I use a fairly powerful laptop at home. It’s not exactly a gaming laptop but it has a pretty powerful gaming card (ATI X1600) and uses dual core (Duo T2300E) processor. In short its a great machine to play classic Sega/Nintendo games of yesteryears’ through emulators. Increasingly I have been concerned about the life of my laptop keyboard which I have found, unlike the desktop keyboards, could be quite easily jammed (especially if your 10 year old cousin is banging on Enter key yelling ‘MAAARREYO’).

Somehow I had this intuition that a gamepad-like input device can solve this problem. After a couple of minutes of googling I found that my guess was correct. I could find that it is easily available in cities like Mumbai/Bangalore and it is quite cheap too. But I was not sure if I can get in in Mangalore so I searched the usual places and a few unusual places like gadget.in. I had the following criteria for my gamepad (or joypad or game controller as it is called in some places):

• Must have the basic set of buttons for playing Nintendo and Sega games
• Must have a joystick. This is the basic advantage of gamepads over keyboard+mouse
• Must be cheap so that I can probably buy more if I need to host a mini game party
  Plus, it must have decent looks

The prices range from Rs. 450 (Chinese make incl. Shipping) to Rs. 1100 (Logitech Dual action) online. I also read accounts of people who went for Logitech and lost their calibration in a few months and accounts of people who have been using cheap gamepad for the last 3 years.

Finally, I could get a decent gamepad with vibrations and dual joysticks from Mangalore (Saibeen Complex, Lalbagh) itself for Rs. 350. It is a Chinese model called PU850 and is autodetected by XP when plugged into the USB port (though it comes with a mini CD with drivers). It has all the features I wanted. As regards to looks, decide for yourself

Don’t they go well with each other :D? I have played only a few games with it so this is a quick review but here is what I found:

• It is small and light for my hands alleast. It is fully powered by the usb (no batteries)
• Almost all emulators detected it out of the box
• Sega Genesis games work well with the joystick in Analog mode. I use the 4 shoulder buttons and right joystick in most cases.
• Nintendo Gameboy games work well with the left D-pad or HAT switches. It seems to be over-reacting to the joystick. Could be an emulator problem though. I found it more easier to hold it tilted forward when playing these games.

All in all, it has been a good value for money. I can now literally sit back and play my game collection with much better controls and stop worrying about my Pandora.

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Many, many moons ago, I used to frequent a long dusty and weed-ridden road with the dreams of a pompous education. While the path opened many doors, the dream still remained a mere mirage. The chasm between IT ‘Real World’ and my Engineering classes was shockingly wide, deep and treacherous. My Govt. Engineering College is still an asylum for Dreamers. Their eyes are still full of dreams and heads full of unfinished ideas.

But after those 4 years, I am not disillusioned. Actually, far from it, I have the fondest memories of trying (perhaps in vain) to try and make a difference, to an educational system gathering dust. ‘Softcorner’ was one such attempt that I had spearheaded. Apart from coining a punningly clever name for a software exhibition. I tried to make the demo’ed software as approachable to the ‘Average Joe’ as possible (You might wonder how many Average Joe’s one would find in an Engg college. Trust me, plenty!!). We designed a mascot character who would explain different technical concepts in a simple language through posters. I had to think how to visualize concepts like Huffman encoding and Data Structures in the language of comics. In fact, some of my friends didn’t know I could draw until that day

Of course, a software exhibition would be incomplete without cool software. We had some bright fellows who were developing pretty interesting software thanks to Pramod Sir, who gave us lots of guidance. But we needed many more projects to make it truly a moderate sized exhibition. I, for one, felt a lot more responsible and wanted to develop 3 or 4 projects in this short time span. Being a little egoistical, I wanted them to be decent crowd pullers as well. In hindsight, a major handicap was that there was no Internet connection, so ‘online applications’ were out-of-question. So in circa 2001, this zeroed down to practically using Visual Basic 6.0.

I had 3 project ideas at that time:

1. A Kaun Banega Crorepathi (KBC) Simulator
2. A Biorhythm Calculator
3. A simple VGA game

My timeline was one week. Please note that I had to manage the logistics of preparing for Softcorner in parallel (I am not going to add ‘meanwhile complete my assignments’, because it wasn’t much of a workload then). All these applications had to look attractive and should be running full screen.

As it turns out, the first project was easiest to code. KBC is basically the Indian clone of the gameshow based on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ All the game requires is a way of picking random questions and allowing the player to pick among four alternatives. Regular viewers of the show are quite familiar with the hexagonal interface and gimmicky confirmatory questions by the host like ‘Lock Kiya Jaaye’ or ‘Confident?’. Armed with Photoshop and a GK book, all this went into the design of the game. The whole affair didn’t take that long and within one night, I had the EXE ready (What a productive one night stand !)

But the second project turned out to be the hardest to make, despite being the second time I was developing a Biorhythm application. The date functions and the math never seemed to find a middle ground. I also didn’t have a working Biorhythm calculator to confirm. So in terms of testing, this baby was a nightmare. But I must admit that with its cool sinusoidal graphs and calendar buttons, I was extremely proud of it when it was finished.

The game was pretty much DOS based and used Allegro for graphics. It was a variant of “Bouncing Babies” except with Chimps. It had pretty much all the usual features of a DOS game like High scores list, Help screens and various difficulty levels. It was fun designing the physics for this game(isn’t it always so ?), but certainly not eye candy for the masses. Again, adding all the features, took quite a bit of coding in C++.

The D-day finally came and we were all tensed. We tried to market as best as we could. If we pulled-in only the “geek crowd” and some senior lecturers, then it would turn out to be a flop show. So, we tried the simplest trick in the book, attract more girls! It was simpler than we thought, we started distributing some handouts to the ‘target population’ (an MBA term I later picked up) and also some extensive word-of-mouth publicity. The crowds slowly trickled in and soon a bunch of wide-eyed girls are listening intently to a demonstration of ‘Huffman’s Compression Algorithm’.

Being egoistical, as mentioned earlier, I always kept an eye on my 3 projects and the results still astound me. The first project was without exaggeration the star of the show. Many wanted copies of the simulator and wanted to know how it worked(!) They kept pondering over questions like - ‘Why does it repeat some questions?’ (it had some 30 odd questions in its database), ‘How does it make such smart comments?’ (random no: generator) etc. If you have ever seen the original game show, the main selling point is the tension built just before the participant answers the question. The viewers hang at the edge of their seats wondering if the words coming out the person on the hot seat will take him/her to the next higher rung or seal his/her fate forever. Many felt that my simulator could recreate a bit of that drama successfully.

It was an important lesson at that point. Basically, Do your research well before you start coding. Spending Herculean effort on any venture will make you biased on judging the success of the project. But often, simple but effective ideas ‘click’. Probably, I should say one of the best lessons I learnt from GEC.

PS: All images are copyrighted by their respective owners. They are not screen shots of the software mentioned in the article

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This is an update on game development which has been put on hold for quite some time now. Despite being my definitive passion, it has frequently been pushed to the back burner. My recent interest in photography, since I bought the SLR and short stories are chiefly to blame. Actually, I have received very good appreciation on both. But at the end of the day, the following quote (which is now on my signature line) from John Carmack holds true:

“Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.”

Being one of the most brilliant and successful game programmers in the world, there must be some truth in his words. In the meanwhile I have read many, many game blogs. These blogs are specifically written by game developers who describe the development of their projects

Most of the time when I get an idea to design a game, I end up either over-engineering it (purely on paper) or over-researching. In short, there is never a single line of code written. It is like the age-old school boy’s dilemma of whether to skim through the entire syllabus or to concentrate on some sections which are likely to be asked in the exams. It is a dilemma because even if some achieve the former they manage to flunk. In case you haven’t guessed, this is a Wrong Thing. John Romero is supposed to have written one game every week at the prime of his career. There is a reason for placing more importance to execution than planning when it comes to game programming. The primary reason is that there are no established frameworks or fundas when it comes to the game industry like for eg: Enterprise software. Most people seem to have the roll-out-your-own mentality rather than reuse the existing body of work. There have been attempts to create a games knowledge base but it doesn’t ease the pain of clean room development. Most of the time people end up learning it the hard way, i.e. by quick prototyping. It is often impossible to gauge if a game would succeed or not without a prototype. No matter how good you are at game design, it often comes down to how clever or innovative you are in execution, in game development.

Personally, being an indie game developer, my primary means of delivery is the web. Hence I usually end up thinking - “How to reduce the downloadable size or can it be playable on the browser?” This puts severe restrictions on what technology you can use. For eg: consider I am making an Indian Mario-like platform game. Currently all platform games are being made in 3D, hence this game would have to be in 3D. However the download size of the code and all the artifacts like textures and sound clips would add up to several tens of megabytes. This is prohibitively large in India, which is still a long way off from the broadband revolution. In fact the IGF 2005 caps this download size limitation at 25 MB for international markets. Of course, I can aim at other markets. But even in those markets, there are very few who would download a game to play it due to the considerable deliberation involved and concern about viruses.

This leaves us with basically web based games (or the casual gamers market). Two technologies are poised to cover this market. The first is Javascript and the other is of course Flash. Javascript currently requires a lot of improvement like sound playback, smooth rendering of large area redraws and scalable graphics to be good enough for game development. Flash requires proprietary development tools which are not even geared towards game development. However, these are 2D game technologies and not considered to be competitive or technically interesting domains anymore.

A surprisingly large number of adults play a certain kind of 2D game called computerized board games. Board games are interesting because they are like ancestors of many kinds of computers games like Age of Empires , WarCraft etc. Most of them have elaborate rules and very interesting themes. Traditionally played as a family game, the computerized versions often have an AI player making it suitable even for solitary play.

I stumbled across this by pure luck. In fact, I was trying to design a murder mystery based on my hometown Thrissur, codenamed Pooram. I happened to stumble upon a board game called Clue or Cluedo. It seemed to have the right mix of chance and deduction to suit my taste. In fact, its sheer popularity can be guessed by the sheer number of websites dedicated to it. Pooram is best played in multiplayer mode though I expect the majority of the casual gamers to play it in single player mode. It involves solving a murder mystery in a 3D environment with billboards like Paper Mario. This is the plan and I decided to stick to it. Of course, there was a lot of research. Some of it (about 20%) turned out to be useful. Most of it disproved that 3D might be a bad option. Some of them used a custom 3D engine for smooth zooming in and out, which would have been difficult on a 2D game. But I guess I’ll have to design a prototype to know for sure

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One of the most disturbing questions most game developers face is whether Video Game is an art form or not. Of course, by Video Games I’m also including computer game and console games.

A very well written essay on this can be found here Video Games as Art by clysm

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My 75th post! (or so says my Wordpress engine), a big thank you to all those who have visited my little space on this sea of information. Is it now due to move to Wordpress 2.0? I’ve read all the enhancements and me don’t think so

With more and more projects like Basecamp and Gmail, the application space within a browser is limited only by ones imagination. If AJAX sounds greek to you, probably you might not have heard about all the excitement behind it. Basecamp is already net’s most favourite Project Management tool. And you would really need to get out of that rock if you haven’t heard of Gmail.

As a budding game developer I’m quite frankly petrified by the alarming growth of such web based apps (this includes Flash based and Javascript based apps). These days I’m sceptical if a gamer would download a zip file or (shudder) an EXE file and go through the installation to just try a game. All the while when there are many of your favourite games like Pac-man (-clone) and Lemmings already ready for you to play. Well, I guess hard-core gamers would be put off by the slow interactions within a browser, but playing speed might just be a question of time.

Anyways, I’ve decided to try my hand at some cool javascript coding. Right from the moment I discovered the game at E-Scribe I found it quite addictive. I just had to finish coding it. In fact, it must have actually taken me less than 5 hours to code, design artwork and test (in 3 browsers - IE, Firefox and Safari !!!) meanwhile sippping tea over endless discussion in the foodcourt ;).

For the impatient the game below is ready to play, so try it online, try it now

Rules

The objective is to arrange the some jumbled numbers into numbers in increasing order. At each step all you can do is click on a number. As a result all the numbers to the left of the number including the number will be reversed.

For example, if the current list is 2 3 4 5 1 6 7 8 9 and you reverse 4, the result will be 5 4 3 2 1 6 7 8 9. Now if you reverse 5, you win.

Play here, now!

“Reverse” in your website?

Simple! Just copy paste the following code in your site

<iframe src="http://www.arunrocks.com/downloads/reversegame/reverse-js-game.html"
width = "420" height="100" frameborder="0" scrolling="no">
</iframe>

Please give due credits. The code is release under the GNU General Public License

Learnings

This section would be of interest only to Javascript developers
Some interesting lessons learnt whilst developing this game are:

• IDE: Mozilla Firefox is an excellent platform to develop JavaScript apps thanks to the DOM Inspector and clickable JavaScript console
• Presentation: End output is very professional and customizable. This is due to usage of CSS which very effectively separates presentation from design. For eg: I can make any number of “skins” for this game. Also traditional game art resources such as fonts are already present “out of the box”
• Paradigm: Out of the box event handling model need some getting used to, especially for new programmers. This is especially true for timer code which I would expect most games to use extensively.
• innerHTML: innerHTML is not fully crossplatform. It is very useful for debugging hence was often used in alert boxes. Use for node creation use DOM functions such as createElement or appendChild
• Animation: This was one of the primary reasons I wanted to turn the text based game in E-Scribe to a graphical one. It was no clear which digits were being swapped. Rather than go for a full blown fading/translating animation, I opted for a simple blink. As a result the gameplay is faster and more responsive.

[tag]Programming, Javascript, Game, DHTML, DOM, innerHTML[/tag]

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A test to see if the mini-site on game development is working…. A promise of more exciting things to come

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This weekend, I was humbled in more ways than one. First while
visiting the London Science Museum, when one gets to see a spell
binding display of the relentless scientific pursuits of Man. Despite
spending a good 2 hours inside, we barely managed to cover the ground
floor of this five storied treasure house of knowledge. And second,
when I realised that, whenever one feels financially complacent; pay a
visit to Harrods and you’ll swear never to use the expression
“over-priced” in your life.

Harrods is the world’s most recognised department store spread over
five acres right in the heart of London. Here you can see heaps of
well earned money frittered over the most trivial or sometimes futile
purchases. Like for e.g. in a “Sale” a pen for £250 (twice the price
of a mid-range digital cameras) or a coffee table with a chess board
print (not even carved) for £10,000. However, what would probably
surprise you is - simply, the crowd. Yes, hundreds of rooms filled
with buyers busy filling up their umpteenth green ‘Harrods’ shopping
bag. If you hadn’t noticed the price tags, this would have passed for
an ordinary departmental store.

Few minutes later, you look around. Your fears get confirmed. You are
indeed the only person who is not shopping. So, I decide; while I’m
here, I better observe the ways and manners of the elite. Most
disappointingly, they look exactly like the ordinary London
milieu. Most of them in casuals like sneakers (horror!) and jeans. Yes
my friends you have to look out for subtle giveaways like designer
labels or rolex watches to spot the real cash puppies. Hints that
never escape the sharp eyes of the shop assistants. So, if you are the
right crowd, you’ll perhaps be treated like a prince (most probably
you are already one;) ). But I’m far from one, so…

The next planned destination - Hyde park, was sealed due to the
Live8 concert. Though a major event here, the whole idea seemed
shallow and pointless to me. In fact, it was not even a fund raising
event like ‘Live Aid’. People seemed to have watched the whole 12 hour
show and stayed up most of the night. In fact, I did stay up too, but
for my game project Was fighting some Ogre-Blender related issues,
but I got my issues solved thanks to the excellent Ogre3d
support. Yet another day is saved, thanks to the excellent support of
open-source projects :).

PS: From now on we can have beautiful category icons designed by Jimmac

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It has been a long, long time since I coded anything in C++. It was bound to happen, I kept telling myself. For one I was building Agony, a multiplayer game with 3D graphics. Like the slog overs in a cricket match, my project was also crawling. So today morning when my fingers started itching, I knew that time is ripe for… Agony. Here are the (low-coloured) screenshots for your amusement:

An army of stationary bots with sphere-like weapon (aka a pointed triangle ;)) [1 hrs]

Bots are scattered, but turning and moving! [3 hrs]

The hero has arrived! Arrow keys work [5 hrs]

Well, incase you would like to play this incomplete game you can download it from this link

03Agony.zip [137 Kb]

Regarding life, I’m moving out of my guest house tomorrow. It has been 3 months so far. The longest stint in any transfer I’ve ever had in any place. A huge vaccum is being felt. A window of this screen is the most special place in my world, now. I see few words of taunts or liberating rants which my near and dear have to tell me in a box within this 14 inch frame.

No I’m not missing home, but something more. I need to feel achievement pulsing in my blood stream again. I guess I’m addicted to it.

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A big colourful cloud filled with happiness and energy. That’s how that last ten days felt like. Being a prisoner of monotony of work, this break was my parole. Just enough to breathe life into my dying creative thoughts.

Four extremely long bus journeys which afford sleep in semi-recliner position gave me enough time to mull over my pet project. I realized that the MMORPG is just an approximate term for something I have in mind. Role-Playing be it text based or graphical is only as interesting as the environment. The environment I have in mind is hardly original – Ancient India. Carrying the tradition of RPGs we could invent (or rather discover) races such as Rishis (similar to wizards), Devas (no analogy, except say Elves) or Asuras (say Orcs?). I really don’t know if this would appeal to our audience. This concept is helpful to differentiate participants by trying to identify them with a sub-culture. We, Indians, I daresay already co-exist with different sub-cultures. It’s a debatable question. On a more practical note it tends to provide repeat playability.

I would like to clarify that my pet project named Agony will essentially involve sub-plots and multi-linear gameplay. In my personal opinion, purely immersive playing with infinitesimal pathways can get quickly boring. This would also mean that we get to make a universe with its own physics/economic laws and a decent storyline. And lest do I forget, engaging 3D graphics (no we are not recreating “The Matrix” here ). The biggest giveaway would be the “creator” mode in which you can perform level editing. Not having played a single MMORPG myself, I do not know if any game server supports this. But to me, game servers are nothing but persistent finite state machines. This makes them suitable for rapid prototyping of user-made levels. This is one experiment which I would definitely try out.

Regular readers of my blog would notice that my research is slowly creeping into my regular blogs. This is was not forced and it seems it is far more common than I had imagined.

Time to switch to other more worldly matters. The organization in which I did my NGO project Janaseva Sisubhavan (designed by me ) is getting greater media attention than ever. NGO project is basically a part of my MBA programme in TAPMI involving social work. It must be one of the most important organizations in social work in Kerala. I promise to add more pictures of Kerala in my gallery soon.

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Wow, its finally happening. I’m going home for Diwali! A major inauguration happened yesterday, the Phase 2 of Pune DC was inaugurated. Everyone came in ethnic wear. There was a competition for best dressed male and female. It seemed there were too many contenders. Thankfully, we were in the food court all the while, where it was being staged. It was sometimes hilarious with patriotic and clichéd Miss World style one-liners.

I’m writing this from Mangalore all the while thinking about my game project ‘Agony’. Past few days I’ve been reading a lot about MMORPGs. My proverbial fears have turned true. There is deep relationship between EAI and MMORPGs. There is a concept of rules and facts and rule engines here. More than that, making an MMORPG required exhaustive knowledge of many social sciences like history, geography, phsycology etc. Amazing! And how many MBAs are actually making one. Very, very few. Why? Because of the immense depth of knowlegde that can be conveyed by the medium of the game. For e.g. many bright guys (no sarcasm here) in my MBA batch tried to make a financial simulation, but they had very cumbersome tools like Excel spreadsheets. As a result the game was very linear and turn-based (as opposed to real-time). In fact one of our profs tried using a game called MarkStrat (a commercial product nothing close to an MMORPG in terms of UI but a multiplayer simulation nonetheless) and it was a big hit. Many described as the single most important course in Marketing that mattered. So I’m pondering to get behind the camera of a multiplayer game. Lets see how crazy this project gets On a unrelated note, it needs a more telling name, like ‘SimDesh’ or something.

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