Alexis Bauchu - On est pas des machines

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Pour ce dernier post sur la Global Game Jam 2010, voici mon bilan personnel de l'événement. La GGJ 2010, c'était...

... un jeu vidéo

Parce que le but de l'opération c'est quand même de réaliser un jeu vidéo. Voici donc Meet Me at the Banana Disco, un jeu qui vous mets dans la peau d'un homme qui sort en boîte de nuit et qui tente de récupérer un maximum de numéros de téléphone. Pour cela il faut aller parler avec les gens, ce qui se manifeste dans le jeu de manière musicale.

Chaque "clubber" émet une phrase musicale (deux notes dans le cas ci-dessus) et il faut répondre par la même phrase musicale pour séduire. Les notes sont produites en maintenant la touche espace et en appuyant sur une flèche du clavier. A l'intérieur du club, la tâche est difficile car la musique est plutôt forte.

Pour pas un rond, vous avez donc:

• un gameplay musical
• un look sobre et marrant en pixel art
• trois ambiances sonores et visuelles différentes

Vous pouvez jouer en cliquant ici (soyez patients, le chargement au début est un peu long).

... des rencontres

Je ne connaissais pas du tout les gens avec qui j'ai travaillé sur ce projet: Guillaume Martin (programmeur), William David (game designer et graphiste pour l'occasion) et Matthieu Morizet (sound designer). Je tiens à dire que c'est des gens super sympa, super comptétents, et encore une couche de super sympa par dessus. J'étais content qu'on ait des tas de goûts et de références en commun (je suis parti avec le disque dur plein de super sons electro grâce à Matthieu). C'est dans ce genre d'occasion qu'on se rend compte que le monde est très petit: Guillaume et William connaissaient des amis de l'ENJMIN parce qu'ils ont travaillé avec eux. C'est aussi les mecs qui ont fait Tuper Tario Tros que j'avais découvert 2 semaines plus tôt.

... un cours condensé sur la réalisation d'un jeu vidéo

Quand on y pense, bosser 48 heures d'affilées, c'est comme abattre une bonne semaine de travail bien dense! Une semaine durant laquelle vous vivez en avance rapide le cycle complet de la vie d'un jeu: conception, production, validation et livraison. Avec tout ce que ça implique au niveau humain, au niveau logistique, etc. Alors que dans l'industrie, il existe des gens qui n'ont jamais vu la fin d'un projet! Ca arrive: des projets non retenus au bout de leur phase de conception, des annulations pures et simples, des coupes dans le budget. Certains bossent en freelance sur des projets déjà commencés et qu'ils quitteront avant qu'ils soient finis.

... une expérience à ré-itérer

J'ai adoré participer à cet événement. Les gens m'ont demandé: "alors c'est pour quand les résultats?". Je ne comprenais pas la question.
- Mais les résultats de quoi?
- De la Game Jam!
- Mais tu veux que qui dise quoi?
- Ben on veut savoir qui a gagné.
- Personne ne gagne!
Et je trouve ça beau. Les gens qui se retrouvent là le font parce que ça leur fait plaisir. Quand vous retrouvez un ami musicien après un boeuf, vous lui demandez pas qui c'est qui a gagné? Non?

Vous l'avez peut être suivi sur mon compte Twitter, le week-end dernier j'ai participé à la Global Game Jam à Paris. Il s'agit d'un événement mondial qui en est à sa deuxième itération. On pourrait traduire en français par "Session d'improvisation de jeu vidéo mondial". Ce qui veut pas dire grand chose comme ça, mais disons que pendant tout un week-end, des programmeurs, des game-designers, des sounds designers et des graphistes se retrouvent, font connaissance, et développent ensemble un jeu vidéo.

L'événement avait deux sites en France cette année encore: Angoulême et Paris. La GGJ d'Angoulême était hébergée par l'école nationale du jeu vidéo (l'ENJMIN) et cette année la GGJ Paris était hébergée par l'ISART Digital (école de jeu, d'animation 3D et de web). La GGJ c'est l'occasion de rencontrer des professionnels: le sympathique Oliver Lejade du studio Mekensleep (Soul Bubbles) était notre hôte; Fabien Delpiano de PastaGames a fait une apparition et a ouvert la session par un discours de motivation et de conseils. Dommage qu'il n'ait pas pu rester. C'est un gars du Sud et il avait un train à prendre.

Après quelques jeux et un petit pot pour faire connaissance avec les participants, le sujet est dévoilé: "deception and seduction", avec en rab l'obligation de faire apparaitre dans le jeu au moins un des éléments suivants: un singe, un âne, une clé. C'est pas des belles contraintes ça?? Optionnellement, les participants peuvent tenter d'atteindre des objectifs qu'ils choisissent: jeu sans téléchargement, utiliser moins de 16 couleurs, jeu multi ou communautaire, etc.

A partir de là, chacun a réfléchi pendant 45 minutes sur une idée de jeu: il fallait trouver des mécaniques et un contexte qui colle aux contraintes. Je peux vous dire que c'est pas facile. Est venue ensuite la phase de présentation: on nous a donné 45 secondes pour présenter notre idée aux autres participants pour les convaincre de travailler sur ce projet. Ensuite, de manière informelle, les gens ont pu discuter entre eux de leurs idées et former les groupes. Les dernières associations ont eu lieu pendant la dégustation de pizza gracieusement offerte par l'ISART. C'est comme ça que j'ai fait la connaissance de Guillaume, William et Matthieu.

Si le sujet vous intéresse, inscrivez-vous à mon flux RSS. N'hésitez pas à poser des questions ou faire vos remarques dans les commentaires!

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This is big news: ModDB is launching a new service called Desura. Think distribution service (like Steam), except that it will also support mods and custom content and that it will be all community oriented. By community oriented, I mean that for each game / mod, community members can add their comments, reviews, screenshots, etc.

What appeals me the most in the project is the support of mods. Finding, installing and patching a mod is such a hassle, I was thinking of doing a Steam-like app just to support HL2 mods, but ModDB is doing it for just any game. Awesome.

Here's an extract from the FAQ:

Q: Is the idea that Desura will provide an easy way for people to automatically download/install mods for any game they own (possibly excepting games purchased through Steam and the like)? So essentially you just click "Gimmie that mod!" and it downloads, installs, and then patches?
A: Exactly like this

This could be really good! For the moment, the product is in private beta. More when it goes publically live.

Yep, still good sales there.

• Mirror's Edge at 3.74€
• Monkey Island Special Edition at 2.24€
• The Chronicles of Riddick, Assault on Dark Arena at 9.99€

I recommend Mirror's Edge if you've never played it.

Epic released what they call the UDK. It's basically the Unreal Engine 3, for free!

Here are the best news:

You can create standalone applications with UDK. This means that users will be able to install and run your game without owning a copy of Unreal Tournament 3.

Now go get it and make some great games!

I'd like to share with you some stats that 2D Boy published after the big sales they had for the 1 year birthday of World Of Goo (WoG for short). The point was that you had the choice in the price of the game, from 0.01$ to whatever you want. 2DBoy released the results of the first week of that event: they sold a lot of copies of the game, but most of them at 0.01$, which means 0$ because this all goes to PayPal for the transaction. So they tried again for another week and the game kept selling good but this time, at a much better average price, certainly due to people knowing that 2DBoy don't really get any money under a paid price of 1$.

But what I'd like to highlight, is the results per OS. It's a well know fact that if you wanna play games on a computer, you must have Windows, otherwise your choice is very poor (extremely poor on GNU / Linux). Developers and publishers don't care much about the other platforms and I bet they think the market is not big enough on these systems. But if you look at the market shares of WoG, you get a surprise:

During those two weeks, only 65% of copies of WoG were downloaded for Windows! This is far from being an undeniable domination of the market! GNU / Linux gets 17% of sold copies and Mac OS gets 18%. In these days where the iPod and the iPhone are real hits, Apple is regaining a fair number of shares of the desktop computer market, so the Mac score is quite understandable. But it's a bit more surprising for Linux. It seems obvious then that the fans of the penguin crave for games on their OS. It's easy to say that people don't play on Linux, when in fact there's just no game to play. So that's one myth busted. Note: last christmas, the guys from Wolfire got to the same conclusion and wrote a nice article about why developers should support Mac OS and Linux.

Another myth is that Linux users (and more generally open source fans) are cheap people, that they always want everything for nothing. Well guess what, here's the graph of the average price paid for WoG, per OS:

I say: myth busted

What system do you use? Do you play games on it?

A while back I said that I'd talk about what I do during my internship at Wizarbox. It was in April, so it's been 5 months. Ok ok, I'm late, but when I post, I like to be REALLY sure! Seriously, if I haven't talked much about it, it's simply because there's not much I'm allowed to say. Game developers (and even more the publishers) like secrets.

What I'm allowed to say for the moment is that I'm scripter on Gray Matter, the new and greatly expected game by Jane Jensen. If you don't know her, she's the one behind the classical Point-and-click game series Gabriel Knight. I'm in charge of integrating the backgrounds of the scenes, the dialogs, but mainly to create the script of the game, which means the interactions with the world, between the characters, with your inventory, and to create the animated cut-scenes.

Here's the official trailer (in german) presented at Gamescom 2009:

Recently I've tried the Resident Evil 5 (RE 5) demo. I'm a fan of the previous episodes. Not a HUGE fan, but I know the subject: I played to RE 1, 2, Code Veronica, Rebirth, 0, and RE 4. And I have to say that this 5th episode doesn't quite convince me...

What I like in the games prior to the 4th episode are the atmosphere, the strong feeling of vulnerability and the puzzles. Your avatar only had 4 health points and ammunitions were rare so you really had to avoid fighting, your inventory was quite small so you had to choose carefully what stuff you'd take with you (more health kits or more ammo?), your sense of orientation was challenged, that kind of stuff. Those ingredients created a new genre that can legitimely be called survival / horror. This all disappeared in RE 4 which flushed the frustrating camera and inventory away, but with it, many of the things that made the Resident Evil series what it was: out the evil company Umbrella, out the puzzles, out the zombies (the enemies are infected by a horrible parasite) and so on. To me, RE 4 was an excellent action game, but a terrible Resident Evil. Capcom certainly hoped to capitalize on the brand, but the idea is a bit weird: the gap with the first games is so important that old fans were disappointed and I guess that old haters were still repeled by the only sound of the name.

RE 5 is the direct descendant of RE 4: fast pace, hordes of infected, ammo and money popping out of dead bodies, camera located above the shoulder of the avatar. The new thing is that the hero is now followed in his mission by a sexy partner. And I think that there was many other places for improvement, but the devs blew it. The controls are horrible: while the game is loading, the key mapping is displayed on screen, but before you've read everything (or anything) the game starts. And it fails to tell you that you can use the cross to quickly switch weapons. Suddenly, your gun runs out of ammo, and you swear, trying to switch to your shotgun using the menu while the infected kiss you in the neck. You reload the level, this time you manage to keep the enemy at distance but eventually some big guy breaks in the house you were hinding in and smash your partner with a giant axe. Game over. AAArr!

Every time you restart, you come to a new sad realization: this big-manly-sweating character you control is obviously motor impaired because he can't fire a gun or reload or use his arm-long knife without his two feet stongly anchored in the ground. The two partners can't exchange a couple clips of ammo, instead they have to pass the whole stock, leaving the other one defenseless. The big guy with the big axe seems invincible and the mission ends only if you survive long enough, meaning you can run around the level and still win. In fact that the best way to stay alive. Doors can be kicked, but you can't close them (they automatically close after some time), you can't jump off a roof or even run (RUN!) without pressing a button... At this point, you're so frustrated that the coop mode is not able to save the experience. I remember thinking "this makes me wanna play Left 4 Dead right now".

To conclude, it took me at least 7 times to finish the first level of the demo. The true spirit of Resident Evil died with RE4, and now RE 5 is probably gonna kill a decent action gameplay with silly usability issues. The game is not out yet, but I'm not hopeful.

Don't miss it (ends january 2nd):

• Portal at 4€ (ish) (if you get only one, get this one)
• Bioshock at 5€
• Opposing Force and Blue Shift at 0.99€ each
• and many other big discounts

Steam is now pricing games in Europe and United kingdom using respectively euros and pounds. Another major change is that the VAT in now included in the price, and not hidden until you pay for your game. So I went on the Steam Store to check the new prices by myself. At first I was pretty mad to see that many of my favorite games suffered from the "magical conversion" (stating that 1 dollar is worth 1 euro), overpricing some games by about 25%. Which is very not OK since it's digital distribution (you can sometimes find non-digital copies of a game on the net for less than the digital one on Steam). But I could only compare prices of games I already bought and of which I knew the price in dollars. Now the website only shows new prices and makes it difficult to achieve a global comparison.

According to Rock Paper Shotgun, this change brings also very good news among the bad ones.

Right now there’s some odd prices up there. Bioshock is currently £13.99. On the US Steam it’s at a mystifying $54.99. Which when bought at UK prices, with tax, would be £42.38. That’s a mysterious saving of over £28. Er, blimey. The Complete Pack for Civ IV is a whopping $59.99 for Americans. That would have been £46.21 for us. It’s £26.99 on the EU beta. Even some brand new games, like GTA 4, have notable savings. US converted price: £30.80. EU price: £26.99. And the complete publisher packs are currently insanely cheap. Fire sale prices.

But they only study the new prices in pounds. If you get any information about the prices in euros, please comment about it.

Edit: All this things also raise the question of "what are they doing with the taxes?". I mean, it's only 8% in the United States, but many times more in Europe. So are they paying the taxes to the country the client is from? Or to the USA? Please bring us some lights on this if you have any.