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.

Well, a whole week is definitely more of an absence from updating than I would have liked, but such is the reality of doing coding in your spare time. More writing = less coding. Still, I’ve got time tonight for a pretty good status report.

To the right is a screenshot of the development code as it stands now. I’ve created a few objects to populate the room, and the lights are able to be turned on and off with a mouse click. I had a bit of fun generating the light texture, as I didn’t have one yet. even though the game itself is coded in C++, I find Java extremely useful for simple data manipulations like the generation of procedural textures such as this one. All told, it only took about 30 lines of code, including braces, to generate, and I think it turned out much better than I was expecting, with additive blending it almost looks like a bloom effect (I’m not using any shaders at the moment). The other textures are all done in GIMP, because I’m too resourceful cheap to buy a real imaging program.

Everything clips along quite happily at 60 frames a second on my laptop, with less than 1% processor usage. I’m curious to see how much that goes up once I get some roaches roaming around.

I’ve realized as I’ve been working just how important having a good, solid framework is when doing something like this. I’ve seen a lot of advice flying around the ‘net about not worrying about how game code looks, or if it’s elegant or not, since in the end so long as it runs on our target platform/hardware configuration at a reasonable speed and doesn’t lock up, nobody cares how it’s written. I think that’s true in the general sense, but in the case of the programmer(s), it’s extremely important that your low-level “building blocks” be good enough that you can plug them together and rip them back apart with fairly little difficulty. Sweating the small stuff is definitely the way to go with game coding; taking a few extra hours to really make your game components easy to integrate with each other will save many more hours later on. There is nothing worse than wanting to make a conceptually simple change, but finding that there are so many interdependencies between your hastily designed objects that it becomes an incredibly herculean task.

When I was thinking about how exactly I wanted to launch this website, I realized pretty quickly that I would need a hook, something interesting to keep people coming back at first. Ladies and Gentleman, this is that shameless, shameless hook.

I’ve had the happy fortune of discovering both Jonathan Coultan’s “Thing-a-week” as well as the Experimental Games Project almost simultaneously. And I realized something as I was browsing through their work: that rapidly developed work is generally more interesting, both for the artist as well as the viewer, than long-term projects. From the artist’s point of view, there is a very rapid sense of satisfaction that comes from putting things together quickly, as well as the ability to “cheat” a little bit, and not get bogged down in doing things “correctly”. Also, I have found, at least from my own experiences, that doing a lot of small things quickly, as opposed to much longer things over time, forces you to be more creative, to come up with ever more outrageous and ridiculous concepts to put into action. Quantity is not as important as quality, but if the correct effort is put into your creative process, quantity very often leads to a greater quality, in much the same way as running every day will make you physically stronger.

For the viewer, there is a reason to keep coming back, to watch the incremental process of creation and feel that somehow, in some way, you are helping with that creation, through feedback. And feedback that is more likely to be taken into account. Long projects, like a train, have trouble changing direction once they develop too much momentum. Also, the artist will have a greater emotional investment in the project, making him less likely to concede changes. Short, “disposable” projects possess neither of these faults, which is why I have decided to put my current long-term project on hold in favor of a short detour into the land of rapid game development.

I don’t plan on making it quite as rapid as Coulton or Gabler’s work, however. One week timeframes are certainly possible, and I relish the thought of being able to work at that speed, but the truth of the matter is that my current station in life provides me with very little time for much of anything outside of my various responsibilities. So while a weekly basis is out, monthly is definitely possible. And so that is what I am going with. With updates on progress every few days, with any luck I can keep things interesting up until the not-so-bitter end.

But enough blather, on with the game!

Game-in-a-month 1 (will there be a 2?) is called “Silas”, and it stars some of the world’s most detestable creatures. No, not kittens. Cockroaches.

I came across the concept around 3 in the morning. Taking Kyle Gabler’s concept of “themeing”, I started from the idea of light, and then proceeded to come up with as many different things you can do with light as is possible. And my thoughts turned out something like the picture at the top of the post.

From there, it evolved into a game about a dead butler cursed to care for his master, but the only thing he seems to be able to do is turn lights on and off and scatter roaches. Poor guy.

And I mean it. It’s funny how the creative process tends to consume everything it touches, transforming even the most nonthreatening of creations into raving, lunatic monsters that cause their masters to slave away for hours, and then weeks, and then give up when they realize what a horrid relationship they are in with this beast they have created.

Which is one of the reasons I’m putting this up here. After three redesigns and more time wasted than I like to quantify, I do believe I’ve tamed the beast to a point that it will actually be manageable. Sure, there’s still a lot more I’d like to put up here, a tweak here, a change there, but, I think it will be far more interesting to let you, the reader, in on the ride.

Oh heck, let’s be honest. This devlog is here to keep me focused :).

v2 of the site is almost done, I just need to finish up the server specific configurations first (I do all of my development locally). Until then, you’ll just have to make do with this placeholder.