Elecorn: The Animated Coder

Yup, I submitted Caster to Apple this past week end for review.

It seems that the review process takes about two weeks, so it shouldn’t be long before we see Caster on iPhone and iPod Touch!

Courtesy of Spencer Nielsen.

I kid you not! Defense Grid: The Awakening (available for pre-purchase now on Steam) is without a doubt the BEST tower of defense game I have ever played! I play lots and LOTS of games including a lot of Tower of Defense games. There are some really sweet tower of defense games out there (Immortal defense is one of my favorites), but Defense Grid takes the cake!

Everything about this game is Quality (with a capital Q)! The balance of the game play (easy to play and yet difficult to master), the intuitive controls, the music, the sound, the voice acting, the art direction, the animation, the user interface! It’s all there! The only thing I have to compare it to is the amount of quality I expect (and recieve) from the Mario games from Nintendo.

Of all the games I’ve been involved with in my career, I am more proud of this game than any other (yes, even more than Tiger Woods Golf 08 for the Wii which was awesome).

We’ve been playing Defense Grid internally at Hidden Path Entertainment and I just can’t get enough of it! Not many games do that for me. 90% of what I play I put down after the first 10 to 15 minutes, but this game keeps calling me back!

I’m confident that this game will stand as a landmark in the history of the Tower of Defense genre.

So, if you’re looking for a fun and satisfying game play experience, visit Steam and get a copy of Defense Grid. You’ll be happy you did!

Recently I listened to a talk given by Jonathan Blow on conflicts with story and game play.

You should check it out here:

http://braid-game.com/news/?p=385

I usually agree with most of what Blow says, but I didn’t quite agree with a lot of his assertions in this talk.  However, I found a lot of value in what he said and it has changed how I’m viewing my game creation process.

On that same note of meaningful games, I would like to promote Wii Music based on a friend’s recent blog post (Russell Carroll that does GameTunnel.com) .

http://vgbm.blogspot.com/2008/11/in-defense-of-wiimusic.html

Wii Music (and Wii Fit for that matter) are providing new game play experiences beyond anything out there.  If you’re looking for meaningful games that can impact your life and change the way you look at things, give Wii Music and Wii Fit a fair try.

I really wanted to make my next game after Caster meaningful in some way.  These two posts have really helped in this endeavor.

You can find Caster on the first page!

http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entries2009.php

My good friend Victor Chelaru wrote a great article on better and more productive design for UI (mostly on the implementation side).

I plan on using these principles in my tools work at Hidden Path Entertainment.

Check it out here:

http://www.flatredball.com/frb/?postid=211

Thanks!

First post in the new blog!

Caster update
Just updated my log on my progress this past week. Check it out here: http://www.elecorn.com/caster3d/log.html.

I’m a little ahead which means that I may have time at the end of this milestone to add a few nice things that I put on the back log because of lack of time.

Educational Games
I’ve been thinking a bit about educational type video games lately (edutainment as some call it). I believe that you can pick anything that you would like to teach (reading, typing, history, problem solving, memorizing, moral issues, etc) and make a fun game with it. However, I also believe that trying to teach too many different things at once can hurt the game.

The design for an educational game should start with what you want to teach. The game should then be built around it. Some people argue this and say it is better to make a good game and “sneak” little bits of learning into it. I say that most games teach things just by their nature and there is no need to “sneak” learning into a well crafted game to this end. Just sticking little bits of learning into a completed game is not a focused effort for teaching that subject and will not be as effective as it otherwise could be. This is not to say that the game needs to focus entirely on the subject to be taught, just that teaching that subject needs to stay as a core motive to the game design.

On a slightly different all games teach something. Some of this teaching makes the game more worthwhile than just in its entertainment value. Some of this teaching is demoralizing. Also, all games and media take time. How do you want to spend your time?

I have chosen tasks for the first Caster milestone. You can see them here. These come from a much larger collection of tasks that I made a few months back with time estimates in hours for completion. I plan to update their status once a week on the web site as part of my accountability and visible progress.

One trick to successful scheduling is to be able to cut features to meet your deadlines–usually based on amount of effort relative to importance. This can be quite painful for engineering types like myself. I console myself with the fact that I can always stick them on the backlog and maybe address them at a future date where more time is made available. In reality, they seldom ever end up getting done, but at least the project does!

Here it is. This is my milestone schedule for completing Caster in exactly one year from today.

I will be posting more specifics on the tasks in each milestone and the progress for these tasks as each milestone comes around. I plan to post them on my web site here.

Wish me luck!