Fugu Talk

An updated HyperBowl Mac widget is now on the web site – submitted it Monday, saw it there on Tuesday! (quite a difference from the App Store review time) Didn’t get Feature Widget status this time, but still a Staff Favorite and hanging in the Top 50 download list. So, no complaints. This update fixes a crash/freeze that occurs if you get a spare in the ninth frame (an embarrassing code bug) and has a new trophy scene as shown below.

Under the hood, it’s a rather substantial rework – the previous version had assets imported at 1/100 of the proper scale (due to a default import scaling option in Unity), so I scaled down physics to match, which is supposed to work. But it doesn’t. When I reimported everything without the shrinkage and leaving physics parameters alone, the bowling pins behave much better. In particular, they don’t get stuck in a partial fall/roll and just stand there tilting. Plus I added a flat collider to the bottom of the pins so they can wobble a bit if they just get a glancing blow. Seems to me even the lighting works a bit better and the materials automatically pick up the right textures when I reimported (as opposed to manually attaching each one the first time I did it) Lesson learned – from now on when I’m importing assets, I’ll be sure to reimport them immediately at the desired scale. Now, anxiously awaiting the new iPhone version to show up on the App Store…

This use of the plugin, combined with the previous post, should demonstrate one clobbering the other (i.e. you’ll see two players with the same content instead of two different scenes).

Quick test of the HiggyB’s Unity WordPress plugin for someone on the Unity forum.

I was dismayed when the new IGDA leadership started off by announcing a member survey. What’s the big deal? Well, to put it bluntly, surveys are lame.

First of all, it rings of amateurism. It’s one of those bright ideas you expect from fresh-faced business school grads, along with “branding” and “monetization”. (“hey, let’s do a survey!”) And I’m not saying this is something just biz-school grads do – I joined a engineering-oriented startup just before they sent out a survey to potential customers and frankly, it was a waste of time. Everyone has their pet not-well-thought-out idea of how to design a product – if they really know what they’re talking about, you should hire them or work for them. And most of those surveyed weren’t the purchase decision makers, anyway.

Second, it’s annoying. I get pop-up surveys every time I leave my online bank account (“What can we do better?” “Get rid of this pop-up”) and other sites (like the KTLA news site). And I’ve only seen one or two on-line surveys that bothered to tell you how many questions are included up front are provide a progress indicator. The last IGDA survey I started said “this will take approximately ten minutes” – that’s both vague and unappealing. I once got suckered into taking a survey at GDC to get the “free” t-shirt, but after ten questions I asked the attendant how much longer it would take. I forget the answer, but it explained why the line was so long, so I bailed out. At least on-line surveys are less obnoxious than telephone surveys (“this will take just a few minutes…”). Non-profits are guilty, too – before I got rid of my land line I used to receive telephone surveys from non-profits (“help us out with our study”). I even left one non-profit after I showed up and they put me on a phone to call donors (“thanks for donating, so now I’m going to call you at dinnertime…”)

Thirdly, surveys generally lack rigor. You can construct and interpret a survey any which say – it’s like a focus group without the free food. And it’s the laziest form of research, like the students who post their homework questions online and ask for answers. There is some entertainment value, like the call-in opinions solicited by news shows (although I could go to a bar to get a man-on-the-street opinion, and a beer to go with it). I always check the Game Developer salary survey out of morbid curiosity, but I wouldn’t cite the results in a scientific paper. One year I was surprised to see the highest salary listed was $200,000 and then noticed they mentioned that they omitted any salaries over $200,000. I put much more stock in Christer Ericson’s article that lists real salaries based on Department of Labor records.

Finally, there’s no substitute for real data, but if you’re searching for subjective conclusions, swing the other way and really talk to people. In the startup mentioned above, there was an existing loyal following of customers who could have acted as an advisory panel. The IGDA already has an active member forum (and if it’s not active enough, there’s one thing that could be fixed – how about an RSS feed?) and personally, as someone who’s not only a paying IGDA member but a paying studio affiliate member, I would have appreciated something more than a mass e-mail soliciting my input. And sometimes, if you really want to see what the situation is, just look around. To pick on the IGDA one last time, I looked at their latest diversity survey. It’s well intentioned, and probably a good idea (like the Quality of Life survey), but studio owners and managers aren’t going to knock themselves out reporting how much they resemble a Minuteman patrol, and I’m going to guess your average white male isn’t going to be startled that he’s surrounded by other white males. But just browse around the forums where female game developers compare notes (it’s both horrific and entertaining) or just attend GDC and take a look around, especially in the progamming sessions. Even I was taken aback in a DirectX lecture when I looked around the hundred-plus crowd and couldn’t spot any women (not that I was expressly searching for some) and saw only a handful of non-white males. For real awareness, there’s nothing like immersion.

So, if you really think surveys are useful, well, just include that question in your next survey…

This is a neat demo of the open-source Chipmunk 2D physics engine. It runs on multiple platforms and has been used in several iPhone apps.

I just looked over the Twitter terms of service (a while after starting to use it – shame on me!) and I’m pleasantly amazed there’s no indemnification clause. That’s a breath of fresh air. More typically, when you sign up for a web service, there’s a clause like this one (taken from the WordPress terms of service)

1. Indemnification. You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Automattic, its contractors, and its licensors, and their respective directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any and all claims and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, arising out of your use of the Website, including but not limited to your violation of this Agreement.

That’s nice – if anyone, not just the company, but anyone employed, on the board, contracted, whatever, is sued or suffers any “expenses” in any way related to your use of the site, whether or not you did anything wrong, you’re on the hook. I’ve even seen this on sites of non-profit organizations – hey, give us some money, and pay our legal expenses!

It’d be great if those proponents of tort reform to help out those poor big corporations suffering from class-action lawsuits would take a look at removing the legal traps from consumer transactions (and how about those EULA’s in shrink-wrapped software that you agree to even before you can read them? Don’t get me started…) In the meantime, try to reward those few bright lights of reasonableness with your business. I was going to point to just one other example, the Goodreads TOS which has an indemnification clause specifically for breach of contract,

You agree to indemnify and hold Goodreads, its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, and other partners and employees, harmless from any loss, liability, claim, or demand, including reasonable attorney’s fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the Service in violation of this Agreement and/or arising from a breach of these Terms & Conditions and/or any breach of your representations and warranties set forth above.

which seems quite reasonable, but it turns out they amended it least year (without even mentioning it on their blog) to this:

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Goodreads and its subsidiaries, agents, managers, and other affiliated companies, and their employees, contractors, agents, officers and directors, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney’s fees) arising from: (i) your use of and access to the Service, including any data or content transmitted or received by you; (ii) your violation of any term of this Agreement, including without limitation your breach of any of the representations and warranties above; (iii) your violation of any third-party right, including without limitation any right of privacy, publicity rights or Intellectual Property Rights; (iv) your violation of any law, rule or regulation of the United States or any other country; (v) any claim or damages that arise as a result of any of your User Content or any that are submitted via your account; or (vi) any other party’s access and use of the Service with your unique username, password or other appropriate security code.

I don’t know why they put ii-vi in there, (i) seems to cover any possible case. Now, you might say that’s just lawyer stuff, in practice you don’t need to worry about it, but in that case, it doesn’t need to be there. And if I can’t rely on a common-sense intepretation of the text, do I need to hire a lawyer every time I sign up for a web service? C’mon.

I saw a mention of cocos2d in iPhone Game Projects (also mentioned Unity, too!), so I checked it out. Nice video:

I haven’t really done any marketing for Fugu Maze, because, after all, it’s just a maze, and I’ve been concentrating the last few months on getting HyperBowl running, but it is my best-selling (well, best-downloaded) Mac widget and iPhone app, so I finally got around to googling it. Well, apparently it’s long overdue, since there was a query on a Mac games forum two years ago asking why it was slow on his Mac (it was an old G4 Mac, that’s why), but he’s probably in college now, so no point in answering him now. And just this summer, there was this MacLife article including Fugu Maze on a list of apps that need accelerometer controls. I’ll take the publicity, but I’ve got to disagree – I have seen plenty of App Store reviews saying that that FuguMaze needs a tilt control, but the only first-person walking controller I’ve seen using tilt controls on the iPhone (Cube?) received the exact opposite review – remove the tilt control!

It’s a knee-jerk reaction to say, wow, this could use a tilt control, but like everything in game design, it’s easy to kibitz and takes some thought to do it right. Tilt controls make sense where you naturally bank, like extreme sports games, rolling ball games, flying games, and, borderline, driving games. And of course, tilt is perfect when you’re simulating real tilting, like those tabletop rolling ball mazes and bubble-level tools. But, say, controls that require tilting the screen away from you is a bad idea. And tilting to turn without the implication that you’re leaning or virtually tilting in some other fashion is just confusing. Now, if you’re running (like in all those trendy parkour games) and tilting to lean/turn, that could work.

But when a customer is asking for a solution that doesn’t sound right, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem to be solved, in this case, the first-person controls. Now, I like the iPhone controls in FuguMaze – they are in fact a simplification of some demo controls supplied by Unity and more or less used in full by other games, but FuguMaze could probably use a quick tutorial in the beginning, like RealMaze3D. And in the bigger picture, standard first-person controls are an obstacle to casual gamers even on PC’s, so on the iPhone perhaps we have an opportunity to invent something better. And who knows, maybe that will involve some kind of tilt.

In the meantime, however, I have been thinking a bit about where it’s appropriate to add shake detection, so in the latest Fugu Maze app release, you can shake to rescramble the maze. I think it’s a nice conceptual match – shake to scramble, shake if you’re stuck.

No, it’s not a poisonous fish smoothie. I wanted try shake detection in  iPhone apps (“I need more cowbell!”), so the latest FuguMaze now rescrambles the maze if you shake it, and the latest WordsEye Feature loads the next WordsEye image on shake.

I’m a free man!

Dear Philip,

Your traffic school Certificate of Completion has been processed by the court and your case has been dismissed.

Sincerely,

Court Official
West Justice Center
Orange County, California

My “case” took a while (it was for not stopping at a stop sign – maybe it was a Bostonian rolling stop, but the officer described it as if I’d just cruised on through. I’d like to see the evidence. When is Google going to have real-time satellite traffic videos?) When I first tried to pay my traffic ticket at the courthouse, they told me “you’re not in the computer”, giving rise to thoughts of a Catch-22 situation where I couldn’t pay my ticket but got in trouble for not paying my ticket (anyone see the movie Brazil?) This wasn’t helped by the web-site instructions saying I should follow the instructions on the ticket on the “courtesy notice” which hadn’t arrived since I wasn’t in the computer, while the ticket itself said I was responsible for following the instructions on the courtesy notice but the courtesy notice was just a courtesy so I might not receive one.

But thankfully(?) I received a letter a month later saying the citing officer mad a “mistake” and my case was “rescheduled” and a month after that I received a letter with instructions on selecting a traffic school. In the same envelope was another note instructing me not to select a traffic school for another two weeks because they just changed traffic school systems, and, here’s the good part, a modest refund.

I’m mildly curious about the in-person schools that employ comedians as instructors – thought that was a made-up idea in King of the Hill – but not that curious. Instead, I decided to make the most of the situation by trying out an online traffic school that featured Flash games, Traffic Interactive.

The games are OK, about par for free Flash games. While you might expect a bunch of driving simulations, there’s only one driving minigame in the section about choosing the correct lane:

Most of the games have nothing to do with driving, e.g. the one below requires you to harpoon squid – you just score a few points and the game pauses while a popup explains a few driving rules.

I don’t even remember what this one is:

Most of the game is filled with non-interactive Flash presentations that border on annoying (actually, they cross the border a few times – I mean, why does that guy keep harping on his grandma’s driving? They should show teenagers – they’re the worst) And it’s still traffic school – games or no games, after a few hours, it feels like it’s not going to end. Fortunately, there is a nice map showing your progress in this traffic school wonderland:

And the beauty of an online school is you can log out and log in at anytime. I killed an afternoon completing the bulk of the course but had trouble logging into the final test (which requires additional authentication steps). It took me days before I figured out (there appears to be no functioning help desk) that the pull-down list of courts in the final test login had my court listed twice, once as “Online” and once as “Notary”, which “Notary” listed further down and I had selected that inadvertently. The web design isn’t great. On the other hand, the online school cost around $15 and the online authenticated final test (vs. the Notary option which requires you to pay a notary to watch you take it) costs an additional $8. So I finally took the test near midnight during  a commercial break while watching Conan. You can’t beat that for convenience.