On that note, I figured the best thing would be to visually compare these games, and see what I might gain from sheer observation from the developers choices of their UI and Menu design.

I took four well-known games, and one successful newcomer to the App Store: Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Jetpack Joyride, Peggle, and Tiny Wings. It is not lost on me that I chose both level-based puzzle games, and “runners”. I’m personally interested in these titles for their ability to either have continuously iterated gameplay through level design and challenges, or to keep a basic gameplay altered by the way you guide the player to interact with his or her surrounding environment.

Screenshots are provided in sections where they are applicable.

Main Menu

• In some form or another, all of these games are giving players the ability to play the game, or fiddle some knobs (options)
• A couple games use the main screen to introduce you to an immediate challenge, such as your high score or current level (Jetpack Joyride and Tiny Wings). Three of them let you jump into local or online leaderboards, pitting you against your own scores, or your friends. (Angry Birds, Peggle and Tiny Wings)
• Two games use the first screen players see as a point-of-sale (Unsurprisingly, Angry Birds and Peggle).
• Most of these games use a service other than GameCenter. This can be interpreted as an accepted inferiority of Game Center to other offerings, or just be due to the fact many of these games were available before Game Center came out, and wanted to be able to introduce Achievements and other incentives of replay-ability to players (Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Jeypack Joyride).
• Only Cut the Rope immediately introduces social media on the Main Menu, Angry Birds does if you click the bottom right icon.

Options

• Angry Birds and Jetpack Joyride don’t have specific Option screens, but their Main Menus expand a bit to offer some of the common features we see elsewhere.
• While there doesn’t really seem to be too much symmetry here, everyone seems to offer the ability to mute the audio in their game to some capacity. (I guess iOS doesn’t do this if there is an audio stream coming in from another media app.)
• Peggle offers some accessibility options, to the colorblind and lefties.

World Select

• Angry Birds and Cut the Rope have multiple sell points on this screen.
• Angry Birds invites users to gift the app, as well as purchase merchandise, sign up for a newsletter and advertises one other Angry Birds related game.
• Cut the Rope also invites users to gift the app to friends, and offers a IAP to unlock all future content without needing to beat enough levels to do it manually.

Level Select

• Angry Birds uses the Apple “page” paradigm in order to notify the user that there are pages worth of levels for this particular world.
• I included two different level selects for Peggle, since they can be somewhat different depending if you’re jumping into Quickplay or Challenge.
• All of these games mark the level icons with something to display extraneous progress on the level, past just unlocking it and beating it.

Gameplay

• With the exception of Peggle, all the games take a very minimal approach to the UI during gameplay. Most simply provide a pause button, and the score.

Pause

• Peggle’s “Pause” screen is identical to it’s “Options” screen, with the exception of having a “Main Menu” button rather than a “Credits” link.
• With the exception of Angry Birds and Peggle, the other three games are offering some sort of stats to bring the user right back into the game with something to beat. High scores, challenges, or stats.

Level End

• Angry Birds and Cut the Rope give some indication if your current score beat a previous best.
• It’s not Peggle’s “End” Screen, per se, but the fanfare leading up to the beating the level is a tremendous amount of positive feedback that is sure to make a user chuckle, or at the very least smile their first few times around, solidly awarding them for their performance.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Almost two years later, and four products shipped with my name on them (The Beatles: Rock Band, Rock Band Network, Rock Band 3, and Dance Central), I came up for air. I had learned a ton about game development at (relatively) larger scale for the industry — at it’s peak, Harmonix was around 350 people, and has multiple projects and teams working on new stuff all the time. With such a large company, however, it is important to have some people be dedicated and focused on a particular task. By developing and harnessing experts for very specific parts of your pipeline, you can create a really strong foundation for the rest of your development team to flourish. I found my work becoming more and more pigeonholed to a direction that I wasn’t comfortable with (it was far more directed at tools than it was at game development), and I decided a change would be appropriate for me. I wanted to have my fingers in a bunch of proverbial pies, so to speak. I am fairly certain that games are my passion, but I wanted to take some time actually trying a bunch of different facets of it before I settled down into something.

Through some networking, I managed to land one of the most rewarding three months of work I have had yet, doing some development on a demo for Moonshot Games. The game is called Fallen Frontier. I did some light work in their engine, worked with the designer, implemented auto-aim, created a crowd system, and even got to design and develop a fun cannon-fodder enemy, the drone. If that experience wasn’t mind blowing enough, I got to present the game with the team at PAX East 2011. Check out some of the gameplay footage, I think everyone who worked on that is very proud of what we managed to put together for that show.

After PAX, I went full time as the lead developer on a game I had been working on in my spare time. A company in DC who does training for the DoD wanted to add a game to their training to help instill the issues that they are trying to teach their students. The game puts a player in the role of the people that they will be working with to help the player gain a broader cultural awareness of the communities, views, and goings-on of the location they are being deployed into. At a basic level, the game is a resource management and decision making game, supported by primary source information that is showing to be very successful in generating meaningful conversations in the classroom setting during the training. Being the lead developer on the project has taught me some invaluable lessons about creating systems that can systematically grow very large over the course of the project. Forcing the team, at times against their will, to deal with these larger systems during the build out caused changes much later in the project to be much smoother and understood by everyone. I can happily say that most of the requests that we get for feature additions play into the original design of the game’s system.

After about six months of full time work on that game, my tasks are starting to wrap up, and I’ve reduced my time to a four day workweek so that I can (finally?) open up some time to do some game development on my own and discover what to focus my energies on.

I bit the bullet and purchased a Unity 3 license, and am determined to release something. I hope to share some of that experience of the games I make here, not only to review the decisions I made down the road, but to hopefully help others learn from my successes and missteps, IN REAL TIME.

The Secret of Happiness

Nasrudin is known as much for his wisdom as his foolishness, and many are those who have sought out his teaching.

One devotee tracked him down for many years before finding him in the marketplace sitting atop a pile of banana peels–no one knows why.

“Oh great sage, Nasrudin,” said the eager student. “I must ask you a very important question, the answer to which we all seek: What is the secret to attaining happiness?”

Nasrudin thought for a time, then responded. “The secret of happiness is good judgment.”

“Ah,” said the student. “But how do we attain good judgement?”

“From experience,” answered Nasrudin.

“Yes,” said the student. “But how do we attain experience?”

“Bad judgment.”

Reading about the Mulla was quite humorous as well.

1. Take off your lens, putting the lens cap on to protect it.
2. Put your body cap on to cover your camera’s sensor.
3. Turn your camera on, and go to the second “wrench” setting page on the menu.
4. Scroll down to “Sensor Cleaning”, Select it.
5. Select “Clean manually”
6. Click “OK” when it tells you the mirror will open up.
7. Let the mirror stay open for about 30-60 seconds, and then turn off the camera.
8. Put the lens back on the camera, turn it back on, and take a few pictures
9. If you’re lucky, you will have risen your pixel from the dead!

Should we call it an excerpt from the NecronomiCanon?

I have been trying to perfect cooking steak on our iron skillet and the oven. They came out a little dry this time, but inconsistency as a part of the learning process, right?

Pan seared steak with a hollandaise sauce, mashed potatoes with goat cheese, scallions and bacon, and garlic and ginger sauteed broccoli. A side of freshly baked bread, and we washed it all down with a delicious 2008 Rook by Corvidae.

At first, I felt cheated, but soon thereafter, I felt empowered. Armed with the Internet and a kitchen scale, I set out to truly learn some tasty recipes that we could con cot from the bare essentials. What else do we buy packaged that we can make from scratch? Turns out, pretty much everything. I’m happy to say that for almost the past four months Megan and I haven’t purchased a basic loaf of bread from the grocery store.

I’ll admit, the basis of this recipe came from Ratio, but I’ve put some slight variations onto it, and it’s become a very flexible dough for us, one that we find ourselves using for loaves, dinner rolls, and pizza.

15g yeast
300g water

20-30g lemon juice
5g sugar
10-15g salt

450g bread flour (we use King Arthurs)

1. Let the yeast sit in the water until it’s been activated, and you’ve got a tan-milk-ish color, then add the salt, sugar, and lemon juice.
2. Mix in the flour thoroughly. I let my dough hook run for about 5 minutes with this, while I use a spatula to scrape the insides of the bowl, ensuring everything mixes. If things start getting a little too sticky, I’ll sprinkle some flour to dry it up a little bit.
3. After the mixing is done, take the lump of dough out and sprinkle more flour on it, until the dough can be handled without sticking to your hands.
4. Knead the dough for a little bit longer, and then let it rest in a bowl or on the counter for 2-4 hours, depending on the temperature of the room.
5. When the dough has doubled in size, take it out of it’s container, and shape it into the loaf that you want, and place it on a thoroughly floured surface to rise for another hour or so.
6. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees, preferably with a baking stone inside.
7. Cook the bread at 450 for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 375 for another 15 minutes.
8. Take the bread out, and let it coli for about 30-45 minute before you serve. The gluten needs time to rest, and the flavors are still not fully formed yet.

For the nice ridges of the dough, I stole a trick that I’ve seen sushi chefs do, and wet a bread knife thoroughly before I make the cuts, rewetting it for each cut.

A simple recipe, but it has been our go to for some time now. I intend on buying some oatmeal flour in bulk soon, and seeing what we can do with that.

As a present, she had given me a few books, the first of which that I’ve read so far is Beauty in Photography, by Robert Adams. One interesting tidbit (albeit discovered from Wikipedia) is that Robert Adams only began photographing after he left college.

A few choice quotes:

Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do most photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as the had been easily made can convincingly suggest that Beauty is commonplace.

After years with a camera I had wasted still more time trying to do what it apparently was not given me to do.

The book itself is a collection of essays that he’s written, and definitely worth a read. It not only describes his views on photography, but discusses the path others have taken in discovering what photography means for them, and thoughts on art criticism as well, among a few other topics.

It’s got a Wiki, Task Management (to track both Bugs and Tasks), Time Management, Repository Integration, and strong Access Control, all of which are compartmentalized by Project (of which you can have an infinite amount). That’s just scratching the surface of the features, there’s so much more available if the team were to grow larger.

Dreamhost is a pretty good host too, for many reasons, (price, featureset. The speed hit from page loads is a bit frustrating at times, but I’ve yet to find someone on the east coast that can beat them out, feature for feature, so I continue to stay a customer of theirs. (Something like 6 years and counting…)

Now, it’s really best if you start this setup with a brand new account (with SSH enabled), or you’re prepared to move a bunch of files.

First, go through the Unix account setup. I’ve done it on a few of my more used accounts, and it’s a really good suggested organization of everything.

Then, if you plan to use Subversion as your SCM, I would suggest installing the latest version of subversion in your directory, especially if you plan on connecting via SSL. Dreamhost’s currently got Subversion 1.5.x installed on their systems, and I needed a switch that is only available in 1.6.x. Note: While the wiki points to tigris.org, you’ll need to use the links available at subversion.apache.org, since they’ve taken over the project now.

Now, on to installing Redmine! Everything here was pretty self explanatory, except when I went to execute:

rake generate_session_store

I was asked to install the latest version of Rails 2.3.11, and I was able to enter the following in the redmine directory:

gem install -v=2.3.11

After that, BAM! I was able to jump into Redmine, login as admin, change my usernames and get a bunch of my projects setup!

Fixing Subversion SSL connections

Subversion was still broken though. Whenever I would try to visit the repository page, I would get the error: “The entry or revision was not found in the repository.”

So there was a bit more work to be done.

Now, I pay the extra $4 a month for a Static IP, and just use their SSL certificate that they give me. Because it’s not by a verified certificate authority, Redmine will fail silently whenever it tries to connect to your server via SSL. This is a pain in the ass to figure out, but if you’ve done everything up to this point, you’re almost there!

The first thing you want to do, is go to your Redmine configuration (which you created to get sendmail working, right?)

Open up <redmine_dir>/config/configuration.yml in your favorite editor:

You want the following line to have the path to your Subversion 1.6 install:

scm_subversion_command: /home/<user>/run/bin/svn

Then, you want to navigate to <redmine_dir>/lib/redmine/scm/adapters/

Open up subversion_adapter.rb , and change the following line (263 for me) from:

str << " --no-auth-cache --non-interactive"

to:

str << " --no-auth-cache --trust-server-cert --non-interactive"

This will allow your subversion client to connect to servers, and just trust their certificate. Another way to do this is to login as the webserver and have it list the contents of the repository, to get it to accept the certificate. Since this is a shared host, I don’t think you’ll be able to do that here.

Finally, restart your Redmine install by running the following from the Redmine directory:

touch tmp/restart.txt

The next time you visit your repository within the Redmine install, you should be able to connect to your Repository without issues!

Forcing HTTPS, and getting a bonus speedup!

In order to avoid users mistakenly visiting the HTTP version of the redmine install, I wanted to force them to always visit and view the site via HTTPS.

So, I headed over to <redmine_dir>\public, and completely replaced the .htaccess file with the following contents:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URL}

Now, to be honest, I had mistakenly overwrote the other file that already existed there. However, after doing so, Redmine was perceptibly snappier. I have no idea what the previous .htaccess file was doing to cause the issue, (and honestly, I haven’t cared enough to replace it with the old file and do a line-by-line removal to find out) but I have actually seen a few other people suggesting to get rid of the file to deal with some other issues.

Either way, congratulations! You now have a speedy, secured install of Redmine on your shared Dreamhost account, with access to a Subversion repository over SSL!

Luckily, there’s an easy fix!

Open up your terminal, and throw in:
echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc

Restart Terminal, and you’re set!

(Credit)

Note: Anything in a monospaced font is a terminal command, or something you should be editing in a file.

Apache

sudo apachectl start

That’s it. Check http://localhost/ to see if it works.

Virtual Hosts (VHosts)

Edit the Apache2 Configuration

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Search for “httpd-vhosts.conf”, and make sure the following line is uncommented:

# Virtual hosts
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Now, lets add some folders for a test site.

mkdir ~/Sites/testsite/
mkdir ~/Sites/testsite/htdocs
mkdir ~/Sites/testsite/logs

We’ll add an HTML file as well, so we know when it’s working.

echo 'Hello, World!' > ~/Sites/testsite/htdocs/index.html

Now, we want to add our site information to our vhost config.

sudo vi /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Comment out the “dummy” virtual hosts, and add this under them:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@localhost
    DocumentRoot "/Users/mike/Sites/testsite/htdocs"
    ServerName testsite
    ErrorLog "/Users/mike/Sites/testsite/logs/error_log"
    CustomLog "/Users/mike/Sites/testsite/logs/access_log" common
</VirtualHost>

And now we want to add a line to our hosts file to point “testsite” to our computer.

sudo vi /etc/hosts

In here, you want to add the following lines after “127.0.0.1 localhost”:

# Dev Sites
127.0.0.1 testsite

Lastly, we want to restart apache to make all the changes live.

sudo apachectl restart

Check your success @ http://testsite/

PHP

cd /etc/
sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini
sudo chown 666 php.ini
sudo vi php.ini

You absolutely need to uncomment the “;date.timezone” line, but here are a few settings and some settings I changed my values to in my php.ini. Keep in mind, the following lines do not follow each other, do a search for them to find their proper locations.

date.timezone = 'America/New_York'
post_max_size = 16M
upload_max_filesize = 16M

Now, lets actually enable PHP in Apache.

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Uncomment the following line:

LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

and add “index.php” as an allowed index:

<IfModule dir_module>
    DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
</IfModule>

Finally, restart Apache.

sudo apachectl restart

If you want to test it, do this:

echo '<?php phpInfo(); ?>' > ~/Sites/testsite/htdocs/info.php

And visit http://testsite/info.php

MySQL

MySQL is a piece of cake for 10.6.

Download it here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html#macosx-dmg

Install it in this order:

1. MySQL
2. MySQL Startup Item
3. MySQL Preference Pane

I would suggest using Sequel Pro (the successor to CocoaMySQL) for a GUI Interface to your DB.

You can login to your database at 127.0.0.1, username root, no password.

Don’t forget to restart Apache when you’re done.

sudo apachectl restart

Good night, and good luck!