ORVS Live!

Posted by sswink on January 30th 2008 to Posts

Yay! Head on over to www.raptorsafari.com to play zee game. Also, here are some additional Raptor Fun Facts*

Raptor fun fact #108 - Raptors are natural thespians.
Raptor fun fact #109 - If you feed a raptor cheese he will lay eggs for 47 hours.
Raptor fun fact #110 - Raptors will control your house after being in an electrical storm.
Raptor fun fact #111 - Raptors store extra food in a skin pouch that they call a “pizza”.
Raptor fun fact #113 - The Yakuza hire raptors to do their dirty work.
Raptor fun fact #114 - The raptors life span is 666 months.
Raptor fun fact #115 - There’s nothing worse to a raptor than a bad case of shingles.
Raptor fun fact #116 - Raptors read Hustler magazine.
Raptor fun fact #117 - Some raptors are farmers.
Raptor fun fact #118 - Raptors did 9/11
Raptor fun fact #119 - Raptors aren’t “fun”
Raptor fun fact #120 - Raptor came in my house.
Raptor fun fact #121 - Raptors are the goats of the dinosaur world.
Raptor fun fact #122 - Raptors recycle; do you?
Raptor fun fact #123 - Raptors hate croissants.
Raptor fun fact #124 - A raptor will pull a fast one on you.
Raptor fun fact #125 - If you are eaten by a raptor while wearing a hat it will steal your hat to sell on the black market.
Raptor fun fact #126 - Watch your back or you’ll get raptor’d.
Raptor fun fact #127 - A raptor can puke so hard he can sand blast a 12′x12′ wall in 0.4 seconds.
Raptor fun fact #128 - Raptors second favorite mode of transportation (after streetcar) is bicycle.
Raptor fun fact #129 - Raptors keep their emotions bottled up inside.
Raptor fun fact #130 - Raptors transport grain in a wheeled cart called a “thetch.”
Raptor fun fact #131 - Raptors do not tolerate laughter.
Raptor fun fact #132 - A raptor with a glass eye is still called “SCREEEECH!”
Raptor fun fact #133 - Baby raptors are called raptorlings (pronounced “SCREEECH!”)
Raptor fun fact # 134 - Most raptors are lactose intolerant
Raptor fun fact # 135 - Raptor milk is an aphrodisiac, but only to bears.
Raptor fun fact # 136 - Raptor Jesus is a jealous god. Thou shalt have no Raptor Jesus before Him.
Raptor fun fact #137 - A raptor will never listen to The Beach Boys.
Raptor fun fact #138 - 6 in 10 raptor automobile fatalities involve an off-road vehicle
Raptor fun fact #139 - A raptor in the future is like blender in a hamster factory
Raptor fun fact #140 - Do not invite a raptor to your birthday party.
Raptor fun fact #141 - If you are invited to a raptor’s birthday party, say yes but plan to leave early.
Raptor fun fact #142 - The only thing you can trade with a raptor at the river is your life.
Raptor fun fact #143 - Raptors love monopolies.
Raptor fun fact #144 - The raptors favorite artistic tool is a spirograph.
Raptor fun fact #145 - Raptors always need floaties at the pool, or they’ll drown.
Raptor fun fact #146 - Raptors hate web 2.0. because they only know html.
Raptor fun fact #147 - Raptors love listening to jam band music while eating hot dogs…but because of their rich culture full of traditions, they cannot do so.
Raptor fun fact #148 - Raptors love George Michael despite being banned from his concerts.
Raptor fun fact #149 - When a raptor’s wife is showing too much cleavage he is legally allowed to claw her up to three times.
Raptor fun fact #150 - Raptors run in the night with vampires.
Raptor fun fact #151 - Don’t ever bathe in a raptor’s afterbirth.
Raptor fun fact #152 - Gabriel is the most common raptor name.
Raptor fun fact #153 - When visiting Vegas raptors will only stay in Treasure Island.
Raptor fun fact #154 - When attacked all raptors form a raptor milita known as the Great Brown Lamps.
Raptor fun fact #155 - Believe it or not human is not a traditional dish at raptor weddings.
Raptor fun fact #156 - Raptors are pro unicorn.
Raptor fun fact #157 - Raptors can’t get past medium on “Through Fire and Flames.”
Raptor fun fact #158 - Raptors are elite socialites that demand the best products in the world.
Raptor fun fact #159 - You never argue with the ref in raptor soccer game.
Raptor fun fact #160 - Raptors take Valentines Day deadly serious.
Raptor fun fact #161 - “Raptor Hammock”
Raptor Fun Fact #162- Only a Raptor may refer to himself as Ralph.
Raptor Fun Fact #163- You might cook with aluminum, but Raptors only use steel.
Raptor Fun Fact #164- When this log rolls over these Raptors will be dead.
Raptor Fun Fact #165- Pencil shavings keep a Raptor busy for hours.
Raptor Fun Fact #166- Raptors also do not appreciate Rickets.
Raptor Fun Fact #167- The only proper phrase to whisper to a Raptor is: “clever girl!”
Raptor Fun Fact #168- A vacationing Raptor in shades will resemble a cross between Sylvester Stallone and Matthew McConaughey.
Raptor Fun Fact #169- An open door for a Raptor usually means coffee.
Raptor Fun Fact #170- If you invite a Raptor for a ride you’d better be ready for a game of table top football played with a dehydrated armadillo kidney.
Raptor Fun Fact #171- Raptor meat can be substituted for soy jerky or awful.

*Special thanks to Amy, Bryan Manning, Chris Manning, Mike Brendan, Chriag, and Adam for contributing amazing raptor facts!!!

* 1 Comment

Velociraptor Safari (!!!)

Posted by sswink on January 24th 2008 to Posts

Open Unity –> Drink heavily–> Black out –> ??? –> = ORVS $$$

www.raptorsafari.com

So apparently the internet was desperately craving a game in which you hunt down feathered velociraptors in an off-road vehicle and send them forward in time to be made into Num-Nums© brand Raptortacos. Who knew? I can’t really remember where the idea came from; like most funny things I think it came out of random jokery. Or maybe we were just drunk. It’s hard to remember things when you’re sitting on anthills of genius. I’m pretty sure there was at least one Mechtley involved, though.

Cheers, internet. You truly are a series of tubes.

* 1 Comment

Tip ‘o the Monocle to Sir Kyle

Posted by sswink on January 14th 2008 to Posts

ROBOT DESTROY!

Kyle posted his neato robot destruction game. Play it and experience trembling terror at the skills of a superhero one-man game development studio named Gabler!

ROBOT GAME

It’s a neat nod to what has become a webgame metagenre, the “Tower Defense” game. I look forward to the day when we won’t name genres for influential games and will instead have an understanding of how interactivity is constructed, why a certain combination of mechanics and content seem to harmonize so well, and where it’s reasonable to draw the genre lines. Somebody solve this problem! Anyhow, big ups to my main man Kyle, he of the Indie Midas Touch :P .

* 1 Comment

“The Candidate”

Posted by sswink on January 07th 2008 to Posts

And then it hit me. What we as Americans really want in order to decide our next leader is…a reality show! Think about it; contestants could be recorded around the clock without the benefit of their speechwriters and consultants, we could put them through a bunch of asinine “leadership challenges” like managing a McDonald’s for a day, and we could verify what we’ve always known: that they’d gladly eat hissing cockroaches to become president. We could find out who they really are - it’d be amazing!

It would be hosted by James Carville since he apparently wants to get into acting.

Season 1, Episode 1 Challenge: come up with a viable Iraq strategy in 24 hours or less and present it to congress. Winner gets immunity next round and a $100 Chevron gas card.

* 2 Comments

Best hat evar!

Posted by sswink on January 02nd 2008 to Posts

Seriously. God, I need to make an airship game.

AIR SHIP HAT

* 2 Comments

The Nintendo Feel Question

Posted by sswink on December 06th 2007 to Posts

I was asked this question:

Nintendo-made games, at their best, have a particular feel, some kind of optimal relationship between the player and what goes on on-screen. It’s part of a more general Nintendo-ness, something many gamers and critics tend to call “polish.” What do you suppose that is?

There are a handful of video game developers in the world who can afford to take the “when it’s ready” approach to game development. Each developer chooses to do something a little different with this luxury: Blizzard are the masters of structural game design and game balance while Valve champions level design and produces games that have uncanny flow and pacing. Nintendo’s unique focus is on moment to moment interaction. Specifically, making the thing being controlled in the game feel like an extension of the player into the game world, making that sensation powerful, tactile, and subconscious. This means building games from the most common experience outwards, removing obstructions to easy play. Every Mario game starts with a sandbox level in which all the controls of the game are developed, honed, and perfected for many months. “Before any of the levels had been created Mr. Miyamoto had Mario running around and picking up objects in a small ‘garden’ which he uses in all his games to test gameplay elements.“ Pragmatically, the problems being solved aren’t particularly earth-shattering. As Yoshitaka Koizumi said at his recent keynote at the Montreal International Games Summit, three main things they were trying to solve in Mario Galaxy were simple, camera-related problems: the problem of accurate depth perception (accurately stomping a Goomba is really hard in 3d), motion sickness from excessive camera movement, and preventing players from getting lost. This is where the idea of running around spheroids came from. There are no obstructions to move the camera quickly around and the space is small and easy to navigate.

It all comes from an underlying philosophy. Shigeru Miyamoto calls it the “miniature garden” aesthetic. You want the player to be drawn into the design of a miniature garden. The garden is self contained, self consistent, and full of joyful discovery. It is alive. It changes, grows, and evolves, inviting you to play with it. The world feels whole and complete, your abilities fitting in clearly with the reality of a simplified but living world. So many times in a Nintendo game if you ask the question “I wonder if I can…” the answer is yes. Can I get up to the top of that tall mountain? Can I fly to that distant cloud? This comes out of giving the player a great deal of expressive freedom within narrow but well masked constraints.

What I think is so surprising to gamers, critics, and other game developers, is just how different the experience of a Nintendo game can be from other games that seem to be constructed with the same elements. The reason is that video games, more than any other medium, rely on harmony. The whole is what’s important. Examining each component separately is fruitless, because the art is in the relationships. If a coin didn’t give you health, or if collecting 100 coins didn’t get you a star, would you bother collecting them? Nintendo games, while comprised of familiar elements, combine them in ways that give rise to the most delightful dynamics. These are masterfully crafted abstract relationships. This mastery of relationships extends downward to moment to moment interaction, which is Nintendo’s chosen problem domain. They construct the miniature garden from birds’ eye, looking down on its entire ecosystem.

* 1 Comment

Article on Game Feel up on Gamasutra

Posted by sswink on November 23rd 2007 to Posts

It’s not news if you read this blog, but yeah, cool, zee article went up as a feature on Gamasutra. Cool!

UPDATE: Looks like it went up on Kotaku as well. Fun thread there. Highlights:

Thanks everyone for the kind words about the article and thanks so much for the discussion. I’m actually working on a book on this same topic so many of these observations are things which I am keen to hear more people’s opinion on. Specifically, I’d love to hear what people think are the best-feeling games of all time. I’m also really interested in the way people describe feel. If you have any particular way you describe the feel of a game or compare one game’s feel to another, I’d love to hear about that. Things like responsive, sloppy and so on are great. Also, what do you consider to be two ends of the same extreme? For example, is ‘sloppy’ the opposite of ‘responsive?’ *shameless plug* More of my in-progress thinking on the subject at my blog (www.steveswink.com.) */shameless plug*

@ J.Kyle: Out of curiosity, what games have been ‘just right’ for you feel-wise? I haven’t played Half Life for a long time, but I did enjoy the feel of it quite a bit. I’ll have to revisit and try to experience what you were feeling. I think that most if not all games use a certain slipperyness because it’s preferable to stickiness. Most of the time, it’s preferable to press against something and have yourself slide past it than it is to get hung up. Also, I think Half Life was the first game to really nail jumping in an FPS, what with the ‘jump and tuck’ control scheme. It had a surprisingly powerful sense of physicality for a game in which you couldn’t see your avatar at all.

@DCARTIST: Yeah, totally, and driving a car is one of my favorite analogies. It’s the closest thing to game feel that people who don’t play video games have experienced. Your concept of intent and outcome is also something I’ve come across- controlling something with a controller is something of a megaphone for your thumbs in that regard. You get a lot more bang for buck in terms of motion input vs. reaction output, which is one of the things that makes controlling something in a game so compelling (I think.)

@SXP151: I think you make some interesting points, for sure. The sort of meta-point you’re making, at least from my perspective, seems to be the question of skill. What is the difference between something that’s worth mastering and something that isn’t, between difficult controls with good feel and just plain bad feel? I think we can more or less agree that with enough time, about any controls can be mastered. That doesn’t mean that all games have good feel, though. So I guess the question is: it is both easy to learn and difficult to master? Does it have a high skill ceiling and a lot of layers of mastery/expressiveness while still being fun and rewarding from the first moment you pick it up? And, digging deeper, what is it about games that have this property? How does it get designed/created? I don’t know that I have a great answer to these questions yet. Interested in what folks think .

* 2 Comments

Ron, 2dBoy extraordinaire, on playtesting…

Posted by sswink on November 13th 2007 to Posts

Virginian

It’s, like, precisely everything I always say about playtesting! To my students: see, I’m not completely full of crap! To Ron: <3. It’s neat to see someone smart come independently to the same conclusions!

No Comments

Air Traffic Visualization

Posted by sswink on November 11th 2007 to Posts

This is neat!

* 1 Comment

Unity LSystem Fiddle

Posted by sswink on November 08th 2007 to Posts

Whee!

LSystem test 1
L-System test 1

* 3 Comments

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