psychicsoftware
May 31, 2012
Game Musings
2 Comments

I want a free lollipop!

May 31, 2012
Game Musings
2 Comments

One of the more interesting new angles that I have seen from the clamor of ‘social discovery’ and ‘rewards’ APIs whose developers have contacted me is that of giving real-world rewards: physical goods.

So when I was checking out ‘Pet’ games on Google Play (for research purposes!) I came across a cute-looking one called ‘My Pet Coby’. It’s a nice little (very simple) tamagotchi thing where you tickle your pet, play a bubble popping game with him, feed him ice-creams etc., while the game tries to insidiously lure you into buying virtual food for your pet using your mom’s credit card (which is, hopefully, not password protected). The usual stuff. But it also made a very strong point of reminding me, whenever I started up or closed down the app., that if I came back every day I’d get a free lollipop. This message was so important that it warranted a special full-screen pop-up lasting for several seconds.

It’s probably just me being sentimental but I found this concept really striking, and I could vividly imagine a 3 or 4 year old going around for several days obsessing about getting a lollipop from their pet. It said something to me about lost innocence and of the utterly different goals of a small kid compared to a grown-up. Having a simplistic life where you have very little control of your own destiny, you get transported around to different places and activities according to other people’s schedules, but all the while you have a little private relationship with what you imagine to be a real pet, and you have a little private goal of earning something real (a lollipop) yourself. OK, you get the picture.

So this morning, I started up the Coby app., all excited about my lollipop. Wondering how they would get the lollipop to my house (I imagined a downloadable voucher which I would present to my local shop just out of a pure perverse sense of humour). My sons reckoned the president of the lollipop company would personally fly over in a private jet to deliver it to me. We were all wrong. The game gave me a f***ing virtual lollipop to give to Coby. Something that they value at about 5 cents, if you look at the in-game shop. Gah!

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May 19, 2012
Let's Break Stuff!
17 Comments

Let’s Break Stuff! – gameplay movie and BlackBerry release

May 19, 2012
Let's Break Stuff!
17 Comments

The first platform I’m releasing Let’s Break Stuff! on is the BlackBerry PlayBook. It runs really nicely on this device and the newly configured portrait orientation suits the extreme-widescreen of the PlayBook.

Here’s a few screenshots and a youtube demo..

Let's Break Stuff!
Let's Break Stuff!
Let's Break Stuff!
Let's Break Stuff!

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May 4, 2012
Conferences & Events, Techie
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Shiva Undergrad Course

May 4, 2012
Conferences & Events, Techie
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This is the content from a complete 9-week undergrad course that I taught between January and April this year. I hope it’s useful to some other Shiva developers!

WEEK 1 – intro, IDE, API overview
Lecture 1 – Introduction
Lab 1 – Setup Shiva + Mars Rotator
Mars model (Collada .dae and .jpg) (for use in lab session 1)

WEEK 2 – key game entities, automatic flow of control, AIs, keyboard, accelerometer
Lectures 2&3 – Concepts, the Shiva SDK etc.
Lab 2 – Mars and its moons!
Phobos/Deimos models (Collada .dae and .jpg) and skyboxes (.jpg) (for use in lab session 2)

WEEK 3 – programmed flow of control, messages, key game entities, data handling
Lectures 2&3 – Added to since last week!
Lab 3 – Mars with collidable asteroids
Asteroid model (Collada .dae and .jpg) (for use in lab session 3)

WEEK 4 – physics, direct movement, the camera
Lecture 4 – physics, movement, camera
Labwork: start on your game projects; complete lab 3 if you haven’t done so yet.

WEEK 5 – HUDs, runtime object management, coordinate systems, vectors and angles, ray casting, the math object
Sample solution to lab 3 (Mars with Moons and Asteroids)
Lecture 5 – HUDs, raycasting, runtime object management

WEEK 6 – sensors & colliders, tables, hash tables, xml, game deployment
Lecture 6 notes

WEEK 7/8 – particle emitters, multiplayer, multitouch, efficiency, Shiva script and OpenGLES, materials & lighting, pathfinding
Lecture 7/8 notes

Demo Games that we will be discussing in class:
The Shiva webplayer plugin will automatically install..
[Afterburn 2150]
[Mars Defender]
[Block Rockin]

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May 1, 2012
Conferences & Events, Techie

Genetic Algorithms – Game Dev. Magazine Article

May 1, 2012
Conferences & Events, Techie

I was asked to write an article for a magazine called ‘Game Coder’. They seem to have nicely focused special issues, and they were planning an AI one so my article on Genetic Algorithms fitted in well.

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PSYCHICSOFTWARE | Psychic Games Ltd.
Sam Redfern indie games developer and university academic