Eric Butler’s Weblog

Friday marked the deadline of the first ever round of GCS competitions. One of the other things Andrew Fox and I wanted to try this year was small game competitions in addition to the normal semester-long projects. We messed a lot of things up with this run (as expected), but it was a surprising success, especially our game competition. You can check out the entries (and vote on the results) on our forums. We’ll be giving out prizes, too, like a free copy of Spore.

I entered a submission into both the game design and music competitions. The game compo’s theme was a one-button game, and the music compo’s theme was “airship cruising.” So being the lazy individual I am, I combined the two and wrote a little Game Maker game called Sky Sailing. The game music causes problems on some systems, so if it doesn’t run, try the one without music.

Download Game: Windows EXE, Windows EXE without music
Download Song: MP3, OGG

I was surprisingly pleased by how these turned out. The game mechanic involves using the space bar to control your ship and smash other enemies while avoiding mines. Tapping the space bar cause you to gain altitude while holding the space bar charges a “blast shot” that launches you forward and destroys enemies.

My personal goal was to explore the limits of how much information a game can extract from the player in a single button. Just how much complexity can you extract from a button while maintaining some sense of simplicity and usablitiy. I broke 2D movement down by distingusihing two parts of a button presses: how long you hold a button and how often you press the button. It gives you surprising field of movement all over the playing field, though the controls are still sluggish and clunky and could stand for more tuning.

Anyway, enjoy! And go check out the other entries. There were some really amazing ones.

Today marks the “official” kick-off of fall projects for Game Creation Society. They have one semester in which to develop and produce a game, which will then be released with much hurrah on the last day of classes. I’m doing one myself (which I’ll talk about someday soon) along with 8 other projects, all with distinctive goals and game designs. I’m pretty psyched to see what will happen this year.

This year I instigated and tested a radical change in the traditional pitch process which games undergo. The old one was rather terrible in my opinion. Students aspiring to be project leaders would craft an idea and then have an individual meeting with the development director to get the green light. Then they’d give a 10-minute presentation to the club pitching their project and begging for members.

This is wrong for a lot of reasons, the biggest of which, from a production standpoint, is that you can’t really determine if the project will be successful and give it approval before the project recruits members. You have no idea what interest will be like; they may attract no one and be unable to generate the resources necessary. Additionally, ideas are less refined when they only come from one person rather than a group. The design will be bound to change once the other group members get a hold of it. Basically, you can’t possibly tell whether or not a project is on sure footing nor provide useful design advice until the team has formed.

So instead this year we reversed it. At last week’s meeting I threw everyone in a room together and told them to get pitching and discussing. Andrew Fox called it a “concept fair.” So prospective leaders came in with ideas, mock ups, demos, (and in one case a tri-fold board with little origami cranes decorating it) and started attracting potential members and receiving feedback on their ideas. Only afterwards, once their ideas have been refined from feedback and they have a few more people on board the project, do we carry out the traditional pitch, in which they sit down with upper management (i.e. me) and convince the club to make them an official project, while the development director provides design advice, makes sure they have a legitimate schedule for production, and covers logistics.

And I think it was very successful, on the whole. Well, at least the general idea. The execution this year was kind of shoddy, as I’ve heard in feedback and observed myself. We were rather unprepared and were in a not at all appropriate room. We should choose a better location, preferably one with tables, much like a job fair. This would help with the other problem, which was that people couldn’t really tell who was pitching something. We should give each person pitching a minute or two on the floor to give a brief introduction.

We botched the description at the first meeting little, so I think people assumed you needed to be extremely prepared. They thought you needed to come with prototypes and boards and demos and detailed docs. But that’s not how I had envisioned the concept fair. To me, all you really need are ideas. It was supposed to be people getting together and sharing ideas, and then those ideas would morph and form into cool game ideas and some groups would form from them. This did happen, to some extent. And, of course, for those with more concrete plans, it’s a place to show off what they have and to get feedback and recruit people to their project.

So, next year, we need to do a better job getting a good room. We need to better explain that this is more about sharing ideas that existing work, and we should do a better job letting members know who’s planning what, both by utilizing the forums and site more effectively and by giving people a bit of floor time to introduce themselves. If you have any feedback, please go make a comment on how we can improve.

Why I Really Went into Computer Science

One will have noticed that Mozilla posts have rather died off over the past months. The cause behind this is that of school starting up as my internship ended. So Mozilla posts will periodically continue (the shadows patch is ready to land, btw), but the start of the new school year seems an appropriate time to begin talking about one of my major hobbies: game development.

Video games were, without a doubt, the reason I first became interested in computer science. As a kid, I had always imagined creating worlds, be it on paper, with blocks and toys, through music, or only in my mind. Amazed by the games I played as a child, I dreamed of being able to create some of my own, but it somehow never occurred to me that I should do something about it. However, during my senior year of high school, I finally decided that I didn’t want my dreams to be merely dreams, and taught myself programming so I could start writing games. Within 2 years I found myself to be a CS major spending nearly all his free time designing, programming, and making games. And I haven’t really looked back since.

Carnegie Mellon’s GCS

At Carnegie Mellon University, I help run a little game development club called the Game Creation Society. It’s purpose is rather straight forward: to provide an environment in which students can get together and have fun learning to develop video games. People get together in groups and develop a game over the course of a semester.

The organization is not related to the curriculum in any way: everyone who participates is doing so on a volunteer basis, entirely for the desire to make games. Some do it to build experience for the potential of going into the industry, and some do it to practice skills in the many areas involved with game development. Many others, like myself, do it simply because making games is damned fun.

GCS has so far been an invaluable experience for me. My skills in all areas (software engineering, sound design, art, game design, project management, etc.) have greatly improved from my experience on projects. Very few classes provide the experience of working with a sizable group on a sizable product and seeing that product all the way through the development cycle from brainstorming to release. I’ve learned and developed a lot, and I’m very grateful for what I’ve gotten out of the club. Also, and most importantly, it’s been a blast. I really can’t emphasize how enjoyable game making is.

All of this is (among other things) why I wanted to give back to GCS, and took on the position of Director of Development, which essentially entails managing all the active projects, and ensuring to the best of my abilities that everyone has the resources they need to learn and create awesome games, and have fun doing so. This post served as a little introduction to the organization and what’s it’s all about. In the near future I will talk more about games, both about personal projects on which I am working as well as my experiences running a game development club.