Top MP3 player requests:

1. Flag songs/albums/folders as “never play randomly” for Christmas and holiday tunes, novelty tunes, audiobooks, movie quotes. They should play when double clicked, or when in a playlist, but otherwise no.

2. Avoid similar songs in Shuffle -- it should do this by avoiding songs with one or more similar tags (perhaps just song title but could also be for artist and album too), checking the play history to make sure it’s been a while since a song’s been played. Large music collections often have multiple takes/versions/renditions of the same song. Would work great on a Christmas shuffle to make sure 3 different versions of “Jingle Bells” don’t play back to back. Update: Looks like iTunes has this already; it’s called Smart Shuffle.

3. Give me one or two click access to nuke a song from playback, and off my disk. This should be available whenever a song is playing, whether it’s on my PC or on a portable player. Shuffle turns up a lot of junk that I don’t want on my iPod or my hard disk anymore, and there’s no easy way to do this. This request is actually part of a bigger point-of-access UI request -- that I should be able to access options for my music regardless of how I found it.

4. When I skip a song before it’s fully over, mark it as “played”, so that shuffle doesn’t decide to play it again a few song later.

UPDATE: The issues I describe below clearly were specific to my laptop, as I was able to install the game on my desktop machine with no problems. Check the game out, it has great just one more time addictiveness!

I’m writing this post from IE because Bang!Howdy has locked up Firefox.

I decided to try Bang!Howdy today. So far it is not going well. As GDC Daniel from Three Rings mentioned that 90% of the people who visit Puzzle Pirates end up not even trying the game. If Puzzle Pirates is anything like Bang!Howdy, I can understand.

A few problems:

1. When downloading, Bang!Howdy had the dreaded resetting-progress-bar which tricks you into thinking the download is done, only to discover the progress bar has hopped back to 0% to for another step in the process. Multiple times. This wouldn’t be so bad except the each progress bar took several minutes to get to 100%.

2. During the download, I could not access any tab or window. Firefox had not crashed, but it wasn’t letting me have any access to the tabs. So I was stuck waiting.

3. Once the game was downloaded and running, it asked me to log in or create a new account. When I clicked “create”, it told me to check my web browser to create a new account. Except my web browser was still not accepting new windows. At this point I had the option of closing the game and hoping Firefox recovered, then create an account, then reload Bang!Howdy again (another 3 or 5 minute wait). Or to use IE to create an account.

I fired up IE and created an account. Once I was logged in I got Another progress bar. I think.

When the game started running I noticed it was too big for my screen. the bottommost part of the game UI was covered by my windows task bar. I couldn’t see the score or the “cards” you’re awarded in the tutorial.

Once getting through all that I really enjoyed playing the game. I just played the tutorial’s “Claim Jumping” scenarios for several hours, ignoring the bottom portion where I couldn’t see. But I can see how attracting new players may be a bit difficult with such a daunting start up process.

I am not sure if Daniel was trying to hint at something during his GDC speeches; I do remember him saying that their next game will be in Flash and not Java. It seems like there’s a big barrier to just getting Bang!Howdy to run. It may just be that it’s not optimized for Firefox, I’m not sure.

Anyway, to Three Rings, if you’re reading this … very clever game! I really enjoyed it, despite the troubles I had getting it to run. I really would have given up (as I have with Puzzle Pirates) but I really wanted to try it out. I’m glad I did. To everyone else: go check it out!

I have ranted in various places about how disappointed I am with Photoshop’s current trend of adding auto-layer-selection to tools. I’ll give you the micro-version of the rant:

One of Photoshop’s most power features is its layer palette panel. You pick the layer you want, and then work on it with the tools, not worrying about what’s in front of it or behind it. In more recent versions of Photoshop some tools have started to automatically choose a layer for you when you click in the document. Some tools have this as an option, like the Move tool, but others are not optional, like the Text tool and the Vector shape selection tools. The problem is that these tools break the model of “pick then layer, then work on it in place”. I have to watch very closely every move I make with the Vector layer tools and Text tool or risk accidentally selecting another one.

That’s my rant in a nutshell. Recently I’ve started to believe that Adobe’s new love affair with auto-layer-selecting tools is actually a suboptimal cure for a root problem: Photoshop’s power has outpaced its generalized layer selection tools. Read the rest of this entry

In my comments, someone took me to task for calling Kongregate a publisher.

In the CD-ROM and Floppy days, I knew what a publisher was. They were the ones who cut your deal with, and they were the ones who paid you when your game sold. They also normally were the ones who did stuff like make your your manuals, boxes, and discs, and they dealt with getting your games into stores.

Do Publishers like that still exist? Probably. But these days the people I (and most indie game developers) sign deals with and who send me check every month are the Portals. Portals can play a big factor in how many people play your game, how your game is marketed, and how much money you make. I don’t need CD-ROMs and boxes. I don’t need someone to go to the portals for me to get my game on their virtual store shelves.

So what am I missing by not having a “Publisher”? I’m losing out on retail distribution, although some of the portals are getting into that as well .In fact I just found out Rocknor’s Donut Factory is making its way into retail via an eGames collection. I’m probably missing out on getting some generalized marketing like press releases and whatnot. But that’s easy for me to do myself, too.

I can tell you one thing I don’t care I’m missing -- the percentage cut that publishers take. In fact at a GDC session, Merscom’s Lloyd Melnick said you can expect that about 2/3rds of your retail proceeds will go to your publisher if you have one. Ouch.

Portals are the gatekeepers these days. They publish games to their own sites. They are the new publishers. And when you see me use the term “publisher” on my site, I’m probably talking about a site that will get your game into the hands of a lot of players, and pay you for it.

In a GDC presentation on Spore’s editors (called Spore’s Magic Crayons), there were some interesting bits mentioned:

• Everything that people make will automatically be uploaded to the Spore servers.
  
• Stuff on the Spore servers will be automatically downloaded to Spore players and will populate the gamer’s universe.
  
• The editors are designed to create great looking things quickly, and without needing artistic talent.
  
• The editors are powerful enough to make realistic looking Navy battleships and the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek.

The battleship and Enterprise were shown during the presentation of examples of things that could be built with the editor. All those points kind of have me worried. I love the idea that I can go to other planets and interact with stuff that other people have built, but if I run into the Starship Enterprise I know I am going to be sucked out of the game and won’t want to play it. Read the rest of this entry

Just a quick note to let all (three) of my readers know about my newest blog: Junkyard Clubhouse. Humu and I are both bloggers there. It is our place to link to the fun, interesting, cool, strange, and wacky stuff that we don’t want to post on our more focused blogs. I’m still going to be posting to this one, and my hope is that JYC will allow me to keep this blog more on-topic with the stuff I write about here (video games, art, programming, and UI) Enjoy!

Another GDC is over and done with. Here’s some highlights:

• Running into Jedi Knight Alumni Justin Chin, Ray Gresko, and Chris Ross.
  
• Day 3: Seeing Richard Garriott (Ultima), Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris) and Shigeru Miyamoto (Donkey Kong/Super Mario Bros/Legend of Zelda) all in 1 hour time period at the IGF/Gamer’s Choice awards.
  
• Just about every session at the Indie Game Summit but especially Russell Carroll’s insightful session on indie marketing, which I believe was the most valuable discussion there.
  
• Meeting Gene Endrody (Sherwood Dungeon ), Jim Greer (kongregate), Derek Yu (Tigsource.com) and Dave Grossman (Sam & Max) face-to-face after only emailing them for so long …
  
• Raph Koster’s talk on “Where Game Meets the Web”. Nothing too insightful for me, but it was interesting to hear his assertion that the Game Industry more or less is (again, sigh) not paying attention to how the web innovates and evolves.
  
• Discussing the finer points of game design, UI, and “high-art” with the MawSoft crew.
  

The week provides me with more than enough creative energy to get me through another 360 days until the next one. Thanks to everyone mentioned here, and also those I didn’t mention.

While I’m going to be at GDC all next week to soak up as much as I can, I’ll actually be regurgitating exaggerations humbly discussing my misadventures in game development in a panel session about the challenges indie game developers face (although, most of the time I’ll be sitting there silent). It’s titled Challenges for New Game Developers and is a panel discussion including the following superstars of the indie game scene:

• Kalle Wik—President and CTO, Skunk Studios
  
• Patrick Wylie—Vice President, Big Fish Studios
  
• Peter Glover—VP, New Business and Technology, Atom Entertainment
  
• Ritesh Banglani—Product Manager, Director and Shockwave, Adobe Systems

Plus me. It’s on Thursday March 8, from 4:00pm — 5:00pm in room 3004, West Hall

Hope to see you there.