Collision Games

Like Nemesis(Gradius), Scramble, R-Type, Vanguard? Then there’s a good chance you’ll love this. Although the retro styled visuals are beautiful, they can get a little sterile at times and feel cold. If you’re a fan of PixelJunk Shooter (like I am) then you’ll get this quite quickly as a lot of the physics and little puzzles are based on the same engine. For £6.99 I think it’s a steal.

And we’re back.

Last night my oldest friend sent me an email with an indecipherable string of letters in it separated with hyphens. It turned out to be a download code for the new XBLA War of the Worlds game. A game that began its life around the same time as this project and one that I got to see intimately at all it’s stages – from the original conversations Lee and I had around what he thought would work, to the final release. I’ll write more when I’ve completed it but at this stage I urge you to download it. It really is one of the more original games you’ll see this year.

What’s quite incredible about it is that you can tell what it’s influences are, particularly Prince of Persia, Limbo, Another World, but here’s the really wonderful thing. It feels totally original.

More later. Go Download it. Now!

I know! It’s been how long since the last update? Lots!

Let me apologise and begin the resurrection with some Q&A

Is the project dead?
No.

Then why the hiatus?
Money. Hey guv, I have two small starving children…Well we’re far from destitute but more pragmatic demands meant that I had to pause the project to bring in contract work which inevitably went on longer than expected.

What happend with the Abertay fund?
I got through to the last round but the game design had outgrown the scope of the fund so I had to withdraw for the time being. Mike Enoch was great about it and has hinted they’ll be another round around Spring which we can re-submit for, if we need to.

So are you working on a game now?
Yes. The past few months contracting have brought the game design sharply into focus and some of it can be cut out but what remains is really strong. So yes, I’m actively writing code.

Are you going to tell us what it is?
No.

Why not?
Because if I learned anything over the past few months, it’s talking about it on the interwebs doesn’t get it built but…I should have something to show in about 6 weeks.

So is it still location based and mobile?
No. Location based gaming is, for the time being, not mature enough. It’s felt too contrived throughout the whole design so I’m going back to what matters most. Having fun the old school way and making it feel fresh. Pop!

Daytime consultancy stuff is zipping along and for once in a long time I’m actually enjoying building business tools. That’s probably because I know that it’s a means to an end and all the hard work is building the foundations for the game development. I also got time to read the End of Mr.Y, kindly sent over by Mr.Cummings – who’s currently working on Paramount’s new lineup (very exciting).

The book was a bit of a let down in it’s final third (too many lofty ideas at the start never got fleshed out and it ended up being a little bit too Dan Brown for my liking – “The famous man picked up the red cup”) but I really enjoyed it plus it gave me an idea for neat little casual game I’m going to build over the next few weeks in HTML5.

It’s called, as the blog title suggests, Le Petit Mort and it’s not that rude really but the object of the game is simply to die, as often and as quickly as you can. Sounds morbid but I can assure you it’s anything but ;o)

Firstly I should cough up an explanation as to why the posts dried up. It was a combination of three things: long summer holiday, work and money. The current project plan for producing the Collision Games project brings it in at around £20,000 and unless you have a crystal ball, that is quite a sum to gamble on what could be seen as a “folly”. Throughout all the posts and research it became very clear that the games have more in common with art than anything else and therefore to constrain them with a rigid business like plan that also controlled content would, for me at least, be a tedious and facile exercise. I’m doing this because I love games not because I want to be the next Apprentice. It means my parameters have changed slightly but that’s fine because that’s life and as someone with two small children (6 months and 2) I have a lot of experience of planning for A but executing b,c,d,e,f (usually at the same time in a best-effort is good enough sort of way!). Therefore, I’ve undertaken a largeish consultancy role in order to provide the resources for the game development.

I also have a slight tinge of guilt, not at the large break in the writing, but in not getting up to the amazing Iain Simon’s GameCity.org – family commitments meant I had to attend to more prosaic things like potty training. I’m sure he’d be the first to point out that it’s not “his” GameCity but having read parts of his closing speech on Twitter yesterday it’s clear, for me, that his passion and drive for creating a visible and approachable public image for games is the main force behind it. I just wish it wasn’t in Nottingham, not that I’ve anything against Nottingham, but on purely selfish reasons it’s a quite a trek from Cardiff when you’ve 2 infants (and 1 of which likes getting up at 5am – or 4am as it is today with the clocks going back!)

Right, so I’ve gotten the blog back on track and fumbled a slight apology to Iain for not making GameCity which is a start, of sorts. But something Iain said in his closing speech stirred me to start writing this morning and what I really wanted to write about were dreams. Iain addressed, again, some of the problems that games have in being accepted by the mainstream; in part down to those who play them, those who make them and those who write about them.

In trying to determine their importance it got me thinking about that question “why do we play games?” and it reminded me of a similar and hard to answer question: “why do we dream?”. And as I drifted to sleep last I had the thought that maybe these are now the same question with the same answer.

Games are dreams. Their internal mechanisms only have to be consistent within their opening premise but this can change on a whim; one minute you’re flying and the next driving a bus. This makes them as important and as irrelevant as dreams and that is wholly, and only, validated by the person experiencing it at that time. Some developers want games to be interactive movies, some want them to be less about skill and more about a sense of achievement (“Awesome, you’ve won the putting disc in machine achievement” ack!) but to try to create a facsimile of another medium (e.g. the movie) within such a boundless, malleable environment is to miss the point.

Oh, and what about the game I was working on I still can’t go into that as it’s still being developed – and possibly by quite a large studio (really!) so here’s the tiny javascript HTML5 game I made in 1 hour for GameCity – the plan was I was going to spend the day there polishing it and adding ideas from random strangers to create something similar to the way dreams segue from one theme to the next.

http://www.collisiongames.co.uk/html5/sprite.html

Here’s the Javascript game that Peter Liepa inspired me to make

More on that later, promise!

Back soon

Hugely enjoying this and might just have found a nice mini project for the iPhone learning next week ;o)

I was at a talk on next years SXSW event (more on that later) when my G1 started flashing with a new message. I flipped it open to find a message on Google Talk from Peter Liepa (creator of Boulderdash). It turns out Peter’s written a new game and it’s in less than 1k. He really is an astonishing fellow. I had a quick play with it before he submitted it into the JS1K competition http://js1k.com to offer a little feedback but with only 1 byte left to play with it’s about as perfect as it can be with those constraints – to give you a rough idea the text up to this point has almost consumed 1k!

It’s really an amazing little concept and you can play it here: http://js1k.com/demo/640

Trying to write a game in 1k is a great exercise in constraint, optimisation and game mechanics – and thanks to Peter I’ve been obsessively trying to put together something for the demo competition myself. So far I’ve got a screen full of space junk (pictured above) and I’m riffing around using localised gravity to collect them together into satellites. It’s sort of like a cross between Gravity Well and Katamari only it’s in 1k.

Thanks Peter, that’s my spare time gone ;o) I’ll post mine up when it’s showable, prob a in a day or so

p.s. I’ll be catching up with Peter again next week to talk about his new projects

Bonjour!

This week I finally heard back from the agent of a well known bit of I.P. that I was hoping we could obtain in order to bolster the games credentials for marketing (Actually the agent replied ages ago but we had a problem with the Collision Games email server which meant I read his replies about 2 weeks late! Luckily he was very understanding, sorry DC!). As the blog title suggests, he turned down the request as they’re working with another developer so am actually quite excited to see what they produce as I love the I.P. in question (I can’t say what it is as it would give away too much just yet). In hindsight it was always a long shot without anything concrete to show them, like a prototype, on that subject I’ll get to in the next post.

This week I also spoke to a very good friend, Susan Cummings, who is VP Product Development at Paramount Digital Entertainment (Paramount Studios) about trying to use well known I.P. (as they have quite a lot and she was able to give me a good industry take on how long this sort of thing can take. A very long time as it turns out. And as we all know the terrible cliche about time and money it sounds like a large risk to introduce into this sort of project.

I’d started to come to the same conclusion myself from a more pragmatic point of view as I’ve tied up around 3 weeks of the project by exploring the I.P. route with various people. As it turns out this hasn’t cost me anything other than a bit of my time and a small delay to the project. It was worth it as I now have a good feel for the sort of inertia a license can introduce into the project. It could be the best thing for it or it could absolutely be the worst.

What I do know is that I’m systematically removing or clarifying the process I need to follow before exerting too much energy on development – this along with money is probably the most valuable commodity at this stage, perhaps even more so. There is definitely a balance to be had between thinking and doing and I believe I’m now about to cross that divide. I’ve got one final revision of the business plan to support the development (which I’ll be shopping around at this event: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/08/want-to-meet-investors-who-want-to-put-money-into-early-stage-games-companies/ and then it’s prototype time (the funding of which I’m currently looking around for, see recent post on the public sector things in Wales…)

As was well documented earlier into the project, the idea for the license was obviously to help with the marketing but as anyone who’s ever started and finished a project like this will know, first you can’t let something like that derail you and second you often find that the loss of something perceived as important turns out to be a catalyst for something inspired…