Disruptive Tech or Deceptive Myth!?

This year is going to be the year of new gaming platforms and devices. Ouya was a major surprise very recently followed by GameStick and the Shield by nVidia and the news and gossip about Steam box. This is just going to be the beginning and we will probably experience waves of new devices which are mostly open systems.

Whether these new platforms succeed or not, there seems to be lots of new opportunities for independent developers to make video games and have opportunities to self publish their work. Unlike the MS, Sony or Nintendo owned consoles which have strict developer and game selection policies, these new platforms are open for anyone to use and create games.

There is a lot of excitement in the air for the independent creative people but how important will these new opportunities be really? I am skeptical about the success of most of these platforms.

Android based consoles and handhelds will provide the opportunity for all to easily make games and their digital distribution channels will enable most to ave their games available to gamers all over the world. Is this really a new opportunity? PC gaming has been like this for a long time now and most recently, android based mobile games have shared the same level of open ness and ease of distribution. PC games suffered a huge decline in their sales, to a level that many big publishers stopped porting their games for the PC, indicating that it is not worth the effort. Android markets are a joke compared to the closed iOS store. Making money off of Android mobile games seems to be a myth more than anything. There are many reasons for these digital failures, piracy being a major one. Lower piracy rates for the closed console devices and the Apple products is one reason games made for them have been able to survive and enjoy a solid paying user base.

A big exception exists for PC gaming and that is the Steam digital distribution portal. The magic of Valve has been to create a software platform that will enhance the user experience and provide added value for the games to a level that it makes sense for the gamers to want to purchase their games from steam and live inside this highly maintained walled garden. Steam seems to be the reason PC games did not die and to seme extent have flourished during the recent years.

A quick review of the current situation in the game market reveals that Xbox, PS3, Wii, Steam and the Apple Store have been highly successful and developers selling their products for these hardware and software platforms have been doing quite good. PC sales other than steam, android and all other mobile platforms have been huge failures compared to the theoretical potential that they should have (considering their open nature and the penetration factor of the platforms in society).

Open systems, open markets and free opportunities for all has not proved to be the best financial solution for sustainable growth in the digital age. Similar conclusions can be made by reviewing the state of the music and film industries too.

I think that the new Android based consoles will experience a future very much similar to the non-steam pc market and the Android mobile market. It will get quite fragmented too and there will be lots of content made for lots of distribution channels and many devices. Not to mention tons of piracy. Epic failures will scare away the developers and the new kids on the block will be forgotten before anything major.

Other than tough marketing opportunities for these new consoles because of fragmentation, visibility and piracy, much lower capabilities compared to PCs and consoles takes away any competition possibility for them in wow factors and considering the fact that many mobile games showed flashes of brilliancy by employing new touch controls for otherwise mediocre games, reverting back to the standard console controls will toughen the challenge to come up with creative game ideas.

All in all, while we should be ready for quite some hype in the coming months around these platforms, I really don't think that we are going to witness a disruptive technology and a paradigm shift.

Having said all this, I do believe that a huge change will happen with the birth of the Steam Box or Steam Boxes! Adding the pleasure of relaxing on the living room sofa with console game pads to the PC games with big screens and the new small PCs that are configured to work with the monster gaming system called Steam seems to be a wonderful idea. This will further strengthen an already strong gaming system. With the new initiatives like the Green Light on Steam, there should be little worries about those complaining that the system is closed and not democratized well.

I think we should be ready for great news about it soon and it sure will be exciting for all developers, especially the ones that are independent.

Karateka

I recently played the remake of Karateka (1982). It is a great arcade style game, a wonderful remake full of visual, combat and musical beauty. The game is quite short but very enjoyable and although it can be finished rather easily, finishing it the proper way is very hard.

Jordan Mechner has done a great job for the remake.

http://jordanmechner.com/category/karateka/

I don't remember whether I played the original game on an Apple II or a 286 PC. Either way, I still remember the fluidity and smoothness of the pixel art animations and the great feeling from the combat.

The introductory game trailer is quite nice and funny:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YMx-_aFP1lQ

Outshined!

The verdict is here, before I turn 37, I am going to select the best music album of my entire life! Something I never thought would be possible but for some strange reason is quite obvious now. Drums rolling .... "Bad Motor Finger" by Soundgarden (1991) is at the all time number one position! Decision is made based on the music, vocals and lyrics and the magical fact that all of the tracks in this album are exceptional. The mysterious note is that every track you hear from this album feels better than the previous one, once you reach the end, listening to the first track one more time feels even better than the last. This is the concept of a strange loop, exactly like an Escher painting, an ever growing loop, like everything else in life.

Another major point is that for some reason I am absolutely certain that there will not ever be any album better than "Bad Motor Finger" in the future! Thank you Soundgarden for this miracle!

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Bad Motor Finger
Strange Loop
Escher
Honorable Mentions: 10 by Pearl Jam, Jar of Flies by Alice in Chains, Far Beyond Driven by Pantera, Undertow by Tool, Black Album by Metallica, Use Your Illusion by Guns 'n Roses

Free Style R&D

It has been a few weeks that we have revived our weekly game design R&D sessions at the office. These sessions include a presentation about a topic by a developer followed by open discussion about the topic. They have always been quite useful and fun. Talking to colleagues about different topics and passing ideas is probably one of the most important activities that can be done.

Recent presentations have been about multi-player level design, combat system techniques and designing for horror in games.

I was at bat this week and since I've been investigating the idea of emergence in games recently, I read a book with the same title, Emergence in Games. The ideas in this book are quite generic and it really does not add any valuable insight for the idea of emergence in games and it covers a lot of unrelated material. This is why we chose to discuss a different topic, Minimalist Games. I reflected upon an excellent paper called, Towards Minimalist Game Design from Rutgers University. There are a lot of interesting notes about game development in general in minimalist games and the way they abstract everything out to focus on the most significant aspects of the game for the player is something that we can learn a lot from. The ubiquity of games on mobile devices has resurrected these types of games.

One of the key notes in the paper is about the differences between perceived complexity and systemic complexity in games. It is always good to have low perceived complexity in a product, so do minimalist games but their systemic complexity is not necessarily low. This means they do not have to be very simple casual games. This idea has been tried out in different fields by expert designers, a lot of apple products such as the iPhone have benefited from such a view to product design.

There are references in the article to a great presentation by Jonathan Blow, "Conflicts in Game Design" which is quite fabulous. This talk discusses why games have not been able to have similar effects on their audience as novels or movies regarding emotional experiences. The conflicts mentioned here are mostly conflicts between gameplay and narrative. A highly recommended talk.

Other references are to articles by Ian Bogost. Puzzling the Sublime is one of the most interesting of these articles which investigates about the meaning of puzzle games. Sublime, being a word with roots in philosophy has been discussed by numerous philosophers including Kant. Sublime talks about a kind of aesthetics which can be found in unbounded phenomena and infinity. Hegel believed that the aesthetics of the excessive use of details in eastern and Islamic art are examples of the sublime. There is quite a lot to inspire from in these areas.

Enemies ... oh .. so wise!

For some reason the enemies of Batman have a lot of philosophical quotes! Joker had lots and this is my favorite one from Bane: "Victory has defeated you!"  ...aah ... how Victory can defeat people indeed... indeed ....


By the way, I feel that the recent Batman series are going down a kind of uncanny valley, once you get too deep in the meanings and become serious, then the guy wearing the strange custom and jumping around kind of feels out of place! Maybe super hero movies should find a different direction?

November Status

It has been a while since my last post, well, since the post before the last post. I should write more in general,  the main reason is that these writings are a chance for me to reflect on myself and assess my current status, these help me get out of the usual mold and see life from a different angle. Well, here it goes then.. what should I write about? hmmm.. lets see... I am just going to start from .. right .. here.. Infected Mushroom is playing now, the name of the song is "Nation of Wusses", how ironic... I'm going to start off with my son, my son is 4.5 years old now, he has changed quite a lot, in fact he changes every two weeks, it is all a quite an experience, the way he changes, the way he talks, the way he sees me and expects things from me, it all makes me want to try more to be a good role model for him, a real big challenge but really interesting. The wonderful thing is that we can now enjoy playing video games together, both on PS3 and the iPad, I remember what a wonderful joy it was for me when my father played a bit of Family Computer with me and my brother back in the 80s and the same memories enhance the joy I get from playing video games with my son.

Testament is playing now, Dragon Attack, just pure awesomeness. We spent yesterday and today working on Kuro mostly, two packed days of focused work on our side game project for the iOS devices. MLD has been exceptional and these days were a blast, looking forward to a productive day tomorrow, thanks to the very long weekend here. It is magical how much work can be done when there is an intense focus, not to forget about the wonderful accompanying music. The whole Garshasp project had a few of such events which defined its structure and were major leaps for the product in terms of quality and team morale.

Team morale, its all about the team, its all about the players, we've been always lucky to have great players around us, we've lost many, we've gained many, its all about great guys wanting to do great work. Its all about the process that matters. The process which runs on the foundation of great developers. "A" class people.

Pearl Jam is playing now and I couldn't be more happy. The latest Soundgarden album is great, not as magical as the old albums but still quite good for these days. Alice in Chains was around these days, fabulous, I don't know what really happened in the 90's in Seattle, but whatever it was, the result was the best musics of the world, period.

I am looking forward to Lakers this year, saw Kobe and Howard perform the Showtime! Kobe is just great, not quite Micheal Jordan but still good. They're gonna win it this year.

What am I writing about really? Nothing major, just reflecting.

There are quite a few areas that I researched about with enthusiasm recently. One was related to creativity. I had to talk about it a bit for the class that I had, read about it in un-related books and I attended one of the distant learning courses of Stanford about the subject. This is a very significant topic for life in general. The beauty of it is that it stems from the right hemisphere of the brain where it is all about magic and intuition. The part of the brain which reminds us to not be so analytic about everything. The scalability of creativity is what makes it super valuable with great lessons to learn from for small teams that can not compete with the big players in terms of money or experience. MNO introduced me to a wonderful presentation by Ken Stanley entitled: "Discovery without Objectives" which is quite related to the idea of the value of creativity and novelty. The presentation and the related papers about "Novelty Search" are exceptional. There is so much wisdom hidden underneath the concepts that can be used for diverse fields such as AI, Sociology, Science, Math and Psychology.

On the technical side of things, we've been pursuing an exciting new path to develop a brand new game engine with yzt for quite a while now, we hold regular code jam sessions and the progress of the core of the engine has been really well so far, I learn extensively from guru yzt in each session and this is a priceless experience. The code base is heavily based on C++11. The component system and basic features including the networking layer have been implemented so far, quite exciting. One big question mark is the rendering system. OGRE has been quite nice to use previously, but our extreme care towards performance might lead us to other solutions. We'll have to see. In one alternative universe stemming from a few days from now, yzt can develop a super efficient and capable graphics engine to act as the front end of the developing engine.

Wolfmother, oh so great! "Indukti... And who's the God Now?!" Words can't explain ....

This is going to be a bit shorter than I thought and will have to stop here.

Fundamentals of Game Development

I recently taught a course about the Fundamental of Game Development. It was an interesting experience for me, first of all because I was back in a class after about four years and secondly because it was the first time that I had a class about game development, a topic which is quite interesting for me these days and I've been involved with during the past 6 years. The great thing about teaching in a class is getting exposed to fresh new minds, trying to help them achieve their goals and also finding a time to reflect on yourself and your own status. Too much teaching is not something that would be good for me but a little is what I would need.

Here is a link to the course material I had prepared for this class:

http://fanafzargames.com/ahf/gdi

Students ranged from people who were aiming to pursue their studies in different categories related to game development, some technical, some art and some related to game design. Quite diverse and the topics needed to be quite diverse also.Alas, this is the real beauty of game development!