I love Everyday Shooter so much that I built an applet in Processing that lets you play some of the generative music from the first level, "Robot." The Everyday Shooter "Robot" Player (requires Java) exists mostly so that I can get the damn song out of my head. I originally thought of just grabbing the song from the data files, but the main mp3 only contains the chord progression. Because much of the music is generated by gameplay, it would be kind of ridiculous to just listen to the chords or record myself playing the level once all the way through and listening to that playback.
Originally, I was going to write an applet that would trigger the sounds roughly when they might trigger during gameplay, so some sounds, like picking up point markers, would tend to happen after you hear the chaining noises. But I ended up being too lazy to do that, and instead settled for my first prototype, which is a simple "press the button, play the sound" applet. Hope you enjoy it!
Boston Game Jam
I have long been a fan of the Indie Game Jam, and even got to participate in the 2005 Indie Game Jam. Inspired by that experience, I put together a Boston Game Jam in January of 2007 where we made a bunch of games over a weekend based on the theme of "Shift."
b1nary her0
I'm working on a project with Craig Perko called b1nary her0. It's a rhythm game played with the Guitar Hero controller, but the fret buttons correspond to bits of a 5-bit binary number. You're shown hex digits, and you have to "play" the corresponding binary to the beat.
A screenshot of an early prototype. Right now it's just feeble programmer art. Try not to barf.
That's pretty much the whole game. Need to hit a 1 on the beat? Hit the high fret and strum. See a 2? Slide one fret lower and strum. Uh oh, 3 coming your way? Hold down those two frets and strum.
I'll list some key features we've implemented here:
play with a Guitar Hero controller
easy to make new levels and compose new songs (text editor and some WAV files are all you need)
built-in super-crappy "synthesizer" (feed it WAV files and it will sequence and transpose them)
Some key features we have yet to implement:
terrible '80s hacker movie story. "Dude, you need to thrash on the guitar of hacking in order to defeat the encryption on the mainframe! Totally rad!!!!"
songs that are good. All the songs so far as the test ones that I wrote. Kevin's need to be integrated.
vertical guitar powerup. I'm thinking when you play the guitar vertically, we'll show you the actual binary instead of the hex values, but we'll also increase the tempo of the song by some 10% or whatnot.
bitwise logic mode. As if the game weren't already hard enough, there will be a mode where instead of a falling "A" you'll see "A & 5" and have to strum "0". (Thanks for reminding me, Dave.)
Oh yeah, and this game will be released for free. I would honestly feel bad even attempting to make money off of something like this.
del.icio.us Visualization
In my spare time at home, I've been using the Prefuse visualization toolkit to make visualizations of my del.icio.us tags and posts. Today, I finished the basic visualization that I'm going to be extending over the next... I don't know how long. If you click the thumbnail below, you'll see what I've made. It's rendered as a graph: each node is one of my tags, and the size of the tag is directly proportional the amount of use that the tag gets. Each tag is linked to another tag if it's appeared in a shared post: so if I tag a post with "games" and "design", it puts an edge between them. The thickness of each edge is directly proportional to the number of posts shared between two tags; also, edges become redder as they get bigger, just so they stand out more.
I went through several iterations, starting as a simple tag cloud and moving to rendering every single tag like this. However, rendering every tag created an indecipherable jumble of information. I implemented a filter that only graphed the subset of tags that have appeared in more than N posts. Experimenting for different values of N, I settled on one that worked for me (8), and that generated what you see in the screenshot.
I like this visualization: you can easily see that, in my world, concepts closely entangled with one another include:
I think my next project will be going back to the giant pre-filtered graph and applying a fisheye lens to it, to see if that aids in readability.
I'd also welcome any suggestions for other APIs that will give me neat data to play with. del.icio.us is cool, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for: I'd particularly love something related to a social network.
HopperQuest Fan Page
At the 2004 Game Developers Conference I attended, among other events, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. At this workshop (more like a lecture), one of the things they present every year is the result of the Indie Game Jam.
The IGJ is an event where Chris Hecker (a well-known game programmer who used to write a lot of great articles for Game Developer Magazine) gets together a group of about 20 other game programmers and gameplay researchers. They are all given a technology and are locked in a room (with Hecker) for 4 days with the ultimatum of creating a lot of small games using that technology.
The IGJ2 technology was a 2D physics engine that one of the game jammers had written during last year's IGJ. There were about 15 games that came out of the event this year, but one of them stopped me cold when I saw it at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. It is a tiny not-even-a-game called HopperQuest.
One of my ongoing projects is the creation of a module that can plug into a GameBoy Advance and act as a full-color, 2-channel oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer. Don't laugh, it's possible! The GBA is a powerful piece of hardware--it packs a 16.7 MHz ARM processor. I estimate that I could get the requisite FFT and visualization stuff, working entirely in software, efficient enough to operate reliably for measuring signals of frequencies up to 1 MHz.
The hardware would be a board with an ADC and some probes (or better, BNC connectors for probes) that would plug right into the cartridge bus of the GBA. The board would also contain the software program, in ROM. The whole thing might be produced in volume and be sold to people at $50 a pop.
Consider a potential market for such a device: hobbyists and especially high school students. Students can't afford their own oscilloscope; decent ones can cost upwards of $1500, a budget model might cost $400. A color TFT display would only add to the cost! Having spectrum analysis capability would make these prices shoot through the roof. Of course, the major reason for this cost is that these scopes read signals of frequencies up to something like 1 GHz. This is overkill for most hobbyists and students, who tend to stick to audio frequencies (0-60kHz, if you want to include ultrasonics).
Many students already have a GBA; if they don't, they can get an older model used for $30. Add $50 for this module, and that's $80 for a 1MHz-rated O-scope and spectrum analyzer with a full-color TFT!
To prove to myself that I wasn't crazy, in January of 2003 I created a software demo which accepts a user input of a waveform, then calculates and displays the FFT of the waveform on the screen. This demo was written using gcc and the excellent HAM library for the graphics and text output. Below are the screens from a run of my program, using Boycott Advance to emulate. Note: I actually did run this natively on the GBA hardware, off a flash cart that I burned. It worked just as in the emulator.
This is the gorgeous screen where you enter the values of your 16-point waveform. Any integer value will do. Note that I include exactly 4 periods of the waveform.
Okay, this one is hard to see, but it's the 8-point FFT bar graph representation of the waveform. Note a giant bar at the far left denoting the DC offset of the waveform. Then note the second bar. This represents the frequency of the waveform, the major harmonic. This is 4 pixels to right. This is very good, because there are 4 periods of the waveform in our FFT window!
Check check check check it! Big values for the 0 frequency (i.e., DC offset) and big values for the 4th frequency, which is 1/(4T), which is exactly the frequency of our waveform assuming that T is the size in 'seconds' of our FFT window! (Of course, the use of units here is just a nice convenience to help my engineer's mind wrap around the thing. This is pure math, but I'm wired to intuit these things in Hz and seconds. My apologies to the Fourier mathematicians out there.)
The Stupid Blob Game
As a test run to see if I could get a Fourier transform working on the GBA, I decided to program a stupid game. Thus, behold: The Stupid Blob Game! You run around the map eating red sprouts while your evil clone chases you around. I made the grass tiles myself, but the blob sprite and its animation was ganked from a tutorial. It's not actually that fun, although it was cool to load it up onto a flash cartridge and see it played on a real GBA.
I wrote it in C++ using gcc, which was actually a nice refresher for my languishing C++ skillz. I even did all object-oriented and everything. Not too shabby for a poor Assembly programmer.
A screenshot of the lovely little game.
Video Games: A Critical Approach
One of my theses at WPI was entitled Video Games: A Critical Approach. The 61 page paper was an overview of video games, applying the lens of continental critical theory to subject. I drew heavily on the work of Marcuse, Feenberg, and Gadamer, among others. From the introduction:
Developers of video games, time and time again, find themselves coming up against seemingly unanswerable questions. Certainly some these questions concern violence in video games and what it does or does not do to children, but there are other, more abstract questions that game developers face that they have not answered satisfactorily. Is a game only a game? When is it not a game? Is the individual the sole interpreter of a game's reality? How does a game affect the player, in a general sense?
These questions appear daunting and unanswerable to game developers, largely because game developers are rooted in the scientific culture that requires quantitative answers to problems, answers attained through formal logic. Indeed, "the philosophical center of [the game developer's] world is the Von Neumann stored-program digital computer" (Adams). By applying different philosophical methods, such as critical theory and negative dialectic, to video games, we can attain an understanding of games that we did not previously have. The unanswerable is only unanswerable as such in the framework of instrumental reason. These new answers can give game developers insight as to how one might go about designing a game to promote positive social change, how to design a game that questions the status quo rather than promotes it.
In early 2003, the WPI Game Development Club was approached by the WPI administration. Richard T. Moore, a MA state Senator, asked WPI if they'd be willing to make a game about balancing the budget of the state of Massachusetts. WPI aked the Game Development Club if we could do it. I was Executive Officer at the time, and we were very excited about taking on our first "real" project for an outside client.
We were given 9 weeks to complete the game. Actually, it was closer to 7 weeks. Anyway, we were scheduled to begin development in mid-March of 2003. Luckily, I was headed to my very first Game Developers Conference just beforehand. While there, I met Ben Sawyer at the Academic Summit and later at the Serious Games Roundtable. He runs the Serious Games Initiative. He liked the idea of the game, and offered to be our advisor. Which was very cool of him to do.
Long story short, we finished the game. I am credited as "External Relations," even though my role was more of "Executive Producer." But hey, who's nitpicking? Ben even invited us down to Washington, D.C. for a games lobbying event. We got to sit at the Serious Games booth and show off the game to congressfolks, senators, and their staff. They were actually all pretty interested in the game, which I suppose makes sense considering who they are.
While MassBalance isn't my favorite game in the world, it is the project that got me pretty heavily involved in the games industry--that's "heavily" for a full-time undergraduate at a four-year university. For that, I am thankful.
I made a custom skin for the game Rag Doll Kung Fu. It's a cartoon representation of me. The face was drawn for me by Worcester artist Doug Chapel, and the rest of it I drew with a mouse and The Gimp.
