games

via Jason Scott. visit GET LAMP for more information.

I have some backlog stuff, as per usual. This weekend to catch up? I hope so.

Last night I went to the SIGGRAPH Los Angeles event held at the EA facility in Marina del Rey. Devon was supposed to attend with me but he ended up distracted by girlfriend. The Electronic Arts building, or rather set of buildings, was very nice—they had a little arcade, and a gym, basketball courts, and security all around. It actually reminded me a bit of the franchulates from Snow Crash, how hermetically sealed up from the rest of the community the place was.

The topic was digital acting. In brief, it examined the challenges of creating digital, directable animated charaters, in both linear media and in games. The emphasis on artificial intelligence was a bit of a surprise, I hadn’t thought about how much behavior gives a sense of “reality” to the world. And behavior is inevitably complex and hard to model. It was fascinating stuff and had me thinking about the challenges of making NPC (non-player characters) in a game.

I’ve been attending SIGGRAPH events in various places since the 1990s. In the presentations folks would indicate when their “first SIGGRAPH” was. Not that you’re interested, but mine was in 1995. On the nametag (which I still have) I wrote my occupation as “FILM/COMPUTER GRAPHICS STUDENT.” Mind you I was only toying with the web at the time as a consumer. I was learning PhotoShop and taking classes at UCLA Extension at the time. Out of all that curiosity about how computer graphics were done in movies, science fiction, computers, programming—I ended up in the web. And the rest, is history.

Even though my day to day life has gone more toward code and less toward graphics, I’ve kept up with local chapters of SIGGRAPH ever since that first SIGGRAPH.

Next month the topic is Automobile Visualization, and I wonder if my buddy Chris might want to attend that one.

The drive home was nice. I drove PCH. The big wide ocean is so large and so dark at night. The crescent moon shone down on it. I listened to danah boyd on an audio podcast from Harvard which had my mind racing over many topics.

There is an interesting intersection between games and social media and I’m not sure what that ends up looking like.

But now I have a gamertag: http://live.xbox.com/member/artlung

Working in the games business, as I do by dint of working for a game company, it’s become sort of sad that I don’t have one.

Even sadder though, is that I’m unlikely to add anything to it anytime soon.

As you may have seen previously, I’ve been experimenting with building a game with jQuery as the infrastructure over on joecrawford.com. This is a screenshot. The super-cute illustrations were created by Dug. The concept of a game with sheep was suggested by a few people, including MAS. Ping said cats and mice, but I quite like the sheep.

I’m just building this in stolen moments away from real work or real life, and this is a gas. I added scoring, though I have not been able to set clickability once I’ve clicked it. I created a recursive error by trying to assign $(this).click(null). I need to understand the object model better, and really, re-re-read the documentation, which is actually quite good.. :-)

One of the funner side effects of working for a game company is that new games tend to get bought on the date of release. To that end, yesterday there was a copy of Rock Band in the office. Because of my previous experience (documented by Leah here) playing SingStar and Karaoke Revolution I was not intimidated to sing, which I’m rather proud of. I did ok on songs on Medium difficulty, but I utterly failed on the Garbage song “I think I’m Paranoid” on Hard. I enjoyed singing Gimme Shelter—but I find myself mystified by how Mick Jagger goes between the falsetto and his gruffer voice. All told I tried my hand at these songs:

• “Blitzkrieg Bop” – Ramones
• “Creep” – Radiohead
• “Gimme Shelter” – The Rolling Stones
• “Here It Goes Again” – OK Go
• “I Think I’m Paranoid” – Garbage
• “In Bloom” – Nirvana
• “Learn to Fly” – Foo Fighters
• “Maps” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• “Paranoid” – Black Sabbath
• “Say It Ain’t So” – Weezer
• “Should I Stay or Should I Go” – The Clash
• “Wanted Dead or Alive” – Bon Jovi
• “Wave of Mutilation” – Pixies
• “Pleasure (Pleasure)” – Bang Camaro

There are photos! The Ferreteer took some. Let him show you them:

I completely lost track of time playing the game. It wasn’t till Leah texted me until I really realized we’d spent 3 hours on the game! I had fun. This was on one of the Xbox 360s at work and on a big TV. It is a loud game though. You really need to hear the song to be able to play, or at least I do, and the drums are loud, and usually the singer is loud. Honestly, it made me think of the stepkids – I can see Dev on guitars, Tony too, Alex singing, and Ty on the drums (which were difficult! I need to try again but it felt like I had no rhythm at all). The feel of the guitars are a bit different from Guitar Hero I and II —but not unlearnably so. The singing interface looks just like Karaoke Revolution, and that made it familiar to me. I’d love to pick this up, but really it demands stuff not in the budget yet—a wider TV (we have a conventional tube TV still and I don’t see how the interface for four people would fit on the TV at a good size—it’s really designed for a wide aspect ration), an Xbox360 (Joe says that there were 150 Xbox360 copies at the Best Buy he went to , and only 10 PS3 copies), and the game itself. I believe that adds up to more than $1500. I can’t justify the cost at this point, but I look forward to a day when I can. :-)

This morning my voice is raw and tired.

One of my goals in the new year is to create some kind of simple online game in JavaScript. I’m almost at a point where I have free time, which is so awesome.

Also, I’m learning some of the libraries and frameworks for JavaScript—to that end I’m experimenting with some of the frameworks—this weekend it was jQuery—and I managed to rough a simple “the objects run away from your mouse” exercise.

jQuery is really powerful. It also seems to be really heavy as a download, and I’ve not tweaked that, but the syntax is just “pretty”—I was IMing a bud about the syntax and he found it ugly as sin, but I think it’s really beautiful.

So at http://joecrawford.com/ there’s a simple little exercise. Everything is in the source for the page, only jQuery itself is in a separate file.

Comments, suggestions, ideas about making games in JavaScript, about jQuery, about thinking about game programming are welcome.

Don’t use oxygen and smoke, please.

Thomas PM Barnett, a great Powerpointer, mentions that Al Gore has his Nobel Prize because of his PPTs (actually Keynote, but same difference, presentation software).

Read/Write Web has good thoughts on Microsoft’s playing catch-up with Google on a number of web tools. I like competitor for Google. It means we’ll keep getting innovation. And don’t count our Yahoo. They are building a lot of stuff these days.

The cartoon where Jesus, Mohammed, and the unseen Barmaid talk are usually good. Like this one: Snake.

Free To Play notes a study that says of the time kids ages 2 to 17 play games, 91% of it is on free games.

WebKit now has an implementation of a local SQL database (via John Gruber). That’s odd, and cool. It seems to be what Google Gears is trying to do, or what Flash does with its Local Shared Objects. All of these kick the butt of mere cookies for storage. The real thing they allow is to allow web applications to work without an internet connection. What’s WebKit? It’s the engine inside Safari and KDE browsers. This local storage thing is being discussed with great enthusiasm these days seems like. It’s still a great time to be working on web stuff.

Last night Leah and I visited a bookstore after dinner and I looked at a book called Beautiful Code. It’s got a chapter by Douglas Crockford. I’ve not bought it yet, but it’s been added to my “to read” list. I’ve been trying to write my JavaScript according to his code conventions.