Programmer Joe

Watch this first.

So let me get this straight.  This is a game (or mocked up video of a game) that encourages its players to run around an actual city while staring at a little 4 inch handheld screen.  Even better, there are virtual dangers in the game, so if you don’t watch the screen at all times you might get squashed by a boulder.  To me, that sounds like a great way to get players run over by actual dangers like cars and buses.

Of course being able to run around the city and play such a game would be sweet.  It would give me a chance to get some exercise I might enjoy, instead of enduring boring workouts just because they’re good for me. Outside of “footrace to the castle” games there are even lots of opportunities for social interaction with such a device.

I wonder how the games would be be mapped onto different cities.  I suspect Seattle wouldn’t be too far down the list, but does that mean I couldn’t play at all when I’m visiting my family in small-town Colorado? Obviously the “actual actress shows up and smooches you” mechanic is never going to happen in the real world, but it looked like the game world was being mapped over very specific buildings, which wouldn’t exist in another city, let alone in a small town.  Maybe the software has to be smart enough to look your location up in satellite images and pick some nearby buildings as the key points in the game.  The client in your handheld them could then “fancify” whatever its camera sees without developer involvement.

In any case, it’s all very cool, and I look forward to a time when this kind of thing isn’t just vaporware.

Brendan Walker, one of the engineers on Pirates, has posted a devlog on the server operations tools we’re using in our beta (and soon in our launch.) The stuff he’s put together is pretty sweet and is really helping us stay on top of the beta.

Joel Spolsky posted an essay the other day drawing parallels between the optimization-in-assembly obsessed application developers of the late 80s and the optimization-of-download-and-compile-time obsessed web application developers of today. He proposes that someday soon someone (perhaps a “bratty Y combinator startup”) will come up with NewSDK, a rich SDK and language that does all sorts of fancy AJAXy things. Because they don’t have to convince anyone it’s a good idea, the brats will pay far more attention to functionality in NewSDK than they pay to performance, so when it first comes out the performance will be terrible. Existing AJAX apps (like everything at Google) will ignore NewSDK because of the performance problems, completely forgetting about Moore’s Law:

 But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.

Once improved JavaScript support in browsers, more bandwidth, and faster computers do for AJAX what better compilers, more RAM, and faster computers did for PC applications, NewSDK will suddenly take off. All NewSDK apps will interoperate nicely, have a rich user experience, and work better across browsers. The market share of AJAX applications that don’t use NewSDK (or at least interoperate with it) will start to fall and the brats will take over.

But Joel’s essay overlooks one important fact:  Google is already developing NewSDK.  The Google Web Toolkit is an SDK that allows a developer to build their entire application in Java and cross-compile it to browser-specific JavaScript for use on real clients.  The toolkit gets better every month, and with version 1.4 they aren’t even calling it “beta” anymore. (Does that mean it’s no longer Web 2.0?) Short of a few highly suspicious meteor strikes, Google isn’t going to go away before GWT has a chance to graduate from “Wow, that’s neat” to “saved us a year.”

So far adoption of GWT has been fairly small. Three Rings is using it for Whirled. They use GWT to wrap the flash applet that does the heavy graphical lifting. They are able to call back and forth between the two so they appear to the user as one application. As the SDK improves over time, more people are bound to try it out, and it only takes one successful application for it to really take off.

All this kind of makes me wish I had a reason to write a major web app. As long as you survive, it’s good to be an early adopter of the Next Big SDK.

9:30am Friday – Coming to America: Nexon’s Microtransaction Revolution

Minho Kim – Nexon

This was the keynote for the third day of the conference and it was every bit as good as the Habbo Hotel talk.  The talk centered around Nexon’s experience bringing Maple Story to the US.  Gamasutra has an excellent write-up.

Unfortunately I was distracted during the talk trying to get my slides onto the laptop I borrowed.  Turns out that some thumbdrives, including mine and Brian’s, require a driver install that is incompatible with Vista. Fortunately Damion was able to read the thumb drive and the convention center WiFi was working well that morning, so the day was saved! Thanks for the help, guys.

11:00am Friday – Flogging: Data Collection on the High Seas

Me!

I think it went pretty well.  You can find the slides here.

1:30pm Friday – Massively Modernized Online: MMO Technologies for Next-Gen and Beyond

Shannon Posniewski – Cryptic Studios

Shannon is the technical lead for game play programming on all Cryptic titles. He described the architecture of the City of Heroes servers, and then went on to detail how they are simplifying things for Marvel Universe. I expect we will go through a similar process with our servers for whatever our next game turns out to be.

The big shocker in the talk is that Cryptic is writing its own database server for Marvel. They were dissatisfied with the performance they got from Microsoft SQL Server for CoH, so they are writing an object-oriented database form scratch. That’s one approach to the object-relational mapping problem, I suppose. It just seems like a risky move for something that’s so fundamental to the game.  I hope it works out for them though.  I loved CoH and I’m really looking forward to Marvel.

And that’s it!  While this wasn’t the strongest conference I’ve been to, there were some solid talks. It was also good to get down to Austin and see everybody. I’m definitely going back next year.

9:30am Thursday – Fostering Open-Ended Play: Unleashing the Creative Community

Sulka Haro – Sulake

Sulka is the lead design behind Habbo Hotel, a casual non-game world popular among teens 13-16 all over the world. They get 11 million unique visitors per month and collect money with virtual item sales. By some measures (those that don’t involve revenue, but do involve users) they are “bigger than WoW.” That was a big theme at the conference. Everyone was talking about things that were bigger than WoW or as big as WoW, or whatever.

This keynote was excellent. Sulka talked about how Habbo Hotel came about and their experience expanding the game to add new hotels all over the world. He talked about the many features of Habbo Hotel; this is one seriously complex game. And, of course he talked a lot about the environments and forms of play that the users put together on their own. For someone, like me, who didn’t know anything about Habbo Hotel, this was a very educational talk.

11:00am Thursday – Web Client Development Issues – Best Practices

Michael Bayne – Three Rings
Michael Grundvig – ElectroTank

Three Rings is doing web development with their new game, Whirled. ElectroTank makes flash games and middleware. These two talked about the pitfalls of Flash, Java, and AJAX development for games that run in the browser. It was a pretty technical, but had a bunch of helpful tips on this sort of development.

1:30 Thursday – The Zen of Online Game Design

Damion Schubert – Bioware

Another talk that it’s worth buying the audio to. The slides are here, and Raph was live-blogging it. Lunch was a big rush to get to this one early so I could actually get in the door.

4:30pm Thursday – Startup Lessons from Recent Online Games

Raph Koster – Areae
Anthony Castoro – Heatwave Interactive
Joe Ybarra – Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment
Nabeel Hyatt – Conduit Labs
Daniel James – Three Things (Moderator)

This panel covered a wide variety of startup issues. To me the most interesting was funding: Each panelist had their own approach. Cheyenne Mountain is entirely funded by angel investors. They have more than a hundred of them. Heatwave is funded by a publisher in the traditional game studio route. In Areae’s case, Raph was approached with offers of funding from the day he announced he was leaving Sony and eventually settled on two different VCs to share the first round. Conduit is also VC funded and secured $5.5 million in funding over 6 weeks. Three Rings was self funded/bootstrapped, and launched Puzzle Pirates on relatively little funding, at least compared to the other panelists.

Gamasutra has a fairly complete writeup of the entire panel.