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.

NA-NA-NA-NA-NA! Three sound toys that I’ve been working on with Milo Creative for the CBeebies show “Space Pirates” are now live.

Read more about them here.

Theres a number of interesting bits of homebrew that are being released at the moment, ranging from emulators and ports to bespoke games and music toys. I’ve been playing around with a few, trying to crystallize a few ideas into something that I might develop part-time (especially when the official SDK comes out). Its quite a peculiar device to design for, due to its unique abilities and shortcomings. Some things it does very well but others are a big no-no. The most significant absence I’d say is the lack of d-pad for tactile feedback when mashing buttons. This is interesting though, some developers have been experimenting with putting graphical interfaces on the screen (a virtual d-pad) but this really doesn’t work. The closest device to design for is probably the DS (with the d-pad buttons removed), so any titles like Zelda which uses the stylus so ingeniously are definitely a significant source of inspiration for future iPhone titles. Its proof that mechanics can be adapted to a different interface if well considered. The only difference between the DS and the iPhone is the use of the “hot dog stylus” that is your finger, which obscures the objects that you are trying to interact with as well as limiting the accuracy of your click. This can be countered to some degree by transposing a rollover or representation of the item you’ve selected above the click position to make it visible (much like apple do on the keyboard when you click). I’ve done this on Ducks (the current action puzzler I’m playing with) and moving up by around 40-50 pixels and it really improves the usability of drag and drop on the iPhone.

Heres a brief roundup of mechanics and genres that I think work well, some that dont, and some that havent really been tried out yet but that really deserve an outing on the new device.

The good

Interface - Gestural interfaces
eg Crayon Physics port (iPhysics)

These also work extremely well - direct manipulation of the objects on screen make the interface extremely learnable and highly suitable for the casual audience of the iPod owner. For games, toys and creation tools, gestural interfaces are applicable across the board.

Suitable ports: Loop, Sodaconstructor, Moovl

Interface - Tilt interfaces
eg Labyrinth

Very straightforward to use, these work very well with the iPhone’s 2D accelerometer. Great while sitting at home or train, perhaps less so when getting your elbow’s battered on the bus.

Suitable ports: Super Monkey Ball, Loco Roco, Wario Ware Tilted.

Genre - Turn based / solo puzzlers
eg Othello, Chess, iSolitaire, Sudoku

Already popular casual games with well-known rules, these are already plentiful on the iPhone’s existing roster (as well as abundant on the DS and PSP). Well suited to game-snacking sessions of seconds or minutes.

Genre - Point and click adventures
(example ScummVM - Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max)

These work *wonderfully*. The slow pace and direct interaction are ideally suited to the iPhones interface and nature of use. The only possible problem is that they are not always suited to 5 minute game-snacking but demand slightly more involvement to remember the storyline/setting and current options/objectives.

The bad

Interface - D-Pad/button input (exemplified by the large number of emulated games - NES, PSX etc). This means no platformers, shooters or arcade adventures unless modified to use the touchscreen properly. Ports will not be that straightforward.

The missing

Genre - Racing games. Tilt sensors or multitouch inputs could really work for both 2D and 3D views.

Genre - Virtual Pets. Multitouch Nintendogs? Hell yeah! Finally I can scratch BOTH the dogs ears at once.

Genre - Minigames - Wario Ware, where are you? Multitouch and tilt-sensitive mini-games are just dying to be added.

Genre - Music games - Mutlitouch, multiplayer Electroplankton that pulls tracks from your music library on the iPod/iPhone. That definitely works. Calling Toshio Iwai…

Any other ideas or thoughts? Put em below!

I’ve been playing some more with the iPhone/iTouch. Despite much headbanging, I think I’ve got through most of the major frustrations that can be so commonplace when trying to learn something somewhat alien and or new. The lack of documentation (and a debugger) has made progress somewhat peculiar and retarded, but the number of resources popping up has certainly reduced my blind stumbling in a rake-field to more of a dizzy meander through a china-shop. (Small pic here shows current progress of my action puzzler! oh and yes i know it looks a lot like roadies now…. shhh)

Next up - a prediction. Game and application development for this is going to be massive. There have been to date 100 Million iPods sold. Thats a lot. Compare this to 65 million DSs and 15 million PSPs. Assuming that Apple chooses to phase in the iPod touch OS as the default OS for the iPod, this guarantees a fair number of potential customers. Assuming that people have a copy of iTunes and an internet connection, purchase for them is extremely simple. Not to mention the fact that people could potentially buy games straight from their iTouch/iPhone. I’m no nostradamus (and as a disclaimer I have backed some exceedingly shabby horses in the past) but there seems to be very little that apple have done wrong with this. Development is extremely easy - playing with the development libraries available with the current toolchain, a lot of the nasty stuff is taken care of with reasonably high-level libraries - be that networking, graphics, animation, 3D, audio, GUI. Its very similar to development on OSX.

If you are interested in doing some more playing, here are a few recommendations (caution nerdcore).

Get this book - iPhone Open Application Development. Its only a tenner for the PDF (”rough cut” available now) and gives you EXACTLY what you need to get started and a great overview of Objective-C and the iPhone libraries.

Learn Cocoa (if you are on OSX). Go through the tutorials at Cocoa Dev Central to learn about cocoa foundation classes and cocoa graphics. These are very similar to the iPhone’s frameworks.

Be careful with memory management. This was the cause of most of my frustration. Lots of classes kept disappearing and without a debugger I had no idea whats going on. Setting autorelease doesnt mean a class gets garbage collected when its no longer referenced. It means it will get deleted automatically at the end of the current event loop. damnit.

Get some nice Xcode templates from here. These even take care of SSHing into the device so the code will be easy to run as soon as you build.

This is a remarkable video the result of a (for me) unlikely collaboration of Philip Glass, and logo-esque geometry education - created for the kids TV show Sesame Street. What I really love about it is the purity, the conveyance of wonder, these geometric forms arising from the simple behaviours displayed on the screen. Glass’s haunting, minimal score is perfectly suited to the animation. For me, this is such a wonderful way to help inspire interest in children - really giving them a “Whoa, whats going on here” without any on-the-nose explanation (ie Big bird asking Kevin Bacon what a triangle is or somesuch something).

Via Ben’s Antenna

Phew 2008 already. Apologies for the complete absence of posts these past few weeks, I’ve got lot of different bits and pieces I’m dying to post about but really don’t have the time yet sadly. I’ve got a lot of projects taking up a big part of my time, many of which are happening simultaneously. February should be a lot less hectic so should be a time to go into more details on the fun stuff that keeps cropping up like Johnny Lee’s projects and Videotrace. I’ve also got tons of code that I’m planning on open sourcing at some stage.

I’ve been working on three fun little sound toy flash games for CBeebies with the guys at Milo - should be live this week.

I’ve been designing and developing a 3D multiplayer driving game (think Mariokart meets Crazy Taxi) for the Science Museum’s latest exhibition “The Science of Survival”. Really happy with this one, can’t wait to see it go live on April 5th.

I’m honored to have been invited on the D&AD Awards 2008 Gaming Jury. Its been an amazing year for games with some outstanding titles, looking forward to joining the jury with some familiar faces and others I’ve always admired.

I’ve been plugging away with the iPhone toolchain and got a fun little action puzzler up and running. I’m still getting my head round some of the weirdnesses of the toolchain (and having to learn Objective-C and the iPhone frameworks at the same time), but hopefully will have something to show soon.

Lastly, I’ve been working on some experience prototypes at IDEO for some upcoming (and obviously NDA’d) products. I read The Art of Innovation a couple of years ago which really piqued my curiosity in IDEO and the way they work - its great to experience it first hand.

More updates soon. Look forward to tomorrow’s Apple keynote, lets see what they are gonna give us in the iPhone SDK.