Probe Meat – Nordic Game Jam 2011
The Nordic Game Jam (NGJ) is the flagship for the Global Game Jam. This year the theme was "extinction". I missed some more constraints. Hopefully that will be the case next year.
Our game "Probe Meat" was developed in Unity and is playable here, play Probe Meat.
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Unfortunately, we don't get to see all the games because there are so many teams. So everybody was split into four different rooms where the finalists were chosen. There were some really good ones among, such as: Strings of Fate, Tree of Light, Cubiclysm, and Tikkiit. Personally I would have like to see Cubiclysm win. I think it captures the theme well (which a lot of games do less), is very tight and polished, has an interesting mechanic that you as the opponent can tell the difference between (shoot and rotate). It seems to work very well out of the box.
Windows Phone 7
Development for the new Windows Phone 7 (WP7) looks promising. Had a chance trying some XNA development and I must say that compared to development for Windows 6.5, this was like a walk in the park - it just worked out of the box. It was no more complicated than doing an XNA game and deploying to an Xbox. Interesting to see where the easiness of development will place WP7 in the competition.
Bill Buxton talk
Some while back Bill Buxton gave an interesting talk at Microsoft in Vedbæk. The talk focused on . An interesting aspect was Buxton's observation of the time it takes for a new idea to reach maturity (think he defined this as reaching $ 1 billion in company value), which was 20 years. Thereby saying that the things that are the new things of today was actually being thought of 20 years ago. In his talk he used the touch, seen in tables, phones etc. as an example of this. Showing both early research done at Xerox PARC with table interfaces, gesture recognition in old watches bought from Casio and thus uncovering that if anybody knows the history or has done any thorough research touch is not this WOW-thing, but more about F**** time-thing.
It leads to an interesting aspect in terms of thinking about how far an idea is in maturity. If you want to hit the market in five years time the idea/"product" is already there and 15 years old already. It might just have not reached maturity yet in terms of bad implementations, wrong context etc. He stressed the importance of looking at why it didn't succeed when looking back. One should always be able when describing an idea to say in what context it is succeeds as well as in what context in does not succeed.
Unclear selection in Windows 7
Since I'm leaning more towards the usability and user experience area I thought I'd also let it reflect a bit more on the blog.
I have been a bit annoyed by the fact that I have been unable to rearrange the items in the left window of the Explorer. It really seems intent on there being only one way to do things, which is not the way I want to do them of course :D After just having had an Explorer incident I thought I'd make it in to my first small post on usability. The story is that I accidently deleted a wrong file in Windows 7 because the selection in the Explorer was unclear. I was returning to the window and saw the file (in the right window) I wanted to delete was selected, so I went ahead, pushed delete and was expecting the confirmation dialog - it never came. Instead from the corner of my eye I saw something happening with my favourites (in the left window) and quickly noticed that I had just deleted my Desktop shortcut, which apparently require no confirmation... Luckily it was not catastrophic - I survived :) but clearly a usability problem both in regards to inconsistency for the favourites (no dialog) and lack of clear distinction for the Explorer selection. See the image below of the ambiguity.
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The Longest Journey on Windows 7
I never got to finish The Longest Journey (TLJ) before I got Windows 7 on my laptop. After installing TLJ I ran into a few problems. The first being that you cannot lunch through the shortcut which tries to execute launcher.exe (had the same problem on XP). So I knew how to get around that one, but after launching Game.exe instead the game would crash shortly thereafter. Compatibility mode solved this, but the animation was very lagging. Disabling 3D solved this, but turned out the sound was stuttering. After some googling I got it to run more or less flawlessly. Here is what I did.
1) To lunch the game use the Game.exe found in the installation directory.
2) Set compatibility mode to Windows XP (SP3) on the Game.exe.
3) Disable 3D acceleration in the window that pops up after launch.
4) After the game has started do a minimize and open Task Manager. Set the game's affinity to one CPU only.
There are some occasional stutters still, but they don't seem to jam the game in the same way as before.
Developing for HTC HD2
A while back I had the pleasure of taking part in development of a small game for HTC's HD2 running Windows Mobile 6.5, which I must say wasn't a stroll in the park. I have broken this post into two parts one about development and the second about the phone.
Before we got started on developing a small graphic hack was performed greatly increasing the performance - around 500%! And I must say that was necessary, see the comparison film.
After the huge increase in performance development could begin. It turned out quite troublesome, since it's like developing games in windows forms. So, it's not that programmer/game development friendly.
Now I haven't used a touch phone before, so I admit it might take a bit of getting used to. That said, I found it more difficult to write a text than I had expected. Hit wrong keys, did double presses, and I couldn't feel my way as on a regular keyboard. I've given up wearing a watch, since I have my mobile on me anyway. I often bring it out of my pocket to have a quick gaze on what time it is. The problem however, is that it displays the last shown time before it went into standby (black screen) and then takes a slight delay before it actually updates to the current time. Quite annoying that time isn't updated before it's shown. I really don't want to be given false information, since I before I noticed this had already slipped it back into my pocket - suddenly 10 minutes lasted quite longer ;) Also, time or a watch is something you just gaze at quickly I really don't want to wait for it. Sticking with time, there is a nice old school calendar clock (see the picture below), which has some nice animation for when the time changes.
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In the beginning I found the animation really cool and I think the developers did as well 'cause every time I go into some menu and back to the home screen the clock has been pushed back 1 hour and some minutes, just so they can do the cool animation, which after a while isn't that cool anymore, but rather an annoyance. Lastly, I haven't been able to configure the build-in mail service to use the GPRS network for my mail when no Wi-Fi is in the vicinity..
Stepping a bit back from all my criticism it's really a nice phone it just ruins the experience encountering these small annoyances.
Windows Phone 7 (WP7) seminar
With WP7 it becomes possible to develop applications across computers, Xbox 360, and Windows Phones. Microsoft is holding a seminar Thursday the 17. of June at Fisketorvet focused for developers who want a sneak peak on WP7 development platform.
Seminar is held in English. Sign-up here (free).
Azure competition
A competition in developing applications for Azure is up here. It's worth checking out and there are interesting prices to be won. But hurry the tokens that give access are limited!
Berserker Breakfast – Global/Nordic Game Jam 2010
The Global/Nordic Game Jam has ended and as usual the experience has been great. A lot more people participated this year, which also meant that a lot more games were created. Theme global theme was "deception" and the local contraints was either to have a monkey, donkey, or key in the game. Friday night we got settled on a game idea - vikings eating mushrooms. This meant that we on Saturday could begin implementation. There was a bit more stress Sunday with the deadline fast approaching, compared to the other two years I've participated. We hadn't had time to play the game except once during Sunday and even after that huge modifications were made. However, I'm quite pleased with the final result taking the time into account. There is of cause still a lot of stuff we'd like to do and who knows, maybe we will ;)
Try it out here.
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Pluralsight on trial
I have recently had the possibility of trying out Pluralsight. A site focused on providing e-learning for .NET. I was given access to the video material and used some time on C# and WPF. I was quite satisfied with the way the C# tutorials had been done. Different content was explained while also shown in real-time code. I was slightly disappointed when I moved over to the WPF tutorials. For the record I must say that I'm already skilled in C# whereas WPF was new to me. My subscription ran out during my focus on WPF, but from what went through it seemed less hand-on and I felt I had to go through a larger portion to actually be able to do anything in WPF. I think it's fair to point out that another reason might due to how WPF is structured, but again I'm not familiar with it enough to be able to assess whether this is the case or not.