Rule Databases for Contextual Narrative... and spelling bees.

Valve's Elan Ruskin gave a fantastic talk at GDC 2012 on using "Rule Databases for Contextual Dialog and Game Logic" -- basically, the implementation behind the dialogue response system in Source games, most recently used in Left 4 Dead 2 and DOTA 2. I'm surprised more people haven't picked up on it because I think it presents some really effective research on procedural narrative systems.

A lot of game logic / narrative resembles a flowchart, especially with the advent of visual scripting systems like Unreal's Kismet or Twine -- resulting in this deeply entrenched concept of branching structure. Authoring and changing these individual branches is usually very expensive.

On landscape porn.

We couldn't do large, open, video game environments before. Now we can. However, this kind of power is limiting in its own way; you just see the same concepts of grand sweeping vistas, over and over. It's very beautiful and expertly crafted, but it also resembles the same stagnation of a mud-brown rusty metal corridor decorated with skulls -- a certain lack of imagination.

Conceptually, this is Thomas Kinkade, repeating, instantiating, stretching endlessly past our view frustums to infinity. It's always the same sunlit painterly natural realism with some normal-mapped ruins in the foreground.

A short history of non-monoplanar first person movement.

I'm working on a new game that reuses a lot of Souvenir's code, so lately I've been doing more research into non-monoplanar first person movement, meaning you're not limited to primarily moving along the X and Z axis / traversing across a single, fixed, designated "ground" plane.

Traditionally, "noclip" flying / spectator modes have been the most common form of non-planar first person movement. However, I'm not a fan of it as a movement mechanic because you're always "right side up" above a ground plane. Your idea of space never really changes because that's not the point.

Shattered Horizon (2009) was a multiplayer FPS in space, where astronauts shoot each other while hovering around asteroids. From what I can grok in gameplay videos, players can rotate and hover freely, but they almost always maintain the same common "ground plane" as if there's a "right side up" in space. Common map layout terminology and directional lighting also reinforce the idea of a "top" of the map.

Pardon the lack of updates...

... but I've actually been working on a game, for once.

I'll finish some writing this weekend through, probably.

(Sci-fi textures by PhilipK.)

TRIP, a crazy psychedelic first person peyote simulator, is now available for purchase and play.

"TRIP is an exploration art game featuring an abstract world. There are no objectives, there are no enemies, just you and the world."

Sounds good to me.

Games for Change 2012, thoughts

This is from last year but it pretty much looked the same

A friend of a friend said the atmosphere was "masturbatory." I think that's about 50% accurate. Not much criticism goes on here, everyone just pumps each other up about their ventures and start-ups and whatnot. (I'm guilty of perpetuating this culture too; my "gay rant" consisted more or less of patting everyone on the back.)

But is there anything wrong with masturbation? It feels great, it doesn't hurt anyone, they should do what they enjoy -- so yeah, mixed feelings here.

I watched one presentation by the Tate, where basically they had a bunch of money and wanted to make games inspired by Alice in Wonderland -- and in a breathtaking squandering of opportunity and resources, they chose to reskin a pipe dream game / a matching cards memory game -- followed by some patronizing videos of mouth-breathing adults talking about how you used the memory in your brain to memorize cards.

And all around the auditorium, with my eyes like dinner plates, I saw people eagerly taking notes and celebrating this as something other than a profound lack of imagination that utterly betrays its subject material.

One feels almost as if G4C could use a bit of the drama that engulfs GDC / IGF each year.

Text of my "Gay Rant" at Games for Change 2012

I spoke at Games for Change 2012. It was very well-received, and I'm so relieved because I wrote and re-wrote this speech like 20 times, revising it constantly in the nights before the festival. Here's the full text, though I ended up flubbing some of the lines as well as running a few seconds over.

Hi, I'm Robert Yang. I'm an indie game developer as well as a practicing homosexual.

"How to “Get Better”: Approaches to LGBTQ-relevant Video Games" at Games for Change Festival 2012

So on Tuesday, I'll be speaking at the 2012 Games for Change Festival at NYU about gay stuff in video games. Me and MIT-Gambit darling Todd Harper were originally going to tag team it, but as the schedule got finalized, the logistics for Todd zipping down here got less tenable, so now I'm just going to be dancing on my own.

I've been scheduled in a 5 minute time slot labeled "Rants" on Tuesday at 12:15 noon, on the main stage. That's just 5 minutes to foam at the mouth about heterosexual tyranny!

It's been difficult writing this talk because I don't really know the demographics of the audience here -- from what I can grok, it's mostly government / NGO education groups, some private sector education people, and the odd sprinkling of AAA game industry. (That means no Mass Effect jokes; that means an entire audience will lack fundamental video game literacy for a talk about video games; that means I'm screwed.)

But, uh, we'll see how it goes.