So what else has been occupying my time recently? In a word, games.

On the playing side of the equation, the full version of Uncharted 2 (guess I should do a write-up of that too, huh?) and Demon’s Souls landed in my mailbox, along with Brütal Legend (which has surprisingly failed to reach it to the PS3 yet).

But more time has been spent on the developing side, which can’t be a bad thing, right? I’m back working on that word game — the one that started all the way back here, although it now takes a very different form from that primitive version.

Actually, given I’ve never mentioned it here in a public post, let me informally unveil it here now: the current working title is WorldPlay! (although it’s likely to change soon-ish), and it’s a word game with a degree of world building and a whimsical, vaguely Katamari Damacy-ish feel. You can read the official TIGSource devlog for more info and updates.

Progress is being made, and it’s all very exciting and rewarding. Good times, good times.

While not necessarily a reflection of the game itself, I have to say that this was, for me, the most disappointing demo of the show.

Why? There are a few reasons. For one, I don’t think this is a game well suited to a 12 minute demo. The first Creed was, in many ways, quite a slow game, or at least a game that emphasised un-hurriedness as a major design element.

The demo featured a single mission – go an meet an informant, killing 5 potentially troublesome rooftop archers on the way. The demo was only half hands-on – first I had Sony Demo Guy show me a few things, and take out the first of the 5 archers, before handing the controller to me. From then on, he was leaning over my shoulder, pointing things out, commenting on things, and so forth. It’s not a situation I particularly like at the best of times, but it really left me feeling unable to just roam around and explore the city (especially with him periodically checking his watch). Simply rushing from objective to objective in the first game killed a lot of the experience, and that’s exactly what I ended up doing in this demo.

My other criticism of the demo was that it didn’t really show me anything I didn’t know from watching trailers and playing the first game. About the only thing new I saw was that you could change the colour of Ezio’s outfit at the shops I knew were in the game, although Demo Guy did point out that it doesn’t actually make you any stronger or anything, it’s purely cosmetic (incidentally, I remember reading somewhere else that it actually may have some slight effects on your conspicuousness in certain situations).

All of that said, there’s still a lot that’s exciting about this game. It’s impossible not to notice the huge graphical upgrade over the first game – Venice is significantly more detailed and impressive than the Holy Land was. Ezio seems to have a great many more nasty tricks up his sleeves than Altair did – I did enjoy pulling guys of ledges in the demo. And there is the promise of a much more varied gaming experience than the first one delivered. And for all it’s shortcomings, the first game was still a reasonably interesting and entertaining experience. Taken together, these are all reason that I will more likely than not pick up this title.

It’s just a shame that the demo of the game really didn’t do much in the way of reinforcing those points.

This was, for me, the best game of the show.

The thing that impressed me the most were the environments. The Nepalese city I was running through (forget if it’s Kathmandu or not) looked amazing. The urban setting lets them create a much more colourful and detailed setting, and the level of detail they’ve put into the environments is amazing. It’s the little things, such as having books fall out of bookshelves as you climb on them, that gives the world so much life. The city really has the feeling of a place that’s war-torn and falling apart – half the buildings are blown open, trucks are driven through walls, it’s a mess.

It also feels a lot more fun climbing around the half-ruins of the city – as well as the traditional sticking-out bricks, you can also climb on a range of other things too. Initially, I did feel a little lost and unsure of where to go, although I’m not sure if there was some Japanese hint I missed. Sadly, in the short playtime I had I only got 2 fights, and a climbing section in between – I didn’t get to see any of the puzzle solving side.

The combat was something I enjoyed in the first one, and the second seems to have added a number of small changes to add a little more variety. For example, I got my hands on a metal riot shield, which afforded me some mobile cover in exchange for slower movement and being restricted to one handed weapons. Also, the propane tanks littering the city can be picked up, thrown and detonated by shooting them, for fun barbecue times. On the side of simplifying controls, grenades are not much easier to use too, by simply tapping L2 when aiming, instead of having to switch to them as a separate weapon type.

There really wasn’t a great deal more that I can say from the TGS demo, but I found the demo really exciting. Even for “just” a demo, it felt very well – and very deliberately – crafted, with a good interest curve (this was particularly noticeable compared to some of the other demos at the show).

In the week since the show, I’ve had a chance to experience a bit more of the game, through the multiplayer beta that Naughty Dog have very kindly made public.

While traditionally I’ve avoided online multiplayer (perhaps due to memories of arse-whoopings in Warcraft 2/3 and its ilk), lately I’ve been more and more inclined to try it out, and I have to say, it’s rather fun.

I won’t say too much about it, but I’ve played a variety of games, and game types, and they’re pretty enjoyable. My least favourite are the elimination matches, largely because when (not if) I die, I’m stuck waiting for the longest, and the matches tend to end pretty quickly. I imagine they’d be pretty fun with two coordinated teams though. My favourite mode is probably the Plunder matches, which pit two teams against each other trying to reclaim an idol. It’s a lot of fun, especially as it forces each team to group up and work together (especially when you need to throw the idol). I’ve yet to try playing it against the CPU yet, but I hope to get to that at some stage.

My other favourite is the RPG Deathmatch, just for the sheer madness of it

Your kills in the multiplayer matches are rewarded with cash cash moneys, as are various actions, which earn you medals. Earning cash grants you levels (like experience), and allows you to buy various booster abilities (most of which additionally have a level requirement), as well as different skins, taunts, and other upgrades. The boosters are small, situational bonuses, that can be switched before each level, depending on what you’re after – ultimately they’re a minor character customization.

It’s quite addictive, all-in-all. In fact, this post has probably taken me the better part of 3 or 4 hours to write, largely because I’ve been playing it between matches

In short, this game will be awesome. I can’t wait the two weeks for it to be released (birthday present to myself lol), a wait which is made all the harder by some of the reviews that are already hitting the interwebs.

Anyways, next up: God of War 3.

Again, I got about 15 minutes of demo time. Fortunately, the language barrier was less of an issue than with Heavy Rain. I’ve been playing through GoW: Chains of Olympus recently, which has been a good reminder of what the series is about, and how it plays, and GoW3 looks to stay pretty true to that original formula.

Graphically, the game looks pretty good. Kratos is nice and detailed, as are the hordes of foes you’ll be facing off against. A few particular changes I noticed are with the orbs and chests – the former seem a lot smaller than previous games, which is a big improvement. It’s kind of unfortunate that they’re still just bland glowing coloured orbs, it would’ve been nice to see a little more detail in them. The chests look a lot better now though – they now bear a coloured omega instead of glowing out the top.

The gameplay still works much the same as well. Kratos’ twin blades are still just as quick and deadly. A nice addition was with the grab – instead of the usual grab and kill, Kratos had a few options once he grabbed an opponent, triggered by different face buttons. Circle was the traditional stabby death; triangle lifted them above Kratos’ head, before ripping them in half; and square allowed you to charge through other enemies, using the held one as a shield, with Kratos flinging the enemy at the end of the dash (or repeatedly smashing their head into a wall, should one be sufficiently close).

The demo also allowed you to use a 2nd weapon for Kratos, a pair of large gauntlets that could be used to pound enemies into submission, or thrown outwards before being yanked back together on chains, again for large damage. While I’ve always preferred faster weapons to the slower ones, the addition of extra weapons could help to add some more diversity to the action as well (they’re mapped to the d-pad, so there will probably be 4 different ones). It was hard to tell how much of a tactical decision weapon choice will be – personally I’d like to see each weapon have it’s own niche, and weapon switching be necessary to success.

The grisly kill QTE’s for larger enemies make a comeback too. Presumably to make it a little easier, the prompts now appear at the appropriate edges of the screen (triangle at the top, circle on the right, etc), although this did make it a little hard when playing standing less than half a meter from a 30-ish inch screen. This is one aspect I’m not entirely sold on – while QTE’s were significant element of previous titles in the series, they are a mechanic that seems to have fallen out of favour somewhat.

Speaking of grisly, one thing that did bother me is that, despite all the gouts of blood that spurt everywhere, none of it ever end up on anything, be it Kratos, other enemies, or even the environment. It just seems to evaporate shortly after leaving the body. Admittedly, this is something that bothered me more watching the trailer, but how much more brutal would Kratos feel if he ended up coated in hie enemies’ blood (like Uncharted’s Drake’s T-shirt, but less water and more blood)?

For the nitpicking I have, this does still seem like a solid title, with tight controls and everything that made the earlier titles so much fun. What I’ll be waiting to see is exactly what this game is going to add to the mix.

After about 45 minutes of waiting, I spent about 15 minutes with the demo. Here’s a rundown of what happened in that time. Be warned, this is my interpretation of it through an imperfect grasp of Japanese (did I mention it was in Japanese? It was in Japanese), and could be considered to contain some small spoilers.

The demo had 2 separate playable episodes; the one I chose had me playing as FBI agent Norman Jayden (<3 wikipedia). I was going to question junkyard owner ‘Mad Jack’, about a car that he’d sold. He couldn’t/wouldn’t tell me who he’d sold it to (he’s apparently bad with names). He walked off, and I had a chance to wander around his workshop, finding clues using Agent Jayden’s ARI, a set of high-tech glasses and a fancy glove which let you scan your surroundings and pick up additional information. As I went to leave the workshop, Jack held a gun to the back of my head, stopping me (for not trusting him, or finding him out, or something). As he led me back into his workshop, I was able to trip him up with a tile, allowing me to disarm him, and take him on in a good old fashioned fist fight… until he grabs a nearby pipe, and starts smacking you with it. After a valiant struggle, I fell, and was summarily bludgeoned to death by Jack. Thus ended my playthrough.

Fun, if not a little short. There was a heap more to the chapter that my ineptitude at quick time events precluded me from seeing. Very sad. A few thoughts from my time with the game though:

Firstly, there are a lot of quick time events. The entirety of the fight with Jack was a series of quick time events, although they weren’t too harsh time-wise. That said, it does kind of fit with the rest of the game – almost the entirety of the game, aside from moving, is played through pressing buttons corresponding to various on screen prompts attached to parts of the environment, characters, etc. Outside of the fight these were, or course, entirely untimed and repeatable, but it is an interesting control scheme. On the up-side, it also allows the developers to build whatever kind of interactions they like into the levels, with less concern as to how to have the player perform them, or know they can perform them. It’s interesting, and though somewhat unconventional, does play quite well.

The game has far more control over the camera than is traditionally the case. This potentially gives the game a greater degree of cinematography than is typical – camera angles can be changed for different sorts of effects. Again, the control scheme helps to make this possible, especially when things like movement are dictated by the direction your character is facing, not the camera angle.

Having just finished playing Arkham Asylum, it’s impossible to avoid drawing parallels between Agent Jayden’s ARI and the Bat’s Detective Mode, with both allowing you to draw extra information about your surroundings, as well as chucking a coloured filter over your entire screen. A really nice touch during the fight was when Jack throws you – although you initially start the fight with the ARI on, he knocks the glasses off, kicking you back into “normal mode”.

That’s it for now. This game had already been down in my books as a “to buy”, and today’s demo only served to strengthen that view. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the whole game, with it’s multiple POV characters fits together and plays out. With any luck, I’ll be able to check out the other scenario tomorrow, and then hopefully, sometime in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be able to do it all again but in English!

After a long-ish hike out there, and a minor hiccup getting in (Chi wasn’t given her ticket for the public day), we got in around 1:30.

It was equal parts noisy, nuts and AWESOME! Being my first experience of something of this particular size and nature, I wasn’t sure what to expect exactly, although my suspicions were mostly correct. A lot of screens playing different videos and blaring noise, the fabled booth babes, and a lot of people wandering around between them.

Most of our day was spend wandering around the halls, checking out the booths and collecting books and whatnot from the various booths, earmarking which games I’d go back and try and get my hands on. Of course, in queue-happy Japan, there was a lot of waiting to be done to get to these games. In the end, I only managed to get my hands on the one game – Heavy Rain. I’ll write up my thoughts on it separately, but it was good – I hope to go back and get another shot at it tomorrow.

Anyways, that’s it for now, time to write up my Heavy Rain thoughts

Still, this project required it (the alternative is having the user spend almost half their time waiting for the program - not cool), and so I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and playing with different ways of implementing them.

My fear now seems a lot more rational.

To start off with, Apple’s threaded programming guide, whilst incredibly informative, is written with some strange incantation woven into its text, one that has the power to reduce a grown man to tears. Whilst it’s easy to write this off as a lack of understanding on my part, at least I’m not the only one.

But I’m also finding that, mentally, there’s a muscle here that is totally underdeveloped. Normally I’d say I’m pretty good at mentally picturing the sequence of method calls and so forth, but for more than a single thread at a time, my head explodes (asplodes?). Coupled with some of my less-than-model debugging practices, today has been a fun day.

To derive some entertainment from this process, I thought I’d illustrate my latest and greatest problem, in humorous form.

Thread A: Hmm, I need to get some info. Luckily my buddy over here went and grabbed all the relevant stuff beforehand. Oh wait, he’s still getting it, I’ll just sit here and wait for him to get it ready.
Thread B: Urgh, why am I the one who has to do all the heavy lifting? Anyways, this lot of stuff is just about done. Hey A! I need you to grab this for me, it’s pretty much ready.
Thread A: I’d love to help man, but I’m waiting for that stuff to be ready.
Thread B: You just need to take it, then it’ll be ready! Just take it already!
Thread A: No no no, I’m waiting. Seriously, I can’t do anything until it’s ready.
Thread B: But it won’t be ready until you take it. GOD, YOU ALWAYS DO THIS!

It really is quite a simple problem, but it’s taking me far longer to get it clear than I’d like. Still, it does make the eventual problem solving all the more rewarding.

It has also got me looking at alternate ways to do things. I’m not sure that my current approach is exactly the most optimal one, so all of this could ultimately prove somewhat redundant. Still, it’s been (somewhat) fun!

Though I named this blog a yardstick for my creativity, my absence here belies my recent creative efforts. I’ve been bashing away at my iPhone app, and putting together a complete working model of its most basic mechanics. It is a tad boring at the moment – as it stands, it’s more a complicated toy than a game – but it’s a game, and it works.

If I let myself stop and enjoy it, there is a strong sense of fulfillment and pride (wow, pride :D) in there. Of course, I have many ways to not let myself enjoy it – my mind has a long list of pre-prepared statements with which to undermine my confidence – but at the end of the day, it is still there. It’s the thing that lets me say, without hesitation, that I am a game designer.

So far this app has been a huge learning experience. I should make the time to go over the code that I’ve written and document exactly what I’ve learnt to do. For all that I have learnt, there is still so much more; yet that doesn’t hold the same fear and significance that it once did.

Wow… This is one more reason I should come and post here: I really hadn’t given myself time to look back at this, just by myself. Self-indulgent back-patting it may be, but it’s probably something I could safely allow myself to do just that little bit more often.

Moving on, time for some goals (SMART goals!). There are six initial shorter term ones I’m starting out with, as follows:

1. Finish reading The Art of Game Design by the end of July.
2. Work my way through iPhone SDK Development (including completing the projects in each chapter) by the end of August. This starts now, not after finishing The Art of Game Design.
3. One piece of random creating fiction each month, by the end of the month (first piece by July 31). Why should games be the only thing I’m creating? This is practice in creating worlds, use of language, and somewhere for me to do whatever I like, really.
4. My first playable iPhone game by the end of August. Need not be releasable finished, but with most game elements intact, working, and balanced.
5. Improve my Japanese, such that I can pass the JLPT Level 2 in December. This goal needs a little more detail in how I’ll execute it, which will in turn be done by the end of the month.
6. At least two posts here per week, on any topic; at least one dedicated gaming post per fortnight. More is always better though!

Longer term, and more vaguely speaking, I’d like to be in a position where I can seriously look at applying for work at some Japanese gaming companies for next year (April onwards). I’d also like to have a few games under my belt by the end of the year, say 3. These goals are a little less SMART, though.

I fell of the wagon.

I know exactly when and why it happened. There was a two or three week period where there was a lot happening - first we spent a significant portion of our free time on the move, and then we went on holidays. By the time we got back, I had a hankering to play WoW again, and here we are, two odd months later.

It’s interesting to see – I hadn’t fully realised the extent to which the work I had been getting done was a result of the routine I’d gotten myself into. But it needn’t take much to break a routine, especially a new one, and so the progress I was make came to a grinding stop.

Time to get back on that wagon.

And so I’m back here, planning what’s next and publishing it for all the world to see, even if only a handful of people actually look (you know who you are; writing this is, in a way, my way of reminding myself that I have your backing and support). In some ways, this is a yard-stick for my work. When I am working, and thinking, and being productive, I write stuff here, or share stuff. When I am not creating anything here, I’m probably not creating terribly much anywhere else either.

My intention is to write a lot here

I’ve started reading Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design, and so far it’s a fascinating read. It’s kind of like the Landmark of game design, full of different perspectives from which to look at game design. Of course, there’s a lot of straight info, advice and suggestions in there, but just as much of it is written to stimulate more thought, more questions. So far, it’s been more than a little inspiring – I find myself again being a demand on myself to create.

Alongside this, I’ve started working my way though iPhone SDK Development again – it’s had significant re-writes to keep it up to date with the iPhone SDK 3.0, and it’s doing me good to go over some of the basics again after my little hiatus.

While I’m all inspired and excited now, I know it won’t last. Not that that’s a drama in any way, shape, or form – for though it won’t last, it will come back. That roller-coaster of inspiration, crash, and re-inspiration is, last I checked, colloquially referred to as “Life”. Time to start enjoying the ride. One thing to do is to start holding myself accountable to some specific goals, but I think I’ll put them in another post (if only so I can spot them more readily).

Let’s do this!

Oh, and one more thing, for anyone who had any doubts on the matter (especially Y.T.):

I am a game designer.