December 2010 – Page 2 – T-machine.org

Going to GDC 2011? Want an iPhone app for the conference?

Last GDC, we made an iPhone app for friends at the conference, but it got stuck in submission for too long (Apple was being paranoid about anything with location/GPS at the time. Sigh) and only a handful of people got to use the app (our beta testers).

We ended up re-using the tech (and improving it) for client projects during the year – including a 4-star app for the Venice Biennale (100,000 people descend on Venice for Art/Architecture festival).

GDC’s organizers didn’t want an app for 2011 – the last we spoke, they’d commissioned a mobile website instead. As they pointed out, it may be lowest-common-denominator, and lots of usability problems (what do you do when you have no internet?), but it’s likely to work for the BlackBerry users, unlike an iPhone/Android app.

But it looks like we’ll have some free time / spare cash in February, so I was wondering if it was worth updating our app from last year, and putting it into submission really early this time.

Votes yay/nay?

The tech we built works out where all your friends/colleagues are right now (iPhone only), and includes stuff like a live-updated list of all the unofficial parties (this year there were about 25 parties, only 5 of which were on the conference website, IIRC)

EDIT: PS – if we’re paying for this ourselves, we couldn’t afford an Android port, so this would be iPhone only

Your Animator just broke your game design…

Here’s a great example of why so many Flash authors write crap games:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/JacksmackDotCom/primary?tab=achievements

What the F happened?

Someone let an animator dictate the game-design.

This is one of the side-effects of Flash: it encourages people to base games off animations, instead of basing animations off game-design.

The game is actively unpleasant to play because the controls suck so badly. They suck so badly because:

they won’t “allow” you to do a new action until the current anim finishes
if the engine cannot visually playback the anim it’s trying to, it cancels your keypress (!!)
your “position” in game terms is dicated by the current anim-frame

In case that last one is too subtle: the main character has a very camp “skip” walk-anim. But your character is physically “taller” during that anim, because they keyed CD off the anim, rather than off the game-logic.

So, when you’re doing fine movement, you have to wait-and-watch the individual frames of animation to decide when to jump. I find it hard to believe that this is what the authors intended. In practice, you end up spending most of the time watching anim frames, and/or counting frames, instead of playing the game.

I suspect – partly from the documentation from the authors – that they thought everyone would admire the “prettiness”. No. You made a game. People will judge it on the playability. In fact, they have (read the comments – endless complaints about the infernal control system).

Who cares?

For the record, I’ve seen this exact same problem on at least one 7-figure-budget game, and it contributed to the entire project getting cancelled. The studio making it had a background making animations for other people’s games. I shan’t name names because they were skilled and competent – just naive at the time – and my impression was they learned a *lot* from the experience. (I doubt they’d make the same mistake today).

I have seen very similar issues on a couple of other games – most of which got canned; at least one SHOULD have been canned, but instead cost an ungodly amount of money before putting the studio out of business.

It’s not a small issue. Any real game player will spot it. Any professional game developer will recognise the n00b mistake and scoff at it. The sad truth is that many artists – and most animators – won’t even notice it.

Until they get terrible reviews, and wonder why no-one is buying their games :(.