While in Japan this past month, I met with both D.K. and Junpei Isshiki at a bar outside of Shin-okubo station. It was fantastic, as we talked for well over four hours, and even though Japanese is a second language for me we understood each other fairly easily just because of the strong similarity in interests. It’s not every day I can get into the nitty-gritty technical details of game development without extensive background explanation. And on a completely unrelated note, Isshiki could drink and smoke like nothing I’ve ever seen, downing an unholy amount of beer and cigarettes before the night was out, and he honestly didn’t look any worse the wear for it.

While our conversation rambled all over the place, touching on everything from a comparison of differences in coding older cartridge based systems (which allowed for the addition of expansion chips to extend upon the base capabilities of the host console) and modern consoles to shopping for old computer parts in Akihabara, there was one topic in particular that I thought deserved a write-up, and which the three of us spent a considerable amount of time discussing. That topic is accessibility. Both D.K. and Isshiki want a greater non-Japanese audience for their games, and they asked me to help them spread their games to more people. I doubt they are alone. Here are some of the ideas we bounced around, and some of my own mixed in as well.

On my own, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the topic of accessibility in terms of internationality lately, largely due to all of the Japanese freeware games I have been sorting through on the off-chance of finding something appropriate to write about at indiegames.com. When I first started sifting games for Tim, I didn’t think it would be a particularly difficult project. I speak fairly good Japanese, and so I naively thought that by reading the Japanese freeware news sites that I could find all kinds of cool games that would be extremely difficult to find by people who don’t speak the language. And I do find awesome games, a very great many of them, but almost all of them are unplayable outside of Japan for two reason. First, most of them have extremely Japanese-heavy interfaces, which prevents even the simplest of action games from being playable by non-Japanese speakers. The second, and more complicated issues are technical. A very great many Japanese games do not run on English-language based versions of Windows, crashing and burning when their filenames become garbled from the character-set change, or when libraries common on Japanese systems are either missing or outdated on Latin-alphabet based operating systems.

There are other small problems as well, such as garbage displaying on window title bars, and even the text inside games being displayed as random symbols instead of actual text. Even though most non-Japanese gamers will not be able to read the text even if it were being displayed correctly, I think displaying garbage causes damage to a game’s perception. What would otherwise be seen as a spotless release will seem more poorly put together as soon as one starts seeing text display as “@##$%!!@#$ }{_^*??!” instead of “あ！なにをやってんだろ？？！”.

Certain developers, such as Zun (of Touhou fame), D.K., and Isshiki manage to skirt most of these problems with only a small amount of extra effort, but the bulk of developers do not. D.K.-san has been especially sensitive to this topic, attempting to make his games as universally accessible as is humanly possible.

However, even if a game is made with the intention of international release, it is often unknown outside of it’s host language due to a simple problem of logistics. How to non-native speakers of a game’s language even . This is the bulk of the reason why I try to find games for indiegames, searching for ways to connect Japanese and Western developers in ways that allow their games to be seen by more people. But, that is such a small part of the puzzle. I wonder about how many Chinese, how many Korean, how many Dutch or Russian games are missed by the world at large due to language and cultural barriers. I’m sure there must be indie gamers/developers out there who are bilingual in many languages, and who could bring all kinds of amazing games to the attention of the English-speaking world, and vice versa. The indie game scene is only as strong as it is visible, and more visibility will, I think, yield more and higher quality games, partially due to quantity, and partially due to the fact that I suspect most devs (I know it’s true for me) work harder, faster, and better when we know people are watching, waiting for, and enjoying what we produce.

Obviously, not all games are going to do well with international release. RPGs are obviously not good candidates, but even some of those would probably be worth translating. Just think of how many people would have missed out on Cave Story if not for the intrepid soul that translated it.

So, this is a call to do your part! Adopt a developer in another country! If you enjoy indie games and find a game in a language that would be difficult to understand for someone who does not speak the game’s language, provide an explanation of the rules, translate a readme, suggest it to a review site, or even just to a friend. Let developers know when a game doesn’t work on your computer. If you’re technically minded, try to help them fix the problem. And no matter what, send the developer a note, let them know personally when you suggest their games to a review site, or even if you just enjoyed it yourself. Nothing will make their day faster than knowing that somebody is enjoying their game.

Note: D.K. is a Pachinko programmer for Climax, and Isshiki codes arcade games for Milestone. I know this doesn’t really have much to do with the subject above, but I’m always curious about what other developers do for a living, so I’m throwing it out there :).

And that single error message, dear readers, is the only thing between you and roach killing nirvana. This is driving me crazy, I’ve got the engine done just in time and I can’t compile it for Windows because of a linker hiccup. Wonderful. It’s way too late for me to continue beating my head against it, though, so I’ll get it compiled up as soon as I have the time and can figure out why ming is choking.

All told, though, I don’t know that it’s that big of a loss if it’s a day late. There still aren’t any sound effects, or music, and I really doubt there will be. The month is up, and for as much as I think it would be cool to extend this project as I talked about doing a few posts ago, it’s tempered by even parts of wanting to get back to work on Muse. I’ve learned a lot while working on this project. Here are just a few of the highlights:

1. Don’t attempt to design your game by typing coordinates into the source. You should use some sort of visual editing tool, preferably one that lets you edit scripts right into it. The less you have to touch the engine source, the better.
2. Use those scripts. C++ is not a good choice for the game logic most of the time, keep it to engine logic.
3. Create either your assets first, and then your code, or create your engine first, and then fill it with assets. Doing both at the same time is tricky.
4. Don’t put off verifying that compiling to windows works until the night of your deadline!
5. Don’t get stressed out about going halfways on some items of a one-month prototype.

So, yeah. In some ways, this whole experiment went better than I expected, and in some ways, it went worse. I would have liked to have gotten some more polish into the game, and some sound, but considering how badly I allowed it to billow into having menus and an intro story and everything, I’m not sure I would have had time to do both anyway.

So that’s that. I’ll post builds for Linux and Windows in a few days when I have the chance to get ming working on windows, and then it’s full speed ahead on getting enough of Muse done to put out a demo of that. Hopefully a few months at most.

It seems to me that no matter how many times I get into this stupid cycle, I never learn from it.

This past week my coworkers and I have been playing around with the Wayback Machine at archive.org, which is a pretty cool thing that lets you view what websites looked like in the past, at various intervals. Today, I decided to check out a site I did way back in ’03, which housed an aborted comic and some various ranty type materials.

And I was stunned. It seems that the more time goes by, the more and more human my earlier efforts seem. I seemed so open, so honest back then. Of course, for all I know I was just as manipulative back then, but it might as well be a different person based on what I read. If I was late, I said I was late. Apologized, of course, but it was no biggie. If I was courting traffic, I made no secret of it. And now, I just feel so wrong. Everything I do is with the intention of “making it”, of utilizing my time for maximum result, not for fun. I think this is partially a reaction to my slowly getting older; the older I get, the more I realize that my time is limited, and I (naturally, I think) want to use it better. But the end result is, I don’t.

Back in 2002-2004, I worked like crazy on my projects in my spare time, at least as hard as I do now, if not more. But the critical difference was, I wasn’t ashamed of my shortcomings then. I have a mean perfectionist streak in me, that makes me want to hide away anything that doesn’t feel like the best of my best, and that includes art or programs that I have done before that seemed okay at the time, but no longer “make the cut”, and so get deleted from whatever public viewing location I had them up at. It also includes this website, which has gone through three different revisions without being posted, simply because I didn’t want to put up anything that might compromise any first impression I could have made with my honestly non-existent fans. I had fans at one time. Not a lot of them, and not really deserved, but fans nonetheless. People who looked at my art simply because they liked it. And I had online friends too, a network, people who liked what I did and I liked what they did. People with similar interests as me who would keep me straight and honest with myself, and vice-versa.

And then, I think around the time I was prepping to go to Japan, it all fell away, and because of me and me alone. I had a lot of real-world things to do, and places to go, and things to see, but I allowed myself to drift away from what I had in favor of the new. Things change, people change, and that’s okay, but I’m not convinced this was entirely a good change, and haven’t been comfortable with it for quite some time. My Deviant Art blog is full of “I’m back, no really this time!” posts, in which I would post some picture and promise more, but then never do so. And I think the big reason I did was because, I didn’t enjoy it anymore. The pieces that I did for myself, usually simple sketches in my sketchbook, were relaxing, comfortable. But in my narrow little mind, art for the web, for public exhibition had to be more. It had to be the absolute cutting edge of my skill level, something that in somebody else’s portfolio would make me say “Wow”. My goal was no longer to present the art that was a part of me, but art that I thought would be popular, that would make people think “geez, this guy is good”. With the result that I didn’t post anything.

And so, I’m going to try to pull myself out of the creative ditch once again, but with a slightly different tack. I’m going to upload things that are not perfect do DA, for a start. Heck, I’m going to upload things that aren’t even colored, and probably some that aren’t even shaded! And, I’m going to try to make the effort to make some new internet based contacts. I’ve still got my DA account, which should work okay for the art side of things, but I’m not so sure where to look to find other hobby game developers. I’m sure a short search will turn some stuff up, though.

Let’s keep it real. Even if my blog starts to sound like a whiny myspace page, I don’t care. At least it will be honest. And potentially entertaining ^^.

Lately my brother Peter (he’s five) has been asking me if I would teach him how to “play Mario”, so yesterday I dug my NES out of my closet and hooked it up to the TV. This is a major no-no, as I have a projection TV, but the old warnings only apply to old TVs, right? Right?

So anyways, after giving him a choice between Super Mario Bros. and Megaman 6, he opted for Megaman. In hindsight, this was pretty stupid, as somebody who is just cutting their teeth on gaming probably shouldn’t be starting with a franchise famous for inducing controlle-through-screen syndrome in all but the hardest core of players. He plunked down on my lap and proceeded to start mashing buttons with all the vigor and futility of a one-eyed bird going at a skyscraper window.  So I tried to give him a little instruction in basic controller usage techniques. Hold it with one hand at each side, use your thumbs, no DON’T move one hand to the other side, there that’s better, DON’T move your hands, etc.

And it suddenly struck me that this was, in some strange, surreal way, a coming of age ceremony. In much the same way that boys have been being taught to fish, to hunt, to tie a tie by their fathers and brothers for generations, this generation has one more feather in its developmental cap: the videogame. Watching his little hands frantically push the buttons, largely without any useful effect, I realized that everything I have been doing instinctively since my grandfather first bought me this NES, are lost on him. I push ‘A’ to select something without even thinking about it, he has to look at the controller every time he wants to jump just to see where ‘A’ is. It was mesmerizing to watch the gears in his head turning, trying to absorb everything at once and sort it out enough to jump over the next pit, to molecularize the next evil robot, to survive just one encounter without being beaten into a pulpy, wired robotic waste heap.

And how different it is from when I was his age. The earliest games that I can remember playing were on my father’s Commodore64, when I was roughly Peter’s age. Duck’s Ahoy and Ghostbusters were the order of the day, and looking back I realize that I did surprisingly well at them for my age. And unlike Peter, there was nobody to show me how. Sure, my Dad enjoyed playing games, but his instruction was very different. Video games were still so young a concept, so fresh an idea, that regardless of age, if you played, you were a beginner. There wasn’t a person alive who could look at me and state with any kind of integrity that “when I was your age…”. There simply weren’t any games around when the adults of the 80’s were kids, aside from perhaps very crude implementations of Pong and their ilk. And so largely, my generation taught itself.

And the games grew with us. From the NES and the Super Nintendo, to the Playstation and PS2, my generation can truly look back and say “we were there”.  And as the games have become technically more complex and engaging, so have the the barriers to entry. I think this is one of the major reasons that the Wii is cleaning house so effectively at the moment with its focus on intuitive controls and “accessible” games. The clock has been reset, a new generation of young people, the future gamers, are coming up in the wings, and there is no way they will be able to understand the Devil May Cry’s or new Final Fantasy’s of the world. They are simply too complex. It would be like trying to teach a kid to read by giving them a copy of Beowulf. It’s just not gonna happen. But, the current generation doesn’t need to teach themselves like mine did. Like so many other things, I think that most young boys (and some girls too, my sister is a total gamer) will now learn to play games not through experimentation, but through instruction. When kids start showing an interest in playing games “like mommy and daddy”, their parents will give them a controller and a sippy cup and plunk them down on the couch, and then teach them how to play. I learned how to run and jump the hard way. My brother will learn to run and jump because I will show him how. It’s social now.