Off to the USA

I'm heading over to the good old US of A this Wednesday. I'll be there for a week, which means I'll miss out on seeing Spiderman3 in Australia with friends... but hopefully I can hook up with some of my LA pals and catch a session with them.

And what's a plane trip without a load of handheld games to play? I'm still playing Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters on PSP, so I'll give that a good bash on my trip. I'll also be picking up some DS games while I'm over there - notably Pokemon Diamond and Puzzle Quest. That should keep me busy on my flight back.

Scumm 20th Anniversary

IGN has an interview with Ron Gilbert about his days at Lucasfiilm Games and his work on the SCUMM adventure game engine. It's hard to believe that it's 20 years since the first point and click graphic adventure game was created.

Monkey Island was a huge inspiration for my Flight of the Amazon Queen graphic adventure game. I was a huge comic fan and had been making arcade style games prior to seeing Monkey Island, but when a friend showed me the game a light bulb went off in my head. This was a game that was like a comic book!

Prior to that I had written some text adventures (a genre I also love) but these were more akin to interactive novels. Graphic adventures were just way cooler! What's really exciting is the work now being down by Telltale Games, and the talk of moving their games over to the Wii. I think the Wii is the perfect platform for adventures and can't wait to play Sam and Max on my wide screen TV.

So, congratulations to Ron on the 20th Anniversary!

By the way, if you're interested, you can download the ScummVM version of Flight of the Amazon Queen from my website here. It's freeware! (Just scroll down to the Free downloads! section).

Brainiversity Sneak Peek 3

I've set up an online survey for the beta testers to fill out using Survey Monkey. It's a great way to track what people think of the game. I'm finding out what activities people like best, what their intent to buy is as well as what features they'd like to see in future versions. I'll definitely use Survey Monkey for the final release of the game.

Well, we've entered the home stretch now. It's just a matter of testing, testing and more testing. In the meantime, here's a screen shot from the "Visual Memory" activity from Brainiversity:

Color Blindness and Games

I've just made a change to Brainiversity to take into account people with color blindness.

Deuteranopia, or Red/Green color blindness, is the most common form and affects about 8% of Caucasian males and 0.5% of Caucasian females.

So I've adjusted each of the tests that require the player to look for particular colored items or words to not use both green and blue at the same time. The change was simple but it was something that I hadn't really considered until I remembered reading a Gamasutra article a few years ago on Improving Game Accessibility.

It really does pay to read journals about game development!

Inspiration and the other 99%

I love games. Video games, word games, board games and puzzles.
And I love creating games. And one of the challenges in creating games is coming up with new and interesting ideas.

As game developers a lot of us seem to draw our inspiration from two places: 1) other games, and 2) TV shows and movies.

Within those two wells of inspiration we tend to focus on specific areas. If we draw inspiration from TV and movies, its invariably genre shows focusing on sci-fi, fantasy, action or horror. And if we draw from games, we generally look at the top selling blockbusters. Now there are so many other sources of inspiration that range from books, toys, real life stories, sports, and natural phenomena to academia, but within the areas of games, TV and movies there is still a lot of untapped potential that developers can draw from.

Looking at the Top 20 grossing films in the US last year we see a wide range of topics that include pirates, penguins, race cars, period musicals and political parodies. If you dip below the top 20 you get an even more diverse range of films. Of course not every idea would make a great game. But then prior to Diner Dash, the smash hit casual game, most people probably would have thought basing a game around a sassy restaurant owner to be sales suicide.

And if you look within the world of games for inspiration you'll find the top 20 to be fairly predictable with themes of war, sport, music, crime, fantasy and sci-fi action. But like film, go outside the top 20 and you'll find some cool stuff. If the casual game market was included in the NPD data you might even find Diner Dash somewhere close by.

What I love about this great medium of games is that there is so much potential to be had if we stray only a little bit from our usual source of inspiration. It feels like we've only tapped 1% of our potential - and that 1% has been pretty good so far - so imagine what's waiting for us with the other 99%.

That excites me!