ben is on the inter.net

Man, the 360 has been pretty astonishing over the past month.

I beat Bioshock, I’m about 30% into Blue Dragon, haven’t even popped in Eternal Sonata, and I’ve only finished a couple levels between Halo 3 and Stranglehold.

This month, the one with my birthday in it, will now be known as BIHALUE DRAGTERNANGLEHOLD.

At Toys-R-Us. It sucks because Juls had his DS stolen.

It’s just stupid Manaphy but it will have special trainers and I gue-

Wish I was playing Halo.

I’ll probably regret this later! You see, I managed to get really hyped up for Halo 2 (thanks to the Haunted Apiary) only to be let down really hard when the game finally came out. I mean, I know that’s what expectations do to experiences, but it was still really disheartening, like something I thought to be impossible.

Well, it’s happening again. Partly because of the museum ad (and it’s delicious parody), but mostly because of this:

(there’s a wonderful HD version of this over at gamersyde)

Anyway, I really, really like the concept of a war memorial for the last moments of this game. I think it’s a really clever campaign even though the interviews are a little strained.

I’ve even gone back and started Halo 2 over on Legendary to see whether or not I truly did dislike the experience. And… well… I sort of do but I also sort of don’t. It used to bother me how hollow the world felt in Halo, but now I like to think of the Master Chief as some sort of Crackdown character. I mean, he can jump like 30 feet in the air and absorb bullets! Plus, there’s David Cross!

It doesn’t help that Halo 3 is adding in replay saving stuff and some sort of crazy map editing mode where one player is the Hand of God. Maybe, if people I know play it, I’ll be able to enjoy it? I played one round of Halo 2 online ever and I was disgusted at just how much bigotry can be crammed into a 15 minute game. I can’t wait to have kids!

So, Tuesday’s my birthday, and my copy of Halo 3 is already paid for, and for some stupid reason I’m really, really excited to play it. That’s it, really. Expect a post in a couple days where I totally hate on the game.

I played the demo a bunch but have not yet spent enough time on the retail version. Still, the video posting feature is really, really excellent. I made a video of my wild and/or crazy fat shirtless moobman.

I’ve changed hosts for the site here, so if you’re using some sort of feed aggregator to read this, you’ll want to update your links to those on the main site, because in a couple days I’ll be destroying everything on the old host.

Also, and this is for you, Mark, I’m no longer using cheesy domain masking and outgoing links will work correctly now.

In early June, video game artist John Taylor and software engineer Ben Burbank amused themselves during the busy bug-fixing period by filling the open center of a round conference table with plastic balls — sort of like the ball pits at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Without the jokes, employees say working at EA would be like working at an insurance company — maybe like the one that shares an office park with Tiburon.

“They hate us because we have fun and they don’t and their bosses would never put up with the kind of crap we do,” Taylor said. “They are all grownups. They are weak. We are cool. They’re not.”

-Orlando Sentinel.

UPDATE: Now the story’s on Next Generation and Kotaku.

Today marks the end of my fourth week of development in this 100x Challenge. I’ve accomplished more than I did for my senior thesis in college. What a slacker I was, am I right? Well, I’ve learned some lessons since then, sure, and I’m certainly spending less time worrying about the lower-level code thanks to the XNA framework, but that’s not the whole story. I’m still writing shaders and dealing with hardware issues and having to figure out some really complicated stuff. So… why is this process more successful?

An Hour a Day

When I was in school, I programmed for my thesis about 6 hours a day for 18 weeks on top of my regular school and work hours. I wore myself out. I didn’t have time to plan or read articles or do a good job or be awake at work.

Now, I’m averaging a little more than an hour a day, but honestly it’s hard to pull myself away from the game now that I’m seeing real tangible progress every day. Only twice have I had to work longer due to some technology or design flaw leading to frustration. I feel that the game itself is on track for a demo in another 3 weeks (which was my original goal), and that, while a lot of the game code is prototype-y, it’s significantly better thought out than most things I’ve worked on.

I attribute most of this to the pacing! Since I know that I’ll spend an hour a day on this, I’m having to really evaluate the tasks and think them through in my head before implementing them. I’m getting better at estimation as a result, but I’m also getting better at trying to evaluate when and where features need to happen to make the game better every day. The decisions were easy at first… “Hey, draw a sprite;” “Hey, collide with a polygon.” But it has definitely gotten harder and I’ve had to keep a broad picture in mind. My process right now has the feeling of an extremely well planned rapid prototype. It’s not really coming to fruition as fast as a true rapid prototype, at least, not in terms of days. But after less than 1 work week of total development time, I’ve developed the basis for a 3D game engine in which I will be able to do many, many things. I’m calling this process “Super Slow Rapid Development.” Many spare-time developers have worked with similar processes for years; I’m positive I’m not the first. I think that posting a screenshot and/or video each day, however, is really investing me in this game, and by the end it won’t be hard for me to be proud of it.

Investing in Rapid Development

Agile methods are really gaining ground in the industry today. All over the world people are throwing away long, complicated schedules in favor of smaller, bite-sized morsels. As a result, many people are looking more and more at fast prototyping methods. Typically, during some formal Design phase for a project, people will get together and prototype the features they think will be tricky, as fast as possible, and work through some of the issues they’ll see coming. Most of this prototyping time can’t really be considered research and development as much as it’s just a technical feasibility study. Also, I’d be willing to bet that many people will attest that the prototype never gave them a real accurate model for the final project, and in the end, while they felt the prototype was useful, it isn’t something they’re proud of having built.

Google, however, has a slightly different take on this. They block off amounts of time, I’m told, for all developers where they are intended to develop or research their pet projects. Many of their public projects started as tools developers were working on with no formal direction or goals. Hey, guess what! Software Developers are smart people! Many of them actually have really good ideas for significant inventions! Many of them won’t ever have the chance to explore this because they feel priorities at their job outweigh personal priorities!

Game companies could easily miss the point here. It’s hard to justify investing 15% of your software developers’ time on intangible rewards. When Demo X has to be done for A Giant Project, it’s impossible for people to support the grass roots. But crunch time is one of the important times to continue investing time in research and development tasks!

In the last three to four years, we’ve seen a shift in What Game Players Want. The Wii and the DS, both technically inferior to their competitors’ products, have succeeded many times over by valuing accessibility and playability over graphics and cinematic experiences. This is causing many companies to distance what Microsoft calls the “Core gamers,” while significantly growing the market among non-gamers.

However, in doing this the game development world has been presented with the option of driving costs down while increasing profits. Many studios are focusing heavily on faster to develop small games, and while I feel this will have significant short-term gains I also see this causing long-term issues for these companies. Based on reviews, it’s pretty clear that the gaming industry wants a Bioshock or other massive, cinematic game from time to time as much as they want Brain Age 2s to pass the time in between. Too much of either side bores the audience.

The problem with the larger games is development cost, pretty clearly. They cost significant amounts of time and effort to implement. Developers will spend a year or more working on features that might not get finished, or they might spend time on features that seem insignificant compared to the whole. “I worked on the trigger scripts!” seems pretty small when compared to the amount of work one person can do on a smaller game.

The Point

You can make a Brain Age 2 with very few hours of actual programming.

Game companies need to devote Software Development time to R&D. Software Developers, especially in games, want to see tangible results that they’re proud of, and they will most likely become more energized given the chance to explore technology or gameplay elements that they find interesting or important. This Super Slow Rapid Development way of doing things is just one of the ways in which this can be done. I personally like seeing my progress tracked by tangible visuals, but others might want to track their progress through some other means.

And remember, it’s not just a Brain Age 2 that the game company will get out of it. They’ll get smarter, happier employees, and a plethora of ideas. Though the rewards seem initially intangible, it is not in any way hard to imagine the massive gains.

My pal Juls was robbed tonight. He’d just moved his bed into his new place last night… They took his computers (i.e. his art tools) and his camera and some other stuff and this sucks really bad.