Inlägg av Jesse

Hoppas hoppas

LucasArts day 253. Mm, jag har väl kanse inte varit så fliting med det här bloggande som jag borde, men när jag såg denna
http://www.fz.se/nyhetsarkiv/?id=34690

så kände jag att jag kanske borde säga några ord. Lucidity är det spel som jag jobbat på sedan jag började på LucasArts i Januari. Det är som ni ser ett litet sött beroendeframkallande XBLA spel. Även om jag jobbade som Lead Designer på spelet, så kan jag inte ta åt mig äran till att använda Byssan Lull som titellåt till spelete. Den idén kom från vår fantastiska musiker Jesse Harlin, men jag var i alla fall snabb med att backa upp honom.

Så testa det 7'e oktober vettja och säg vad ni tycker vettja!

#blogg

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LucasArts day 36. Last December, LucasArts did something that to my knowledge other companies only dream of. They dedicated a full week for the whole company to go nuts with creating game prototypes. No matter if you were a hardcore programmer or if you were a part of the marketing department; for one week, you got to get your hands dirty and try out that idea that you previously only had been able to talk about over lunch. Sadly, this was before I started here, but I really hope they will repeat this as it turned out to be a smashing success.

From what I've seen, 10-20 or so teams managed to produce a playable prototype. I've tested out a few of them, and as you can imagine there were some really interesting ideas being kicked around. As usual, I can't really talk about them here, but it's really inspiring to see such a creative outlet for all those talented individuals. The long-term result of this week is also really interesting. LucasArts have had a rough couple of years, with lay-offs and problematic projects. Also, as many of you who are experienced game-developers know, people tend to get cynical over the years, as making games is actually pretty hard. Being able to shred all those meetings and just get-it-in-there-whatever-it-takes, seems to have made people remember that it doesn't have to take 6 months to design and prototype a new feature. Its great hearing people saying things like: Hey, if we could do that in a week, we should be able to pull this off as well!

I've heard other companies talking of doing something just like this, but I've never seen anyone being able to pull it off. So hey, if LucasArts could pull it off, so could your company!

#blogg

LucasArts day 22. I'm slowly starting to get settled in here. After a move into a permanent apartment last week, almost all the stuff related to my big move has been taken care of. I got my Social Security Card, all the benefits form are filled out, my banking needs are taken care of, and yeah... I bought an iPhone. I would estimate that about 80% of the LucasArts employees have that thing. Now I do as well. Imagine that, being a developer for it and all.

For a tour of our campus, I recommend this video (8:13 long) which shows Conan O'Brian visiting Industrial Light & Magic (A hilarious thing related to Conan O'Brian is the commercial (0:30) that ran during the Super Bowl last night, which had a nice reference to my dear home country). To continue showing off how cool this place is, I have to tell you that I had the pleasure of attending a Q&A with Henry Selick last week. He's the director of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Nightmare Before Christmas and also the upcoming Coraline. Also, today they screened the Oscars-nominated Slumdog Millionaire in the big theater, and we'll get a visit from its screenplay-writer Simon Beaufoy tomorrow. I'm starting to see a trend here.

For those of you who are wondering what's happening with all ongoing Collecting Smiles projects, I'm sure you understand that my priorities changed a bit the day I left Sweden. Before I left, I did manage to scrape together a pre-release of Hyena v1.1 which included a few fixes, mainly targeting the blind community. I hope to clean up that into a proper release once I get some time over, but more pressing is getting Colors! for DS v1.1 into a releasable state. I hope to have more updates on that soon.

#blogg

Ja, det känns som det är en väldigt optimism här. LucasArts har ju haft ett antal stora uppsägningar det senaste året, inklusive ledningsbyte, men jag får intrycket av att alla tycker det är mycket bättre nu.

Iofs så var The Sims när det kom var ett av dom innovativaste spelen det året. Om jag förstått det rätt så missade det även helt sin målgrupp (Sim City spelare).

Här har ni förövrigt ett spel i den "smalare" änden:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2008/12/07/rara-racer-finished...

LucasArts day 13. Before I started working at LucasArts, almost every game I had been working on has started off with a full team. This is not to say LucasArts is doing things differently, it's just that I've always been in the situation where we as quickly as possible must go from nothing to a full-fledge game-prototype in minimal time. Usually that has also involved making sure a big team is as productive as possible. Right now, that is not the case. While I can't say what I'm working on, we are in early pre-production with only a few people. This is quite a change for me, who am the kind of person who enjoy production-chaos.

A great bonus is that I'm working with some good people. The designers on my team have some real gems on their track-record. Psychonauts (Joe), God of War 2 (Chip), The Getaway (Dom) and Blade Runner (Brett) are all games I have a great admiration of. Production-chaos will probably come soon enough, so I'll just enjoy this luxury while it lasts.

In other news LucasArts released this trailer for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. And Starbreeze released a new trailer for the upcoming The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Looks amazing as always.

#blogg

LucasArts day 5. First week on the job is over. And what a job that is: Lead Designer at LucasArts. Who would have though back in the days when I got my kicks playing Manic Mansion that I would work at this legendary company that has developed so many great games over the years. I just browsed through them and just look at this list:

Maniac Mansion 1987
Zak McKracken 1988
Loom 1990
The Secret of Monkey Island 1990
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis 1992
Day of the Tentacle 1993
Star Wars: TIE fighter 1994
The Dig 1995
Star Wars: Dark Forces 1995
Grim Fandango 1998

And these are just my personal favorites!

So how is it working at LucasArts? I hope to be able to share some thoughts on that over the coming months. Some of you might already know about the awesome surroundings of the Presidio of San Francisco, where LucasArts is located. One of the cool things with that is that the offices are shared with Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas' special effects company, which make some amazing people pass through these halls. Yesterday Ed Catmull gave a very interesting speech in the huge screening theater here on campus. This is the guy who has "Invented texture-mapping" on his resume! I just wish I was here a month earlier when David Fincher was here screening The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and doing a Q&A about it.

So, first week is over and I can't be more excited to be here. And it isn't only because Friday is Donut Day.

#blogg

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.

In my opinion Apple has done the most important innovation in the game-development industry since the Wii. They have single-handedly provided a both a platform and a distribution system that allows developers to easily distribute their work, and even make money out of it, without having to get into the dirty business of business. Basically, you can as a sole individual, without even talking to another person, make millions if you release the right game or application at the right time. For all of you who have some experience with trying to get a game published, you'll realize what a difference that can make. Now, I should note that Microsoft has been trying to do the same thing for quite a while with XNA, but instead of promises and delays, Apple just got it out and it was simpler and worked better than anyone ever expected. There are of course flaws, but none of them overshadow the step forward that Apple has done, and that I believe the others will follow.

App Store represents the giant shift in the industry that I will remembered 2008 by. While EA fails with safe bets like Need for Speed, small creative leaps like Braid is taking the glory. This may finally be the time of the independent developer. App Store, XNA/XBLA, PSN, DSWare, WiiWare, Steam. There are so many potential ways an independent developer can flourish. I hope I'm right. The games-industry will be better for it.

#blogg

>Räknas det ut automatiskt att jag hade torch och tinderbox
>eller skulle man gjort något innan man körde ett random
>nummer?
Nej, allt sådant ska fungera automatiskt. Jag funderade på om/hur man skulle kunna presentera sina bonusar på ett bra sätt, men då dom kan ändras under stridens gång så var det lite lurigt.

Svenska går alldeles utmärkt. Jag skriver på engelska för att jag återanvänder texten.

Kul att du gillade det!

It's time for the release of another project:

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. GameBooks on the other hand is something that's almost been forgotten, but basically it is a book where you at the end of each page were given a choice and decided by turning to one of the specified pages. I remember being fascinated by them in my youth, but they sort of died out when computer games became complex enough.

Today GameBooks touches the core of one of the things the interests me about games: Interactive Storytelling. As you might have seen in my previous project Rorschach, I love to dig into what this really is about. While the works produced during the Interactive Fiction Competition are already of exceptional quality, GameBooks are a simpler form of interactive storytelling, and in my opinion one that hasn't been properly explored.

So, my take on this is to create a GameBook player for handheld platforms where you don't need a screen, and you only have to use one button throughout the whole game. Just like AudioBooks, this makes it possible to play games while your body is occupied with other things, like driving or out running (or while sitting in Church <span style="font-family: Wingdings J</span>). This turns out to work really well on for example the Nintendo DS, where you can play the game even when the is console closed. Also, while googeling the term AudioGame, I of course found sites talking about games for visually impaired people makes the project even more interesting for me.

Bundled together with Hyena is one of the GameBooks I played in my youth: Lone Wolf - Flight From The Dark, by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk (available through Project Aon). Since I'm not a native English speaker and I didn't want to record the 1596 lines of dialogue needed for this game, I used a speech synthesis to generate them which gives a kind of weird feeling to it. In the future I hope there will be additional AudioGames that uses Hyena, and some that uses real narrators. I have made it as simple as I can to define the logic behind the game (which was surprisingly complex in Flight From The Dark) using an external LUA file. Information on exactly how that works will be released shortly and any writer interesting in writing a game are welcome to contact me.

Hyena is currently available for the Nintendo DS and within short there will be a Sony PSP version as well. Also, for the people just wanting to test Hyena out, there is a reference version for PC available. You can find them all here.

#blogg

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)

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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 some of the views I and my fellow designers at Starbreeze has had on how to tell a story in games. In the last couple of games we've made, storytelling has been extremely important.

I distinguish two goals you have when trying to make a good story-driven game. Let's call the first "Immersion and emotional impact", which basically is a story that the player cares about and feels he is a part of. This goal is the one we've been striving for in Riddick and Darkness and borrows heavily from movies. A lot of progress has been made here the last couple of years. The quality of the stories has increased because good writers are writing them and the acting are substantially better than just a few years ago. Perhaps most importantly; stories in games are told much better today.

On of the key changes is that nowadays stories are mostly told from a player perspective. We decided to do this in Riddick, which in that game meant that we never showed the player anything that the Riddick couldn't see. This helps strengthen the relationship between the player and the hero. Another example of what's improved is that you seldom see the game violating the trust of the player by having the hero make a decision that the player would never do. A typical example if this is when you, after fighting off hoards of enemies in a game, enter a room and see a cut scene where your hero suddenly surrenders; something that the player would never have done in that situation. This can still be seen from time to time, but not so often anymore.

The second goal can be called "Interactivity and non-linearity", which in my opinion is more to the core of what games are about; meaningful choices. This means having a story where the player can make decisions that affect how the game-story plays out (or even create new ones). This is a much harder goal to reach, since the complexity of a story grows exponentially for every meaningful choice the player is allowed to make.

Obviously, combing these two goals is even harder. To compete with other games in terms of quality a games-developer must focus on the things he knows that the player will experience. With today's quality standard, doing a game where you have two different story-paths instead of one could be double the work for the developer, especially if the developer strives for the "Immersion and emotional impact" goal. This is because so much effort is needed to create any story-related situation in a game (you need a unique voice and animations and usually a lot of other specifically created content).

Doing predefined story-situations like that may be a stupid way to create stories in games, but it's basically the only way to do it today. Ideally, the game should be smart enough to be able to automatically create involving story situations inside the game-world, but we are nowhere near there yet, at least not with the kind of beautifully rendered worlds and characters we are used to.

Until then there are many ways where you cheat. One concept we made up about during the development of Riddick is "The illusion of non-linearity", which basically states that as long as the player believes he has a choice, even though he may not, the player will feel he made an important decision which makes the story more involving. There are many ways to implement this thinking, and I most recently saw it used in the excellent Mass Effect, where you often have three dialogue-choices that lead to the same result, even though they can look like opposites from the player perspective.

Hopefully, we will see more innovative ways to allow the player to have a bigger part in the creation of the game-story. There are a lot of designers out there thinking about it, and there are a couple of interesting games in production trying to do just that. The future will tell.

#blogg

Hehe. Jo, jag har haft lite svårt för hela RTS genren. Dune 2 gillade jag skarpt, liksom Warcraft 1, men efter det så verkade jag ledsna.

Jag har faktiskt inte testat World in Conflict sedan en tidig multiplayer alpha. Men den hade nog inte kommit med ändå, då det hade varit för färskt i minnet. Jag har en lista på contenders också, som kommer med om dom fortfarande insiprerar mig om något år.

Finally, here is the last genre:

Jens' favorite Strategy games of all time

• Jagged Alliance 2 (PC) - Jagged Alliance 2 pulled off something I didn't think was possible to do well: a stats-driven combat role-playing game in a contemporary setting. While I've never been as fascinated by real weapons as some of my friends, this added to the game more than I expected. This combined with the excellent setting (overthrowing a banana republic) and some truly deep adventure makes this game legendary in my eyes. Sadly, the developer Sirtech Canada failed to convince the world of this and I remember the day when read that they had closed down. Shortly after creating such a genius game and well underway with the third installment the team scattered. Jagged Alliance 2 was not too long ago released on Steam, and while the user-interface may feel dated it's still great so if are into strategy and RPG, I truly recommend you to give it a try.

• The Clue! (Amiga) - The Clue! is probably the biggest underdog to take a top spot. I've yet to find a game that recreates The Clue! experience. Taking the role as a thief, climbing his way to the top in seedy London (mostly) was a great setting, but the game-play was the unique thing. You planned your heists on blue-print and synchronized all participants using a time-line until you were satisfied. This game was made by some obscure German developer and I think it did well enough (at least in Germany) to warrant a sequel. The sequel did seem to keep the core game-play, but it was made in simple 3D that didn't help the game-play and a cartoonish style that didn't appeal to me. It also seems to have failed commercially.

• X-Com: UFO Defense (Amiga) - The original and best. Fighting back an alien invasion can't be done better than this. I spent many hours on this sluggish beast that it was on the Amiga and recently rejoiced when I found out that it's free and fully playable on today's PC (of course without any hint of a slowdown). Surprisingly enough even the user-interface, that usually keeps old games from being playable, manages to keep its head over water. If you are at all into combat-strategy, you must test this one. The UFO/X-Com license has had a weird history, with the two names being owned by different companies, both producing "sequels". I try to try out every one of the new releases and UFO Afterlight actually got it (at least with the nostalgia glasses on). Of course, with the recent news that Irrational is working on an X-Com project, we might see something really special in the future.

Runner-ups

• Advance Wars (GBA) - I've always been fascinated by the simple turn-based strategy titles but how simple they may seem, it seems to be very hard to do them well. The updated DS version is equally excellent.

• Civilization III (PC) - From Civilization 1, I always tried similar games and played them through once and was satisfied with that. With the third installation, I for some reason restarted it, and tried to play it another way. I almost regret that, since Civ3 became one of the biggest time-sinks I've ever encountered.

• Deuteros (C64) - While being unfair and buggy, this game introduced me to one of the style of games that have fascinated me the most; some kind of resource-strategy exploration adventure.

• Jagged Alliance (PC) - While the sequel took the top stop due to its additional focus on the RPG aspects, this game also contains so many of my favorite aspects.

• Railroad Tycoon (Amiga) - The second Sid Meyers game on the list with the accompanying excellent core game-play. Surprisingly, it's probably in here because it taught me some basic financial theory; and about the danger of blowing your stock to unreasonable proportions a few years too early of your retirement days.

• Reunion (PC) - As with its cousin Deuteros (and to some extent Dune), Reunion is a hard game to pinpoint. I'm fascinated by games where the game-play evolves and while I understand why it's so hard to create and why it can be a bad idea, I wish I had more games like that.

• Uplink (PC) - Another underdog on the list, but a more modern one. Uplink is still sold as shareware by a sympathic group of people and while the game failed me half-way through, it's still one of my great inspirations. Again, the genre is extremely hard to pinpoint, but how about hacking-simulation RPG?

• Warlords (PC) - Being mostly a single player kind of guy, few games made this list because of its multiplayer offerings. This fine resource and combat-strategy game is an exception, even though multiplayer at the time meant leaving the computer (again at the school's computer-room) for the next player to take his turn.

#blogg

I'm not sure it's fair to bundle these genres together like this, but it would have been a very short section otherwise.

Jens' favoruite Sports, Racing, Fighting & Puzzle games of all time

• Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (Amiga) - The sequel may have been the one that became famous, but this is the first car-game I got hooked on (and the sequel was too forgiving for my taste). I fought long and hard to beat the game but I never managed to win the final race, no matter how close I got (but one day I will).

• Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe (Amiga) - Another title that was perfectly balanced for my taste and I still remember the sense of accomplishment when I beat the game at its hardest mode. An Xbox Live Arcade version was recently released, but seems to have received a cold reception.

Runner-ups

• Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec (PS2) - A close to perfect game, but I'll never forgive how it made the challenges more and more boring until it was too much work to enjoy it.

• Pinball Dreams (Amiga) - The legendary first game by swedish Digital Illusions/DICE. It may have made me skip school, but it also inspired me to become a games-developer.

• Tekken 3 (PS) - Probably my first true Playstation experience, and the adrenaline kick it gave me every lunch-break for a year is a found memory.

• SSX 3 (Xbox) - While the original SSX was probably the most memorial experience, the technical excellence of SSX 3 made me choose that one and also put it high up on my list of perfect games.

• The Incredible Machine (PC) - It was a fight against time trying to complete each level at my school's computer-room. The prize of winning was to walk over to my friend and mock his progress until he also completed it and the race could start again.

• Lemmings (Amiga) - Another close to perfect game that became an instant classic with a type of game-play you had never seen before.

• Tetris (PC and other) - While I never considered this to be an exceptional game, I've spent far too much time on this not to include it in this list.

#blogg

I think it was because I had very few geeky friends while growing up that I never got into the whole pen-and-paper RPG thing. Instead, I marveled at the worlds created inside the computer. Even today, one of the things I look forward to most with games is exploring a new character-development system in a strange new world, hoping that I won't see the limits to it anytime soon (most recently expreienced in Oblivion). Again, it's very hard to classify games in this genre, mostly because almost all games I like contains RPG elements (whatever that may be), but here goes:

Role playing games
Fallout 1 & 2 (PC)
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (GBA)
Pool of Radiance (C64)
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (C64)

Runner-ups
Deus Ex (PC)
Diablo (PC)
Ultima V (Amiga)
Ultima VII (PC)
Planescape Torment (PC)
Pokémon Gold (GBA)

#blogg

Jo, förvånande nog så hade jag aldrig en spel-konsoll förrän i vuxen ålder. Och Amigan var absolut som den gyllene åldern för spel för mig. Jag är rackarns glad över att det finns fungerande Amiga emulatorer nu för tiden, så man kan få sina nostalgitrippar då och då.