Art
Games Design Doc Sites.
This is Surgery Games Design Document Blogging:
Have been looking at different Games Design Document Sites. Has anyone got one they know that they’d recommend.
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19970912/design_doc.htm
http://www.pagtech.com/
http://www.obscure.co.uk/articles-2/preparing-a-game-demo/
Liberatis – an early alpha version of an MMO produced by a group of Young People
Onteca is proud to announce the unveiling of a playable Alpha of our Mediabox Project, ‘Liberatis’ (a name thought of by a young person working on the project). This is an MMO created by young people, for young people. It involves some violence, within a Tolkienesque ‘fantasy’ setting, because that is what the young people called for. It is still at an early test stage, but is playable.
Given the theme ‘Freedom’ this is what a group of 14-19 year olds came up with
A screenshot from liberatis
Over 50 young people worked for four months to make this game. First the young people planned out an overall story, a premise, a series of characters and detailed paper-based maps and Level Design Documents for each section . Next they had to painstakingly learn the skills they would need: Maya to create the 3D assets; Photoshop to create the mood-boards and textures; the Torque level editor to create landscapes full of trees, mountains, valleys and towns in which the game could be played. Onteca provided support and training at every step.
Onteca then worked on integrating all these elements into a playable game, to the design of the young people and under the direction of their representatives.
Some of the most academically inclined young people on Merseyside worked alongside young people from a local Special School who had learning disabilities. Everyone addressed themselves to the same tasks and were expected to prodice the same results. Sometimes the young people would work alongside each other, sometimes they would split into school and project based groups. Standards were high across the range of schools, with genuine talent and IT ability coming from all groups involved.
Areas worked in were amonst the most economically disadvantaged in the country. That said, the young people who involved themselves in this project were eager, polite and creative. Hopefully, they will learn from being part of the making of Liberatis, and consider a career in the North West’s still healthy Games Industry.
Thanks to all the young people involved, and Onteca hopes you like the game you helped create.
An alpha version of the game is available to download here to install it, just download and run.
if you get an error message mentioning python when running the game on certain versions of vista you will need to run the game as an administrator
Of noobs and leets and crossing over…
Alison’s Blog.
Being the noob amongst the leet at Onteca has its pros(everyone assumes you know nothing about their stuff)and its cons (normally because you erm don’t).Working with Onteca this year, attending Crossover Kids and working on an MMO created by young people, has been great. Challenging what I know as a writer and pushing me to think about what I need to. This blog is about ‘Crossover.’
So, ‘Crossover’ is:
‘…an extraordinary series of ‘innovation labs’ for creative professionals from a diverse range of backgrounds: game developers, tv and film producers, web designers, animators, theatre practitioners and others. Each Crossover lab is an immersive, five day incubator fostering new collaborations and original ideas for cross platform media content and services.’
Jon and Max put me forward for: Crossover Kids (Dec 1 – 5).‘Crossover Kids’ said it would:
explore the future of children’s media and develop original ideas for cross-platform projects. Based on the knowledge that:
‘Children have always loved TV, but the days when passive viewing was their only option are well and truly over. They’re media literate and demanding more sophisticated, interactive content which is fragmenting the market. So what does this mean for content creators? A decline in traditional TV commissioning and falling budgets? Or a framework for innovation and collaboration?’
I wasn’t sure on the idea of being incubated with a load of content creators. But, on the promise of a paid trip down south,(Thank you North West Vision and Media) a hotel spa and a country walk, I bought myself a nice new networking cardigan, packed my bestest walking boots and swimming cossie and set off to deepest, smartest Sussex to find:
non-stop work and no time for a sauna, or even a stroll around the grounds. But it was jolly good work, planning, pitching and thinking a lot about how multi platforms can be used with a young audience. I spent time thinking about how creative ideas can be best delivered to an audience of children who probably don’t even think about the word ‘virtual’ because to them it just is.
‘Crossover Kids’ comes highly recommended. Over the five days I worked on ideas involving Bluetooth mapping, MMO worlds and erm robot alien ponies. Obviously it was the alien ponies idea that I chose to develop. (See Recon Ponies Blog to follow.) It was constantly relentless, equally rewarding and hugely funny. Mentors were excellent and networking opportunities allowed for me to make some good contacts with lovely folk, specifically:
Childs Eye
Mustard Corporation
Unexpected Media
Red Bedlam
Tuna Technologies
Grierson Awards
Wak Studio
Poddington Peas
Milky Tea
and Capsule films
Friendship and creative seeds were planted in December and as we turn into spring I’m pleased to say they are growing.
Following the Crossover week, I also attended the first Crossover Kids pitching event, which was held at the Princess Anne Theatre, BAFTA, London on Thursday 11 December. We saw a couple of new CBeebies ideas including a great news programme aimed at 4 year olds ‘What’s your news?’ I pitched along -side virtual world creator Kerry Fraser Robinson(Red Bedlam), producer Emma Hindley (Grierson Awards) and animator Sara Quick (Tuna Technology) our multi platform animated cartoon/ website/robot: ‘Recon Ponies’. We’re still looking at developing this idea. Interest and funding most welcome. We thinks it’s got legs (and a nosebag.)
Crossover enabled me to extend the thinking that I had already been doing on my work with Onteca, specifically working story narrative in MMO and developing cross platform ideas. I am still very much a noob but with leet aspirations.
Sublime Drone Installation / NYC
La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela
Guggenheim Museum, NYC
Annex Gallery 4
Friday, January 30 – Sunday, April 19, 2009
This new site-specific Dream House installation is a rare counterpart to the 16-year ongoing Dream House installation at 275 Church Street.Young and Zazeela characterize the Sound and Light Environment as “a time installation measured by a setting of continuous frequencies in sound and light.”
In the concurrent sound environment, La Monte Young presents The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered above and below The Lowest Term Primes in The Range 288 to 224 with The Addition of 279 and 261 in Which The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped above and Including 288 Consists of The Powers of 2 Multiplied by The Primes within The Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in The Half of The Symmetric Division Mapped below and Including 224 within The Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with The Addition of 119, a periodic composite sound waveform environment created from sine wave components generated digitally in real time on a custom-designed Rayna interval synthesizer. As this is a setting of the same sound environment presented at the MELA Church Street Dream House, the two Dream Houses running in simultaneity represent a perfect unison in New York City for the first time.
The New York Times wrote: “…As for Mr. Young, he and his ‘Dream House,’ with a 24/7 drone and trippy lighting by Marian Zazeela, have long since become underground institutions. First installed as a permanent environment in his Manhattan home in 1962, then used for performances with his teacher, the Hindustani raga vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, and now reconstituted at the Guggenheim, “Dream House” forms a natural bridge to the conceptual and performance art”.
For more information regarding the Church Street installation, the Guggenheim installation, or the upcoming concerts, please email mail@melafoundation.org.
Multimedia C++ Framework
Very interesting course at the Fact Centre, Liverpool into a new multimedia C++ framework which of course i only found out about once if was over. The examples of work look amazing and the aspiration is one we agree with the ease of Flash with the performance of C++. Not released yet but will be LGPL – Open Frameworks
Performance in MMO Engines
Generally i can’t find any information about the way in which World of Warcraft is put together, but through some lightweight spying, looking at their jobs page you can see that the whole thing is coded in C++ which must have been a hell of an engineering effort, hence their enormous budget for production. Obviously C++ is the fastest possible code for raw speed but i don’t fancy we have the budget to go that way.
We are currently using the Tmmokit which will max out at around 200 players per server. I am keen to move forward incrementally and come upon an interesting article about Eve online (which claims players in the thousands on individual shards). Eve uses Stackless Python.
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