disruption.ca

As usual, stupid fast game development has been on my mind, so I’m going to write some of my thoughts on the topic.

Most people are quite impressed when they see what can be done in a 48 hour game programming competition. I’ve heard programmers look at competition results as say “Wow, that would take me a month.” They are correct, it would take them a month. But that isn’t because they are bad programmers, it’s because they aren’t working in the competition environment.

To better understand where I’m coming from, read this blog post about 24 hour game development sprints.

this is 100% being in the zone, where each hour spent in one of these jams is worth perhaps 10 or more hours at work in your usual environment.

I think this is very true. The right environment can give you a massive productivity boost. Here is a off-the-top-of-my-head list of reasons why the ld48 makes for such a high level of productivity:

• Super tight deadline
• Procrastination is not an option.
• You can live off of pizza, avoid chores, and sacrifice sleep because you will return to normal life after 48 hours.
• You don’t have time to second guess your decisions.
• You don’t have time for perfectionism.
• You will see results quickly.
• It’s a competition
• Competitive pressure can spur you on.
• Working along side a group dedicated to similar goals is inspiring. (Together via IRC if not shoulder to shoulder)
• It’s yours and yours alone
• You don’t have to convince anyone that it’s a good idea
• You don’t have to communicate or coordinate with anyone.
• You only have yourself to blame if it sucks.
• You’ve committed a weekend to the project, so even if it gets tough, you might as well see it through.
• No one is paying you to do it. You do it because you want to, not because you have to.

Now if only I had a way to get this level of productivity in my day to day life.

I’ve written some basic documentation based on what I have learnt about game programming with Python. If that is your sort of thing, please check it out. Feedback is always appreciated.
Examples Of using PyGame and PyOpenGL for 2d game graphics

I really should fit the above documents into the blog page structure. Other things that are on the bloggy todo list:

• Create a page for datacam, my latest ld48 entry.
• Create a page for evilboxes. Which has a minor update: evilboxes-1.1-Win32.zip
• Replace the template. I like WordPress’s default template, but it would be nice to have something less common.
• Get a real server. There has been talk about colocating a real server for a while. I need to get off my but and make it happen.

In other news, I’m looking forward to being on vacation next week. 3.5 days in Toronto then 4.5 days in Montreal. Should be fun.

Also, I’m really looking forward to the PyWeek programming competition on the 26th. It’s about using Python to make a game in one week, with no restrictions on team size.

I’ve uploaded some pics from halloween. The Mario Bros costumes worked out surprisingly well, although they weren’t as popular as the previous year’s Jay and Silent Bob.

At the time of this writing, Jette also has some halloween pictures online. Her photos don’t tend to stick around though, so don’t blame me if the link is broken.

Edit: Here are my PAX photos.

I’ve had a few requests (ok, one) to write about PAX ‘05, and I have finally overcome procrastination to deliver.

Scott, Todd and I rented a blue PT Cruiser, left Edmonton at 6:30 Wednesday morning and made it to Bellevue at 8:00 that night. ~15 hours in the car was much less painful than expected. Scott and I even won a co-op game of Starcraft on the laptops during the drive.

Thursday was spent exploring Seattle. We hit the Sci. Fi. museum, which was pretty cool. They have a full size Alien queen and the powerloader suit from the Aliens movie, which alone makes the museum worth the visit in my mind. We also hit the Experience the Music Project, which was ok, but was much more museum and much less “Experience” than expected.

The expo opened Friday, and unfortunately started as an exercise in waiting in line. We got to spend some time on the consoles and PCs, but we had a lot less game time than I expected. The crowd of 7000+ people was too big for the space they had available. Saturday was better though. We brought Scott’s gameboys and his DS, which made the lines less painful. Also, the exhibition hall was open, where Nintendo was dominating the show. They had a playable demo of the new Zelda. Mariokart DS was playable, along with a pile of other DS games. But the most eye catching demo was Mario Strikers, a new soccer game. Other highlights from Saturday include Scott and Todd advancing to the second round in the Mario Kart tournament, and the three of us being interviewed by Attack Of the Show. They didn’t end up using our interviews on tv, but you can briefly see us on camera at the beginning of part 2 of their PAX coverage.

Saturday night we got into the theatre for the musical acts, which were surprisingly awesome. It started with the Karaoke Revolution Omegathon round. All of the Omeganaughts sucked, but Tycho and Kara showed the crowd how it was done by singing “My Immortal.” Even though they weren’t very good, you have to give the Omeganaughts credit for singing on stage in front of 2000 people. Seeing Karaoke Revolution in action made it seem like loads of fun, and was enough to sell me on the game. I might pick it up when it comes out on the Gamecube in November. Next we had Final Fantasy music on a concert piano, then MC Frontalot followed by MC Chris. Unfortunately the audio system wasn’t really working for the rappers, and you couldn’t hear their vocals while they were signing. But when MC Chris was talking between songs he was amazingly funny. He knows his geek material, and he worked the crowd perfectly. The night closed with the Minibosses, and they were excellent. Much to Todd’s delight they played Megaman 2 as their opening song.

Sunday was more of the same, with the highlight being the final round of the Omegathon. It was revealed as the best of three rounds of Combat for the Atari 2600. It was so epic I can’t even begin to describe it. I didn’t know that game could be so intense. I guess a crowd of 2000 people screaming with every point can have that effect.

When the convention ended we went to Fatburger for dinner where Scott and I took the triple king challenge. The idea is to see if you can eat a loaded triple king burger faster than the 13 minute 32 second time posted by a local radio celebrity. The burgers were huge, featuring 3 half-pound burger patties, cheese, bacon, egg, chilli, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, mustard, ketchup and relish. I finished mine in 9 minutes flat, and Scott ate his in 8:15. Pretty impressive for a man who was a vegetarian a few months before.

Here are some random PAX related links:

Loads of PAX photos on flickr:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pax05/

Attack Of the Show’s coverage:

• Part 1
• Part 2 (Watch for us on camera at the beginning.)

A million other blog postings about PAX:

• http://technorati.com/search/Penny+Arcade+Expo

Jay asked me to tell him my “dig a hole” story, and after writing it up, I decided that it could serve as blog filler. So here we go:

The year I was backpacking I spent some time living in Sydney, where I picked up casual work as a laborer on a construction site. About the third morning I’m working there, the boss comes up to me and tells me that I need to dig a hole, and he marks as spot on the ground with some spray paint. I find out how deep he wants it, and I ask him what I should do with all the dirt I dig up. He points to a bare spot nearby, and tells me to pile it there. I say, “Ok, no problem” and I spend a couple of hours digging a hole.

A little later that afternoon my boss comes up to me again and tells me to stop what I’m working on and come with him. We walk back over to my hole, which hasn’t changed since I dug it earlier, and stop. He says “I need you to get rid of that pile of dirt” and points to my pile. I mentally sigh, but say “Sure, no problem, where should I put this dirt?” He stops, thinks for a second, looks around us a little, and says “fill that hole.” Completely dead pan, and without any indication that he realized what he was asking.

It wasn’t even a make-work project to keep me busy. I was doing useful work until that point. Nothing had been done with the hole either. It was a completely wasted effort. I suppose it did have the benefit of amusing the eastern European contractors on the site who would mutter things about the “stupid don’t know anything boss” as they walked past me. I didn’t really mind doing the work though. I was getting paid by the hour for my efforts, which is better than I can say for some tech dirt moving that I have done for contracts in the past.

IGN has a trailer of the upcoming Doom movie. It’s pretty much what you would expect, but one thing caught my attention. The final sound effect is a very familiar roaring scream. The same sound effect occurs in Starcraft when you click on the terran academy.

Intrigued, I checked google for more information. I didn’t find much. Apparently this same sound is used in the game Dark Forces when a storm trooper gets knocked off a ledge. I have also read that this is the same sound that tie fighters make in the original Star Wars, and that an orc makes the sound when falling off a cliff in one of the Lord Of the Rings movies.

The frequency that this clip occurs makes me think it is some sort of Wilhelm scream, but it doesn’t match the Wilhelm samples I’ve heard online. Does anyone know anything about the story behind this sound?

If anyone wants to read more about this, I have found a couple of uninformative, but interesting discussions.
The first is in a discussion of the doom trailer. Search in page for scream. This page isn’t really safe for work.
The second is this thread in a slashdot story about the Wilhem scream. Again, not much real info.

Update: The story of the screen has been found, read the new post.

I decided a while back that I wanted some web space to dump things that I find interesting. After much procrastination I have registered a domain name, set up wordpress and entered some content. I don’t think my site will be very blog like, but it seems to be the format all the cool kids are using these days, so I went with it. It at least beats editing html by hand. I probably won’t be posting very often, but if you want to know when I do, grab the rss feed.

Please look around the site, and if you have an opinion on any of it, let me know.

One final note: I’m sorry if the site is slow. The server is tiny, so please don’t get me slashdotted.