My two year sabbatical is coming to an end. I’m starting as Lead Designer at LucasArts in San Francisco this January which is the beginning of a new phase for me. In September I released Colors! for iPhone and iPod Touch. This has turned Collecting Smiles into a full-fledged independent developer, and I wanted to write a few words of thanks to Apple for that.
Automated game testing
Something that is very cumbersome (and boring) to do for every developer out there is the software testing. To combat that, you usually develop a number of methods that helps you track down bugs, for example automatic bug-reports and unit-testing.
One of the more interesting ones is automated testing. For games, this usually means that you have a system that simulates the player and automatically generates input for it. For my latest project Hyena. I’ve had the rare opportunity to play around with an application where the controls are so basic that it was actually possible to write a system that played the whole game for me.
Hyena v1.02
I’ve released a new version of Hyena for DS and PC at
http://www.collectingsmiles.com/hyena
Hyena – Audiogame Player
It’s time for the release of another project: Hyena
Hyena is something I call an AudioGame player. It is probably more correctly called AudioGameBook which is a combination of the words AudioBook and GameBook, which Hyena is based on. AudioBooks have had a dramatic rise in popularity the last couple of years, probably due to the rise of mp3-players, but they do provide a unique function: Being able to “read” a book while your body is busy with other things. Continue reading Hyena – Audiogame Player
2 cool indy-games
I just wanted to share two recent flash-game findings:
Rose & Camellia – A hilarious game which proves that any setting will work for any kind of game-play
Cursor * 10 – A brilliant innovative idea of a puzzle game
Totally brilliant.
(and on a similar note I just found out that Rorschach made 1up’s 101 Free Games 2008. Not too shabby)
Computergame + Human = Story
Yesterday I attended a lecture by Jonas Carlquist called “Datorspel + Människa = Berättelse” (Computergame + Human = Story). The lecture was mostly directed towards people who didn’t know that much about storytelling in games, but it was still very interesting to see everything from an academics point of view (also, he made a good impression on me by namedropping important games for storytelling like Deus Ex and Planescape Torment).
After thinking a bit about this lecture I though of some of the views I and my fellow designers at Starbreeze has had on how to tell stories in games. In the last couple of games we’ve made, storytelling has been extremely important.
Collecting Smiles
As you may know I’m currently on sabbatical from the games-industry and my company Starbreeze. After having the best job I can imagine for 8 years, I felt I needed a change of scenery and decided to take the money I had managed to put away and burn it on things that makes me feel wiser. You can see some of those things on this site, with small projects of different kinds; some art-projects, some game-projects and some other things that may or may not be good ideas.
The biggest of these projects is one that I haven’t really started on. It’s the project that I’ve been hoping to do for quite some time, and it’s the project that made me create this site in the first place. It’s the Collecting Smiles project.
Strip Mails In Current Folder
Regarding my recent mail-cleaning session I’ve modified a small VBA script I found at Nicola Delfino’s blog that removes attachments from old mails to get the data-base size down. Changes are:
· Processes all mails in the currently selected folder instead of the currently selected mails
· Doesn’t add the ATTACH REMOVED string anymore since using WordEditor made my Outlook wonky for some mails
· Limits the size by throwing away all data after 16384 characters (I had a bunch of 500Kb mails containing program logs)
First time I’ve used VBA. Kind of neat. You can download the script here.
Non-stop audio diary & Memory enhancing technologies
No one can argue that technology has changed how humans think and behave in a very fundamental way. A very simple example is how easy cell phones have made it to meet up with someone while you are out. Before the cell phone you had to carefully plan where and when you would meet while nowadays you just use the cell when it’s time. This may sound like a small thing, but it’s a big change in how you think about planning and also in required personal responsibility.
Another area that I think will make a big impact is forms of memory enhancing technology. People have used PDAs with calendars for a while, but that’s just the beginning. Continue reading Non-stop audio diary & Memory enhancing technologies
Interactive storytelling & dialogue
One of the hardest things to create in games is the interactive stories. It’s probably because that’s something that is very new for us. Before computers, the only stories you could call interactive or branching were the role-playing game-books such as Lone Wolf (which I remember foundly from my childhood). And even those stories are not much older than half a century. Even so, I wish interactive storytelling had evolved as so many other areas related to computers and computer games like graphics technology and AI has.
There are some interesting things going on the subject, though. Continue reading Interactive storytelling & dialogue