Shmup Experiments

Whilst riding the train to and from work I'm working on a fantasy rpg meets shootemup game. Basically it'll be about the princess who goes on a quest to rescue the prince.

Here's a couple of test demos that I'm working on - each one shows off some effect I want to achieve in the game:

Shmup Circles

Many shooters have "curtains" of bullets. I finally figured out how to do that..


Lots O Dots

Trippy - will be part of a dream sequence...



I'm including the Gamemaker 6 source files if you want to try them out yourself using GameMaker 6 which I highly recommend getting if you like the idea of creating your own game.
Here's a screenshot if you want to take a look.

Me on Oreillynet

The Wayback Machine is an amazing thing - like looking through an old school yearbook. Anyway I happened to run across one of my articles I wrote for Oreilly a while back concerning Mozilla. The specifics may be off now due to changes in specs, but the ideas are still sound and have totally not been utilized...

Jay Is - web games

Oh I'm just a link hound. It's sad. I should stay with just a few sites and keep to my own little interests.... Nah.

You probably know by now I dig web games. Here's a great site which also seems to dig webgames and reviews them. Found several I'd never heard of before. Cooolio!

Yes, I'm just a link hound.

Checking out Rojo

Somehow, I managed to get an invite to Rojo, which looks to be a cross between del.icio.us, bloglines, and google search results, with a little orkut/tribe.net thrown in. It's kinda cool! I find myself fighting the interface somewhat though - I keep looking for the kind of things you get in del.icio.us for free ... the ubiquitous copying and stuff. Overall it's pretty darn cool though.

BTW I have 4 Rojo invites left -- if you want to try it out drop me a message

Wet Miserable Day

Yoh Ho Ho it's a wet and miserable day.
Yoh Ho Ho it sucks in every way.

Gotta a ton a work to do and not much else to say.

Yo Ho Ho it's a wet and miserable day.

Repost: Socially Constructed Interfaces

Here's another idea reposted:


Imagine if you were able to construct new interface widgets from within your application, and send them in realtime to folks you were connected to which they in turn could use right away in their own version of the app. What I mean is this: for a long time I have been trying to find a way to tie "gaming" principles of competition and "construction" into more traditional apps like say a browser or an email app. I was playing a game called the "game neverending" (link) which has built into it the ability for you to construct - "things" such as boxes or apple pies, and such things like that - which you can then give to other people in the games as gifts. They are more than trinkets, though, because the "thing" you create can have useful properties like improving your mood. This seems to be a similar concept to something you might see in a MUD or a MUSH. I also noticed that there were things you could construct like "radio button" and "scrollbar". In the context of this game this is used for some other purpose, but it hit me that this would be an excellent way for someone to combine a game with a "real world" application.

Imagine (if you would) starting off with some kind of application which did one thing - send email perhaps or have instant messaging. The ui would be extremely plain - but you would have the intrinsic ability to


1) connect to friends somehow


2) be able to construct your own "widgets" which could range from simple tree menus, to throbbers, or even useless animated icons


3) have the ability to send these "widgets" to others - which in turn gives you the increased capacity to make more widgets or accept more complicated widgets of your own.


In this way, UI elements and features "evolve" from social interactions. Really cool widgets get shared widely and advance the tool as a whole. Other features which are useless never get shared, or rarely do and would fall by the wayside. The user is constantly incentivised to continue to revise and create new features and GUI's because they gain what I can only describe as whuffie or egoboo - but there would also be some real world benefit.

I dont know if this idea would fly, but that's why I'm posting it here as well as LazyWeb.

In a way it would be sorta like a kazaa for ui elements and features instead of images and music, except that you are rewarded for sharing - and you are actually "pushing" widgets to your friends instead of them just "pulling" them from you.

The incoming widgets would reside in some kind of "in box" but would be "live" even while they are there and could be dragged and dropped into the main app.

There might be an issue of viruses or denial of service widgets, but this is offset by the fact that you are proactively sending the widget to someone else, and they know who you are (otherwise you couldnt send it) and if you mess up their machine they will spread the word quickly to others to keep you from doing it again.

Repost: Playful Applications

Here's a reposting of something I did on a blog a while back, but I want to revive the MEME :)

I've been kicking this idea around in my head for a long time, and I hope that I can begin to describe it here in a way that I can convey what I mean.

What is a "playful" application? It is an application which takes the concepts of play and discovery and merges them with a traditionally mundane task - like email or web browsing. It's probably better to explain this with a series of examples - both imaginary and real.

Example 1) MoodStats From the site it says:

Moodstats is an application that allows you to quickly record & rate how your day has been in six different categories. You can also attach comments to these values to further illustrate why your moods are the way they are.

MoodStats is an excellent example of what I'm trying to get at. It is an application which does something practical (if you expand your definition of practical to sharing info about your mood to others) and does so in a way thats fun and encourages you to "play" with the app, as well as actually do something besides get a "score" which usually means nothing to folks who play games.

Example 2) n_Gen N_gen is a tongue in cheek application which allows you to enter some basic information and it generates a host of "designed" treatments for you. I'm including this as an example mostly because it's not "really" intended for you to try to do some serious work with the tool, but rather to explore the kinds of things it can do. This exploration aspect is something I think is a key feature of games, but is so very much lacking in standard applications.

Example 3) (fictional) Imagine if you were to fire up your email application - and instead of seeing an endless litany of email subject lines - that you see say a simcity style isometric view of a town, where each house is an email thread, and individual cars are incoming email messages. Spam messages show up as say fast food restaurants. You still see the same "information" which is the contents of your email inbox, but now it has visual aspects of a game, and you have that "discovery" factor.

Example 4) JuniorNet Juniornet is primarily a "kids desktop" which consists of a rotating and constantly updating desktop of games and other visually interesting applications. The most intriguing of these, at least to me, is something called "SteamMail". Instead of getting a beep when you get new mail, you see a little steam whistle like character who pops in and says you have new steam mail. Launching steammail takes you to a large room that looks like some kind of machine that accepts mail as those old fashioned "tubes" like you used to see at old drive through bank tellers. Whenever my kids would get a mail message, it was a very exciting thing to watch the mail come into the machine and cause all kinds of interesting things to happen.

Example 5) The Game Neverending When I first started playing this game, I briefly thought that in addition to creating in-game "toys" that you could create user interface widgets that could enhance your game UI. I learned that this was not actually the case, but the idea intrigued me so much that I wrote an article called Socially Constructed Interfaces... This is one kind of task that a "Playful Application" would be great at doing.


Example 6) <fictional> Imagine that you have purchased a new computer with a brand new operating system. You start off with a very basic interface, and you can only to very simple things like open files and view text. As you gain experience using the computer, it gradually "unlocks" new features for you such as a browser, an mp3 player, or a new way of navigating your files like say via a timeline or an icon based view. This would be akin to playing say an RPG where you start off with 'nothing' and you gradually learn about your world, and you gain new tools to interact in your world. Gosh, why isnt anyone doing this?

mini example 7 - Look at this site, and click on the "toy box" link. All these adoptable "toys" that folks are passing around on the web are evidence of a desire for folks to engage in "play" at the same time doing practial activities (hrmm is web browsing practical?). What if we could combine these "toys" with say blogging.


*sigh* I'm finding this concept difficult to explain, but perhaps if I keep at it I can convey what I mean.

I am puzzled by the fact that there is this huge invisible wall between so called "practical" apps and "games". Practical apps have dry, plain text based interfaces where everything simply sits there and waits for you do pull down menus or scroll down scrollbars. Whereas games can have wildly different interfaces, yet somehow there is an underlying order that gamers pick up on almost immediately and can usually make sense of right away. Why is this? Perhaps it is that "practical" apps have always been for "serious" or "mature" audiences, while games have been the province of children.

I can see some exceptions to this trend. For instance when you look at "skinnable" apps like many MP3 players - you see a pent up desire to break away from traditional look and feel.

Here's another way of describing this... imagine if you took the folks who designed Sim City, or Half-Life, and tasked them to create a personal organizer app, or a web browser. What kind of application would they come up with? You could bet that it'd be fun to use.

It's these aspects of play, discovery, progressing through "levels", gaining skills that I think make some of the more popular traditional applications so appealing. What do I mean? Well I'm still trying to figure that out, but ever notice when you use a tool alot, like say Photoshop, that it seems to have almost a personality, or "flavor" to it? Some apps have virtually none of this "personality" but the ones that do, I'm wagering have a greater popular base of users.

So far I have yet to find an application which really employs these ideas. So this is partially why I've written this article. Do you know of any "Playful Applications"? If so please email me! I want to create a collection of these rare apps. I also intend to try to write something like this myself - with my meager skills - perhaps with RealBasic.

---

Some interesting out-links:

my list of playful applications


social software

presence based multiplayer gaming


Faciliplay : play as an online facilitation technique

Naima - social architecture for networked communities

Found a comment host: Comment This!

Amazing - I stumbled across this site completely by accident - and I realized it was exactly what I was looking for. Now you can comment your hearts out. :)

Blog Comments hosting?

Hello blogosphere, websphere, geosphere, insert-your-name-here-sphere. I am in need of some assistance. Is there a service somewhere out there (beneath the pale moon light) that can host free blog comments? Meaning I host my blog on my plain vanilla FTP site through blogger.com - and I dont have the dynamic cgi access to allow comments, but I've been getting feedback that comments might be useful -- I'd certainly dig them. So does anyone know of a site that offers an add-on blog commenting system? Does even such a beast exist?

I can feel it - "convergence"

I am getting that feeling again. The one I had a long time ago when the web hit. It's that "convergence" feeling. I'm sitting here at my pc, jumping from kinja, to bloglines, to del.icio.us, to magnatune, to yahoo groups, and I realize that someone's going to pull all these services together and create something really powerful. I've been subscribing to great RSS feeds, and I'm finally starting to see the "rewards" of that. News that I care about, and stuff that's interesting to me is getting to me very quickly and efficiently. Oh, and by the way - I havent read my spam-filled inbox in days - instead I'm using Gmail. Can you smell it? CONVERGENCE is coming.