For the past month, my living room has been filling up with boxes and boxes of goodies, in anticipation of the big move to our new office space. i thought it might be nice to preface an official announcement by posting these before and after pictures of our little two-person (and growing) operation:

Untold Entertainment cares about the environment! After setting up our office, we set these boxes and chunks of styrofoam adrift in the Arctic Ocean to provide homes for orphaned fur seals.

My inbox is filling up with the same email every other day from DIG London. “DIG” stands for “Digital Interactive Gaming”, while London is a Southern Ontario town. The DIG London group is running two separate rackets - a conference, and a design competition.

Hit up their site for an exercise in vagueness. After staring at the web page for a good long time, here’s what i’ve figured out:

1. There is a competition with cash prizes.
2. You must enter individually as either an artist or a programmer.
3. You’ll have one week to complete the project.

Aaaaand … that’s about it. What are you expected to build? No idea. Using which programming language or drawing software? No clue. What proficiency level is required? Dunno. Will/where will the final submissions be showcased? Shrug.

From the site:

This competition was created to allow industry professionals, students and others to show off their gaming art and programming skills.. Digital game industry professional will judge all submissions and help us award great prizes including cash!

“Digital game industry professional” ? Is that like “Annual Gift-Giving Man” ?

Elsewhere:

“…we expect that the projects will take between 2 and 4 days to complete depending on the project.”

“Depending on the project”? Do the organizers even know what the projects are? Or are they just taking orders from different companies for a bunch of stuff that needs building and sending it out to people in the guise of a contest? It reeks to me of those “logo competitions” that i rail against.

Or maybe i’m just cranky, and it’s a perfectly above-board, enjoyable competition promoted with a terrible website. If anyone out there holds the keys to the mystery, please let me know.

We worked very dilligently to complete our application for the new Screen-Based Content Initiative from the Ontario Government. As i mentioned earlier, Captain Ontario drummed up two million dollars to fund not a final project, but a development toward a final project. This is great news, because often times, getting that ball rolling is the most difficult part.

The Ontario Media Development Corporation, who are reviewing the apps and doling out the money, have been dropping hints along the way that this fund will be “very competitive”. Eligible candidates include those companies who need the funds to develop screen-based content (ie film, television, interactive, video games, radio [when said radio is behind a window], screen door manufacturers, olympic athletes subjected to drug screenings and silk screen T-shirt artists), as well as just about anyone else in the provice running a fairly regular pulse.

When i walked into the OMDC office, i really hoped to see enormous towers of folders, boxes and bind-o-files looming in impossibly-piled stacks, their twisted silhouettes blotting out the sun, their stratospheric summits encircled by seagulls. Alas, no. Instead, i walked into a fairly calm and organized office.

Then i was greeted by Application Checker Lady, who thrust out her oak staff and blocked my path. She deigned to ask me a series of two questions before our application would pass muster. Answer them correctly, and she would spirit the app away to her treasure hold. Get the questions wrong, and she would … i dunno. Eat my face or somesuch.

Her questions were these:

ONE! Does your submission contain four separate copies?

“Y-yes!” i stammered.

TWO! Are the copies collated??

This last gave me pause. Were the copies “collated”? i knew what the word meant, but hadn’t i just answered that yes, there were four separate copies? Did she assume that i had shuffled all of the pages together and left it for the Corporation to sort out?

Or was this some kind of trick question, upon which the fate of our application hinged?

Like a fool, i grunted “W-what do you mean ‘collated’??”

Application Checker Lady was not impressed. “Separated and bound together in their proper order”, she said firmly.

“Uh … yes! Yes they are!” i said.

Application Checker Lady nodded curtly and turned on her heel. i was safe.

On my way back to the office, i tried to brainstorm other question combinations that would have thrown me off in a similar manner:

ONE! Do you live in a house?
TWO! Do you live in a home??

i dunno. At any rate, i’m disappointed that i didn’t get a chance to glimpse the mysterious Chamber of Wonders where all of the funding applications were being stored. i’m picturing the piles of gold you see shored up around sleeping dragons in airbrushed high fantasy artwork, but probably only because the app we submitted was for a high fantasy-themed game.

High fantasy with, naturally, a twist.

Aside from the volume of submissions, what i was really curious to see were the myriad ways in which people bound their applications. It was a bit of a trick to find just the right combination of plastic presentation folders and clips at Stipples; i wanted to see what everyone else had come up with. The next time i need a file folder, though, i’m going to hit up the OMDC - i can’t imagine how many folders and folios they’ve got cluttering up the place … some probably inlaid with find goldleaf and scented with lilac.

i won’t say what we actually presented until i find out our application status in about three months. This was our first funding application, and we’re a young company, so i realize we’re a long shot. Still, it’s nice to entertain thoughts of going into full production on a high-quality game that’s entirely our own.

X08, Microsoft’s holiday preview event for its XBox 360, XBLA and XNA platforms, has come and gone. Overall, the feeling i’m left with is the same feeling i had when i went to the movies recently and saw trailers for remakes of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Death Race (??). It was kind of depressing, sitting there realizing how hard-up for ideas Hollywood must be to be remaking Death Race. i mean, Death Race. Mere font emphasis fails me.

Ditto X08. i wandered the junket floor from kiosk to kiosk, looking for the gotta-have games for Christmas (or, if you’re Jewish, Black History Month) and came up wanting.

Here’s a quick rundown of my impressions, based on up to two minutes of hands-on gameplay in a noisy and distracting environment, completely out of my natural habitat (ie not sitting down):

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

Easily the biggest disappointment on the floor, the Nuts & Bolts build was incomplete, but not so incomplete as to suggest that its biggest problem will be ironed out by launch. The game is slow. Like, slow as a sloth riding the short bus. It seemed to take forever to march bear and bird from part of the enormous demo level to the next. i tried to explain this away by convincing myself that the levels were built for Nuts & Bolts’s’s vehicles. That rationale lasted until i climbed into one of the vehicles, which actually drove like the short bus.

Word is that Rare is bringing the original Banjo Kazooie to XBox Live Arcade to finally deliver on their “Stop n Swop” promise. This would have been much more clever if it was executed on the original N64 cartridge. Daddy hates retcons. i’m trying to contact a representative from Rare to ask if he can go back in time and announce this to me ten years ago when i actually cared.

Castle Crashers

The latest from the guys (guy?) who brought you the ultra-punishing platform shooter Alien Hominid return with this cartoony, medieval beat-up. Like Alien Hominid, it’ll win big points with fans for its art and animation, which definitely set it apart from the pack. It’s too bad i played this game already, back when it was called Double Dragon.

And Bad Dudes.

And Final Fight.

And Double Dragon 2.

And Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III:Turtles in Time.

And Golden Axe.

And The Simpsons Arcade Game.

And et cetera.

Viva Pinata 2: Trouble In Paradise

“Trouble in Paradise,” hmm? Could the “trouble” be that Professor Pester has erased the database storing all of your piñata records so that you have to spend hours upon hours re-collecting all of the same piñatas from the first game, plus about thirty additional characters? Or could the “trouble” be that the developers used this storyline as a justification to re-use all of the models and gameplay from the first game to try to knock a few remaining dollars from you with a stick? A more appropriate title would have been Viva Piñata 2: This Again or Viva Piñata 2: Same Effing Game or Viva Piñata 1: Oops Did We Say 1? We Meant 2, Honest.

A footnote: If you’re choosing the guy to do your Viva Piñata demo, make sure you don’t pick the guy with breath that makes you want to run for the border … especially since he has to spend the entire day extolling the virtues of PUHHHHHUUUHHHH-iñatas in people’s faces.

Infinite Undiscovery

i only caught a brief glimpse of this Square-Enix title. It was easily the prettiest game in its aisle of kiosks. It’s, predictably, an RPG, but it has real-time combat, which i’m a big fan of. Battles looked very shiny and chaotic. As long as it doesn’t get too terribly button-mashy, it might be worth checking out. It’s out in a week an a half, so we’ll know soon enough.

Rock Band 2

i can hardly criticize Viva Piñata 2 for offering up more of the same and in the same entry, start gushing over Rock Band 2. Aside from it being far awesomer than the Guitar Hero series, which is for meth addicts and people who download animal porn, Rock Band 2 offers up roughly the same number of innovations as Viva Piñata 2.

Piñata has local and Live multiplayer co-op. Rock Band 2 has local co-op (as before) and Live World Tour (story) mode.

Piñata has a free-play level where you can print piñata cards from their online community database and scan them into your game using the console’s camera, without going through the hassle of catching them the “legitimate” way. Likewise, Rock Band 2 has a “no fail” mode so that when grandma comes over for a visit, she can still rock out with you instead of flunking simple songs on “Easy” vocals within the first fifteen seconds.

Despite this, the reason why Rock Band 2 is exciting and Viva Piñata 2 is not, is that Rock Band 2 allows you to bring all your downloaded songs and (for a nominal fee) the songs on the first game’s disc, in addition to giving you an entire disc’s worth of new songs. Viva Piñata 2 gives you essentially the same content as the first game, plus 30 new animals. It’s (very) roughly the equivalent of buying Rock Band 2 with all the same songs as the first game burned on the disc, with a handful of extras thrown in, and some nonsense story about how your millions of fans were struck with amnesia at the same time, and they want you to re-play all of your songs again.

i’m beginning to think “Rare” describes the probability of seeing a good game come out of that developer.

The bottom line is this: a friend of mine grabbed a copy of Rock Band from the US last year around thanksgiving, because the title was grossly delayed up here, and i have not stopped playing it all year. No other game in my library boasts that kind of staying power. Rock Band 2 presents an automatic, robotic, walk-to-the-store-and-plunk-down-cash-like-the-Manchurian-candidate situation for me.

Gears of War 2

Friggin’ awesome. You’ve got this gun? That shoots bullets? And the bullets are tiny chainsaws? And they go in the locust horde’s mouths and, like, explode them from the inside? And it’s awesum! And your screen is, like covered in blood. My mom won’t let me play it but i played it over at my friend Timmy’s house even thow its’ not out yet because Timmy’s dad works for Microsoft and Nintendo and all them and he gets games urly.

…

One day, someone will have to explain to me why the word we chose to describe this kind of content is “mature”.

It’s been a few short days since friendly neighbourhood Bob Ippolito from MochiAds clued me in to the rev share service’s opt-in distribution tactic. This offering sees developers uploading their games to the site, which are then offered to portal owners so that their games are automagically distributed to anyone who wants them. It’s a lot like putting a plate of muffins stuffed with lit cherry bombs in the park, and listening for the sounds of exploding squirrels.

Proviso: that’s not something i’ve ever actually done.

Curiously, you can’t upload the same MochiAds-enabled file to participate. You have to embed a different piece of code into a “clean” version of your game, otherwise you find this message in your inbox:

Dear Ryan Henson Creighton,

The MochiAds Quality Assurance team has reviewed “Two by Two” for distribution and found aspects of the game which do not meet the MochiAds Program Policies.

Reason:

Stuck at “Loading” screen. Loader apparently not compatible with version control (and not necessary, version control guarantees the content is fully loaded when it begins). See https://www.mochiads.com/community/forum/topic/old-news-but___/47191#47191 for the latest tips for using version control

Please visit the link below to review the reasoning from our QA team.

https://www.mochiads.com/dev/game_hosting/two-by-two

Kind regards,

The MochiAds Team
support THE_AT_SYMBOL mochiads.com

Drat. i understand the problem - i just don’t have time to fuss with it at the moment, because we are closing up shop for vacation next week.

HOWEVER …

There IS some breaking news in the Pimp My Game saga that’s just too good to ignore:

WE BROKE THE ONE DOLLAR MARK!!!
Keep reading »

i’m taking Two by Two from the Untold Entertainment library to see how various online monetization methods for Flash games pan out.

Introduction
Part 1: Armor Games
Part 2: Kongregate
Part 3: MochiAds
………./\……….Update: MindJolt

First things first: the MochiAds user agreement keeps me from linking to the site or using the service’s logo, both of which i’m doing in spades here. But since the purpose of this article is to review and critique the service, i claim these usages under Canada’s Fair Dealing provision. And with that, we begin.

Keep reading »

i don’t mean to TOTALLY BLOW YOUR MINDS or anything, but apparently “flash games” - ie “games that have flash in them” - are sweeping the nation.

The child heart lurking inside you feels great satisfaction when playing new and exciting flash games full of immense animations and sound effects.

i’m impressed with the liberties the author has taken with the English language (and/or Alta Vista Translator). He has truly raised the bar for prose in my mother tongue. Never before have i heard of a child being described as “lurking.”

No, really - go back and re-read that quotation, and ask yourself if you could string a more subtly perverse sequence of words together.

Anyway, i’ve decided that quote is going on our new business cards.

Thanks to Gavin for the link.

Did you ever want desperately to do something, and you thought you’d be pretty awesome at it, only to give it a first try and realize that you’re not some sort of prodigy? Or worse, to discover that you’re COMPLETE GARBAGE at it?

When i bought my wife a knitting class for her birthday years ago, i picked her up after the session and she was in tears. She thought she’d be a total pro, but her project looked like someone had had a grand mal seizure while playing cat’s cradle.

My whole life, i’ve adored the work of Jim Henson, to the point of changing my middle name to “Henson” (while on the run from Colombian authorities during my tomb-raiding escapades searching for the legendary South American jewel of Toh-Tallei). i finally had my chance to try it out during a workshop with the Nanalan’ / Mr. Meaty puppet troupe The Grogs, only to find that my arthritis and inflexibility kept me from lifting the puppets far enough over my head. It never dawned on me what a physically demanding job puppeteering was. Acting, puppet construction, improv - i could handle all that. But lifting my arm and keeping it straight? Impossible. Another dream crushed.

Down but not Out

Another dream of mine is to create a video game that uses physical, photographed objects as graphics. i want to either make some kind of game from clay, or to build a graphic adventure-style POV game (think MYST) where the whole set it made of physical stuff, and i just drop a camera inside the set and take pictures that serve as the graphics. The player would feel as if he’s inside a dollhouse, i think. i dunno. i haven’t done it yet. Maybe it would just stink?

i’ve also been burning to do a game in clay. “Like, Claymation?” everyone asks. No - not exactly. Stop-motion animation is incredibly time consuming. i just want the look of clay. i need a game with static graphics that are programmatically animated. That way, i can build the elements in clay and simply photograph still shots - no animation needed.

Clay Achin’

i got my chance a few weeks ago while building a game for the Chumby. It’s a simple card game, and all the cards have symbols on them. Why not build the cards and their symbols in clay? i could scratch the itch in the course of a weekend!

My family was taking a trip away, and i had a bachelor Saturday ahead of my, so i siezed my chance. i ordered a pizza, turned on Goodfellas, and set up the camera and tripod. i took a little desk light from my office and shone it on a white piece of paper - that was the extent of my set. Then i modelled nine little shapes and photographed them all. In a few hours, i was able to knock out all the backgrounds and lay the pngs down in my Flash game.

Here, friends, is the assy result:

It’s embarrassingly bad. Like really, really horribly awfully bad. And bad, bad, bad. Just - just no. Just a failure. A horrible, horrible embarrassingly bad failure. But i decided to write a post about it, warts and all, in the hope that some readers would offer advice, or that i’d encourage someone else who was facing the same challenges.

Here’s a short list of things that went wrong:

1. a poor workman blames his tools, but my camera - particularly with its macro focus - is not that stellar
2. i don’t know a thing about lighting.
3. the shadow cast by the yellow clay shape was also yellow, which made it very tough to separate it from the background. i somehow expected a grey shadow (?) Clearly, my scientological understanding of optics is flawed.
4. i’m not the best hand at Photoshop. Whenever i tried to change the colour of the shapes, they’d lose all the wonderful texturing that made them look like clay (that’s why all the shapes are yellow. They’re actually supposed to be different colours)

Ply, ply again

Unlike puppetry, knitting, and championship weiner-eating, i’m determined to keep at this until i get it right. i think my main stumbling block is the photography. If you have any advice or tales from the trenches, speak up! Meanwhile, enjoy a few screenshots from some games made out of clay:

BEEP BEEP BEEP … that’s either the sound of a Tenacious D concert playing on Family Channel, or the sound of the OMDC MONEY TRUCK backing up to your door sometime soon.

The Ontario Media Development Corporation announced last week its Screen-Based Content Initiative, aimed at putting cash in the pockets of Ontario corporations to develop content for film, television, the Internatz, cell phones, handheld gaming devices - anything with a screen. Note that the money is for developing something. You don’t have to actually arrive at a finished product. This is great news for those of us in the (ambiguously-named) media industry, because most often, paid work takes a back seat to developing new products, as new products are often researched and developed at a loss.

Given the choice between taking a work-for-hire contract to build someone else’s games for someone else’s property, and running on fumes while we create an original product that might become economically viable and could possibly break even … or turn a profit … or not … the survival instinct kicks in, and we sign the work-for-hire contract. We’re very optimistic that we’ll end up in the running for this funding. It’s amazing to think that we’ll have something to call our own.

Everyone and His Dog

The OMDC itself admits that this initiative will stir fierce competition. i’m even wondering how far certain people will try to stretch the “screen-based” requirement. Maybe silk-screen artists will try to make a grab at the funding? Or screen door manufacturers? Or people who screen their phone calls?

The screen-based development activities that the OMDC lists as elligible include:

The top prize is $100 000, up to 75% of the project budget, until the OMDC burns through up to 2 million dollars. The rest of the details are on the OMDC site.

We were very excited to receive our Chumby today in the mail. Chumby is an adorable, squeezable bean bag with a cuddly creature-shaped charm on it. You can hold it, cuddle it, or toss it around the room, though that might not be a great idea because it has a computer inside.

The device pulls wireless Internatz content through the ether to display a chain of Flash Lite 3 displays, called “Widgets”, that can do anything from displaying the time and weather to updating you on the latest Chuck Norris legends. The designers built Chumby so that owners can very easily develop content for it, which is then uploaded to the Chumby network to enjoy privately or to share with other Chumby owners. Chumby Industries even actively encourages its userbase to hack the device, providing Chumby schematics and specs on their site.

Long before the Chumby was released, i knew it was right up my alley. i’ve long been looking for a device that will run Flash that i could show off to my friends, and the fact that this thing is encased in a cozy beanbag drove it way beyond “Daddy Wanty” on my “Vapid Materialism Metre”. Unfortunately, the Chumby isn’t the answer to my portable device fantasies that i was hoping for.

Crumby

No device is perfect, and i hate obsessing over the flaws of a device once it’s in my hot little hands, so let’s get this part over with quickly. The trouble with the Chumby, as most online reviews attest, are as follows:

1. Unresponsive touch screen
2. No hardware volume control
3. Wall power required.

This last point absolutely killed me. The Chumby has to be plugged in via its AC adapter and cable to function. My dreams of running through idyllic meadows, spinning my battery-enabled Chumby around in my arms and collapsing into a bed of fluffy dandelions was shattered. The need to plug in your Chumby precludes all kinds of interesting uses, not least of all carrying on a polite conversation with someone about all the magical things you can do, and then proving it by pulling a bizarre touch screen-enabled beanbag out of your pocket and demonstrating your software.

i haven’t owned the Chumby long enough to comment on the missing volume dial, but i immediately noticed that the touch screen was not very sensitive. Regardless, folks with meatfingers like mine are probably best off using a stylus. i can’t even wrap my sausage-digits around the P2 interface to play a lousy song or two.

Untold Entertainment

So with its mandatory wall-tether, the Chumby makes for an expensive, gadget-lover’s alarm clock replacement. i’ll wait until the hardware hackers come up with a cool Chumby Mech Suit that lets your little beanbag walk around the house shooting tiny layzzor beams at your cats. Until then, the Chumby can download and play Widgets for free from the Chumby Network.

i’m still in the process of reviewing the 50-odd games available on the Network to figure out where my Chumby ambitions lie. i am excited to exploit the more unusual features of the device, like the squeeze sensor and the accelerometer.

The Cure for the Common DJ

Even if the Chumby is destined to sit dutifully by my bedside for the rest of its life, i was more than thrilled to unplug my old alarm clock and all but hurl it out the window. For the past few months, i’ve been enduring Toronto radio DJ Bill Carroll talking about how much he hates cyclists. Just this morning, he was talking about the current Toronto police campaign to improve cyclist awarness, and complaining about the fact that he’ll now have to signal before making turns in his car just for the benefit of cyclists, because the police are watching. A few weeks ago, after a cyclist was killed when someone opened a car door in his path, Carroll put the blame on cyclists.

As a cyclist who commutes with his 2-year-old daughter to day care every morning, i don’t enjoy waking up to this guy dangerously misinforming his listeners, tacitly defending motorists who maim and murder adults and children on bicycles. Good riddance, Carroll! Say … perhaps the Chumby could use a “Punch Your Detested Morning DJ in the Face” app?

But no! i must not use my Chumby for evil. i will most likely tool up a quick little game get my feet wet with the Chumby, before embarking on something more ambitious.

If i develop anything that can be played properly on your computer, i’ll be sure to make it available on the Untold Entertainment Games Page. If i build stuff that uses the squeeze or motion sensors, you’ll have to consider getting a Chumby!