John Zeitler

I tend to take a rather dim view of my capabilities and general handiness. If a task requiring any amount of physical exertion says it normally takes an hour, I’ll schedule three for it. On occasion I’ll surprise myself and finish the project in a reasonable amount of time.

And then there are times when, once I finish more or less everything without a hitch, I manage to spill an ENTIRE CONTAINER of jelly beans while MOVING A BOX.

Okay, so I now have the three new pieces of furniture I wanted in order to do the living room redesign, and to make the best use of the space (plus to open up room for the third, and very probably final for this apartment, media shelf once the Collection warrants it, which is probably going to be around January or so). Not only did I employ mad spatial estimation skills to get all the crap into my car in more or less one trip, I also rocked the raw nerd strength needed to get the boxes down the stairs to my apartment. (Those of you just joining me, this means pretty much the exact opposite of how badass I made it sound.)

I like putting things together, so ordinarily I would say that the hard part is over, and the fun was just starting. Unfortunately if I did that, I would be a liar. Y’see, I’ve kinda, well, lived in my living room for the past three years, and in all that time I still haven’t taken down the folding table that I’m currently using as a computer desk. The only improvement, really, has been that I replaced my very sketchy console-rack-bridge-thing with a proper media stand at the beginning of the year. As a result– and a natural consequence, completely justified by my being a single guy– there’s a lot of stuff here that needs to be organized and put away into my small and nearly empty storage space across the hall. I initially thought I was going to be able to just do the rearrangement all on Sunday without any stress. Yeah, that might not be happening. I suppose that if I’m really lucky and handy with getting the stuff packed away tomorrow night (read: I don’t decide to just blow it off and go see Ponyo like I had originally planned) I could still have a workable living room on Sunday evening. The odds of this actually happening are ridiculously slim.

Ah well. It’ll get done eventually. In the meantime, listen to the sweet serenade of the origin of my new desk.

…red dragon tattoo, hmm just about hmm hmm…

…er, yeah. Sorry, got massively sidetracked today, and tomorrow’s not lookin’ much better. Still, I should have something for you guys at some point before bedtime. Later, folks.

Ha! Now you’re infected, too.

…I’m fit to be dyed, hmm hmm fit to hmm you…

There are no words to describe this, honestly. A gamer who was lucky enough to be featured on the Xbox 360′s “Gamer Spotlight” received very many… unflattering messages from people he didn’t even know. Business as usual in the cesspool that is “random mike nights”. What makes it a proverbial Crowning Moment of Awesome isn’t that the gamer was able to flush the haterade with aplomb, or that he just deleted the messages without a second thought (in fact… well, he tells it better than I could)… no, he broadcasts the worst of them, in a digital version of shaming the mob. To prevent “promoting” the foul-mouthed little reprobates, no gamertags are mentioned in the show he shouldn’t have named the wastes of carbon who vomited out the messages (I think some of the ‘people’ in the voice clips mention their own tags, though). This is the classy way to deal with random messages.

I’m putting the clip behind the cut, though, because it is that damn bad. Most of you know my policy about the F-word. This clip F’s the ever-living F out of the F’in F-word. This isn’t just a cluster F-bomb. This is Carpet F-Bombing. You have been F’in warned.

( Mom, seriously, don’t click this… » )

Catch you folks later.

I promise, these aren’t too abysmal. In fact, this first bit is sheer concentrated awesome.

(Okay, so the Halo “aria” could use some work.)

The second thing, though, is a bit more self-serving. Most of you folks know I’m on a big productivity kick, and part of that means getting as much information available as passively as possible (read: lazily). To this end, I’ve set up another panel on my GeekTool desktop to show me which podcasts in my regular rotation have not yet been listened to. You can see the general effect here. You also get a glimpse at my incredibly boring schedule.

Anyway, that’s really it– tomorrow I’m going to do more coding work, or possibly the D&D campaign review I keep meaning to do. Oh, and as you can see the Twitter feed is back online on the main site page. Catch you all later.

In a discussion released recently regarding the Wii version of Punch-Out, Shigeru Miyamoto said:

Now, when young game designers make games and they are not fun, they add a lot of new material to try and make it fun. Even though they should make the game more fun using what they have right in front of them fully, they bring in new stuff.

In a nutshell, he’s pretty much summed up my main source of worry about the XNA projects. I could care less about how well the game sells, honestly (though it would be nice if the game does well enough to cover costs). What I’m worried about most is if the people who play it are having fun.

Right now, I’m in the engine-building phase; I’m designing, more or less, the tools that I will use to create a game. At any point during that later phase– the game design phase– I still have the ability to go back and say, “I need this,” and then go and implement it. This gives me a lot of freedom, almost too much freedom. This is because the more times I go back to the engine and tack on more stuff, the more complicated it gets; and the more complicated an engine is, the greater the chance that there will be bugs based on a flawed or incompatible implementation of the stuff tacked on.

When I was building XVINE, I had a dozen or so thoughts flitting through my head at any given time as to what tools I would need, what objects I needed to implement, and what situations I would encounter. When it came time to finally put it all together, though, I found that many of the things I thought were absolutely necessary were in fact either redundant or useless, because I could do it with simpler tools used more intelligently. Granted, there were situations where a single tool was only used once, but that’s because what it did could not be replicated by another tool combination.

In developing this engine, I’m running into that too. The entirety of this week’s coding was cleaning up the frenzied, hurried, slap-dash experimental implementations from last week’s initial “can I do this?” phase. It was a hassle, yes. But now the engine is designed in a cleaner, more effective manner. Similar objects now have common interfaces; inheritance and abstract classes are used to make sure things get done properly; and the engine has hooks for further optimization should it be needed. More to the point, with the new structuring of the engine, expandability is made that much easier– I’ve been able to easily start adding an “environmental effects” layer to each map layer in order to allow stuff like trap tiles or exits and so forth. (That’s going to be a harder part of the engine design, I think.)

What this boils down to is that once I’ve created the engine, I have to then find a way to make it fun. My original idea– a visual novel– isn’t not fun. At least, I don’t think it’s un-fun. However, a significant portion of the target audience– that is, Xbox 360 players– probably will find it to be un-fun. Yeah, this was pointed out to me before, but I resisted because I felt that the scrolling, tile-based engine setup was going to be too much work to properly implement. It’s not as hard as I thought, but it is a lot of work. The payoff is that I’ll have an engine which could be used to create a game that more people find fun– an engine which more or less works like any old NES game’s engine would, just in HD.

So what kind of game should I make? Satoru Iwata, in that same interview, made this remark on the subject:

It’s hard to know what to do when someone says to do whatever you want.

The tool that I have now is raw and unpolished, but its possibilities are limitless. However, in order to make it the best game that I could possibly make, I first have to know what kind of game I want to make, so that I can steer the engine in that direction. Now, there are some constraints. It’s a 2-D game, it’s top-down (so far), and I only have about 150MB of total space for code and resources. Really, those constraints are pretty minor. So, instead, I must fall back to the old adage: “Write what you know.”

I know old-school RPGs, and I know action RPGs along the lines of Zelda or the Mana series. I also know older action/arcade games, like The Guardian Legend and Pac Man. I really wish there were more games like those available these days. With that in mind, mimicking one of those would be pretty good for getting started, but there’s issues of complexity in each one: the original Legend of Zelda, as “simple” as it is, is far more complex than Pac Man. Heck, Pac Man itself is no slouch in the complexity department! Still, I have to take each project as it comes, and make a decision very soon on what project I want to work with first. My first project, then, using this new engine will be somewhat pedestrian– a Pac Man clone, just as a proof of concept. Once I’ve got that running and playable (it certainly isn’t going to be released) I can start work on the next project, which… I think I’ll keep quiet on for now. One step at a time.

Overall, though, I have to keep in mind the advice mentioned above. Less is usually more. Fun must come before whiz-bangery, and it’s almost certainly possible in this day and age to have a fun game in extremely tight constraints. Tetris is no less fun today than it was on an extremely high-latency monochrome LCD screen. And Final Fantasy IV told a compelling story in just one megabyte of space. I have 720p resolution, millions of colors, a powerful processor, tons of RAM, and 150 megabytes of storage. I envy the old days.

(with apologies to Robin Williams for the title.)

I’ve been on a little bit of a karaoke game kick lately, particularly because I’m usually roped into doing vocals whenever we do a Rock Band night. Also, there have been some very good deals on the games of late– most Wal-Marts have the Lips bundle marked down to under $40, and Best Buy was running a sale a few months back to offer a couple of Singstar discs at $10 each. Anyway, given that I have a lot of these games, and that I’ve had some experience with each of them, I’ll go over the pros and cons of each one in case you folks were wondering which one to go with.

Rock Band 2 (any version, any platform; tested RB2, 360): It probably shouldn’t surprise you that this is the benchmark by which I’ll be judging; it was the first one I played with any amount of seriousness, so it has its place. Rock Band’s vocals have improved greatly in the interim since RB1, with accuracy in non-musical portions the biggest change. The game also has a very fast octave calibrator, meaning that a singer doesn’t have to match the track’s vocals exactly– just hit the same notes within a different octave. It’ll sound higher or deeper, but will still sound “right”. The game does have four difficulty levels, and a pitch indicator telling you where along the staff your voice is currently being detected. That last bit is key– it can help you with feedback before a note is required. Now, as for a drawback, the selection of songs is somewhat uneven, even though without a doubt Rock Band has the largest library of the three games. Supplementing a disc with a Track Pack disc or a few individual songs from the online store is a good idea, but by itself you may only find about ten or fifteen tracks on the main RB2 disc. Also, Rock Band’s focus isn’t on the vocals– there are three other instruments to play, so vocalists don’t get nearly as much screen real estate as in the other games.

Singstar (any version, PS2/PS3; tested Singstar Vol.2/Singstar Queen, PS3): Singstar brings with it a good idea to the table: it was designed from the ground up for two vocalists, either as a battle mode or a duet mode. Each disc has about 30-40 songs on it (except the artist-specific discs, which are usually about 25), and unlike Rock Band, they feature the original video playing in the background. On the PS3, this is done to great effect. More interesting, though, is the game’s voice-command system, which means you don’t need a controller to navigate and select songs. However, the game itself is very flawed. The lyric lines are set up with uneven speeds: one line flies by, while another takes upwards of six seconds… this is dependent on the song, really, but there’s no warning or indicator before you’ve completely missed a line. Singstar also lacks a vocal indicator, meaning that you can’t adjust your pitch before a note appears; with the punishing difficulty level (even on so-called “easy”) this makes the game incredibly frustrating. And that voice-command system? Yeah, the game halts if your controller shuts off during the song, interrupting your groove. If you have a PS3, you have the option of getting new songs via PSN, and there are plenty of discs available now; more importantly, the discs are usually released in Europe far in advance of the North American releases, and as the PS3 is region-free you’ll have no problem importing them. However, the general-interest discs are pretty wildly diverse; Eminem, The Mamas and the Papas, Tone Loc, and Natasha Bedingfield are all on the NA Vol. 2 disc. PS2 owners might want to skip this, honestly, and just go with Rock Band.

Lips (Xbox 360, only one version so far): The wireless microphones are a nice draw (with RB compatibility coming soon, according to Harmonix), and functionally the game is identical to Singstar– so much so that it could legitimately be claimed that this is a “copycat” release. That accusation gets shot down once a few other things are added into consideration: First, the wireless mikes have motion sensors in them as well, and while they’re certainly not anywhere near the level of, say, a Wiimote, they work well enough to trigger Lips’ version of Star Power. In addition, while Singstar only offers the original videos, Lips has a few other visualization modes and offers a couple of fun minigames tied to your singing accuracy. However, Lips also doesn’t have a vocal indicator (or at least not a nearly accurate one) prior to a note. I despise the menu navigation in Lips. Lips has an embarrassingly small amount of DLC available as of this writing; it manages to try to compensate for this by allowing any MP3 on your hard drive to be added to the game and playable, but tracks added this way have no scoring ability and are “just for fun”. And, being the latecomer to the party, there’s only the one disc available, and its music selection– while diverse– is a bit more focused, so it’s probably going to have a bit more on it to warrant a purchase. In time Lips will grow into a good karaoke game, and the bundles going for cheap now are priced about right, but if I had picked it up at launch I’d have been furious.

So what’s the verdict? My bias might have been showing in that I compared everything to Rock Band 2, so obviously that’s the one I recommend. However, the alternate games exclusive to the 360 and PS3 are both worthwhile– as long as you don’t have the opposing system. There’s a lot of overlap in the tracklists for these games. Because of that, I’d say stick with one unless you see a very good deal on the others.

I’ll also say that the only time you should ever feel embarrassed to play these games is when you’re alone… which is ironic, given that nobody ever wants to play these games when other people are around, out of fear of being embarrassed. Honestly, if you believe that your friendships are so fragile that a little karaoke will break them, then you have some serious self-esteem issues to work out. The key is: everybody sings. That way the purported “shame” is spread around.

Anyway, that’s all for now… I’m off to take care of some stuff and then actually do some coding work.

I had plans for the evening, but something I ate disagreed with me… Unlike the last time this happened, however, I was able to talk it out of making the evening a total loss, even though it did scuttle my productivity. Ah well, any night where I simply relax is a good one. I’ll be back to work on the new engine tomorrow, I suppose.

Upon arriving home, I discovered that the Twitter widget in the sidebar was malfunctioning, blasting out my extended tweet stream rather than just the current status. I apologize for the inconvenience; once it’s working normally again, I’ll restore it.

Beyond that, I’m off to bed… catch you folks later.

Okay. Really, I’m going to bed early. Fortunately I have someone who can take calls in my absence tonight…

…uh, on second thought, maybe you’d be better off e-mailing me, and I’ll get you back in the morning.