• A Northway tour of San Francisco


    San Francisco
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    Yes, the Northways came back to SF for three months, which as Colin says fits us like a glove. We’ve got to move on to BC in July, but I’m already planning our next SF visit for GDC 2012. A friend asked us for advice on what to see and do in San Francisco, and listing out all the best places for him has made me start to miss the city already. Here are, more or less, our favourite things to do in SF:

    If you’re going to be there on a Thursday, start by planning that day around the Academy of Sciences nightlife event – adults-only cocktails in an aquarium! That starts at 6:00pm in Golden Gate Park, so you can spend the day in and around Golden Gate Park. Start by taking the N Judah MUNI train (here’s a bus map), get off at Carl & Cole (great sushi for dinner there) and walk down to Haight & Ashbury and Magnolia’s brewpub for brunch because it’s never too early for a beer.

    Stroll down to the park, check out the drummers on hippie hill, and make your way to the museums. Across from the academy is the De Young which has awesome creepy skulls and fetishes from New Guinea, and a sweet tower that’s free to go up with a view of the city. Nearby on 9th is the new Social Kitchen brewpub and Arizmendi which has delicious pizza and other baked yum you can pick up for later.

    If you have time, come back to the park on a Sunday when they close the first half of JFK drive for people to ride their bikes (rent bikes at Haight & Stanyan). If the weather is warm (March-April is best; in July-August expect sunny mornings and chill windy afternoons), go all the way to Ocean Beach and follow the walking trails north through the ruins of Sutro Baths to Golden Gate Bridge. The trails continue east from the bridge along the water all the way to pier 49 but it’s a long way; better to head in to Geary to catch the 38 bus back. But first stop at the Russian importers for some sausage and poppyseed pastries. It’s always good to have snax for later.

    I think Alcatraz is overrated and pier 49 is a tourist hell hole, but it’s worth going just for the Musee Mechanique. Then you can walk from there to check out the best parts of North Beach and Chinatown. Hike up to the base of Coit Tower then walk down the paths on the east side to Embarcadero. Follow that south along the water south to the Ferry Building which is cool in a yuppie kind of way, especially when they have the farmer’s market on Sunday.

    In terms of museums the Exploratorium is my favorite, but it’s best if you can go to their monthly after dark event so you don’t have to share all the cool interactive science stuff with the dumb kids it was designed for. Colin likes the SFMOMA and YBCA art galleries just south of market near 4th, and there’s a comic book museum and other little galleries nearby that are cool, and free the first Tuesday of every month.

    That’s it for downtown though. I wouldn’t bother with the area around powell, market, and union square because it’s just commercial tourist blah, and busy. Avoid wandering into the Tenderloin west of union square around 6th + market unless you’re looking to buy some crack or converse with crazy people.

    The cable car museum near chinatown is free and cool, and if you must take a cable car, the California line is the easiest to get a seat on. You can take it to the end then walk down to Van Ness to hit up Tommy’s Joynt (or perhaps somewhere classier).

    Take the BART to the Mission to find all kinds of good restaurants, urban culture and people speaking Spanish. Wander between 24th and 16th, Valencia and Mission st. It’s what I think of as the “real” San Francisco, and it’s a little grimy. It can’t be denied, SF is a stinky city and inhabited by a lot of homeless people. That’s part of the… charm? Head up to the Castro for a break; it’s much trendier and whiter and gayer.

    If you have a car and can organize who gets to drink and who has to drive, our favourite outside-the-city thing is to do a day of wine tastings around the Russian River area to the north. It’s a couple boring hours on the highway to get out there but once you do the roads meander and the countryside is lovely. There’s a burger place called Mike’s At The Crossroads that’s great for loading up on grease first, and another brewpub in Santa Rosa for when you’re sick of wine. If you don’t want to go so far, buy some $5 wine from Trader Joe’s and have a picnic on the hills just north of the Golden Gate bridge (if it’s not too foggy – earlier in the day is better).

    And of course before you go, take a look at what events are going to be on, maybe take in a concert or a play. I love a good street fair or craft fair, and then there’s Bay to Breakers, Gay Pride, LoveFest, the Folsom Street Fair (scary!), etc. SF likes to throw big, weird parties.

    For those who might not know, we started a new development blog at NorthwayGames.com for game and work-related stuff. We’ll continue posting here again when we’re “abroad” once more in French Polynesia this fall.

  • Byebye to Costa Rica


    Bye bye Jose & Gabe’s bar
    Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

    Our last weekend in Pochote was crazygoodtimes. So crazy and good in fact that we never had a chance to write about it, and then we got to San Francisco and that was the end of our free time. But here’s how our last weekend in Costa Rica went:

    We went to another Rodeo in a small ranching town north of Pochote. I can’t remember the name and of course it’s not on the maps (neither is Pochote for that matter). The entire festival was smaller and more community-based, we went with a bigger group and everybody knew everybody. But the bull riding was more intense, and bloody.

    The first rider was running for the walls after getting thrown when his bull caught up and gored him in the back. The guy made it to the wall then collapsed, and the announcer joked that he’d let us know when the funeral would be. At least I assume it was a joke, but the rider didn’t look too healthy as they were rushing him to the medics. The second ride was even worse. The rider was thrown off, then the bull stomped hard on him several times. It was hard to tell how badly he was hit, but it was terrifying to see. When they chased the bulls off the rider jumped up and ran to the walls, then fell over and had to be stretchered off as well. With that tragic start, every ride afterwards seemed life-or-death. Those bulls were furious, much angrier than at the Cobano rodeo. We didn’t miss having drunken tourists running around in the ring with them.

    After the rodeo we all went back to the beach in front of Gabe’s and drank the bar out of alcohol once again while watching the stars and our bonfire.

    The next afternoon we were working on the deck when an incredible racket started up from the direction of the bar. It was an 8 or so part Cimarrona band that looked and sounded roughly like this. They were the band from the rodeo, playing for their supper right next door. They lent us some instruments and let us play along, and so our last evening in Costa Rica got started early. Kwon-bum brought lobsters and scallops for another amazing feast from the sea. We danced and drank and said our tearful goodbyes late into the night.

    We miss our friends in Costa Rica, and we miss the peace and beauty of our little whale bay. Every place we visit is so different and it’s hard to leave each one, but we have to remember that we’d never have discovered Pochote and had such great times there if we’d stopped traveling. So, onward!

  • Rebuild 2: Bring on the music

    Colin and I are having a great time in San Francisco. It was a big adjustment (especially weather-wise) from the beaches of Costa Rica, but seeing all our friends again has made me wonder why we left.

    Last month we went to a bizarre concert: Mike Patton and noise-music duo PIVIXKI, consisting of a mad, energetic drummer and an even madder more energetic pianist. But it was the opening act that caught my attention and wouldn’t leave my head.

    Bill Gould and Gigante Sound (Jared Blum and Dominic Cramp) opened with music from their new album The Talking Book: a collection of dark and atmospheric soundscapes that were so moving and so amazing to hear live (I was right up front). I kept closing my eyes and could imagine playing Rebuild to the music. It was perfect. I contacted them later in the week and licensed a few songs for the sequel. So, presenting the soundtrack to Rebuild 2:

    The Talking Book by Bill Gould & Jared Blum
    The Talking Book – Rebuild’s new music

    You can hear samples on their site or on Amazon, but the 30-second snippets don’t do it justice. I fell asleep last week after listening to the album and had a vivid dream of a zombie-ridden future.

    It was actually quite a sad dream. Most of the people I loved were dead and our chances of survival seemed bleak. I wondered if it was morally right to make light of such horrors, even if they are fictional.

  • Rebuild: Regarding Clones

    Last week someone released a knockoff of Rebuild for the iPad. When I contacted them, the publisher politely said it was a mistake and took it down immediately, but it reminded me of what’s at stake if I take my time with the sequel (which will come out for iPad as well as Flash).

    It also got me thinking about the topic of clone games, which have always bothered me, but I find it hard to pin down exactly what constitutes a clone and why I find them offensive. The conversation tends to gets heated when the topic comes up, but I think it’s important that we talk about it all the same. It’s going to buzz around my brain until I do so I decided to look at some examples and ask some questions.

    Rebuild vs clone of Rebuild
    Rebuild vs Knockoff Rebuild

    The Rebuild clone is an extreme case and it’s been taken down, but I’d like to start with it. The gameplay was the same, the art was better but strikingly similar and the events were rewritten in different words. Perfectly legal, except that they named it “Rebuild” which was probably an accident. I think it’s crazy that someone could spend so much effort to produce a beautiful and polished game while skipping the fun part of designing the gameplay. I imagine profit must be the only motive, but I’m not sure. I am sure that it shouldn’t have been legal.

    There are good reasons why you can’t copyright gameplay. Gameplay is hard to define, and borrowing ideas from earlier games is an important part of how genres evolve. I agree, it would suck if someone owned the copyright on aiming with a mouse, or levelling-up a character, or if Square Enix could sue you for using the FFVII class system in your vector-based robot platformer. I’m happy anyone can iterate and expand on ideas from other games, but there’s a difference between that and being a total, shameless knockoff.

    Clones are like porn: you know it when you see it.

    Fantastic Contraption vs Magnificent Gizmos & Gadgets
    Fantastic Contraption vs Magnificent Gizmos & Gadgets

    After Colin wrote Contraption, he started negotiations for an iPhone port with a developer but it fell through when Colin realised the deal they offered was rediculously out of scope with the industry standard. Three months later they released a nearly exact clone of Colin’s game with a pretty graphical makeover, almost beating our real port to the iPhone market (free tip: before you deal with someone see how many outstanding law suits are pending against them). Apple didn’t take it down, but (with our publisher inExile’s help) they did feature us and the clone got buried.

    The situation was unusual because Colin new the cloner and suspects they’d already started on the game (as an official Contraption port) before negotiations collapsed. It might have held up in court if it had been worth suing over, but I’m really glad we didn’t have to find out.

    Don’t rely on Apple to make any moral decisions regarding knockoffs. They’ll take something off the App Store if it violates copyright, ie if it uses your name or characters or graphics, but they’re slow and don’t reply whether they decide to act or not.

    Tetris vs Brick Game
    Tetris vs Brick Game

    Possibly the most cloned game ever, Tetris, has been beset with copyright problems since the get-go. Knockoffs show up everywhere from naughty versions on xxx sites to “9999 in 1 Russia Brick Game” handhelds at dollar stores. Last month the company that owns Tetris sent Google a DMCA notice regarding 35 games on the Android market which were all promptly removed. Some of them used the word “Tetris” which is unarguably illegal, but many just had similar gameplay.

    It’s interesting that this sue-happy company can so easily throw their weight around to enforce copyright on a 30 year old title. I guess the system does work for some people. But I wonder if Tetris is so well known that it should be considered a genre in itself, gameplay in the public domain. Did any of the unauthorized games combine new and interesting concepts with our beloved block game?

    FarmTown vs FarmVille
    FarmTown vs FarmVille

    Facebook games all look the same, to someone uninterested in spamming her friends every time she grows a tomato. Talk about shameless mimicry! Consider Zynga‘s multi-billion dollar line of clones: FarmVille, PetVille, Café World, Mafia Wars. They wait for a game to be successful, copy it to a T, then aim their firehose of players at it – ka-ching! They must have a strong sense of irony, because now Zynga’s threatening to sue people for using “-ville” in their game names.

    Granted, they’re not the only ones at it, and Zynga is spectacularly good at optimizing games to maximize virality and revenue. Did FarmTown lose money when it got cloned, or did the sudden popularity of farming games bring them new players? Is there room in a player’s feed for two (or three, or four) such similar games?

    Minecraft vs Fortresscraft
    Minecraft vs Fortresscraft

    Microsoft just announced that Minecraft is coming to XBLA. This must be a disappointment to the creators of top-selling XBLIG game FortressCraft, one of the most recent in the genre of “first person multiplayer voxel art mining sandbox roguelikes”. Unlike the owners of Tetris, Notch has no intention of suing, in part because he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on: Minecraft started as a self-admitted clone of Infiniminer (by Zachary Barth, creator of SpaceChem).

    You could argue that the world wouldn’t have discovered this new genre if Minecraft hadn’t picked up after Infiniminer was cancelled and iterated on it to make a really great game. On the other hand, the graphical similarities are so obvious it’s embarassing. Barth says he’s flattered that his game design has become so popular, and leaves it at that.

    Crush the Castle vs Angry Birds
    Crush the Castle vs Angry Birds

    Angry Birds has been in the App Store top 3 for over a year and has made over 70 million dollars. Apple constantly features the game because it’s in their interest to have fewer, more popular games whose household names might intice people to buy an iPhone or iPad. Few games get into the top 10 and they tend to stay there, which makes developing for the iPhone kind of like playing a slot machine.

    As you probably suspected, Angry Birds’ gameplay was copied from a Flash game called Crush The Castle. The difference this time is that Angry Birds used a completely different look, having you whimsically toss suicidal birds at pigs instead of cannonballs at armored men. It feels good, it sound good, and it’s obvious why even our parents are playing this game.

    Is it innovation if you just change the setting? I know I wouldn’t have been so miffed at the Rebuild clone if you were fighting aliens on a moon base instead of zombies in an identical looking city.

    WaveSpark vs Tiny Wings
    WaveSpark vs Tiny Wings

    In another case of innovation via higher production values, top-selling iPhone game Tiny Wings is far, far more polished than an earlier game WaveSpark which used the same gameplay. WaveSpark was created as part of a project to write a different game every week, and the creator Nathan McCoy didn’t spend a lot of time making it look good. It goes to show that polish pays. So do cute birds.

    It seems that’s what players care about, as McCoy’s request for credit was met with jeering at his game’s simple graphics. I’m hesitant to call Tiny Wings a clone, but I’d like to see developers (and fans) give credit to games that inspired theirs. Do they not for fear of being sued?

    Desktop Dungeons vs League of Epic Heroes
    Desktop Dungeons vs League of Epic Heroes

    QCF Design has finally started preorders for Desktop Dungeons, and last week they briefly had a beta version of the game online (I’m bummed I missed it). They’re being secretive for good reason: they’ve been burned before.

    They started off releasing alpha versions of the game as they were writing it, incorporating feedback from the community and growing a tidy fan base. Then one such fan released an iPhone game copying Desktop Dungeons’ gameplay right down to the classes and spell names. After months of friendly but fruitless discussions between the two developers, QCF finally brought in their lawyer and spoke publicly about the situation. The cloner relented and graciously took his game down.

    He didn’t seem like a bad guy. He just wanted to make a good game, and Desktop Dungeons was a good game. But releasing it before the original was even finished? Ouch.

    SimCity vs Rebuild
    SimCity vs Rebuild

    I’m just kidding about this comparison, but SimCity was one of the inspirations for my game. So was X-Com and zombie movies like 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead. Like I said, all games borrow from other games and I’m happy they can.

    I know I’ve gotten all high and mighty, but there’s a line that gets crossed too often. It just ain’t right, and something needs to change! If the law can’t help and distributors like Apple won’t help, at least players can have an effect by respecting the creators of original gameplay and not buying the knockoffs. Or at least give credit where it’s due and play the original games too.

    Colin notes that the real tragedy is that the cloners aren’t just stealing a good idea. They are stealing refined, thought out game design that might have taken years to make work. It takes much less risk to just steal great gameplay and polish up the graphics.

    Good thing there will always be foolish indie developers who are more interested in making something cool than simply making money.

  • Thinking… Metaphorically

    I’ve been trying to tease out the constituent parts of human problem solving for a little while now. This is the kind of topic you’d think you could just find a couple of books to read or fish out a couple of papers to get some insight. Unfortunately my searches aren’t bringing up as much as you might think. Although I will heavily recommend Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence. His book is still pretty theoretical but it has a lot of great ideas that have been slowly sinking into my thinking.

    Nevertheless I have recently contrived a crude theory of human problem solving in my own head. I’ve come about these ideas from reading a few books, some introspection, the rope experiment I mentioned last time, and watching a ton of playtesting of puzzle games. It’s probably shallow, wrong, and not worth anything, but I’m going to subject it to you anyway.

    I think there are two major components to our problem solving.

    • Permutation
    • Metaphor

    The first one is easy. Permutation just means “trying everything”. I have believed permutation to be super important for a few years now. I don’t think the idea of just trying every possible action is going to shock anyone but from playtesting puzzle games I think you’d be surprised just how important permuting is to our problem solving. A lot of puzzles are solved by permutation alone. When you’re just “playing around with something” you are permuting. When you solved one of those “get the metal loop off the rope” puzzles and it just falls apart in your hands you are solving by permutation. When you are thinking out every possible outcome of a chess move you are permuting. Permutation is our go-to workhorse for getting things done. To do it all you need is two hands and a memory. It’s super versatile (you can apply it to pretty much any problem, regardless of how diverse) and it’s generally pretty effective, if laborious.

    So permuting is an obvious part of problem solving but it’s clearly not the whole story. It doesn’t explain how people make leaps of intuition, and it doesn’t explain how people play games with very large solution spaces like Fantastic Contraption. In Fantastic Contraption permuting is very hard. You can put a stick or a wheel anywhere and connect them to anything. It would take you days to solve a problem by just trying every possible machine. Luckily, we have a wonderful gift for metaphor.

    By a gift for metaphor I mean we have the ability to see similarities between seemingly disparate things. Consider this typical metaphor: “an angry man is like a simmering pot of water” (that’s a simile, which is a kind of metaphor). I argue that we are using the familiar pot of water to help understand the more rare angry man. We take some traits shared by the two objects: that they could both quickly convert to a state of painful unpredictability. At the same time we don’t get confused about other qualities of boiling water and anger that are not related. We don’t think of the man as being wet or becoming a gas, for example. This is second nature to us, but if you were to try to write a computer program to do this you’d quickly see how magical the talent is.

    We can use this ability to see similarities between new problems and previous problems. Consider the rope problem from my previous post. A number of people wrote me saying they thought of the rope solution first. In fact I think more people come up with the swinging solution when the problem is posed as a thought experiment than when they have the ropes in front of them in person. I’m going to guess that this is because it’s harder to permute in our heads so we jump more quickly to our metaphor engine. Then we recognise the similarity of the rope problem to a tire swing, or a clock pendulum, and we’re off to the races. Metaphor also helps explain mastery of a game. As you improve in chess, for example, board states start to become analogous to eachother and so the outcome of previous games start to inform future games.

    Permuting also helps us discover new metaphors. By playing with things we are always seeing them in a new light and there is an ever increasing chance that we will see a sudden similarity between the current problem and something we’ve seen before.

    In this way Metaphor is your ability to take what you understand about one problem and apply it to a new problem. That is a super powerful talent that we all have. I believe it’s this ability, along with just trying random stuff, that makes our species so adaptable and so good at videogames.