No Time To Play

There’s been much talk lately about Unity 3D. A combination of rich toolset, portability, price and other factors conspire to make it increasingly popular. The recently released Indie Games Developer magazine opens with an article on it, and this sentence jumped at me:

In fact, [Unity] is so simple that it sometimes scares people off initially as they do not believe that something so easy to use can produce professional quality games and that there must be compromises to be made.

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So, earlier today Nightwrath shows me this video tutorial for Unity 3D (on YouTube). It’s not my thing at all, but I watch a little out of curiosity. Wait… this bloke sounds like a twelve-year-old. That picks my interest, and I click through to his profile, then his blog. Which is full of game and console reviews, and more video tutorials. To top it all, he makes music as well. And what do you know… he actually is twelve! How cool is that?

No, I won’t give you an “in the old days” speech. Things were different back then. But I’m thrilled to live in an age when so many people can make a contribution to the world’s culture, without having to ask anyone for permission. As Michael Masnick put it recently, We’re Living In the Most Creative Time In History, and that’s not a given. Be grateful for this freedom. Fight for it.

And don’t forget to check out Computoguy’s blog.

How cool is that?! by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Well-known game developer Raph Koster starts 2012 with a 6-point guide to making cheaper games, to which the Rampant Coyote responds thoughtfully as ever. Here at No Time To Play, we are definitely interested in this particular topic, though we prefer to frame it as making games faster instead. Since time is money, that’s the same thing in the end: both come down to making games with less work. That’s especially important nowadays, as development times/costs are skyrocketing towards unsustainable levels (as Shamus Young points out at every turn).

But how can you do that? Let me add my own two cents first.
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Two gaming publications have just announced that they’re closing down. That in itself is no big deal, except perhaps for the timing. What is interesting is the different ways it was handled.

On the one hand we have the GamePro magazine issuing a press release a mere week in advance (which promptly drew the ire of Internet archivist Jason Scott). On the other hand, we have GameSetWatch explaining their reasons in a very personal manner, and explicitly promising to keep the website online.
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What would you consider a decent screen resolution for gaming? 1280×1024? 1600×1200? Or maybe 1920×1080, if you’re a console owner?

My mobile port of Buzz Grid runs just fine on a screen as small as the one on the left:

That’s 176×220, a common resolution for cellphones around 2005. Seems limited? Nintendo Gameboy, possibly the absolute best-selling gaming console ever, had a screen no bigger than the one on the right: only 160×144! And four shades of gray for variety.

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You know, I’m beginning to think I’m not actually that much into games.

That may sound strange coming from someone who makes games (even as a “mere” hobby). But the more I think of it, the more it seems that I care little about the very things that make games special. I’m not a competitive person; challenge for the sake of challenge disgusts me. I do like to play, to explore and to socialize, but technically you don’t need games for any of that. It’s just that games happen to be excellent enablers for all three, ideally at once.

That probably explains my preferences. But most importantly, it might be able to show me where to go next.

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen;

Felix has been kind enough to give me permission to make a mess of post on this site, so in the proud tradition of programmers everywhere: Hello, world!

Let me warn you; the first part of this is going to read a little bit like a rant, but I promise it gets constructive.  And I’m not ranting against things I hate, I’m ranting about things I wish could be better.  Things, in fact, that I love.  To my mind, this is vital for game developers to see; we, as a collective, need to always learn and strive to make better products.  We need to learn from the good and from the bad, and always play with an open mind.

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I learned a lesson these past few days.

Starting something on the Internet has become frighteningly easy.

You can create a Google Code project, or a Google group, or an Yahoo group in seconds. Or if you have your own hosting, you can set up any number of Web applications in minutes. WordPress, MediaWiki, you name it: with practice, you can do it essentially without thinking. All the infrastructure required to launch an open source project (or the next great Web empire) can be set up literally on a whim.

And therein lies the danger.

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What is it with people waking up in 2011 to declare they know what CRPGs (computer role-playing games for the acronym challenged) are, better than anyone else? It’s doubly annoying, as the genre is rich and diverse on the one hand, and solidly anchored in a tradition of pen&paper games on the other hand.

The latest to try and squeeze countless games into a narrow definition (and complain about it) is this write-up from an online magazine I hadn’t heard about before. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, that’s okay, because the tl;dr version is right there at the beginning.

None of these games (ed: DA, Fable, Final Fantasy) are role-playing games. They are, in fact, nothing more than story-driven strategy games.

At that point, I almost stopped reading, because the author is criticizing a bunch of very different CRPG franchises for… capturing the essence of Dungeons and Dragons itself.

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…But does anyone need to be saved? Good question, and to be honest I think lately the paying customers need more and more patience just to keep staying… legal. What? Shouldn’t “legal” be the word by default when it comes to any normal situation that regards the average citizen? I mean, it the eyes of the law we are all innocent until proved otherwise. We don’t ban knives because people could stab other people… and some countries do not ban weapon carrying… but let’s not go there. Usually it’s people who kill people, but some people like to think that “guns do kill people”. I could come up with examples of people who were killed using… a fork. Now, should we “ban” forks? Of course not, that would be insane.
So, everyone who possesses a fork is a potential… killer. Kind of far fetched, isn’t it? And let’s not forget the part with “innocent until…”

Well, apparently when it comes to software or video games… you are not as innocent as you though you might be. You have the potential to be one of the filthy creatures that is stealing some other people’s hard work.

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