Games – Page 8 – ɔimoɈɒ

Dicing with the iPhone

In an odd combination of non-day-job-work and play, I found this: “I started working with the audio toolbox on the iPhone today. This morning, I added sounds to the little dice rolling application I’ve been writing. I recorded a total of fifteen sounds, five of a single die being rolled, five of two dice being … Continue reading “Dicing with the iPhone”

In an odd combination of non-day-job-work and play, I found this:

“I started working with the audio toolbox on the iPhone today. This morning, I added sounds to the little dice rolling application I’ve been writing. I recorded a total of fifteen sounds, five of a single die being rolled, five of two dice being rolled, and five of four dice being rolled. I let my kids roll the dice while I recorded the sounds, which they thought was cool, although they can’t understand why I can’t put the program on my iPhone.”

I’ve never really used computers in my gaming. Recently it was useful because Google Maps helped us visualise the countryside in Arizona where we were travelling through.

Jeff LaMarche is developing an iPhone Dice Roller for us gaming geeks and I, for one, think it just the tip of the iceberg for the iPhone/iPod touch-carrying gamer geek.

Okay, Jeff, get this app out and we’ll see what we can do about Apple giving us a Certificate to install. I’d like to see “dice sets” myself. I will need all sorts of dice for Runequest, only d10s (but a lot of them) for Godlike and everything in between. Get to work (because it looks gorgeous).

In planning to play Godlike, we’re going to be using a lot more than one pair of d10s which means that the possibility of using a DiceRoller application has great interest to me. I don’t know if Jeff LaMarche will develop it but it’s inspired me that I’ll need it. Do I need it to just roll a number of d10 or do we need to provide matches? What about dynamic rolls? That would rock 🙂

My battery will need to be replaced however – to help make sure it lasts a game session and also gets my email. I’ll get in touch with my local AASP and get that sorted.

Linux Gaming.

Slashdot got this article from MadPenguin.org on why more Linux users aren’t gamers. Here, of course, is my wisdom. There are two kinds of Linux users. Political and Technical. The Political Linux user will have long abandoned any technology which hasn’t reached his or her standards of political extremism. They’ll have removed all Windows partitions … Continue reading “Linux Gaming.”

Slashdot got this article from MadPenguin.org on why more Linux users aren’t gamers. Here, of course, is my wisdom.

There are two kinds of Linux users. Political and Technical.

The Political Linux user will have long abandoned any technology which hasn’t reached his or her standards of political extremism. They’ll have removed all Windows partitions and yet resent their bank for not catering to their minority needs and the iTunes store and themselves for wanting doohickeys like iPods. They’re the ones with the various shades of window manager and boasting about how power management works. Easy to spot. Easy to lose in a cafÃ© too (just close your MacBook and leave. They’ll take a minute or six to shut down and get packed up.

The Technical user will, of course, be expedient with his or her use of technology. They’ll likely use a MacBook of some shape or size (because, you know, if you don’t you’re some sort of weirdo) which may or may not dual-boot to Linux or Windows. The only reason they have Windows is for their bank or maybe so they can actually play some decent games.

Of course, neither of these definitions explains exactly why there are so few games for Linux. It could be the (entirely correct) perception that Linux users don’t pay money for software. That’ll be a big one right there. And while companies can make a buck selling support for Linux as an operating system, selling support for games isn’t going to go far as people just hacked off when a game doesn’t perform.

What I wonder, however, is why there hasn’t been some sort of “x86 gaming platform” invented. I mean, almost all the hardware out there runs on x86 based machines now. Why not engineer a solution not dissimilar to the PlayStation where the OS was loaded from the disk at the same time as the game? Why hasn’t Intel pulled their finger out? We’d end up with a system where we bought CDs and DVDs, maybe even USB keys, with a base Linux kernel that would autodetect the hardware, run the drivers and autoload the game. The entire game would almost be copied into RAM and there’s your solution. Reboot to play, takes a few seconds to boot and doesn’t require using Windows.

Right. That’s the hard bit thought of. I’ll leave the easy bits (the technical side, the code, hardware, distribution, licensing, advertising and sales) to others.

Casual Games

I’ve been thinking of applications which would suit the iPhone and iPod touch and mused about how the original iPod models had a click wheel and yet no-one managed to bring out a driving game 🙂 One area that I’d love to see some work in would be gaming on iPod touch and iPhone. John … Continue reading “Casual Games”

I’ve been thinking of applications which would suit the iPhone and iPod touch and mused about how the original iPod models had a click wheel and yet no-one managed to bring out a driving game 🙂

One area that I’d love to see some work in would be gaming on iPod touch and iPhone. John Carmack has criticised the iPhone already in this area despite not seeing the SDK and not knowing therefore what Apple’s strategy was for gaming on the iPhone.

Casual Games work because they can be picked up and dropped off. SIMCity and SIMTower (the less complex version and include SIMAnt here) were the olden days versions of Tamagotchis. They were games that you could spend an hour or ten minutes messing with and then wander off for a few hours. Come back and then see where it had got to. Tamagotchis had the same thing but with a little more tech and a little more demanding on the attention. Ignore the little device with the little animal and it died. So sad, too bad. Nothing was more fun than coming back to SIMtower and seeing that floors 9-13 had cockroach infestations and 24-30 had a fire about half an hour after you left it. So, you’d repair the problems and then wander off for dinner.

Attention is the resource we’re striving for. But we’re not looking to completely capture it.

Games like Strategy, racing games and FPS require absolute attention. We’re talking about games that will run on a phone so people might be just trying to kill time while waiting for someone to come out of a shop. So the games have to let you in quickly. There also has to be a SaveState or not much of a penalty for dumping a game. Games which require you to drop back to arbitrary save points are a pain – and why would you as a developer of entertainment want to cause your viewers pain? That would be like a TV programmer, after each commercial, show the last minute of what happened before the commercial. I’ve seen this done in the US….and I didn’t like it.

It’s a bit like Splash screens in games. Man – how annoying are the splash screens in Battlefield 2142? Yes, we know it’s EA. Yes, we know some company called DICE had something to do with it. After the first time, we don’t care who made it. At least on most Mac versions of games you can delve into the bundle and ditch the movies which make up the splash screens and the game just continues on. Saved us from the overly long sequences in the Mac version of Halo I can tell ya. These are only slightly less annoying than companies which insist on showing you splash screens after the game is finished. You quit out only to be hit by an advert. Thanks but no thanks.

We’re looking to grab the attention, hold the attention and be able to release attention quickly. So our game must load fast, not be in your face too long, and get you into gameplay as soon as possible. And when done – it should allow you to exit quickly.

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