I am not a great player of games. My loop from eye to brain to body (specifically fingers for gaming) is particularly slow and susceptible to stalls (rabbit in headlights). When I play a shooter online then chances are I will be in the 50% of the population who don't quite hit a 1:1 KD ratio, rather than the 50% who are somewhere above that magic line (which 90% of people claim to be above - don't you love statistics). My ability to accurately point a crosshair at your upper torso and click, then react to the potential movements of bits of the system to maintain that position and throttle my clicking rate to best provide an accurate stream of virtual bullets to pierce your virtual head is not good and is only partially compensated for by my ability to pick sensible places to engage. But give me a support class or an objective and I'll make a good addition to your team. Hell, even in something like Counter-Strike standard maps I'll work out non-traditional disruptive play to prevent the other team from playing in their comfort zone, at least in a casual skill environment (no doubt high skill players can shut down my shenanigans). This is something I am completely happy with, by definition half of the group have to be below the median and if we're looking at a skewed distribution (assume a normal population distribution of reaction times, most very low players give up, everyone else sticks around) then most of us are below the mean. I have no proof to support the idea that most game populations are skewed that way so feel free to reject the second idea, that most of you play at a sub-average reaction level.

So what has brought about this claim that not only am I not very good at the see, analyse, react chain but most of you are (comparatively) down in the mud with me? Does it matter? Should game designers care?

Super Hold Left or Right to Continue

When I first saw Super Hexagon I thought it was a game about analysing the scene, deciding on a rotation needed for the pointer, and hoping that you'd made a decision about that rotation with enough time for the rotation to complete and get through the gap. The skill coming from that reaction speed and correctly choosing left or right rotation and chaining those decisions together into the sequence that matches the ever contracting and moving world around your pointer. The rejection of the music game memorisation by adding randomisation and constant speed of the pointer's movement (baring stationary) seemed to clinch my reading of the game.

And then I purchased a copy and played it. Or I should say I repeatedly played the first second to 9 seconds of the game. I was not expecting to have to express my intent for rotation as a press on the left or right side of the screen for a certain number of ticks (with error margin for the width of the hole narrowed by future positional needs / rotation change lag in your input reactions), I was expecting the touch to provide rotational intent despite the lack of an analogue stick. This leads to my reading of the game as both a call against and demonstration of players' willingness to work around needlessly bad reading of user intent. I do not think this interpretation was the author's goal but I don't think that should be a relevant factor.

When someone complains about the pointless tank controls in earlier Resident Evil games when played on a device with analogue sticks, that it is harder than it should be to express their intent via their avatar, then this is exactly what Super Hexagon is demonstrating. A game where the avatar cannot react in zero time to rotate perfectly to a new angle should express that limitation in the animation system, not in the controls. When people express the difference between their failure and a failure of the game it is usually described as "I made the wrong decision" vs "the game didn't do what I wanted" or unfairly/arbitrarily killed them as they had no way of knowing what the right decision was. Dark Souls is lauded for the canned animation system (you cannot break from an animation once you initiate it so decisions cannot be aborted) and interactions that are challenging but feel fair and push players to be very methodical and make the right choices. Hard does not mean lightning reflexes, it means making the right choices and fair means the game gave you the information you needed to make the right choice.

At 5:40 seconds into the game the cursor snagged the end of a wall, the wall I had time to get past but had mistakenly released the right side of the screen early to avoid overshooting the hole. The hole I had the intent to get through and the reaction times to initiate movement to complete in the right direction. But I didn't hold down my finger for exactly the right length of time and so the pointer hit the wall. Stupid game, let me move my avatar to where I want it to go!

User Intent and Skill

While discussing that game with Paul from Mode 7 Games, I was being my usual contrarian self and making no headway expressing how I see the game as tank control analogous, narrative against bad controls by using bad controls and this eventually pushed him to posit, "I don't know how you categorise a disconnect in user-intent vs. making something skill based - don't you need a disconnect for micro". Now there is an interesting question, is skill (specifically as expressed in micro) just the player having to overcome problematic controls to express their intent efficiently?

It's certainly a sane viewpoint, my counter would be that perfect reading of user intent is hard to impossible depending on the range of things the user is able to express in the game but being as good as possible at reading them is a requirement for an honest game. For something like Starcraft then there is clearly an issue with users expressing the exact movements and actions of every unit in the game as soon as they think of what they should be doing. We simply can't work out how to use our current input methods to achieve that and so we build the tools as best we can and consequently the ability to better express intent using fast reactions is part of micro. But knowing what you want your units to do is also massively important. The APM to pull back units and prevent them being destroyed is key to being most effective in an engagement, knowing that you want to fight with an army of half-health units by pulling some out of range of attack rather than half an army at full health and half corpses is the skill. Starcraft even uses that time being locked up at the controls for micro as a balance mechanism, with players who are weaker at micro knowing this and so devoting their APM budget to other things. Micro is much more than reactions and good play is informed by understanding of your own reactions and application of it to the limitations of the controls; giving the players the best chance to express their intent is critical, while accepting the limitations of input will provide some with ability to do more, faster, up to the constraints of the input system.

I'm sure most people who have played Super Hexagon and read my interpretation of the game didn't agree, I've expressed the view to responses of o_O enough times to expect it. But what if my Super Hexagon and your game aren't the same game? Maybe on my Nexus the lag on the digitiser or on the renderer's output / screen means I have a couple less frames to make my reaction, that the feedback loop of when to lift off my finger has to be done by precise mental calculation rather than via screen feedback. My laggy brain may make for some disadvantage in twitchy multiplayer shooters but what about laggy hardware, especially in the wide ecosystems of PC gaming, Android/iOS (when grouped collectively), or consoles (mainly what TV you hooked them up to). Is this skill or just a randomised impediment that the game design should accept and try to minimise?

Consider a shooter with a handicap system for health. When you buy the game you get a health value between 50 and 150 and every time you spawn that's your health, your given handicap was randomly chosen. Only you play on a nice large IPS TV as your screen, when you spawn your health is now half of what it was. You own that brand of GPU and those drivers with default settings? Take 30 health off. Didn't configure your $60 mouse correctly for 1ms updates? Drop off another 10. This is what lag to the input and output are doing, on top of the random lag of the user's own processing abilities we have massive, uncertain lag from the variable hardware and settings. By not trying to optimise reading of user intent we exacerbate the ability for luck rather than skill to rule the systems because we can't know from user to user if what they can actually see and react to on their hardware is 100ms behind a different user.

What Have We Learnt Today?

This line of thought can be taken to extremes, the simplest straw-man is to declare that I am saying no timing checks are allowed and so all games much become turn-based. Reactions are part of micro and that's a key element of gaming, especially competitive gaming, and even our experience of reality in general; time moves forward and we go along with it. But we can't equate skill with enforced disconnects in reading user intent. Obviously the user doesn't intend to generate a game over screen or lose so our game, to have challenge or provide player rankings, must offer paths to failure that the user should not take but has the option to. I think games are most worthwhile when that is offering a choice that the user takes and then leads to failure, even if they only took that option due to being rushed and needing to make some reaction (one of which can be no input at all). We need to be aware of the variable reaction times of the devices making a mockery of any intent to be aggressive with dividing players by speed of reaction as a skill or a skill check for expressing precise intent that can be recorded by other means.

An input system that is harder to interact with than is necessary, making correctly expressing intent the skill, is missing the mark; a throw back to before we had the processing power, input bandwidth, and know-how to do better. We will always have a problem with correctly reading user intent until people have brain interfaces but minimising those disconnects does not prevent games of reaction, even if the fair balancing of such a game seems impossible due to the range of hardware people use to play games.

That is the hole I see when I look at using hardening expression of user intent as a skill mechanism, with real-time games already at the mercy of input and output lag those games that walk that path are just doubling down on giving luck as skill, luck of the hardware and luck of the nervous system. Games are about offering choices but in Super Hexagon my best choice it to stop playing.

This post was originally posted to the previous site early on Sunday but the deadline for database migration came down too early for it to survive to the new site. A few comments were lost along the way and webcache.googleusercontent did not preserve them.Syndicated from my blog.

Here are a few thoughts on games from 2012 which I completed and have seen doing the rounds on many a Game of the Year list.

Best AAA classic money-bags creation 2012: Halo 4.

Halo, but with outstanding graphics (Reach was the first 360 Halo that didn't insult the hardware; the games were all great but even will all the effort they only got Reach up to the pack) and a new aesthetic and character designs to make it look a bit new while still looking (and far more importantly playing) like a Halo.

It wasn't the perfect story but I was reasonably happy with the broad strokes and wonder if they're going to make an interesting launching off point for the next game (shame about the Legendary ending). The online was great (but the Spartan Ops needs to really jump up to be more than rather middling co-op with a great video series) and the solo was just right. I felt my interest in Halo had been dropping off this gen since the white hot love of the original xbox releases but Halo 4 grabbed me right back, even if I'll never really care about multiplayer console FPSs.

Best small budget release that kept eating my time 2012: FTL.

Take a light roguelike-like story generation engine into space and add an active time battle combat system with a focus on managing the people who run the ship and you've got gold. I spent many an hour doing this while another screen contained something to occupy the other half of my brain; that isn't a bad thing, games like Forza and puzzle titles are also in this awesome area where the bit of my brain I want to apply to the game can be split off from a podcast or film appreciation section.

After tens of hours it wears thin, the things I have not seen are hidden from me by an RNG and I have explored all the viable strategies that occur to me can be constructed by the combat systems in place. But you should totally play this game until you hit that point or naturally drift off.

Best thing that others may tell you isn't a game: Dear Esther.

Great place to go, great story to craft yourself as you walk about and get a selection of narration with the wonderful touches of narrative from the locations and beautiful landmarks. Bit of choice that comes from the randomisation of the spoken voice and optional sights that make it more than a corridor title where you can choose what to look at but otherwise are in a movie.

I really got along with the few hours that it takes to walk through Dear Esther. That old Source engine is great at stereoscopic 3D for some reason and it really sucked me in to be able to look out of a broken window and have the proper depth perception of focussing on the frame or the background. Something about 3D in FPS can work really well to drag you into the frame and make the rest of the world simply not exist. That possibly made the game what it was for me, but obviously the stuff inside the virtual environment had to be worthwhile to keep me in and make it more than just another stereoscopic experience.

(of the games I completed) Not on this list but on everyone else's 2012: Journey & Forza Horizon.

Journey really didn't do it for me. I guess this is rather cool as I could appreciate both what it was doing and the quality of the technical work. I did not care for the co-op at all and I wasn't in lock-step with the game's emotional trip as it moved about and so felt the music and events disconnecting. Add this in to Thirty Flights Of Loving (which I guess was also this year so should be on this list non-entries, but I haven't seen a lot of GotYs with Thirty Flights Of Loving on either so maybe it didn't really do the rounds of the enthusiast press to be on everyone's mind at the end of the year) for games I was fine with playing but didn't much care for and didn't feel like I had missed what it was they were trying to say. Why is that cool? I generally consider this to be my personal idea of 'art' and taste. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy playing them (for ludic, technical, or aesthetic reasons) or failed to find their message; I just didn't find it resonated with me. Their point was to sell me on that connection and I was not sold. It's cool that I can see someone else's GotY list and see games I would never put up there but not think they're crazy.

Forza is a harder one. I really liked it (I completed it like everything on this list and for a driving game that's often harder due to how they typically stretch the game progression) but I found it lacking compared to the numbered titles (notably 4). I want to think of Horizon as one of the best games of the year, but I also don't want to get another Horizon style game next in the Forza series and am glad it didn't explode and outsell Forza 4. It was a great game about racing cars with that lovely 'made for in-car view' physics/handling, upgrades that mean any car is reasonably viable selection for the class race, and plenty of stuff to do on the vibrant open world they created. But it crystallized what I loved about Forza, the driving and not the racing. The start is fun with a race but the best part of Forza 4 is the enforced clean laps, the assists notes by each time, and showing my friend's scores for a hot lap at the end of every race. So I do a lap or two getting the course in my mind while I overtake the pack and am racing and once I'm done I then drive for the rest of the race with the leaderboards in my mind. Assists off, no cutting onto the grass or decelerating using some useful wall; clean, smooth, driving. And Forza Horizon is a racing game, that means it can't hold the same position of reverence in my memory as a numbered Forza. Great game, but no GotY.

Syndicated from my blog.

I shouldn't make fun of open source.

After some time getting my head around what the actual arguments are (in what could be simplified to 'Windows vs Linux', or the other argument (the actual nuance) 'can libre exist without gratis') and deciding what I want to do with my life (because at the moment I will probably end up in my early 30s with a doctorate and a rather varied work history and enough cash behind me to still be somewhat picky about work if I continue to not care about material possessions and being able to support more people than me).

I like that Linux is a thing and that we have all these free repositories of great software developed by the community spirit. People spending 10% of their time doing something for everyone or working on something in their niche dev life and realising it probably doesn't have massive commercial value (or think it shouldn't) so why not let the community all use and improve it. This is good, but if you're spending your entire working time working on open source / free software projects then you're either: independently wealthy and so good for you but you are the 1% (or the 0.001% if you are both worth enough to never work for money and inclined to build software with your time?) and you have to understand almost everyone doesn't have that choice you did; or you're working on some con game where the full development cost of the project is returned in support contracts or donations from those working through your lack of documentation or are inclined to give (which is not a stable business plan - ask buskers about how they can manage their current and future expected income to pay for future training and development of new material). Basically I think libre should include the freedom to not be blocked from understanding of the code by lack of documentation or obscure and fractured code base; if you're making a decent revenue from support contracts to run your open source software house I have questions as to your use of the concept of libre and suspicions about how much of the actual software you're selling support for is written by your paid team of coders and how much of it is sitting on the backs of the libre movement.

Basically I'm happy for someone to pay me for my code and then put that code into the public domain or use any form of copyleft/libre license. I hope to do more work (beyond my current occasional submissions of fixes to open sourced projects I'm working on top of) on free software projects and return to the code base any improvements I make to free software that I use in my normal work (just as I file bug reports for the non-free software I work on if I find something I think is a bug). But I don't see the copyleft idea as one under which I can make a useful wage for any ideas I do consider to have commercial merit (and with the understanding that without some form of remuneration then I simply can't spend the time needed on the project - we all gotta eat and some of us even expect to chase up the pyramid on needs to try and get to the top). I do not believe that copyleft is a requirement of libre. Gratis (which is the right to free redistribution, unless you only ever want to sell one copy or make a release effectively donationware) will burn you in a commercial sense (obviously) and I think contains the seeds to a damaging divide between closed and gratis as the only two teams in town. Also see the above about how some paths to remuneration via gratis lead to concerns about ability to get income vs incentive to make code towards the libre ideal.

So I want to say the right answer is neither of these two teams (this is not a surprising insight, but inside the games industry there doesn't seem to be any momentum behind paid software that is source included).

Copyleft open source software doesn't seem like a great idea for games. If we take the average cost per seat for $10k/month for games then even a 3 year solo project (about the smallest 'commercial' indie outside of the exceptions of 6 month duo development by two very experienced rapid prototypers with an established code base that already has the edge case PC compatibility issues worked out of it) requires $360k (that is just over half a million once you factor in a 70/30 split for distribution) to break even. You could not pay yourself, being a proper starving artist and maybe we'd like to say that such a selfless act might possibly bring riches. I have no idea if there is any rich copyleft game developers out there who get lots of donations from fans. The gaming industry seems to hold up our indie stars as capitalists, we don't talk with the free software guys. Mainly because they say stuff like this.

On the other side of the fence we have the mainstream gaming industry and most of the indies. You get a binary, maybe several if it works on other OS, and assets. All of these are protected under copyright and you get a license. To make a modification to the thing you now own requires reverse engineering. We intercept DirectX and OpenGL draw calls; we modify memory values to create cheats and other ways of changing our games; we deconstruct the binaries, fix errors, and then build fix files to write those changes into the binary. Morrowind has a DirectX call interceptor that uses the scanned memory location data of the player to also generate a host of new DirectX calls based on the asset data to draw distant lands into the world behind the scene the game thinks it is rendering. That's not a 'crazy land of fiction' but one of the more popular mods for that game to turn the foggy world into a massive open landscape the artists created assets for now we have the rendering power. That is insane. Just as the creator have copyright on the binary files, so the creator has copyright on the source files. When you sell your game you could give the source files with the binary and continue to indicate your copyright to prevent redistribution. This is sort of what mods are, we just built an abstraction layer to avoid letting the person, who ultimately pays for us to work, from seeing our precious source code. Fuck that work to build a mod layer; that is the same argument as DRM and we all know that argument is bankrupt.

The right answer is to sell your software and sell it as an easily modifiable release that gives the person who now owns the license all the power you have as the author to implement fixes. Include your source files. Don't make it copyleft, but do believe in the idea of libre software. If you have time to work on something then don't make a mod layer to closed software, make a way for all the people who you sell a license to to share the modifications they make with each other in a really easy way. Rather than having your binary (and modified editions of it) jumping all over the internet then make it easy to share and branch your code, accept Git into your heart and into the suggested software for your customers. Surface cool modifications and ask the authors about offering it into the updates for later patches. If you don't believe in software patents (and you shouldn't) then no fragment of code is copyright but the entire work is, that means you may need to talk to people who make changes to your code if they are enough of a derivative to generate their own copyright but fixes should not even require such a conversation, it's just nice to ask first before using someone else's fix to patch your code. Also, without software patents then none of your code is 'secret sauce' so that argument for not releasing your source code goes out of the window. If someone steals 4 chapters from a Stephen King book and puts it into their own work then it's still copyright infringement, if someone rips off your software you can still go after them for unauthorised redistribution of your work. You're making it easier for partial theft to happen with releasing the source code but I have bad news: it was already completely trivial to steal all your stuff as soon as you sold your first copy and gave a binary to someone, the 0s and 1s are already out there. You are preventing the people who do have a right to modify your stuff, because they already paid you, from doing that rightful modification to try and stop the bad guys who don't care about your copyright in the first place.

Make games, sell games, release your source as part of the sales and make sure to make it clear this is not a copyleft license. This is still commercial software, but this is a reasonably unused area of games software licensing where on day 1 it is much easier for modders and fixers to get in there and have a good root around. No waiting years for an eventual release once it has no more commercial value to the company, every line of code out there for anyone who wants to buy a copy to read, edit, fix, enjoy.

Syndicated from my blog.

It has been a while since I blogged on GB. Or at all for that matter. How is it 2012 already?

I was going back over some DICE coverage (finally catching up with the talks this year I hadn't had time to check out) and walked right into this piece (30mins video feed) only hours after reading this post.

Unless I completely got the wrong end of the stick (but I think it was sold quite clearly in the talk), can you see how linear stories with psychological hooks (story arcs which create incomplete purchases from each bit of DLC you buy) to get people to keep buying the new DLC are being sold (by the EA guy) as a great driver of an open world environment. The real non-linear content comes from the emergent gameplay (with systemic game design) that has nothing to do with constantly trying to sell a person the next chunk of linear content for your world.

Building an open world with linear story (GTA, Elder Scrolls being two great examples) are narratively linear when you're writing the story (even if you can approach a lot of the content in the order of your choice). The non-linear content is the emergent activities, walking the earth or enjoying the city simulation. That is where the players craft new stories that the designer did not build and yet the guy from (DLC fans) EA gives a big talk about how getting a writing staff around to constantly pump out paid content with story arcs as episodic content is non-linear.

I'm starting to get a deep understanding of why EA moved off Steam and it wasn't just Origin was ready to release (EA have no issue sharing sales revenue with any other digital store, as long as those stores don't force them to offer the choice of buying DLC from that same storefront). They see the boxed game as a traditional revenue source for getting the game out the door and are happy to give away some of the money to distributors (digital and retail) because they just got a customer for that product 'platform'. The game (a platform to sell more piecemeal linear story) is their conduit to far more revenue generation by selling DLC to expand the experience. Boxed copies drop in value over time but by enforcing all DLC via Origin they can keep 100% of that new big revenue stream and avoid a traditional price depreciation. That's worth losing any sales through Steam for on PC. Mass Effect 2 is £5 retail but you have to pay £30 on top to get all the DLC (if you made the mistake of buying Me2 used then it's a £40 cost to buy all the DLC including the stuff that comes with the new copies) and complete the story and all that money goes direct to EA. Imagine if all that DLC was critical to your full understanding of the story arcs of the game and they all chained together so buying one meant a sunk cost pushing buying the next one to see that multi-DLC story arc blossom. It has nothing to do with emergent non-linear stories, non-linear is only true in the strictest sense that you can do a lot of content (especially with a Elder Scrolls style many-linear chain design) in an order of your choosing. Like reading 3 books about the same character at once and picking where you go for the next chapter as you flick between them.

This ties in to a longer conversation about the ethical issue with 'whales' (the F2P term) and how we move with episodic content without abusing the customer and creating a drop-fed, unhappy consumer who ends up leaving the industry and spending their money on DVDs, books, and other entertainment if we treat them like something to maximise our cash intake from. While a game and traditional expansions had a classic price depreciation to pick up a long tail and let gamers buy when they could afford it (limited only on peer pressure to consume the latest talking point game), are we shooting ourselves in the foot with 30-60 minutes DLC missions for the price of a classic release (say 36 months after game launch) of a full game (or even an indie title at launch)? Are we offering a suitable value and is there a problem when a game that you can buy for £5 with lots of content can grow to 125% of that total content only by buying £30 of additional DLC, especially if we start to look at tying that content into arcs and hooking into the desire to follow threads (as discussed in the video).

When we grow to a TV model and have masses of DLC, two games worth of quest chains (four 12 episode seasons of content? At £5 an episode that would be £240 of content sold bit by bit as DLC but two games new only costs £60) then how to we price fairly? If we try and take every penny today then we'll end up stripping the customer base for gaming. And why did the guy from EA decide to try and pas this off as a non-linear discussion? Was that just a lack of a good term for this episodic content without using that phrase (because episodic content is something associated with some mild failure stories of timetables and popularity) as he pushed DLC? Does the not technically fixed order way that Elder Scrolls does content make the dev think non-linear somehow?

Just resting my eyes.

So I guess I was expecting a Whiskey Media subscription to run around the micro-payment zone (so when bundled up you'd probably go with quarterly / annual pricing to avoid eating too many charges on each transaction) and $50/year is higher than my expectations.  And time-delaying the Bombcast to incentivise users is a bit of a shame after the talk about subscriptions only being a premium offering.  Grrrr, Geoff smash plans of sustainable content generation without significant advertising revenues! 
 
And then I turned around and looked into the middle distance, coincidentally resting my gaze on a pile of EDGE magazines.  Being a local, they're roughly the same subscription value (if you get a discount offer) as Giant Bomb is asking.  130 pages a month, printed on paper.  Am I really just paying the money because of the paper bindings?  When I think of the WM sites and all the original video programming and written content I'm enjoying, how can I possibly not say that is worth a few dollars each month? 
 
"Because it's online" 
 I guess that's the answer.  We're so used to getting basically everything for free online that we don't expect to pay for anything.  If I don't support these guys then someone else will be making free content and I can just move to their free take-out joint.  Quality may go down, trust in an honest view may wash away, but at least we'll never have to pay a penny more than our basic ISP fees to get at the juicy juicy time-sink content. 
 
Well screw that!  I'll find $50 each year and throw it at the Whiskey brand.  If I really run out of cash I could stop subscribing to EDGE and put my money where my hours of enjoyment are.  But it isn't just about putting cash into things you like; it's about putting cash into slightly niche enterprises you really enjoy and want to see more from.  If Giant Bomb, Tested, Screened, and co are just another site in your mind then obviously putting a delay on some content is a dick move and maybe you'll just move away to somewhere else to get your gaming content.  But, if you think this content is unique and special, give a few dollars each month to help make sure it'll still be here, maybe bigger and better, in the future. 
 
 
Full disclosure, this isn't something new I've had to wrestle with on hearing the bombcast news.  As a paying subscriber to Rock Paper Shotgun (your number one PC-centric online magazine, only $24/year) I've already weighed up my view of paying for online content.  If the content is good enough, I'll happily pay magazine/newspaper subscription prices to help fund it.

Some development news first: I'm going on Holiday at the end of August and so have set that as a deadline for getting the first in-engine concept images/video completed.  At the moment I'm not sure if the animation system will make the deadline so it might just be some screenshots of random generic objects posed in a scene showing off some of the rendering tech we're using to give the game some character.  There may be time to get it all running to the point where a video would best demonstrate how everything looks in motion.

I recently purchased a GTX 470 to replace the old 8800GT 512MB in my testing/gaming rig.  450 CUDA cores is a lot of computing power and hopefully it'll enable some real-time capture of the higher end settings for this new game engine (even if the current development path continues with DX9/XNA for a while before jumping to DX11 and some really impressive real-time code options).

At this moment in time I'm typing on a keyboard sat on a pile of cardboard boxes, looking at a monitor sat on a tiny foldable table.  Ah the joys of moving flat, which is why my development desk isn't here any more.  The new location is out in the depths of the countryside and will probably give more time for working, being as it is so so much further from any decent pubs.  I'll round off this short update with some mumbling thoughts on game rentals now I've promised future content and professed my love for nVidia's software engineers (electronic engineer fans would own an ATi 5850, something I tried briefly before realising nVidia employ a lot more software engineers for the benefit of people like me).


Recently I was listening to streaming music through my Spotify subscription while downloading TV shows, justified by my nation's demand that all television watchers subscribe to a BBC service, and thinking about what films to add to my LoveFilm (USers: think NetFlix) queue.  Entertainment companies seem to be starting to accept the rental/subscription model where I end up never owning anything but having access to more than I could ever consume for the lifetime of my monthly payments.  But games seem to be the one form of entertainment that is trying to move the other way.

EA fight second hand sales with project $10, CD keys get bound to users for life with Steam and GFWL, and as everyone fights to make games unlike anything else you buy by removing the US concept enshrined in the first sales doctrine (if I sell you something then one thing I must sell you is the right to sell that item on again) the rental market gets burnt down with the game stores.  I've given up on renting games for the most part, waiting for them to hit sales months down the line unless it is of the utmost importance I consume them asap.  Being more of a single-player fan this doesn't hurt me as much as social gamers.  It does mean I typically pay £10 for console games and often less for PC releases (although they can be tempting on launch day with £20 price tags rather than the £30-35 of a console release, which have started to turn up at £40 for some titles).

But as I consumed all my other rented material and wondered how DLC and digital locks were putting the clamps on rental for the gaming market, the light of OnLive started to shine on the subject.  OnLive is a stupid system, buying the monthly access to the service and then paying a per game rental fee on top of that, but it shows the way for a service that could take an all-you-can-eat approach to serving up what gamers want.  I can see consoles continuing to fight against it for a while longer but PCs are already fighting a weird war.  Second hand PC sales are dead, CD keys in the 90s took out the ability to resell games and as the millennium approached we all found online an unlimited pool of pirated content.  In this world where second hand sales are already dead the publishers are desperately trying to stem to piracy that helped them kill the sales they don't profit from.  Online only single-player games, cloud locked save-games, phone home activations everywhere.  Some publishers totally fail the balance and take away offline play entirely without providing anything you might want (compare and contrast Assassin's Creed 2 and Guild Wars, both are locked online but one is loved for giving an MMO style world without a fee while the other is shunned as going too far with DRM restrictions) but a rental service might give gamers something to get excited about and could easily use the Ubi system of keeping at least some game code server side and always online auth checking for valid users.  But as it would be tied up in a rental system where you have access to hundreds of games at any time players would drool over it.
 
Syndicated from 12sqm Design.

I'm late to the party on Assassin's Creed II (AC2).  I got it around release for a week of on/off fun through the early chapters and wandering the new cities before being distracted by other shinies (a word with more definitions than I expected) and returning the rental.  It seemed like a really solid expansion of the open world ideas of the original and taking on the point that the first game was rather repetitive in a way most gamers don't enjoy any more (although we have apparently found a test for those that can still enjoy it in terms of the lower end MMOs and two Crackdowns).  But why was I just doing a quick sample on release rather than finishing it then?

Wait for the inevitable £10 (about $15, or more like $10 in equivalent buying power nowadays) price point/sale and you're laughing, definitely better than the £35 launch price.  When working on a budget playing games 3-9 months late means the difference between a rarefied selection of choice cuts interspersed with near starvation and an all you can eat buffet with a few choice cuts thrown in for good measure.  In our DLC enhanced, extra penny grabbing, anti-rental/second hand sales world then you can also hope for the GotY edition with added content bundled into the sticker price for quite a few games (or even sales like the recent Steam one offering major discounts on the DLC as well as base games).  And so it was, that recently I got a sale bundle on the complete box of AC2.  Base game plus the two missing chapters of the story and 3 more tombs to pretend to be raiding in.

I didn't 100% remember all the details of the controls and tutorials I'd previously played through and this did start to have a slight effect on my version of Ezio.  I had easy access to dual blades, later found the sword switching button, and eventually worked out the locking for aimed knives (which I ended up never using as I got a gun about this time which was equally useless for normal tasks but took over the special cases of ranged combat/sniper assassinations from the crowd).

The problem with rejoining a character half way through their ascent to walking God is the personality I seemed to bring to the role.  Ezio quickly became a man I despised.  A cold clinical killer of soldiers, partially because I took a while to find the weapon switching and the blades were doing well enough 90% of the time with my new tactics.

Y'see, with dual blades you can do double-kills on unprepared targets with a running-lunge strike into the group.  You can also get up and follow up with one more double-kill freebie before anyone raises a defence and you start the real combat mode.  So effectively Ezio can murder a group of four or less guards without actually entering combat proper or drawing a sword or risking time wasted or becoming hurt.  If combat was initiated against him a long battle would commence, with passing guards adding into the fight, and only the retractable blades to slowly whittle down the enemies.  This turned into a personality defect in my on-screen avatar.

At this point I was earning so much cash with nothing much to buy that wanted levels were no issue, they could be quickly paid off to a town crier if I couldn't be bothered to jump for some posters.  His notoriety was always zero.  I remembered the love of roof travel, and took with it the joy of lunging blades.  Archers anywhere along his path fell bloodied rather than be a bothersome chasing enemy.

On the ground Ezio ran through the streets, watching for guards that might take offence to his scampering ways, and casually stabbing any soldiers in his path that weren't in visual range of too many others.  Ok, this is excessive and all but it does make some sense for an often wanted man, even if the virtual people watching him exclaimed their shock.  I was starting to get a bit uncomfortable with how I was playing the game for optimum efficiency, but it wasn't too bad.

As the game progressed, I started to remember the ease of murder; fools guarding chests were oblivious to Ezio's theft and then suddenly realised, through the blade sticking out of their chest, the depth of their inattentiveness.  He could have quietly walked away but why let live someone who might be in the way and is so quick and easy to dispatch.  This view started to expand Ezio's moral freedom.  Anyone not a civilian was a target to be taken freely.

'Ooh, look at that group of guards with two heavily armoured fools at the back'.  Run, lunge, dual neck spurters as the big ones hit the ground.  Ezio jumps to his feel and so calmly and methodically extends both arms perpendicular to his straightened body as the blades come back out into the faces of the front pair of guards.  Job done, continue travelling as if nothing happened.

Finally Ezio became perverted by the love of the kill, women, and my quick reading of the achievement list.  Despite being totally capable of generating moral outrage on his own with a quad-assassination of the guards standing outside rooms of florins or parchments, ladies of the night came into regular play.  For a modest fee the women would tempt the guards away from the entrance and watch, rapt, as Ezio stole from their room before slowly killing the four fools while they were distracted.  This was made all the worse for the game's propensity to animate the kills with the blade through head animation.  I started to wonder had the 150 florins really changed these women's view on such brutal killings and their involvement in it?  Was Ezio buying their souls or were they already up for the depravity before he arrived and only required the money to make it look like they were being brought?

I finally started to notice some of the graphical details; the bloodied sleeves Ezio almost constantly wore from his chosen path struck a note.

I was starting to feel less than great about what I had crafted in this possibility space.  Ezio was seemingly joyous about his craft and perfecting his bladed dispatchment.  I had learnt how to use other weapons at this point but had already perfected my game with only blades.  Ezio's morality was clear to me and changing now would not undo what had come before.  As the game progressed further I found allies during some missions who would walk with Ezio and join him in combat, their strikes leaving open the backs of enemies in the rare cases where we were ambushed by more than four foes in a group.  At least the game was doing the normal chest kill animations for now during these rear assaults.  The facial destruction was being reserved for the occasional moment of horror.

And so the game went on.  The dlc was good fun, the first one being an integral part of the story and great content that is a shame so many people will have missed from their first play-through.  A tiny snippet of modern day, where Desmond insisted on being thrown back into the world asap, is where I expect those without would have heard a long story about the corruption of memory and how your real world money would be greatly appreciated in the months after launch to enable it.  The second chapter resolves the story of the first and moves us up in time but also adds in a repetitive kill nine X block of missions as padding that reminded me of how AC1 didn't manage to keep interest through lack of time for customised quests/missions.  There were a couple of interesting stealth-enforced killings but mainly it was normal assassination stuff just repeated a lot.  You got to play around it a section of Florence that non-dlc users would never be asked to see, showing how much this was content cut to hit launch dates rather than added later as an expansion of the complete story in the boxed product.

Finally the game ends with a rather fractured final level that feels like a combat-orientated crypt and weird boss battle.  The ending and post-credits epilogue fight are part of the expanding AC world of 'why did they bother with this modern day VR gimmick?'  The two games are already linked enough to share the AC name with the line of Assassins and Templar fighting for the future of humanity and trapped knowledge in their own time periods but now we have a lot more that I won't spoil but is 100% more stupid than the modern day stuff that the first game executed with so little style.  You unlock some videos as you play through AC2 that look like someone borrowed them from a different project.  When you reach the end the true WTF of it all explodes in a dethroning moment of suck and needless exposition where Ezio seems about as non-plussed as you probably feel that the developers went in this direction for their overarching series plot.


So, in review: awesome game, well worth it.  Slightly worrying moral freedom (especially if you don't bother to look up the controls and make do with what you've found to work) and dumb ending that forebodes many more increasingly dumb sequels. 
  

Syndicated from 12sqm Design.    

Yes, as with most blogs, over a week has gone by and a follow up post to an intro is conspicuous by its absence.  This is also not a post about E3 as we're far enough into the future that everyone has stopped talking about those events and anyone interested in a précis of funny bits has already read their fill.  Work, life, and beer have undone my plans to write up the events.

Engine work is coming along, right now it's all about getting a custom model format nailed down and working with some animations.  Slow, quite boring, long hours, ground work that has to be done before moving on to anything interesting.  It also provides very little in the way of eye candy or even amusing debug data to post up as light relief.  Earlier today I spent 30 minutes unable to work out why something wasn't working until I realised I was using the wrong hand.  Realising my mistake was the highlight of the day; being forced to use some rather dry coffee beans to make my regular rocket fuel, the lowlight.

As a way of moving this post on from purely complaining about coffee, work, and apologising for lethargy, I'll quickly touch on a stupid problem with moving around APIs.  Moving APIs is very common, most programmers use what they like and know but also check out the field to make sure there isn't a more suitable option just around the corner with hundreds of boring hours of coding removed from their expected future workload.  Hell, moving around languages isn't exactly uncommon (especially if you wander the C-likes as part of your daily life with a mix of tasks) and there the pitfalls and weird slight differences it's critical to remember are far more dangerous.

Today my problem was working on XNA.  Lovely .Net/C# with even more functionality for game engines heaped on top.  Ok, with this custom engine there is quite a lot of throwing stuff out and building new to better suit our needs but a lot of boring coding is done for you by XNA.  Right now this model system is being built to replace an existing system that works fine for 90% of cases I'd guess.  This project is unfortunately part of the 10%.  The problem is XNA is built by Microsoft on top of Direct X.

I know DX, well at least have dabbled in the past from version 6.1 onwards.  Direct X uses a left-handed system (LHS) for coordinates.  That means hold out your left hand, thumb as x-axis and first finger as y-axis raised up in an L shape, your other fingers bent over point at the positive for the z-axis.  All the x,y,z coordinated assume those directions as positives.  OpenGL uses a RHS, which means using your right hand and effectively reversing the direction of the z-axis.  When you've played around with both systems you remember that DX is LHS and OGL is RHS and take that into account when doing anything.  Getting it wrong means everything is invisible as you only draw the polygons pointing at the camera and screwing up means you actually only draw polygons that point away.

XNA may be build on the corpse of Managed DirectX and use the DX rendering API underneath it but XNA is actually RHS, not the LHS of DX.  30 minutes down the drain on a stupid problem.  D'oh!  

Over the past few nights (or days and evenings for US time, which I am currently operating on with the power of caffeine*) we've been enjoying some great coverage of E3.  Press conferences streamed in HD over the internet, expansive talks and interviews with designers, and drunken evening shows where the news is dissected and people ramble off into some enjoyable anecdotes.  Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft kicked off the events with a couple of hours each chatting new games in internet streamed events that are now as much about pushing buzz with the dedicated flock as they are informing the mainstream press who attend and write up short articles for the masses to digest.  Nintendo and Sony continued into the second day with some actual new games that don't require a 3D camera (and a few that use a different type of 3D camera) and it finally ended last night with a lot of show floor impressions.

Activision had a big party (that I'm told didn't cost $775 million, but may have had the potential to rack up a $7.75 million tab if everyone involved was being paid their normal fees) and Konami didn't want their press conference broadcast along with the rest but Microsoft probably managed to throw the most money away with their Cirque du Soleil event for Natal/Kinect.  I'll give some highlighted views on how things emerged over the three days in follow up posts, but it was both an excellent celebration of games and a look at some interesting directions that game interfaces may walk while we look for something beyond what we've been able to do before.

 * I'm currently trying a new-to-me tea called Lapsang Souchong which is a pine smoked tea totally unlike any black tea I've drunk before.  The initial smell alone is enough to set it apart, the smoke permeates the leaves and makes you think of bonfires just opening up the container.  The final taste isn't all that vibrant to my buds but the nasal quality pushed it to be something interesting.

I'm normally found drinking from a Ceylon/Darjeeling cup with some lemon in there to really bring out the natural citrus flavour and dampen the bitter tannins but I'll happily accept an English Breakfast blend with a touch of milk and sugar when faced without my favourite.  Lapsang doesn't seem to gain anything from milk, sugar, or both even after a long brew to bulk up the flavour.  Surprisingly I have found that a very slight dash of the lemon does wonderful things and brings it up near the top of my tea list; too much and you'll overpower the flavour (unlike a Ceylon that can survive quite the lemon assault when brewed strongly) but a light touch and it really brings out flavours while keeping that wonderful nose.

Well that was quite the tea talk for a footnote, buoyed by the consumption of the aforementioned.  In the end it's all just a cuppa which is why some cannot abide the flowery language and use of taste buds to analyse further.  I'll assume those people stopped reading during the first sentence so if you made it this far you might try tracking some Lapsang down to try it yourself (it's common enough to be supermarket available here in the UK).