GBGamesThis.
Is.
Ludum
Dare.
Check out the keynote speech by Mike Hommel, aka hamumu, as well as all of the new things going on with the website. There’s a new submission system, thanks to Phil Hassey, and a new voting system.
As Mike said, “Let’s do this, man. Let’s ROCK AND ROLL!”
The final round of voting is here, and these are candidates for the theme for Ludum Dare #15!
The winning theme will be announced at 10:00PM CST, and then we’ll have 48 hours to create a complete game based on that theme.
My personal favorites: Burrowing, Evolution, Castle, Town, and Winds.
Which ones are you hoping for? Any ideas for a mini-theme?
Recently I went to a craft and hobby store, which was too glittery for my tastes, but it was for a good reason. I wanted to buy these:
You can get a better sense of scale here:
If you’re looking for items online or at a store, the circles and stars are just flat pieces by the appropriate name. The tall board game avatars are called doll pins. The mushroomy pieces are furniture plugs. Since I purchased so many of each type, the total price came out to less than $40. It’s very likely that I paid too much for them, or that I bought too many, but as you can see, I have an entire bag of these items. Why?
In the Game Design Concepts course that I’m taking online, there was a post early on about creating a prototyping kit. After messing around with paper cutouts which blow away too easily or stones from a wedding centerpiece which are a bit dirty to hold (sitting in water that evaporated years ago will result in that), I decided I wanted some hardier stuff. These pieces can be used as various tokens for game prototypes.
In my design project for the class, I’m doing a high school reunion game, and on paper I had rules about earning prestige points by accomplishing various goals. Initially I marked these points as stars that I drew with a pen, but now I have star pieces which are more tangible. You get 4 prestige points? Here are 4 star-shaped wooden pieces that have a decent weight to them and feel nice.
I bought 8 doll pins. They come in packs of two, and I was originally going to get 2 packs when I thought, “What if I want to do something massively multiplayer?” B-)
The furniture plugs just looked cool. I could see placing them on spaces to indicate that there are traps or coins available.
And if I feel so inclined, I could always paint each item various colors.
If you would rather have a ready-made kit, check out the Piecepack, or if you’re looking for awesome craft parts for your own custom kit, look at CraftParts.com. And of course, you can probably find such items at any local craft/hobby store.
In my post on Plants vs Zombies, I was lucky enough to have one of the people deeply involved in the production of the game answer some of the questions I had about the design process and behind-the-scenes work. I have been waiting for an in-depth interview with George Fan, the designer and creator of the game.
GeneralGames.ca’s interview with George Fan is a short one, and it isn’t as in-depth as I would like, but Fan does answer some questions about how the game came about.
In other interviews, he has said that he was innovating on the tower defense genre, mainly by improving the accessibility.
My goal was to take the tower defense standards and simplify them down to the point that almost anyone could pick up and play. With that in mind, I kept the playfield small and removed some of the things found in traditional tower defense that might not be as intuitive.
He mentions the humor aspect being a big focus as well.
There’s no word on whether or not a sequel to the game is in the works, but Plants vs Zombies is being ported to other platforms, including XBLA.
The Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution states that Congress shall have the authority to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”, and it specifies how Congress shall do so: “by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” See my article on what an indie needs to know about copyright for a primer on the topic.
Copyright, trademark, and patent laws were created to provide the latter in the hopes that it encourages the former. While anecdotal claims have been around for some time which insist that patents are stifling innovation, especially in the realm of software development, the prevailing view is that patents are good for innovation. Of course, that claim is also anecdotal.
Dr. Andrew W. Torrance and Dr. Bill Tomlinson simulated different types of patent systems, using PatentSim, which sounds like an MMO based around owning and utilizing patents. Based on their simulations, using different patent models, they found that the data “suggest that a system combining patent and open source protection for inventions (that is, similar to modern patent systems) generates significantly lower rates of innovation (p<0.05), productivity (p<0.001), and societal utility (p<0.002) than does a commons system.”
Read about the study at Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts.
Changing the US Patent system is tough, especially since so many businesses exist with an interest in keeping the status quo, but if promoting the useful arts and sciences can be more effective by NOT continuing with current practices, it sounds like “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” was an erroneous assumption on the part of the Founding Fathers.
Wolfire Games has a new blog post that attempts to define what indie games are. Defining what “indie” means has been about as tough as defining what a “game” is. I’ve covered a few attempts here and here.
What people in general think “indie” means can affect how a new game is welcomed into the market. I know that a number of game developers worry that labeling their games as “indie” might negatively affect sales since people might associate “indie” with “low-budget” and “amateur”. On the other hand, other developers want people to associate their “indie” game with “innovation” and “creativity”.
Wolfire Games mentions Microsoft’s handling of their Live Arcade and Community Games sections. When the name of “Community Games”, which has generally been considered the home of poorer quality games, was changed to “Indie Games”, many developers balked at the idea of associating “indie” with “worse”.
After talking a bit about how various organizations have defined “indie”, Wolfire gives its definition: an indie game is one motivated by passion and designed by the people actively working on it.
And right away, I’m sure some of you are uncomfortable with that definition, too.
So if you make a game that seems to appeal to people willing to spend their money, and you work on it to improve the revenue, you fail the first part? Or what if you are just absurdly bad at the marketing and business aspects? Do you pass the first part?
And if you have a small company that actually separates the game designer from the programmer, it fails the second part?
I think that most people can agree that being indie means having full creative freedom over your work. I think if you look at Wolfire’s definition, it attempts to solve the problem of answering “Who is indie?” with “EA” or “Nintendo”. While EA technically has freedom in that no one tells EA what to do, EA is far removed from the actual development of a game, and any game they publish is presumably not being made without their influence somehow affecting it. On the other hand, Introversion, creators of Defcon and Darwinia, are able to exercise creative freedom without worrying about a publisher making feature requests or design changes. They sink or swim based on their own efforts.
What about a company like Valve? Most people try to claim that “indie” means you don’t have a publisher, but what if you ARE the publisher AND develop games? Well, how many levels of hierarchy are there? Does it impact the creative freedom of the developers of any individual game? Valve would also be considered too big by Wolfire’s definition. Portal was made by a group within Valve, which implies to me that full creative freedom by the hands-on developers was hampered.
Basically, if you’re big enough to have studios within your company, you’re not indie because each studio is beholden to some other part of the organization.
Perhaps a better way to define indie is to restate Wolfire’s attempt as: an indie game is one that involves full creative freedom for the people working directly on it.
Now it’s your turn to be uncomfortable with my attempt at a definition. Feel free to comment and poke holes in my definition. B-)
It’s August, which is one of the months of the year, and that means that Ludum Dare, the the tri-annual 48-hour game development contest, is back!
Suggest your theme, and in the coming weeks the theme vote will commence. Will Exploding Bananas win? Circuits? Glow in the dark? Cooking? We’ll find when the contest officially starts on August 28th!
Here are the results of LD#14 from this past April. I ran away with the gold…in the Food sub-competition. My journaling abilities also commanded a respectable 5th place. The theme then was Impending Wall of Doom, and there were a lot of creative ideas that people implemented.
Ludum Dare is always a fun time, and the last one broke records for number of participants. Will a new record be set at LD#15?
I first wrote about Agile development as a lone indie years ago. I got some good comments, but it still felt like I lacked any real insight into how to be a better developer on my own. A couple of years later, after seeing someone use unit tests first-hand, I wrote about Test-Driven Game Development.
So I immediately tried to use unit tests for my next project, which was my Ludum Dare #12 entry. I stopped after encountering difficulty. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I needed to make progress. I had a deadline.
Recently, I decided to start using TDD to create a simple game. And I wanted to use it for the entire project, not just the easy parts. I created a simple design for a game involving vampires, and set to work.
And immediately I hit a problem. In order to get anything useful on the screen, I needed to use libSDL. How do you go about writing unit tests that make use of a library? I don’t want my test binary to open and close windows, manipulating hardware, and otherwise resulting in weird side effects. Ok, no problem. I’ll just create an abstraction layer between the game and libSDL. I called it HardwareLayer, but then ran into another problem. The HardwareLayer would need to use libSDL directly, so all I’ve done is put the hard-to-test code in a new class. Well, maybe I can make an interface, but how does one test-drive his way to an interface? I didn’t make anything easier for me at all. Unfortunately, my lack of experience was going to bring this TDD experiment to a standstill.
But I pushed. I checked the book Test Driven Development: By Example 
Brett Schuchert of Object Mentor took the time to write up a blog post on TDDing an Interface. While his example was in Java, it was eye-opening to see how TDD gets done in a somewhat real-world example. I was able to make some progress, but still had the problem of using libSDL at some point. My inexperience questioned whether I would be using unit tests on the code that simply delegates to libSDL calls.
And Schuchert once again spent an evening writing up another blog post about hiding global methods, and this time he even used C++ and created a working project! He claims that the effort to get everything under test was simple to do since most of the issues I was having are idiomatic and therefore pretty easy to solve.
In our discussions in email, Twitter, and the blog, I had the insight I needed. I’ve since purchased Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Since those posts, in the time I’ve been able to dedicate to game development, my test binary doesn’t make calls to SDL directly, and my actual game does. I might still do bizarre things when it comes to TDD and unit testing, but I’m making progress that I’m reasonably confident is correct and working at all times. It helps that I recently participated in a three day TDD workshop that the Day Job sent me to, but I found that the most beneficial part was doing exercises with someone available to say whether or not I was going about it correctly enough. In fact, even the Bowling Game Kata makes a lot more sense to me as an exercise. That is, I get it now.
Jay Barnson of Rampant Games reported on yet another abuse of the DMCA. This time, the abusers are car manufacturers.
Modern cars are equipped with computers, which means repairs and auto work now require more than just hitting your engine with a hammer. It seems that in order for non-dealership service shops to fix your cars, they need to circumvent the encryption of your engine.
And of course, according to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, circumventing “technological protection measures” is a felony.
The DMCA was passed under the impression that artists and authors would produce more creative works since without these protections they had no incentive in the modern age. What we’ve seen is security researchers barred from discussing research on computer security, which also discourages said research in an age when we need such research the most. What we’ve seen is Wal-mart, Best Buy, and a number of other major retail companies use the DMCA to prevent comparison shopping websites from posting uncopyrightable prices. What we’ve seen is the removal of public domain works from sites such as The Internet Archive. For a list of abuses as of 2003, see the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s list of abusive DMCA subpoenas and takedown demands.
The DMCA doesn’t require the accuser to demonstrate proof. No judge needs to be involved to allow overreaching takedown powers. If the accuser sends a notice to an ISP, the ISP needs to take steps immediately or be found at fault and liable for damages. If you upload a video you made to YouTube, and Viacom or 20th Century Fox sends a DMCA notice to YouTube accusing you of uploading THEIR content, you can defend yourself…after the fact. Most likely you will find that your video has been removed, even if it was completely original and under YOUR copyright. Imagine if Microsoft or EA managed to get your game removed from your servers by sending a DMCA notice to your ISP.
And now apparently the DMCA is being used to lock-in service work for car dealerships. Seriously? In this case, it doesn’t even involve a copyrighted work! It also discourages hobbyist car mechanics from tinkering with their cars. It’s disgusting.
So apparently after the DMCA gives all of these absurd powers away, we need laws to patch up specific abuses. Researchers can do research under an exception. If you’re blind and want to be able to listen to ebooks? You need an exception. Now there is a Right to Repair Act on the way to allow people to take their cars anywhere they want for service. Where’s the Right to Repair Act for everything else?
The public loses again.
Thanks to Scott Macmillan of Macguffin Games, I learned about an article by Cory Doctorow called Digital Licensing: Do It Yourself.
Doctorow suggests a fascinating idea: self-service licensing. Let’s say you create a game, and someone wants to create plush toys of the characters and sell them online. Technically, it’s illegal unless they get your permission. Disney, for instance, would want you to negotiate an agreement with their expensive lawyers…which requires you to hire your own expensive lawyer. Unless you’re a huge manufacturer and intend to sell to hundreds of thousands of customers, it’s not worth the expense and effort.
But you’re an indie. You don’t have an army of lawyers on staff. Your staff might consist of just you, in fact. So if someone wanted to make a plush toy out of your video game characters, and you had no problem with people doing so, even for commercial gain, but wanted to make sure you were protected, what could you do?
Your options used to be sticking your head in the sand, risking the dilution of your trademark, giving permission but worrying about what legal rights you might accidentally give away, or preventing people from making what are essentially derivative works without your consent. But why not just give them consent? After all, it isn’t your core business, and they’re taking all the risk. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make an agreement with them without having to negotiate over the course of weeks or months?
Doctorow suggests some general wording that covers your obligations to your own trademarks and rights while also allowing others to understand what they can and cannot do and how you expect to be paid from their profiting off of your works.
The key part is simplicity:
Complexity is your enemy here. Two or three sentences are all you want, so that the idea can be absorbed in 10 seconds by a maker at three in the morning just as she embarks on an inspired quest to sculpt a 3D version from your logo using flattened pop-cans.
The secret to simplicity here is in the license fee, the payment schedule, and the enforcement regime.
What’s exciting is that such simplified, self-service licensing opens up potentially multiple market research opportunities! Someone can make plush toys and determine if they sell well WITHOUT you needing to invest in it. They carry the risk, and you can earn royalties if it works out for them. Someone else can do paper-craft, or craft some earrings, or create a movie, or make a painting, or any number of possible derivative works, carrying all the risk of seeing if there is a market for these things, and if it turns out that there is, you always have the option of doing something bigger with them.
Without self-service licensing, you have to dictate everything yourself. You need to prevent everyone from doing fun crafty things based on your work, but you also only have so much time to dedicate to your own business, which means less time to do anything that could potentially create new markets based on your work.
When I was younger, I drew pictures of Super Mario Bros characters. I tried to sell them at a garage sale and also at a shopping center. Now, keep in mind, I was a child trying to sell pictures I drew, and I had no idea that I was infringing on Nintendo’s copyrights and trademarks. Nintendo wasn’t going to do anything to me because they didn’t even know I existed. But if I had done it today, you could imagine that I would be using eBay or some website, which means the entire world could find me. Suddenly, my personal little craft is just that much more dangerous. Nintendo could shut me down if they wanted to. A lot of the creators of Nintendo-themed woodwork and art are only getting away with it because Nintendo hasn’t pointed their legal team at them. But if Nintendo had a self-service license, it would simultaneously protect their trademark while also allowing fans to create and sell crafts on a small scale. My Nintendo-themed drawings could be sold, legally and without harm, and Nintendo gets a small cut of any revenues I get.
Now, Nintendo might not care too much about the relatively small amount of money that would come their way through such a system, but what about you? Do you have fans that would love to create works based on your game? Wouldn’t it be nice if they were given a simple, safe way to do so? One that would give them peace of mind that they wouldn’t get sued by your company on a whim, and that also lets them kick back some extra money towards you?
And even if self-service licensing doesn’t appeal to you (although I would strongly suggest reading Cory Doctorow’s article to see a much better explanation since it might change your mind), the idea of simplifying your licenses in a Creative Commons way would only help. Copyright is confusing, and most people don’t know what it is, let alone why they should pay attention to your EULA. Why provide 37 sections of legalese when you could tell them what you expect in 4 plain-language sentences?