This Gamecraft blog has now been around for a full year.

As of this posting, Gamecraft is a year old! It hardly seems that it has been that long. Of course, that could be the fact that I am not posting here every single day, or it could simply be that I have been so busy over this period that the time flew right by. My wife will probably contend that it is because I have no sense of time, which I always counter with the observation that this is true for all of the very best game programmers.

Reflecting back over these twelve months, a great deal has been happening here at Digital Gamecraftâ„¢ and SophSoft, Incorporated:

• We completed a new product, Most Popular Solitaire, for Goodsol Development.
• I testified before the Michigan Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to video game restrictions.
• We finished two significant upgrades to Pretty Good MahJongg, with another in development.
• I attended and reported on Future Play 2005, the first major game conference here in East Lansing.
• We finished a major update to Action Solitaire, and another upgrade is the works.
• I gave formal talks to Spartasoft and to the IGDA – Michigan South chapter.
• We added functionality to the card library for a new version of Pretty Good Solitaire.
• I attended SIC 2005, where Pretty Good Solitaire won a People’s Choice Award.
• We produced several game designs, including those for two titles currently in development.
• I helped launch the ASP Indie Game SIG within the Association of Shareware Professionals.
• We sponsored the Campfire under the Full Harvest Moon event at the Grand Rapids Schmooze.
• I went ice racing again and even led part of a lap before wrecking my car rather spectacularly.

For a partial list of blogged accomplishments over the course of a year, that is not too bad. The next year is shaping up to be even busier, but I am intending to post more often about this craft of game development. I certainly hope that it has been and continues to be a worthwhile read for the hundreds of people who check here regularly. Maybe by this time next year, that will be “thousands”.

Thanks for reading.

The same great content with a new look.

This week, Thomas Warfield‘s blog, A Shareware Life, moved fully to a new blog site, TypePad. Along with the move to a new service, A Shareware Life has a new look and, apparently, a reinvigorated author. I know that he has been planning this for a while, and there have been multiple posts daily since the changeover started.

A Shareware Life is the blog that I check most frequently, and that would be the case even if my company, SophSoft, Incorporated, were not working closely with his, Goodsol Development. I am not just saying that because he made Gamecraft his first new Link of the Day… honestly.

For a blog that I will not be checking often, see Solitaire Trader, which Tom launched earlier this month. That site just makes my head spin. Maybe someday when I have both time and money to spare…

Here is one final look at the conference.

Today, Gamasutra published a feature article on the Future Play 2005 game conference. The article, Event Wrap Up: 2005 Future Play Conference, was written by Scott Brodie, a student game developer here at Michigan State University.

As mentioned in a previous Gamecraft entry, Game Competition Results, Scott is President of Spartasoft, the game development group at Michigan State University, and one of several members working on a game, Ballistic, for the Independent Games Festival. (Since the submission deadline was yesterday, I trust that they got their entry in.)

A federal court issued an injunction against enforcement of the new law.

Last week, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan granted a request by the Entertainment Software Association and issued a temporary injunction preventing implementation of the Michigan legislation signed into law in September. The law was scheduled to take effect on December 1st, right at the peak season for retail game sales, so this ruling grants retailers a reprieve.

In his ruling, Judge George Caman Steeh found that “it is unlikely that the State can demonstrate a compelling interest in preventing a perceived ‘harm’.” He also wrote that “the Act will likely have a chilling effect on adults’ expression, as well as expression that is fully protected as to minors.” According to the ESA, Judge Steeh stated that brain imaging and social science research presented were unpersuasive and insufficient to sustain the argument that violent video games cause aggressive behavior.

In my (unscholarly) understanding of First Amendment interpretation, a state would have to prove three legal ‘pillars’ to regulate free expression: that it has a compelling interest in restricting expression, that the expression to be regulated leads directly to injurious behavior, and that the law is tailored as narrowly as possible to only prevent the particular expression. As I read quotes from the injunction, it seems that the Judge is indicating that the State of Michigan failed to prove two points and will probably fail the last as well.

I particularly liked this paragraph from the official Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association response: “We remain supportive of the industry’s self-regulatory efforts and our members are committed to partnering with and empowering parents. It is unfortunate that valuable time has been wasted with political opportunism rather than working proactively with the industry to educate consumers. Perhaps with this knowledge and foreshadowing, we will cease squandering resources and focus our collective efforts on working together.”

For those keeping score at home, anti-game legislation in the United States is currently 0-3 (losses in Indianapolis, St. Louis, and the State of Washington) and behind on points in the current match. Unfortunately, following passage of such laws in Illinois and California, as well as here in Michigan, several opportunistic politicians in other states are jumping on the bandwagon, so even more resources are being squandered pointlessly. Having seen the politics on this issue up close, I am sickened by the pretentious posturing by legislators who could not care less which side of the issue they are on, as long as they think that it will gain them votes.

Here is my completely unrelated quote of the day, courtesy of Colin McRae, 1995 World Rally Champion, on his performance in Rally Australia this past weekend: “First stage was a bit slow; I reckon a school bus would have driven through there with more commitment than I did.” Made me laugh.

It was a great day for our local community.

Today, the East Lansing High School Boys Varsity Soccer Team won the Michigan State Soccer Championship (Division 2) by a score of 1-0, with the winning goal scored with 16 minutes remaining in the game. This is the school’s third state soccer championship, and first since 2002.

What makes this victory particularly meaningful to me is that it is the first state championship won by a team with players that I coached several years ago. At the time, it was clear that I had some very special players and I predicted this very outcome. Alas, my older son decided not to play soccer in high school, but I am pleased to see that a few of his former teammates continued and have had success. Next year will be their senior year, so hopefully I will get to post this again in about 12 months.

Congratulations! I am proud of you guys.

I am trying to recover from a rather severe cold.

Over the past week, I have been suffering from a cold. I usually just ride them out, and one of the advantages of working from home is the ability to care for myself and still be able to make progress on important projects, albeit at a slight disadvantage to productivity.

Once or twice a year, though, I get sick enough to actually take medicine to (supposedly) help. Ironically, perhaps, every time I decide that I need to relieve the cold symptoms, the next day or two are just miserable. There is no good, scientific way to determine whether I am resorting to drugs just as the worst part of the illness hits, or if the decongestants are causing me more harm than good. [Insert preferred pharmaceutical industry rant here.]

The one thing that most of my really bad colds seem to have in common is that they tend to correspond with beautiful weather. After a long Michigan winter, the cold will hit hard on the first day with bright sunshine, or, as in this instance, it arrives on the last lovely day before the big cold front is forecast to drop temperatures below freezing.

Sorry, no major revelations about game development or design herein, but one needs to complain every so often to dissipate a foul mood.

I have been programming computer games for more than a quarter century.

After reading the diversity report from the IGDA, which concludes, among other things, that the average tenure in the game industry is only 5.4 years, I started to think back to my very first programming experience all those years ago. I dug out an old posting where I recalled the day that my career started. Forgive me while I reminisce…

On Friday, December 22, 1978, I met up with a friend, Harold Stewart, while visiting my father in East Lansing during Winter break. It had been only half year since I had moved to Houston, but there were changes in town. Harold took me to a new place called New Dimensions in Computing. There he introduced me to a friend of his, Rob Raisch.

The big selling point of the visit was “video games“, so Rob sat me down at an Exidy Sorceror where a game of Wizard’s Castle was in progress. In retrospect, given that I was already an expert in the (then very limited) area of video games, with a growing interest in Dungeons & Dragons, a text-based RPG in BASIC was probably the best possible introduction.

I was hooked by the concept of being able to play whenever I wanted, at a deliberate pace, without having to feed in quarters. The interaction was novel, and I could even play different games on the same machine!

Then it happened…

In the game, I walked “N” into a room with an angry monster. Without a chance to do anything but panic, it attacked, hit, and “You are dead.” Bummer. Rob heard my sigh and told me to hit the [Control] and [C] keys at the same time, and I followed his instructions. I thought I broke something, which I discovered I had.

“Type ‘LET H=100’. Good. Now hit [Enter]. OK. Type ‘CONTINUE’ and hit [Enter].”

I did as instructed and, lo and behold, my character was back to life. Not only back to life, but powerful. That is the way I felt, too. Not only could I play different games on one machine, at my leisure, but I was in control. My character could be immortal; I felt omnipotent.

Anyway, after some discussion, and more than a little coaxing from Rob, I decided to relinquish the current game. (Remember, the idea that one would actually quit a game in progress was new to me, being contrary to the idea of arcade video games.) He wanted to show me something even cooler, but not a game.

In the course of a few minutes, I learned about “NEW” and “RUN”, line numbers, variables, “FOR” loops, and the “GOTO” command. I was able to use earlier knowledge to get out of that early BASIC program everybody writes consisting of an infinite loop of “PRINT” with ones own name.

The seed was planted, and I realized that things were going to change. I returned the next day, met a college student who was trying to figure out why his program to distinguish among prime, abundant, deficient, and perfect numbers was not producing the correct results. Honestly, I just wanted him to finish so I could try this programming thing again.

After the student spent a few minutes explaining the concepts of perfect, abundant, and deficient numbers (primes I already knew), I looked through the program listing on the screen with him and spotted the error. Debugging on my second day, and helping a college student (while still only in 7th grade myself )… I was definitely hooked.

I had no real agenda when I returned to NDIC that Saturday afternoon other than to get my hands on the machine again. After helping to fix the number theory program, we started to make more changes, working together to try to discover patterns in the relationships of abundant numbers to primes, just because we could.

Alas, it took me three and a half years, and the proceeds from my first professional programming job, before I actually got a personal computer of my own, but I spent the intervening years begging and borrowing access whenever and wherever I could. When that failed, I actually wrote game programs, twenty or thirty pages long, in pencil on lined paper, to be typed in when I next got computer access. (I still have a few. )

Now, all these years later, I am still programming computer games. Most importantly, though, I still really enjoy what I do.

Traditional board games will always have one advantage over computer versions.

I noticed an interesting news bit on Gamasutra this week. According to the story (third item), the publishers of Fritz 9, one of the stronger publicly available chess programs, has licensed a physics engine. Looking at the description on the main (European) ChessBase site, the program does indeed offer “physics on the board; pieces fall realistically”. Not only that, but this chess game also provides “3d stereo-surround sound in all boards”.

Computer versions of chess have been readily available basically since the advent of the personal computer, and they definitely have some advantages over OTB (Over The Board) play. Obviously, there is always somebody to play, and one can select the strength of the opponent, so it is easier to practice and gain experience. Better for me, nobody ridicules me when I lose (save Chess Maniac 5 Billion and One). More recent improvements include tutorials to help one learn the game and network play to provide human opponents and some of the social aspects of board games.

Nevertheless, what computer board games cannot do is provide the physical experience. There are tactile elements to playing a real board game, such as the heft of the pieces and kinetic sense of movement, as well as the sounds of placing a piece, transmitted not only through the air, but through ones body. I will be interested to see how Fritz 9 makes use of real physics (for resignation, I presume) and surround sound, but it is no substitute for the real thing, and likely adds very little to the cognitive aspects of the game. It probably will not be harmful, either, unless the required computer specifications are increased just for this gratuitous technology.

When you next have a chance, play a physical board game and experience the simple pleasure of that activity once again. No technology required.

The results of a survey on diversity in the game industry have been released.

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has published a report entitled, “Game Developer Demographics: An Exploration of Workforce Diversity“, which analyzes a survey taken by 6437 self-described game developers. After filtering out those not in the industry and those from countries where English is not the primary language, the final sample size was 3128 surveys. The IGDA has made the report available on their Game Developer Demographics Report web page.

Here are a few interesting statistics:

USA represented 66% of the studied results, followed by Canada (18%), UK (12%), and Australia (4%).

Third-party developers are 43% of the industry, and when combined with freelancing (13%) and contracting/outsourcing (5%) make up a 61% majority of developers.

Programmers made up the largest single category of respondents (28.5%). After that, there was a statistical dead heat between design (16.1%) and visual arts (15.9%). I suspect that the number of designers is inflated in this survey.

The typical game developer is, unsurprisingly, a heterosexual white male in his early 30s with a college education and no disabilities. Each of the first three characteristics are overwhelmingly common in the industry: male (88.5%), white (83.3%), heterosexual (92.0%).

Only 0.96% of respondents identified themselves as transgender. This refutes the suggestion by a developer friend of mine that the game industry had an unusually high number of transgender individuals.

The average length of time in the game industry is only 5.4 years. Having worked on my first published retail game in 1988 (not counting earlier failures), I have been doing this more than 3 times as long as the average. The report concludes that “the industry’s wizened ‘graybeards’ are few in number.”

Of the 13% of disabled developers, 61% had either a mental (31%) or cognitive (30%) disability. Relatively few reported a physical disability with sight (9%), hearing (6%), or mobility (4%).

There is also a separate report with anonymous comments (identified generically by gender, age, disability, education, and location) supplied with survey responses. A quick scan of the early comments showed some hostility or trepidation at the concept of a diversity study conducted by the IGDA.

My personal opinion is that it is important to know our industry, and also to know our market. With such an overwhelming lack of diversity in the industry, it follows that a majority of games cater to a similar audience. In particular, if only 11.5% of game developers are female, and the average age is 31 years, large portions of the market tend to be given short shrift. With only 2.0% of the game industry being black, it is unfortunately easy to see why we were unable to place Black Thunder, a game based on an African-American superhero. (Instead, we get stereotyped crap like Superfly Johnson from Daikatana.)

How does the game industry, which cannot collectively think beyond licensed titles and sequels, expect to address this issue of diversity? I suspect the answer will again come from independent game developers, and not from the entrenched publishers. Of course, as soon as new markets are developed, the big business types will come sniffing around…

Future Play has posted the results of their game exhibition and competition.

As I had hoped, the Future Play web site now contains a news item with the results of the Future Play Game Exhibition and Competition. (Here is a direct link.) The award winners were all deserving, and I want to hand out a few unofficial honorable mentions:

SUDS, by JJ Chandler and Ethan Watrall, was a nicely polished game for a handheld device that made use of the stylus. There was not a “future” category in which it fit well, but it is an excellent example of simple and elegant game design. Putting myself in the position of somebody who had never really used a PocketPC before (which took no imagination), it served to get me used to the stylus in the same way that Solitaire and Reversi were included in Windows 3.0 to help users get comfortable with using a mouse.

Guardians of Kelthas, by Steve Cornett and a whole host of other developers at Indiana University and around the world, was a visually appealing implementation of an original card game, similar to Magic: The Gathering. Despite the familiar physical gameplay mechanic, this game makes use of the platform to extend rules into the virtual realm, where cards can change dynamically. The ability to actually complete a student game with more than 30 contributors is worth a mention all by itself. There is more information about the game at the Guardians of Kelthas web site.

Ballistic, by Scott Brodie and several other members of the Spartasoft group at Michigan State University, shows original gameplay based around a physics engine to create a unique game experience. Imagine Marble Madness in a constrained area, where one controls the world instead and lets gravity move the ball(s). Several of the games at Future Play will participate in the Independent Games Festival, and this one is expected to be part of the 2006 Student Showcase.

Congratulations to all the participants.