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.

After an insane amount of headbanging I’ve finally managed to get a working toolchain up and running, compiled, deployed and run a game on my iPhone. The Jailbreaking part wasn’t too hard (just followed the instructions in the Jailbreak 1.1.2 package), but getting the compiler, libraries and paths set-up was a complete nightmare. (Those of you thinking about doing the same under Leopard, just follow the instructions here and make sure you set up your .arm-cc-specs file).

So, is it any good? Yes! Having played with Installer.app and a few of the recently released packages, theres already a ton of good stuff out there. I was a bit disappointed with the speed of NES.app but the ScummVM port runs beautifully (and is perfectly suited to the screen/interface). Theres a pretty nifty version of solitaire.

In terms of picking apart source (is there a better way to learn?) the first thing I dug around was Bounce by CeD (source code here). This led on to a real seam of practical learning bits, using a lot of the different aspects of the device (including multi-touch, tilting), at the iApp-a-Day page (all of the code for each application is available here).

It looks like a pretty good development environment. UI bits and pieces are handled by UIKit, and you have a reasonable graphics library with CoreGraphics for blitting, bitmap manipulation. Not had a play with any of the OpenGL|ES stuff yet. I’ve got a few ideas I’d like to work up, but will probably spend a little while getting to grips with Objective-C and the libraries first. What fun!

Update: Theres an ideal OpenGL example here by Andrew Willmott. Shows how to render an OpenGL scene within a normal Application.

So, I got an iPhone on Monday. I wasn’t one of the rabid queuers on Regent Street, but picked one up Monday morning at a regular Carphone Warehouse. I’m not going to waste precious finger-tapping (and eyeball scanning) by inflating the bloated media-blimp that is iPhone coverage on the internet, but suffice to say it’s a beautifully crafted (albeit slightly flawed) device that does a few targeted activities particularly well (maps, media, email, phone, web browsing).

But, as a device with potential its really quite absurd. I’m definitely interested in the dev side of things – and seeing how people have got a few emulators, games and tools running pretty quickly, I got digging around looking to see what the state of development was, and what libraries are available.

Apple have announced that there will be an SDK available in February, but people have already taken the steps of creating their own toolchain with the ability to link to Apple’s frameworks.

One thing that I wasn’t previously aware of was that the iPhone has a 3D graphics processor embedded, the PowerVR MBX – which explains the smooth transitions for effects such as cover flow (without the nasty aliasing you get on the new iPod nanos). It also includes the OpenGL|ES framework (the baby brother of OpenGL).

Obviously,one of the first thing that struck me about all this is the huge potential for games. We’re starting to see a few original games released to take advantage of the hardware, such as Labyrinth which uses the tilt functionality as well as hardware rendering via OpenGL. Lets take a look though at what the iPhone/iPod touch has to offer, and why it could be a real contender in the games market.

Graphic display
Big, high-res (480×360 – compared with 480×272 for the PSP and 2x 256 x 192 for the DS)

Interaction
Multitouch touchscreen and tilt sensors (versus 50% touchscreen and standard buttons for DS, analogue stick and buttons for PSP). The iPhone also has a microphone and camera.

Connectivity
54mbps Wi-fi, backed up with EDGE/GPRS and Bluetooth on the iPhone (versus 11mbps on the PSP/DS)

3D acceleration
Not sure how it compares in terms of power with the DS/PSP though, but sure its not too dire.

Distribution channels
Potential support via iTunes – also has a built in browser which could potentially allow you to browse and download games directly from the internet. (versus traditional retail distribution for DS/PSP, fledgling downloadable games market for PSP). Installer.app already does this.

Open platform and development
How open is yet to be established, but I imagine that you will get access to a large chunk of the phone/ipods features, just maybe cutting off enough so that you can’t create Skype-like apps. Compare this to the officially closed platforms of the DS and PSP. While the mac has a very low-key games development scene, larger players like EA and Harmonix are starting to work on original iPod games – you can bet that they are already working on some titles for the iPhone.

All the homebrew dev seems not far off OSX development, using Objective-C, C, C++. I imagine that XCode integration will come with the SDK

Storage
With a guarantee of 4Gb/8Gb/16Gb storage on the device, you have enough room to store a LOT of games or game data. With a lot of DS roms weighing in at 64Mb/128Mb theres enough storage space to satisfy a lot of applications.

Obviously specs are one thing, but imagine some of the potential games that could be developed:

• A high res, fully touch screen electroplankton with poking, pinching dragging and the ability to use all of our music collection from your iPod and ability to upload and share songs you create over the internet.
• A tiltable locoroco game.
• Brain training on the iPhone/iPod touch would work perfectly.
• A Habbo Hotel client wherever you are.

But I think most of all the reason it will work well is because people will buy it anyway - there is the potential for many millions of these units to be bought, and without Apple even MENTIONING games. Its not yet being pitched as a contender in any way, but they could easily turn round in February and announce an incredible line-up from EA, Ubisoft, Harmonix. It almost seems like a stealth move, as this has the potential to be the greatest handheld gaming device on the market. To be honest, I’m glad they haven’t gone down the N-Gage route of touting gaming as a major feature - consumers of any games on the device are likely to be very much casual gamers, and shifting the focus from the core features of phone/ipod/web would likely reduce its appeal to the people that they are trying to sell to.

Whatever happens, I think next year could be very interesting for this device.

I finished Bioshock Halloween evening (only after carving my first Jack-O-Lantern and dodging neighbourhood sweet-guzzlers, satisfied that my cliche conformance for the year was on schedule), having played it on-and-off for a couple of months. Obviously its been a much-discussed title, but why not chuck in a few pence worth of comments?

First up, the story. This is fresh - great setting (50’s nostalgia, under the sea, filled with umm… mutants?), great premise, excellent twists, well-fleshed out characters. In some sections the sense of wonder and suspense and really well-built up, avoiding the “who cares” attitude provoked in the majority of in-game chest-puffing storylines (looking at you Halo). It is also genuinely scary in sections - visually theres some genius set-pieces and the audio is particularly disturbing. Late night play did develop bizarre dreams and restless sleep. Thankfully, for such a story-led game theres little in terms of cut-scenes, most of the story is disseminated by audio commentary that you pick up around the environment. Good, but valves story exposition works better in my opinion. I found listening to the audio a bit of a chore by the end and there was very little indication as to whether the audio would contain a bit of fluff (someone talking about going to the shops perhaps) or a genuine bit of story-critical exposition.

Art direction is beautiful. The world is exquisitely rendered and its taken a source of reference that has been utterly neglected, plus invented some iconic characters and locations. Top marks.

But, strip away the story and the visuals and you are left with a fairly standard game design. To be honest its dated. Given how many years its been in development, its understandable why the standards of the time have been used as the water-mark onto the project. It consists of fairly mundane FPS fare - move into a room, shoot all the creatures, move into the next room, shoot all the creatures. Some creatures suprise you. You kill them, you move through to the next level, a new creature is introduced, etc. The celebrated difference in this case - Plasmids (the ability to manipulate your DNA to grant new skills) - is certainly interesting, but in most cases is used as a lock/key condition to progress through the game, or to simply incapacitate some of the bad guys. Some of the more interesting elements are the ability to turn creatures on each other, or to get security cameras to get bots to attack them, but its really not enough to make a difference.

Other design decisions are a bit bizarre. “Hacking” involves replaying the 80s game “Pipemania” as a minigame. Rather than have a series of minigames, you are forced to play the same minigame. Hundreds of times. WHY?! Secondly, they have added quicksave AND penalty-free respawning making the game insanely easy and removing any tension as you can just be killed and walk back into the same room and repeat where you left off. Run out of ammo? Just wander round with the wrench and respawn several hundred times. Quick save on its own would have been fine.

So, is it worth playing? Definitely. Its set new standards visually and with its narrative. Its just a shame that those efforts were not matched by the design team, which could have raised this to being a defining game of this generation.

George Pólya is a Hungarian mathematician that was discussed a little bit in Papert’s Mindstorms book. While examining potential processes to instill problem solving skills in children, Pólya’s Four Principles are presented, which attempt to create a framework to solve any problem. Here they are, freshly copied and pasted:

Polya’s First Principle: Understand the Problem
This seems so obvious that it is often not even mentioned, yet students are often stymied in their efforts to solve problems simply because they don’t understand it fully, or even in part. Polya taught teachers to ask students questions such as:

• Do you understand all the words used in stating the problem?
• What are you asked to find or show?
• Can you restate the problem in your own words?
• Can you think of a picture or a diagram that might help you understand the problem?
• Is there enough information to enable you to find a solution?

Polya’s Second Principle: Devise a plan
Polya mentions (1957) that there are many reasonable ways to solve problems. The skill at choosing an appropriate strategy is best learned by solving many problems. You will find choosing a strategy increasingly easy. A partial list of strategies is included:

• Guess and check
• Make an orderly list
• Eliminate possibilities
• Use symmetry
• Consider special cases
• Use direct reasoning
• Solve an equation

Also suggested:

• Look for a pattern
• Draw a picture
• Solve a simpler problem
• Use a model
• Work backward
• Use a formula
• Be ingenious

Polya’s third Principle: Carry out the plan
This step is usually easier than devising the plan. In general (1957), all you need is care and patience, given that you have the necessary skills. Persist with the plan that you have chosen. If it continues not to work discard it and choose another. Don’t be misled, this is how mathematics is done, even by professionals.

Polya’s fourth Principle: Review/Extend
Polya mentions (1957) that much can be gained by taking the time to reflect and look back at what you have done, what worked and what didn’t. Doing this will enable you to predict what strategy to use to solve future problems, if these relate to the original problem.