A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work
Apr. 3rd, 2009
07:54 pm - Planbeast stuff
Cool Planbeast news: Earlier this week I wrote the producers of one of the games that inspired me to create Planbeast in the first place, saying, "Hey, your game helped inspire Planbeast. We should work together, and I have an idea how to do it." Conversation follows, and reception to this proposal has so far proven a complete success: not only are they interested, but they have been offering me plenty of constructive criticism from the perspective of commercial game producers. We might be a lot of things, but storied publishers we are not, so information like this is gold for this project. Very exciting.
I have a pretty obvious path to take: do this more. Find more producers that could use a little Planbeast in their operations, and make the pitch. Because I'm me, this is hard to focus on. My natural neophilic inclination is that, having one success, it's mission-accomplished time and we can move on to something else. This is OK to an extent - I've scribbled out a couple of pages' worth of ways that we can improve the planbeast.com experience for our own users - but we've found something that works with this take-it-to-producers strategy, and I've got to stay on the road.
Mar. 30th, 2009
02:01 am - Summary of what I'm working on
People have been asking, so here is where stuff be at:
The Volity Network (including the webclient): Personally, am completely burned out on it. I have no plans on doing any active work with it at any point in the foreseeable future. The proper thing to do now involves wrapping an open-source license around the webclient and letting it fly, right? That's a conversation I'll need to have...
Planbeast: After a successful early testing phase and an initial bump of interest, approximately zero people are using it right now. This is OK. As far as I'm concerned our soft launch was a success: we have a much better service now than we did in mid-February.
But now we need to figure out how to get the users to come. I had a truly excellent day of meetings a couple of Fridays ago on this topic with a couple of new voices. My major take-away is that, this early, our main customer shouldn't be game players but game producers. We should form partnerships with companies, offering Planbeasty tools they can use on their own websites and such, driving traffic to us while we increase the visibility (and online multiplayer-ability) of their games.
I last week spent a long time writing the first letter making such a proposal, aimed at a very particular target. Now that GDC is done, I'm going to send it, and then I'll see about writing some more like it.
Project X: Regretfully, and for reasons not entirely under my control, I had to move it from the back burner to the freezer. If you want the full poo-poo on this saga, feel free to contact me through another channel. Given everything else I have going, my heart isn't exactly broken over this, though it is rather disappointing just the same.
If nothing else, it was a great one-year hands-on course covering both the technology and the business of commercial game publishing. Even better, starting on it gave me the confidence to reconnect with the local game-dev crowd (hi ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dariusk), a resource that I expect I'll continue to find invaluable - and worth being an active participant of - as my focus shifts back to meta-gamier projects like Planbeast and...
The Gameshelf (the show): This has been idling for as long as Volity.net has, another victim of the Project X bug biting me, even though my attitude towards it is entirely different. Still have tons of new footage waiting for me to get awesome with it. I haven't really been zotted by a bolt of inspiration to resume work, and haven't been bored enough to do it anyway. But I really am expecting that I will return to it, when the time is right.
That all holds true for Jmac's Arcade, as well.
Mar. 28th, 2009
11:08 am - Planbeast on Twitter
Planbeast has a twitter feed now, where it jabbers about every new public game event that someone schedules. Sometimes it babbles about other stuff too. I like this.
(FWIW, I've been a lot more active on Twitter lately, myself, though you aren't missing much if you already read my status updates on Facebook; I mirror most of em via ping.fm.)
(Icon because it just occurred to me that my Planbeast critter and Zarf's classic Werewolf doodle appear to be cousins.)
Mar. 13th, 2009
07:43 pm - Planbeast cards
Nifty new Planbeast feature: Personalized Planbeast cards, little images saying what you're gonna do next on XBL, with links going to the event's detail page:
Thanks to daerr for gadflying me into doing this prior to my starting to post on alien forums to spread the Planbeast gospel. (Yes, guess what's going to go in my signatures, there.)
Haha, and of course I just noticed that the time zone setting on them appears to be screwed up. Still digging. Update: Fixed.
Feb. 23rd, 2009
01:50 pm - Planbeast is live (again)
Planbeast, the free scheduling service for Xbox Live games, is now online at its new server. I finished the move this morning, and am very pleased with how well it's performing, compared to its previous location. (Scorecard: Hurrah for linode.com, boo for tektonic.net.) As you can see, I'm now confident enough in its quality to make a public LJ post, and let it start to soak in that magic Google juice.
In a nutshell, Planbeast lets you use the web to schedule times that you'd like to play your favorite Xbox 360 games online. You can use RSS or iCal to know when other fans of these same games set up matches of their own, which you can then join as a guest. When the time comes to play a scheduled game, everyone who has opted-in for notification receives an email or an IM telling them who's playing, and how to get started.
Xbox Live is a very clever and robust online game network, but - like all the major such networks - its "matchmaking" functionality is rather wanting. Depending on the game, trying to play online with strangers usually means either finding nobody at all online, or finding yourself playing with unsavory sorts. Planbeast aims to help this by connecting fans of games with one another, and letting a game's online players know who and what to expect from the other folks at the table.
We think it's really cool, and if it proves popular enough, we'll consider expanding it to cover other online game networks as well.
I've been working on this project with my Volity Games colleagues daerr and radiotelescope in what time I could scrounge over the last six months. There's lots of work to do still (holy cow is there), but the site does everything it says it will in its present state. It's going to be in public beta for a while, so I would be thrilled if you visited and let us know what you think.
Have fun!
Feb. 18th, 2009
10:19 pm - Well, that's depressing
Wired reports that unscrupulous players now have the power to disrupt online multiplayer Xbox games by DDoSing individual players. It's possible thanks to some new tools that make it easy to get the IPs of the people you're playing an Xbox game with, rent a slice of botnet time, and willfully firehose the former with the latter.
I didn't know this until just now, playing an otherwise delightful game of TF2 with lediva and a pile of anonymous members-of-public. Playing on defense, we both found our connections had become unusably choppy moments before our opponents' raiding party showed up, time and again - how curious. I was blown clear off the server at one point. Ms. Diva suspected the likely culprit, and forwarded me the article link even as we soldiered on. (We still managed to win, but jeez.)
As far as I know, there's no practical way to defend against this, or even react using the system's reputation tools, other than blanket-voting-down every member of an opposing team - it's impossible to know which of them threw the DDoS at you. This is a real bummer, and rather a wet blanket on the idea that NXE's friends-only chat channel would let you play with strangers online without being exposed to idiocy. Boy if only there were some way to easily gather a group of non-strangers to play together and etc. etc.
Feb. 7th, 2009
11:25 am - Boob tubage
Been on my Xbox 360 a lot lately, both to play games and watch TV...
I learned from "Penny Arcade", of all places, that most (all?) of Doctor Who, new and old, is now available via streaming Netflix, which I am able to enjoy via the Xbox. So, I finally got to watch "Blink". Hooray. Even classicaljunkie liked it! We are likely to go back and start watching season 3 from the start. (I gave up midway through season 2 when Sci-Fi Channel was broadcasting it, either after the Satan-in-space one or the Cybermen ones. It was just too cheesy.)
I finished "Operation: Anchorage", the first chunk of Fallout 3 DLC. Meh. The super-easy combat isn't any harder, and the game once again makes it even easier by pairing you up with a literally invulnerable NPC buddy. (The main storyline has one of these too, but at least you can choose to make the game harder by telling him to stay home.) I had fun with it, but I am unlikely to purchase further expansions for this game. I still have plenty of the main map to explore, should I feel like it later.
I picked up "Castle Crashers" finally. It's stupid fun, as expected. Also lots of poop jokes. I wish 360 controllers weren't so dang expensive or I'd go pick up a couple more, just to be able to host a four-player local game.
My field trip into non-random Xbox Live play last Tuesday evening was a success, thanks to Anthony and Sean. I got to try out the new "party" system, introduced to all Xbox users with last November's OS update, and confirmed that it will dovetail quite nicely with a certain project of mine.
Hmm... I'd better go hit the trenches and finish up what's left of said project, now.
Aug. 28th, 2008
11:25 am - <hr>s
Broker than I thought I was. Suddenly unable to pay bills, prior to this check that came in the mail yesterday. I shall toddle down to the bank after I finish writing this. Check is fairly fat, so it'll last for a little while, but fun spendy-spendy time is over for me until my next period of full-time consulting.
I did manage to do my taxes, finally, and I've started to track Appleseed's finances by starting a new file with plain-old Quicken. Now that I use Freshbooks to track my time and invoicing, Quicken does a fine job handling the bank accounts, including tying certain transactions to tax forms.
Hm, I think these events are connected. Suddenly having over $9,000 vanish out of one's bank accounts is liable to cause some distress.
Picked up "Dogs in the Vineyard" last week, on the grounds that it might make a nice setting for a text adventure game. I didn't know before this that all the PCs are explicitly ~20 years old, and virgins. The notion of roving gangs of indoctrinated, armed youth with little life experience, but a license to carry out God's judgement as they see it, strikes me as terrifying, like roleplaying the Chinese Red Guard. Wondering why I haven't seen anyone else take up this angle.
I haven't actually played the game, and there's much to love about the rules and setting elsewise. I would absolutely be willing to give it a try and see what came of it, but I dunno if that will actually happen, since I am not much of a role-player. I remain interested in checking out indie RPGs that have small scopes and "gamey" rulesets, like "Agon" or "Prime Time Adventures".
Was disappointed by the XNA user group meeting I attended at Microsoft's Waltham offices yesterday. It was really more of a class, with an MSFT employee behind a lectern, stepping through code for one of the XNA example games (a simple RPG). On top of that, it was a continuation of the same topic from the prior meeting. I lost interest quickly and slipped out after less than an hour.
There were no women in attendance, and I may have been the youngest person there. Two other attendees looked under 40, after which there were a dozen more guys ranging up into deep greybeard territory. This is cool, but the lack of younger folk surprised me, since to my mind the typical person who wants to make an XBox game would be significantly younger. I wonder if the idea of offline user group meetings is becoming increasingly alien to anyone under 30.
(I muttered about this on Twitter, since little else was accessible from my phone during the class. One person responded that younger folk just call user group meetings "meetups" now. I would have liked to go to an XNA meetup; in fact, I think I was rather hoping for one. This was not that.)
I may sacrifice a weekend to prototype that game scheduler idea. I've made one already, for Volity, and it would give me an excuse to learn Catalyst much better. Catalyst is what one can rudely-but-correctly call Ruby on Rails for Perl, and it's what my larger client makes use of. I like it a lot, but I don't think I'll really grasp it fore-and-aft until I build a Catalyst solution from scratch, for myself. So.
We have GO on rationalization for latest cockamamie project idea, sir.
Aug. 27th, 2008
01:05 am - Question for XBox-playing folks
How do you find other players for games that aren't the top five FPSs? I don't know! I'm asking!
It seems that for any game other than Halo / Gears / TF2 / wev, the only way to get a decent XBox Live game going is to contact remote friends offline and set up a game. The Quick Match button is almost always futile, and plenty of games that seem like they'd be plenty of fun online and aren't even two months old (yes, I'm thinking of Schizoid) seem to have approximately zero joinable custom matches going on, at any given time.
This is rather crying out for a user-made scheduling system, and you'd think that it would exist already, but I'll be damned if I can find one.