As we moved into our new 2 bedroom apartment in the beautiful hills of Oakland, my face was slapped by reality. I had taken for granted that anywhere you moved in the Bay Area, you were surely going to be able to get some kind of broadband service. Not so in my new place. Although it’s located in a major US city, neither Comcast nor AT&T would give me service. This caused me to have a minor freak out.
Then I realized how much of a slave I am. The thought of going without high speed internet made me wonder how I would keep my sanity. Gradually I realized that I existed without it before, so why am I freaking out at the idea of going without it now? Because modern comforts have a way of owning you.
Anyway, it might all be moot anyway. It turns out that AT&T will possibly bend the rules and give me service anyway. And if not, I can explore the whole mobile broadband avenue. (I refuse to use satellite.) We’ll see what happens, but after that mirror was held up to my face, I realize now how screwed up that is.
The interesting thing about developing a game for a next-gen console (you know, the ones with a gamepad instead of a fancy white magic wand that you wave about the room) is that, as a first-timer, I feel a certain amount of pressure to utilize all the buttons. Not that this pressure is coming from anyone else on the team, mind you. It’s just that you look at the analog sticks, the d-pad, the triggers, and the colorful buttons… and when you’re not using some of them, you feel a little guilty. It’s like an elaborate meal was prepared for you and you’re skipping the buttered corn because you’re filling up on turkey. (I don’t know if that metaphor works, but whatever.)
Until someone says, “Uh, why are you trying to make all these buttons do things that are necessary to gameplay? Just make it easy to play, stupid.” Oh right, I almost forgot. Games don’t have to come with a steep learning curve, do they? It’s like I almost threw out my entire education about making interactivity fluid and intuitive, just because I felt some obligation to the hardcore gaming crowd that loves all sorts of crazy control. Lesson learned, I guess. Unnecessary buttons don’t need to be made necessary.
(By the way, before anyone asks… no, I’m not working on a new port of one of our existing games. I’m just experimenting until our new game is announced.)
Yeah, I’m one of those bloggers who goes months without an update. But hey, a lot has been going on in my life, both professionally and personally.
The biggest thing I can mention is that I’ve started work at Telltale Games as a content programmer. And by the way, in case you’re unaware, we just announced Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, a WiiWare title based on the popular Flash cartoon. It’s interesting to see how more and more Flash content is finding its way onto next-gen consoles… although granted, this is not Flash. It’s a full 3D game that faithfully replicates the vectorized look of the original cartoons. Around here, we call it our “Flash Shader” instead of just your average “Toon Shader.”
So it is going to be a little weird to not be primarily working in Flash anymore. Currently I’m using the LUA scripting language to code our games. Hopefully before too long, I’ll be able to talk about the title I’m working on. But until then, I’ll be as vague as possible. People love vagueness.
This is a post for anyone who may run into the problem I had and couldn’t find a blog entry regarding this issue. ( At least with Flash 8 )
If you’re attempting to load Unicode Japanese characters from an XML file or something similar, you might want to consider using the font Arial Unicode MS for your text field (at least if you’re on a PC.) You’ll most likely have this font on your system, since it comes with Office.
At first I was just trying to use straight Arial with the Japanese characters embedded in the font. Curiously, this won’t work, and will just display “[][][][]” block type characters if you’re loading Unicode text. Using Arial Unicode MS will display just fine when you embed the Japanese characters.
If you don’t have to embed at all, then you can just get away with using Arial. However, since my text was to be under a mask, I did have to embed just to get any text to show up at all. Thus, Arial Unicode MS was my best option… seeing as how I didn’t have a Japanese font handy.
This week, the agency I work for launched a microsite for Windows Mobile 6 in which I was the lead developer.
As I mentioned earlier, the challenge with this site was having a (nearly) full video background with animations and content layered on top. So here’s what I learned during development of a site like this:
In leu of being there, I’ve received a few text messages this evening from people telling me that I just won the award for Original Sound at the 2007 Flash Forward Film Festival in Boston. I’m kicking myself for not being there, but work schedules wouldn’t allow it… but I am about to get on the red eye flight to Boston to enjoy the rest of the conference.
Although only one award is given (I think), I will say that Luminous Sound deserves credit for their music contribution and props should also be given to the Art and Creative Directors…. Brandy Cole, Darrell Loden, and Christian Wojchiechowski. Thanks, guys!
Question. I know that enabling the “use runtime bitmap caching” feature is pretty much useless if you’re adjusting the scale, rotation, or any other effects on the movie clip. From what I understand, only changing the X and Y position will keep the bitmap intact. However, what you have a nested movie clip that is cached as a bitmap? If you change the scale of its parent movie clip, does it maintain its cached bitmap, or is it destroyed?
I have to admit, even though it’s been around since Flash 8, I still don’t fully understand this feature’s capabilities.
Okay, I just experienced one of my biggest “duh” moments in the past two years or so. I’m working on a project now that will involve high resolution video with a lot of fast motion. As mentioned in a previous entry, I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I see video like this because I know it’s not going to compress well. Video compression works best when movement is minimal so that the codec can concentrate on the differences between keyframes. Fewer differences = better image quality.
After doing my first test with this new video, I was horrified at the result. It took a data rate of 2.5mbps before it even started to look decent. Not acceptable considering how much video there was going to be. Then I remembered someone recently mentioned in passing, “Oh god, you’re not still using Flash’s video encoding tools to compress your On2 video, are you? What a loser. Get me a soda, loser.” (Maybe I remembered it wrong.)
Luckily someone here had a copy of Squeeze, so I figured I would give it a try and see what came out. The difference was quite impressive. I was able to cut my bitrate by more than half and STILL get a better image quality. Thank you 2-pass encoding! Now I’m not sure if this was just an isolated incident because of the extremely fast movement of this video, but I’m sold. I’ll never use Flash’s encoding tools again if I can help it. I only wish I had done this on my last few project… I hate to think about how much better they would have looked.
If I were to have a fundamental complaint about agencies who do interactive work, it’s that they often don’t seem to have the consumer in mind. A lot of CD’s, ACD’s, and AD’s I’ve worked with seem to just be concerned about one thing: creating something that is impressive within our industry circles so they can show off to colleagues. Or what’s worse, I’ve seen agencies whose primary goal was to win awards. Sometimes the attitude from a CEO or an ECD seemed to be, “Forget about creating work that is effective. Forget about creating a usable website. Hell, forget about what the goals of our clients are. What’s going to get us to Cannes?”
Who wins in this scenario? Yeah, you might get some nods in AdWeek, but if your stuff doesn’t succeed, aren’t you just wasting the client’s money? And in the end, wouldn’t that be the downfall of your agency?
Sadly, it seems not. Sure you might lose some clients because the Flash site you developed for them is completely unusable and annoying, but if you win awards, you’ll just get new clients who will spend more money. I guess eventually it all comes crashing down.
I can specifically remember the moment when I lost faith in awards. I got a big nomination for a site that I thought was horrible, unusable, and all around lame. Not surprisingly, it ended up being a complete a miserable failure of a campaign… yet apparently there were a few judges that thought it was top quality stuff. It’s a shame that a lot of interactive awards* promote sites that don’t work. But boy, they sure do look pretty.
* Er, um, this opinion does not apply to the Flash Forward Film Festival. Please vote for Move the Crowd…*cough*…
Two big events in my career have occurred this week. First, I’ve made the move to San Francisco to begin work as a Senior Flash Developer at a new agency. I’ve loved working for Tribal DDB, but I felt it was time to try something new… and in a different location. I’ll miss the talented folks in Dallas.
And second, I was informed while waiting on a connecting flight to my new home that Move The Crowd is a finalist in the September 2007 Boston Flash Forward Film Festival! This is the second time a project I’ve worked on has become a finalist… and in a row, no less. Thinking back to my first conference and being intimidated by the work that was shown, I never thought I’d get this opportunity. I’m sure the competition will be as fierce as always… I only hope I’ll be able to attend.
Update: I will not be able to attend after all due to my new job. Someone let me know how many cheers/boos our project gets when it comes on screen.
