The argument put forward is that when faced with too much choice people will often choose nothing at all rather than go to the effort of objectively weighing up the options and trying to come to a decision. I find this tends to stand up to my daily observations the most recent of which was a trip to the supermarket where my girlfriend asked me to choose some crisps and; faced with an entire aisle of choice, my brain completely shut down and refused to even try.

The book splits the world into two groups: Satisficers and Maximisers. Maximisers want to be sure that their decisions are the best they can possibly make even to the point of comparing them to imagined possbilities that don’t or can’t exist in reality. Satisficers have standards but don’t worry about whether or not they got the best deal just that their most important criteria have been met.

Satisficers tend to live a happier more fulfilled life because they spend less time worrying about things they can’t control while Maximisers tend to be more depressed and filled with buyers remorse.

This is similar to Perfectionism. Perfectionists strive for an unattainable ideal often at the expense of everything else. Perfectionism is in fact very bad for you unless you have some outside force that is willing to intervene when you get carried away.

Duke Nukem Forever suffered immensely from this. In an effort to create a “Perfect” videogame 3D Realms ditched a perfectly good game they believed wasn’t good enough and started over. Ultimately they never released anything. Perfectionists are doomed to be depressed and to hate the very things they help create because they will only ever focus on what is wrong with things. It is in fact a very pessimistic outlook on life and yet for some reason a trait that many claim to desire in the people they hire.

Well I guess that might be true so long as the person doing the hiring and cracking the whip isn’t themselves a perfectionist and has the guts to stand in front of a room full of perfectionists and tell them that what they have made is “Good Enough”  (There is no bigger insult to a perfectionist than being told what you have created is only “good enough”).

I’m a recovering perfectionist. I’m trying to get comfortable with the idea of letting things go in cases where changing them any more isn’t going to result in any significant gain or benefit. This doesn’t mean I won’t make something as good as I can possibly make it but it does mean that I’m more likely to recognise when further work is futile and instead take pride in what I have done rather than dwell on what I haven’t.

This is also by way of apologising for not posting any updates on my game. I had a perfectionist moment and decided to rewrite the entire code base so that it did everything it used to do but in a nicer way that nobody but me will ever care about.

Sorry. That would be the curse of perfectionism right there.

So it is that I present to you: Quitters Arcade

Now this is an honourable enterprise as the goal is to help people stop smoking but my Dad used to smoke and he claims that if you are serious about it then you don’t “Quit” you “Stop” and call me crazy but I can understand where he’s coming from. However “Stoppers Arcade” really doesn’t have a great ring to it. The site consists of 3 flash games that are allegedly based on arcade games from the 80’s. You have a side-scrolling shmup, a vertical platform game and a reflex game where you throw packets of cigarettes in the bin (which is actually my favourite).

I guess the idea is to raise awareness among youngsters that smoking sucks and it’s easier to give up than you think. At least that is what the press release says. It’s an honourable goal and it may succeed in some small way. However to quote my girlfriend: “people who have been smoking for quite a while, like me, do not really need a silly game to know we should quit” and she really is right about that. But you’re a bugger when you’re a teenager and maybe delivering the message via videogames is a good way to go about it.

OK now since this is a games design blog on to the games.

They’re not great.

“Blast n Quit” is the shooter and to be honest it fails in many ways. The instructions aren’t clear and the first time I played it I found myself floundering around the keyboard for the fire button (Left Control by the way). In addition that screen scrolls too fast, the weapon doesn’t seem powerful enough and it’s difficult to tell what to avoid. The waves don’t feel balanced and it’s just far too difficult.

“Bin Um” is the game where you toss packs of cigs in the bin. It’s actually quite a nice example of a one-button game and once I figured out the relationship between the markings on the charge bar and the distance thrown I found it relatively fun. However the difficulty doesn’t seem to ramp up very much and I felt I could keep a chain going forever. No doubt there will be some ridiculous scores posted as a result of this. Girlfriend didn’t agree however and felt it should start off slower and ramp up as you got better.

“Escape from planet smokey” is a platformer where you have to escape the rising cloud of smoke and get to the top of the screen collecting as many pickups as you can on the way. This one is simple and intuitive although I felt a little harsh as second hand smoke kills you instantly and is hard to spot and time due to the relatively small and obscure graphics.

It is however much easier and in my opinion more fun than recent game Flood The Chamber which I really did not enjoy at all. Also no I have not played VVVVVV yet either.

This includes the UI, Scoring and Online Scoreboards.

I find procrastination tends to set in at the end of my projects because of these boring bits and because I don’t have any work left to look forwards to on the other side of them. Being able to implement some awesome stuff is a great motivator for implementing the boring but essential bits.

So with this in mind I am trying my hardest to get as much of this out of the way now so that when I come back to it again in future it’s just to tweak and bugfix it which is infinitely less dull.

However this doesn’t mean I’ve not done anything on the game itself. It’s just that most of what I’ve done are small tweaks that annoyed me and were easy to fix. Things like making the game work at resolutions other than 1280×720 or fudging the camera so you can see more of the arena when you are near the walls. That kind of thing.

I’ll be back soon with an update after I get the boring bits out of the way.

Lets start with the video:

The most notable addition this week is a new enemy called a “Bumble”. Bumbles are so named because they bumble around the arena in a pseudo random fashion bumping into each other and occasionally the player. I wanted an enemy that would be unpredictable and serve to reduce the amount of empty space in the arena which would make it more difficult to just kite the “Grunt” enemies.

The wandering behaviour is based on this article although since I don’t have an infinite playing field to work with I added in some code that pushes the steering force back towards the middle of the arena the closer to the edge they get (although it’s not so strong that they don’t sometimes just bounce off the arena wall).

I’m learning some things about shoot-em-ups that I never realised before but which tie in with Deathmatch style level design.

For example – Power-ups exist not to make the player more powerful but as a way to get the player to move somewhere specific rather than just moving into the space with the least enemies. As enemies often spawn a Power-Up when they die; and this is often in the middle of other enemies, this forces the player to make a risk-reward decision. This is exactly the same as placing Power-up in a Deathmatch level where the best weapons get put in the most exposed and least defensible places.

Finally if you want to read about the more technical work that went on this week (most of my time was spent refactoring code rather than adding new features) then check out this post on the UDK forums where I talk about Actor pools, memory fragmentation and Pawns being overweight.

So to update: I decided to ditch my efforts to make a physics based puzzle game for two reasons:

1. The cap on angular velocity.
2. I wanted to make a game where you get to blow things up.

If I’m honest it was mostly the blowing things up bit that turned me.

So using what I had already built as a base I started experimenting with making enemies that I could later shoot at. There was much messing around with navigation meshes and pathfinding before I eventually decided to ditch anything remotely complex and keep everything as simple as I could.

This resulted in an “Enemy” that looked exactly like the player and whose only behaviour was to roll towards them as fast as they could. Heck entire games have been sold that only have this behaviour.

With my simple enemy type I set about coding up a simple weapon class and targeting system. Bullets get shot towards the mouse. I used the basic Projectile class that is built into Unreal for my bullets and wrote a simple state machine for my gun that just spawned a bullet on a timer.

Behold!

This however was about from a week ago. This weekend I decided that it was time to give the game a full visual overhaul and get some sound up and running. You can see what the result of all that effort was beneath the cut:

I think it’s quite spiffy myself. The balls are still there but just hidden so the physics remains the same (although I’ve gone back to using impulses and not torque to avoid the angular velocity issue).

As well as giving the game a complete new look there were innumerable tweaks, bug fixes and indulgences that went on. Just getting the explosions to change hue over time was a couple of hours work alone and there was about 3 hours of completely failing to understand the math behind line-circle intersections in order to fix an issue with one of the enemy spawners (the friendly people in #Unrealscript will recall me appearing briefly just to rant about it last night).

Right now however I have a huge list of things to add, I have lots of different enemy types to add as well as more feedback and effects to implement and one game mechanic in particular that I think will be very interesting.

It’s been tentatively titled “Zero Point” by the way. It’s not a great name but I was tired of calling it “TestGame” feel free to leave suggestions in the comments thread.

They all then rushed to the forums to ask how you make a game.

Fortunately I’m an old hand with Unreal, starting back in 2000 modding Deus Ex and then progressing pretty much hand in hand with the engine through each version to the current one often being paid for the pleasure. I’m one of the few people in the world who can say they have worked with every version of Unreal that doesn’t work for Epic.

So rather than rush to forums asking how to make games I just made a game.

BEHOLD! One short weekend of fiddling with UDK later and I have something that can be very loosely called a game…

Ok so it’s a ball that rolls around a simple level collecting glowy yellow things.

More beneath the cut…

If I’m honest I spent more time fiddling with particle effects and lighting than I did actually writing code. Some people liken it to Pacman, other mention Marble Madness. At this point I didn’t really have any plans of what I was going to make and was really just poking the code to get something to happen with a minimum of effort.

However as more people encountered my little endeavour I was encouraged to maybe make something a bit more interesting.

Here is my list of restrictions that I’m bound by:

• Project can only use content that I can create myself.
• Project must support online multiplayer.
• Project should epitomise Systemic Game Design.

With this in mind I decided to expand on the physics theme and spent a few hours on monday and tuesday implementing support for buoyancy (which PhysX doesn’t support out of the box) and fiddling around with Fluid Surfaces.

It’s during this phase that I relise how lucky I am to be an Unreal Developer by day as I stumble across one of the more annoying features: The C++ Black Box.

UDK doesn’t give you the C++ source code. This means that there are times when the engine is doing something that doesn’t make sense and has disappeared into the Black Box of Native code. In this case it was the calculation of a physics objects mass.

This means that some constants and formulas are locked up beyond the prying eyes of the UDK programmer.

To cut a long story short however it turns out that Mass in Unreal is calculated as:

(Volume x Density)^0.75  x MassScale

The argument being that it reduces the difference between small and large objects because PhysX behaves funny when you have wildly different Masses involved.

Whatever the formula though so long as you know what it is you can at least be sure your simulation is internally consistent even if it isn’t a 100% accurate recreation of the real world.

With this version I change the Balls physics to apply Torque rather than an impulse which gives a more satisfying and “Physicsy” feel and even allows the ball to climb walls a little (hurrah for friction!).

So far however I’m still just playing around with tech and not really concentrating on the “Game” part. I have vague ideas involving fire, wind and fracture meshes. I also have an idea for making enemy cubes that stomp around the map but it’s early days yet.

Watch this space.

[Via Gizmodo]

To the right you can see a graph plotting the total money spent by consumers on music since 1973 divided into different media.

There is a clear trend here of one new media type taking sales away from it’s predescessor.

Until you get to the drop off in CD sales.

Now the RIAA would like you to believe that this drop is purely the result of internet piracy.

It isn’t.

I’m not about to say Internet Piracy isn’t a problem (it is) but I’m also not about to side with the RIAA as their tactics have been fairly reprehensible.

However Piracy alone cannot explain the huge drop in spending on music.

What follows is my opinion based on anecdotal evidence. It’s not facts and I’m not claiming that they are. I have no real evidence to support my claims but I hope that somebody at elast investigates it because I think it’s an interesting topic…

The Internet Killed Music

Piracy hasn’t killed the music industry. If anything Online Retailing and the rise to power of Amazon has had a much larger effect on the bottom line of the music industry than any amount of downloaded music.

Back in 1999 if I wanted to buy an album on CD I would be paying between £12-15 for it in a brick and mortar store.

Today ten years later I can buy a New CD for under £10 sometimes even less than that.

Most things in the last ten years have gotten more expensive (like Candy. That stuff cost 30p ten years ago and now costs closer to 70 of our pence. Rip. Off. ) but CD’s have gotten much cheaper.

2 Reasons exist for this:

CD’s cost less to duplicate. I can get 1000 CD’s pressed with boxes, Cover Art etc for under £1 each with shipping. The numbers the Music Industry is dealing with means that they are paying pennies to actually manufacture the product.

Compared to ten years ago the profit on the physical product is much higher (while arguably the cost of recording the music has kept pace with inflation).

This reduced cost of manufacture is what allows big stores like Amazon to sell a CD for 2/3 it’s RRP and still turn a good profit.

At the same time as manufacturing costs dropped the intense competition from online retailers has forced the retail price to drop. In order to stay competitive and stop a sale going to Amazon high-street music stores have to charge online prices.

So point 1: Music Costs less to buy now than ten years ago. Thus the value of a single sale is much lower than it was ten years ago. All we know from the above graph is we’re spending less money. That doesn’t mean we’re buying less music just that we’re spending less money on it.

CD’s Aren’t The Only Fruit

Around 1999 (the peak of CD sales) something happened. DVD became a viable format for Films and Videogaming consoles had become mainstream entertainment.

Both of these cost more than a CD full of music.

What happened then is that people found their disposable income was split between CD’s, DVD’s and Videogames.

Films and Videogames both cost much more to produce than an hour of music with budgets firmly rooted even then in many millions of dollars. To make back your investment on a Film or Videogame meant you had to charge more for the end product.

It was easier to spend more money on music ten years ago for most people as the alternatives either didn’t exist or weren’t as compelling.

Remember that the amazing numbers you see for how much money we’re spending on Videogames has to come from somewhere. In order to spend more on videogames we had to spend less on other luxury items like Music and Books. The new format taking over from the CD in that chart isn’t mp3 or digital downloads but the videogame.

I promised to post a review of this a very long time ago now. In truth I finished reading it a long time ago I’ve just been far too busy to blog anything until now.

I bought this book as a follow-up to Blink as I wanted to know more about subconcious decision making and instinct. On that front I am not at all disappointed.

Gut Feelings demonstrates alot of the ways that we make decisions subconciously and presents data resulting from many case studies around the world pitting logic and reason against intuition. The Conclusions are very convincing and I finished the book happier in the knowledge that I could apply what I had just learnt not just to my work (more on that in a moment) but to my everyday life.

One of the key principles demonstrated in the book that really stuck with me is the “One Good Reason” heuristic.

The theory is that the majority of decisions are made by focussing on the most important elements one at a time. Once you find a solution or product that matches that element you stop looking. If there is a conflict between 2 or more products you move on to the next most important element until you end up with just one.

On analysing my life I did relise that I do make most of my decisions using this heuristic. Logic and reason would suggest that I weigh all the variables equally and use some highly complex formula to come up with the correct result.

Fact is though that system only works for hindsight when all of the relevent variables are available. With limited knowledge in a highly unpredictable world the simpler “One Reason” heuristic has been proven to operate at much better than chance (Even when predicting the stock market).

This has made me less worried about writing lists and comparing them in order to make my decisions. I’m much happier with decisions I’ve made on instinct than ones I’ve poured over for days. I trust my subconcious alot more than I used to.

As far as how this can be applied to Games Design though I think this is a must-read for anybody working with Artificial Inteligence.

While designing Wheelmans OnFoot enemy AI we developed lots of very complex formulas to weight cover locations and targets. These formulas would get more and more complex as more and more exceptions and edge cases were found. In the end they were largely useless and the AI still behaved erratically.

Looking back at it I think applying a decision tree that only looks at one element at a time would produce much more predictable and sensible results. An added bonus is that such a heuristic is far faster and inherently more optimised than a complex formula that tries to account for all possible variables at the same time.

For more general Games Design I think understanding the different heuristics we use often can help you understand how your players will try to solve a problem and generally play your game. 80% of people playing your game will be operating entirely subconciously and be unaware of any complex decision making process (Heck I manage to play Civilization 4 that way – I suck at it but that isn’t the point).

Recognising how the subconcious is evaluating your game, world and the systems that make it up will help you evaluate the player experience and play to the strengths of the subconcious.

In conclusion: Buy this book. If you’ve read Blink then you can probably skip alot of the early parts as they mostly just give you a grounding in the topics that book covers. I would also say that there is no reason to buy Blink in order to read this book as it is incredibly easy to read and is written in a very entertaining and conversational tone.

I rate this book: Yes out of ten.

An interesting problem that crops up occassionally in Second Life is the question of Whether or not a Viewer bug that affects rendering should be fixed.

In most MMO’s the idea of fixing a bug is a very simple thing. Bugs are bad and there to be squashed. However as soon as you have an economy that pushes roughly $450m a year around the world you start to get into all sorts of problems.

The most recent issue is a fix to the order of Alpha rendering on Avatar Skins. Ever since I can remember The Eyebrows and Lips were rendered below the texture and this has been used by Skin makers to allow users to modify their skins without destroying them by making the lips a little darker or adjusting the overall skintone.

As you can se ein the picture above though changing the render order to draw these elements above the texture can have some very nasty side-effects that could threaten to ruin the Skin industry.

Fortunately this fix is being reverted by Linden Labs as they aren’t so stupid as to incur the wrath of their entire customer base and destroy a lucrative industry with a few lines of code.

The original bug report (and hysterical comments) can be found here.

You can find my musings on the impact of Second Lifes economy on it’s technical progression beneath the cut.

Over the last ten years we have witnessed significant changes in Videogames rendering technology that have made games look more realistic than ever before. However these changes have always come at the cost of increasing the amount of art and amount of skill required to make that art.

Take the mode scene for Unreal Tournament or Half Life. These two games have a HUGE amount of fan-made content of a good quality. Fast-forward to today and there are less mods and maps being made for Half Life 2 and UT3 than previously despite the communities actually getting larger (well at least in the case of Half Life).

The problem lies in the difficulty of creating content for these games compared to their older more simplistic versions. Mods require bigger teams with more talent and skill. It’s harder to make a fun Deathmatch map for UT3 than it used to be not because of any gameplay reasons but because nobody will download your map if it doesn’t look any good. You may be a great Level Designer but if you aren’t also a good artist nobody will care.

This problem is even worse for a Virtual World like Second Life. For years now it’s residents have been creatively working around the Viewers limitations and even using bugs to their advantage (the entire Jewelry industry is based on twisting Primitives into sizes that they technically shouldn’t be capable of).

Second Life is stuck in a position where embracing technological advances can destroy existing industries and as a result the livlihood of countless entrepeneurs.

That’s alot of pressure to be under.

Take Shaders for example. Second Life can’t afford to increase it’s minimum requirements to support more advanced shaders for several reasons.

1. A huge number of Residents are using very old hardware that won’t support it.
2. A Two-Tier economy is created between those who can’t take advantage of this new technology and those who can.

The first point is fairly self-explanatory. Linden Labs don’t want Residents to leave the world and take their money with them.

The second point is slightly tricky though.

Taking the Skins industry as an example I would love to see a viewer that supported advanced shaders so I could see even mor erealistic Avatars with better lighting and shadows etc etc. However anybody that decides to create content that takes advantage of this new technology will find themselves in a situation of creating content twice. The High-definition versions for those with the Hardware to render it and a Fallback for those that cannot. After all even if you can render and see your spiffy Normal Mapped Avatar somebody stood next to you in-world may not. However they still need to see something and you don’t want to show up as the default avatar after spending all that money on your new look.

Could the economy in Second Life support this route of premium content for players with modern hardware? I don’t know. That’s really for an economist to answer. I do however know that it will put alot of pressure on Skin makers to support this market in addition to the existing one and only reduce competition driving out those who aren’t able to adapt to the demands required by the new technologies.

So for the time being the rendering in the viewer remains largely untouched in an effort to retain the status-quo and a stable economy.

What does this mean for Second Life in the long-term with lots of new Virtual Worlds coming along claiming super-realistic graphics as a feature? I believe these newer worlds will struggle to generate enough worthwhile content to draw people away from Second Life until it is as easy to make content as it is in Second Life.

Second Lifes biggest advantage in the battle of the Virtual Worlds is in it’s low barrier to entry by using older more stable technology.

Now if they would just let me rate Places with a star rating so their in-game search engine no longer sucked that would be abug worth fixing!

However Damnation are apparently going a different way and basing their Level Designs on Concept art. 

I’m interested in seeing how this process works out in terms of actual gameplay as a good concept artist can throw out sketches faster than you can block out a level in sketchup and tend to get hired on the strength of their imagination. In contrast Level Designers are often hired for their technical skill more than their artistic ability.

Being able to use a game Editor and script in LUA will push your Resume closer to the top of the pile compared to somebody who can make their own textures (ProTip: If you spend longer making your level look awesome than play awesome apply for Environment art jobs).

So with that in mind inspiration can be tricky when coming up with your designs. Having a Concept artist onboard early in the process will at least introduce a sounding board for ideas and a second perspective from somebody who can visualise a 3D scene and then communicate it quickly. So long as it’s a two-way process with the artist and designers inspiring each other I can’t see how it could fail.

So here’s hoping Damnation is actually fun.