Life long game developer
May 18th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
Hey you! I am sad that I didn’t come up with this. Wii Ware’s new must buy game in video form below:
Here’s the translation:
“To everyone who loves muscles…”
“MUSCLE MARCHING” (name of game)
“Hey you! You can’t just look can you??”
“Lets all hustle together with Wii Ware”
“Protein is our energy but a robber took it, wait wait wait!”
“This is nice! And nice body!”
“Today’s tears will become muscles tomorrow!”
There are more awesome quotes but that should be enough to hold any muscle lover over.
May 15th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
An iPhone application I recently worked on for a client has been released. It is called “Indicator Maniacs” and it has all the sauce needed to wet your otaku whistle. It’s basically a Star Trek “tricorder” that you run on your phone and it shows various meters and numbers. There are six indicators to choose from and the user can select three of them at a time, set their layout, and tint them to a variety of colors. I did all of the engineering.
The information website in Japanese is here.
You can check it out in English or Japanese on the iTunes store.
The indicator types are:
In the screen shot above you can see the digital clock, memory and microphone indicators.
If you are into really geeky stuff like this or use your iPhone in a dock as a clock be sure to give it a look.
May 14th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
I’ve been watching some of the NBA finals games via the NBA International League Pass. For about $40 you can get access to all the games of the playoffs and finals when living outside of the US. It’s convenient and works fairly well.
During halftime I was surprised to see the WoW logo.
It was kind of shocking to hear the announcer say the words “World of Warcraft.” That’s the first time I’ve seen a non-sports game being advertised in a sporting event. The game industry has come a long way.
May 11th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
I highly recommend checking out Windosill, an awesome interactive game experience by artist Patrick Smith aka Vectorpark.
The goal is to move the little toy car throughout an interactive environment. I wont say anything else about it because I don’t want to ruin it. The combination of artist work and the response to use touch just feels incredible. It really shows how enjoyable interactivity is the cross section of art and the code that drives the response to that touch and interactivity.
You can play the first half of the game for free. The full experience is $3.
May 5th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
For the past few hours I’ve been slamming my head against the wall trying to get these features working together: background playback of iPod audio, OpenAL playback of in-game events, and microphone recording. Microphone recording is not compatible with iPod audio and that is OK. When I enable the mic midway through program execution all I wanted to do was switch the session category and let the OS kill the music but it wasn’t working. I finally came up with a workaround and am writing this up for anyone else who runs into this issue.
Problem #1: don’t initialize OpenAL before initializing an audio session explicitly. If you do, iPod audio will be killed as OpenAL comes up. I couldn’t find any documentation on how this affects the session category.
To let the iPod continue to play you need to initialize an audio session and set the category to kAudioSessionCategory_UserInterfaceSoundEffects or kAudioSessionCategory_AmbientSound (info here). Make sure you do this first.
Problem #2: the OS will not let you change session categories if you first set your audio session – as above – and then start OpenAL. Why? I have no idea, the error code the API function returns is not a documented error.
I had to completely tear down OpenAL first and then call AudioSessionSetActive(false); to shutdown my initial audio session. Then I was able to change the category, restart the session, and finally restart OpenAL. Yes, this also means that I have to free all of my application’s sounds and reload them. This causes additional time the user has to wait for the sounds to reload. In the end it works but is not pretty.
May 4th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
The Japanese version of Get Dirk Drunk is nearly complete. Entitled “Hebereke-kun” – which translates to something like “piss drunk guy” – the software, art, and website is done. All that is left is to record his voice, which a Japanese friend of mine is going to do, and then submit it to the App Store. I recorded place holder voices for Hebereke-kun myself but a native speaker will do much better. See the website for Hebereke-kun here.
Thanks go to James Kay for localizing the art quickly. As usual he has done a bang up job.
I hope with the drinking culture over here that a salary man drinking game will catch fire! This guy has been playing the game too much:
April 23rd, 2009 by Mark Cooke
About a month ago I was showing one of my friends – a bartender here in Tokyo – some applications on my iPhone. He asked “why is there no cocktail mixing application?” and I had to reply “I dunno!” And so Get Dirk Drunk was born.
What began as a simple cocktail mixing toy turned into the glorious game you see before you. In the game you play as the local bartender. Further explanation is on the website:
Dirk is your average guy out on the town on a Friday night. He has had a tough week slaving away for his corporate overlords and it is time for a drink. That’s where you come in. As the bartender of the local drinking establishment you’ve got to keep mixing drinks and pouring them into Dirk’s mouth to keep him drunk. If he sobers up, you lose!
So be a pal and Get Dirk Drunk!
If it isn’t obvious from the trailer the game has its tongue firmly planted in cheek. I built it in my spare time and it was easy to make time in my schedule as the game involves two things I enjoy: silly, crude humor and drinking.
I wanted to go through the full process of releasing an application – idea, design, development, hiring outsourcing, release preparation, marketing, licensing, etc. – to get more experience in the areas I haven’t had the chance to work in on the large teams I’ve been on. Specifically I wanted to gain more experience in the production side of the business and though this is a tiny minigame going through the process was valuable. It is onward and upwards from here.
Now, be a pal and go and help Get Dirk Drunk! iTunes store link.
(please drink responsibly)
April 11th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
Zombie Apocalypse, the recently announced zombie shooter for PSN and XBLA, is one of the games I have been working on recently. I worked primarily on gameplay, AI, weapon, and player control systems. I’m proud of the results and think it is especially fun when playing with your friends in the up-to-four player simultaneous multiplayer game modes. Congratulations to everyone involved at Nihilistic and Konami for finishing off the project strong.
Check out the video below for a sample of gameplay.
April 10th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
In the “Health & Fitness” section of the Japanese Apple application store the free version of Prescription for Sleep is the most popular application.
The application is much more popular in Japan than it is in the rest of the world currently. I’m not sure why that is given that there are far more iPhones in the US and Europe. Certainly having it localized in Japanese helped immensly but that doesn’t account for its comparatively lower download count in other countries. There may be cultural elements at work here I don’t understand. The idea for the application was conceived by a Japanese person after all and perhaps simply appeals more here.
The application certainly isn’t for everyone but it is nice to see that a good number of users are enjoying it.
April 8th, 2009 by Mark Cooke
On a recent trip to the US I dug up some old items of mine from storage that indicate the beginning of my game developer roots. First, here’s a picture of me at 15 years old along with John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Shawn Green from id Software. It was taken in 1996 at the Computer Game Developers Conference, or CGDC, which later became the GDC we know and love today.
At the time this was taken I was playing a lot of Doom 2 and it was awesome for those guys to take some time out to chat with an aspiring game developer who looked up to them. I ran into Romero at GDC 2009 and he was just as friendly as ever. Doom 2 is still one of my all time favorite games.
The photocopied check in the upper right is from my first job as an intern at a defunct game developer named Rocket Science Games. That company was in a building on 2nd and Townsend in San Francisco. The same building now houses Secret Level and ngmoco.
Next we move onto early experiments in game design. Below is a map of a pen and paper RPG (geek alert) I created as a kid with a childhood friend of mine. Construction paper for the win!
We were working on that right around the same time I started to teach myself how to program, around 11 years old. The game was called “Catiso”. I don’t remember many of the details unfortunately but I do remember that we had a rulebook to go along with the maps. Hopefully I’ll find that someday. I bet lots of game developers have fun game designs from their youth too. It would be great if someone shared a story in the comments.
Finally, this isn’t related to me but here is a cool video from Romero that was recorded during the creation of Doom. It’s great that he uploaded it – it’s fun to see how small id Software was during the creation of one of the biggest games of all time.
A Visit to id Software from john romero on Vimeo.