Now ok, maybe that doesn’t really show what I’m getting at. After all there is this massive spike in interest in July for Starcraft that really skews the graph. The bit I’m interested in is the tail. So here’s the last 3 months instead.

I’m not really suggesting that you can compare the two games. They are two very different beasts that service two quite different markets. One’s made by a faceless team of hundreds another buy one guy (well there are 4 in the credits, more on that later). However both games come together in the audience’s attention span. I’m not sure if that’s an actual concept but it does sound legit. After all if you’re a gamer, it’s a good bet that you’ve have been exposed to both titles by now.

To me there are really interesting questions tied to the productions and finances of both of those games. I wonder if you looked at the per worker day investment of both teams and the financial return of both games. Which one would come up on top?

Next interesting point is the google search terms. My favourite bit is how “crack” and “cheat” appear twice in the Starcraft top 10 and they don’t even crack the list for Minecraft.

For me nothing sums this up more than what appeared in my twitter feed this morning. On the same day as LA Noir drops a very impressive trailer, a never heard of bunch of students drop Octodad.

Click through for both.

Octodad from DGE2 at DePaul Game Dev

LA Noir from Team Bondi

I used to work here. In fact that hole in the wall on the second floor. Well thats where I sat. A lot of the people who worked there have moved on. A number overseas, some in other states. There are only a handful of us who’s work has kept them in the same area and I’m still loitering at the same coffee shops.

I’ve watched that building stay vacant for the last two years. EA had a 5 year lease and they were happy to keep it empty.

So last Monday was a shock. Shawn, Kieran, Morgan and I just stood there. It was hard to put into words really. We’d all had good and bad times at that job. But the space is gone. There’s a lot of mixed feelings. But I thought the least I could do was post a few photos from the place.

I’ve known that chapter was over. Now I know it’s buried.

More photos in the full post.

]]> http://thequietvoid.com/archives/495/feed 2 http://thequietvoid.com/archives/453 http://thequietvoid.com/archives/453#comments Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:30:12 +0000 Matt Ditton http://thequietvoid.com/?p=453

If you haven’t heard, Freeplay is going to happen in Melbourne in about a week and half. It’s turning into a pretty significant event. Not only because of the stellar lineup of people. Not just because most major game conventions in Australia are slowly dying. But for me it’s the way the talks have been put together. Grab a bunch of people and take them out of their comfort zone. Then put an audience in front of them. What could go wrong.

Why am I mentioning this? Well I’m on a panel called “101 things I learnt in Game Design School”. The idea comes from this book, which is a personal favourite of mine (buy it, it’s really good). The way it’s working is that all the Freeplay speakers (there are about 600,000 of them) offer a thing they learnt. And then we panel about them. The last bit is a little hazy but Helen assures me that it’s under control.

Before my friends get out the pitchforks, it wasn’t my idea. I’m not a game designer. And I never went to a Game Design School. But I do run one (which might be the only reason I’m on the panel) and I hang around a lot of Design people so I’ve leached a lot of ideas though the years.

As prep I sat down to see if I could write out 101 things that I actually do know. I present them below as a way of throwing myself at the mercy of the court. If I’ve learnt anything it’s because people much smarter than I already figured it out and shared it with me. This talk is for them.

Click Details to get the list.

This was day 1 for the Alternator Brisbane Dev team. The amazing thing is nothing exploded.

So myself and 3 other people are looking after the Brisbane side of the Alternator Game project for the ABC. The project is going to run for about 6 months. I’m going to endeavour to document the whole thing and drop out updates. I want to make the whole stressful and insane process a little more stressful and insane by being as open as possible.

And so the video above. This is our first clean, build, break, fix, network, install day. And the funk music makes it sound a lot more awesome. We’ve moved into K Tower in the Valley with Defiant Development. A brand new studio started by Morgan Jaffit.

More info to come, as we wind down from all the red cordial of yesterday.

Music by Kutiman “The Mother Of All Funk Cords”
You can buy his stuff here And you should because he’s awesome.

I finally had a weekend off so I put together this face tracking PONG demo using openCV. It’s just like the original PONG. But. With. Your. Face. There should be a nice HD version at Vimeo. I try to explain what’s happening in the video so watch it to hear what’s going on. Strangely enough keeping composed while trying to smack cubes with your face is a little tricky.

March was insane. I got back home and the next day was the first class of the year. And I haven’t stopped. Every project I was working on came to a grinding halt. Which was a little annoying. But there is great stuff coming down the line that I’m looking forward to getting out there. GFSGames has their first lot of 3rd years and they are awesome.

But next week is the mid term break so it’s scramble to get ahead time. No rest for the wicked or the convenor.

MattD

theFIELD by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

This is my entry in the Jan 2010 comp running over at experimentalgameplay.com. The theme was 100 things. You can play it at the link below.

theFIELD

The game is called theFIELD. And it’s quiet meditation on cube collection. Turn the lights down, breath, relax and push some cubes.
Controls are UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT and SPACE. Hopefully their use will be obvious.

So far it’s taken about 5 days to get it to this point. I got the gameplay nailed down in the first day and then it’s been tweak this, tweak that for 4. I even spent half a day on a possibly pretentious title screen (but there are 100 letters in the title). The music is by the wicked Joel (JiveMaster) Bird

I must give a big “dude your awesome” to Shawn Eustace, who when I asked for comments gave me a page of things I didn’t even see.

Comments and criticism are warmly encouraged.

In which I test the uploading of a Unity Scene. How hard can it be?

‹‘−’›

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Getting this working took 4 hours. Not the scene. Just the posting to the web part. I’m not getting that time back.

But for all who come after, know this. thequietvoid is hosted through godaddy.com and at current they do not support the .unity3d file type as a known file. So after following the instructions from the Unity site. Installing the WP_UnityObject plugin. Making the changes to the functions.php that would allow .unity3d file uploads. Still nothing worked. The advice I found was to change the web.config file so that .unity3d is an allowed mim type on the server.

But web.config in the root has been hijacked by wordpress, so everytime I changed the xml the site stopped working. Sigh.

So how does it work at the moment you may ask ? Well, and don’t try this at home kids. I renamed the .unity3d file to .jpg. Made the change to src tag in WP_UnityObject and viola, the HACK IS ALIVE.

But it’s not right and I’m sure it’s going to break things if the scene try’s to access the browser. So now I have to go through the process of getting this fixed.

Bugger.

UPDATE: later that night

Ok, now it works. I had a nap. Thought on it. Fixed it. The trick is I just had to add a unique web.config file into the wordpress upload folder allowing the webserver to serve out the file. There now it works correctly. Before I forget this is the secret ingredient. Adding this to a file called web.config in the wordpress upload directory fixes the last of the problems.

[cce lang="xml"]








[/cce]

I was working at Pandemic Brisbane for about 3 months before we merged with BioWare and Elevation Partners invested 300 million into the company. Two years later Pandemic and BioWare were sold to Electronic Arts for about 800 million. About 18 months later the Brisbane studio was shut down. Today the LA studio has also been shut down. Read about it here.
It’s interesting to note that John Riccitello left EA in 2004 to form Elevation to buy Pando/BioWare to then go back to EA in 2007 and buy Pando/BioWare from Elevation. According to this article he made 4.9 million from the deal (the second time)

And the image up the top? Well the high point on the left is when Pandemic was bought at $60 a share. And it’s been an impressive ski slope ever since.

48hr Game Challenge from Monkey Something

I’ve just had the best weekend I’ve had all year. I got 5 hours sleep. I ate nothing but crap (apart from Kieran’s pies). I lost it in front of some students, and we made a damn cute game.

This is Thunderheads Garden. You play a happy raincloud in the garden of the mad giant Thunderhead. You spend your days growing sunflowers and watching the happy bunnies multiply. But when Thunderhead gets angry he flips the world to hate and you have to use the flowers as a gasoline trail to wipe out the evil bunnies.

So it’s like a family game. And it’s for 3 players.

I’ll get a web version uploaded after another nap.