Well this week off was meant to be a bit more productive, but a bit too much time spent bowling, in pubs and in turkish restaurants. Still, at least I got a chance to put up a few videos of things that can’t be seen online, courtesy of Vimeo.

There’s finally videos for Create-A-Make, Under Sea Ice and Killzone - Vekta Today. Full list of videos up at the Handcircus Vimeo page.

Off snowboarding tomorrow, so no posts sadly, but in the meantime, check out Trism, a nice little iPhone prototype. Im not a massive fan of Bejeweled games, but nice use of the accelerometer, eh?

While working on the game design for the current exhibit I’m currently finishing off for the Science Museum, quite a few unique design challenges have presented themselves. Most of these have centred around play-session length. As with most museum exhibits, the idea is that you dip in for a couple of minutes to interact with the content and absorb information directly/indirectly. In the context of a simple touch-screen controlled kiosk this doesn’t present a problem, but in this case it’s a driving game in an urban environment. Within the 90 second period, the user has to pick up the controls, comprehend the objectives, orient themselves in the environment, achieve some of the objectives and take in the educational content. On top of this, it needs to be designed so that users of all ages and gaming experience have an enjoyable and engaging experience.

From learnability perspective, you really need to make it something that maps directly onto mechanics and interfaces that people have already had considerable experience with, or if possible to make the controls utterly intuitive (for example whack-a-mole or a light-gun game take no explaining). In this case, we were fortunate that you put a steering wheel in front of people and they pretty much know what to do, but other circumstances would certainly produce a greater challenge - this is not the place to implement new mechanics or interface or to explore mechanics with considerable depth.

How to make it enjoyable and engaging? This is a slightly woolier question. One method that I’ve tried to use when designing the layout of the city is to use the “two second rule” (or perhaps it should be called interaction density?) . Basically this involves presenting the user with an interesting and meaningful choice (or interesting event/spectacle to gaze at) every two seconds of session time. So for a 90 second session, this would be 45 unique events or choices. In the context of a racing game, this could be a junction or corner (where you can choose direction), something to pick up/drive over/drive through, something to avoid, or an interesting spectacle to drive past. By trying to mentally follow this rule whilst driving around the city, you should really pick up on areas that need tweaking (say for example if you are driving along a simple straight bit of road for 5 seconds you have no real choices and could very well just let go of the steering wheel). This also applies to the other end of the spectrum, in that you dont want the user to be overwhelmed with choices at any point in the experience.

Its been a great project to work on, hopefully lots more posts on this soon! The Science of Survival opens in early April at the Science Museum, London.

Microsoft keynote has finally completed the circle of its “YouTube for games” plan by opening up the distribution channel for indie game studios and hobbyists on the XBox 360 platform. From this Autumn, games created using XNA Game Studio Express can be submitted to the Creators Club community for peer review. This community will vet your game and if it gets approved it will be available to anyone with an XBox 360 and an internet connection. Obviously this is a huge step for hobbyists and microstudios - its the first time the barrier between such creators and consumers has been completely removed. It will still require the circa-£50 annual subscription to get you membership of the Creators Club and allow you to submit your game (which seems like a very ill-thought out move when comparing the revenue they get from this stream compared with the amount of additional content that could be generated if they removed this boundary, although they have announced free membership for students).

Its not just for those making freebie games either - a revenue stream is set to be announced in the near future, allowing people to charge for their game (presumably in microsoft points, and with MS getting a fair cut).

They also announced the news that everyone has been waiting for - you can now create your own games for the worlds most popular MP3 player… the Zune.

2dboy’s first release, the much anticipated World Of Goo is very much an indicator of the current state of indie game creation and a validation of the micro-studio as a viable structure for nurturing successful games. They have just released a prerelease version of the PC version, allowing those that have pre-ordered to play through the first chapter of the game, and its a hugely enjoyable experience.

While indie games have frequently been associated with lower production values, this shines with polish. Its charming, playful, refreshing and addictive. They have taken the core mechanic from Tower of Goo (released by Kyle Gabler, one of the co-founders as part of the Experimental Gameplay Project) and extended it into an action-puzzler format within a physics sandbox. Taking a few slices of Lemmings and a dash of Bridge construction set, each level calls for you to coerce various types of goo-ball (each with different properties, such as reusability or being lighter than air) into forming structures to get the other goo-balls to the pipe at the end of each level. It is a genuinely new game mechanic, and as with many indie-games it makes great use of the physics engine (ODE in this case) to create open-ended gameplay.

The game has been made almost entirely by Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Both share design responsibility and programming, with Kyle also producing all of the artwork and music (a true indie renaissance man).

They have made some savvy decisions during the development process. Going for a mouse-driven interface definitely lowers the barrier for entry for casual gamers (and also opens up opportunities for a Wii port, which they currently have underway). Using off the shelf open-source libraries like ODE and SDL cut down development time and make porting to other platforms such as Mac much easier. Rather than handle the Wii port themselves, they’ve brought in another ex-maxis employee, Allan Blomquist, to handle the port, which apparently he managed to get up and running in under a month. Starting off with a PC prototype definitely seems the way to go.

So, definitely inspiring for anyone out there working on (or considering to start) an indie games project. Its a great success story, and updates the 1980s-bedroom-coder phenomenon to a 200x coffee-shop-dwelling laptop-swinging microstudio. Between 2DBoy and Media Molecule, perhaps we’re seeing the start of a new trend in the games industry.

Eurogamer has an interview with Andrew Eades of Relentless, discussing Buzz: The Schools Quiz, a special edition of the popular PlayStation 2 quiz game tailored to the Key Stage 2 Curriculum. There has long been discussion about the potential for games to provide a fertile platform for children’s (and indeed adults) education but the involvement of a games studio in the production of such titles is a rarity ( although Commercial games have certainly be repurposed before). The larger budget, polish and production experience that games studios can bring to educational titles is hugely advantageous and could go far to prevent the “Mama McDonalds” effect that arises when kids compare the average edutainment title to the games they’re playing on their console. Kudos to Relentless for embarking on the project.

Read the interview here

In know everyone posts Ted talks, but this is one from a while ago that I really enjoyed. Its a great introduction to Theo Jansen, the Dutch artist/designer/engineer most famous for his Strandbeests - exotic skeletal structures made from plastic tubes, bottles and sails. These strandbeests represent an entirely mechanical artificial life, deriving power from the wind, and as Jansen has evolved his designs he has supplemented them with ingenious devices for power storage, environment sensing (comparable to mechanical Braitenberg vehicles), determining direction and more.