I never saw a dame yet that didn’t understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45.

So I got a bit worked up about an Opinion article on Gamasutra by Steve Gaynor. It was discussing the concept of the noir video game (one following in the footsteps of Film Noir). Figured my response was worth posting here:

While I would love to see a truly noir approach to games and I appreciate the plea Gaynor is making, this summary of the genre does not do it justice. Noir was not created as a means to an end. There was no group of directors that didn’t know how to make a film with a small budget except “by focusing on flawed, unpredictable characters living out street-level conflicts between individuals in the mundane, modern-day urban world.”

Low budgets may have helped kickstart noir, I’m sure they did. It can’t be denied that big budget projects tend to lack experimentation because the backers don’t want to take any risks with their bank books. Still, noir is more related to artistic innovation than business strategy.

Film Noir was a movement which sprouted from an increasingly dark outlook in American filmmakers, reflecting an increasingly dark outlook in American culture (due to the Depression, the rise of organized crime and eventually the WW2 environment). It was influenced by German expressionism of the 20’s, but came from American filmmakers; not an “influx of expatriate German [Expressionists].”
Continue Reading…

“Indie games are the new form of self expression for the motivated misfit. I’m blown away by little Flash games oozing with style made by kids who aren’t even old enough to drink, wtf? The community of lovable and terrifyingly capable indie developers is steadily making big budgets irrelevant.”

-Kyle Gabler

From a Gamasutra interview on The World of Goo as part of their “Road to the IGF” series.

Gabler and Ron Carmel are coming from 2D boy. After a glance at their main page, I stumbled across Gabler’s Human Brain Cloud; one of a number of interesting experiments Gabler is running. Seemingly useless data . . . I’d like to put it to use.

-Christopher J. Rock

Continuing my coverage of the Wii, I must today discuss the “Check Mii Out Channel.” I’m happy to announce that the first Mii contest is finally over and this, ladies and gentlemen, is my award; a souvenir photo:

You may notice, I went for a more classical approach. He is based on the original Mario, with small pixel eyes and an open mouth.

I assumed everyone was going to make Marios that looked the same, and so I made one that was more individualistic. I was only half right. While voting, I saw hundreds of Marios that generally looked nothing like Mario or were strange spins on him. The top 50 winners though were basically identical, which is somewhat disappointing. My Mario was in the “7th level.” I’m not quite sure what that means, but I was shown an animation of Mario running up a Fuji-esque mountain and he stopped near the snowcapped top, so I’m happy with that.

For those of you that haven’t heard, this channel allows online Wii owners to upload their miis for public viewing and judgment. You can view public miis with a random “grab bag,” by popularity, or by searching for a specific type of or individual mii. That’s pretty cool, but the real fun is in the contests.

Nintendo is hosting contests on this channel that ask players to design miis to a given theme. The first worldwide contest asked for “Mario without his hat.” After that we saw “A Pilgrim from the first Thanksgiving,” “The Tooth Fairy,” and “Cleopatra” as national contests in the US. I understand that in Europe, instead of the pilgrim contest, players were asked to produce “King Arthur.” Continue Reading…

(See TraceManager (AS2) Update)

Finally I put some code up here:
“TraceManager.as”
“TraceManager Test.fla”

This is an AS file I put together for some big engine work. When your jamming together a lot of code and a big library of functions, it becomes difficult to keep track of what’s working and what’s breaking. For me, constantly turning traces on and off and having to figure out the meaning of traces that I wrote weeks (or even months) ago gets old fast.

Lately, my physics work has me running more functions than you can shake a stick at; functions within functions within functions, nesting like you wouldn’t believe. This leads to the most hideously complex tracing, almost nullifying the reason you trace data to begin with. So I put together this TraceManager to end such problems once and for all:

_________________________________________
Time(seconds): Depth: Function:
—————————————–
0________________+0____function1 (test1){
0________________+1________function2 (test1 1){
0________________+2____________function3 (test1 1 2){
0________________-2____________} function3—RESULT( test1 1 2 3 )
0________________-1________} function2—RESULT( test1 1 2 3 )
0________________-0____}function1—RESULT( test1 1 2 3 )

-This trace is from the example fla. It runs like so: function1 takes a string (“test1″) and adds a ” 1″ to it, then passes the result to function2; function2 adds a ” 2″ and passes the result to function3; function3 adds a ” 3″ to the string and returns it. Each function returns its own result to its parent function until all functions are complete.

Continue Reading…

So some time ago I ordered me a copy of Raph Koster’s “Theory of Fun.” I read it, thought it was pretty good, and said to myself “You should review this book!” Maybe I will someday. . . . Guess I’m not much for detailed book reports.

These pros and cons I’ve put together may be of interest to those gamers gone readers, readers gone gamers or anyone inbetween.

Continue Reading…

I was looking over a recent post on Arthouse Games about Ebert’s old attack on games as art. . . . I couldn’t help but take the bait, so I commented. Then I figured it was worth putting up over here.

”

I hold it to be true that no definition of art can be accurate as long as it excludes anything tangible (or, arguably, intangible). There are judgments and criticisms of art, how well it is liked, its value or utility, but there is no logical reason to say that anything that exists is not art. Centuries of art have repeated that lesson.

Furthermore, to say that video games are in some way incapable of meeting the standards of ANY definition of art, is ridiculous. The best Ebert could come up with is suggesting that anything with interactivity dilutes the intent of the artist and is therefore not art, or is somehow “low art.” Is criticism not interactivity? Isn’t light reflecting off of a screen, sculpture or painting and into one’s eyes for their mind’s interpretation interactivity? Do we all share a single uniform experience from a given work or do we perceive it individually? The answers to these questions are obvious. All art involves interactivity in one sense or another. The intent of the artist is, therefore, to select a manner by which the audience will be controlled or manipulated to a given end.

No medium to date equals video games in expressive complexity and freedom. Not to mention, no medium inspires as much audience dedication and thus no medium can deliver as much raw experiential data to the willing member of a lay audience.

No one will ever spend over 100 hours reading a single book, watching a single film, viewing a single painting, or listening to a single song. Video games achieved that sort of attention not long after conception.

”

Mind you, I meant 100 solid hours. I suppose I should have made that clear. I’m surprised that professionals in games seem to concede that games are not as true to the artist’s intent because of player freedom. . . . That is completely and obviously false. . . .

Series: Robot Music I, Robot Music II: Modes, Robot Music III: The Circle of Fifths, Robot Music IV: Scales of the World

(This post features the hip guitar stylings of none other than ME! I’ll play some real life, randomly generated, Robot Music! The link is at the end.)

I’ve wanted to see more procedural music in games for a long time, but the most we see are pretty sorry attempts. I’m not just talking about “shifting volume on pre-recorded riffs” procedural, I mean “the game is writing its own live soundtrack” procedural.

“But Chris, that doesn’t even happen on consoles! We can’t do it in flash, no way!” Sounds difficult or even impossible, but it isn’t. The only problem is it takes an understanding of tricky programming concepts and tricky musical concepts. Without programmers that also study music theory, we just don’t see procedurally written music.

Well, I’d like to help change that. I know a thing or two about music and a thing or two about programming so in this article I’m going to do my best to tip off any programmers interested in putting together a simple music generator. Today’s generator won’t be truly procedural, but it’ll start things off in that direction.

And if you play a little music, but don’t know how to write a song, maybe this article can help you out too.

Continue Reading…

Everybody Votes!

This blog has more posts about the Wii on it than anything else, but that’s okay because it deserves the attention.

I was just putting the “Everybody Votes Channel” to use on my Wii and thinking about what a concept of genius it is. Look around for thoughts on the Wii voting channel and you see a lot of complaints about how mundane the questions are. A lot of gamers seemed disappointed when they tried it out and realized the questions were irrelevant to gaming and others seem to expect questions of, I don’t know, more scientific value. However, people seem to enjoy it.

Today I answered the following poll questions (I’ve included my answers, just to let you know I take a stand on the issues):

I wish peole would say this more often: A. Hello B. Thank You

My Answer: Hello.

Which language would you prefer to learn? A. Chinese B. Japanese

My Answer: Japanese

Where can you eat the best food? A. Mom’s house B. Restaurant

My Answer: Restaurant

My friends, these may seem mundane, but this information is of the utmost importance to Nintendo! And I’ll tell you why.

Continue Reading…

Long time no post. I’ve been very busy coding. Coding, coding, coding.

I just wanted to stop by and say that I’ve uploaded some new videos to my youTube account and welcome all to check them out: http://www.youtube.com/rockytastic

Continue Reading…

Bryson sent this one my way saying the flash8 bevel function appears to have been used for lighting. I was really impressed: http://www.mikebithell.com/reunion/

The game is interesting, but laggy. Too laggy. To be honest, I couldn’t play through the whole thing because it lagged so much, and I’m on a Mac G5. I’ll have to see how it runs on a PC at home.

What I like about this game is that Mike Bithell demonstrates a keen understanding of tone and this game demonstrates its careful manipulation via visual and aural media. His moves are subtle, but effective.

Lighting, my friends, lighting! Lighting is everything! The use of music is good too. Lighting and music are not used to a tremendous effect. Don’t expect anything mind blowing, but they’re used and used well. Continue Reading…