Intelligent Design

Today I attended the introduction class to a week-long seminar on iPhone development (one year and half too late, probably) which will be in charge of several representatives of Mobivery, a Barcelona-based mobile content development company which currently has 190 applications in the Apple App Store.

Besides from a very informative fly-through of the whole process of getting an app into the App Store – starting with “you need a Mac” and going all the way to “you can choose from different pricing tiers” – the representative presented us with some data from different case studies taken directly from the apps they have developed and put up for sale or download. (more…)

The Disney Legends

The IAAPA Attractions Expo held many surprises for me, but none as gratifying and mind-bogglingly amazing as a panel session very aptly titled “Disney Legends: working with Walt”.

The Disney Legends themselves were Marty Sklar (story man), Blaine Gibson (artist), Bob Gurr (mechanical wizard), Richard Sherman (composer) and Harrison “Buzz” Price (numbers man), all sitting side by side and brilliantly moderated by Bob Rogers.

The whole point of the session was for them to share their stories about working with Walt Disney (as in the man, not the company), though of course we were all hoping for them to deviate a little bit into sideplots in order to get the best stories that these men could tell. All of them having helped build what Disney is today, it wasn’t surprising to find them all to be brilliant storytellers and effortless entertainers. (more…)

Daniel Nelson, programmer at Neversoft Entertainment, has this to say about the thumb sticks on console controllers:

Few controllers report zero magnitude at their rest position. Each controller reports a different magnitude at rest, and the same controller will report different magnitudes each time it returns to rest. Additionally, different controllers report different maximum magnitudes when pressed fully in a direction, and the same controller will report different maximum magnitudes when pressed in different directions.

He goes on mentioning how you can mitigate this issue by implementing dead zones, but I find it extremely interesting because it’s exactly the sort of problem that we never think about until we encounter it in our designs. Every time we pick up a console controller, we take reliable thumb stick response for granted, but that does not mean that it does not pose a challenge to developers.

The project I’m currently working on, Depero Futuristi, just got featured as one of the best performances of the Performa 09 festival. We presented a digital reimagining of Balli Plastici, a 1918 puppet ballet, followed by a live demo of the software we developed in order to create the video performance. We had close to a hundred people show up and got a very positive reaction.

Read about the project here and here.

Check out the Performa website.

Lee Sheldon stopped by the ETC today and he told us:

Some stories are fit for a Haiku and some for an epic novel

People all over were talking about it and, to boot, I was in the process of applying to Zynga for a summer internship so the only logical choice at the moment seemed to be to just go to my Facebook profile and enroll in Mafia Wars. Four months later, with a slightly nostalgic look in my eye, I clicked my last Mafia Wars button. I felt, above all, relieved.

Mafia Wars is defined all over as a glorified spreadsheet. An evil glorified spreadsheet, if I may say so. There’s not much more to it than a messy UI, heavy on the black and yellow, and a lot of stats. Which is, of course, enough to hook me for eternity.
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I had been wanting to play Henry Hatsworth for a while before I finally got the chance, and so when I did I realized that I had a lot of things to say about it. First I talked a bit about the flow of the game and then I posted a note about its starting screen. After the latter got featured in Gamasutra, I received a surprise email from none other than Kyle Gray himself.
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I have been playing Henry Hatsworth for a while now, and have been somewhat enjoying it, though it definitely has its ups and downs. Something I cannot stand, however, is the starting screen.

Don’t put anything in your game that goes against the player’s wish to play. That’s a good rule to design by. And the very first thing you encounter when you turn Henry Hatsworth on seems to go against that.

It’s a very simple flaw: the start menu is located in the bottom DS screen, the one we are accustomed to interact with using the stylus. But for some reason the screen won’t take stylus input, so you must use the D-pad and buttons no navigate it. It looks like a minor detail, but the game definitely sends some mixed messages by not letting players interact with it in the most intuitive way.

The complete antithesis of this is Rhythm Heaven. That game is all about using the stylus to touch and flick, touch and flick. And the starting screen won’t even let you play them game unless you prove you can flick with the stylus. After you turn it on a little icon appears, prompting you to flick it. Want to play this game? You better learn how to flick!

I find it hard to believe that Henry Hatsworth‘s starting screen was playtested much, if at all. True, it’s just a starting screen. But it’s precisely the first thing your players will interact with, so you better take good care of it.

Uncharted 2 pre-orders are here and Amazon, Best Buy and Game Crazy join GameStop on the pre-order bonus frenzy. Pre-order bonuses have been around for a while now, but it became popular relatively recently to offer in-game content as incentive to pre-order a videogame. Whether it’s a limited edition power, a special weapon, an extra level or a temporary bonus, in-game content has become the ultimate reward for customers ready to put down some cash in advance for an upcoming game.

Pre-orders bonuses are, at least at first glance, a win-win-win situation. The retailer pays the developer (I assume) to include the customized content; in turn, customers buy more advanced copies from said retailer, ensuring an early revenue from the game; and finally, players get to enjoy an extra bit of content from a game that they, in some cases, were going to purchase anyway.
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This weekend I finally got to borrow a copy of Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, a game designed by Kyle Gray, an ETC alum, when he was still working at EA.

I had the pleasure to meet Kyle last year at the ETC when he came and gave us a very good talk on how he successfully pitched Henry Hatsworth to the EA higher-ups and got it green-lit. Right then I made a mental note that I should play this game as soon as it came out, and it wasn’t until now that I actually got the chance.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure is, as the title cleverly points put, a puzzle-adventure game: think Bejeweled meets Super Mario Bros. Since the game is made for the DS, it’s very convenient to have the Sidescroller Platformer on the top screen and on the bottom one the Puzzle, where the stylus is most helpful. (more…)