This may be a little off topic but since I love video games and logic, I thought I’d take a moment to share some thoughts I was having.
I just read this post from Kotaku talking about the new proprietary memory card that will be used for the PSVita, Sony’s upcoming gaming handheld. The tl;dr version: Sony’s making a new type of memory card. They will only work with one gadget. They will be expensive.
This is not the first time that a gaming company, especially Sony, has asked us to pony up for a proprietary storage medium. Sony has virtually cornered the proprietary format market: MiniDisc, MemoryStick, BetaMax, even those little cassettes that go in your answering machine. All of this, I must assume, was in the hopes of making one that lasts and becomes a standard. Well, they kinda did with BluRay even though it’s appearing at the twilight of physical media. But I digress. Microsoft’s also in the game with their custom XBox360 hard drives costing about twice the going rate. In fact, every non-standard CD-ROM or cartridge is also a proprietary format when you get down to it.
Anyway, this post isn’t really about storage being proprietary. It’s about storage being expensive. The companies create this proprietary media then sell it to us. We’ll have no choice but to buy it so they can charge whatever they want. That makes sense I guess. So to sum up their thinking…
Make a thing customers need to use our product
Sell it to customers for $$$
Get rich… Right?
There’s one glaring flaw here. If I may be so bold as to illustrate my consumer-centric logic…
If storage is $$$…
I don’t buy storage
I don’t have much storage
But I need it to play games!
I can’t play games :-(
I don’t buy the games I can’t play
I spend less money and have a generally un-fun experience with the gaming system
To look at the same argument conversely…
If storage is El Cheapo!
I buy lots of it
I have lots of room for games
I spend the money I saved on storage buy games without worrying about where to put them
I have a more fun experience with the gaming system.
To try to turn this from pure gripe into something useful, I will just say this. Don’t make me your willing customers have to work hard to spend money on you. Always be aware of decisions that benefit your company by punishing your customers.
This is not just a video game rant. The online world is also fraught with similar follies. One phenomenon is discussed in this great post about the Mobile App Splash Screen Anti-Pattern by Martin Sutherland. Another example is any site that makes me create an account before I do even a simple task. Virtually every restaurant website ever made has made me endure a Greek techno slideshow and download a PDF menu just to find their hours and address.
Don’t let this happen to you, or to your clients! Always Be Closing! And let me buy more video games, dammit!
This is just a quick little flow-chart. A project I’m working on includes a ‘Simon-says’ type game. I thought I’d share my notes on how the game logic will work.
10. Dance Band Hero: World Tour
9. Yoga Tycoon
8. Waggle it!
7. Super King of Pushups 2011
6. Airplane Taxi Director HD
5. Waggle it! Pro
4. ASL Warriors
3. Point, clap, & slap: Puppies
2. MasterGators
1. The Controller: Adventures of you
This video detailing the struggle to find the perfect SimCity plan is both beautiful and frightening, the same feeling perhaps one might feel witnessing the detonation of a nuclear bomb or a grizzly bear slaying a fawn. The elegance of it is undeniable and it seems to be underlain by a confounding universal harmony that could elevate one’s mind as easily as it could tear it asunder.
This game was entry in the Experimental Gameplay Project‘s 10-second game theme for March. You control Jesus, our lord and saviour, helping him to run as fast as possible and do “Jesus Things”. My description shouldn’t be longer than 10 seconds so please enjoy!
Jumpman, (no, not Jumpman), is a game for Mac/PC/Linux/iPhone with the look and feel of an Atari-era puzzle-platformer but with a few interesting twists thrown in. It’s fun! You can download it for *free* and give it a whirl. If you like it, consider shelling out a mere $2.99 for the iPhone version to support the creator.
This isn’t a new article, but it touches on a topic I’ve heard a lot about recently. That is, pixel ‘blitting‘. Blitting is an old school process used in sprite-based games of essentially erasing a spot in a bitmap image based on a sprite’s alpha and using a bitwise operator to draw the sprite into that bitmap image. Most graphics systems do this transparently to the user in some fashion (pardon the pun). 8-Bit Rocket has a good introduction to these concepts with regards to Flash, but read on for the important part of this post.
The article shows that Flash Player is already fairly optimized for graphical composition operations when compared to blitting. Both showed similar framerates. However, the cacheAsBitmap operation caused an exponential increase in memory consumption when the number of sprites on stage increased. Ironically, the comparison was run by the creator of the Pixel Blitz library who, I’m sure, had a difficult time presenting the results.
There are some good details in the article so if you’re interested, read the whole thing before you decide if you agree.
Have you done any work with bit blitting or sprite sheet animation? Have you found it to be beneficial? Tell us your thoguhts.
I recently created this video game for Suzuki to promote the Kizashi’s all-wheel-drive performance. I threw this together in about 2.5 weeks starting with some code I wrote for the Global Game Jam. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the work.
Indie developers from such popular titles as Braid and World of Goo are taking a new approach to funding indie games that encourages independent game developers to stay independent. We’ll find out more at GDC next week but in the meantime… IndieFund.com
