xeophin.net/worlds

... is, apparently, something Tale of Tales are rather good at. Robert Yang has a neat timeline of the current events. And it is not the first time they make people angry.

Of course, you can debate the value of their provocations, you can debate their contribution to game culture –

Tale of Tales is important and interesting... but also kind of not. Their conception of video games seems really narrow, perhaps out of necessity in order to target it effectively in their crazy dogmatic manifestos.

– the thing is: there is a discussion about what games are and what not. People might consider them to be wrong. But people might also consider Blizzard to be wrong, inasmuch as they pretty much only polish up the games they did ten years ago.¹

No matter how aggravating/boring this argument may seem: It is important that it is discussed. Every game designer that plays a Tale of Tales game will either see how games could be made as well – or she or he will realise how games are not to be designed. Either way: everybody learns.

Here’s to the crazy ones, so to speak.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.

... indeed.

I guess my plan is not so bad after all. At least this article at GameLife proves my point perfectly: first learn all the important stuff about producing a game at a big studio, probably failing miserably a few times along the way – and then actually founding your own little studio to produce the games you really want to do – just as Jamie Cheng (Shank), Jake Kazdal (Skulls of the Shogun) and Sean Murray (Joe Danger) did.

Choice quotes from the article:

The stereotypical image of an indie gamemaker is an iconoclast who prizes art over commerce, or perhaps a kid with no formal training working in his parents’ house, cobbling together a genius new game idea using pirated software and raw talent.

But that’s not what the new crop of indies are. They’re veterans of the triple-A game biz with decades of experience behind them. They’ve worked for the biggest companies and had a hand in some of the industry’s biggest blockbusters. They could work on anything, but they’ve found creative fulfillment splitting off into a tiny crew and doing their own thing. They’re using everything they’ve learned working on big-budget epics and applying it to small, downloadable games.

The good news for gamers is that, as the industry’s top talents depart the big studios and go into business for themselves, players are being treated to a new class of indie game. They’re smaller and carry cheaper price tags, but they’re produced by industry veterans instead of thrown together by B teams and interns. Most importantly, unlike big-budget games that need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to turn a profit, these indie gems reveal the undiluted creative vision of their makers.

I have not watched those yet, but they might be wort a look:

Kurt Reinhard from the Institut für Theorie, Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts, recently posted on Vimeo a fascinating series of short videos on the future of storytelling. The videos juxtapose the perspectives of some key thinkers in this space, including Clay Shirkey (NYU), Joshua Green (UCSB), Ian Condry and Nick Montfort (MIT), Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation, Joe Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling, and, hmm, Henry Jenkins (USC), among others. Each video is between five and ten minutes long and tackles some of the ways that shifts in the media environment are changing the nature of stories and storytelling.

The complete series can be found on the blog of Henry Jenkins.

There was the conference about the Art History of Video Games, which was organized by Ian Bogost, one of my secret heroes.

Now all the non-attendants can watch the presentations as well – head over here and bask in the knowledge of people like Jesper Juul, John Romero or Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn.

The universe is pissed.

No, Human Gameplay Trailer from woodn on Vimeo.

Find more information about this Swiss iPhone game here.

Thanks to a game blog (Destructoid, or Kotaku, I do not remember) I came across the Border House Blog, a blog about questions of gender, feminism and LGBT in games. One of the articles is about WoW:

I suddenly saw social ideas writ large in the game’s concepts. The racial undertones that often gird roleplaying games where humans are coincidentally European and other real-world human cultures are given pigeon holed non-human races. The way even female heroes are shown wearing very revealing or skimpy “robes” and “armour,” or the occasionally poor writing for female characters. All of that analysis became impossible for me to ignore because something dramatic had shifted in my life. I was now well outside the target demographic of games like WoW.

I think we will have a course about females in games, but this blog shows nicely that it simply is not done with putting a generic female body into a game to address the issues.

Definitely a blog to keep an eye on, even more with my bachelor game coming up.

The first live-action trailer for Halo: Reach was great already (including all the eye candy), but it even gets better:

Awesome. This is how stories are supposed to be told.

Of course, it would be even better if those stories would be told in the game, and not just in the trailer for the game.

[via Kotaku]

Placing stuff in 3D space in Unity 3D is simple, right? Just use this.transform.position and you are all set – or so we have been taught in art school. Turns out there are a few pitfalls I happen to hit whenever I work with that stuff.

Reading and Writing Values of transform.position

Yes, you can access the x, y, and z-values of the transform.position. But you can not change them directly (at least in C#). You have to use a Vector3 object, as in:

this.transform.position = new Vector3(newX, newY, newZ);

Obviously, by feeding the original values in, you can change just one value at a time:

this.transform.position = new Vector3(this.transform.position.x,
                                      newY, 
                                      this.transform.position.y);

Global vs. Local

Also of note: transform.position actually refers to the position in global space, it is the absolute position.

In many cases, you want to calculate movement relative to the parent object. In order to do this, you need to use transform.localPosition, which works exactly as the other one, but is calculated relatively to the position of the parent object. If there is no parent object, localPosition is the same as position.

In my opinion, it is in many cases better to use localPosition instead of position, since most of the time, you want to have objects move with or along their parent objects. After all, also the editor shows you the local position.