I’m going to be talking at this years Creative Quarter at the V&A in London, an event for 13-19 year olds to find out a bit more about a variety of creative industries. I’ll be talking a little bit about Rolando, showing some background on how it got started, and talking about the indie game development process (well at least my own version of it!).

If you’re at school and want to find out more about everything from architecture to fashion design, it looks like its going to be a great event. Theres more information here.

While the HandCircus blog used to be a bit of a blend between personal thoughts, comments and work related content, its starting to feel like the right time to split the two. As a result I’ve started up a second, personal blog at www.simonoliver.com/blog/.

This blog will stay focussed on HandCircus games and other projects, while my personal blog will be geared more towards commentary, thoughts, observations, and ideas.

Lots of news coming out of WWDC, Apple’s big developer event. Biggest of all is probably the announcement of the 3G iPhone - still the same power and graphics capability but now with 3G for data, and GPS reception. Location-based games here we come!

Also, there were updates on a few games, such as a new Super Monkey Ball demo (looking very slick):

There were also some new game announcements from Digital Legends and Pangea Software.

Lots more screenshots on Engadgets coverage.

Theres finally some video of this in action after a lot of buzz and very positive hands-on previews. Applying a first person perspective to the kind of maneuverability normally considered the reserve of third person games, it really does look like it could transform the experience. The weight of movement and interaction with the environment are a step forward from the current FPS pinnacle.

Random collection of updates here, apologies for not having blogged a little bit more over the past few weeks, been extremely busy but this are just getting back to normal. D&AD judging was great fun - joing the panel with a few old friends that I’ve worked with before (Rob from Preloaded and Gravy from Playerthree), some people I’ve long wanted to meet (Tetsuya Mizuguchi - designer of Rez, Lumines, Space Channel 5, Sega Rally and Alice Taylor of Wonderland blog) and luminaries from the casual/commerical games world (Ben from Tribal and Loius from Skive).

Unity have announced upcoming support for the iPhone (following their support for the wii). You’ll still need to pay your £50 to join the Apple developer program, and it will most likely be cut down to some extent in terms of feature, but it promises to be one of the easiest ways for game creators to get their content on the iPhone.

Hudson soft have joined the swelling ranks of traditional games developers that have announced ports of existing properties as well as new titles for the iPhone. They’ve pictured a Bomberman port, which is a bit of a weird one - can’t see this working without buttons but definitely give them a chance. Theres also “Touch Trix” - presumably some sort of demo showing a few of the fruits of their mucking about

The oolong engine is an open source iPhone game engine developer by Wolfgang Engel. Compatible with the unofficial and official SDK it has a tasty feature set including full support for the Bullet physics library. Grab the code from Google Code.

The latest Bullet Physics engine (2.68) has been released with Softbody physics, including cloth, rope and deformable volumes. I LOVE softbody physics! Time to get working on that blob-em-up you’ve always wanted to make. Its about time someone made a killer game with a mechanic based on softbody physics (yeah I know, Gish and locoroco sorta did, but maybe a game with more than just a blobby avatar.) Check out the demos and get the source from google code.

The Science Of Survival has just opened at the Science Museum in South Kensington. Its a fantastic exhibition, exploring how we will survive on a changing planet.

I worked with Spiral Productions and Matt Bell to create one of the exhibits for the exhibition, a driving game that sees you exploring a futuristic city, discovering a variety of potential modes of transport and types of fuel that might be employed in the year 2050. Your task is to pick up as many people as you can, and drop them off at the big party in the centre of town.

View videos and screenshots on the Science of Survival Driving game page

By the way, I’ve just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 as the old version a splode. If you see anything bizarre please let me know!

(Warning, bit of a technical post). I’ve had a couple of days to play with the official iPhone SDK now that it has been released. Its obviously significantly easier to get things up and running now and theres a lot of documentation and a number of videos up at the iPhone DevCenter. First up, the presentation for the SDK launch was pretty impressive. Dual distribution, both via iTunes and the AppStore directly on the iPhone/touch and a 70% cut of the royalties is extremely fertile soil for development. £50 to sign up to be a registered iPhone developer (and allow signing of your apps) is not bad. They’ve obviously had a few inspirations from Installer.app (eg autoupdating of apps) and the whole package looks very streamlined and easy to use. They’ve handed out beta copies of the SDK, allowing anyone to have a go (even without an iPhone). The SDK includes a simulator, allowing you to run and debug your apps on the desktop, and also allows tethered running and remote debugging for a physical unit that you have plugged in (although you will need to have paid your £50 and got yourself a certificate, none of which Apple has released yet). The frustrating part is that without the certificate you are slightly crippled by the fact that the emulator won’t properly support the accelerometer or multitouch (other than basic pinch gestures) and most significantly for games, it wont allow OpenGL code.

That all said, its been great fun. I’ve been getting my head round the basics (Core Animation, Multitouch input, Quartz rendering), and am trying to piece together a toolkit for making games. First priority is rendering and a physics engine, so (much like the excellent iPhysics) I’ve been playing with Erin Catto’s wonderful Box2D engine, and ported the TestBed over to the iPhone just as a little warm up project to get my head round the SDK. I think Quartz might be a little slow but as soon as I can get a certificate I can start using OpenGL instead which should hopefully start to really allow more complex scenes.

Heres a little vid of the Box2D testbed running (although embedded vimeo doesnt work on Google Reader sadly):

Also, it looks like firmware 2.0 has already been leaked and hacked, bypassing the need for you to obtain a certificate from Apple. This should certainly speed things up for some.

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.