For a while, at least, I'm confident we won't see any really great work done from academic gaming. There are two reasons for that:
1. No established directions or sides to support. With no idea of where to start, all the early work is just a lot of useless pontification and attempts to steer around developing any lasting field of study. The "literary criticism" of games that we see a lot of I consider to be among the latter - I mean, really, the fact that you start with three lives in most games using lives does not make it a Biblical reference or some other statement on the human condition...that's an invention of *gameplay mechanics*, dammit. There are plenty of ways you could talk about how games are meaningful without immediately reaching for the bag of techniques used to analyze traditional storytelling.
2. Most of the first people in this field will be mediocre, because of the conditions in 1. No idea of where to start, nor any real curriculum. This won't help attract the people that really might know something, so it'll have to start slowly at first.
But there's no question that there are plenty of things to discuss...especially from a historical context, something which seems to get overlooked a lot even though games tend be more evolutionary than anything else.
If it does, it has the smack-your-head obvious advantage of being a portable multiplayer device; with only one unit and one game, you can play with your friends.
If not....well, I'm sure that people will come up with ways to use multi-screen in a single-player fashion.
When I was little I copied tons of type-in programs from books or magazines into the Atari. I didn't necessarily understand everything, but doing the work gave me a basic understanding of what was going on.
I think a modern book based around the type-in approach, regardless of the language, would work very well, especially if it adopted an iterative model where you slowly added bits and pieces to your programs. After each new addition there would of course be some explanation of what's going on that captured the essentials of *what the computer is doing* rather than putting everything in abstract terms and relying on the kid to trust that it'll all somehow work out. An appendix at the back could provide further detail as to how the hardware operates, and the various ways operating systems work with the hardware, without necessarily becoming tied to specific hardware.
Oh, and there would be no CD containing the programs in finished form. That only encourages you to "see it working" rather than "make it work yourself."
I've probably written pages and pages of stuff since I was 8(18 now), when we first got an Internet connection. At first, it was embarrassing(at least to today's me) posts to Usenet. Then forums...and irc but that's never really changed how I write so much, other than the (temporary) discarding of a few rules and some capitalization to improve the flow, and little habits I picked up like:/me sighs and has to come up with an example.
This fomula is very convenient cause it lets you express emotion in the first part and then immediately act on it in the second part. Typical in person, harder to convey in standard writing.
Another benefit of writing is that when I write about subjects I'm interested in, I tend to learn about them by going through the writing process, and I get to do research from Google(and nowadays Wikipedia) every so often. It's all very good practice.
A light-gun shooter? Time Crisis 3 fills the current "token light-gun game" slot - it would only be bumped out by a quality game.
Or a first-person shooter? I suspect that this is an impractical idea for most arcades; while using a trackball or two joysticks like on a gamepad would solve the durability problem, all existing FPS control systems are generally considered too complex for an environment where ease-of-use is of maximum importance.
Or...a shoot-em-up? By the description I would guess not.
But there's plenty of things one could add to a game that can't be done quite yet; some of them are programming questions like AI or systems modelling; others simply require more hardware, like modelling worlds with totally deformable terrain(Red Faction, if you even remember it now, felt like a hack because only certain parts could be destroyed) or bringing the detail of our CG characters and environments in line with pre-rendered work.
The real issue is how we, so to speak, "start over" now that games can do everything we can imagine, when a big enough budget and schedule is allowed. Lots of people want to do virtual realities, in an online or single player form, and over time the distinction between that(when it was still theoretical) and a game that constantly tests our abilities or acts as social glue in the way that sports or board or card games might has gotten muddied; games today are often made heavy and slow-paced by feeling the compulsion to satisfy both the requirements of skill/excitement and of VR. Games rarely ever have a continuous stream of challenge thrown at you anymore; instead, it's broken up into little chunks wherin you explore a little, and then you fight or solve puzzles or whatever, and then you go back to exploring...
That said, I have great hopes that the market will reinvigorate itself with a whole new set of ideas; there's plenty of untapped potential floating around that is likely to unleash great stuff over the next few years, games that try to do things "new and different" like any art should.
As I grew up and got older I noticed that I could no longer tolerate such marathon stretches of sitting.
Or maybe it was because I was sitting *more* often than when I was younger.
In any case, when it bothered me I'd figure out a new position, usually lying down or something. Using the same one forever is really problematic unless you happen to be using a $1000 chair or a $15 exercise ball.
My experience with amateur level design for Half-Life(in multiplayer games like CS or Firearms) is that you can only "sell" maps to the community or to team leaders by making them look pretty...
Which really put me off from the whole deal, because I hated tweaking textures and splitting brushes constantly just for cosmetics. The few maps I did make and release were quite successful, for non-official maps.
I tried a collaboration with a artsy-type mapper a few times, where I came up with some new, outrageous design that was focused purely on how players would behave in it, where I would set things up so that x amount would go one way, and y amount would go another way, and they'd all meet and fight in area z, where it would be very exciting, but some people could go around through q or r without being too visible from z, etc., and I would generally try to leave enough room in polycounts for him to do his thing, but pretty much every time he would "improve it" by recreating the whole thing from scratch and leaving it barely recognizable, often eliminating some key elements from my original map. Then he would go on to release it and get the majority of the credit, because he made it Look Good(tm).
Individual players that played the beta versions, though, always whined that it wasn't as fun anymore. I wonder why?:P
Seriously, if you(the topic starter) really are passionate about good levels, and about good gameplay in general, work towards game design. It's hard to get into that position in pretty much any development studio, but that doesn't have to stop you. If you're like me and have the time and money to burn, you just go strike out on your own and decide to build shareware games, learning every trade required along the way. You don't get the power rush like you might when you're designing a "heavy" AAA title where your possibilities are almost unlimited, but you learn a lot about designing things that are FEASABLE, and with a minimum of wasted/deadweight content. That is probably the surest path to success in an industry laden with ever-more-grand visions that are inevitably executed in a halfhearted way.
The game I'm working on now, which will be my first released title if I can get it done(not the first thing I've ever done by a long shot), contains a city simulation. It doesn't simulate anything very deep, but it will have just enough for the player(who plays an individual character) to be able to influence/be influenced by it. The city will not be 3d. It will be 2d. You will not get to see individual buildings, unless you count the little tiles I have to be "buildings." The concept I'm working with is to minimize the amount of content needed and maximize the amount the player can do with it; hence, I have some random but predictable elements, and will include ways for players to build new cities, with multiple "career paths" and ways to influence the simulation, and an overall open-ended play structure that relies heavily on small blocks of text to provide story information and lend atmosphere to the settings, much in the way some of Sid Meier's games did(Pirates! and Covert Action come to mind).
No large publisher would ever approve such a vague, unfocused title, and most developers would have a hard time working with it, because it runs counter to the ingrained(though oft unintentional) belief that the game should provide a lot of structure and linearity; most games only really need that for technical reasons. The choice tends to be between adding details and the "sizzle" that goes with them, and adding truly grand elements to the design that almost require a level of abstraction, and nearly every time, the sizzle will win - not just because of pressure from big companies, but because the artists and programmers love the thought of building something that's better looking and more detailed and requires more skill and polish than anything that came before, because doing it will prove their worth. That often results in games turning into technical
RealArcade is a fairly successful game site held by RealNetworks. However, to date they have only "made their hay" on casual games of the simplistic match-them-up or shoot-them-down kind. The casual market is now an oversaturated one; everyone's already gotten the idea that one could make a simple puzzle game knock-off for pennies, or a couple months of time, and then market it to the hilt in hopes of reaching the elusive "casual gamer."
However, once you've taken that market like Real quietly has over a few years, you don't have any real way to expand it; there are only so many computer users looking for a light 15 minute game. So now they're engaging in some consolidation like with this aquisition, and in the future, I've heard, they're going to try to target a wider market.
A lot of the people here are advocating the hardcore, learn-to-program approach.
But not everyone that wants to make games wants to learn programming, and this was a source of some frustration in my own younger years, because although I had tools available, I saw what I was going on, and I had plenty of ideas, my drive to actually create code was almost zero. So I let things sit quite a long time, and was almost entirely dependent on finding tools that minimized the amount of structural work needed(graphics routines, objects, tile engines) and maximized the amount of control I had over the critical segments of gameplay, like collisions and shooting. The best free one around like that today is Mark Overmars' Game Maker. It allows you to do some very complex things with a C-subset scripting language, while at the same time providing a strong IDE and toolset. It's unfortunately tied to DirectX and Win32, though, and it's also not an opensourced project(for a $15 registration fee you get a couple more options), but the free version is by no means crippleware, and for what it does it's very good. Also the forums are quite funny because the majority of the posters are kids playing at game development, and not even really having the smarts to do well with such a great tool.
Now I'm a freshman in college and plan to get at least a BA in CS, not because I like it, but because it's going to keep pushing me to advance my skills until I'm well capable of making games of all complexities. (I plan to go into shareware/independent gaming, so learning all skills equally well is a Good Idea. Also a good recipe for using up all my spare time.)
I've moved on from Game Maker to Pygame since I started college; my current greatest accomplishment with it is doing a scrolling tile engine(with all sizes, screen border etc. adjustable); it took three times for my code to be really anything close to clean, and after the second time I decided OOP is not a magic bullet for anything. My next project is to add a modular framework that includes the tile engine; using this framework, users will be able to make maps that play differently, because each map will load some Python code and objects in addition to settings for the tiles. It's kind of confusing me, which the tile engine did too, the first time, but I think that if I keep at it I'll get somewhere, and from there it'll just snowball until all of the sudden the game I'm planning is done hehe;)
Don't forget that in addition to people doing the "real work" in any business or industry, there are also middlemen like distributors, retailers, etc.. You can't say that these middlemen contribute anything particularly great, but at the same time they are necessary to facilitate the well-being of the economy in lieu of, say, technology that would put them out of the picture.
In MMORPGs, the middlemen could lose their business in the blink of an eye if the game's owners decided to provide their own system facilitating the use of real money in virtual trade. I would call it a "high-risk" business on just that standpoint alone.
In addition, insurers probably also don't offer policies for "loss of virtual items due to crash."
I know for a fact that on a real arcade stage(which is usually a grade above even the high-end home ones for sale) even people 300+ pounds can play. Dunno about 400+ though;)
Also, the cheapo mats(which have absoutely nothing to crush in them except the sensors, and those will take quite a bit wouldn't break if a heavy person stepped on them. The only danger with the cheap ones is that they can tear and get folded and crushed etc., which won't start to be a problem until you reach advanced levels of course ^.^
I played Boulder Dash as a kid. And on the Atari, its ORIGINAL platform(more people remember it on the C64 of course). I wasn't so great at it because all the levels past the first two or so really were quite hard. But when we got the BDCK I had lots of fun making levels ^.^
Interesting how both games(BD was made by Peter Liepa, whose page comes up first on any google search) were made by mathematicians.
I wonder why mathematicians stopped making video games?;)
Before they ever did Wheel of Time, they were an adventure game house. Steve Meretzky was one of the great names, and came there from Infocom IIRC.
Their first games were basically text games dragged into the 90s kicking and screaming, by letting you play using both verb/object bars, or just typing in your commands like usual. Small still images and BGM tracks constituted the technical advances.
That might sound bad, but the games were good, especially the later ones. The asthetic essentials of descriptive text and vibrant environments were never left out.
I think Legend's two main problems were:
1. It got stuck in FPS games after WOT was a success. Its core strength, after all, was originally in adventures.
2. It got sucked into the folds of a large game company. When a developer reaches that position, it seems like death is inevitable.
One of my favorite hole-in-the-wall arcades/pool rooms(The Rack 'n Cue in San Francisco State Uni's student union) has an NES set up at the counter. Anyone can play, though they have to request their game to the person staffing it(not exactly an outsider-friendly system, which is useful in some ways). If anything, it probably helps business, because it gives the place an additional attraction as a "hang-out spot" for the young after-school crowd, one of the place's two sets of core customers. (The other is university students of course) And if you go at all, you're more likely to spend money there obviously.
Even if right now SkyOS is a "maybe we'll open the source...later" project, I really like seeing new desktop options.
Part of that is because I'm sick of the same old discussion: "Is Linux ready for the desktop yet?" "No." "Yes." "NO!" "YES!" "Use OS X if you want a good desktop." "But Apple is as evil as MS!" etc.
The thing is, although the wide range of choices and features that Linux(as a whole) has steadily gained in are nice etc., they don't always help to advance it onto the desktop. An OS that is designed "light" and with the specific task of desktop use in mind from the beginning might be a more successful strategy than "Linux Distro X" vs. "Linux Distro Y," where both X and Y are doing a lot of the same things, and usually make stabs at trying to do everything, but neither are really good at one or two SPECIFIC things.
Of course, only time will tell whether a complementary solution is needed. Linux is already poised for dominance in a number of fields, but that doesn't make it the best choice in all of them. It may well only be "good enough" or "better than the others" until a more specialized solution comes along.
I wrote a small paper for a school class on how virtual and real worlds will collide with new technology. Online game addictions of all kinds(whether it be a simple fragfest or a more long-term RPG type like EQ or Planetside) are early manifestiations of such collisions - the people in them are real, but their status is changed as they play their avatars.
With another generation for additional tech such as augmented reality and information-beaming implants to reach maturity, people will be able to direct and shape their virtual personas into real world ones - it's a fairly common area in modern science fiction.
Then, when people tell you to "get a life," you can ask them which one. ^.^
The average age of gamers has steadily risen over time. In the computer world, it's pretty much already reached the demographic average of all computer users(and AFAIK has been since at least the mid-90s, when I first started seeing such discussions after getting Net access): i.e. people in their 30s. This isn't hardly as true for console users, but they've been getting closer with time.
These are statistics from 2003, and it's only to be expected that as the game market grows it will take in a demographic closer to that of the whole population.
At first, video games were simple and limited not just because of a lack of design abilities, but because of technical limits. We all know that, but we don't necessarily look at the other side of the story...
As the barriers to creating video games with more technical sophistication went away, games naturally moved in the direction of becoming sophisticated themselves, because that's generally agreed to be the best way to eke out every last drop of play value for your development time. And so features like item shops and special moves and multiple endings came into vogue, because they gave the game a little extra bit of fun/complexity and were relatively easy to add into a game once the rest of it was in place.
Games for the computer platform, of course, are most guilty of going overboard on complexity. And why not? It's a good platform to appeal to someone who wants a detailed simulation.
However, both console and computer games have fallen into the same traps. Now that all developers developing for the retail market have good access to detailed 3d graphics, the overwhelming temptation is to make the play 3d too, regardless of whether that's a good idea or not. Similarly, because it can be done, developers of all styles of games will throw massive quantities of some kind of feature at you, be it # of enemies, special effects like lighting or wierd gravity or whatnot, subquests of the FedEx variety, or special attacks or combo moves or SOMETHING.
This is all done as a way to differentiate the product and improve gameplay, but the massive flaw of this methodology is that one does not have to improve gameplay by making use of new technology or by adding directly and sequentially to previous designs. It works in the short term, on a product-to-product basis, but over time results in games that feel "heavy" and demanding of the player in a way that old games never were - they simply have so much STUFF in them that one can't find the fundamentals of the game anymore, and so players will, time and time again, go through them like they would a theme park - picking and choosing among the attractions of the game - and if they are lucky, they get that choice 100% of the way. If not, there is inevitably player suffering due to game length/other annoyances.
The point of all this is, one should design games so that they have complexity that is merely sufficient to the task, and not to go any deeper without good reason. Abstraction is a very useful tool, as non-video game designers have known forever(well, the ones that weren't wargamers, but cardboard-and-paper wargames that are heavy on detail and take most of your day to play come few and far between today for a good reason).
Python is also great as a language to port from. The python.org stories from companies and groups using Python often say something like "We started with Python, and were wowed by it's ease etc., and then as our code matured we started converting parts of it to (C/C++/Java/etc)."
Now, you might want to take that as a bad thing, that Python isn't good enough to keep using indefinitely, but that's not really the reason they stop using it. It's more often a question of speed or skills needed for maintainence - not as many people know Python as they do C(++) or Java, and with a clear reference implementation to work off of, rewrites(partial or complete) for other languages are usually fairly straightforward. If only certain bits need optimizing, the C integration features become quite handy. The standard libraries make good use of C to optimize the heck out of the most frequently used features, which would account for the I/O being comparable with all other languages. A similar result, or at least one much closer than with this benchmark's tests, would probably occur if you benchmarked some of its handy built-in data types with their equivalents in other languages.
So there are, fortunately, plenty of ways to get around Python being slow in benchmarking, if you aren't doing something that requires a heavy amount of raw number-crunching like these benchmarks.
Does this include, for example, the "new $20?" (Or the "old $20" that didn't have the cartoony numbers.) Or is it imprecise? Will different denominations work with it?
Inquering counterf---minds want to know... ^.^
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For a while, at least, I'm confident we won't see any really great work done from academic gaming. There are two reasons for that:
1. No established directions or sides to support. With no idea of where to start, all the early work is just a lot of useless pontification and attempts to steer around developing any lasting field of study. The "literary criticism" of games that we see a lot of I consider to be among the latter - I mean, really, the fact that you start with three lives in most games using lives does not make it a Biblical reference or some other statement on the human condition...that's an invention of *gameplay mechanics*, dammit. There are plenty of ways you could talk about how games are meaningful without immediately reaching for the bag of techniques used to analyze traditional storytelling.
2. Most of the first people in this field will be mediocre, because of the conditions in 1. No idea of where to start, nor any real curriculum. This won't help attract the people that really might know something, so it'll have to start slowly at first.
But there's no question that there are plenty of things to discuss...especially from a historical context, something which seems to get overlooked a lot even though games tend be more evolutionary than anything else.
Does it have two sets of controls or not?
If it does, it has the smack-your-head obvious advantage of being a portable multiplayer device; with only one unit and one game, you can play with your friends.
If not....well, I'm sure that people will come up with ways to use multi-screen in a single-player fashion.
you insensitive clod!
I use the phone lines MANUALLY.
Thresh played tennis in high school too, IIRC.
Not that anyone remembers him these days. The current world-champion DM player seems to be different every time I look >.>
When I was little I copied tons of type-in programs from books or magazines into the Atari. I didn't necessarily understand everything, but doing the work gave me a basic understanding of what was going on.
:P
I think a modern book based around the type-in approach, regardless of the language, would work very well, especially if it adopted an iterative model where you slowly added bits and pieces to your programs. After each new addition there would of course be some explanation of what's going on that captured the essentials of *what the computer is doing* rather than putting everything in abstract terms and relying on the kid to trust that it'll all somehow work out. An appendix at the back could provide further detail as to how the hardware operates, and the various ways operating systems work with the hardware, without necessarily becoming tied to specific hardware.
Oh, and there would be no CD containing the programs in finished form. That only encourages you to "see it working" rather than "make it work yourself."
Maybe I should write that, when I feel up to it
I've probably written pages and pages of stuff since I was 8(18 now), when we first got an Internet connection. At first, it was embarrassing(at least to today's me) posts to Usenet. Then forums...and irc but that's never really changed how I write so much, other than the (temporary) discarding of a few rules and some capitalization to improve the flow, and little habits I picked up like: /me sighs and has to come up with an example.
This fomula is very convenient cause it lets you express emotion in the first part and then immediately act on it in the second part. Typical in person, harder to convey in standard writing.
Another benefit of writing is that when I write about subjects I'm interested in, I tend to learn about them by going through the writing process, and I get to do research from Google(and nowadays Wikipedia) every so often. It's all very good practice.
It had the basics of any modern RTS: unit production, real-time movement, multiplayer(only two though).
A light-gun shooter? Time Crisis 3 fills the current "token light-gun game" slot - it would only be bumped out by a quality game.
Or a first-person shooter? I suspect that this is an impractical idea for most arcades; while using a trackball or two joysticks like on a gamepad would solve the durability problem, all existing FPS control systems are generally considered too complex for an environment where ease-of-use is of maximum importance.
Or...a shoot-em-up? By the description I would guess not.
But there's plenty of things one could add to a game that can't be done quite yet; some of them are programming questions like AI or systems modelling; others simply require more hardware, like modelling worlds with totally deformable terrain(Red Faction, if you even remember it now, felt like a hack because only certain parts could be destroyed) or bringing the detail of our CG characters and environments in line with pre-rendered work.
The real issue is how we, so to speak, "start over" now that games can do everything we can imagine, when a big enough budget and schedule is allowed. Lots of people want to do virtual realities, in an online or single player form, and over time the distinction between that(when it was still theoretical) and a game that constantly tests our abilities or acts as social glue in the way that sports or board or card games might has gotten muddied; games today are often made heavy and slow-paced by feeling the compulsion to satisfy both the requirements of skill/excitement and of VR. Games rarely ever have a continuous stream of challenge thrown at you anymore; instead, it's broken up into little chunks wherin you explore a little, and then you fight or solve puzzles or whatever, and then you go back to exploring...
That said, I have great hopes that the market will reinvigorate itself with a whole new set of ideas; there's plenty of untapped potential floating around that is likely to unleash great stuff over the next few years, games that try to do things "new and different" like any art should.
As I grew up and got older I noticed that I could no longer tolerate such marathon stretches of sitting.
Or maybe it was because I was sitting *more* often than when I was younger.
In any case, when it bothered me I'd figure out a new position, usually lying down or something. Using the same one forever is really problematic unless you happen to be using a $1000 chair or a $15 exercise ball.
My experience with amateur level design for Half-Life(in multiplayer games like CS or Firearms) is that you can only "sell" maps to the community or to team leaders by making them look pretty...
:P
Which really put me off from the whole deal, because I hated tweaking textures and splitting brushes constantly just for cosmetics. The few maps I did make and release were quite successful, for non-official maps.
I tried a collaboration with a artsy-type mapper a few times, where I came up with some new, outrageous design that was focused purely on how players would behave in it, where I would set things up so that x amount would go one way, and y amount would go another way, and they'd all meet and fight in area z, where it would be very exciting, but some people could go around through q or r without being too visible from z, etc., and I would generally try to leave enough room in polycounts for him to do his thing, but pretty much every time he would "improve it" by recreating the whole thing from scratch and leaving it barely recognizable, often eliminating some key elements from my original map. Then he would go on to release it and get the majority of the credit, because he made it Look Good(tm).
Individual players that played the beta versions, though, always whined that it wasn't as fun anymore. I wonder why?
Seriously, if you(the topic starter) really are passionate about good levels, and about good gameplay in general, work towards game design. It's hard to get into that position in pretty much any development studio, but that doesn't have to stop you. If you're like me and have the time and money to burn, you just go strike out on your own and decide to build shareware games, learning every trade required along the way. You don't get the power rush like you might when you're designing a "heavy" AAA title where your possibilities are almost unlimited, but you learn a lot about designing things that are FEASABLE, and with a minimum of wasted/deadweight content. That is probably the surest path to success in an industry laden with ever-more-grand visions that are inevitably executed in a halfhearted way.
The game I'm working on now, which will be my first released title if I can get it done(not the first thing I've ever done by a long shot), contains a city simulation. It doesn't simulate anything very deep, but it will have just enough for the player(who plays an individual character) to be able to influence/be influenced by it. The city will not be 3d. It will be 2d. You will not get to see individual buildings, unless you count the little tiles I have to be "buildings." The concept I'm working with is to minimize the amount of content needed and maximize the amount the player can do with it; hence, I have some random but predictable elements, and will include ways for players to build new cities, with multiple "career paths" and ways to influence the simulation, and an overall open-ended play structure that relies heavily on small blocks of text to provide story information and lend atmosphere to the settings, much in the way some of Sid Meier's games did(Pirates! and Covert Action come to mind).
No large publisher would ever approve such a vague, unfocused title, and most developers would have a hard time working with it, because it runs counter to the ingrained(though oft unintentional) belief that the game should provide a lot of structure and linearity; most games only really need that for technical reasons. The choice tends to be between adding details and the "sizzle" that goes with them, and adding truly grand elements to the design that almost require a level of abstraction, and nearly every time, the sizzle will win - not just because of pressure from big companies, but because the artists and programmers love the thought of building something that's better looking and more detailed and requires more skill and polish than anything that came before, because doing it will prove their worth. That often results in games turning into technical
However, once you've taken that market like Real quietly has over a few years, you don't have any real way to expand it; there are only so many computer users looking for a light 15 minute game. So now they're engaging in some consolidation like with this aquisition, and in the future, I've heard, they're going to try to target a wider market.
A lot of the people here are advocating the hardcore, learn-to-program approach.
;)
But not everyone that wants to make games wants to learn programming, and this was a source of some frustration in my own younger years, because although I had tools available, I saw what I was going on, and I had plenty of ideas, my drive to actually create code was almost zero. So I let things sit quite a long time, and was almost entirely dependent on finding tools that minimized the amount of structural work needed(graphics routines, objects, tile engines) and maximized the amount of control I had over the critical segments of gameplay, like collisions and shooting. The best free one around like that today is Mark Overmars' Game Maker. It allows you to do some very complex things with a C-subset scripting language, while at the same time providing a strong IDE and toolset. It's unfortunately tied to DirectX and Win32, though, and it's also not an opensourced project(for a $15 registration fee you get a couple more options), but the free version is by no means crippleware, and for what it does it's very good. Also the forums are quite funny because the majority of the posters are kids playing at game development, and not even really having the smarts to do well with such a great tool.
Now I'm a freshman in college and plan to get at least a BA in CS, not because I like it, but because it's going to keep pushing me to advance my skills until I'm well capable of making games of all complexities. (I plan to go into shareware/independent gaming, so learning all skills equally well is a Good Idea. Also a good recipe for using up all my spare time.)
I've moved on from Game Maker to Pygame since I started college; my current greatest accomplishment with it is doing a scrolling tile engine(with all sizes, screen border etc. adjustable); it took three times for my code to be really anything close to clean, and after the second time I decided OOP is not a magic bullet for anything. My next project is to add a modular framework that includes the tile engine; using this framework, users will be able to make maps that play differently, because each map will load some Python code and objects in addition to settings for the tiles. It's kind of confusing me, which the tile engine did too, the first time, but I think that if I keep at it I'll get somewhere, and from there it'll just snowball until all of the sudden the game I'm planning is done hehe
Don't forget that in addition to people doing the "real work" in any business or industry, there are also middlemen like distributors, retailers, etc.. You can't say that these middlemen contribute anything particularly great, but at the same time they are necessary to facilitate the well-being of the economy in lieu of, say, technology that would put them out of the picture.
In MMORPGs, the middlemen could lose their business in the blink of an eye if the game's owners decided to provide their own system facilitating the use of real money in virtual trade. I would call it a "high-risk" business on just that standpoint alone.
In addition, insurers probably also don't offer policies for "loss of virtual items due to crash."
I know for a fact that on a real arcade stage(which is usually a grade above even the high-end home ones for sale) even people 300+ pounds can play. Dunno about 400+ though ;)
Also, the cheapo mats(which have absoutely nothing to crush in them except the sensors, and those will take quite a bit wouldn't break if a heavy person stepped on them. The only danger with the cheap ones is that they can tear and get folded and crushed etc., which won't start to be a problem until you reach advanced levels of course ^.^
I played Boulder Dash as a kid. And on the Atari, its ORIGINAL platform(more people remember it on the C64 of course). I wasn't so great at it because all the levels past the first two or so really were quite hard. But when we got the BDCK I had lots of fun making levels ^.^
;)
Interesting how both games(BD was made by Peter Liepa, whose page comes up first on any google search) were made by mathematicians.
I wonder why mathematicians stopped making video games?
Blizzard will become a shell of its former self, produce at most two or three more titles and then be shut down.
That seems to be par for the course when founders leave, anyhow.
Before they ever did Wheel of Time, they were an adventure game house. Steve Meretzky was one of the great names, and came there from Infocom IIRC.
Their first games were basically text games dragged into the 90s kicking and screaming, by letting you play using both verb/object bars, or just typing in your commands like usual. Small still images and BGM tracks constituted the technical advances.
That might sound bad, but the games were good, especially the later ones. The asthetic essentials of descriptive text and vibrant environments were never left out.
I think Legend's two main problems were:
1. It got stuck in FPS games after WOT was a success. Its core strength, after all, was originally in adventures.
2. It got sucked into the folds of a large game company. When a developer reaches that position, it seems like death is inevitable.
One of my favorite hole-in-the-wall arcades/pool rooms(The Rack 'n Cue in San Francisco State Uni's student union) has an NES set up at the counter. Anyone can play, though they have to request their game to the person staffing it(not exactly an outsider-friendly system, which is useful in some ways). If anything, it probably helps business, because it gives the place an additional attraction as a "hang-out spot" for the young after-school crowd, one of the place's two sets of core customers. (The other is university students of course) And if you go at all, you're more likely to spend money there obviously.
Even if right now SkyOS is a "maybe we'll open the source...later" project, I really like seeing new desktop options.
Part of that is because I'm sick of the same old discussion: "Is Linux ready for the desktop yet?" "No." "Yes." "NO!" "YES!" "Use OS X if you want a good desktop." "But Apple is as evil as MS!" etc.
The thing is, although the wide range of choices and features that Linux(as a whole) has steadily gained in are nice etc., they don't always help to advance it onto the desktop. An OS that is designed "light" and with the specific task of desktop use in mind from the beginning might be a more successful strategy than "Linux Distro X" vs. "Linux Distro Y," where both X and Y are doing a lot of the same things, and usually make stabs at trying to do everything, but neither are really good at one or two SPECIFIC things.
Of course, only time will tell whether a complementary solution is needed. Linux is already poised for dominance in a number of fields, but that doesn't make it the best choice in all of them. It may well only be "good enough" or "better than the others" until a more specialized solution comes along.
I wrote a small paper for a school class on how virtual and real worlds will collide with new technology. Online game addictions of all kinds(whether it be a simple fragfest or a more long-term RPG type like EQ or Planetside) are early manifestiations of such collisions - the people in them are real, but their status is changed as they play their avatars.
With another generation for additional tech such as augmented reality and information-beaming implants to reach maturity, people will be able to direct and shape their virtual personas into real world ones - it's a fairly common area in modern science fiction.
Then, when people tell you to "get a life," you can ask them which one. ^.^
Some Proof
These are statistics from 2003, and it's only to be expected that as the game market grows it will take in a demographic closer to that of the whole population.
At first, video games were simple and limited not just because of a lack of design abilities, but because of technical limits. We all know that, but we don't necessarily look at the other side of the story...
As the barriers to creating video games with more technical sophistication went away, games naturally moved in the direction of becoming sophisticated themselves, because that's generally agreed to be the best way to eke out every last drop of play value for your development time. And so features like item shops and special moves and multiple endings came into vogue, because they gave the game a little extra bit of fun/complexity and were relatively easy to add into a game once the rest of it was in place.
Games for the computer platform, of course, are most guilty of going overboard on complexity. And why not? It's a good platform to appeal to someone who wants a detailed simulation.
However, both console and computer games have fallen into the same traps. Now that all developers developing for the retail market have good access to detailed 3d graphics, the overwhelming temptation is to make the play 3d too, regardless of whether that's a good idea or not. Similarly, because it can be done, developers of all styles of games will throw massive quantities of some kind of feature at you, be it # of enemies, special effects like lighting or wierd gravity or whatnot, subquests of the FedEx variety, or special attacks or combo moves or SOMETHING.
This is all done as a way to differentiate the product and improve gameplay, but the massive flaw of this methodology is that one does not have to improve gameplay by making use of new technology or by adding directly and sequentially to previous designs. It works in the short term, on a product-to-product basis, but over time results in games that feel "heavy" and demanding of the player in a way that old games never were - they simply have so much STUFF in them that one can't find the fundamentals of the game anymore, and so players will, time and time again, go through them like they would a theme park - picking and choosing among the attractions of the game - and if they are lucky, they get that choice 100% of the way. If not, there is inevitably player suffering due to game length/other annoyances.
The point of all this is, one should design games so that they have complexity that is merely sufficient to the task, and not to go any deeper without good reason. Abstraction is a very useful tool, as non-video game designers have known forever(well, the ones that weren't wargamers, but cardboard-and-paper wargames that are heavy on detail and take most of your day to play come few and far between today for a good reason).
Python is also great as a language to port from. The python.org stories from companies and groups using Python often say something like "We started with Python, and were wowed by it's ease etc., and then as our code matured we started converting parts of it to (C/C++/Java/etc)."
Now, you might want to take that as a bad thing, that Python isn't good enough to keep using indefinitely, but that's not really the reason they stop using it. It's more often a question of speed or skills needed for maintainence - not as many people know Python as they do C(++) or Java, and with a clear reference implementation to work off of, rewrites(partial or complete) for other languages are usually fairly straightforward. If only certain bits need optimizing, the C integration features become quite handy. The standard libraries make good use of C to optimize the heck out of the most frequently used features, which would account for the I/O being comparable with all other languages. A similar result, or at least one much closer than with this benchmark's tests, would probably occur if you benchmarked some of its handy built-in data types with their equivalents in other languages.
So there are, fortunately, plenty of ways to get around Python being slow in benchmarking, if you aren't doing something that requires a heavy amount of raw number-crunching like these benchmarks.
Does this include, for example, the "new $20?" (Or the "old $20" that didn't have the cartoony numbers.) Or is it imprecise? Will different denominations work with it? Inquering counterf---minds want to know... ^.^