Blessing the Build makes for Happy Monkeys!

Gamasutra has a nice feature article up detailing a blessed build process that MMP game developers will find very insightful.

While some old-schoolers might scoff at such overhead and heavy process if they bite the bullet they will find that such an investment will pay for it self many times over in reduced snafu's and development team downtime as well as increased morale and decreased in-fighting between programmers, artist and designers.

If you found that article useful you should also checkout the following:



"Unit Testing for Massively Multiplayer Games" by Matt Walker from NCSoft published in MMP Game Development (1).

"Automated Testing for Online Games" by Larry Mellon (formerly from The Sims Online) published in MMP Game Development 2.

Show Full Story

Tales from the Lite side - part 2

Here are some new upstarts looking to get in on the ultra-lite MMO market mentioned in part 1.


Dofus is a 2d iso Flash based MMO with a turn based combat system...


Runescape is a Java based 3d MMO with a play style not unlike Ultima Online that has a large and growing userbase.


Sherwood is a Shockwave 3d based MMO still in development.

This batch may not be pulling down boatloads of cash like other ultra-lites such as Habbo Hotel and Neo Pets but they do give a good indication of what is possible to do in this space with respect to features and scope.

Show Full Story

Supervillians run Linux :)

Pure Evil but Pure Entertainment :)

Show Full Story

Remote-controlled humans at Siggraph

One of the stranger things spotted at Siggraph this year can be found here...

Remote controlled humans might sound a bizarre and nightmarish prospect, but Japanese researchers hope to harness the trick for computer gaming.

By remotely stimulating a person's vestibular system - the fluid-filled tubes in the inner ear that guide their sense of balance - with electrodes placed on the skin just below the ear, researchers at NTT's research laboratories in Kanagawa have found a way to turn humans into oversized radio controlled vehicles.

The technique, known as galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS), unbalances a person so that they automatically veer left or right in an attempt to rebalance themselves. The NTT team developed a headset and a control unit similar to that used with remote-controlled toy cars.

Here is a video of a girl being driven around like a RC car.

Clearly this tech isn't something you can go pick up at Best Buy yet but it could make its way into a new generation of Head Mounted Displays that put more reality in VR.

Taro Maeda and colleagues at NTT believe the system could primarily be used to make computer games feel more realistic. In a driving game, for example, a player could feel gravity shift as their car hurtles through a tight bend.

"I do think this could find an application in computer gaming," says James Collins, an expert in GVS at Boston University in the US. "You could definitely use it to give the illusion of motion when going through some virtual environment."

Add in some voice recognition and better voice chat capabilities and you start to paint the picture for an entire new user interface with direct implications for the design and gameplay for future MMO games.

Show Full Story

Study: MMO games cause Violence - NOT!

Lately I've noticed that when strangers ask me what I do for a living and I tell them that I make Video Games they respond with some remark about how they are all so violent or how they are the cause of violence in society. People tend to parrot what they hear in the media without much thought to its validity and lately there has been a ton of coverage blaming games for the ills of society.

Along comes the University of Michigan to inject a little intelligence into this debate with an interesting study based on MMO players...

Two groups of subjects were recruited, none of whom had played MMORPGs before and many of whom had never played video games at all. One group then played the game for a month, for an average of nearly two hours per day. The other group acted as a control. All participants were asked questions about the frequency of aggressive social interactions (such as arguments with their spouses) during the course of the month to test the idea that gaming makes people more aggressive.

Game players, it turned out, were no more aggressive than the control group. Whether the participants had played games before, the number of hours spent gaming, and whether they liked violent movies or not, made no difference.

I find this study all the more convincing once you factor in that they used Asheron's Call 2 as the test cast. If that game doesn't make you want to smack someone upside the head nothing will :)

This is not a new phenomenon. In the nineties it was movies, in the eighties rock music (Ozzy is the Devil!) and in the seventies it was comic books. Who knows, next maybe it will be the evils of Podcasting!

If people care to do some research they will find decades of research that shows that violent social behavior arises from a lack of impulse control that is learned by most children in their formative years. Ever hear your grandparents use the expression "Spare the Rod, Spoil the child" or as my former boss put it so aptly "Some people really just need a good ass kicking" :)

Show Full Story

Cowboys and Pirates!

The scurvy dogs that brought us the joy that is Puzzle Pirates have struck again - this time with a new game that takes you to the wild wild west called Bang! Howdy...


Here's a blurb from their site about the games features:

Multiplayer online tactical strategy game in a 3D Wild West setting, yee haw!

Fast-paced hybrid of turn-based and realtime strategy gameplay with a healthy helpin' of rootin' tootin' antics!

Dozens of unique units, hundreds of special playfields and over ten wild and crazy gameplay scenarios!

Customizable avatars and collectable badges let you show them city folk that you know how to handle yer dogies!

Collect and customize Big Shot units that complement your play style whether ya like to take yer sweet time or go in guns ablazin'!

Want to be a cowboy? You can sign up to be a beta tester here!

Perhaps Daniel and his Three Rings crew will swap out those pirate hats for cowboy hats and switch their greeting from Arrr to Yee-Haw!

Show Full Story