zOMGamez!!!!1!11eleven

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.

Update: Here’s my quick prototype (before skinning)

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.

Speaking of the creator, who seems to go by Mechanically Separated Meat, he (she?) sounds like a very smart and interesting fellow whose blog posts include lengthy discussions on Quantum Physics. His hacked SNES9X code for rendering multiple attempts on Super Mario World is particularly interesting.

PS, I found this guy via TouchArcade. (Bit Pilot is good too!)

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.

Read the article on Photon Storm

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.

Give it a go and let me know what you think!

Suzuki Kizashi Vs. Evil Weather

All design was done by Siltanen & Partners

I’m very pleased to announce that one of my latest projects has just gone live. The Deepening – Select Your Own Adventure Edition has just gone up on Atom Films. Go give it a look, it’s hilarious.

The video is a Good Cop / Bad Cop action show where you get to choose what happens next. It was created by the brilliant Duncan Brothers who asked me to help build the Flash portion of it. Enjoy!

deepening.atom.com

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has recently formed a new special interest group for Flash games and Flash in the gaming industry. This promises to be a great resource for aspiring Flash game creators. Check out their Wiki and user groups if you’re interested in the subject.

Last night, I participated in the Iron Flash competition at the LA Flash Users Group in Venice Beach. As in Iron Chef (my favourite television show), the participants are all skilled Flash users pitted against one another with the goal of creating something interesting within a strict time limit and featuring a common “ingredient”. In this case, the ingredient was a set of pictures of ‘pucks’, specifically, R. Blank’s dog Puck, Puck the faun, Puck from the Real World, and a hockey Puck. We had 3 hours to make something out of any or all of the pictures. My fellow competitors were Jon Ruppel of Hooky Interactive and Ben McMaster (also at Hooky) who both made some awesome stuff in such a short time. UPDATE: All of the entries have been posted on the LAFlash site.

It was a great experience, and not just because OMG I WON!!!

My entry was a video game featuring Puck the dog. I was considering other physics based games involving the hockey puck and the dog somehow. Then I thought of using the dog instead of the hockey puck and somehow that reminded me of the sport beloved in Canada, Curling! The scoring system is a little wonky but if I may say so, it’s not bad for 3 hours work. Here are screenshots (click to link to the game) along with the source code:

Download the source code

I’m going to GDC for one day to schmooze and go to parties. If you’re going to be in downtown San Francisco next Wednesday, drop me a line! If not, you can follow my exploits on zOMGamez!!!1!11

I’ll be the guy that looks like this:

I’ve recently split the video game portion of this blog into a separate site.
http://blog.zomgamez.com/ is where you’ll find gaming news, interesting flash games, game programming related posts & moar.

Why?