After many frustrating days and sleepless nights, we have for you a small holiday gift: a quick beta test of N v2.0, in holiday contesque form.
Yes, that’s right, there’s a new Contesque! (For those of you just joining us, “contesque” is a delightful and non-legally-binding portmanteau of contest + the suffix -esque. We coined the term to describe our contest-like events, which are not true contests in the legal sense because we cannot afford to have a proper legal document drawn up. Wordplay!)
Now before you get too excited, this little beta is very rough around the edges. The framerate is a bit unstable, the victory animation is placeholder, the door animations may be broken and a multitude of other small things are unfinished. Basically there’s still a ton to do, but we thought it would be fun to give you this preview of the new codebase, and the “arcade challenge” game mode.
The two main improvements you’ll quickly see are in the ninja’s interactions with slopes and bounceblocks — no more glitching on slopes or needing to dance around on bounceblocks, hooray!
On to the contesque! It’s open from now until January 14th (three weeks from now). Your replays will not be visible until after the contesque closes and we can determine the winners. We’ll enable them then, in a new build, so everyone can revel in the glory of the winning highscore runs. Check back here for links and details.
IMPORTANT: Please let the highscores load before playing, and make sure to let it finish uploading your highscore before starting a new game. The net code is very slap-dash, rest assured that this will be addressed before the proper v2.0 is released. And that horrible framerate too, ugh… sorry. The good news is that once we finish upgrading the simulator from 40hz to 60hz it should be smoother than ever before!
Note #1: When (if?) you get a highscore, you’ll see input boxes for your name and email — we’re still working on a login system, so you’ll have to enter a name and email each time. Also the font may be screwed up because Flash sucks.
Note #2: Emails will only be used to contact you if you win; we’re not spammy. Submitting your score may take a while, please be patient!
Note #3: There are three tracks of varying difficulty, and the rules are a bit different from what you’re used to in N v1.4: you only “collect” the gold’s time bonus when you beat a level, and the timer is not reset when you die. So the pressure is really on! Good luck.
Note #4: This challenge is definitely not for n00bs. If you’re having a hard time, you should probably practice on v1.4 (available for free here) a bit until you get the basics down; the challenge levels are are fairly advanced. We’ve tested thoroughly and determined that beating them is definitely possible though 🙂
Feel free to post questions about the Contesque here in the comments, and send bug reports to metanet AT metanetsoftware DOT com, and please be as detailed as you can — ideally, send the steps to recreate the bug you’ve found. Thank you in advance!
There may be a few updates (we really had to rush at the last minute and may have made a few errors), so keep an eye on the blog. We’ll keep you posted!
Whew! That’s it for this year. After Christmas family fun-times, we’ll be taking a few days off to try to decompress a little. It’s been a really rough year and we are very worn out. Until next time, dear readers: thank you for your support, enthusiasm and feedback. We always appreciate it. We hope you all have wonderful holidays and fantastic new years! Here’s hoping next year brings happiness and success to us all.
Wow, December already. It’s been an incredibly busy year, and time is just flying by.
First of all, in case anyone missed it, we’ve started the long overdue process of cleaning up the N v1.4 highscores, and can always use more help. If you know of a highscore that was acquired by cheating, please collect this info:
the episode and level numbers of the highscore so we can verify it, and the name of the user who holds that score
November was a volatile month, filled with ups and downs — more downs than ups, unfortunately. We hit a few snags with N, and are working hard to find solutions for those problems and finish the game. We will definitely have something for you by the end of the year, but we aren’t sure what that will be yet — it’s likely that the full release will follow that.
We’re working on figuring out a few projects that you should all find exciting for next year, as well. Hopefully, 2012 will be a great year, rather than 2011’s mediocre and in many ways, immensely disappointing one. We all need something to look forward to!
Ok we’ve got to get back to work — expect the last post of 2011 before the end of December!
We’re back from Indiecade and have had a hectic month full of meetings and scrambling to accomplish something. It’s been busy, but not as busy with game-development as we’d like, so we’re a little behind. Down, but definitely not out.
This was our first time at Indiecade, and it was great to see all of our game-developer friends, and meet some new ones. There were lots of inspiring talks and discussions, a couple really great parties, and generally not enough sleep. Our friends at Bigpants won the audience choice award for their game The Depths To Which I Sink: congratulations Em and Jim!
Mare made the IGF deadline with Yeti, which means it’s ready for you all to try as well! It’s an experimental and quirky adventure game that explores the humble beginnings of the intrepid Yeti you’ll get to know more in Office Yeti. Check it out here (download is Windows-only, but it works on Mac with Wineskin): https://www.officeyeti.org/yeti.html
Bonus exclusive just for you, dear readers — some character wallpapers! Yeti Faye Sasquatch Guy
We hope you enjoy them.
So that’s it for this month’s post. We’re still working on N and are currently in the middle of a couple other things — we’re hoping to have some exciting news for you in the next month or two. Stay tuned!
We spent all of September working on many different projects, and wrapping up the last few Difference Engine Initiative sessions, then working like mad to finish something cool to show you for this month’s post. Unfortunately, we didn’t get through as much as we would have liked, and we came up short. Probably not what you wanted to hear, but hang in there! We’ll have more for you soon.
We’re still working on the N editor, and are making progress. We want to make sure the interface is fluid and intuitive, fully-featured while still being easy to jump into: many conflicting design constraints are being wrestled with. We’re trying a few options to figure out a good balance between mouse and keyboard control, trying to support the old editor’s key shortcuts but also offering some new functionality that’s been sorely lacking.
The good news is that there should be a rich set of operations that make dealing with entities and tiles together much easier and more fun.
At the Hand Eye Society Social last night, the games from the Difference Engine Initiative were presented to a full house, which was very exciting. We had originally intended for this post to feature more info and links to the games each participant made, but that will have to come in a later post — there’s nothing up for public display yet.
Hopefully Erin Robinson’s excellent talk will also be posted online, so we’ll link to that as well if possible. Stay tuned!
Mare’s DEI game, Yeti (an adventure-ish game and the prequel to our upcoming game Office Yeti), ended up unfinished and very buggy, but we’ll be working to fix that just after we get back from Indiecade and will post a download here so you all can try it as soon as it’s in a more presentable state. There are a lot of interesting ideas there, but there’s still a lot of work to do! So many bugs to work out and a handful of scenes to finish. More on that soon.
And with that, we’re on our way to Indiecade for a much needed change-of-pace and a lot of hanging out with creative, insightful, interesting and awesome people — this could be just the refresher we need!
We’re frantically working on a few things before leaving for Indiecade, and will have time to write a post summarizing them on October 4th. Sorry for the delay!
We’re still soldiering away on multiple projects here. Among other things, the next iteration of N. Yes! Finally we’re posting about N. Hooray!!!
There has been a lot of internal discussion about what sorts of things we want to do with it, and beyond the obvious — make it a proper “web 2.0” dealie with in-browser play and integrated level creation/sharing and all that good stuff — there are lots of things to consider.
So far we’ve come up with a bunch of interesting and weird online ideas, and we’ve been talking with some of our friends about how to actually implement them — our knowledge of all things online, from databases to social platforms, has some serious catching up to do. The exciting news is that databases are apparently way more powerful and less complicated than our limited experience has led us to believe, and we’re really looking forward to figuring out the best ways to use this power in fun new ways.
The core game will remain more or less identical, however the presentation of this gameplay remains an open question. Even the smallest change in context can result in large differences in effect, and some of the things we’ve been debating are the merits of the current “episode-based” single-player structure vs a more freeform arrangement of levels. Episodes definitely provide some much-needed structure and challenge, however they’re also awkward in many ways. We’ve been trying to figure out what other approaches could be used to present/structure levels.
There are also still some annoyingly large concrete development tasks that loom before us, most notably rewriting the editor. We’re of course going to be keeping a “legacy” mode so that everyone who’s gotten used to the current horrible version — ourselves included — can continue to work unhindered. Obviously we’ll be improving even this old-fashioned mode somewhat, because there are a few basic but vital functions that it currently lacks. Undo, anyone? 🙂
The main problem editor-wise is how to deal with the whole “half tile” issue: there are some annoying asymmetries caused by our selection of tile shapes. This has been discussed on the forums in the past and it’s a bit hard to explain/describe — actually this vague description indicates that at least part of the challenge lies in finding the most useful way to classify and describe the problem itself.
There remain many possible solutions, all of them with serious flaws: introducing new tile shapes (for example, a 1/4-sized square) means that the tile-selection UI becomes more complex. Frankly the number of new tile shapes that would be needed approaches the number of original shapes, so this option sort of sucks — we don’t want to bury the existing shapes under a pile of (literal) corner cases!
Instead we could simply change the grid to be 2x the current resolution; this works beautifully and unifies everything nicely… except for the circular shapes! Unfortunately these shapes can’t be nicely cut into quarters. There’s also all of the UI problems associated with allowing tiles to be moved around by 1/2-tile increments: users can create very awkward shapes, but is it best to automatically sanitize these, outright disallow any movement that results in such problems, or allow the creation of horrible awkward monstrosities?
It’s a big UI nightmare!!
Anyway, aside from a few remaining bugs and other mundane tasks — such as devising a new format for the level and replay data — there really only remains the considerable effort of developing the backend (database stuff) and the front end (menu/UI flow). Both of these tasks are substantial and somewhat overwhelming… hopefully we can figure it out, if not alone than with the help of our friends.
In other news, the Difference Engine Initiative — which was talked about last time — continues at full steam. Each week the sessions are vibrant and inspirational, and the women involved are creating some really unique and interesting ideas and experiences.
One of the assignments was to modify an existing Stencyl game to make a new game; Mare’s take on this exercise is Herding Cats! Note: You’ll want to hear the sound. It is very simple, and rough and unfinished in a lot of ways, but it’s a decent version 1 and it was an excellent learning experience.
Stay tuned for more on The Difference Engine Initiative as it unfolds.
The first two sessions are part of the Ada Lovelace edition. This is a game-making opportunity just for women, which Mare and world-famous Toronto-based community organizer extraordinaire Jim Munroe are setting in motion.
This initiative is important for many reasons, but the most urgent of which is that the games industry needs to change substantially to survive in the modern world. The video game industry is by and large made up of a specific group of people (white dudes), so the games coming out aren’t representative of very many opinions and ideas, but also aren’t as accessible as they could be since they don’t resonate as strongly outside of that group. As well, the titles coming from the AAA side seem to be stagnating compared to the multitude of ideas coming from the indie side. More diversity in game development is better for business and better for team dynamics, leading to a higher quality output of more interesting, more nuanced and more varied games; we need to really shake up the numbers to keep this industry fresh!
There are some interesting points about why we need to diversify game development in Clint Hocking’s recent article for Edge (but note, there are a few issues with this article as well; for more, see You Can’t Fight Sexism With Sexism), and Robin Hunicke’s GDC Rant discusses some more. We are becoming more aware as a society that these are issues we need to address, but we haven’t yet really started talking about how to do that, and unfortunately there’s still a gigantic subset of the gaming industry that doesn’t see any reason to change. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Well the problem is, whether you want to see it or not, it’s broke. Er, broken.
So how do we encourage diversity? Well, based on her experiences and observations, plus many informal polls, Mare theorizes that you generally need three main things to start:
Visible Role Models
The DEI will introduce local game-makers and point to inspiring women around the world who are working to enhance and explore the world of game development, in order to show participants what’s possible.
Tools and Access to them
We will introduce participants to several point-and-click tools which are easy to jump into and fun to use so they can transform their ideas from paper to virtual reality with minimal difficulty.
Support
One of the most valuable tools in any game developer’s toolbox is a good forum, a good support network of knowledgeable peers, and the ability to ask questions and get feedback on their projects. We will be bringing in local mentors as well as providing lots of advice, tips, answers to questions and support for the game-makers.
There are lots of factors influencing who makes games and why, so this is just a start — after the above, things get very complicated — but building a future on a solid foundation is crucial.
So that’s the why, let’s get into the details of the sessions themselves. The Difference Engine Initiative is based on the Artsy Games Incubators, another of Jim Munroe’s successful brain-babies: https://nomediakings.org/artsygames/
The basic model is based on crafting or writer’s circles, which use a peer-mentorship atmosphere rather than a classroom setting to teach the basics and help move ideas from inception to completion. There are plenty of benefits to this approach, and the encouragement and feedback in a welcoming environment will be essential to new game-makers. Mare and Jim will be co-coordinating the sessions and teaching about game design, and will also be making games themselves.
We will take a handful of participants with little to no game-making experience, but who are passionate about games and are interested in learning what goes into making them — these are people with ideas and the desire to make them a reality, for whom the opportunity to get into game development has either been absent or unwelcoming.
This endeavour is about empowerment: we want to give women the skills to get started, the knowledge that making games is something they (and anyone else) can competently do and the confidence to continue in this industry if they’re so inclined. At the end of the Incubator, the participants will have a game that they created on their own, and the satisfaction they can get from that accomplishment is substantial.
It’s important to note that this Initiative is not the perfect solution to all the problems of gender disparity in this industry, nor is it intended to be. We are hoping to generate some data and theories as to why there aren’t more women in game development, and are hoping to learn how to make future endeavours more effective at encouraging and satisfying a more diverse group of people in this industry.
There are obviously many reasons why there aren’t more women in game development, but some of the most prevalent are entirely socially constructed: there is a persistent belief in our patriarchal culture that women are less capable than men in the fields of science, math, engineering, physics, and basically anything requiring a degree of complex thought or problem-solving. There is a lot of sexism ingrained within us as a result of these beliefs, and that tends to reveal itself in social situations, whether consciously or unconsciously, which can make it very uncomfortable for those being discriminated against. As it happens, there is no biological basis for the belief that women are less capable than men; it is completely false and entirely fabricated. For more info on this, you need to read this book — actually, everyone everywhere needs to read this book:
Cordelia Fine is a psychologist with a delightful sense of humour and a fantastically engaging and intelligent writing style. In this book, she uses critical analysis to explore the bad science in studies which purportedly show how men’s and women’s brains are functionally different and thus have qualitatively different outputs and capabilities. She shows how and why these studies shouldn’t be trusted, and what the reality is. The mastery with which she eviscerates each faulty argument is just plain delicious, and should not be missed.
Read that book, it is captivating, and so important. Her other book, A Mind of its Own, is similarly scintillating and also worth reading, especially as a companion piece.
So back to games. Since it’s such a relatively young industry, there is a real opportunity here to make some lasting changes, but all of us need to continue to make steps towards the future we want to see. The Difference Engine Initiative is one of these steps. And if you see the value in this project, please help spread the word! If you think we’re doing it wrong, why not start your own initiative? Encourage the people around you to start making games and being creative. We need to start talking and thinking about these issues much more than we currently do, and in much more detail, in order for them to permeate social culture as we know it and begin to change our collective minds. So get out there and start up a conversation!
The deadline for applications is tonight at midnight, so if you’re a Toronto woman who is interested in making a game, please apply!
Mare, Raigan and Jim, are all very excited about the enthusiasm this project is generating — about 30 women attended the info session last Tuesday, and so far there are twice as many applications — and especially about the smart, creative and interesting women who are applying. We can’t wait to get started and see what happens!
June was a very busy month, and we were focused on finishing the office so that we could get back to work — but unfortunately we only finished the finishing the office part.
It turned out beautifully though, check it out! Office Before (you saw these last post)
It’s a vibrant, fun space that embodies our senses of style plus a lot of inspiration for future projects. The high ceilings and large window make the office bright and airy, which is great for motivation.
What we’re most excited about is the flexibility. The furniture can move around if we need it to, and each piece can serve several purposes. For example, the large meeting table will also be useful as a workspace for people should we need to hire someone for contract work. It’s neat, tidy and ready to go.
We’re psyched to get started working in the new space (tomorrow!) and are just finishing up a few last-minute computer issues (such as the network).
We hope to have lots of exciting news next month. Stay tuned!
Second: The reason for our horrible failure to post in May is probably not as exciting as you might hope: we now have an office. Or, we will once we finish fixing it up and moving in.
The past couple weeks have been full of painting, assembling Ikea furniture, installing air conditioners, trying to figure out basic plumbing, and lots of sweating. Although now that the air conditioner is in, hopefully less of that 😉
What is the point of an office? After discussing this at length with Toronto indies who have offices, we are convinced it could help us to get things done. We mainly hope that a dedicated work space will help increase productivity and reduce stress relative to working from home. It will also have room for others to work, in case we need to team up with people or if any of our friends feels like working in an office for fun 🙂
In other news, the sixth annual TOJam happened a couple weeks ago. In case you don’t know what this is, here’s a link: https://www.tojam.ca/home/default.asp
TOJam is one of Toronto’s most exciting video game events, and has resulted in many, many memorable games. The benefit to video game culture is immense — the Toronto game development scene is very much indebted to TOJam, and we can say with certainty Toronto would not be as vibrant without it.
We were most impressed by the quality of the games jammers have produced in just three short days. Their talent and skill is indeed awesome.
We didn’t participate in the jam itself, but it was held just a couple blocks from our office, so we decided to “remote jam” and make something fun and small over the weekend. And so, we present to you a simple 2d basketball prototype! Compared to the official TOJam games, this one pales. But it was a fun little project and we’re happy we participated.
The controls are a bit awkward — we need more time to refine them 🙂
A fast-start tutorial would be:
-click in the window to set focus
-press tab
-press 1
-click+drag to pull back ball; release to throw
As you can possibly tell, we spent most of the time on the editor and didn’t end up having enough time to get a real game working; we’ve got a couple ideas of where to take it though so hopefully we’ll have a chance to revisit it in the next couple months.
And now we will address what, judging by the comments on the last few posts, is on everyone’s mind. Yes, N.
We are still on track to get this new version done this year, and will be ramping up progress as soon as the office is complete and we can get back to work. In the meantime, we’ve been making levels and planning so that we’re ready to start knocking items off our to do list. Levels are actually becoming much more difficult and time-consuming, because at this point we’ve made over 2000 of them and we’re trying not to repeat ourselves! Thankfully it’s still fun and enjoyable to test them.
The ragdoll has been rewritten, and there are a very few small things to fix up game-wise (e.g finally figure out how to make un-breakable one-way platforms!) but on the whole the rest of the work is database/back-end and UI type stuff.
We really appreciate your enthusiasm for N, and we hope this will be the definitive version. For the sake of our sanity it will probably be the final version, at least for the forseeable future (and notwithstanding a possible PSN version); at this point the game has become somewhat of an albatross for us, it’s a very hard first act to follow!
We know that we can eventually produce something that we like just as much as N, but so far all of our efforts on other games have been disappointing and frustrating… nothing is really turning out as well as N did. But still, we struggle on, because there are games we want to play which don’t yet exist, and we are dying to make them happen.
This month we leave you with something quite silly. Some of you may know Kris Piotrowski, a Toronto indie from Capy. A photo of him taken at GDC 2011 inspired us to create Happy Little Kris, a little pocket of ridiculousness that has been cheering us up ever since: https://happylittlekris.tumblr.com/ Here’s the facebook page.
Happy Little Kris just makes everything more fun.
Okay, this is very cheap-ass but we’re too tired right now to post properly, it’s been a very long and labour-intensive couple weeks… details tomorrow!!
