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 ๐
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 UKโs Creative Industries generate a staggering ยฃ8 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) ๐ It is all still very creative and requires leaps of faith to get things to work sometimes.
Right back to go live day then !
Monthly Archives: June 2014
The future of broadcasting via super8, Wimbledon, CKD Road Trip, twitch and tango – flush 13
Another exciting monday morning as the new edition of Flush The Fashion magazine goes live.
As usual there are loads of great articles and also some great prizes to be won in the magazine. This time Kano raspberry Pi kits ๐
On page 74 I have my article “We go live in 3.2.1…” which once again looks great with the layout and the images that @tweetthefashion put together.
I discuss the evolution of home movies from the 70’s and super 8 film to the amazing changes in being able to broadcast live right now to everyone. On the journey are the experiences of trying to some early multi platform broadcasting and virtual worlds elements at Wimbledon (which starts today so that’s good timing) to the ability to just say xbox broadcast to share your game play with commentary to anyone anywhere. Being an emerging tech section I also have to consider the wonderful Project Tango from Google too.
The full magazine is here
The ipad version will be live very soon.
This will get you to my little article
Knockout game – UFC
The new UFC mixed martial arts game/simulation arrived today for the Xbox One. I had got very interested having played the demo. In Choi Kwang Do we don’t do this sort of fighting, as we don’t compete and hurting people is not really on the list of things to do. However with my developer hat on I wanted to see how the moves looked, some of which are obviously similar to the flowing sequential moves we have in Choi. Having looked into how the kinect can capture out moves it is interesting also to see how the mixture of motion capture and artistic adjustment is done in a high end fight game for this generation of consoles.
It is very impressive. The quality of movement and engagement that you feel as a player is very good. Being UFC is it as much about grappling and ground work and punches and kicks. Another thing that we try to avoid in CKD ๐
This is of course a game and punching buttons is very different from launching a powerful kick. Practicing a martial art though does help you appreciate the power that anyone can generate, and hence imagine the power the professional athletes dedicated to this style of combat can create.
The animations and models of the fighters are some of the best that I have seen in a game. It is complex to have to deal with the multitude of movements and blending the animations together. If you have tried to create animations, or combine them, even on a small scale (like my current project in Unity3d) it is by no means straight forward and as big an art form and speciality as programming or visual design.
This version of UFC has a brilliant model of the great Bruce Lee. he will be familiar to many people as an iconic and talented martial artist so it helps to see him if you haven’t seen the other fighters in action to appreciate where the start of the art is.
A lot of these knockouts have the move that caused them played a few times afterwards as button basing tends to happen. However that lets us see the way that those moves are represented.
I am still hopeful that with Kinect 2.0 (the windows version is due very soon) and a bit of work I can get some degree of fluidity to represent our more peaceful art using similar technology.
Admiring the diversity and variety in games
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?
Forza Horizon 2 and Crackdown- E3
Anyone who has been to one of my talks will know I always mention Forza on the Xbox as an example of some interesting ways that games technology is used and can be used to share information. It means I can show some really nice pictures and cover any subject. I am also a big car racing fan. So I was made up when this trailer and the extra information appeared yesterday about Forza Horizon 2.
I also know from experience that it is going to be a brilliant game. Forza 5 is a track based racing game. The original Horizon let you drive around a free roam area, racing and discovering things with the same dynamics and setup at Forza5. Horizon is one of Predlet 1.0’s favourite games too.
It looks as is the Drivatars will be free roaming too, which will be interesting. How that data is collected and the illusion of the real players driving style in such a free environment is quite tricky to pull off.
From the video there is also the statement that you can drive anywhere. In Horizon there were a lot of very strong fences, unlike in Just Cause 2 or Test Drive unlimited where you could drive across any field and over a cliff. So that looks like its been rectified. Free roaming games are the best sort for a gameplay magpie like myself as I dip in and out of various games. The ones that hold my attention let me go off and make my own experiences work. Driving fits that pretty well though as the constant flow and balance of cars are a microcosm of free roaming in their own right.
As part of the E3 bonanza Turn 10 also released the “free” patch to Forza 5 to give us (back) the Nรผrburgring in its entirety
I dived straight in and did an 8 minute lap in a Ferrari 458 and lo and behold I ended up 41st in the world ๐
That will not last, but it was a pretty good time. Whilst it is a very unforgiving track it can be learned and the previous Forza on the Xbox 360 had the track. They definitely have upped the detail on it, the video mentions laser scanning the most accurate model yet. No mean feat. It does suggest its a free update, and I applaud them for delivering it, however as there were not very many tracks in Forza 5 compared to Forza 4 the next gen upgrade felt a little short on content. Now releasing the ring at E3 to help promote Horizons 2… well its almost as if it that free content was held back as part of a marketing plan? Of course it was. Still, I am pleased it is here and look forward to September’s release.
Another game I was very very pleased to see was Crackdown making a return. The original game was one of my all time favourites. (back in 2007 I said I thought it might be good ๐ )
Crackdown 2 was ok but this reboot and the original creator running it will hopefully get back to its roots but jazzed up to current tech.
The trailer is CGI bit anyone who has played Crackdown will get a little tingle in the back of the neck watching this. “We like Dominoes!”
Can that be the same game? Max and sparky
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 ๐ ). 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.