In this video, I recorded myself playing through the interactive environment, which I created in Unity.  The interactive parts are triggering scenes, blooming flowers, changing gravity behavior of the spheres/particle systems, changing the brightness of trails, and moving the trail thingy during the chorus.  In hindsight, I think I have a ways to go in terms of adding more interactivity in this.  I suppose that’s what prototypes are for, though!  But I’m pretty happy with how it turned out in the end.

The music is Branches by Finn Miles, and this last weekend I performed the visuals using a gamepad while Paul Gratton of Finn Miles played the song live at our church.  Paul is a part of Napkin Sketch, a creative collective of which I am also a member.

I’m really looking forward to the next two weekends.  This coming weekend is TIGJam Midwest #2, which is a game jam event where those of us from Intuition, in addition to other developer friends, try to make games in a weekend.  The name comes from TIGSource, our favorite gaming community.  Rumor has it some of the other guys are interested in making something in Unity, so that got me even more excited than usual.

The weekend after that is the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project, and those of us from Napkin Sketch will be participating in it once again.  That event is where we try to make a film in 48 hours after given a genre, character, line, and prop on Friday evening.  It should be a blast once again.

Jiggmin and I decided to release our typing game, The Great Red Herring Chase, after 6 months of not being able to find a sponsor. We’re proud of the work we’ve done on the game and hope you all like it as well.

We’ve decided to release it both on jiggmin.com and here at intuition exclusively as a bit of an experiment. We’ll see how it goes. Nonetheless you can play it here at intuition right now.

It has been a big struggle trying to get an acceptable visual style going. I wanted to progress from the pretty rough interactive sermon prototype. I decided to go 2.5D, and by that I mean planes/sprites in 3D space. I’ve also been learning to write my own shaders a little, though at this point I’m mostly hacking ones I find on the Unity forums.

This screenshot was taken in the editor and shows grass dynamically moving away from a cube. It’s based on a script by metervara who kindly provided it to the Unity community. I’ve shared my version, which ports his shader to Unity 2.5 and adds the ability to grow the bending effect radius when you press a key/button. The intention is to allow the player to use that ability as one means of expression for a visual instrument.

The original context I imagined this being used in is during worship at a church. So the band would be playing musical instruments and people could play visual instruments as a complement. In fact, the first usage of this prototype will be at our church. The deadline is July 12th, which I will probably (hopefully!) make. Of course, this could be used in any live music setting, and in fact the three of us are planning to do that for a future project.

Oh! To continue the visual instrument analogy, I was thinking that the Wii remote would basically be like a tambourine in that the primary action would be percussive. This led me to think about other parallels, like a melodic device. And now I have dreams of circuit bending some sort of guitar thing to use for this idea, hopefully with the help of someone more engineering savvy. Just think how sweet it would be to have a circuit bent Guitar Hero guitar that played music and visuals!

Andy’s been burning through his lists ever since he wrangled in a Box2D bug that was holding him up, so we’ve got tons of stuff going on now, including a working level editor, places to share levels/ideas and much more. Right now we’ve got a handful of dedicated alphanauts [as I call them] creating awesome levels and giving continuous feedback on the game. If you’re interested, check out these links below to get involved! This is a community based game so we need all the help we can get.

If not, you can at least give the alpha a quick glance here at http://protonaut.net. Do know that this is an alpha, bugs might be present, features will be missing, levels could be empty, and fun may be sparse. The object of the game at this point is to collect all the gases [circular objects] in any given level. We’re still growing the game, experimenting with different objectives, but I think these basic rules are fairing pretty well so far.

• Play Protonaut
• Browse levels [sorted by rating]
• Chat with us: irc.coldfront.net @ #protonaut
• Protonaut forums
• Andy’s devlog

Also, I came up with this website mockup for protonaut.net. It should replace the placeholder site fairly shortly.

I was thinking about Driver actually and how much I loved the starting sequence/tutorial of that game [as well as the entire thing]. You were stuck in this garage pressed with what seemed like monumental challenges at the time. But eventually you got out of there and you felt unleashed. Like you were a kickass Driver ready to own the road with all your newly learned moves.

So the level I set up is a much more condensed version and really just to get a starting point for what I’d like this to be. It’s waaay too hard and not really all that interesting at the moment, but I spent most of my day trying to beat my own challenge. I took it a step further and tried to make a slalom out of it by limiting “victory” to something only that was completing a true slalom course. I’ve only really made it to the top a handful of times and only once with the “slalom” in mind.

Play the Slalom Challenge [choose level 1].

Fishbowling is a concept well-known to people that take on projects under a certain time-frame. Urban dictionary failed me with a proper definition, but basically the idea behind fishbowling is that if you are given a certain amount of time to complete a set of tasks that you’ll take the entire time to do it. Lots of things feed into this. Procrastination, perfectionism, feature-creep and so on and so forth. In terms of game development, fishbowling can be very bad. But it doesn’t have to be.

Admitting this tendency is the first step to overcoming it. Once you admit that you’re powerless to the “just one last little thing” disease, only then can you begin to harness its true power. It’s actually pretty easy if you’ve got the willpower. I’ll forgo the Frodo reference here [even though its perfect] and yield to my better judgment.

Armed with this knowledge, it’s time to setup your plan. And this coicides with the “sprint” ideology behind Agile or Scrum, but those often get lost in the shuffle because they are far too sterile. Getting shit done is messy, it’s a ton of work and an elaborate plan is ultimately a waste of time you could have spent doing shit. DISCLAIMER: I work in a small team, like sometimes it’s just me [smallTeams > bigTeams]. But even if you do wield a big team that needs constant management and clear meetable goals, a huge plan and project management software doesn’t get to the real issue about what’s hard about either finishing a project or letting it finish you. It’s finding the will to do what needs doing that’s tough.

The problem with project management software [for me] is that it’s too specific. Each sprint has a reasonable amount of items contained within it. If it gets overloaded it’s specifically designed to stop you from making a mistake and overloading. On the surface, that would seem to work really well for projects. All you need to do is know every last little thing that you’ll need to do. Oh. Whoops. I guess I don’t, I mean I have an idea, in fact a pretty clear idea for the most part. But those clear ideas cannot be broken down into smaller tasks, sub-tasks, dependencies and so on [let alone how many hours each one will take].

So… say I’m redesigning a website, the intuition website to be exact, and I’m estimating how long it will take. It should probably take a couple weeks of work, max.

1. Make up a quality mockup.
2. Refine the mockup into finished graphics.
3. Restructure the CSS and implement the new tags and graphics.
4. Setup any extraneous plugins and other features we want.
5. Then take another pass and polish up any rough edges.

Seems pretty straightforward. Of course, within all of those items there are a plethora of tasks that may take quite awhile on their own. Polish being the main offender. If I were to plan this out over 2 weeks, the early stages may take way longer than they really need to. I could make up 20 mockups because I’d have the time to do so. Or maybe I’d get satisfied with the mockup early on and call it a day because I got that checked off. Regardless, what really only needs to take a day or two might end up taking 5 days because I’ll give myself that amount of time in the plan. A low percentage of that is quality time spent working.

Instead, I’ll pick out each of these guys. I’m going to start and finish the mockup by the end of the day, that way I’ll have the website finished in three days total. Now, that’s wholly unrealistic, but it turns the big fishbowl problem into an advantage. Instead of the project growing into the time allotted, you’re fitting the project into a fishbowl it can’t fit into. Some things get cut, but the beauty of this method is that it’s all temporary. It’s all a huge lie to yourself.

Because in reality, I really do have two weeks to make this site. If the fish can’t fit into the far-too-small bowl I take it out and make the bowl a bit bigger. No big deal. Now it took 5 days instead of 3 and I’m still ahead of the curve. The key to this is to be completely and ridiculously unrealistic about your estimates. You’ve got to believe it too. Suspend the two opposing ideas in your head, knowing that it’s never going to happen in this lifetime, but that it’s also most certainly is going to happen. Or you could just go all the way down the rabbit-hole and delude yourself into truly believing you can pass through solid matter. That’s a bit weird though and people might stare. ;)

Once the mockup is done, I jump right into the next thing, make a lofty claim that I will part the Red Sea and move forward with a blind energy that can only be explained by “temporary insanity.” That’s the entire basis for this “strategy” of getting stuff done. Sure it’s not the healthiest, nor is it calculated in the least, but it works really well for me. Give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, you’ll at least have seen the other side of the fishbowl equation and maybe you’ll think twice next time it comes up.

I imagine this tool most often being used to help visualize a sermon being delivered to a church congregation. The goal of the tool would be to present an environment that someone on the media team - a “player” if you will - can interact with.  The player would interact with the environment in a way that matched up with the speaker who is delivering the message.  One example would be if that speaker was telling a story.  The player would explore the environment and trigger events to match up with the timing and emphasis of the speaker’s story.  If the speaker was emphasizing a certain part of the story, the player could trigger events to help emphasize that part.  The final result would be an expression of the story experienced simultaneously through the mediums of virtual interactive experience (of which I consider computer games to be a subset) and oral tradition.

Here’s a run-through recording of the prototype.  It’s based on a story given to me by Chris Petrick, Perry Ross, and Richard Webb at Lutheran Church of Hope, with music and sound design by Paul Gratton (one of my partners from the Napkin Sketch collective), and voice acting by Julie Bull.

Here’s a recording from the production room while I, err….performed it during the last of 4 worship services at Lutheran Churh of Hope.  It kind of shows how the whole thing would fit into a traditional Christian church service. In this case, it was between two songs and presented on the screens. I imagine a “final version” being like this, but with a speaker telling the story live up on stage and a more developed interactive environment.

In this mockup the player assumes the role of the purple space dude on the right. He’s a micronaut and ready to start solving the caffeinated case in the only way he knows how. Through platforming and stuff…

Sorry for being obtuse, it’s pretty early still and I’m not sure if we want to get into a lot of detail right now as the design is subject to change.

He makes the point that multiplayer is unique to our medium, so why not celebrate that? Investigate it in relation to meaningful games or “art games” as some call them. I think it’s an interesting idea, so I’ve been mulling it over, and I guess what I’ve come up with is not so much a counterpoint, but more of an abstraction as to the “why.” And that starts with the best case for a meaningful single player game I’ve ever come across: golf.

I’ve talked about this very subject before on here, but I think I’ve come up with something a bit more applicable to games. You see, I started playing golf a long time ago at a very young age and there is nothing multiplayer about golf. It is the most single player “real life” game I’ve ever played. Instructors, mentors, pros or anyone who’s played long enough will tell you it’s a battle between you and the course. Of course it’s more than that. It’s an internal battle as well. To withstand the unforgiving and impossible physics of it all you’ve got to keep your eye on the horizon, unfazed by the weather, wind and that last shank into the woods. Things will go wrong, and if you’ve ever seen a tournament on television you’ll notice most of the pros drive it into the trees more often than you’d think. But somehow they keep their composure, line up their shot, and make it out of their with a chance for par.

I consider golf to be the hardest game [I don't like to consider it a sport] on the planet. Not the most athletic, the most strenuous, [that's for sure] or even the most competitive, but certainly the most challenging. The difficulty is baked into the laws of physics. “Get this tiny ball into that tiny hole 450 yards away in 4 strokes with this piece of metal.” Of course you won’t get it in there in 4 strokes without years of practice, and even then making par is a victory over the course. By scoring par on any hole, you’ve met the challenge and can hold your head high, because the odds were entirely stacked against you. It’s this insurmountable challenge with hundreds of variables, many of them mental, that makes golf such an intriguing game. All of these things pose an illusive, yet massive challenge to the player so that he might go out to the same golf course hundreds of times and find new challenges every time.

Sounds a lot like traditional multiplayer games actually. Instead of the system being incomprehensibly complex, it is relatively simple. Games like Chess, Go, Counter Strike and Starcraft are all played within a relatively restrictive simulated environment. There are no fluid dynamics, weather models, elaborate sets of muscle memory, friction issues and so on. The real world provides something incredibly desirable when it comes to designing a game in it. It’s so complex that instead of experts “gaming it” down to a series of procedural maneuvers and tutorials, it must be felt. The player uses their intuition. [Cha-ching tagline! ;) ] If I’m facing someone in Starcraft there are a million things running through my mind and none of them could be read off of a ready-made laundry list. The human being is actually the incredibly complex portion of multiplayer games. You’ve traded the real life laws of physics for a real life human being.

When these real life human beings get together in a head-to-head game using real life physics we usually call them sports. No big news flash there. But sports have historically had a big leg up on traditional games [table-top] until the internet came around. The games that have gripped me over there years have been consistently those that must be felt [due to their multiplayer modes]. The real-time gameplay of Halo, Starcraft, Counter Strike, and Street Fighter is so intangible and unpredictable that it allows for an unparalleled depth of experience. These aren’t my all-time favorite video games, because others might have secondary elements that provided a sense of nostalgia that the others couldn’t match. Though, I think that cuts to the core of what a single player experience can be. Because it’s played alone, there are certain experiences and feelings that could not be felt if there were other people playing with you. The intimacy of the single player experience has a tendency to reflect certain truths about oneself, just like it did with me during all those years on the golf course.

Coworking is an awesome concept and I love working here.  A cool benefit of coworking is the ability to collaborate on projects, and that’s what is happening with Neil and I.  A couple weeks later after I saw his simple Flash game, he showed me a prototype of it working on the iPhone, and before I knew it, it was completely ported and more fleshed out.  The game is nearly complete in functionality and design, but he wanted better art for it and help smoothing out a couple kinks.  So I decided to help him out with the art and a little design.

Per usual, I’ve extrapolated them out into a series of half-baked metaphors. Here are those things in numerated list form!

1. Would you get married to someone without knowing them first?

If you said yes, well then definitely don’t start a business. You’re probably in it for the romance of the thing and business [like marriage] isn’t romantic. If you’re like most people, and you prefer to acquire a fair understanding of the individual before signing binding documents committing what might be half of your total self to them, then take heed. Starting a business is not much different. Know your potential partner first. Work with them. For a long time.

It wasn’t until about a year after starting intuition that Mike and I had enough fights that we could be completely comfortable working with one another. It’s not enough to just know the person, or be friends with them. They may end up being totally different people to work with. Moreover, working with someone day-in and day-out on something you are both passionate about [a baby] brings up a lot of healthy, and sometimes unhealthy, conflict. Sometimes it’s too much, sometimes there aren’t fights at all and that’s the problem. Whatever it is depends on the people involved, it needs to come to the surface and that takes time and energy. Make sure to expend enough of both before you “elope.”

2. Are you a polygamist?

This is a bit of a misnomer, because getting into an equal business partnership with more than 1 person is worse than polygamy. At least in a traditional polyamorous relationship [Mormon-wise] there’s often some sort of male-dominant chauvinistic hierarchy. In an equally shared business partnership between more than two people you are basically amplifying the potential for disaster because there’s really no “order of operations.”

When we started intuition, we did this exact thing. 4 of us were excited about working together, finally finding competent and passionate people that could potentially get something off the ground. If we hadn’t done it, I know I would be worse off today. But if I were to do it all over again I wouldn’t have started a business per say, or at least one that would have a life outside of the project we were working on. I would have opted for a per-project type of organization that would provide for much less restriction. In fact, I’d argue we didn’t really need the operating agreement or any of that. Legalese replaces trust and we all trusted each other at least to the point that none of us would betray the other. We would have made Dinowaurs and have been done with it. That comes off as harsh at first glance and a little unnecessary, but it would have changed things immensely. With each of us armed with the knowledge that we would have to figure something out after Dinowaurs we would have approached the entire situation much differently.

3. How well do you know yourself?

This is probably the toughest one because it’s a catch-22. You’ve got to go through it first in order to investigate your own personality deep enough to be conscious of what’s important. Not explicitly though, maybe you’ve got a penchant for understanding these potential relationships, or you’ve been through a nasty divorce or two enough to know what the real hard work is. Nonetheless here’s the short list of stuff you should know.

• How you want to work.
• Who you want to work with.
• What kind of work you want to do.
• Where you want to be as a result of this endeavor.
• Why you are doing it. With 100% Honesty.

Each of these are tough questions, and not a single one should be breezed over until you’re as sure as you can be about the answer. Even then this doesn’t cover the gamut. The main takeaway: you should know what you want to do [the easiest part], why you want to do it [the hard part], how you want to do it [the harder part], and who you want to do it with [the hardest part]. Some of the difficulty varies wildly from person to person. Someone may know exactly what kind of people they work with but remain clueless on what they want their work to mean to them.

I’ve been in a few serious romantic relationships and even after those I’m still not sure what I’m looking for in another woman. People are a complex mess of behavior and emotion and getting two to live together on an exceptional level [happily] for an extended period of time [ever after] is an incredible unlikelihood [doesn't exist?]. Finding a business partner is not much different. Granted there’s not much fighting about the minutiae usually found in a stereotypical martial spat, the stakes are somewhat elevated because many times decisions relay directly into paying the bills and livelihood. Don’t take it lightly. Don’t be naive. You wouldn’t take marriage lightly would you? It will become your life. Choose wisely.

4. How well do you know your prospective partner(s)?

Ask them the same 5 questions above. Ask them in a serious and private setting and make sure everyone thinks long and hard about the answers. It’s not in anyone’s best interest to be anything but 100% honest.

We only recently did this, which prompted the splitting up of intuition into a collective. I like to think we’re all much happier for it, even if it was painful to do the actual splitting. It’s just more evidence that being honest and openly communicating with people is paramount when dealing with any kind of trust/partnership. For us, there was some branching on the questions of “Why are you doing it?” and “What kind of work do you want to do?”, which are not easy questions to answer for a lot of reasons. There’s a lot of gray area in these as well which can lead to temporary confusion. If someone in the partnership “doesn’t mind” doing a certain task, or taking a certain project while the other is thinking it’s the only thing they ever wanted to work on, that can lead to a relative disparity between the two. It might not be immediately evident and in a lot of ways this can lead to a worsened scenario due to how time tends to exacerbate the growing chasm. It’s the whole “rip off the band-aid” thing.

More to the point though, there’s a lot to be said for people doing exactly what they want to do. Partners, employees, wives and so forth. If someone in the team is working on something they’re not honestly passionate about, it’s a waste. This may seem blue-sky and all that, but with a small team [2-4 people] I don’t think it’s that lofty. Sure, at some point we all have to do things we don’t want to even when it’s a project we’re really passionate about, but that’s just reality. I’m talking about working on something that you think will “make you a buck”, “serve a market” or “get you cred” that’s outside of what actually interests you about the work. If it doesn’t serve your own interests, then why would it be interesting to anyone else? Be courageous. Dare to do it.

5. Do you really want to start a business?

Maybe you just want to work with someone on a project and split the profits 50/50. Maybe you just want to make something and can’t find enough people to do so. Sometimes “starting a business” gets people excited. Their eyes get larger and you both embark on this adventure into the unknown. I admit, it’s exciting. It still excites me. But know that if you really want to start a business, then go ahead and do it. You’ll learn a great deal, and maybe the next go-round you’ll get it right.

We decided to simply release Gray to the public for free. We didn’t see a game like this [not intended to be entertaining] doing very well or receiving the right audience at a typical Flash portal, though feel free to distribute the swf wherever you please. The more people that play this game, that happier we will be.

Gray isn’t a typical game, so if you would like to discuss Gray or have some questions ["wtf is this?"] there’s already some healthy discussion going on in the TigSource Forums, or strike up a new discussion on our own forum. Certainly the comments are always a welcome place to voice opinions as well.

Thanks for playing.

So, it’s still arrow keys to move, space to jump and W to fly if you need a boost. In addition, hitting space while in the air and below a platform will shoot out a grapple and connect you to the underside of the platform. From here you can swing back and forth using the left and right arrows, hitting space will sever the connection, and the up and down arrows will increase or decrease the length of the rope.

As an addendum, the little pink rectangle, the one just sitting alone, not the moving one or the triple stairs one, if you land on top you will become the “pilot” of it, its a vehicle basically. Once you’re piloting, you use the arrow keys to float around and hit space to jump out again.

The pieces are falling into place…

Whenever we have an idea for a game, it usually starts out as a gameplay skeleton. “Hey wouldn’t it be cool to push hail up in the air to make it grow bigger and have it crash down onto buildings for points?” or “Have you played death worm? We should see if we could expand on it.” With Life Raft it started as “Hey, we want to make that [redacted] game eventually, maybe we should start with a simple platformer to get some of the tech worked out. Air buccaneers is awesome, let’s do something with grappling hooks and moving vehicles/platforms and etc.” The next phase of development for me is to figure out what the plot/look and all that stuff is going to actually be about. The opposite would be true if we were to come up with themes first and then try and wrap gameplay around them. I don’t think that’s a good way to go, but that’s another post entirely. Besides, working within restraints can breed incredible ideas. So… Life Raft. To begin this process I simply list out the criteria for ideation.

I start by setting up places moving vehicles would work within all the criteria. For this to work, the player needs to have a wide range of motion as well as the constant threat of death below them.

• Lava, Water [shark infested], High Sky, Acid, Event Horizon, etc…

I pick one from that list. Let’s go with water [because that's what I picked]. From water I went into further details with what the vehicles could be.

• Helicopter, Plane, Birds, Dolphins, Hoverboats, etc.

From this list nothing really interested me, so I started thinking about what if “falling” into the sky was the big risk. Like fish that would rise up into the sky [because they were too buoyant] and they’d constantly be fighting against that buoyancy. That struck a cord but I wanted the character to be human, simply because it’s been awhile since I’ve created a human player character for a game. The underwater thing wasn’t working out, but I wanted to preserve the interesting parts of the idea that sea creatures were floating to the surface of the sea. So that’s basically the A to B of Life Raft’s IP. Here’s the gist of it.

Many eons ago the world was flooded and the surviving humans found the rare patches of land to live on. Times were hard but they persevered. Later, strange creatures arose from the depths of the sea, evolved from consuming strange deposits at the planet’s core, they were now made too buoyant for survival underwater. All the people saw this as the species has overgrown in numbers, most of the sea’s surface was covered. Many used their carcasses as a resource to expand their tiny islands, another considered the bounty a blessing and feasted, feeding generations of their people. Many years passed and those that began building with the remains of the beasts prospered and grew large foundations. Back at the isolated island their community remained small, but faithful. Not many years ago, the villagers found a living beast floating in the sky willingly, perhaps fresh from the sea floor. It seemed to feel at home in their island sanctuary and soon found an attachment with a little girl with which befriended. The villagers found it strangely mystical and celebrated their companionship as the strange beast, now named Ekiuna [temporary?], often protected the little girl as she grew older. Now a young leader of her village, she is hailed as the finest hunter they have ever seen. With an innate knowledge of her environment and the agility of Ekiuna, they were a team unmatched. All the while, the village elders spoke in dark corners of the peculiar nature of this new arrival. Now, today, those suspicions are vindicated, an unlikely messenger brings ill-news from the open seas…

Ok, yea. So that’s what I’m thinking. As for the art style, that’s completely independent of the theme for this go around. I started out by painting some pixel art to get the ball rolling and I really liked how it turned out. I tried a few other things, but sometimes it’s best to use your heart and not your head. I guess if my heart isn’t telling me anything about which direction to go, I defer back to my head which is always useful. Hence the whole way I ended up with this Life Raft idea. Though I will admit that the original idea was much more generalized. Something to the tune of “Jellyfish from the sea floor rise up to the surface with gas in them and people run around on them.” Once I had that initial spark I took it further and really sunk my heart into the story, background and characters.

Oh and for this image, I have a bit of a tutorial going that I have in the works. I started writing it yesterday but it’s turning out to be too long so I’ll need to figure out how [or if] to boil it down.

XXOO

Joe