This week sees an interesting government initiated week to celebrate creativity in the UK and today (monday) is focussed on the Games industry (and presumably the slightly off centre elements of the games industry that I inhabit 🙂
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DMCS) are promoting this and it it has a suitably live hashtag social media aspect to it.
The official link is here
“The UK’s Creative Industries generate a staggering £8 million per hour for the UK economy and continues to go from strength-to-strength.”
That is pretty impressive isn’t it.
Our little project for a far away land goes live today with some 8 year school kids. It has been an interesting process, being research we have to adjust to requirements changing and to the creative process.
I wrote about it a few weeks ago, to show the sort of scope. Still can’t do screen shots as its secret. Here though it s bait of the development environment, a state machine for animation and some of the exposed parameters for the main game control object

Mixing a virtual environment for multiple users, with a teacher in charge and also adding a completely different style of interaction with additional 2.5d side scrolling jetpack games has been a challenge.
As usual a small 3 person project needs lots of cross role work. Being tech support for the build etc and being tech design and tech code each required a time consuming mental context switch. You know at any moment you may have to swap roles, stop what you are doing to fix something. I have learned a lot on this project though. Learning is the fun part after all.
Anyway, join in with #createuk, and check out what @DCMS are doing. Making games and games related tech is hard work but worth it. Of course most of what I do is hidden as its code (wishing I was a graphic designer) but then equally most of what I do is hidden (glad I am not a graphic designer) 🙂 It is all still very creative and requires leaps of faith to get things to work sometimes.
Right back to go live day then !

As I was hurtling along the Nurburgring in Forza 5 I was once again hit with the brilliance of all games. I have to admit I was going through a non gaming patch. Probably because of building a small one. The release of the Xbox One had also had me a little non-plussed until the path that allowed me to add extra storage. Knowing I can now play games and get to them easily again has sparked me back into life. (it was only a mini non gaming patch). Having been a gamer for nearly 40 years it’s not going to go away just like that is it ?
I used the Uplaod studio on the Xbox One to put 5 videos together in one comic book framed montage. This is only really as a mental and social bookmark to the thoughts that were occurring as I drove along the road

Forza 5 offers a very intense and very solid driving experience, the quality of the simulation and physics models that allow you to hurtle around in so many different, beautifully rendered cars on accurate modelled tracks is, if you like car games just brilliant.
Watchdogs, another free roaming world, but here I was just messing around on a motor bike. I had gained the ability to make bridges raise and lower via the pretend hacking. So, again another physics engine and a wide variety of vehicles and experiences, this time in free roaming meant I could just go jump the bridge, just for kicks.
Max and the curse of the brotherhood, once again physics is involved by in 2/2.5d, a completely different style of game. yet with a freedom to solve puzzles, here drawing a swinging rope with a magic marker then jumping on it as time slows down for you.
FIFA 14 in world cup mode. Controlling players, kicking a ball around and scoring a goal with all the celebrations and animations that go with it.
Peggle 2, a variation on good old fashioned bagatelle and pinball. All very cartoony, the ball drops and bounces around, its never totally predictable and you have to deal with gravity.
I know some people still think all games are the same, but clearly they are not. The 5 all use a degree of physical simulation, but not the same sort of simulation. They have wildy differing control mechanisms, but each has a feel to it. Some use depth into the screen, the illusions of speed is things coming at out. Others user side on cameras with things going past or up and down.
We have weather systems in the first two games that change, the lighting and the mood changes depending on the time of day that is being simulated.
There are cartoon graphics, there are high end full renderings of real things, there is escapism and there is story telling and narrative.
Each of the games is part of a genre, so there are similarities with other games, but that does not make them “samey”. All our other entertainment and art fits into categories, has similarities.
The compute power, the design skills, the technical ability, the project management, the funding, marketing, selling, testing, fixing and many more skills used to create these experiences are then built upon by our own interaction with them. Our own moments of excitement, or humour, stress and achievement.
Games…. they just are fantastic aren’t they?

I was looking at the new updates on Xbox One including the wonderful ability to add new hard drives now, increasing the puny 500mb storage. At the same time Microsoft added games for gold, free games to subscribers. One of them was Max and the Curse of the Brotherhood.It was interesting that is is all powered by Unity3d, but that is an aside from this tale.
In the inter a boy wishes his little brother away, a magic portal open up and he is dragged into it. Max didn’t mean it so he dives in after him and ends up in a nice looking platformer where the main tool is a magic marker that lets you create things ate certain points.
I couldn’t get out of my head that the story was very similar and I had an inkling that the name was also very similar from something back in 1997.
Back then I was just joining the slightly rogue organisation called the Interactive Media Centre that was doing some interesting work with early web and at the time interactive CD-ROMs. The sort of fancy stuff that came with magazines before we all had internet access.
The team were busy working on a very early web presence for a washing powder. A game was being built which involved a boy and getting dragged into a parallel universe.
In this case the portal was related to washing. I remember the odd CGI that had been created for the narrative where the boy climbed into the washing machine. We all realised this was not a very sensible thing to be seeing. The render got redone and the story changed a little to involve getting sucked into the pattern of the shirt that was being washed. I am not sure who was doing what where as I was very new to the group. (I even turned up wearing a suit on day one, as we wore in the rest of IBM, that was a mistake of course. Not worn a work suit since 🙂 ). This moment had an impact on me as I realised the bizarre set of things we now were going to have top start worrying about and getting right and checking in this fledgling industry. There was no manual to follow we just had to work it out. So in many ways this was a catalyst for all the things I have been willing to get involved with since. Once you know there will be something weird, you may not know what, but you know you can deal with it you develop a different attitude.
Anyway it turns out this game, which I managed to track down some images of was called “Max and Sparky”. It is pretty amazing that a game from so long ago that aaas just part of a project that the team was working on is documented at all on the web. Now we take it for granted that things will be able to be found and looked up.

So I was play a Max game on the new Xbox One, thinking about an old game with Max and history of the web etc. Just to complete the coincidental combination, the name of the excellent game graphic designer I am working with on this current Unity3d project is …. yes you guessed it.