All posts by Andrew Armstrong

IGDA, Videogame Conferences, Videogames, Xbox 360 Videogames

GDC2009 – Wednesday – Anti-Censorship and more

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IGDA Luncheon

On Wednesday I intentionally missed the Nintendo keynote, which from checking the news didn’t announce anything interesting. I went to 4 sessions in the day – only 4! It’s utterly bizarre…

In any case, the first one was the Anti-censorship Committee Roundtable, which looked to do a few interesting things this year – a cheat sheet for the ESRB, information for debunking myths and regional grassroots campaigners or people who rally against laws. Some interesting people there I met who do European items too, which wasn’t covered much in the roundtable itself.

The next session on adding LIFE to Saints Row 2 was a big lesson in not giving designers too many things to do. 15,000 or something nodes on the map – slowly added over development, constantly erroring, and whenever art got updated the nodes sometimes were then in terrain. It however did add a good amount of artificial life – another big thing was that the basic things, not the special fire breathing mimes but just the smokers or groups of talkers were the best additions to the world since they are so common.

Lunch was the IGDA VIP Luncheon – it was nice to see some great praise for Jason although there was, sadly (and I should have seen if something was going to be done) no presentation of anything to him, even just a card or something else. A missed opportunity.

After lunch was the censorship roundup – an interesting look at the state of American censorship. Some stuff on countries I’ve not had a chance to check up on either. After this was the first AI roundtable – a great look at a whole range of areas, from multi-core processing to behavioural design to the way to implement things.

We checked out the Expo briefly before the awards, where a lot of the IGF games sadly were turned off (obviously all at some pre-awards thing, annoyingly I guess!). The IGF awards gave me a few titles to check out, the main awards were pretty standard – not much, I think, that really pushed games this year as much as some of the previous years, but at least Tim Schafer was fun 🙂

I actually wrote this writeup of the day there too, I perhaps half wished I had something better to do I guess! Notes for this day will appear when all the others go up too.

Videogame AI, Videogame Conferences, Videogames

GDC 2009 – Monday and Tuesday AI Summit

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The GDC AI summit was pretty good. A wide range of topics covered – although as someone noted almost all of it for bipedal creatures, usually humans specifically – so it didn’t have as much on strategic AI or for other areas like space/flying – things with 3 dimensional movement.

A good highlight was a great demo by Damian Isla that showed an AI searching for a player, getting confused when the AI didn’t see the player where it last thought it was, then exploring further afield as necessary. The small amount of behaviour gave some pretty nice stuff – a problem being that showing that behaviour to the player is very difficult, and the technical aspects of dividing up spaces to search can get pretty complex. The use of emotions like that though is immensely fun.

I must admit I am more into the behavioural and design side of AI then the technical implementations – I have my notes up from the days, but the notes for the technical sessions might not be as good. These will be up shortly – they’ll take a little time to edit, and I’ll add them here and make a post (this weekend perhaps) when I’ve sorted them.

As for slides – the locations of them will vary. GDC is locking down their public access to slides, and the AI Guild is going to be member access only to “people who have shipped one game” and are an AI programmer. Therefore I’ll probably have a look around for some slides I want to re-read from the author’s own sites.

Videogame History, Videogames

Byte Back 2009

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The memories!

On the 8th and 9th of March I attended Byte Back, a small retro game convention hosted near Stoke-on-Trent, UK. I should really have taken more notes from the event, but honestly it was just a good time for me to get out and actually play some of the videogame history I keep writing about.

It was great to meet some other great people involved in videogame preservation or history – some I still need to contact (I’ll do so after GDC 🙂 ). I had a long chat with Andy Spencer of the Retro Computer Museum – he’s looking for a place to actually display the material he’s collecting, and is looking into making the organisation (which is very new) much more official. Some great systems he had on display, and he’s been getting a lot of good volunteer help and donations.

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The pinball machine was popular

I caught up with Steve Webley, who’s really looking to work in the area of videogame history a lot more. Should be good seeing what he comes up with even if he is super busy doing tons of other cool things! 🙂

Dave Moore from Stairway to Hell was also a great insight into the UK game history scene, especially emulation. I’ll be in contact with him more I hope, certainly since I intend to research the webpages dedicated to systems and gather the webpages own histories. I also chatted very briefly with Weekend Gamer’s Sir Clive, who I should have done a more in depth chat with to see where they’re taking their series (which I brought both DVD’s of – should be a good watch!).

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The second room

There were some good people (who only briefly chatted with) from the Retro Gamer forums, where I need to join up really. So many forums to join up to!

I didn’t do much journalism as such – I hope to get some of the footage recorded by some people onto the Internet Archive if possible, a service sadly not many people know about. I should have done some more prepared interviews, but without a real aim – since I haven’t got down even what information I want to write about the museums and archives, not even getting onto collectors, enthusiasts and private groups! I need to get more involved – or at least do some coverage of – the UK videogame history area.

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A working copy of the Doomsday project! wow!

However, I do have some highlights from the event. At the charity auction (in fact all the money was going to charity, awesome!), I managed to bid for the books The Ultimate History of Videogames, by Steven L. Kent, and Game On From Pong to Oblivion The 50 Greatest Video Games Of All Time, by Simon Byron, Ste Curran, David McCarthy. The former is meant to be a great read – the latter very much a more popular look at good videogames, but I think should be a fun read in any case despite what the One Life Left guys say themselves about it on their show 🙂

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Ocean Reunited

The Ocean Reunion was a little strange – various reminiscent, rants and good stories from the old company. There’s a video of the event on youtube, which is worth a watch (I wish it was on the archive though 🙂 ).

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Jon Hare

I missed Jon Hare, which would have been good to see, but did manage to get involved in the first round of the fighting tournament – I fought a girl from the Retro Gamer forums, and while I managed to win at Soul Calibur, I did really poorly at Street Fighter and finally lost playing the decided in King of Fighters, which I had honestly barely played (although it was pretty close considering). The winner was pretty damn good, I just got roped into it as literally the last contestant, so there we go, my adventures as a pro gamer cut short 😉

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Tony Temple, Jon Stoodley and Paul Drury

Lastly, Paul Drury’s Q&A with Jon Stoodley and Tony Temple was amazing – it explained the phenomenon of high scores, the techniques and games they played (Pacman and Missile Command respectively), the other high scoring players, and some amazing and funny anecdotes (especially relating to Tony Temples strange “opponent” Roy Shildt). This is another area which isn’t really being preserved apart from those dedicated organisations who record the scores, and the odd news or magazine article (sometimes written by the people themselves!). There are the odd few documentary though too – King of Kong (which I still need to watch) and some others I have forgotten about, doh. I’ll put this onto my growing “to investigate” list 🙂

All in all a good weekend, I’ll definitely come to the next one. I’ve also brought a ticket to the Retro Computer Museum open event on May 31st, should be good!

Gallery of pictures, can anyone name every system and game (if they are visible, I need to get a better camera):

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PC Videogames, Recently I've Been Playing, Videogames

This Week I’ve Mostly Playing…Indie Demo Goodness

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This week I have been mostly playing…

I have been playing other things since my previous “This week”. A lot of things in fact, all full of numbers – Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Civilization 4, Dawn of War 2, and other sequels like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2, Empire: Total War and Max Payne 2…but enough of all those. I’ve got various posts in the works for most of them. 🙂

I’d like to otherwise briefly look at two indie games I’ve played the past week – Depths of Peril and Mount&Blade – both demos at the moment, my time before GDC is so limited I’d not have time for the full games yet! Continue reading This Week I’ve Mostly Playing…Indie Demo Goodness →

General, Personal

New Business Cards

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So I’ve been using, wrongly, cards for the last half a year which stated I was still a student, oops! I am doing this kind of last minute – I was recommended Moo.com – so I thought why not. I can think of some interesting card backs to use right? 🙂

I decided on the front, the easy part, I’d do the two logos on the right – my own very simple AA one, and the IGDA Game Preservation SIG logo. This coupled with my contact information (ie; this website). Here is the front in all it’s glory:

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As for the backs, that was the harder decision. There are a few things I decided to do:

  • Raid my photos for some interesting videogame (especially game preservation) related ones
  • Check what pictures I have downloaded that inspired me to save them in the first place – there were more then I thought (but 50 is a rather large number)
  • Add some other random ones in the mix (not specifically videogame related pictures or photos in the first place)

I added a simple text caption of my thoughts onto the pictures – I did try and do the full 50, but I forgot a few important things (which I didn’t want to go back and fix):

  • Cropping will occur – make sure there is whitespace around the edge of the image (which I just couldn’t be bothered to redo for many images – some were much too long or simply not big enough to work) or make sure you are using a large picture
  • Fitting text into some pictures is not possible, aesthetically – and some I did use eventually fails at this a bit
  • Having a second chance to look at what you are going to put on cards you’ll give to people is important 🙂 There are some I cut from this

A mix of these reasons made me cut it down to around 37 designs, mainly the cropping and size issues (it was late when I eventually finished, ouch what an evening). I did end up with a few more unreadable ones (or perhaps just cleverly hidden 😉 ). They’re all in this gallery, including the lot I didn’t use:

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And the final result (Moo do sure like to make it all pretty):

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I think next time I get some printed (I got 200 from Moo) I will see what people think of these. Since I am no artist, and not a very good photographer (I need to get a better camera for starters that can deal with low light and taking pictures of screens), I did source most of them from the web in one form or another. Too cliché? too derivative? too copyright infringing? too self-indulgent? not witty enough? Who knows what people will think, to be honest! At least they’re much more exciting then my last batch which was entirely black. Next time I might also have some more interesting game development screenshots to use. 🙂

Also one last final point:

  • Business card printing prints much, much much darker then what you see on any screen.

Luckily only one of mine was really affected, but it does show using just black or white text helps 🙂

Videogame History, Videogames

My Profile as a Videogame Historian

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I’m currently putting forward some help for the Home of the Underdogs revival project. Adding my profile to the volunteers list, I added “very amateur historian”. This fits the bill quite well – my work in the IGDA’s Game Preservation SIG is pretty much based on the gathering of knowledge around actual preservation work, rather then actively doing any myself. I have however helped on the nearly finished white paper, and have done a little worthwhile work at the National Museum of Computing.

Hopefully, certainly once there are resources in the UK available for researchers to play old games so I can research them more, I can move up the ladder. It will be self-taught, but I do hope to contribute authoritatively by research (rather then anecdote) to different areas – web or otherwise (I hope to get oral interviews done at some point in my life). At least this can be in the way of recording how a game works, which anyone can do but really not enough is done to help.

I also hope my project work in the SIG can help further some aspects of preserving videogame history. I am still working bit by bit on the plans for the Digital Game Canon website, and maybe with that I’ll work on a standard for metadata/data fields in the SIG. All my work in this area will be hopefully entirely public domain or as close to it as possible, as long as we can get it that way – this might mean contributions are tough to come by (but links will be a mainsay of this area anywhere with so much information being around the web and offline), although this is fine with me. 🙂

We’ll see how far I level up my historian skill this year I guess. 😀

Computers

Pandora Pre-ordered

I was debating a while ago about getting some better portable media player. My DS I’ve never got on with – encoding video for my R4 card is a real pain, it just doesn’t get on well with most input video types. My friend directed me the way of Pandora project (I don’t have an iPod touch, like he has, and already have an MP3 player 🙂 ), which is a neat rather indie piece of kit being made up.

It interested me, but not because it is dead cheap – all told it’s £266 for the unit and adapter, which is without SD card storage it uses, and so isn’t cheaper then an Eee or any equivalent really (well, many are much more expensive, but I’m not looking for a laptop replacement here). It has a good set of features and is nicely geared towards something I need to get into – ROMs and emulation.

Simply put there is no way to play the majority of old games out there (buying the consoles and games second hand is actually quite expensive in money and space), so emulation helps in that respect greatly – since I am a member of the IGDA’s Game Preservation SIG, emulation is one area I need to investigate anyway! I’ve never got on with it on my PC, since a keyboard or mouse just doesn’t feel right for most of the games. This should help, I’ve got plenty of time travelling to and from work to play on it. Inputs include a d-pad, some control nubs, shoulder buttons and some normal buttons. The screen is also a touch screen, which saves on having a mouse – which is a big plus, one thing about the Eee’s and other notebooks I’ve used is they are just horrible for mouse control on the go.

It also should be a very competent media player – long battery life, and reasonably big screen (800×480, which is over 16:9 – the closest 16:9 is 800×450) I’m not sure how well it will cope scaling videos (if it is software based it might be a big slow, but some example youtube videos are pretty neat), but in any case it’ll be good to shove some videos on it and play them right away, I do intend to rip my DVD collection once I get it automated.

Finally, while I do not intend to do a great deal with it (but you never know) it will be capable of a full OS, browser and so forth (anything that can be recompiled for the ARM processor actually). Good in a pinch, I’m sure I’ll have it on me more often the my laptop since it is around the same size as a DS. This beats out any other media player at least 🙂 – the keyboard might not be great for this, but it’ll do I’m sure.

The only thing is it is a pre-order, it will probably be more then a month to get it (they’ve not started manufacturing – so likely two months), but I’m happy to support such a team of dedicated people. I did get told of the project when it was starting ages ago, and I’m impressed they’re almost done (since I entirely forgot about it!). A great little open source machine. 🙂

I’ll share my experiences when I get it. It does depend on community support, so hopefully will get what it needs 🙂