Day: Feb 1, 2019

I have to say, this talk has blown my tiny mind. I don’t think that I really appreciated how much emerging technology there really is. Featured in the video…

ATAP Advanced Technology and projects: I love the way that they present themselves to be literally on the edge between what’s possible and what’s impossible. And of course, every time they are victorious is one way or another the space that is possible grows and the impossible shrinks proportionately. Spotlight stories were very interesting for storytelling blurring the line between game and story just a little more. I have developed a little for VR in general with The Prison (where you play as the Wardens embodied wrath and need to terrify the prisoners in your charge) and in the Virtual Military Sim which was the final coursework and the live client brief for the BA Top Up last year. I am keen to see all the different ways in which VR can be used and this caught my eye because of that. One thing that I find a little limiting with VR is the limited locomotion options and as someone that suffers from ‘the most acute motion sickness I have ever seen’ (diving instructor in the Dominican Republic), I can only tolerate teleportation during play sessions. I wonder how much of a factor this is to VR in general although it’s interesting that Google thinks that AR and VR combined from the 4th wave of computing…

Project Soli also caught my eye with its incredibly sensitive gesture reading ability. I think that some blend of VR and this kind of tech would be the start of very high fidelity virtual experiences. It would be great to not have to hold a controller at all and something like Soli be able to read the finger input from a distance although that’s not what the technology is being used for at the moment.

Tango, an AR and VR standard was presented as the cutting edge of that technology. I was very impressed with one point in particular. The presenter explained that due to the software’s ‘area learning’ feature, it would remember where game items had been dropped in the real world. I just could not help myself but think of Breezehome from Skyrim and how it might feel to be able to actually stockpile my gold ingots in my garage!

The gentleman presenting Kubernetes succeeded in making sure that I knew that I need to learn a lot more jargon and that I’m sure that what he was doing was very impressive. I would need to look more deeply at the cloud-based multiplayer backend that he was discussing before I can fully appreciate what was so exciting about it. I will leave that until I am competent (plus a little more) in C++, my teething language of choice.

Skyrim (the second time I have referenced it I know…) is big. The world I mean although the collection of quests is also sizeable. Well, one of the presentations that really got my attention was the Virtual World Building on the Gaming Google Cloud Platform. This would allow a cloud-based, unlimited game world that would carry on engaging with it other occupants until Javaskor (my Nord character) would return. This does bring up a conversation about how such a world would be convincingly populated. Im, sure there are techniques around if I were to dig a little. The other little nugget that I got from this part of the talk was that there is such a thing as a TPU, a Tensor Processing Unit for AI acceleration! This is very exciting as I am very interested in game AI.

For me, this is one of those things that I think that I should be into but my instinct tells me that I don’t want to be. I have never really taken to mobile games and I think that I am going to have to suck it up and immerse myself to cure that. I don’t know what it is that switches me off the platform. Maybe it’s the tiny screen, maybe it’s the awkward controls, maybe I just have not tried enough games! It could also be that I like immersion and like to see myself as the character that I play in the game. While the presenter was talking about the number of hours consumed via YouTube he mentioned that he feels that the makers of Clash Royale have done a great job making the game ‘sticky’. I like that term and describes the desired customer retention perfectly and in one word. Ok, I’m downloading Slither.io and I will let you know what I think. Yeah, it’s not for me.

The last part of his talk was quite relevant to all game developers that would like to encourage people to stream their games, and let’s face it, why would you not? It’s a great compounding advertising strategy and is a genuine way to attract people to the product. After all, they have seen the software running, wort’s and all in plenty of videos and still are happy to invest money in your game? I would take that to mean that the game is solid. The fresh perspective here for me was in thinking that some of the things that streamers find attractive can be engineered into the design of a game giving it a greater chance of finding a home with popular streamers and content creators. The obvious danger is in losing the distinction between tweaking the content for these people and ‘selling out’ to them, ruining some property of your game that was important or worse, necessary.

I think I need to leave it there for tonight as my stinky little (awesome) daughter needs a bath. If you read all this, your tea is cold.

In an effort to fill one or more of the many gaps I have in my game development knowledge, I am reading a book called The Art of Game Development – A Book of Lenses. Although I have worked on a few games now (not enough, not by a long shot) and although all of them have taught me more than I have time to write and you have time to read, I can’t help but recognise the need for a structured set of tools with which to work. I don’t mean a ‘system’ of some other soul-sucking word, but more along the lines of signposts and roughly sketched maps, just something to check myself against. During the course last year (Games Design for Industry BA Top Up) I had the same experience as when I first started to learn to play the guitar. I did not have to be a musician (and never really became one either) to know a bad song when I heard it, but that didn’t translate into the ability to write great songs either. So, I was in this middle ground where I know what I didn’t want and in most cases, I kind of knew what I did want, but I just couldn’t join those two pointers (C++ slip there…) together.

I am trying to solve that problem intentionally now regarding the new skill I desire. Game developer. I think I know which denomination of developer I want to be although I am not sure and in all honesty, it’s still very early in my ‘career’. I’m a programmer. No, I’m a game designer. But I really want to be able to animate too… What about audio? And so I need guidance. And I need it fast as I am no spring turkey. At 38 father of one (more if my wife gets her way) and no real job right now, the least I can do is read up!

The thing I like most about this book so far is nothing to do with game development at all. It’s the pacing. It’s just taking its time and setting the scene, talking about why a book like this should even be cluttering up the automated Amazon warehouse now that all the book shops are closed. Well not all of them…

I am a little over 70 pages in but already very interested in what the author has to say. I think that the way that he has chosen to structure the book, using the tool of a ‘lens’ with which to view your game is very well conceived and allows a structured conversation about game design without reducing the process to a series of steps. I really like the attitude that you could/should use the lenses, and combinations of lenses, to ask the same questions you have been asking already, just in a slightly different light.

My favourite lens so far is the lens of Infinite Inspiration. It is the lesson that some of the most impressive skills or techniques that a practitioner of any discipline has may not have come from watching others practice but from anywhere. 

If you read this far, your pot noodle is overdone and you need to give it a stir…