Choice" award, as voted by everyone else who took part in the Jam!

In Spy Wear, you play as one of 4 spies (it's multiplayer over a network for up to 4 people) in a city sometime in the Cold War. Moving is very simple, you just stay on the footpath and have the ability to enter any of the buildings you go past. Over time, you are assigned missions to go and visit different places in the city. Everyone else is likewise given missions to visit other places.

The key to the gameplay, however, is that of all the people walking around . . . you have no idea who the other spies are. Everyone just sticks to the footpath . . . maybe they'll go into a building . . . but you have no sure way to know whether someone else is a spy unless you kill them . . . and if you kill someone who's not a spy, everyone else gets to see either a photo of you or where your mission target is.

It has this wonderful balance between risk/reward of attacking people . . . then fight/flight . . . do you keep going after missions, or do you assume that someone's after you and start laying traps and changing clothes often. Wait, changing clothes . . . what if the clothes shop is trapped by someone else? We're seeing a lot of really interesting emergent behaviours coming out of such a simple little game . . . factors driven purely by psychology or the cognitive load involved in trying to remember what everyone last looked like and where they might be going . . .

Overall, I'm amazingly happy with the weekend and what we achieved. Our team was: Joseph Gentle, Jeremy Apthorp, Marc Chee, James Carlton, Aevar Bjarnasson, Sam Maniscalco (purely in order of where we were sitting at the time I wrote our readme :P Thanks heaps guys . . . and I look forward to working with you again soon :)

We'll also be publishing the game soon (once it stops crashing :P) for all to play and to show what indie game developers are capable of pulling off in a 48 hour period :) For those of you who aren't scared of installing Python and some packages, we've got some raw files available here.