Play to Learn to Play

Monster Munch: Dead Hungry Diner Demo

DarrylKC — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:27:40 +0000

I spent a bit of time playing the demo from Black Market Games and really enjoyed it – you should try it out. Black Market Games are Northern Ireland based company working in Derry and are one of several small local games companies taking large strides into the games industry.

InvestNI have been supportive of this community and this year are providing financial support for companies to attend GDC. I would love to go to this myself this year but I will need to work out other commitments first.

OnLive to be built into Google TVs

DarrylKC — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:11:52 +0000

Report on Eurogamer that Onlive will be built into upcoming Google TVs. This seems to be a major coup for the company. I’ve just received one of the OnLive microconsoles and a gamepad and I’m on a three month trial – so far I’m impressed by the service and the quality of streaming gameplay. The only thing that worries me about the service is the cost of new games – priced at high street values – because I would rather have a boxed game if its exactly the same price.

I also read recently that Apple’s Airplay may come built into next gen TVs also. Soon I won’t need to buy expensive computers and game consoles if I choose not to – I guess this won’t be a bad thing if the quality of service is good and pricing is reasonable/competitive.

Pictures of Waves at Portstewart

DarrylKC — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:09:17 +0000

Portstewart Waves – Jan 2012

Games and Development Software of 2011

DarrylKC — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:05:33 +0000

The lists of games of the year have gone up everywhere. I normally look out for the Eurogamer.net and Edge magazine’s games of the year. There are no real surprises around this year with the games that I have highlighted in my last post featuring prominently, plus a few others that I didn’t mention like Dirt 3 and Forza 4.

Eurogamer’s staff chose Portal 2 as the game of the year, which was very close to being my favouite of the year. Their shortlist was:

Dark Souls
Portal 2
Xenoblade Chronicles
Skyrim
From Dust
DeusEx: Human Revolution
Quarrel DX
Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Bastion
Super Mario 3D Land
Saints Row: The Third
StreetPass Quest
Might & Magic Clash of Heroes HD

I look forward to these lists at the end of the year because it often helps me discover an interesting game that I have missed during the year and its fun to look out for them in the sales. In this case Xenoblade Chronicles is the game that I had overlooked – unfortunately it is still quite expensive.

The Eurogamer developer games of the year are quite similar, though I don’t agree with the choice of Witcher 2. I felt that the control system and intial difficulty level spoiled the game.

Eurogamer reader’s games of the year seem to provide a good coverage of the best games of the year but the only new game that I have discovered off this list is “The Binding of Isaac (PC)”, which I’ve downloaded from STEAM (on sale at the moment) and I look forward to trying out.

Edge magazine’s games of the year were:

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (mainstream game of the year)
SpaceChem (indie game of the year)
Mario Kart 7 (portable game of the year)
Dark Souls (best online experience)
Uncharted 3 (best visual design)
Portal 2 (best audio design)

Makes me want to go back to Dark Souls and persist with it, despite all the dying!

I’m also very interested in awards for the best game development software as I have to keep my eye on the ball in terms of my teaching, research, and commercial activities. Software winners that caught my eye from the Game Developer Magazine’s Front line awards were for Lua (I’ve been looking at this scripting language in several contexts) especially LuaJIT, Unreal Engine, Havok Physics, Pro Tools, 3DS Max, Gamespy, and XNA Game Studio. Other interesting mentions for me were Blender, FlashDevelop (which I really like), OpenFeint, and the C4 Engine (which I hadn’t heard much about before).

My Games of 2011

DarrylKC — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:04:26 +0000

Here is a list of my games of the year (in no particular order). The only one that I’ve completed is Portal 2 but I’ve played enough of the others to make a judgement. I normally complete more games and although I’ve been very busy this year it isn’t the main reason for not being able to finish games that I’ve bought. I think we have been spoiled with the quality of games releases (and re-releases) and it has become impossible to keep up with playing all these new games if you are as obsessive with trying everything as I am! I think I am also becoming a bit jaded. Taking this into account I have to say that Skyrim is my game of the year (based on my play time, it’s immersive world, and great game design) closely followed by DeusEx. However, I feel I should also say that Bastion is my favourite “indie” style game – I just love everything about it – and Terraria has stolen a lot of my time this Christmas.

Dark Souls
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Terraria
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Portal 2
Bastion
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Scribblenauts (iPhone)
Jetpack Joyride (iPhone)
Skylanders
El Shaddai
Beyond Good & Evil HD
Inside a Star Filled Sky (PC)
Legend of Zelda – Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS)
ICO and Shadow of the Colossus Collection

Its been a year for classic games to be re-released on a new platform and many have been a delight to play. Playing Ocarina of Time on the 3DS has been more enjoyable for me than it has been on other platforms, and Mario Kart and Super Mario are also perfect advocates for 3D gaming (though the means for viewing 3D graphics needs improved!). Scribblenauts has found a perfect home on IOS and I’m glad that ICO got an HD release for PS3 to enable a new audience to appreciate one of the games of all time. Beyond Good and Evil didn’t get enough sales on its first release due to the crazily competitive christmas season and it has found a perfect home on Xbox Live Arcade. Surprisingly for me I have spent more time playing phone games and I’ve actually bought DLC for Jetpack Joyride, which is a really elegantly designed game. It has also been a good year for smaller developers who are trying to innovate. Minecraft should be very influential in the development of future dynamic (openworld) games, though I enjoyed Terraria more. I have a soft spot for these types of game and Inside a Star Filled Sky was a really interesting game to play with an unusual gameplay dynamic (moving inside and outside yourself!). Both Star Filled Sky and Bastion have been influential in my game-inspired learning research – Bastion because of its literal reconstruction of a world (imagine educational constructivist ideas). Bastion of course is also a lot of fun and has a nice way of narrating a player story. Skylanders is worthy of a mention due to its innovative blended reality approach to play, and also because the game suits its targeted age group. However, Skylanders could be improved vastly, especially for young girls, if it had open world areas for freeplay rather than the narrow linear challenge based structure (when are developers for children ‘s games ever going to learn?).

El Shaddai is amazing, especially for its visual style and game design based on a missing book of the bible! However, it’s not quite as good as last year’s Bayonetta for me. Dark Souls, Skyrim, Zelda Skyward, and Deus Ex are getting most of the attention in the game of the year awards/blogs. I’ve played Deus Ex and Skyrim a lot and I love them – they have both significanlty improved the basic gameplay in their respective sub-RPG genres, though they are lacking game design innovation. I die a lot in Dark Souls so it is too early for me to fully rate it and I’ve only started the new Zelda – I guess that Zelda would be my game of the year if I had played it much more.

Other games that I have enjoyed playing include: Gears of War 3, Rage, Minecraft, From Dust, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Rayman Origins, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, MonsterUp (Windows Phone), Contre Jour (iPhone), Child of Eden, Outland (Xbox Live Arcade), and Rift (PC).

Games that I should have played by now include: Batman Arkham City, Battle Field 3, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Super Mario 3D Land (3DS), Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary, Mario Kart 7 (3DS), and L.A. Noire. All of these could be candidates for game of the year based on reviews that I’ve read.

Stormy Portstewart

DarrylKC — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:51:39 +0000

On the way home from work I stopped on Portstewart prom to watch the storm and the massive waves. Splashing over my car actually and here is a picture.

Citi-Group mobile game development prize

DarrylKC — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:36:31 +0000

The school of Computing and Information Engineering at the Coleraine has been fortunate over many years to receive sponsored prizes from local industry. Last academic year Citi-Group generously donated a 2nd year student prize for the best game designed and developed to run on a smartphone. Four groups of students from Dr Darryl Charles’ 2nd year game development class were shortlisted for the prize and their Windows Phone 7 games were scrutinized by a technical team from within Citi-Group. A group of students comprising Jonathon McKinney and Mark Andrews were selected as winners of their prize for their game “The Dark Prince“. In presenting the prize in front of a group of current 2^nd year students, Martin Mellon from Citi congratulated all of the shortlisted students and was highly complementary on the quality of the programming demonstrated by Coleraine students. He encouraged students to work hard in their studies and to engage with next year’s competition as Citi are keen to recruit software engineers of the calibre demonstrated by last year’s cohort. The other student games that were shortlisted were Citizen’s Law (Marc Pepper and Paul Teague), Scooby Doo (Amy Hopkins, Carrie-Lyn Kane, and Christopher Newton), and The MisFits (Rebecca Lynam and Ciara Murphy).

Left to right – Darryl Charles (Senior Lecturer in Game Development), Jonathon McKinney, Martin Mellon (Citi-Group), Mark Andrews, Martin McKinney (Head of School of Computing and Information Engineering)

ICO HD

DarrylKC — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 11:08:58 +0000

Post arrived on Friday and out popped ICO HD from a parcel. I love this game and it looks even better now. I’m not sure its a good thing but I can’t help seeing useful educational metaphors and ideas in games – I don’t think it spoils the gameplay! I had forgotten that I had written some of my lecture slides on AI based around notions from ICO. I love the subtle hints that the game provides to the player in order to guide him/her through the game – the motion of the player character’s head (looking at where he should go) and the speech and motion of the companion character (providing guidance assistance). AI could be used with techniques like this to tailor experiences to individual players in a way that is thoroughly integral to the game.

Publication update

DarrylKC — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:54:33 +0000

I forgot to mention that we had a paper accepted for the Fourth International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, paper listed here: http://icids2011.wp.rpi.edu/full-papers/. The paper received quite favourable reviews and Richard Paul will go over to Vancouver to present the paper at the end of November.

Before ICIDS, Barry Herbert, Michael McNeill and I will be attending ECGBL 2011 in Athens, where Barry is presented his first paper from his PhD. Soon after Micheal and I will be making a short trip to Nottingham for the Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability. There should be great opportunities for us to meet like-minded researchers at these events.

Portal 2 completed

DarrylKC — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:36:11 +0000

I finally got to the end of Portal 2, it only took me 3 months. I enjoyed the game but towards the end I just want it to finish and see the ending! There are 3 phases in the game, each with different sorts of puzzles and new features, and if I was to be harsh I think the length of the original Portal was better for the style of game.
The humour in the game is excellent and the narrative helps keeps you interested, I found the game fun and many of the comments from the robots made me smile. The pleasure of solving a problem that you have been stuck at for a while is second to none!
My Score: 89/100
Currently Playing: Deus Ex Human Revolution, El Shaddai
Longing For: Ico HD, Skyrm