Fugu Talk

One thing I don’t miss about working in a corporate office is the pointless arguments. Employers may fuss about employee web surfing, but at least that’s educational (face it, it saves you the expense of a company library and research division) and everyone can get their Christmas shopping done while they’re stuck in their cubicles during crunch time. But I do regret all the time I wasted trapped while someone’s trying to prove a “point”. Instead of the traditional programmer quiz, I think interviewers should prompt applicants to start arguing and see if they fall into one of the following categories, based on motivation.

• Likes arguing. This person enjoys arguing as recreation, and is actually disappointed if you try to end the argument with an agree-to-disagree or even if you cut it short by conceding the argument. This may be fun in a social setting (not for me), but is a real pain if you’re trying to get something done.
• Likes to win (aka last-word-itis). It doesn’t even matter what the original point of contention is, he’s got to have the final say and carry home the debater’s trophy. I’ve even had a couple of coworkers follow me around the office when I tried to just walk away so they could get that last word in (When Arguing Turn to Stalking – sounds like a Lifetime movie)
• Never-wrong. This can look like last-word-itis, but the motivation is different. This person just needs to make sure everyone knows he’s right and incapable of making a mistake. If presented with indisputable evidence or incontrovertible logic that he’s wrong, he’ll change the subject in mid-stride and argue another point. This is a dangerous guy to work with, since, logically, if he’s never wrong, than someone else must be. Try pointing out a bug in his code.
• Narcissism. You’ll find this in many company leaders, famous and not famous. It has elements of the previous two categories, but the underlying motivation is that everyone has to see the world from his point of view, which revolves around him. It includes last-word-itis, but the game is rigged, so instead of working for the last word, an argument typically concludes with a “let’s stop talking about it”, and then a parting shot. And it has a strong never-wrong element, but logic is a quicker casualty – with no victory in sight, the argument ends with “if you just knew what I have to deal with”. On the plus side, it’s a lot easier to end it than with the recreational arguer – if you want to just get out of there, nod in sympathy about now no one understands him, cluck sympathetically about all the surfers trespassing at his beachside mansion, and give a how-dare-they at the employees who forced him to mistreat them.

Of course, there are plenty of arguments you can join in on from the home office. Just look at the forum threads that just won’t die. Just remember, your argument style will be archived on the Internet for posterity. Don’t engage – walk away.

I decided to check out the competition for my HyperBowl games on the App Store – a search for “bowling” returns over 100 apps! But with over 100,000 apps on the store total, I guess I was expecting worse. I tried out a few – here’s a sampler:

300 Bowl. It’s in German.

Flick Bowling has been on the App Store a long time and is a typically polished FreeVerse product.

Galactic Bowl is very slick with some fancy character animation (possibly accounting for some long level-load times). It’s priced accordingly as one of the more expensive bowling apps.

Downhill Bowling is Unity-based bowling game (the only other one I know of besides mine is Zombie Bowling)

Malibu Bowl offers a coconut as a bowling ball.

Action Bowling.

And then there are my two HyperBowl lanes, HyperBowl Classic and HyperBowl Rome. And the free FuguBowl.

So far, none of my iPhone apps have taken longer two weeks to get approved (well, except for that one that took a month to get rejected), but still it makes me appreciate the 24-hour turnaround I get on Mac widgets. I submitted an updated HyperBowl Classic widget last night and saw it on the Apple widget download site today.

This update includes the new and updated front end screens of the the current HyperBowl web player.

I was fortunate to be interviewed as AppBoy’s Developer of the Week last week, but I was a bit startled to read the term “old school” applied to me (they meant it in a good way). I used to think of old school programmers as those guys who programmed in Fortran and COBOL or APL and remnisced about how they used to feed paper tape into computers.

But I guess there’s a whole generation of programmers now who haven’t seen what I’ve seen (do I sound like Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner?) Remember floppy discs? But most of the technology in use then is still around. I thought dot-matrix printers would be gone by now, but anywhere you see carbon copies (or the modern non-carbon equivalent – what do you call those?), there’s a noisy, slow dot-matrix printer. Just saw one in action at Jiffy Lube, today, when they printed out my receipt. Same with languages. I started out with BASIC in high school and then Lisp in college, and they’re still hanging around.

It’s probably easier to date me by listing what wasn’t in existence yet during my formative programming years. The Mac showed up by the time I went to college, but PC’s were still running DOS – Windows was a few years away (the first usable version, anyway). C had been around for a while but C++ was still a gleam in Bjorne’s eye. And forget about Java, .NET and the gazillion scripting languages that arrived during the Internet boom (Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby….)

And while there was an Internet before the boom, the main Internet applications were email, ftp and something called gopher. There was no web. No web browser. No online shopping, banking, reviewing, blogging, IM’ing, twittering, facebooking, linking in, googling, binging, yahooing, rediting, digging, stack-overflowing…how did I get anything done before the Web? Or maybe I should wonder, how am I getting anything done now?

I decided to try putting HyperBowl on some web game portals. Only a few support Unity right now, but the number is growing. On opposite sides of the spectrum, Unicade was one of the first but doesn’t do any ad-revenue sharing and it’s hard to tell if it’s maintained, anymore. Shockwave also featured a Unity game early on, but they’re submission process is like, “we’ll get back to you.” EditorialD is the new kid on the block, but it seems like they’re still figuring things out.

So I settled on GameJolt and Wooglie for now. They both feature convenient developer account registration and game uploads. GameJolt is a bit more inviting – there’s no wait for approval and they explicitly invite works-in-progress. Wooglie doesn’t show your game until it’s approved, although the approval takes place quickly, and they just introduced a work-in-progress category. Both have nice displays of your current income generated, which is a lot more reassuring than just trusting someone to pay you according to some hidden numbers.

GameJolt is more polished, even though the site says “beta” – it has a nice clean look, even with ads, and developer-friendly features like video uploading and a news section for each game. Wooglie looks a bit more like your typical ad-crammed site and could use some refinement – the comment field is just one line and I saw a web-server error embedded in there at one point. Wooglie also has a slower web player load time (it’s not too bad, at least it lets me test the load-progress display on my web player!). On GameJolt for some reason, my logo display seems a little stuttery.

GameJolt seems to have a lot more traffic, but the downside is you have to compete with a lot of games, mostly non-Unity, and after you submit a game, it get buried pretty fast. Wooglie is Unity-only, so if you submit right now, chances are you’ll show up on the front page.

I recently got an invitation from MyUnity3D to provide Unity-related links. I’ve actually got a few, so I’ll list them here:

• Fugu Games and Fugu Games on Facebook
• HyperBowl and HyperBowl on Facebook
• Game Development with Unity

Googling for “HyperBowl” turns up users of the original PC game still trying to run it and encountering problems, typically with variations of Windows introduced in the last five years or so. One intrepid user found the original support page in the web archive, so I copied it over to the new HyperBowl site as a legacy support page.

As the year is approaching it’s end (once again, way too fast!), I’ve been wondering whether I should continue my studio membership in the IGDA. I originally joined to show support for the excellent industry white papers (mobile games, casual games, online games…) and the generous help given on the IGDA forums and in the columns (particularly Jim Charne’s articles). But I stopped watching the forums largely because it wasn’t convenient (no RSS feed), and it seemed like the same questions (or trolling) over and over, I haven’t seen any new white papers lately, and recent offerings seem to cater to studio heads with travel budgets rather than the rank and file. Those are just quibbles though – the most recent game credit controversies seemed to end in a whimper, the fracas over Tim Langdell stank from all angles (who were those anonymous concerned citizens?) and the departure of some long-standing board members was more disquieting. And what’s up with that newsletter?

But I was very pleasantly surprised (very surprised, very pleased) to see the announcement of an IGDA group health plan. This is one of those things that I’ve been carping about but never expected to see. It is one of those features that professional organizations like the IEEE offer, so not only does it provide a service sorely needed by rank and file game developers who are subject to the whims of employers and unemployment or live in the freelance ecosystem, it helps provide an identity for the IGDA as a professional organization, not just an ain’t-it-cool club. To follow the IEEE example further, it’d be great to offer a professional liability insurance plan. And a legal plan (like my credit union offers, although I doubt they’ll negotiate game contracts for me). But for now, looks like the IGDA has gotten farther than Congress on offering health care. Now, I guess I’ll check in on those forums…

With the holiday season nearly upon us, I’m busy throwing away the increasing stacks of donation-mail (thank you ACLU, for selling my address!). But I’m in the mood to do some revenue-sharing for a good cause, so I’m going to try something: through the remainder of this year, 30% of the proceeds for all HyperBowl lanes on the App Store will go to Get Well Gamers, a charity based here in Huntington Beach that supplies video games to assist in pain mangament for hospitalized children.

That’s 30% of what I get from Apple, so for a $.99 app, I get about $.70, and 30% of that is approximately $.21.

There are two HyperBowl lanes right now, HyperBowl Classic and HyperBowl Rome, but I might get in one or two more lanes, depending on my own progress, the arrival of the next Unity iPhone release, and, as always, Apple approval (in fact, the next Unity iPhone release will address new rejection criteria that resultd from the Storm8 brouhaha)