Digital thoughts

I've been quiet this month, mostly due to working on a game, which turns out to be much more work than expected.

Still, perseverance goes a long way, and now you can even play it a little.

Somehow, among intense development work, I also managed to make a short trip to the Black Sea. Here are the photos to prove it:

Those giant waves you see in the center of the image were the aftermath of a strong wind that kept me awake all night. And don't let the crowd fool you: most tourists were poor people with their families, who go to Eforie Sud out of familiarity, and/or because it's more of an ordinary town and less of a tourist trap. Except this year the shops had little on offer, and high prices. Sigh.

On the plus side, love has no price...

Three articles published on different websites by different people recently managed to draw my attention. Though each is about something else, together they paint a rather unpleasant picture of what we call mainstream media. This is nothing new, of course, just the coalescence of ideas that have been floating around for a while now, but there you have it.

First, look at this parody of an interview with famed game designer Peter Molyneux, which puts into words what I've been thinking for a long time now. Namely, that videogames have "evolved" from trying to be art to being content with the status of entertainment, and now they're happily probing even lower depths I don't even have a name for. All in the name of making -- no, not money, that's what you make by offering something people want -- but the obscene profits the industry has grown accustomed to. Whoops, did I say "industry"? There's the problem. We're taking stuff that is a poor fit for mass-production in the first place, putting it on the assembly line, and cranking that up right over the safety limit. I'll let you make the obvious analogies.

Then, as if to illustrate just how bad the problem is, there is this article from Escapist Magazine (via Shamus Young), highlighting the exponential growth of videogame production costs, and explaining why this necessarily leads to the problem described above, namely the dumbing down of the typical game. I think the problem is more complex than that, but that's a topic for another article. Let's just mention the issue of "big" videogames trying too much to be like movies (hello, different media, anyone?) and not even getting that right. Which leads nicely to the next point.

Movies. Possibly the most profitable business today, right? A century-old industry (here's that word again) that has pretty much figured out how to give people what they want. Except they're in a bubble too, as this article by director Sam Bozzo points out. In his own words:

But distributors of bad and mediocre films depend solely on a paying audience’s misconception that they are paying to watch a good film, when they are not. Via mass marketing, trailers, posters, and paying high fees to star actors, distributors of bad films are betting all their money on one thing; getting as many people to pay to see the film the opening weekend in a theater before that disgruntled, unsatisfied audience tells all of their friends to avoid their bad film.

If you happen to be a gamer, I bet that sounds awfully familiar. Except with games it's more about polygons and frames-per-second than big names. Unless that name is Peter Molyneux, I guess. Or Will Wright. But they're exceptions nowadays. Or not? Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is at the fifth or sixth game. Do you suppose Tom Clancy is still involved in anything but name? Who cares, his name sells.

Incidentally, both Sam Bozzo and Shamus Young make a point of mentioning that indies, whom people usually turn to as a source of genuine quality nowadays -- both in filmmaking and game development -- may not be the saviors everyone expects, as even they incur pretty large costs. I don't agree entirely (again, that's a topic for another article), but there is some truth to that.

Which way, then, media? Are we headed towards a repeat of the 1983 videogame crash? I say no, unless people start voting with their wallets, which doesn't seem to happen. So, we're doomed to see mainstream culture going downhill all the way? Again, no, because technological progress and the rise of free culture make indie production ever cheaper, to the point where individuals can now compete (to some degree) in a market once reserved for large companies. But will that be enough competition to sway the market in the right direction? Is there even a "right" direction in the first place?

I don't know. If anyone has answers, I'd like to read them. The only certain thing is that things aren't going to stay still, so anyone who bets on stability is going to have a big surprise. Too bad the mainstream media seems to do just that.

Quo vadis, media? by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

It seems I can't stay away for long. Sooner or later I'll end up working on a game. This one I started and abandoned three times before. Well, third time (and a half...) was the charm. I dusted off the latest version of the code from a year ago, fleshed it out, and came up with this (click through to play):

As of this writing, the adventure is incomplete -- you will run out of things to do in about a dozen moves. But the rest of it is coming along. Besides, Catch That Cat is just a tech demo; the real game for me is programming the library behind it. Not that I expect it to see much real-world usage; it certaintly can't compete with the mainstream authoring systems.

Now, the idea of writing text adventures in Javascript is not new. Robin Johnson's Versificator has been the basis of a much-awarded game, Aunts and Butlers. The Parchment interpreter takes full-blown Z-machine games. But the former wasn't reusable back when I started, and the latter didn't exist yet. As for other solutions, they all involve browser plugins, and we're all tired of those, right?

Nowadays, my library is probably redundant. But it's a fun project, and good practice after months of barely writing any code at all. Needless to say, I hope you will find some use for it as well. Enjoy!

If this was the beginning of a joke, you'd have to wait a long time to hear the punchline. See, one thing they don't tell you about going over the age of 30 is that you get slower. But for better or worse, my little game is moving forward. Three weeks into the project, you can actually walk a stick figure around a randomly generated level. As usual, click through to try it.

I've met two main difficulties during development. One, organizing the code properly takes lots of time and thinking (fellow programmers will understand). Two, my head has been abuzz with ideas. For the most part, I know exactly what kind of game I want to make, but a top-down, tile-based, turn-based game can be a lot of different things, and imagination has a way of flying around. Focusing on the basics helped a lot, but the game can still take on a lot of different directions. It probably will, too.

In the end, the most important thing when creating a game is to have fun while working on it. If you feel it's a chore, it will show in the finished product, assuming you even get that far. But I like what I'm doing, and I hope you will, too. Stick around.

I'm not a gamer. At least not by the common definition. I don't play AAA games, I don't upgrade my computer every three months, and most importantly I don't waste hours on forums, arguing whether Crysis has better graphics than Fallout 3 or not. But if I'd have to stop and count, I've probably played more games than many people who do just that. Let me explain.

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