SkyeFish Sushi Bar table at Nothern Anime Festival

While at the Northern Anime I met the creators of the plush sushi. Tabby Lulham and Jo Daly. They do some great work, don’t you think?

While thinking about what I’d like to do next month, I stumbled across the Northern Anime Festival this weekend in Oshawa, ON, Canada.  It so happens that that is quite close to my house, so I thought I’d give it a visit.  And I’m glad I did.  Amongst the gaming (I played Settlers of Catan for the first time in years), the seminars (I learned some great tips on how to fabricate anime weapons as toys), and the many costumed guests I came across a unique item from the vendors tables: stuffed sushi.  How amazing is that.

 It comes in various different formats, and all have cute expressions on them.  Maki are my favorite I have to say, but sushi is always good when eaten, and looks great as a pillow.  It is made by SkyeFish Sushi Bar.  A great find.

well, I found it strange to play the whole game without talking to anyone, so I’ve added trainers to each training station and got Daniel Chan to write up some dialog for them to guide you through the training to the final battle.

Version 0.61:
- added trainers who guide you through the whole Mage Master experience.
- fixed underpowered spells from increasing your opponent’s health.  It now says
 attack was ineffective.
- moved game save to START so that those O saving loops go away
- use O to exit from battle preparation screens.
- all new mage upgrades now happen at green or white training centres
- rearranged the order of the training centres to have a more natural flow around the road, and switched the game save format.  The order is now: white, yellow, red, blue, black (tournament) and green.  Please consider restarting your game, I load, but don’t gurantee the integrety of your old games.

Download battlearena061.zip (10 MB)

Well it’s out publically finally.  Here is the release video:

Download Battle Arena version 0.51 for PSP (10MB)

Well, it is coming along well.  I still have lots of work to do on the cut scene player, but the game play is starting to feel pretty solid. I think that the title screen is looking great.

Well, I’ve decided that Battle Arena would have more rewarding game play if there were cut scenes, so I’ve got wicked.fable to start working on them.  My son wants Lego guys, so I found a brick md2. Here is a preview of some of the potential characters, plus a preview version of the throne room:

So hopefully the cut scenes will make the game better. I am working on a simplified script language to describe what happens in the cut scene.

Language for describing a cut scene:
- explicit timing
for milliseconds
- declaration
actor name md2file skin
set objfile
prop name asefile x y z roty
particle name duration spawnrate spawnduration radius scaleamount (directionx,y,z) shape (windx,y,z) directionvariance startcolor endcolor
terrain name elevimage colorimage
- camera action
camera close-up-on|medium-shot-on|long-shot-on name
camera look-at from=x,y,z to=x,y,z
camera pan-to from=x,y,z to=x,y,z
- actor action
appearat name x,y,z
walkto name x,y,z
doaction name action
- misc action
show name
hide name
delete name
dialog iconfile “text”
particle-effect name x,y,z

I have the particle effects working pretty well for Battle Arena now.  I’ve cleaned up the fighting code enough that a duel seems to resolve correctly.  So the next step is to work on a map mode so that you can level up your pantheon of mages.

Hi,

Finally I have an update to share with you.  I’ve been working on collision for Adam Street, and it’s coming along nicely, but it still isn’t running fast enough for my needs.  So while I optimize that, I have been working on a few different projects.  One of the most promising is currently titled HardHat’s Battle Arena.

 In this game you will be able to pit your skills against other (AI) players.  Although if my son wants to play against me at some point, I may consider a two player mode.   And you just battle to defeat the other player.  It is based on MD2 characters, and so far it seems pretty promising.  Here are some screenshots of some of my tests.  It’s pretty plain so far, but I’ll be adding a particle engine and some more details to the terrain (maybe a tree and a fence).  The frame rate at this point is in the 100 to 120 (imaginary) fps, so I have enough to do some nice particle effects without too much slowdown I think.

I attended the industry insider presentation by President and CEO of Activision, Mike Griffith. He talked about a number of things, but mostly he focused his talk on the phenomenon call Guitar Hero. I know Guitar Hero well, having made a PSP homebrew game based on freetar, called Gunnar Hero (which I should add Frets on Fire support to). At any rate, I listened carefully to what he had to say, and to his insights into what is driving gaming.

On that note, the presentation started off with a video of a guy on a bicycle, playing Guitar Hero in the real world, including bonuses and road markings.

Once Mike Griffith reached the stage, he made some bold claims about what Guitar Hero is doing to the gaming industry and how it is affecting things. In fact he spent a lot of his talk discussing the effects of Guitar Hero and of course boasting about how popular Guitar Hero really is. He pointed out things like how Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock is the first ever game to sell over $1 billion worth of copies, and how over 50% of Guitar Hero players are female (breaking the typical profile of the classic gamer).

He talked about how the Guitar Hero guitar controller and the Wii remote are changing the way people play games compared to the paddle, joystick or gamepad of previous game systems.

He couldn’t say enough about Guitar Hero. Not only does the Guitar Hero game make people play games more, but it is attributed to increase the sales of actual guitars and other musical instruments. Recently a survey showed that 3 out of 4 players say that they are more likely to learn to play a real instrument and two out of three musicians are more likely to practice as a result of playing Guitar Hero. In fact, last year there was a 27% increase in the sales of real guitars last year. Kind of intriguing since analysts speculated a year or two ago that it would decrease interest in real instruments.

Meyitzo asked me to post some videos. Here is a performance by some staff from Neversoft who are working on a new Guitar Hero: Metallica with song. It works with four players (guitar, bass, drums and singer):

It even shows in the music industry. Songs featured in Guitar Hero have experienced growth in the rate of downloads. Songs experienced between 15% and 843% rise in music downloads of those songs.

He then went on to discuss three key pillars of growth in video games, that aren’t being experienced in other entertainment fields. Specifically he stated that over the last 5 years consumption of movie tickets, music purchases, network TV and filmed media are flat or decreasing. Video games, on the other hand have grown to 12% of all leisure time.

He mentioned that he sees three basic things growing the field: story telling, community and interactivity. He gave story telling examples of Call of Duty which he claims delivers a cinematic level of story telling. For community, he talked about the 600,000 members of the Guitar Hero: World Tour portal as well as the 141,000 songs recorded and mixed in the GH:WT software which have resulted in 21 million downloads of new user contributed tracks. Finally he talked about the interactivity offered with input devices such as the Wii remote in games like Activision’s Dancing with the Stars and GH controller guitar and drums controller.

Here are his closing remarks, preceded by a video montage of recent releases from Activision:

What do you think?

Well once again we are at the Consumer Electronics show.  Already we see taxi ads everywhere for the various booths and can’t wait to dig in and get at some new gadgets.  We are especially looking forward to seeing what new announcements are going to come from iRobot, Wowee Toys, Roboware and other exhibitors that we met last year.

Maybe Panasonic will suprise us with a demonstration of the kitchen cleaning robot which is built into the counter, and was demonstrated recently to the Japanese press.  An older video from 2007 shows a more humanoid approach that they’ve tried.

 – Dale Wick and Stephen Sutherland