Spore

John Winkelman

A couple of days ago I came across the teaser site for Spore, the next game by Will Wright, the fella who brought us Sim City.

In Spore, you are responsible for evolving the life on your planet, from the level of denizen-of-the-primordial-soup all the way up to galactic overlord.

Gamespy has a long article about/interview with Wright about Spore, among other things. One paragraph struck me as particularly intertesting:

Clicking on the egg brought up a creature editor, and allowed the player to “evolve” with a new generation of critters. The editor was amazingly flexible. Wright could give his creature extra vertebrae, he could give it fins or tails to move faster, he could add claws or extra mouths, whatever he wanted. More importantly, all the creature animations weren’t hard-coded; they were dynamic. If he put six tails on his creature, the game would figure out how a six-tailed creature would move. The critter was completely his.

I immediately thought of two artificial life-ish experiments: Sodaplay and Framsticks, both of which involve creating (and with Framsticks evolving) creatures to test for survivability and fitness.

Supposedly the game will be out in 2006.

The Status of My Status

John Winkelman

I have been too busy spending time with a beautiful woman to post much over the past couple of weeks. Or rather, my creative energy has been directed elsewhere. So now seems a good time to make some changes.

Sometime in the next few days ES.O will go down for a little while as I switch over to a more robust, feature-rich content management system; probably TextPattern. So: New look, new functionality, and new purpose. I freelance now, so the front page will be more professional…whatever that means.

Rather than try to retro-fit all of this old content into the new framework I will probably take all of this stuff and shuffle it over to a subdomain; something like archives.eccesignum.org, or the like. Regardless, it will be linked from the new site.

When, exactly? You will know when you see it.

Gaming and Surfing

John Winkelman

As I dive deeper into the theory and structure of the training courses, I realize that a lot of basic usability features of web pages and applications map closely to the features of adventure games which we consider vital and part of “good gameplay”.

Consider personal inventory. You are in a small room. You are wearing a backpack which contains a coil of rope and some food . Compare this to any of the numerous checkout screens at Amazon.com. Your shopping cart is used in the same way: You put something in it, and while you move from page to page (room to room) the things you put in the cart stay in the cart. They are available for you to use whenever you need them.

Consider navigation. In an adventure game it is considered poor form to put the player in a room from which there is no escape. By “no escape” I mean that the player character is alive and well, but cannot backtrack and cannot go forward. The only way out is to restore a saved game or manually restart the game (play with the game rather than within the game). This is analogous to hitting a page in a website where there are no navigation elements and the only way to move to a different part of the site is to hit the web browser’s “back” button (restore a saved game) or type a new URL in the address bar (restart the game).

I am sure there are many more parallels, but these seemed to be the obvious ones.

Shut That Thing Off and go Outside

John Winkelman

Where have I been? Walking around outside taking pictures in the warmest weather since early November. When not enjoying the sunshine, I have been spending my time doing contract work at the Steelcase University .

So far the life of a contract worker is treating me well. I am immersed in challenging work with extremely talented people and I am my own boss.

Though I could potentially be buried in Steelcase work for a good long time I have just joined Business Networking International , with the idea that I should not have all of my eggs in one basket, businesswise. I was kind of wary when I first heard of it, but when I went to a meeting as a visitor I walked out with the cards of half a dozen people who needed some web work done.

Does all this mean I will be too busy to have fun? Hell No! I will try to keep my hours down to ~30 a week, once I get settled into the new schedule. And, hopefully, a fair bit of that will be done from home, or from various cafes and bars with wireless internet connections.

I have begun work on Whirling Vector Shapes of Doom, version 2. Updated graphics, tweaks to the gameplay, and optimization to smooth out the animations. And maybe some sound.

The web design class at Kendall College is sliding into the crazy last weeks of the semester. I have not made any of my students cry yet, but I still have a month to turn up the heat.

Yeah… life is good.

Back to Work

John Winkelman

Well, it looks like my days as a Gentleman of Leisure are coming to an end. Starting Monday I am back to somewhat regular work hours, albeit this time as a contractor rather than a full-time employee. No more soap operas. No more sleeping in until noon. No more spending the entire day in my pajamas.

So it is appropriate that I hereby announce the release of Whirling Vector Shapes of Doom v1.0 . This is the first game I have completed in eighteen years. The last one was a dungeon crawl written in BASIC on a Commodore-64.

Having reached every milestone I set myself for this release I already see room for a dozen improvements, and I have ideas for the creation of another dozen games.

Stay tuned!