What's New

Monday, January 19th

Last Post (probably)

With this post I will be stopping my regular updates on this website. But worry not! I'll still be blogging regularly on my new website at Fire Hose Games. In fact, I'll be blogging more often then I ever did here. Go there and check out what's new!

Thanks  to all of you who have been coming here to read my posts over the years. I hope you keep reading my stuff at Fire Hose.

Monday, January 5th

New York Times Article on AudiOdyssey!

Whoa! There's a New York Times article on AudiOdyssey! Sweet! Excuse the last corny line about getting an A, I don't know why they put that in. Almost as cool, we got a Kotaku hit as well. Big news!

I know there haven't been too many updates here recently, but that's because I'm doing all my updating on the new Fire Hose Games website. Go there to check out news on a regular basis!

Between Carneyvale Showtime and AudiOdyssey GAMBIT is doing pretty well in the news.

Tuesday, September 30th

Merging Web Sites

It looks like I will be merging this website and Fire Hose Games soon. I plan on continuing to blog on a somewhat weekly basis, but the articles will be posted to www.firehosegames.com and the blog for this site will redirect there. It shouldn't matter too much for most of you who come here, and I'll still keep the archive up if people want to look through old stuff.

Shana Tovah everyone!

Wednesday, September 17th

Great article on Tangential Learning

There's a great new video on tangential learning up on youtube. The narrator has a somewhat silly sounding Mickey Mouse like voice, and it's another one of those Zero Punctuation knockoffs, but if you ignore these problems the message is really great. The authors talk about tangential learning, or how including educational "hooks" in games can easily lead to learning outside of the gaming experience. Some of the advice isn't groundbreaking (put fun learning moments in loading screens!) but the overall message is nicely painted, and shows how a fun game can lead to useful education.

Incidentally, this is exactly  what we're trying to do with Fire Hose. Our first game will hit on this and then some, hopefully with better animation.

Saturday, September 13th

Gamasutra, and "After" Pictures

Lots of good news! First off I was very flattered to appear in the most recent column of Ask the Experts: The Game Designer's Bookshelf in Gamasutra. I'm not sure if I would classify myself as an expert but I was happy to offer my two cents on which design books are useful when making games.

Perhaps even cooler though is our office 2.0! Contrast these amazing "after" pictures to the ones taken last week:

Not bad, huh? We've started making our first game and things are really moving forward. And yes, that is Bill Elliot in the top picture.

Sunday, September 7th

New Office for Fire Hose!

I know I said I wouldn't have too many updates about Fire Hose, but I couldn't help myself this time - we just moved in to our new office last week and I need to show you. We're at 215 First St. in Cambridge, conveniently located between a mall and a subway stop. More importantly, our building also houses a culinary institute, so if we can just make some friends with students we should be set with five star grub.

Here are some pictures of the new office, a few hours after we moved in on Wed, September 3rd. The next post will have some pictures of how it looks now.

As you can see, Sharat is very excited about our new digs. Also: running a router off your fridge is a perfectly normal and acceptable way to get internet.

Wednesday, August 27th

Muzaic

Last year GAMBIT released AudiOdyssey, a visually impaired accessible rhythm game that used the Wii Remote on the PC. While the game was successful and managed to push the accessibility envelope we were left with several areas we still wanted to improve:

• AudiOdyssey is single player only. But what about visually impaired users who want to play multiplayer titles?
• Futhermore, a multiplayer game in which visual ability is not a determining factor would be valuable as it would afford sight impaired players the chance to play a game on equal footing with sighted users.
• A social networking element would be an attractive feature as well, letting players make new friends through the game.

These goals led us back to the development board. Over this past summer a team of eight talented MIT and Singaporean students (Michelle Ang, Jeremy Kang, William Hutama, Steven Bartel, Jennifer Fu,  Alvin Leong, Joanne Loo Ling, and Pradashini Subramaniam) made Muzaic, an accessible Facebook game designed to address these issues. To download the game log in to Facebook, search for the Muzaic application, install, and start playing!

I won't tell you too much about the game play because I want you to give the game a shot. I will tell you that for a prototype it does a lot of things right, and serves as an interesting basis for what a larger game could look like. The player interactions are currently minimal, but compelling - you breed pet "muses" with other people's muses to get new musical offspring. The offspring, of course, are a genetic mix of their parents. The mechanic is currently very simple, but it's a great spring board that shows how one could make a much more complete game centered around the muse breeding scheme.

The prototype has a fun, lighthearted aesthetic which comes through in the art and music style. The island you breed your muses on is initially drab and quiet, but start breeding successfully and it grows to include colorful and musical rewards. The early versions main drawback, however, is that the game is only playable multiplayer, and does not work if you play by yourself. Therefore if you go and download it be sure to have a friend or two grab it as well so you can play together!

Here's the island you keep your muses on in the game. Not pictured is all the music and sound you would hear playing the level. Grab a friend, download it, and give it a shot! Feedback is welcome, my contact info is on the left.

Wednesday, August 13th

Elegant Simplicity with Depth, Boomshine + Braid

Game mechanics are how a game works, and defines the experience the user has playing a game. In Guitar Hero the game mechanic is to strum scrolling notes when the line up with bar, and in Starcraft the mechanics are about killing your enemy before they kill you. Simple game mechanics are make a game easy to pick up, and if the mechanics have depth it makes them fun and engaging to play for a long time. Games that do a good job of working well with both of these dimensions tend to become quite popular, and sometimes lead to many imitators and even genres.

Before I get to Braid, and discuss why it is such a great example of a game with these qualities, let's talk about Boomshine. It came out last year, and it is simplicity defined. Simply click anywhere on the screen, and watch the pretty chain reaction explosions. The game prompts you to explode an increasingly large number of balls until the you finally need to pop 55 out of 60 balls in level 12 (it's possible! Keep trying). What's really amazing, though, is the sound and sound effects. What would normally be an incredibly frustrating game becomes peacful and relaxing thanks to masterful audio design. I highly recommend trying the game!

While Boomshine may be fun, it lacks in depth. Jonathan Blow's Braid is a great counterpoint to it. Available on XBox Live Arcade, it's a small Mario-like platformer with beautiful artwork and a stunning aesthetic. What's really great about the game is the puzzle element, though. In Braid you can control time and rewind at any point, much like the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. What's different is that depending on which world you're in, time works differently. In one world it flows normally, in another rewinding creates shadow versions of yourself, and in yet another time is dialted around a certain ring you possess. The game is loads of fun, and manages to constantly feel fresh no matter where you are - each mechanic is introduced, used briefly, and then discarded before becoming boring. I won't say much about the ending so as not to ruin the game for you, but there's a nice twist, followed by some real head scratching stuff that is almost reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid 2 (I'm sure Blow wanted to make it ambigious, but unfortunately much of that is lost on me).

One of the other things I really like about the game is how it makes fun of standard gaming conventions, like our Princess is in another castle. It always seemed weird in Mario, but here it actually works into the story line. I'm glad that there are innovative people like Blow out there making the effort to create new, meaningful mechanics. I hope our first game at Fire Hose is as good as this.

Wednesday, August 6th

Ralph Baer at Boston Postmortem

Yesterday I went to Boston Post Mortem, the monthly meeting of all Boston based game developers. This month's speaker was video game legend Ralph Baer. For those of you unfamiliar with Ralph, he is a crazy hardcore electrical engineer who thought to himself in the 1960's that it might be "neat" to make televisions interactive. The result was that the built the Brown Box, the first prototype video game system which was then patented and turned into the Magnavox Odyssey. You've probably heard of "Pong", right? Well, pong was born on the brown box. The Odyssey went on to inspire competitors in the field, most notably from Tandi and Atari, and then in the early 1980's a small Japanese card game company called "Nintendo".

Ralph's talk was fascinating, if not a bit hard to hear due to the overly packed room and quiet microphone. We learned all sorts of interesting tidbits about making the brown box - for instance, I believe he said that the original only had 40 transistors in it! I'm not sure that's correct since that seems like some black voodoo to me, to make a game system with only enough transistors to make a handful of logic gates, but then again it's possible I missed part of the explanation.

What I didn't know about Ralph, and perhaps what shocked me most was how prolific he was. He didn't just stop at the Brown Box! Perhaps you've heard of a little game called Simon? He did that too. Apparently the patent for the device called for a square unit, and in a flash of brilliance towards the end of toy development they decided to make it round instead. He also worked on a Fozzy Bear doll that had Teddy Ruxpin or Tickle-me-Elmo like functionality, and a system for digitzing faces for games! Talk about an impressive CV, the guy was really a visionary.

Ralph's work reminds me a lot of Hiroshi Ishii's work at the Media Lab, in that it is kind of goofy stuff that doesn't seem to mean to much at the moment, but is likely to have big reprocussions in how future UIs work. But maybe I'm just reading into the tangible media group's work too much because I'm a complete cheerleader?

Here's a picture of the brown box. That Wii, PS3, or XBox 360 you've got sitting next to your TV? This is their great-grandfather.

This is the Odyssey, the successor to the Brown Box (photo courtesy E2 Museum).

Update 8/7/08

Ralph himself just popped onto the site to point out that the brown box is, in fact, not white but brown. Der. Above is the Magnavox Odyssey, which is the successor to the prototype brown box. The original Brown Box can be seen below, along with its light gun attachment.