I nearly fell into a classic game development blunder. At least I assume that it’s a classic, I haven’t really made enough games to know the full spectrum of blunders. I figure if I drunkenly stomp my way into a few of them every week or so I’ll eventually get to all of the classics.

All of that talk about interfaces and input schemes last week wasn’t for nothing. I was figuring out a few things and, well, this is some of the results.

I’m looking at this xbox360 gamepad sitting on my desk. There are 6 buttons, two bumpers (which are also buttons), two triggers (squishy analog buttons), two analog thumbsticks (which are buttons if you press down on them), a digital directional pad (4 buttons linked under a single piece of plastic), and a power indicator led (you guessed it, a button). When I pick the thing up I have a minimum of two fingers on each hand not directly hovering over an input. The playstation and wiiu pads are much the same. This standardization is both a boon and a constraint for developers. While you have at least a baseline expectation of the controls your players will be familiar with, you are also restricted to those inputs. To be fair, that is an awful lot of potential inputs, and if you can’t find a way to fit your game into the controls offered in modern gamepads, it might not be the pads that are at fault.

Much has been made of the walking simulators. Games like Gone Home, Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture, or Sunset. These are games where the players primary goal is to exist in a different place for a while, and maybe, as an aside, read, watch, or listen to a story. For such inherently gentle experiences they have proven to be polarizing, often in angry ways. There is an entire factions of people who wring hands about whether these experiences can be allowed to call themselves games. It’s an argument that I find so profoundly dumb I don’t really feel like addressing it head on. Since I’m the one writing, I won’t. We demolished the border between what is and is not a game sometime in the mid 90s when the band Primus put Macromedia director content on their “interactive” CDs. Game is a catch all term for interactive experiences. Sometimes words are hard folks. We don’t always use the right ones, and whatever the argument against using the term “game” is, that ship has sailed far past the horizon by now.

Best Games - Aztec Movement Mode W- walk, R- run, J- jump, S- stop, C- climb, A- turn Left, D- turn Right, G- crawl(once), P- place and light explosive, T- take, O- opens box or digs in trash pile, L- looks in box, Z- inventory, F- goes into fight mode Control S- toggles main sound on/off

My son likes to ask me a lot of science questions. I often have an answer for the first few questions, but as the interrogation intensifies, I usually have to offer up either “I don’t know”, “we should look that up”, or both. He likes mathematically precise answers without a lot of ‘sometimes’es and ‘in this case’es. That’s probably a kid thing.

Every year, around this time, teachers from one end of this country to the other will ask students to make a list of the things they are thankful for. The amount of students who actually take a moment to reflect is likely in the single digits. Those of a more seasoned vintage will have a list unspooling in in their heads near constantly.

Best Games - Unreal Tournament Launching at the tail end of 1999, Unreal Tournament became the first in the series to focus exclusively on multiplayer combat. Building on the success and popularity of its predecessors multiplayer mode, this entry in the series opted to make it’s single player experience a progression of, tutorial like, battles against AI bots. Defeating waves of bots while mastering the game’s unique arsenal of weapons was meant to lead the player into the real meat of the game, competition against real human opponents.

Music - Stop the Clocks by Alan Singley ​https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Alan_Singley/Anamorphic_Orchestra/Stop_The_Clocks

When I was a kid someone got me the Wonderful Waterful Robot. It was one of those water filled toys with a single button attached to a simple water pump. Press the button, and you squeeze water out of the pump reservoir and into the main chamber like a fully enclosed squirt gun. The movement of the water would float the 4 robot puzzle pieces around inside the chamber. The swirling was so chaotic that the toy appears to be just a random tempest of plastic objects. I loved it.

This week I was doing some physics fiddling. Even early on in a game prototype, when I should be throwing everything at the wall, I tend to hold back. I’m always looking for that one thing that I implement that will push the entire flaming mess over the edge and reduce the framerate to Muybridge reference book. Of course, whatever that one thing was, it would be absolutely integral to the game and I would have to rebuild the entire structure from scratch just to work around it.

I have been using Playmaker a lot recently. Playmaker is finite state machine and visual scripting editor for unity. I like it a ton. A finite state machine is a sort of burly flowchart. Rather than have simple yes/no options at the intersection of the flowchart, you have states that a program can be in. If you were creating a character movement system for a game you could have a state that waits for player input. Input would trigger another state where the character would move based on that input. There can be another state also running that would watch for collisions and transition the character out of movement and into a collision animation when they hit a wall. States can be one shot effects, that terminate on completion or transition back to a previous state, or they can be loops that run continuously until some criteria is met triggering a transition. There are probably as many ways to wire these states up as there are people who look at the problem. While not all programming problems can or should be solved using finite state machines, they are ridiculously powerful tools. They are especially useful for videogames because games by their nature are interactive and reactive computer programs. Input produces output, and everything is based on interlocking systems and rules.

Crimsonland vast flat empty waste fertilized with care and blood only danger grows

Best Games - Descent At one point 3d graphics were so whiz-bang new that a game could be based entirely around the ability to move in all directions. Soak that in for a second. Moving forward, back, left, right, up, down, and rotating around an axis was so novel that a very successful game used that as it’s selling point.

So, up until last week I had a perfect record. 144 weeks since I started doing this posting something every monday, usually a screed hastily smashed out on sunday night, I have never missed a post. A couple of times I posted around 11:30 monday night. Even when we took a trip to DisneyWorld, I managed to type something up on the Nexus 7 tablet and had it posted for monday. Unfortunately, last monday technology failed me. I was heading out of town and wouldn’t be back until late on monday so I decided to use the post scheduling feature of my websites content management system. My post consisted entirely of a single picture and a short caption. The post didn’t get posted, and the caption was lost to the digital ether. That picture went up on tuesday, and I couldn’t be bothered to recover the caption. Technology, I’m not mad, just disappointed.