I had to share this with everyone as it is AWESOME!
It’s a game where you drive a truck around and kill feathered velociraptors. You also have a ball and chain attached to your truck you can swing around and clothesline raptors with. It sounds wierd but once you play it is just pure happiness! Best of all it runs in your browser… oh my.
Check out the video then hit the link to play the game.
The internet is abuzz today with the announcement of the Google Phone open source platform called Android for cell phones. Here’s a description for the open handset alliance site
Android™ will deliver a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications.
Now I’ve done my share of time in the cell phone game development trenches and have a better understanding of why cell phone game development is a nightmare than I’d like to. Android, however, looks like it could solve many of the problems that plague cellphone game development today. Let me elaborate a bit on the problems with cell phone game development and how Android may fix these.
The Problems with Cell Phone Game Development
First, let me give you a rundown with what I see as the greatest problems with cell phone game development.
1) Nonstandard and Buggy Platforms
The first problem is the standardization of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) [I did most of my work on the Java side of cell phone game development but the Brew (C++) side faces many of the same issues]. Java was brought to cell phones with the intent of making this platform that is completely device independent where one could write their source code once and easily run it on devices from many different manufacturers without any changes. This ideal is fantastic and sounds great, the problem lies in the execution. Today the JVMs for the phones are still buggy in many serious places and each cell phone manufacturer makes their own JVM. Thus for every cell phone there are completely different bugs one must work around and the JVMs do not follow the Java standard very well at all thus source code must be modified conditionally for each set of devices one wants to distribute their game on.
2) Vast Differences in the Handsets the Their Resources
The second problem is the huge amount of differences in the various handsets available. I remember about a year ago I had what was advertised as a top of the line phone (a Sony Ericson s710a) it had a high resolution screen and lots of other nice gamer and multimedia features. When I got further into cell phone game development and actually looked up the amount of memory the phone had the results were laughable. It’s memory available was comparable to phones that were low end trash phones or those given out free years ago. This blew my mind. However, this isn’t a very uncommon problem in cell phones their hardware specs will generally make no sense. People owning that phone expect to be able to buy nice fancy new cell phone games, the phone however can barely count to 3 on it’s own without running out of memory.
More reasons this becomes a problem is the distribution method that cell phone companies use to get people on their networks. They offer really low end crappy phones (hardware wise) that are put into spiffy looking cases and marketed as nice devices. They give these phones out free or even pay you to take them with long 2 year contracts. 2 years is a huge amount of time when it comes to technology, especially technology that is innovating as fast as the cell phone market. What gadgets do you have that are over 2 years old? Furthermore since 80% of the people on any given providers network use these 2 year old low end pieces of junk if you want to make a nice new cell phone game you’re pretty much stuck catering to the low end otherwise you have so little a market and the cell phone providers don’t care enough to let you release your game. Which leads into the third problem.
3) The Pains of Distributing Games with the Major Cell Phone Networks
The third problem as I see it is distribution on the major networks. It can be very hard to get your game released onto the cell phone game market where you can actually sell the game. The phone networks like to control the content fairly tightly and if they don’t think you’re game is a good fit then they’ll shoot you down and won’t let you release the game. This makes cell phone game development especially troublesome for indies because this happens to even the major publishers for example I worked on a game for a major game publisher which was done over a year ago and I think still has not seen the light of day of the market. The networks also will require you make your game for the lower end handsets which means any fancy features or in depth gameplay you want to include will probably be cut unless you want to make multiple versions of the same game.
How the Google Phone Android System Solves These Problems
As you can see there are lots of problems with cell phone game development these days but it can still be a very lucrative market to explore and will only continue to rise in the future as more powerful phones reach the hands of the masses. The Google phone has potential to solve a lot of the problems of the industry lets see how.
1) Android Provides a Standard Platform that Many Manufacturers Plan to Adopt
Because Google intends to provide the operating system to many different manufacturers this could potentially mean that we finally get one single implementation of the JVM and no longer have to go through the nightmare of coding for all sorts of different bugs and “features” of each vendors JVM implementation. If Google does this right and the Android platform is widely adopted and deployed it could really be a new age of cell phone game and application development. The old hope of “right once, run anywhere” could become much closer to reality that before.
2) Android Could Create a Useful Set of Minimum Requirements
It’s not yet known precisely if the Android system will actually do this or not but it would be generally helpful if Google came up with some sort of minimum specifications for phones using the Android platform. For example it might state that there are tier 1 phones which have a certain speed of processor and amount of memory as a minumum (each phone may have more but would need this amount to be certified tier 1) then it could come up with other higher tiers of requirements giving the developers much clearer targets to develop for. This is more of an industry wide problem but something like this created by Google and adopted by the manufacturers who use Android could really go a long way. This would make many development nightmares disapear as development would become much more like developing for consoles (a few machines with a specified hardware specification) instead of the hundreds of devices each with different specs developers must consider these days.
3) Android Provides an Open Platform for Deployment
Google is promoting Android as a very open platform for anyone to develop on. They’re even releasing a SDK to the public in just a couple weeks from now. If done right this will provide a much more streamlined route to market for many developers and could make indie cell phone game projects much more of a reality. Developers could bypass the draconian system of having to run every application and game idea through the minds at the major phone networks (who generally aren’t game minded folks) which could breath new life into the possibilities for innovation within the cell phone game space. We could quickly go from lots of old arcade game ports and tired platformers to games that are really interesting and push the envelope of design. Also it could lead to much cheaper development on a whole which will also help indie developers who want to get into the cell phone game market. If done right this could make the cell phone much closer to the PC as a game platform and really open up the opportunities for cell phone game developers on a whole.
I’m Very Excited About Where The Cell Phone Game Industry Could Be Headed
Before this news about Android I had written off cell phone gaming as a tired and torturous industry to work in. Now, however, I have new hope that that industry can be reinvigorated and the best days could be ahead. If Google can do for cell phone development what it has done for the internet in the last few years we are certainly destined to see some great innovations come right to our pockets. Great and innovative games being just one benefit.
Eye of Judgment
I’ve been really stoked about Eye of Judgment since I heard about it and I still am now that it’s out. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Eye of Judgment is a collectible card game (CCG) for the Playstation 3 (or is it PLAYSTATION 3) that allows you to view 3D renderings of your cards monsters and units and battle against the computer or other players online. It uses the Playstation Eye peripheral to view what cards you’re playing on the board and register them into the game world that is a virtual representation of the board. They also sell booster decks of the cards that you can purchase in game shops and such to make different decks. Wow that sounds complicated when I write it out. Perhaps this cheesy video will help.
Sadly, I don’t yet have a PS3 myself but I’m sure I’ll acquire one soon and this game is certainly putting the pressure on me. First you must understand that I’m a huge CCG fan and was once (and probably will be again in the future) a rather hardcore Magic The Gathering player, so I think about CCG games a lot and they’ve intrigued me for a long time. I’ve even got a game design I did for an online one sitting around that I hope to make one day.
Anyway this game sounds pretty great but I have heard negative aspects of how the game design isn’t that deep and the decks that come with the game are pretty bland so perhaps it’s not quite living up to it’s potential but it is certainly innovative and I’ll applaud that.
The Eye of Judgment Card Hack
The game only recently came out and some ingenious players have already figured out that they can hack it to be able to get any card in the game. Basically they scan the cards into their computer and print them out. This shouldn’t work and it’s an obvious method that the developers would have thought of before hand, and they did. You see they made some special “magical?” ink that they used to print the cards that the camera was supposed to detect, apparently though this doesn’t work at all and a normal inkjet printer can reproduce the cards well enough for the camera to recognize them and you can basically use any card and as many as you want using this technique. There’s more info on the printed cards here. It also looks like you may not even have to go through all that much trouble.
Obviously many people will think this is cheating unfair and such but I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute and explain why it’s not really that big of a deal. First of all any CCG designer worth his salt knows that your game has to be balanced under the assumption that all players will have unlimited access to your card base and therefore can (and will if it grants an advantage) play with the maximum number allowed of in their deck. The reason for this is because any hardcore fans of your game will go to any length to obtain exactly the cards they want for their deck and typically how difficult these are to obtain is irrelevant. This goes back to Magic and it’s limit of 4 of any one card in a deck, as I understand Eye of Judgment has a similar requirement, thus having all players have access to all the cards shouldn’t degrade from the entertainment and fun value of the game and will probably only put a hurt on the profit margins. Any big tournament level player of Magic typically doesn’t think about whether they have particular cards when considering what deck they want to play in an upcoming tournament.
Secondly, CCGs have a long tradition of proxying cards, proxying is the process which a player will take any mundane card write on it or otherwise mark it to indicate it actually represents some other card which they don’t actually own. This process originally necessitated because of the extremely rare power 9 cards and other rare cards in Magic the Gathering which can cost $1000+ each, obviously limiting them their accessibility to the greater base of players of the game and thus granting a somewhat unfair advantage to owners of these cards. Proxying Magic cards is a pretty standard practice these days and many tournaments even allow this practice for the older formats where the cards are much rarer, more expensive and hard for players to obtain because of the limited print runs of cards before the games popularity took off. Wizards of the Coast doesn’t allow proxying cards in any sanctioned tournaments however.
Now if you are considering playing Eye of Judgment online you must realize you will now be playing against players who have access to every possible card in the game in multiples. People will abuse this hack to gain an advantage because it is the nature of a player to take and use any advantage available to them, as Raph Koster tells us in Theory of Fun for Game Design
Ultimately the rules of the game change. No longer is it a game about collecting and skill begins to play a much larger role in the game in the long run since personal wealth and ability to acquire cards becomes a non-factor. What Magic has taught us though is that this isn’t really a bad thing and much fun can still be had when the game becomes a game of skill and less a game of chance, this is of course in theory as Eye of Judgment probably doesn’t have the depth and finesse that Magic has and ultimately the game design of Eye of Judgment and it’s ability to be a fun game will be the ultimate test.
It’s also possible that if they’re serious about this game they’ll figure out how to fix this with the next set or possibly even with some software update and the whole argument becomes a moot point until some fancier hacks are discovered. Either way this is an interesting story to watch.
If you are interested in CCG design then stick around I’ll certainly be discussing it more in the future. CCGs are one of my pet genres so I intend to come back to them quite a bit in future posts.
Well the internet sleuths are in full force and Destructoid reported that someone has stumbled across what was the initial concept work for Echochrome and it is called OLE Coordinate System. The best part is you can play it right now by downloading it here.
Of course since this was one of the most interesting games to come out of E3 I was quick to jump on it and give it a try.
The project page explains that OLE stands for Object Locative Environment which certainly describes what we’ve been seeing from Echochrome game play so far. The author also explains the goal of allowing us all to play in Escher like worlds.
“While M.C. Escher is famous for his “trick of the eye” works, this piece enables users to create and experience their own Escher-esque worlds.”
The page then goes on to describe the various mechanics of the game:
What’s available for play is mainly a level editor where you can create your own Escher like levels and try out the mechanics of the game. Sadly there’s now way to save your levels from what I could find but I’d love to see screen shots of what other people came up with. Here’s a video showing off the OLE Coordinate System in action for those who don’t aren’t into checking it out first hand.
All of it seems very metaphysical and definitely gets the mind jogging. We’ve seen a couple of the mechanics before such as in Super Paper Mario having the ability to flip to 3D mode and move around pipes and such blocking the way. The holes also remind me of the upcoming game Portal in Orange Box and the portals in Prey a bit. But certainly all of these things haven’t been put together into such a mind bending package before and I really think that’s where the fun will come from once Echochrome drops. I’m definitely looking forward to Echochrome being released as I can see this making a fantastic puzzle game.
One of the more intriguing games to come out of E3 this year has got to be Echochrome. It’s being described as a puzzle game inspired by the works of M.C. Escher and in the same vein as Intelligent Qube. The game is set for release on the PSP and Playstation 3 Playstation Network sometime in the future (I couldn’t find a listed release date on this one.) Ironically enough those are the two systems I don’t currently own, that however will probably change especially with the current stream of intriguing games being announced for the Playstation 3. Some game play footage for this was just released as well that looks to do a good job of showing what the games about. The footage also features a classical music soundtrack that feels very natural with this game, I can only hope that is the soundtrack they end up using in the game and not just for the demo footage.
In true Escher style, game play appears to involve rotating the camera to move the objects in the world so that the player can interact with them in different and more useful ways. It’s certainly an exciting concept and I always enjoys games that like to tease the mind into seeing things in many different ways. This looks to be quite an intriguing game and probably one we’ll keep tabs on here at Zen And Games.
