Path Constraint

Forza!!!

2009-11-06T17:19:00.001Z

Well it’s 17:13 on a Friday, I am waiting for the new version of the Editor to load, compiling the game and building assets at the same time so I can start Monday with a fresh build!

So here is something I did this yesterday morning, It took me about an hour on the Forza Vinyl Group Editor, and 112 Shapes.

Now I have a more complete version up on the Store Front, just look for Lionhead.

A long needed post about Lua

2009-09-05T10:25:00.002+01:00

Lua is a scripting language created in Brazil, more specifically in the (Pontifícia Universidaded Católica do Rio, PUC-RIO).

Quoting their own website: “Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.” Which is pretty accurate in my opinion, and probably in the opinion of everyone that works with it in a daily basis.

More importantly though, is that Lua is widely used as a scripting language in games. A lot of major companies use it, and a lot of well known games have published games using LUA. I worked in Fable 2 which is one of them, and I carry on working with it in Fable 3.

Two very important features of Lua in my opinion are the flexible variables, a Lua variable can take anything, integers, floats, strings, tables, enums, and their type can change on the fly so

if a == 1 then
a = ”I changed the variable to contain this string”
end

is perfectly valid.

The other one, and probably the most important feature of Lua are tables. Tables are a way of storing data, much like an Array, but a lot more powerful.

Tables are a sequence of Lua variables, so each entry of the table can contain a different type, and even other tables. And this is just amazing. After you used Lua tables you start wondering why the hell no other language has a feature like this.

I use C# for my XNA personal projects, and I was thinking about implementing a Lua style tables into it just because I miss it so much when I’m using C#.

Of course, these are just a couple of cool things about Lua, there are a ton more.

You can Download Lua here.

New Project and doh!

2009-07-21T14:13:00.004+01:00

I should be ashamed of myself. I have gone and shelved my last project, yes the space one I was so excited about. But I did it in favour of a much simpler and feasible one and I intend going back to it at a later date.

So my new project is 2D, and is coming along nicely. The last thing I did was plugging in the Farseer Physics Engine to it.

I was thinking about writing my own physics library but then I'd be left with a complexity that I'm not really too concerned about. I took a look at the Farseer Demoes and it looks like it does pretty much I need it to do, and it has nice debug viewing library that it come in handing when trying to figure out what is going one.

I plugged in the Body and Geom in my entities, and a PhysicsSimulator, and shazam, they JustWorked™. But something was wrong, my two entities were not coliding.

After some debugging and deep thought at 8:30 in the morning, I scream DOH! (I have created a new PhysicsSimulator for each entity so they were totally unaware of each other), that's when my wife kicked me off the room saying: "I'm trying to write here!"

She is working on her PhD thesis.

Watch our announcements LIVE

2009-06-01T16:35:00.001+01:00

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/e309/default.htm

Geek Chart

2009-05-29T17:35:00.001+01:00

I just added it to the blog. It is supposed to track my geeky activity and show the world how much of a geek I am, and how much time I spend with Internet Novelties. Just signed up for stumble upon just so the chart would be complete. What a total dork.

It’s AAAliveeee!!!…. well sort of.

2009-05-29T09:12:00.001+01:00

Yesterday evening I began to inject some life into my entities by coding the Behaviour Class that goes inside the CSimpleAI Component, my first AI component in the game, which, at least for now, is the very basic Brain of my entities. The cool thing being obviously, that not every entity has a that component.

This morning I finished coding the very basic first behaviour to make into the game. BehaviourGoToPosition, which takes an entity, a Vector in the 3D space(target_position), and a speed value. The AI component takes care of passing the parent entity that it belongs to on the the Behaviour it currently has, and the values I passed as the target_position, and speed where totally hardcoded and arbitrary… calm down there! I’m just kick starting the whole thing.

A added this behaviour to the component as the initial Behaviour and voilà!!!

The entity quickly went where it should be going! OH! The joy of creating “life”!

Progress at last

2009-05-25T16:32:00.001+01:00

It’s bank holiday Monday so instead of slacking and playing games all day long I played a bit in the morning then had to drag myself to the front of the computer to tackle the problem I have been long stuck on.

I had no idea how to reference the parent Entity inside the components. It was pretty simple really.

All I had to do was to add a function to my IComponent interface (and implement them in the Components).

EntityBase GetParentEntity()
void SetParentEntity(Entitybase entity).

Now when I add the component that I read from the Data I have in the XML file, I also add a reference to the parent entity.

component.SetParentEntity(this)

it was very simple and it was right in front of me all along, but it took a long thread from people from work to get the idea right in my head.

Now on to implementing SimpleAI. Now we are moving into more complex stuff.

A blog by email test

2009-05-07T11:19:00.001+01:00

A bit of my desk...

Hiatus

2009-05-06T11:57:00.001+01:00

I haven’t been very good lately. Left my project untouched for a couple of months. I hit a road block on my entity building, and my brain froze. That and I had some games to go through.

Prince of Persia: Pretty good, most critics say is far too easy, I say is fluid. I really liked the experience. The Epilogue bit has all the nagging issues of the old Prince of Persia Games that made them frustrating. It’s almost like they tried to make up for the fact that the game was “too” user friendly. The part that I liked. Specially after playing the nearly pixel perfect jumping and thoroughly convoluted experience that is Mirror’s Edge. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great design and with lot’s of production value but it keeps forgetting why did it came to this world, and what the fun part of the game is “free running”. It’s almost like someone that wasn’t working directly on the project gone and said… hmm… you need more combat, more enemies, there isn’t enough frustration in the game.

Dead Space: I decided that I had “cojones” and chose to play it on Hard from the start, just like I did with Gears of War 2, Halo 3, Bioshock and some other FPS. Damn! Dead Space is hard. Hard and scary, Yatzee forgive me but he is probably suffered from horror desensitization or something. This game scares the crap out of me and I found myself too stressed out to carry on playing. When I come back I will probably put the difficult down… maybe…I want those extra achievements.

And that brings me to the last one, which probably should require a post of it’s own.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts by my fellow colleagues at Rare: God what a fantastic game! Though you really need to spend more than five hours on it to start enjoying it. It is a meta-linguistic-piece-of-art-of-a-game if ever there was one.

“Hero Klungo Sssavesss Teh World” is the work of a genius.

I know the whole “Are games art?” malarkey depends on a very subjective point of view, and what is your personal conception of art, and blah, blah, blah... and for most it’s not even worth discussing, but in my opinion, that little “fake” 8-bit platformer touches so many subjects with such subtlety that it can’t be just out of pure luck, it’s true genius. It’s like the game is an very tongue-in-cheek interactive statement about everything that was wrong with pixel-perfect platformers, while touching subjects of game programming, art, design, production, and the whole game development process. It may be that you may need to be a hardcore gamer or actually work in the games industry to get the humour of it. It’s a piece of art directed to a niche, but a piece of art nonetheless.

A different approach

2009-03-11T08:50:00.001Z

I was looking at my post the other day and thinking about the whole scheduling malarkey. So I have asked for some input from a friend and colleague. We are both lucky because I give him a lift to work every day and I get to pick his brains, so, I think it’s a fair deal.

He said that I really shouldn’t over plan things because due to my level of experience in software engineering it is likely that I’ll get a lot of things wrong. Even experienced engineers make mistakes and have to do a lot of rework. I should try a different approach.

So this is basically his advice. Look to your project and think about what you need it to do, and everything you think you might need in order to get that to happen. Plan those tasks, prioritize according to the dependencies and then start coding straight away. You will get results, and your project will move forward, there will be a lot of refactoring but there would be a lot of refactoring anyways because it’s unlikely that you will stick with the first implementation of any code that you write, and Get Cracking.

So I chose something I need to do. I need to have a spaceship on the screen that moves around, and can be targeted, attacked, destroyed and can fight back. Doesn’t seem much. But breaking down what I need to make this happen I came across a small mountain of work.

So far I have a pretty busy schedule that leads up to the end of April. In total I have:

4 Art Tasks: No big deal
1 Audio Task: No big deal
31 Code Tasks: Ahem…

And I can start working straight away. At least I already have a secondary viewport that draws my current target on in. Pretty neat… but I guess I’ll only put a video of it when I finish my March/April Sprint.

And the winner is

2009-03-11T08:32:00.001Z

I am thrilled that FABLE II has won the BAFTA for Action & Adventure Game last night!

The Boring Stuff?

2009-03-09T13:34:00.001Z

I got to a point of my little XNA project that I’m quite comfortable to set myself a deadline for completion. Two years. TWO YEARS??? Well… I am working on my own after all, and it’s a little but ambitious projects.

Now, if I want to get this out of the door I need to set myself some deadlines… Let’s say, Complete my code by next March, have all the final Assets in game by next September, and have six months to fix bugs and polish.

It’s all fun and games when you are coding and you get visual improvements on the screen. There is a sense that things are moving forward. Up to this point I have been pretty much doing what I felt like doing. All important things that were needed in the final project but now I have reached a point when every time I want to sit down and do some work on it, I need to first spend about an hour reviewing the code I have already written trying to work out what my next step should be. And that’s wasting precious time. Especially because I might decide to work on something that isn’t as important than something else in the huge mountain of works there is to be done.

How big is the mountain? How many things do I have to do, what should I be working on now? The good thing about being working on the games industry is that I now have a pretty good picture of how game development works as a whole. And how much more work there is to be done than one actually would think there was, and how we go about managing the production cycles.

The big difference here is that I am on my own and I can’t do everything simultaneously like it’s done in the industry. But I need to take advantage of that. In the development process of a large game there is a lot of reworking, things that get changed, chucked away, designs that sprout out of nowhere in the middle of a milestone, and other things like that. Most of this is because things are done simultaneously and due to communication problems. Unless I get a split personality in the middle of the process communication with myself isn’t exactly a problem so when I tell myself I need these model to look like this, I will immediately understand what I mean and won’t spend two days working on something that does not please me. And I won’t do things simultaneously, which means it’s unlikely that things I change will have an unexpected effect, and if they do I can resolve it there an then. All and all it means that the project will move a lot slower but it should be leaner.

Basically, looking to the near future of the project there is little code work to be done, but lots of planning. Up until the end of the month I need to have:

Finished the design of the Mechanics and Systems.
Model the Code Structure
Schedule Code Tasks
Schedule the whole project.

On the 360

2009-03-04T09:32:00.001Z

I have finally managed to deploy my project to the 360 for the first time, after a bit of a battle of wits against the XNA content Pipeline.

It’s an awesome Pipeline for small games but I took sometime to get my head around it. Now Inside my solution I have 5 Projects.

Here is how it’s roughly organized.

A Windows Game Project containing the game code.
A Windows Game Library that contains readers and importers. It also contains all of my Assets, this is an awesome idea given to me by a friend, which means I don’t have to build my assets every time I change something in the game code.
A Windows Pipeline that Contains my Type Writers. This was the tricky part to get my head around, since the Content Pipeline will only run on Windows and only at build time, so you don’t created a version of it for Xbox because you don’t need to. You use a reference to the same pipeline project in both your windows and Xbox Game Libraries.
An Xbox360 Game Library that is a copy of my Windows Game Library with some reference changes.
A Xbox Game Project that is a copy of my windows Game project with some changes to the references.

And now I also added Source Control to my Project, using Perforce (That is free for use with up to two clients, and I’m only one).

Here is a little video of it all running. Don’t mind the quality of the video because it was made using my fairly old digital camera.

Fixing UTF-8 Problems

2009-02-26T16:24:00.001Z

I have changed the encoding settings for the blog, because it was spitting out wrong characters when posting from Windows Live Writer.

I have changed the settings now and hopefully it should fix it… let’s put a lot’s of unusual characters for the English language like ( ç â ã á ) and see if they show up properly. Reason for this is that I want to be free to post in Portuguese (Português-BR) if I want to. Although I think this should be pretty rare.

Windows Live Writer

2009-02-23T20:51:00.001Z

There is this new tool that came in with the New Windows Live Messenger that is the Windows Live Writer. A Blog Writer that you without the need to log in into you blog’s dashboard, and you can save local drafts, and has spell checking. Probably the one that is bundle with my Microsoft office pack. Neat. Let’s see if it works… testing… now.

(EDIT: Fixed the weird characters)

Progress II

2009-02-22T15:43:00.007Z

After being able to write my Level Data from XSI and read it in XNA in a tidy XML form I decided to tackle a different problem: The fact that in a completely empty space you have absolutely no notion of where are you going to and from.

I decided for a neat Point Sprite particle system to dot some "space dust" around you.

This implementation is on it's very early stage and it's just an example of what is going to feel like. What you see in the video below is basically a "Box full of sprites". Note that their size does not change with the distance, something I can probably resolve by rewriting the ".fx" file. I will need to do that anyway to have teh Particle system deasling with things like particle life, speed, duration, render distance, etc.

Then I need to write individual Particle Settings and systems for the different needs I have such as explosions, Projectiles, trails, etc.

Progress

2009-02-15T18:05:00.003Z

I have to say. I am amazed at the progress I have made on my little project over the weekend. Nothing that I can post a screenshot of though because the progress was made entirely in the background.

I got my bearings with XSI, I come from years of tinkering with 3Dsmax so I still prefer it, but I am confortable with the interface now and I am actually very impressed at the level of exposure that XSI offers to the end user, so scripting for it has been rather good. Not that I needed anything too complex but with Max I never even tried dwelling into MaxScript, and XSI offers an advantage here, you can script in two languages "out of the box", VBScript and JScript, and you can add Python and Perl if you can be bothered to install the Addons.

I decided to go for the VBScript (which I am finding a bit convoluted) mostly because of the available documentation on it. And in two days I was able to completely write my own self-installing plug-in that exports all the Data I need from XSI into an XML document that I can parse later on on XNA.

So, basically, counting the time spending googling and thinking about my pipeline I was able to create a crude, but functional, Level Editor for XNA using the XSI Mod Tool.

Right now, it comprises of the amazing ability of exporting type, name, position and rotation of every Model in the Level (Scene). Later on I'll be adding functions to create specific entity types from the list of available entities. And Voilá, I got myself a neat Pipeline.

Now onto working on the XML Serializer to actually use the data I churn.

A little video of how the thing looked a week ago (it didn't change a lot yet)

NOTE: I also managed to add support for the Xbox360 pad, so I can fly around the environment easily (much better than the keyboard).

Quaternion Rotations

2009-02-04T08:38:00.004Z

Right.

My little XNA project is moving along. Well, tripping along is more like it. I spent the past three days trying to work out proper transformations for my camera because I they were rotating (in all axes) but the rotations were relative to the world. So they didn't work properly for a flight camera.

Turns out that my calculations for the camera rotation and movement were only updating the position, so the rotation was aways beeing calculated from the world Axis, using values for Yaw, Pitch and Rotation that were just virtual and were not actually changing the avatar.

So I read somewhere (and by somewhere I mean Riemers XNA tutorial) that I needed to use Quaternions to do the transformations easily.

So after reading his tutorial and reading the Wikipedia page about Quaternion Rotations while lying in the bed before sleeping, I ended up dreaming the solution to my problem.

I had to create a Quaternion for the rotation of my invisible avatar, and use that to work out the rotation Matrix for the camera and updating the original Rotation Quaternion after the camera was updated.

Now. It works, but I don't think I fully grasp what I'm doing. It's like knowing how to read out lout a spell from a grimoire without actually knowing what the words you read mean. That can lead to unforeseen and even catastrophic consequences.

Snow!!!

2009-02-02T17:17:00.002Z

Yep... lot's of it. Seems that the UK haven't seen this much snow in 18 years. My neighbour made an igloo. How awesome is that?

Twitter is a bit stupid.

2009-01-29T15:24:00.005Z

So I joined the twittering world today, whatever that means, and I have started following some people, all fine and dandy and the way it's supposed to be, but now Twitter thinks I am following 9 people, 4 of them are myself.

Someone has to tell the twitter devs that really, I don't need to follow myself as I'm pretty sure that I know what I am doing.

Even if I had multiple personalities I'd probably set up different accounts for each one of them.

Long

2009-01-29T12:27:00.001Z

Does anyone have any idea how long does it take to Format a 1TB Hard Drive for the first time?

That is right.

TOO LONG!

2009-01-26T07:34:00.003Z

I finally got around to creating the subdomain for this blog. Its address now is officially

http://pathconstraint.digiduo.com/

2009-01-24T08:29:00.008Z

I'm moving my computer to Vista Today.

I other news. I'm also buying a Wii strictly for professional reasons.

Shame on you Apple!

2009-01-22T12:45:00.003Z

As I profusely advertised here I got an iPhone. And I eagerly explored the App Store in search for good apps and games. And given that the iPhone has an awesome accelerometer I thought it could be a cool thing to tinker with it and try to make and app myself.

I sort of have all the skills one would want if they were to make a game on their own. I can program (would struggle a bit with the whole "making a 3D engine from scratch" but nothing I can't handle). I can draw (I'm not an awesome artist or anything but I can doodle some thingies). I can photoshop (and I'm fairly good at it). I can make 3D models, mostly with 3D studio Max, I wish autodesk had caried on developing the gmax which I they discontinnued, that means if I want something free I'll have to take the leap and start on the XSI Mod tool or something like Blender (I have tried Blender before, but I didn't quite like it). With some help I can even write my on 3D format exporter (not that I need to, well, hopefully not).

So off I went to the Apple website to register myself as a Develper and get my free SDK, just to realize that I can't use Visual Studio to develp for the iPhone, oficially I can't even use a PC, it has to be a Mac with MacOS X and xCode.

Well... I guess I won't be developing for the iPhone any time soon. Back to XNA and Developing for Xbox360, which is free.

OXM Brasil

2008-12-24T19:05:00.002Z

That's it! I made into the press in Brazil. A three page interview for the OXM Brasil (called Revista Oficial do Xbox360 no Brasil).

The picture is there to prove, though I didn't publish a full copy of it because the Magazine is still on the shops, and I don't want to infringe any copyrights.

XBOX360 n.25 pag 38

2008-12-24T18:44:00.001Z

Geolocate this post

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Lunch

2008-12-16T18:19:00.003Z

This phone is the best thing ever. It will completely bring me back to the blogging world. I just had lunch with my sister. Photo to come. It was a true Brazilian meal. I could stay here the whole afternoon.

Posted with LifeCast

Tutu E Carne Seca

2008-12-16T18:19:00.001Z

Posted with LifeCast

Caipirinha

2008-12-16T18:18:00.001Z

Posted with LifeCast

Blade Runner Tupiniquim

2008-12-16T14:36:00.003Z

All I am doing now is read "The end of Mr. Y". No worries, no appointments but a lunch with my sister later on.
Unfortunately I couldn't get a bralizian SIM card to work with my new iPhone, so I am using a Nokia 6085 that my parents lent me for the duration of our holidays. But I am still using the iPhone to blog when I get close to a WiFi zone.
Later on I'm planning to go to Santa Ifigenia to look for a VoIP phone that is Skype Compatible and you can plug straigh to the router. There is something about some places in Sao Paulo that reminds me of Blade Runner, or at least a day time version of it.

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The Crooked Skyline

2008-12-16T14:36:00.001Z

Geolocate this post

Posted with LifeCast

2008-12-11T07:40:00.001Z

Geolocate this post

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Fable 2, iPhone and Brazil

2008-12-11T07:39:00.001Z

Well Fable 2 has sold nearly 2 million copies and we all got a plaque thanking us for all the effort we put in. Here is a picture of it :).
I am blogging this from my brand new iPhone that I received as an early birthday present from my lovely, lovely, lovely wife. It was very unexpected and absolutelly awesome!!!
Now later today we will be getting on a plane and flying to Brazil. It has been two and a half years since last been there. Holidays w00t!!!

Posted with LifeCast

It's going to be a shock

2008-12-08T10:14:00.002Z

Christmans presents - check
Itinerary plans - check
Flight booking - check
Car hire - check
Hotel bookings - check
GBA (only a Tenner, a Bargain really) - check
6 GBA Games (for under a Tenner) - check
3 books (The end or Mt. Y, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, A game of Thrones) - check

Switching temperatures from near 0°C to 35°C - Can't really get my head around it yet.

The change is coming

2008-12-04T16:45:00.002Z

I have been battling about with myself thinking about the decision to put this blog down. The purpose of this one was to keep me focused on the road to becoming a professional in the games industry, and having accomplished that, with as awesome AAA title "under my belt" now, it seemed that it had done it's job.

Now I need a blog, but I don't think I really want to go through the process of creating a new one. So I decided to repurpose this one. I will now talk about random stuff, probably mostly related to games, but the odd random "creative" blurb. Exactly what a blog usually is, or should be, about. Something that no one other than yourself cares.

So there you go! Path Constraint is now my new old blog. See... that didn't hurt. Just like ripping of an old band-aid.

P.S.: Note to self. Find some peeps to read this to keep the motivation.

Here is the proof...

2008-05-13T17:12:00.003+01:00

...that I made it.
The picture came from a press release that can be found here.
http://www.fz.se/bilder/album.fz?id=2890

Confession

2008-02-28T10:13:00.001Z

I laugh at things that are supposed to be funny to someone even though half the times I didn't quite get the joke.

I'm talking about this XKCD

It's been a long time

2007-12-07T11:25:00.000Z

I was roaming around Damascus last night and ran into an old friend of mine.

Yes, ladies and Gents..

It's Optimus Prime. and Guess what, he's in disguise!!!!

Kudos to the fellow developers at Ubisoft.

Designed Notes

2007-07-11T20:53:00.000+01:00

Soon there should be something brewing on

EDIT:
~~http://digiduo.110mb.com~~ Canceled! - 110 Mb does not have Free MySQL support. (trying to find a new free server with free MySQL support (looking into two right now)

Mind you that this is just a temporary website that I'll be running with a friend to work on the Game Design Document. Internally it should be a Wiki... externally... it probably should be a blank page with the "overall idea" if that.

Hell we don't even have an idea of what that's going to be.

Meanwhile I'll just keep busy working on an XNA prototype for my wife's PhD. (She designs it, I'm just the code monkey, and art monkey, and sound monkey for that matter)

ROOOOARRRRRR

2007-04-27T08:00:00.000+01:00

There is not much to say other than what the title says!

An interactive story precursor.

2007-03-03T13:56:00.000Z

I am playing Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy in the USA), which apparently was the most successful commercial attempt to break the linearity of in-game storytelling. I am yet to prove that your actions have real "consequences" in game, or if the feeling of urgency and real decision making is just created by the "constant" tick of the clock sensation. I still am in the first round but something tells me that the sequence, order, content of the scenes is not affected by what you do in game. Elements of theses scenes are, I already noticed that, but the world doesn't seem as persistent as it is supposed to be.

Failing (Game Over) is a big part of this game, this goes against what I believe would be a rewarding complete story. Having the story to end abruptly when you fail to complete a sequence of action still leaves the story unfinished. In the first scene, if you fail to leave the bathroom in time, you go to jail, and game over is upon you. The character says something like, "This is how my story end, the police found blood on my clothes and I was send to jail for life, boo-hoo".

In my opinion, this is not a satisfactory complete story. Of course, you could could say that "guy kills another guy, goes to jail, end of story". It is complete, but its not satisfactory. You want to know why you want to go forward, you want this to be a complete story, not some news headlines.

In this sense, game over should be completely banned from the game. No matter what you do, you will get the whole of your story, no matter where the story leads you.

Maybe, Crawford is right. Maybe a game is a game, end of story, he says and I quote "computer games are about winning, while Interactive Storytelling is about dramatic resolution".

But I still believe we can use consoles' hardware to create an "interactive storytelling" and ship it in a disc, and sell it as a game. Fahrenheit is almost there. but not quite.

So I'm on David Cage's side "Interactivity is still in its infancy. There is still everything to invent".

So let's get to work

Interaction and Flow

2007-02-19T10:09:00.001Z

I read this very good article the other day... Losing for the Win: Defeat and Failure in gaming from Ben Schneider.

And it actually got me thinking about Joseph Campbell and the power of myth and its relationship with how we perceive stories.

The problem with story and interaction is the risk of an open ended scenery (pretty much like in The sims). Schneider's article is brilliant in a way because it scratches the surface of what I think is a very good solution to this problem.

He discuss how defeat and failure in a game can affect the flow of the narrative. If the player feels that the failure was related to something he done wrong, he'll go back to his last "save point" and do it again, breaking the "flow" of the story.

On a truly interactive story, player actions shouldn't be neither right or wrong, but they should be taken into account in order to produce a "fable", something that cam be perceived as a story. Pretty much like the "Campbellian" way of seeing it.

Take life itself for instance, it is a constant streamline of events, life is not a story but you can find infinite stories within people's lives. And this little stories are narrative units. If you can extract little narrative unites from life, or simulations, there should be a way of generating a streamline of events within a certain space and time, that would consist in a single narrative unit that can't be repeated in the exact same way.

What I'm trying to say is. Interaction and narration don't go along because of control. On interaction, the agent (or player, or actor...) has control, and in narratives the control lies exclusively in the hands of the author. By taking the control out of the hands of the author and sharing it with the player you mine the nuances that only the author can give to the narrative.

Take the LucasArts Adventures for instance, there is a story, that the player has absolutely no control over. There is a feeble sense of interaction because you have to solve puzzles and push the hero forward in order to advance the narrative, much like the effort of turning a page on a book.

In a sense I think that's still what I want to do, I don't want to give the control of the story to the players, because their behaviour is unpredictable, but I don't want to hold the control over the narrative as well, because I kill the amount of possibilities a scenery can give me.

How do I "generate" a verisimilar and complete story out of interactive elements?

Interactive Drama

2007-02-08T20:39:00.000Z

I am not going to be presumptuous, and I am not going to assemble a list of the best films of all times, and I am not going to do this with books as well..

And I'm not the one to say what the magic formula for making a great game is, but I am trying to figure out what would make a game a "classic" in all senses.

I'm going to try to find an answer gathering any information I can from industry, scholars, articles.

Gamasutra is a good place to start. But I will also check with some industry veterans like Tim Schafer, Chris Crawford, Ernest Adams.... I'll see what they wrote, and maybe I'll try to get in touch with them if I have further questions.

I was talking to a friend of mine and that made the whole game designing idea a little clearer to me. I like adventures, I loved all the LucasArts adventures, and I like the "action/adventure" genre, however I always thought that most of them lack a more solid storyline, something more serious, more deep, and yet fun to play.

I thought that Tim Schafer was going in the right direction with Grim Fandango but I never saw development on that, and Grim Fandango is still a single plot narrative.

Whenever you put interaction and narrative in the same sentence you make scholars shiver in their chairs. Because those things are supposed to be nearly opposite. There are people that I mentioned before that are trying to come up with a solution for that.

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern came up with an interactive Drama called "Façade". It was a bold move in the direction I am trying to go. I still think that there are some problems with "Façade" because it's a limited set, and the "game" can "end" within a short period if you start swearing at the characters and you kinda can't avoid that, because they're both wankers to begin with. And as the characters throw you out of the door you can't help but linger with the feeling that you have "failed" to accomplish you "mission" whatever that was, and no, you didn't fail, you just led the story to an ending because of your behaviour.

The big clash here is due to the fact that games have winners, and narratives not necessarily do. But I think that is more than that. A narrative has a certain dynamic, like music with it's crescendos and diminuendos. It has a climax, and a closure. I think this feeling has to be translated into the "game".

Mateas tries to encapsulate this in the Façade but there is still a long way to go.

You can check GrandTextAuto for updates on the ideas floating around.

Designing a game

2007-02-05T17:16:00.000Z

Right...

I haven't been very commited to this blog... so you could say that it's title has no meaning whatsoever. The fact is I have been working with something I love, and everyone knows that (unless your blog is you job) t'is bit hard to be really faithful to it when you have something you consider important to do.

Ok. enough of explanations. Let me get to what I want to do.

I want to design a game. Silly really because I already work in the game industry, which was the whole purpose of this blog anyway. However, I feel like I could spread my wings a bit and try to come up with an idea that will not only satisfy my ego, but will also be accounted as a innovative game design.

Chris Crawford told my friend that Game industry is dying... I say: "I beg you pardon". Well I wasn't there for the conversation but the whole point is that although the Game Industry has been there for a good 35 years, there has not been one masterpiece...

Well... I kinda cringed when I heard that. How can someone say that? Then I stopped to think a little. Although I have played some very good games, and I used the word masterpiece more than once. I couldn't find one single original title that could be the... uh... "Citizen Kane" of the games.

I think what he was trying to say was that the game industry is yet to reach it's "maturity" and it's heading the wrong way or, in other words, game industry is a 40 year old teenager that does not intend to grow up.

If you have the right arguments to convince me of the contrary...please... I am willing to take anything to save my beliefs.

No game made me cry... And I bloody cried in E.T. so... let this be a challenge...

The first game that makes me cry will be the one I consider the first masterpiece... FFVII almost did it...but still... .didn't make it.

Meanwhile... I'll try to come up with something that can come close to that. I'm not going to be so bold to set "Citizen Kane" as my target. Ok... first of all I'll try to create a list of "masterpieces" be that in cinema or literature...

I want to tell a story that would be a good story, and that could be considered a masterpiece.

Thus begins one's journey to knowledge.

First step... I need to make a list of "masterpieces"...

EDIT: in Mauricios Comments

Mauricio said...: ...we met after a conference he made in Barcelona and were in a group walking in the streets looking for a place to drink and eat something.
Second: yes, he once stated that "video games are dead" (Gamasutra, June, 2006). But that wasn't what he said to me.
I was telling him about mi interest in studying games narrative potential and asking him about the relations between games and narrative and Crawford's told me that he thinks that "games have nothing to say to narrative". In other words, seems that he doesn't think that games could be (or become) an innovative or legitimate narrative form.
The discussion was a little deeper than that, but the main idea was that he thinks that studying games would be of little help in trying to find out how to create good interactive storytelling.
The thing is: Crawford is well known for his work experience in game industry and research and in some point he realized (or decided) that games were not the path for him to follow.
Anyway... I strongly disagree with him about the narrative potential of games... but I've got to respect his opinion.

Should Path Constraint go Web 2.0

2006-11-12T21:30:00.000Z

Naaah!!.. I don't think so..

Designer Diary

2006-11-07T10:07:00.000Z

Because this hasn't been updated very often I want to put this blog down. But I am thinking about asking my boss to implement a Desiner Diary of some sort in out Game's website.

I don't know how happy he will be about this because of NDA stuff... you know, industry secrets and such.

Nevertheless, I have lot's of things to talk about games. Maybe I'll try to come here more often and try to make this useful.

For now... maybe it will be a good idea to check out Chris Crawford's Website. Storytron. This long time game veteran is developing a tool tro crate interactive "narratives".

One post every four moths

2006-08-15T09:25:00.000+01:00

That's a nice target to aim for.

I have been busy... Terrain generation is a quite demanding task.

Did you know... game development is culture.

2006-04-22T09:15:00.000+01:00

did you know that the Mile, comes from the Latin word. Mile Passum, which means A Thousand Steps?

On the ancient Rome, a thousand (double) steps, would measure 1500 meters. Therefore you have, with some ajustments, a mile.

...cause I was just thinking about skinning you like a dear.

2006-02-28T21:33:00.000Z

Last couple of months have been a mess. I started working for a electrical retailer at Christmas, far from the path, I know, but I needed the money (and I still do), so that was the reason I have stopped posting here. As a christmas temp my time was pretty tight because I was working pretty much full time, now I have been kept as a permanent and that is a good thing, and I am only part-time now, what is a brilliant thing.

Now, here comes the really good one, I have been talking since christmas with this game company that is about to launch a Massively Multiplayer On-Line RPG, and guess what, they took me in a month ago.

I have started working a couple of weeks ago. YES that is right, I am back to the path. My current assignment is to produce a hundred face textures. I have re-made the UVW mapping for the characters faces and now I am producing one texture after another. I can do about 10 faces per day. I have reference pictures which I use to build the textures (side, front, back, etc), and I turn all that into one wrappable texture. I hope I don't turn into some sort of psycho and start skinning peoples heads to take the reference photographs and make my life easier.

I should be done by the end of this weew when I will probaly start working in other parts of the game that are requiring attention.

I am very happy if I might add.

Skil correction

2005-11-06T18:39:00.000Z

Well..

I have suddenly realized that this model that figures in my blog, although made in a program that I am not as well trained as my usual one, can be a real downer for people to actually see my real skill so, I decided to post this one, to show as leas a little bit of what am I capable of. There you go.

Networking

2005-11-04T10:06:00.000Z

Well I have officially started to build up my Network of people inside the business. How did I do it. I have enrolled in the IGDA.

It was in The Lord Nelson Pub, here in Brighton

It was very nice to know some people who acctually work for the industry and have a couple of beers with them. I hope something good come from that. It might take a while but maybe it will pay off.

Modeling in a new way

2005-10-17T17:26:00.000+01:00

I have modelled this simple character yesterday in order to be able to understand the basic concepts of UV Mapping on Maya. It took me approximately 4 hours to do it. I could have done the same thing on 3Dsmax in about 20 minutes.

Probably next time will not take so long once I am getting used to the interface and the modelling features.

I have to do the UV Mapping now and I still don’t quite know how, but I am already trying. I hope to have something by the end of the day, and then I shall start with the Bone and Rigging part.

Now that is going to be a challenge.

The magic of Free PLE

2005-10-16T09:08:00.000+01:00

Well my main modeling and animation tool is the 3Dsmax, it is what I use best, and what I have been using for the past 4 years. The thing is, there is a great deal of game companies here that use Maya, and not having that in your CV might be an application killer.

So I decided to browse through the Maya website so check out if I could learn something. I barely typed www.alias.com, the first thing that popped in the main page is the Maya 7.0 Personal Learning Edition, Free and without any annoying time limitations!

I mean. The fact that I can download a program just for learning is amazing. I am not a company, I am not going to use it with any commercial purposes anyway, I just want to know how to model, so I can put that I know Maya on my CV.
I have made the 200 Mb download, that took no longer that an hour on my 1 Mb Broadband and installed it.

Turns out that the program seems to be excellent. I am already getting used to the new interface and it has some features that really impressed me.
Today I intend to model a simple test character, to be able to understand how the mapping, rigging and animation inside the program works.

Well, enough now
Let's Model.

CSS Headache

2005-10-14T15:13:00.000+01:00

Well, that is it. Finally I have a template of my own. I had some trouble dealing with the Blogger Tags because I have not yet found a list of them, so I had to copy from the previous template. But anyways, there it is. My 3Dsmax-viewport-kinda-blog-layout.

I hope to have some good news soon.

Cheers.

Path Constraint Again

2005-10-09T12:07:00.000+01:00

It is been hard to find a placement or a job in the game industry. Altough I did not want to do it, I think I will have to surrender to general Graphic Design.

This shall be written in english although I am not a native speaker. As a matter of fact I'm am brazilian and I'm starting this blog as a statement of my atempt to become a professional of the game industry.

I have moved to the United Kingdom in September 10th, 2005 and I intend to find work as soon as possible. I have sent a whole lot of portifolios right now, and I have received a whole lot of letters saying:

"Thank you for your application, we regret that we have not been able to offer you an interview on this occation"

that could also be read as: Loser, ha ha, your demo CD stinks, maybe next time sucker! ! !

So, it is public now.