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!

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

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.

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’ll be the guy that looks like this:

Why?

Auditorium is an elegantly simple puzzle game made in Flash that I found through a post on Daryl Teo’s Blog. The player must direct a stream of particles towards fixed collectors to complete a harmonious melody by manipulating movable icons that represent physical forces. The gameplay is quite simple to pick up at first but the puzzles soon become quite challenging. Every level of polish has been applied to the game from visual effects, like the fade between each level, to the pleasing audio clips generated by the particle collectors. The highly sophisticated elements of particle physics, sound, and design blend together to create a deceptively minimalist experience. Perhaps best of all, multiple solutions are possible for many of the puzzles leading to more exploratory gameplay.

Play Auditorium

Check out the latest ridiculous multiplayer chaos unleashed by those crazy, crazy test tube babies at IILWY, Balloono! I developed this game, but it wouldn’t exist without the awesome assistance of EJ, Ken, Daniel, and Charles. For taking it the last mile (or five) and adding lots of great art and polish, THANKS! Great work you guys! Oh yeah, and you’re cool too, Mark.

Keep coming back, ’cause I’m sure IILWY will be adding more levels and other bonus monkey jams! And hey, if you like the game, it couldn’t hurt to vote for it on Newgrounds, right?

As a member of IGDA I was recently informed of an event in January called the Global Game Jam and I wanted to share it with you. Basically, game developers around the world meet up for an intensive, creative session to create a game from nothing but a few rules and a group of strangers. It sounds really fun and I hope to be a part of it next year.

Global Game Jam

I may be in the (rare?) position of being highly interested in two disparate technologies. The first being an online scripting language standard governed by ECMA (used in Javascript & Actionscript). The second, an open standard for real-time rendering governed by the Khronos Group (OpenGL). In recent days these two languages have faced most unfortunate developments. First the ECMA script 4…

On Nov 7, 2006 Adobe announced the contribution of their ECMA scripting engine to the open source community under the name “Tamarin”. Tamarin is also being used as the JS scripting engine for Mozilla Firefox under the name “SpiderMonkey“. It seemed like a good idea at the time of release. But now look at the situation: we have AVM2, directly connected to Firefox AND the ECMA committee –slowing the progress of Actionscript and the Flash Player (and the internet for that matter). Needless to say, this is a disappointment. But it doesn’t end there…

Though having plenty of contributors, the realm of real-time rendering is primarily controlled by Microsoft, Nvida, ATI/AMD, Apple, and (more recently) Intel. Microsoft hasn’t really contributed to the Khronos Group because long ago they decided to pursue their own 3D graphics rendering API known as Direct3D. The evolution of OpenGL has become painfully slow while DirectX and Direct3D are becoming the (de-facto) standard. Finally, the Khronos group promised to improve the long lost API by introducing an object-oriented structure in stark contrast to its current state machine model. That was in October 2007. Last week the specification was finally unveiled and it remains largely the same. Not only is this a big let down, but it will definitely damage all future 3D software and game development releases for non-Windows platforms (including future consoles). Very unfortunate.

DISCLAIMER: Both of these developments are FAR more complex than what this post outlines -and there’s justification behind both developments. But on the whole, they both seem bad for everybody (or just me?).