If you have been following the Design-A-Day adventure, you probably are aware of my goal (I mispelled that gaol...probably means nothing) of becoming proficient in Flash/ActionScript to the point where I can use it to prototype gameplay. I came back from GDC all fired up about prototyping, due in large part to the talk by Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be available on-line, so you'll have to make due with a summary.

I posted a couple of small games over in the game design section, but I have also been making noise for awhile about posting some of the lessons I have learned during this process, along with the code to back it up.

It begins. Gambol on over to Learning Flash, and start coding!

Look up at the top of the main page and you'll see a new addition.

The Design-A-Tron Lite. Rewritten, a mere 20k, not counting the text for the database. I think it's up to about 890+ billion potential combinations.

The new version of the full implementation is in the works. It has...more.

My little Flash learning project, eRadiRace was in need of a soundtrack, so I dusted off my ancient copy of of Acid and laid down some phat beats* to help keep the gameplay (what there is of it) moving along.

You can groove to it on the eRadiRace page, and remember the late nineties. It has a certain Wipeout PSX thing going for it.

Aside: Wipeout XL. Best video-game soundtrack ever. I have a the original game disk lying around here somewhere, and in a move that would be utterly foreign to the DRM-crazy Sony of today, the songs from the game are encoded on the disk as regular old CD audio.

I was going to link to Amazon, and point to a preview clip, but I realized the song I like best from the game isn't on the official soundtrack album. Perhaps someone out there can help me identify the artist and song name of this clip:

Some day real soon now I'm going to write up what I have learned in these Flash projects, and how I see it applying to prototyping in a production environment.

* Beats certified phat by and independent panel of beatologists.

It's time for another dip into the Chrome Cow Search Term log, that beloved feature where I trawl the search terms that failed to find a result on the Chrome Cow, and fabricate the narrative around it. This week, The Mysterious Ice Cream Caper.

The names, and questions are 100% made up to protect the innocent, the search terms are underlined.

Q. Dear Chrome Cow, I admire your site, but have recently read some disturbing rumors on the interwebs. Is it true that you have stolen a pint of famous game designer Will Wright's Ice Cream? Curious, Bill Rite, Emeryville.

A. Ok Will, first, that's the worst nom de plume ever. Come on. Second, it was in the common fridge, and it didn't have a name on it, and it had been in there for like, three months. And third, it wasn't even ice cream, it was that chocolate-almond Soy Delicious stuff that you've been going on about, and there was only about a quarter of the pint left.

You need to let it go. Seriously, man.

Also, you need to realize that when you call everybody into the conference room and shout  in those made-up Sim's words, while holding a thought balloon with a picture of Ice Cream on it over your head, it diminishes the gravitas...just a bit.

Thanks for searching the Chrome Cow! See you next week!

If you have been following the (increasingly misnamed) Design-a-Day posts (and a few of you have), you will know I have made some bold assertions regarding the roadmap for future games development.

It was therefore gratifying to see some of the movers and shakers in the industry make announcements this week that amount to first steps toward the Chrome Cow's mad, glorious vision for the future.

I direct you first to the lads in Redmond, as Microsoft introduces their Live Anywhere strategy. To quote the Gamasutra article,

 

One of the biggest announcements at E3 was that Microsoft is developing Live Anywhere, a network infrastructure that will allow players to communicate and interact seamlessly with the Xbox 360, Windows Vista PCs, and Windows Mobile and Java-based mobile phones.

 

Combine this with John Carmack's latest announcement about Massively Multiplayer Cellphone Games (via CNN),

 

"We're probably going to have a sequel to 'Orcs and Elves' but I'm really into the idea of a massively multiplayer cell phone title," he said. "I have absolutely no interest in going and competing with Blizzard in the high end of that market, but a cell phone version might be interesting." John Carmack

 

Now we are getting very close to the kind of persistent, cross platform and multi-game shared universe that I have proposed in various guises in Towards a Better World, Cross Dressing: AR Across Platforms and Open.World.

One Universe, many games, many platforms. You heard it here first.

The Unspoken Superpowers of the Average Player Character

Though Lazarus and the Time Machine sounds like a pairing straight from the Design-a-Tron, the next few Design-A-Days will be focused on two main metaphors: Time travel and resurrection.

And metaphors they are...most of the time. I'm not an academic, so you'll have to live with my conjecture and the occasional link to Wikipedia to back up the loose history that comes next.

The Continue

I think it is a safe bet to assume that the original notion of the Continue was a simple revenue calculation. A player is more likely to pay another quarter to continue playing a game they have already invested time in rather than starting over from scratch. My quick search of the interweb hints at this, though I have found no direct confirmation.

Further, he conjectured, certain limitations inherent to the original arcade machine architecture would have limited the options for allowing the player to continue a game. Due primarily to the small amounts of RAM, if any, available (he pulled out of his assumptions) you would have been limited to either restarting the player from the point of death (no RAM, simply continuing in-situ), or restarting the player at the beginning of a level (saving only the level-start score, all other state restored from ROM).

But how do we continue a game from the point the player died? They're dead, after all. Just drop their avatar back in the game, and let them go. Who's going to question?

What about starting them back at the beginning of the level? Won't that transition be jarring? Will they recognize that they have moved backwards in the game? It's not that different than the jump-cut discontinuities of French New Wave Cinema; players will adapt.

And it was from these completely plausible and humble beginings that the two most powerful and successful metaphors of video game history were born: Resurrection and Time Travel.

Traditional media; radio, magazines and other have a time honored tradition of periodically responding to viewer/reader mail.

Since this is a blog, you can just leave a message, and unless it involves casinos or \/|46R4, there's a pretty good chance that I'll get back to pretty quickly.

But there is another communication channel by which people reach out to this site for wisdom. So this week let's open up the search term log and respond to some of the actual searches that, sadly, turned up nothing on the Chrome Cow.

The names, and questions are made up to protect the innocent, the search terms are underlined.

Q. Dear Chromey, some of my friends and I were talking the other night about some of the deep philosophical questions, what is the sound of one hand clapping, that sort of thing. Then Travis dropped this bomb: what are the RGB values of Chrome? We went through almost two pans of brownies, and no one could come up with an answer. Then Steve asked if we'd ever really looked at our hands, I mean really looked...wow..the creases look just like little roads. Ok...gotta go man. Mind Blown in Madison

Dear Blown,

These questions are commonly called Zen Koans. They are designed to clear the mind of preconceived notions and habits of thinking. If a scoop of ice cream falls on the pavement and there is no one there to lick it, does it have a taste? That is an ice cream koan.

But to the heart of your question. What are the RGB values of chrome? Well, let's think about this. Chrome is a mirror-like surface. And asking what the RGB values for a mirror are is essentially asking what color is a mirror?

Try this thought experiment. You are in a room, painted completely red. You are dressed from head to foot in a red jumpsuit, wearing red shoes, socks and gloves. Your head is completely covered in a red ski mask. Now look in the mirror. What color is the mirror?

That's right. The mirror is reflecting its environment, and the mirror is red.

So there's your answer. The RGB value of a mirror, and by extension chrome, is 255/0/0.

Thanks for searching the Chrome Cow! See you next week!