Core Dump

At a recent game developer's conference, executives from Blizzard Entertainment gave provided an inside look at the inner workings of the company that produces what is probably the most successful multiplayer game, World of Warcraft. If you're like me, you've probably never given much thought to what it takes to get and keep a game like this working, and I have to admit I was surprised at the scale of the effort.

Within the World of Warcraft team, there are some 30 department leads. There are three tiers of management, with France Pierce (Executive Producer) on top. Production Director Brack and Game Director Tom Chilton are below him, and below those two men are arrayed 8 lower-level managers. Brack notes that they try to structure the teams around the people, and not the other way around. They feel strongly that employee strengths should dictate organizational structure, and as a result all reporting structures within the company vary by team.

Each team on the game aims to be made up of 5-8 people. They break that regularly, Brack admits, but that is the goal. The programming department currently consists of 32 people, and envelopes systems, tools, gameplay, server technologies, and UI. Brack singled out the tools team as a critical component of this group. They make tools not only for the developers, but for customer service as well. Blizzard has an expectation of a long life for World of Warcraft, and so they see these tools as products to be fully-supported in-house. These tools go through their own proofing process, with certification dictated within the company. Their UI team is a cross-disciplinary team with artists, LUA programmers, and C++ developers all collaborating on the game's front end. In all, the programming team is responsible for some 5.5 million lines of code.

Labels: computing, gaming

Finally, Doom for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Doom Resurrection will be out next week. Gizmodo has the trailer. And if my wife gets an iPod Touch, I just know this'll be the first thing she'll buy for it.

Labels: gaming

Not long ago, we bought Drop7 for my daughter's iPod. It's a combination of Tetris and Sudoko, and it's insanely addictive. This review accurately describes it as "puzzle crack". Unfortunately, it's an iPod game and we only have one iPod, a situation is causing more than a little discord in our family, due to the addictive qualities of this game.

So I decided to search to see if there was a PC version of Drop7. And it turns out there is - Drop7 is an iPod port of a Flash game called Chain Factor/. It's not as pretty as the iPod version, but the gameplay is the same. In other words, it's as addictive as the iPod version. You have been warned.

Labels: gaming

If you have an iPod Touch or iPhone and you're a technical writer, then you'll probably like this game - KERN.

KERN, the new typesetting game from Formation, asks that you line up a single letter in a falling word, gaining points the nearer you are to perfection. From the subject matter to the scoring pop-up that exposes the formula used to determine your points tally, this is probably the iPhone app most aimed directly between the eyes of chunky-spectacled design wanksters.

I'm buying this for my daughter :-).

Labels: gaming, technical communication

Here's a nifty time waster - a web game in which you have 12 minutes to name the 100 most common words in the English language. It's harder than you might think. I'm ashamed to admit that I got a score of only 57.

Labels: gaming, language

I've watched my son playing World of Warcraft and wondered how the heck he keeps track of everything that's going on on screen. I've also wondered how I'd document it, if I was tasked with doing the help system. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at this Wired article, which explains what all the various interface elements are for. And there are a lot of them. I've had to document some messy interfaces, but nothing comes close the the complexity of the WoW interface.

Labels: gaming, usability

Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of Doom, arguably one of the best and most influential computer games of all time. It's hard for younger folks, brought up on high-resolution screens and powerful gaming consoles, to realize just how immersive and exciting Doom was, when you compare it to modern games. But very few games (Half-Life and Halo perhaps) have had the impact on gamers that Doom had.

At the time I got it (just a day before the Christmas holidays!), I had a 25 MHz 386 PC that would barely run Doom - to get a decent frame rate, I had to play it at a reduced resolution. But play it I did, for hour upon hour. Now, 15 years later, I have a Sansa MP3 player that will play Doom (although I haven't bothered to try it as the screen is too small for comfort). But I'd love to see a version for my daughter's iPod Touch.

If you just have to play it right now, here's a link to a pretty good Flash version (just the shareware level).

Labels: gaming

I don't play computer games as much as I used to, but when I do, or when I watch my kids play, I'm usually impressed by the slickness of the interfaces. Some games have very complex interfaces, but yet they manage to stay out of the way of good gameplay. Designing an interface like that is something of an art, and not many people do it well. One person who does is Colm Nelson, the interaction designer for Halo 3. Boxes and Arrows has a long and quite fascinating interview with him.

Online systems that facilitate player experiences around social interaction, custom content sharing and online communities have received a lot of attention by both the gaming press and fans and is definitely a hot trend in gaming. The gaming press has even begun to draw comparisons with these features to You Tube, My Space and Facebook. My observation is that developers that are offering more features in [the] user experience around the game are seeing more of a need to specialize and fill roles specifically around user experience and interface design.

Games with success in these areas have generally done a good job developing a solid feature set and matching the social goals of gameplay with the accessibility and usability of the features. Ultimately these features add to the longevity of a game’s popularity, which translates directly to sales. I think as a result there are more opportunities for traditional interaction designers in the games business.

Labels: gaming, usability

SF author and futurist, Bruce Sterling, recently gave a keynote address at the Austiin Game Developers Conference. He wrote it as if he were one of his grad students, returning from 2043 to give the speech, becuase Sterling was too old to travel back in a time machine. Bruce is a great speaker and his talks are always worth reading or listening to.

So do people make games for this platfjavascript:void(0)orm? Sure. Not the sort that were built for flat glass screens. We don't do those anymore, cumbersome, like a covered wagon. We don't pretend a glass screen is a window into another virtual worlds. The idea sounds silly, it's all the same world. It's always been the same world, it just changes. What we do is hang the towel up in midair and gaze through it. And all the light that hits the far side passes through it except that the image is tagged and altered. We don't call it augmented reality, because we think reality is real, but you can still have fun with a game interface is that is everything you see.

Of course reality scales, so we have body games, room games, neighborhood games, city games, world games, even space games for romantic geeks. And 70 years of games, a huge heritage we got from you. Dead platforms and dead IPs, dead stuff always gets revived. You've never heard of Tetris, ahead of your time, incredibly elegant. Pieces fall down on my mediator, and I have to jam them into holes at the bottom. Incredibly popular. I can't keep my hands off it.
"Dr. Sterling was eager I show you Tetris, he knew you woud be impressed, sophisticated design. A pity my mediator is down."

Labels: gaming

Spore, the new video game that lets you create almost an entire universe of life, is now out. It's the brain child of Will Wright, the creator of Sim City and The Sims. The New York Times has a review that's somewhat less than favourable - it sounds like the developers got too caught up in the idea behind the game and forgot to work on the interface and game play.

There's another review in the Globe and Mail and a Slashdot thread about protests against the game's copy protection could be hurting its sales. (I'd like to play it, but there's no way I'm going to install a game that uses the type of protection used by Spore on my PC).

Labels: gaming

The Spore Creature Creator has been released.

With a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can assemble your creature, Pull and stretch parts exactly as you choose, then paint your creature with unique colors and patterns. In just a few minutes, anyone can easily make incredible animated creatures. You can share your favourites with friends using simple built-in tools, then visit the SPORE website and look at all the other cool creatures your friends and people all around the world are making.

Wired has a hands-on report.

Spore, starting with the Creature Creator, blurs the line between social networking and videogames. Strange bedfellows, sure, but an exciting prospect, particularly for a game whose content will spawn primarily from a rabid user-base. (There will be official offerings from Maxis Software, of course.) Every player (upon registering their game) is given their own page on the Spore community site, with RSS feeds tracking events in the game, their creatures' ratings based on community votes (Trunk: hot or not?) and other in-game news.

Publishing to Sporepedia -- a compendium of all things Spore -- is as simple as clicking "Share" once you're done working on a particular creature. Snap a screenshot and send it as an e-mail postcard, and shoot video, too, with uploads to YouTube just a few clicks away. Decided that you must have a Trunk of your own? Drag his image off the web page and into your game, and voilà, there he is on your screen. The whole world is sharing the same database, so you'll never know what you'll find, or where it'll be coming from.

I expect that SF fans will take to this in a big way, not to mention authors - see John Scalzi's post about it.

Labels: gaming

Here's a fun font guessing game. As the title suggests, it is rather difficult -- some of the choices are obvious, but others quite difficult. I suspect that designers would do better than technical writers, who tend to use a core set of five or six fonts. Just in case you're wondering, I identified 19 out of 34.

Labels: gaming

Here's a fun Flash Game - SuperBlockquote - a variant of the old Breakout game but in this case instead of bouncing the ball against blocks, you're bouncing it against corporate bafflegab. Take agaim at that manager speak jargaon!

Labels: gaming

id Software, the developers of the seminal first person shooters Doom and Quake will soon be bringing their online mayhem to your browser. They've announced Quake Live, an online version of Quake that will run entirely in a browser and won't require any software installation.

According to “id Software”, the website will not only allow users to access the game for free and play against each other, but will also provide “every element of the experience” by hosting tournaments and sponsored events, ‘matchmaking’ between players, and offering features such as friends lists, stats tracking and various tools for interaction between players. All of these services and features are meant to create a vibrant and active online community of “Quake” fans.

It'll be intereting to see how they manage this technically, given the performance requirements of modern games. But it anyone can pull it off, John Carmarck will be one.

Labels: gaming

Isn't technology wonderful, and isn't it amazing how it constantly opens up new ways to waste our time? Students at Stanford have figured out how to play Risk in the real world, using online messaging (and offline communication), cutting up the campus into a map, and playing a game over a period of several days. Given how much time I spent playing Risk when I was younger, I'd certainly be playing this if I was at Stanford. Maybe I should try introducing this to the Toronto downtown financial community - given how competitive some of the traders are, it could be really interesting.

Labels: gaming

About a year and a half ago I posted about Spore, a new game being developed by Will Wright, the creator of Sim City and The Sims. Spore may be the most ambitious simulation game ever - it's basically a universe simulator, in which you get to create whole worlds, creatures for them, and then share them with other users. There's been a lot of anticipation about this game, and it's finally got a release date - September 7, 2008.

Bit-tech.net has a hands-on preview of the game. It'll be interesting to see how this gets received - it looks like something that could appeal to a wide range of players. Given the creature building tools available, I expect to see a lot of SF authors and readers picking it up - I can't wait to see someone build one of Larry Niven's Puppeteers, for example. And you'll get the chance - Maxis plans to distribute the creature creator module from the game a few months before its release.

Wired has a gallery of images with some commentary from developer, Will Wright.

Labels: gaming

Here's a serious time waster - a 3D Tetris game implemented in Flash, so you can play it in your browser. It's quite well done.

Labels: gaming

CNET has an article reviewing the 10 best free online games. You'll need Flash to play these addictive little diversions.

Labels: gaming

Here's a review of Valve's The Orange Box, which includes all of the Half-Life 2 installments, Team Fortress 2, and a new game called Portal. I haven't been playing Half-Life 2 much, though I should get back into it as it really is an amazing game.

But then, I'm a nerd. The whole thing is terrific. In the face of dozens of high-price AAA titles this Christmas season Valve's offering stands out from the crowd with a clusterbomb of content that won't be easily put down. People will be playing TF2 for literally years to come, if you're done with Episode Two you can go back through it gnome-style, and I fully expect Portal to be supported by fan-created rooms for a long, long time. It's well worth buying for anyone that enjoys the first-person perspective on gaming, regardless of what kind of gamer you are. Now if I could only get that song out of my head ...

Labels: gaming

It looks like the Halo movie is officially dead, at least for now, and maybe for good. This is bad news for Halo fans, though it may be good news for the rest of us, who have sat through too many awful movies based on video games. http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5987201#
Then again, it might have been good - this is what the director had to say:

"I wanted it to feel like the most brutal, real version of science fiction in a war environment that you've seen in a while. And Universal was on board with that. I don't really remember what Fox thought about it, but Universal seemed down with it. It would have been cool, it would have been a unique take on things, science fiction in a dirty, organic way."

Labels: gaming, movies and television

As if Rubik's wasn't hard enough (well I never learned how to solve it), there's now this - an irregular Rubik's cube. I'm not even going to try to describe it. Just look at the pictures or the animation. I'd like to know just how much computer power it took to get this thing to work, and who dreamed up the idea.

Labels: gaming

Fans of Firefly and Serenity have something to look forward to - Firefly will become a massively multiplayer online game. I might be interested in this when in comes out (probably in 2008). I've watched my son play Guild Wars and it looks impressive, but the fantasy setting doesn't do much for me.

Labels: gaming, movies and television, SF