It was a fairly empty feeling to leave the game jam without a game to show for it, but I made a couple of great new friends/contacts, and I’m particularly proud that I managed to flag down the keynote speaker Manveer Heir, senior designer on Mass Effect 3, to interrogate him about BioWare and their hiring practices. If only the bottom line weren’t that I shouldn’t expect to get a job there until I have 5-6 years of industry experience…

My favourite games produced at the jam (that I’ve seen) are Mein Panzer (which I kicked everybody’s asses in at the after party) and Infinite SWAT (which was developed by – among others – Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, the Super Crate Box guys). If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to watch the hilarious trailer for Mein Panzer.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Abstract

The design of the game space is a major factor in shaping the player’s movement patterns and the player’s perception of movement (kinesthesia) in computer- and videogames, but very little research has been done into which aspects of the game world affect movement in what ways. Understanding the specifics of how space shapes movement is important in designing varied game worlds that affect the play experience in particular ways. This thesis analyses how different spatial structures give rise to different movement patterns in games with or without context-sensitive controls. The thesis analyses the dynamics between the game world, the controls, and the rules, and employs methods from user experience research to gather qualitative data about how players experience changes to each of these aspects of a game. The results demonstrate concrete relationships between different types of game space and different movement patterns and explain the player behaviour underlying these relationships, which will be especially valuable to those seeking to design environments for games where movement is a central part of the play experience.

Kinesthesia and Game Spaces is my Master’s thesis from the IT University of Copenhagen. It’s 70 of your regular human pages, which comes in just under 90 magic university pages (2400 characters per page). It was handed in on the 1st of November 2011, three months after the original deadline, and I defended it orally yesterday to the grade of 10, which translates into an A on the American scale or a B on the European scale. Not that the grade matters much to me right now, as I’m frankly just happy to have graduated with the least scientific Cand.Scient. in the country after 18 years of education.

I guess this marks a goodbye to this blog’s “University paper” tag.

You can download Kinesthesia and Game Spaces as a PDF weighing just under 2 MB.

Yesterday I handed in a 20-page paper on the topic of emergence vs. progression. I wrote the paper in April to get it out of the way so I could concentrate on my Master’s thesis, then proceeded to do fuck-all on the thesis for the entire month of May because I’m an idiot. The project was focused on the production of Archive X, which was meant to be an arcade-action game but turned out to be a puzzle game instead. In relation to the point of my paper, the game is quite a failure, but in and of itself it’s a pretty decent, if very short, puzzle game.

You might wonder how I could manage to work on two different Unity-based university games (Archive X and Broken Dimensions) at the same time. The answer is that I could not, and I did almost no real work on Archive X other than writing the original pitch document and putting the level geometry together in 3D Studio Max (a painful process which required me to first learn how to use 3D Studio Max). Most of the credit for the game should go to my class mate and programmer Isaac Dart (who is also not responsible for its failure to be properly emergent) and the rest is due to his partner in crime Juan Ortega and our artist Veselin Stoilov. They did most of the work while Ali and I were occupied with Broken Dimensions.

If you’re in the mood for a quick little puzzle game based on a very clever physics/chemistry simulation, feel free to download Archive X (111 MB). If you’re interested in the project and how it was used in my academic work, by all means grab the paper, Designing Emergent Gameplay (7 MB). I actually quite like it, it’s probably the first truly academic paper I’ve written at the IT University.

The exam is scheduled for June 16, and it’ll be my last exam before I defend my thesis.

The Global Game Jam came and went around two months ago, but I never got around to blogging about it because things started happening immediately afterwards and never let up. Same old excuses I suppose. I also wanted to wait with posting about the game until I’d finished editing a quick video playthrough of the game, but when I did finish working on the video a few weeks after the jam, it had all sorts of problems pertaining to framerate and aspect ratio, so that whole video has been scrapped. Now I find myself with half an hour to kill before bedtime, I figure I may as well squeeze a game jam post in before my current project wraps up and I’ll need to write about that.

The Nordic Game Jam, flagship jam of the Global Game Jam was, like last year, totally epic. Better yet, unlike last year, I did not throw up out of sheer sleep deprivation and have to go home to sleep through most of Sunday this year, though I did as usual feel incredibly sick Sunday morning after just 4 hours of terrible sleep. The jam took place from Friday to Sunday, with some lectures and seminars on Friday culminating in a string of keynotes and announcements leading into group forming, game pitches, and teams filing out into different rooms across the IT University of Copenhagen.

Dutch Gentleman Adventurer Erik “EER” Renes answered my call to action and made the 10 hour drive from The Netherlands to Denmark to attend the largest game jam in the world. We quickly met up with a couple of class mates from what has become my steady group for socialising, and in complete spite of the philosophy of the “capitalist line” (ideas first, groups second), we decided to work together before we even had this year’s theme. The theme was the for a game jam excellently suited “Extinction”, and after pitching three ideas between us, we caught hold of a graphics artist and decided to make a game about destroying all life in the universe.

After briefly entertaining the idea that we might use Unity, we sobered up and chose XNA for the project. We then proceded to make The Gods Must Be Crazy. I’ll just reuse the promo text from the game jam page here:

Clearly, life has to go. It’s been messing up your godly Creation for far too long. The universe is in dire need of a good hard reboot. Throw meteors to wipe out all sentient life in the universe before each species has time to expand beyond control. Create solar flares to pause the growth of their populations while you plot their death. Don’t let any of these pesky civilizations send colony ships to other planets!

It’s far from a perfect game, but I think it turned out to be a pretty entertaining and amusing little diversion, and most importantly we had a very good time working on it (mostly). Moreover, we ended up actually getting a jury’s award from Jesper Juul, whose name you may if nothing else recognise from my blogroll, where he’s been for absolute ages. It even came with this fancy diploma, so even though our game consistently got tragically few votes from the audience, at least we have proof that one of the real experts appreciates our work.

You can download the game from the Global Game Jam page, or you can grab it directly from the OTP servers by clicking these very words .

[UPDATE: 10-12-2011]

Prakash created a video of the game a while ago, I finally thought to embed it here for the convenience of future visitors. Enjoy.

I have three projects this semester. Due on the 15th of December is a group project where we’re attempting to make a highly emergent game in the Unity engine. For December 8, I need to create a game level for Gamewords as Fields of Expression – I’ve decided to use the UDK because it has good CSG tools so I can produce something relatively good-looking without doing any real modelling. Also for December 8, I’m working on a game prototype with my mother as a target audience for User Experience and Prototyping. This, I’ve chosen to use XNA for, because I’m a masochist.

There are two reasons I chose to go with XNA. The weak reason is that my target audience (mom) prefers to play games on her Xbox 360 than on her PC, primarily because the gamepad is more ergonomic and its buttons are better structured semantically. XNA already has all the gamepad stuff taken care of so I can concentrate on translating the input into useful output rather than figuring out what the input is in the first place. However, the real reason for choosing XNA is that I’ve been wanting to learn C# for ages.

C# is a proper programming language, unlike eg. LUA or Uscript or NWscript (which is the language that taught me about programming), but at the same time it’s a very tidy and approachable language. Everything I’ve heard about C++ indicates that it will destroy your soul if it’s the first language you attempt to learn, which is why I didn’t opt for that despite it being far more popular for game programming. I’d heard C# was supposed to be a lot easier, and since it’s derived from Java the same way NWscript was, I’m more or less familiar with the syntax already.

It’s not been easy to pick it up though. I tried going by some Internet tutorials first, and while I did manage to set up a game with a movable avatar, it didn’t really help me understand what I was doing or how it worked. I took out a couple of XNA books from the university library and one of them (Grootjans, Riemer: XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes) proved incredibly useful for setting up the basics of a 2D game and writing a general-purpose menu system.

Ultimately I’ve learned the most from my friends. My class mate Prakash was generous enough to give me a whole day’s worth of his time to walk me through setting up a hex grid with some code I’d found on the Internet and figuring out the player movement scheme. Shane, Jim, Mads, Mike, and Nick have all been tremendous help in answering specific questions, mostly pertaining to where I should put certain code or what particular errors mean. I’m very grateful that I know so many skilful programmers.

Yesterday I experienced a bit of a personal triumph when I managed to set up a follower selection menu for the player to choose which people to have in her expedition when the game starts. It involved two lists that the player needed to be able to scroll through and switch between at will, and it was quite complicated for me as an absolute newbie programmer to set up, but I managed it almost without help (mainly needed Shane to tell me if I had to add a certain variable to keep track of the current scroll progress or if I could infer it from the existing variables – he told me to just add the new variable). It’s nothing even close to the most impressive code ever, but the fact that I managed it shows that I actually understand how my menu system works, which is good because I’ll be using it a lot.

I’m sure any real programmer unfortunate enough to look at my code would, depending on their inclination, either cry tears of blood or just start laughing and never stop. For one thing, I know there are lots of more advanced functions I don’t really know about – I bet a lot of the more laborious if’s and switches I have could be replaced with arrays or other far more elegant solutions for example, but I’m sticking to what I understand for now. Make it work, then make it fast, as they say. Another thing is that I don’t understand encapsulation and I only half-understand inheritance. I have a feeling 90% of my public variables ought to be private or protected, but I don’t know how to move the necessary information between game objects in the proper way so I use whatever ill-advised shortcuts will get me the results I need.

So that was a bit about my troubles with getting into programming. Diving head-first into it with a fairly complicated system-based game project is not the least painful way to learn to program, but it’s the only way I can stay motivated (knowing I’ll have an awesome product to show for it when I’m done). Now the skill and expedition selection menus are done, the next hurdle is to set up a system for reading tile properties from a CSV file and apply them to the grid, and a system for calling individual event scripts when the player lands on certain tiles. Once that’s done, it should be downhill the rest of the way towards the hand-in date.

Once I have a bit more of the game to show off, I’ll probably post again with more information about the actual game, and eventually there will be an installer for you to download so you can try it out yourself. It’s going to be fun! I promise.

I just finished editing this new ParaDime trailer to present the game for our exam on Thursday. The voice-over may change, as I haven’t run it past the group yet, but it’s from the actual game and there’s a lot to pick from, including a bunch of recorded audio that was never implemented, so changing it if the group is unhappy with it is no big deal.

For posterity’s sake, here are the trailers for the other games produced for the IT University’s Game Development course this semester:

Cyclopes Arena

Impressively polished but disappointingly ordinary multiplayer FPS.

Don’t Look Now

Remarkably scary game. Haven’t played it myself, for that very reason.

Heroes with Rubber Swords

Cute top-down RPG-style multiplayer game based on live-action role-playing.

Little Lisa

Cool premise and interesting story, but damn I hate puzzle games. Yes, I realise ParaDime is a puzzle game too. Shut up.

Oh My God, She Dropped The Baby

Sadly I haven’t had a chance to play this.

The Platoon of Psychedelic Soldiers

Somewhat too ambitious for their own good. Scope and size, people! Scope and size. Their level design is pretty solid though.

Snowball Fight

My personal favourite of all the games produced this semester.

This entry has been a fairly long time coming for various reasons. I have quite a bit of resentment towards the project because our group dynamics were, frankly, terrible. I’m not going to go into it here, because I don’t want to post anything incriminating on the Internet that I will regret later, but suffice to say the artificiality of a university project where 6-7-person game development teams are put together by the TAs and locked into a predefined hierarchy based on personality tests did not work out in our favour.

Nevertheless, we made a game – best described as a sort of 3D Myst in a surrealist setting and much lighter on the puzzles. It was created with the Unreal Development Kit by a team of 6 students in one semester (so around 4 months). I was absent during the most crunchy final month because I had to be game designer on a production at the Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment (more on that soon), so most of what I did for the game was never finished and ended up getting cut. Ironically, though I was designated level designer on the project due to my previous Unreal editor experience, my main contribution in the end was textures.

I actually quite like making textures, it’s a very casual sort of creativity – you don’t have to worry about too many things, you just have to make something look as good as you can. On TNM I’d done a bunch of world textures, mostly billboards and graffiti and stuff like that – until I started on this project, I’d barely learned to make a texture tile seamlessly. It was great fun for me to learn how to texture a 3D object. It would’ve probably been a lot easier if I’d used Mudbox or something like that, so I could’ve painted the textures directly on the model, but with a lot of trial and error, Photoshop served me well enough.

In the end, I’m not really happy with the game, but I’m proud of how much work my group put into it. Everybody really did their best, even if the team meetings near the end were an exercise in antagonism and miscommunication. At least the game looks really good, in no small part due to four of the six team members eventually being dedicated to art production, including the producer and the level designer. Here are some screenshots of the objects I’ve textured – Alex was responsible for producing the models for all of them, so most of the credit for their prettiness goes to him; well, and Epic’s rendering team.

You’ll have to excuse the HUD on the gramophone screenshot – the version of ParaDime that was handed in didn’t have the crank and the record for some reason, so I had to add it myself and grab a screenshot from inside the UDK.

[UPDATE] Here is our programmer’s perspective.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Last week, I went to Oslo to pitch a game for British student game competition Dare To Be Digital. If you’ve never heard of Dare before, the premise is that teams pitch a concept for a game and compete for the chance to get money and counselling to turn their concept into a game in 10 weeks over the summer. The competition accepts a single team from Scandinavia, as well as certain other regions.

Eight teams applied to the Scandinavian part of the competition, five of us were invited to pitch our concept to three industry judges (one from IO Interactive in Denmark, one from Swedish DICE, and one from Norwegian Funcom) in Oslo. We didn’t win, but we did have a fun 1-day trip to Oslo (at our own expense, but still). We also got to hang out with a bunch of other game students, three teams from Norway and one from Sweden.

I invite you to check out this post over on Morten’s blog (which has also been added to my sidebar), as it has lots of details about the game we pitched, including the feedback we got from the judges and our in-engine presentation and prototype, which runs in your browser via the Unity web player.

Due to the volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajökull, we decided not to take our chances with the air-plane we’d originally ordered tickets for. Instead, we bought tickets for the Oslo boat, which is a cruise ship that sails between Copenhagen and Oslo every night. We may not have won the pitch, but nobody can say we don’t travel in style. Photos of the trip follow, click for full size versions with captions.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

I wasn’t sure whether to post this. Since I only got a 7 for it (a C on the ETCS scale, roughly a B on the U.S. grading scale), it’s the lowest marked university paper I’ve ever turned in, and sadly I think that’s completely fair. I prioritised Game Design over Game Theory, but most of all I got lazy.

I wrote the paper in literally a couple of days before it was due, I didn’t meet with my advisor at all, and I spent next to no time searching out material to base it on. As an academic work, it’s piss poor. There are barely any references, the structure is weak, the problem itself is poorly stated and even more poorly answered, and the conclusion is completely rubbish – my usual Achilles heel.

All that said, as a sort of super-extended blog entry, I really rather like it. I think I make some good points, I cover the most important aspects of the topic, and I explore three carefully selected examples of games that have approached the concept of Embedded Narrative in different ways. I’m strongly considering to write my master’s thesis about this topic, and just do a proper job of it next time – Embedded Narrative is a concept that interests me to no end.

So take this for what it is: an embarrassingly lazy academic paper narrowly redeemed by proficient writing, but worth a read for game design enthusiasts.

You can download it here shaped like a PDF:
Embedded Narrative in Games

It’s 8 pages and weighs a mere 212 KB. By all means drop any thoughts you might have on the topic or other feedback to the paper as comments on this thread.

When I was in high school, we got graded on the 13-scale, which had ten steps spaced out a little towards the low and high ends in order to give the extreme grades a stronger effect on your average. The reason we have to use a numerical scale in Denmark is that the university prerequisites all depend on your grade average, and it’s hard to calculate averages from a letter scale. About half-way through my BA degree, the universities transitioned to the new 12-scale, which has 7 steps distributed in such a way that the students’ old averages on the 13-scale are fairly close to their averages when converted to the new scale. The 12-step grading scale goes like this:

12 – Excellent
10 – Very good
7 – Good
4 – Fair
02 – Adequate
00 – Inadequate (failed)
-3 – Unacceptable (failed)

The zeroes in front of 0 and 2 are there to prevent you from adding a 1 in front of your grade, as if that really matters in an age where all this stuff is handled digitally.

Now, this new scale was originally implemented to make it easier to compare to the European standard ECTS grading scale, which goes A, B, C, D, E, Fx, F. Unhappily, despite looking almost exactly like the American grading scale, the ECTS scale doesn’t actually map properly to the U.S. one. Here’s how Wikipedia compares the two scales:

ECTS – U.S.
A – A (4.0)
B – A−/B+
C – B (3.0)
D – C+
E – C (2.0)
FX – F
F – F

In other words, if you get a C (a 7) at a Danish university, it will actually be equivalent to a B at an American university. I’m sorry to say you will see why it’s important for me to explain this once I post my Game Theory paper (and the grade I got for it) some time over the weekend