Continuing what I was working on last week, I have posted the newest revision of this short story. There are some edits and improvements to the start, and another page or so of additional story. It still doesn’t have an ending. Actually it does, but I haven’t written all the stuff between what you see here and the last couple paragraphs, so leaving it hanging makes more dramatic sense. If you wanted to wait until I finish the whole thing to read it, that would probably be a good idea. I’ll just keep posting it this way until it’s all done, which should be in 1 or 2 weeks.

I was going to wait until this was entirely finished, but then I thought “hey, there are no rules here” so this is the first part of a first draft of a story. It doesn’t have a title yet. I’ll post up more parts as I write, edit, and rewrite them. Enjoy.

I’m sure there is a name for people like me. The people who don’t watch movies when they are new, don’t read books when they come out, don’t binge that show the first weekend, and don’t play games in the first month. I could blame it on having kids, but honestly, I was pretty far down this path before they came along. I just like to wait a little. I get excited by trailers and hype pieces like any fan. I search out interviews with creators, and eat up behind the scenes clips. I just don’t buy much, especially games, on the first day. I certainly have in the past. There were games that I bought at retail on launch day. I don’t feel like I really regret any of those purchases, but I know that it probably would have been better to wait. Games aren’t really like a lot of other artistic mediums. There is that quote attributed to da Vinci that goes “art is never finished, only abandoned”. What if your art was not only never finished, but you could dabble on the canvas months or years after it was sold and installed in the customers home. Imagine now that you could make those changes from, and too, anywhere in the world. That art now has the potential to never be finished. People could enjoy that art over and over again as new changes and additions are presented to them. They could even be encouraged to pay for that art again to see more of it. They could be persuaded to subscribe to that art, continually paying and continually receiving. This is where games have diverged from our historical understanding of art. Art as an object or experience that can be bought or sold. Frankly, we haven’t got a damn clue how to promote art like that. We don’t know how to advertise it. We don’t know how to market it. Does the big expensive launch even make sense anymore? I don’t think I’m a unique case. I think that more and more people are waiting and choosing the art they want to engage with when they want to engage with it. Not just when it becomes available. Not when the advertisements are out in full force. The rise of streaming and subscription services isn’t just due to availability. It’s the way people want their art delivered to them. On their own schedule. With games there is an even more practical reason for waiting. Games get better after the initial launch. Bugs get fixed. Features get added. Issues get resolved. This doesn’t happen with music or movies. There is no patch coming to The Beatles Revolver. That album came out, and other than being transferred to new delivery mediums, it remains unchanged. Video Games are sprawling software systems, and most of them currently can communicate over the Internet. They can be modified, and improved over time. This wasn’t always the case in the past, but that is the way it works now. The way that video games work has changed. The way the are advertised and sold should probably change with it. As someone who is endeavoring to make and sell games, maybe it would be best for me if people got revved up for new releases and bought them right when they are put on offer. Maybe that is the best way to make money. There is value in knowing when a ship has sailed. The big marketing push is near its end. Now would be a good time to explore the consistent low level hum. Marketing as gentle reminder. I’m a terrible salesman. I don’t really know how any of this is supposed to work, but I think that games can have a much longer life than they currently enjoy. I think, with my limited ability, extending that life is what I will try to do. Other people wait too. It’s not a matter of telling them to buy now, it’s more about reminding them your game exists when they are ready to make a purchase.

Best Games : 1000 Miglia : Great 1000 Miles Rally and World Rally Championship Design, at it’s best, solves problems. In the early 90s videogames had a lot of problems to solve, most of them technical. Drawing pixel to a screen quickly was tricky enough. Making those pixels look like anything more than digital mud was a rare success. Getting the images on screen to react to input in a satisfying way must have been some form of magic. So, in the early 90s, when faced with the problem of creating an intense rally racing game based on an italian test of human and automotive endurance that had not been run in decades, what do you do? The first thing you do is steal. Drawing a three dimensional track was unattainable on the computer hardware available. The physics routines capable of simulating a convincing car had not been written. Color palettes were limited and animation was limited. Add to that the restrictions of the JAMMA hardware standard that allow game circuit boards to be swapped between similar cabinets, meaning that you might be playing a racing game with buttons and a joystick. Creating a game that evokes the feeling of intense, edge of control racing seems like a tough design problem. Luckily a year previous, the game World Rally Championship was released by a competing studio. Maybe the makers of 1000 Miglia licensed the technology, or maybe they just plain old lifted every gameplay element of World Rally Championship. Whatever the case, they took an idea and ran with it. Both games solve the problem of presenting a slightly canted overhead view of a race by doing the opposite of what conventional wisdom would advise. Rather than pulling the view back to show more of the track, giving the player the opportunity to react to upcoming turns and obstacles, both of these games are very tightly focused on the car and the parts of the track immediately surrounding it. By pushing the view in rather than pulling back, the sense of speed and impending danger is intensified. Of course, restricting the players view of the track would be inexcusable in a racing game, if some other solution wasn’t presented. Both World Rally and 1000 Miglia will briefly flash curving arrows on the screen, like a rally co-driver shouting out upcoming turns and chicanes. Added to that, each leg of the race is only 60 seconds long. For one unblinking, white knuckle minute you have to pay precise attention to upcoming turns, and precisely navigate them, usually by sliding all over the place. What World Rally started 1000 Miglia polishes to a high sheen. Where there were muddy indistinct graphics, they are replaced by sharp, colorful, representations of italian streets and roads where cartoon blurs and speed lines enhance your sense of movement. In place of a generic rally car, 1000 Miglia offers an array of classic supercars from the 1930 to the 1950s. The stock engine noises of World Rally are gone, and instead you will hear the whine and grind of old gearboxes with less than precise tolerances. These cars belch fire and roar from unmuffled exhaust pipes. There is no expectation of traction or modern vehicle handling. Every car in this lineup is a squirrely death box pushed past its limits. This is the sort of fantasy that video games excel at. Maybe the control and mechanics design problems were solved by World Rally, but it what 1000 Miglia that also solved the presentation and immersion problems. Excellent design, from the bottom to the top.

It’s all about the cogs. All of the internal workings. These digital tools that I use must be considered, and employed from the inside out. Like building a table, though you see less of them, it’s most important that the legs are built correctly. The surface can be changed or embellished, but bad legs make for wobbly tables. As someone who is usually preoccupied with how an object in a game or video will ultimately look, having to worry more about the bones and the core construction can sometimes suck. That is, it sucks time away from simply focusing on the external aesthetics. I have heard or read many pieces of advice for artists. There are those who say that you should dedicate yourself completely to one aspect, one field, one avenue of study. If you would like to work on costume design, you shouldn’t distract yourself with the technicalities of animation. If you want to work on illustration, you shouldn’t delve into sculpting. When I receive digital objects or assets, as sometimes happens, created by folks who mainly focused on the external aesthetics, I see a lot of wobbly tables. An awful lot. These are items that obstinately defy improvement or modification. They often won’t even suit whatever purpose they were created for. Similar to a car built with the gas pedal nestled safely under the hood, but with an otherwise spotless interior. Game assets are deviously complex matryoshka dolls of digital information. Texture maps, normal maps, shaders, geometry, collision volumes, skin weights, skeletons, animations, local space, world space, and the reactive and interactive code that drives the whole shambling mess. Without at least a cursory understanding of each of these layers, that beautiful facade will have no place to hang. Start small, start simple, but don’t only focus on presentation. Work from the inside out. Work on the cogs. Well built cogs can wear many faces. 

I’m working on this customisable, action figure, type character. I did a few drawings, worked on a model, then did some more drawings to refine things that weren’t working. You know what, I could write about it, or I could just show you. Have a look here. This sped up video is probably about 50% of the way there. 

Best Games - World Heroes 2 Fighting games are intimidating. Four to six buttons, a dozen or more characters, different systems with split second windows of execution. The hardcore fighting game fan loves this stuff. Knowing how to do a launch a fireball or charge a flash kick is some sort of weird gamer secret handshake. As the years have gone on, each new game has catered to a ravenous audience that demands more secrets, more depth, greater complexity. World Heroes 2 is played with one joystick and Three buttons. Of those three buttons, you only really need to use two. This is the part where I could be expected to write about how approachable this game is. How, in a sea of complicated and intimidating fighting games, this one game is a great on ramp for someone trying to learn how to play fighting games. World Heroes 2 is not that game. It is as dense, nuanced and complex as any other fighting game, but it does all that with two buttons, and the occasional press of a third. World Heroes 2 holds its own in play style and mechanics against the Street Fighters, the Fatal Furies, the Samurai Showdowns, and the Mortal Kombats, but you only need to use two buttons. Not four, not five, not six. Two. Not only that, but World Heroes 2 introduced or refined mechanics not seen in most other fighting games. Throw reversals that predate Dead or Alive. A timed parry that came before Street Fighter 3. A deathmatch mode that has players competing in a tug of war type battle, sharing a single life bar between them. So far as I know, a feature exclusive to World Heroes 2. If World Heroes 2 is just as complicated and impenetrable as other fighting games, then what’s the big deal about it only using two buttons? World Heroes 2 cuts straight to the heart of fighting games. Fighting games are all about timing, spacing, and finding, or forcing, openings in your opponent’s guard. World Heroes 2 drops the finger gymnastics required by most fighting games, and focuses firmly on the real meat of the genre. Playing World Heroes 2 will make you better at fighting games. With the notable exception of DiveKick, I don’t know of any fighting game that is better focused and more aware of what it is. In it’s simplicity, hides the depth of a truly incredible game. One of the best games.

She had packed the box carefully. All things found their place. Some smaller bits drifted down to the bottom, while the larger, more cumbersome, items settled where they would. Nothing took any more space than required. She could have sworn that there had been no room left when she had set down the lid. Still, she felt that this box was slightly lighter than the others. Not as densely packed. It was too late in the day to gather anything else, so this would have to suffice. It was difficult to tell, anyway, without comparing directly. Maybe she only thought this box was lighter. No way to know. She shuffled toward the garage, kicking at hem of her housecoat as she crossed the mudroom doorway. That damned door sill was still loose and had a nasty habit of clawing at anything dangling within its reach. The door had come down years ago, so the sill had no partner against inclement weather anyway. She had meant to gather the hammer and tack it down. Maybe tomorrow. She slowly spun her back toward the storm door that led to the garage and gently edged it open, careful not to upset the contents of the box. It seemed to have taken most of the day to pack it. What’s a little extra care to preserve all that work? Time well spent, she decided. There was still the last hint of pale light coming through the kitchen window, but the garage was dark, as always. Without turning, she snaked her arms back into the darkness and found a spot to fit the box into. It slid in perfectly, as it was meant to. She quickly retrieved her hands and jolted forward, letting the door swing in behind her. She felt that moment of lightheadedness, a catch in her chest, as the door creaked and clicked shut. The storm door had seemed redundant when the garage had been built, but now she was thankful for it. She smiled meekly and nodded to the storm door before relocking it and pushing closed the inside door. As dark as it was in the garage, it must be even worse between those two doors. The thought made her shiver. She double checked the inside lock. Morning. What do we do in the morning? Tea with milk. Toast. Raspberry jam. No, blueberry. Only blueberry left. Tidy up a bit. Organize the photos. Make a list. She liked to write the list longhand. She could type it. She had been exceptional on a keyboard. Certainly she retained those skills in her hands, even if she seldom applied them. Typing, and problem solving. No, not problems. Puzzles? Something with a great deal of strict thinking, but not much arithmetic. In any case, she was convinced that she could type the list, but she liked the feel of pen on paper. Those marks felt permanent. Gathering. Also there was gathering. Collecting items for the box. Most would be on the list, but sometimes other things would get in there too. She made every effort to stick to the list. Some items are just too small to keep good track of. In an instant, it was evening. The light through the kitchen window swept in grey and fading. Just a few more things to pack. She kept it all as neat as she could. Making the best use of the space in the box. Careful and organized. Nestling the contents as well she could. Sometimes jutting edges and protrusions made it difficult, but in the end, she managed it. Convinced that nothing more could be coaxed inside, she placed the lid and slid it down snug. Maybe lighter than it should be? The boxes are usually heavier. She could sense no shifting of the contents, so the box must be full, but still she wondered. Back toward the garage. The sill on that mudroom doorway still needed tamping. She looked down as she crossed it, careful not to catch any stray fibers of housecoat. What good was a sill without a door anyway. The inside door to the garage was already open. She must have done that earlier. That was helpfull. She wouldn’t need to put down the box to open the storm door. She pressed her back up against it. A chill from the door passed ghostly through her housecoat. It made her pull her shoulders up and tremble. The door opened easily. Still very dark in the garage. Always so dark. She reached her hands around without turning her face toward the darkness. Even so, it was hard to tell if her eyes were open or closed. The box found its place, and slid in easily. One quick step forward, back into the mudroom. She felt her breath, sharper than she liked. She heard the storm door click shut behind her, and reached back to lock it without ever looking at it. Morning. What do we do in the morning? Tea. Toast. Something in it. Something on it. Some tidying, shifting items around. Look over the photos. She must have taken at least a few of them. The ones she wasn’t in. Make a list. Write it out by hand. No other way to do it, really. Items for the box. It’s getting dark. The box seems light and loose. It’s filled to the top, but it feels too insubstantial. The boxes should be packed tight. She placed the lid and pressed it down. It pays to take your time, do things right. In the proper order. She passed by the doorway into the mudroom. There is a sill, but no door. Why would you have one without the other. The garage storm door is just barely open. She must have gotten it ready. Easier to carry the box that way. She pressed the storm door open with her back and thrust the box toward the darkness. It was lifted away from her hands so gently it took a moment before she knew it was gone. Back into the mudroom. Lock the door. Morning. What do we do in the morning? Tea. Toast. Make the list. The list seems short today. So few items. It may be a struggle to fill the box. She stared down at her housecoat, down at the floor below it. What would go in the box tomorrow?

When I started creating this Best Games series, I really just wanted to advocate for good things. I wanted to celebrate joy and the hard work people put into creating these strange digital toys. So, with that in mind, here is another Best Game. A small break from whatever stuff you are thinking about today. 

How was your weekend? Me? I sat down with some great people for a couple of days and we made a game. http://globalgamejam.org/2017/games/nektons-journey A huge thank you to Paul Cooper, Logan Cooper, Dione McGuire, and Ryan Dallaire. For the amount of work we did, it was a surprisingly relaxing and fun 48, or so, hours.

I’ve been very slowly working my way through this amazing book, Art of Atari put together by Tim Lapetino. Every single page reveals a new beautiful image that I have to study for a few minutes before moving on. This makes reading the actual text of the book take a lot longer than I would have expected, but I can’t really complain. It’s all just cover to cover gorgeous. I have read several books on the history of video games and the history of silicon valley. As you might expect, stories about the inner workings of Atari come up fairly often. Tales of the work hard, play hard lifestyle Atari had going are pretty entertaining. Since those histories tend to focus on the games, the game developers, and the fledgling business of games, a lot of this book is pretty new territory for me. As the title would suggest, the book is mainly focused on the artists and designers that created the Atari look of the late 70s and early 80s. The state of the art in actual on screen graphics at the time consisted mainly of chunky abstract blocks of color. If you were going to suspend disbelief and accept that those few yellow squares are actually a medieval warrior, bridging that gulf had to start somewhere. Playing a video game in the early 80s didn’t start when you put the cartridge in the console. It started with the box art, and the pictures in the manual. It started with the brief tales of galactic adventure that accompanied them. the work that went into that art and design are every bit as fascinating as stories about the games they complimented. At least for me. What I was particularly taken by was how all of the art, all of the design, had to be filtered through the production technology available at the time. When I started creating commercial art, the world was well into the Photoshop era. Getting digital art out of the computer and into the physical world was still a bit janky, but creating in the computer was rapidly becoming the standard. None of these folks had that available to them. Everything had to be hand done and prepped for screen printing. Large format Inkjet printers that spray the images directly onto vinyl just didn’t exist. The had some four colour process printers that could do the smaller stuff, like cartridge decals and product boxes, but even those lacked the fidelity of modern printers. Working to the technology available, the Atari artist and designers created some amazing things. For several years I worked designing and manufacturing signs. While most of the technology for that industry has advanced significantly since the late 70s, there are still some places where it has lagged behind print production. I have, for example, hand cut a rubylith, which is something only old timers in print and screen printing hipsters will understand. It still comes up from time to time in the sign industry though. Most of it is robots with knives issued marching orders by custom software not too dissimilar from Illustrator. Even with that experience, I have some difficulty wrapping my brain around the hurdles a designer would have to leap to get a six foot tall graphic produced and applied to an arcade cabinet. Well, I have some more amazing pictures to stare at, so I’m going to go do that.

Best Games - One Must Fall 2097 The early 90s were the era of the fighting game. Entire arcades could be filled with nothing but fighting game machines and they would still draw a crowd. It was not uncommon to see multiple versions of the same game, stood beside each other with a line queued up in front of each. Street Fighter 2 was the undisputed champion amongst fighting games, but Mortal Kombat was a strong contender. With it’s large digitized characters and outlandish violence, Mortal Kombat was designed to catch people’s attention. It was brash and blunt in a way that most games at the time just weren’t. Most games that lean heavily on a flashy gimmick tend to have very little depth. There usually isn’t a real game there. Mortal Kombat was a notable exception to that rule. Mortal Kombat was a solid, nuanced fighting game. Great artists steal, right? One Must Fall 2097 apes Mortal Kombat in all the ways that matter. The pace of the game. The snappy back and forth sparring paired with movement that feels deliberately languid. A less twitchy game than Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat could be slightly more tactical. It rewards patience and timing over aggression. One Must Fall borrows, or steals, all of these elements. It also shamelessly lifts many animations and moves from the celebrated arcade game. It does all that and replaces the gimmick of violence and digitized humans with giant cg rendered fighting robots. A solid gimmick. That could have been it. The developers of One Must Fall could have settled for making a sturdy Mortal Kombat clone, and it would have sold well. This was the early 90s after all, and fighting games on any platform would sell. One Must Fall 2097 was released on the pc in 1994, at a time when pc gaming was just starting to get exciting. Doom was installed on more computers than windows, and internet access was on the rise. One Must Fall was the right game at the right time. Popularity is great, but this is why One Must Fall gets on my best games list. They could have done a straight clone of Mortal Kombat, but they didn’t. They built a game that plays to the strengths of the pc, rather than copying a game that was designed to digest quarters at a phenomenal rate. One Must Fall includes a deep robot customization system, and a campaign that could take hours to play, rather than the 20 or som minutes of an arcade machine. There were a surprising large roster of playable robots, and an equal array of human pilots, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This mean that the total number of pilot / robot combinations is somewhere around 100, which is bonkers for a fighting game. Variety, play time, customization, these are the things that pc games excel at compared to their arcade counterparts. That is why One Must Fall was great. They took an established genre, with well defined boundaries and conventions, and then changed them all to best fit the pc platform. It was risky and strange and not the type of thing that an established company like Capcom or Midway would have done, at least not at that time. The game also uses a very simplified control system for a fighting game. 2 buttons, tapped rather than rolled inputs for specials. This might be thought of as a dumbing down, but One Must Fall is just as satisfying to play as its arcade cousins. Just as fast, just as tactical, just as fun. The soundtracks for Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat are good, but they were made to be heard in a noisy arcade, so there are a lot of small musical stings and baselines, but that’s the height of it. The soundtrack for One Must Fall was made to be heard in your quiet home, on your pc speakers. It rocks. Fantastic era standard techno music plays behind every metallic clang and dense thud. This isn’t arcade sounds at home, this is sound designed for, and around the pc gaming experience. In other words, sound you can listen to for a long time without it ever becoming repetative or grating. It might have started as a clone, but One Must Fall 2097 rose above its origins to become one of the best games.

Well, it’s 2017 now. I have been thinking about branching out a little on here for a while. This blog started as a development blog, because I thought that was the thing you did when you wanted to be an indie game developer. Back then I was using Microsoft XNA and just trying to learn C#. I only had the most basic grasp on a few other programming languages at the time, a few versions of basic, some rudimentary C++, a smattering of LISP and Pascal. I could make some sense of the code if I saw it, but lacked the fluency to really write much. I figured that C# was probably going to be around for a while, so I might as well focus on that. As it turned out C# has persisted, and become fairly popular, which is nice since that means there are always lots of answers available when I have questions. Now I typically use a combination of simple visual scripting with a graphical state machine system and very small C# scripts that do only one or two things, but do them well and predictably. The current tools for game development let you do a lot with small, well planned, effort. I wouldn’t say that it is easy exactly, but it is easier than it has ever been. So that is sort of how the development part of this has gone. At some point I started writing about video games in more abstract and non specific ways. I would write about remembrances of particular games that I think are important. I would write more generally about the industry and the culture surrounding video games. Mostly I would just write. Consistently, at least once a week, I would write something. Videogames was just a topic I knew well. A resource I could mine for words on a regular schedule. Videogames were never really the point. At least not for me. Writing was the point. Writing had to become a habit. I experimented a bit, and tried to “find my voice”, whatever that means. I also put every post out there in public so I couldn’t be precious with them. I rarely edit, and when I do, it is for readability and clarity, not content. I have written a few sentences that are real clunkers, and they will stay that way until this small corner of the internet is scoured from history. Here is what I think I will do going forward. Most of the time it will be the usual nonsense. A write up about an old game that only I care about. A commentary on something in the larger gaming culture that I think I might have a take on. Some of it might be personal, some of it not as much. I’ll check in from time to time on my own work, art or development related. Once in awhile though, I will write something very different here. I might just post up a short story from my childhood, as I shakily remember it. Or I may, from time to time, post up a short bit of fiction that probably has very little to do with videogames. These I will write at times other than a few hours before I post them. I will edit them slightly more rigorously. I may even edit them and repost them with the changes. I still love videogames, and I like talking and writing about them more than I like most other things. And when I say that I mean all the things. That exist. In the world. It’s sort of a problem. Anyway, I will continue to write and post at least one piece a week, but they might not all be about videogames. Some of them might be about bikes.