Category: reviews

Product Review: Pickle 2.0

graphics, reviews
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There are a few dedicated bitmap editors out there with features specific to pixel art and sprite animation. One that I like is Pickle. It features a stripped down feature set designed to give the pixel artist just the tools that they need to use.

A full featured image editor like Photoshop or Gimp can just get in the way of the pixel artist, providing too many tools with too many options, most of which are highly un-optimal in their standard configuration for pixel art techniques. By stripping the unnecessary, Pickle gives the user a streamlined interface that they can learn quickly and use very quickly once they’ve learned the handful of keyboard shortcuts to enable them to switch between tools and modes with great efficiency.

I first tried Pickle sometime in the last year, and since then a new version has come out. While I didn’t quite grok the beauty of the interface at the time, I’ve become more experienced with pixel art since then, and decided to give it another try.

License

Pickle is available now only a paid license, no longer a nagware/donationware license. There is a 7-day trial mode, but after that you have to pay to use it.

If it’s the sort of tool you’ll get a lot of use out of, it’s probably worth the price.

For serious sprite animation, I’d recommend Spriter, which is still in beta, but has been coming along nicely in recent releases. But to create the sub-sprite bitmap resources that you’ll import into Spriter, Pickle is still a good tool to consider, especially if your art style is pixel art and you don’t do a lot of work with gradients and filters and the like.

For simpler sprite animations, Pickle has an onion skin feature that shows the previous and next frames in an animation loop so that you can compare the frame you’re working on against them. I find this really speeds up the process of creating simple animations, and removes a lot of the guesswork and trial and error. While it doesn’t have as many features as the built-in Sprite Editor that comes with GameMaker, it makes up for this by providing a well-thought out interface for the tools it does give you, and providing only what is essential to producing pixel art.

Using Pickle

Couldn’t be easier, really. The manual is simple and fits on a single page on the web site, which covers the entire application from start to finish.

All a pixel artist really needs is the pencil, paintbucket, eraser, and selection tools. When you’re manipulating a bitmap at that level, you really don’t need any other tools. Line and shape tools might be useful, but aren’t really necessary, particularly for smaller sprite and tile bitmaps. A text tool would be nice as well, in a more featureful app, but again, for the intended purpose of creating tiles and sprites, not needed.

Pickle shows its strengths in two areas: Tile making, and animation.

For tile making, it provides a means to shift the bitmap so you can more easily discern hard edge transitions in order to smooth them out. There are also mirroring modes which allow you to make symmetrical shapes easily, by mirroring the pixels horizontally, vertically, or both, as you draw them.

For animation, I really like its “onion skin” feature, which overlays the previous and next steps in the animation as a translucent layer, which you can use to guide where you draw the current frame. This helps you make better, smoother animations in less time because you don’t have to flip back and forth between frames for comparison and preview it constantly to make sure it’s right.

Shortcomings

You can only save up to 10 color palettes. This seems arbitrary and way too small. I’d like to be able to develop a palette for any particular project I happen to be working on. 10 is way too small and there’s really no excuse for it to be so low a number. I should be able to browse a directory full of xml files that define custom palettes, however many I need. Pickle does come with a few built-in color palettes that are useful for game development: the GameBoy an Atari palettes are most welcome, but they should keep adding more: NES and Commodore 64 perhaps being the most necessary. In time, I’d like to see every classic console palette emulated.

I also found the palette to be very tiny and hard to click on, and wished that it was quite a bit larger.

Wish List

There’s a lot in this section, but don’t let that mislead you into thinking that I don’t like Pickle as-is. Rather, I’m so enthusiastic about it that I can’t stop thinking of ways that I’d improve it if I could. I forwarded these suggestions to their feedback email, so I’ll be thrilled if the developer decides to incorporate any of these ideas.

Altogether, I admire the minimalism of the Pickle interface and the easy learning curve that the constrained interface permits. I wouldn’t like it to lose that beauty by adding too many new features, but I feel that if the following ideas were incorporated into the interface, it would make for just about the perfect pixel art image editor.

Indexed color/Palette swapping. Switching to a different color palette from the selection of saved palettes doesn’t cause the colors in an image you’re currently editing to change. This might be a desired capability, however. Old game consoles used indexed color and palette swaps to good effect, and an easy way to replicate this in Pickle would be awesome. An “indexed color mode” which changes the colors in the current image when a new palette is selected, instantly re-coloring the image with the new palette, would be a great feature.

Easier palette building. It would also be nice if I could define a new custom palette based off of an existing palette (such as “night colors from the NES palette” for example) — by dragging a color swatch (or a range of swatches) from one palette onto a new palette.

Color switching shortcut. A keyboard shortcut to cycle through the colors in the palette to enable rapid switching would be useful. There is a shortcut (x) to switch between the primary and secondary colors, and that is OK for what it is. But when I have a lot of colors in the palette, I want to be able to switch between any of them easily, maybe though CMD+arrow keys or CMD+scroll wheel or something like that. Mousing over to select the color from the palette, then back over to where I want to draw, is slower.

Better color picker. I find the color picker in Pickle to be a step backward from the color picker in Paint.NET. I like when I can control the exact value of RGB or HSV or alpha and see the result as I change it. I find this helps me to select a color that I like fastest. The advanced color picker in Paint.NET is damn good: I really like being able to switch between using the color wheel, RGB/HSV sliders, and the value boxes to find and select the color I want very quickly.

The Paint.NET color picker

The color picker from Paint.NET provides a better interface for rapidly finding and selecting the color I want. I’d like to see something similar in Pickle.

Another great feature to include in a future iteration of the color picker would be a mode that makes it easy to pick colors schemes based on the theory of coloring presented in this tutorial — for each color added to the palette, the color picker could auto-suggest adjacent and complimentary color wheel suggestions, to enable better shading and highlighting, allowing the user to add them to the palette automatically if desired. This would be an AMAZING feature. The awesome web app Color Scheme Designer does it right.

Canvas and imaging Scaling/resizing! Scaling is a must-have feature which is currently missing. My favorite technique with pixel art is to rough in at very low resolution, then resize the image, doubling the resolution of the image, scaling it using Nearest Neighbor scaling so that no anti-aliasing artifacts are introduced, and then refining the details.

I can work extremely quickly when I work this way — i’ll start out at 16×16, and double a few times until I’m at 64×64, or 128×128, and those single pixels in the 16×16 rough version end up doing the work of a 8×8 block of pixels when I’ve scaled the rough image to 128×128, thereby saving me a factor of 64 pixels worth of work for each pixel that I rough in with the right color by the time I get to 128×128 resolution.

Being able to Select All, then CTRL+plus to double the canvas size, and CTRL+SHIFT+plus to double the canvas size while scaling up the image using Nearest Neighbor would be great. And to marquee-select, then CTRL+SHIFT+plus to scale the marquee selection 2x with Nearest Neighbor. (Essentially it’s like working with a large 8×8 brush tool, then switching to a 4×4, 2×2, and 1×1 brush, but it’s quick and easy for me to work this way.)

 Arbitrary rotation: Currently Pickle only can rotate 90 degrees and mirror the image. Arbitrary rotation of the entire image, and pixel selections, would be extremely helpful. Not strictly necessary, as when you are manipulating pixels one at a time, you often want more precise control. But it can come in handy.

How’s that kickstarter doing?

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I’ve backed a few kickstarters over the last couple years… I guess 15 altogether. Since I’m a busy person, I haven’t exactly followed each project closely. I figured it was a good time to review the projects I’ve backed to see how they’ve done.

In alphabetical order:

Aaron Swartz Documentary – The Internet’s Own Boy

Still in production. I funded at the DVD level, and supposedly should be getting my DVD in March 2014.

Beautiful vim Cheat-Sheet

This one was successfully completed, a bit delayed but not too bad.

Big Blue, an underwater adventure game

This sequel to the videogame Ecco The Dolphin failed to achieve funding, raising less than 10% of goal. I guess the team is still trying to find a way to get a game developed somehow.

Chip Maestro – An NES MIDI Synthesizer Cartridge

This project completed successfully, albeit delayed by over a year. It was frustrating to wait so long, but the finished product was good. I didn’t get the feeling that Jarek wasn’t capable of delivering, just that his estimates for how long it would take to do the things he promised were overly optimistic, and the response was larger than he anticipated, which added complications.

Code Hero: A Game That Teaches You To Make Games

This one doesn’t seem to be as well managed as the others, with the main project website having difficulty remaining up, and delays in releasing updates. The primerlabs.com website is currently down. :(

The Jason Scott Documentary Three Pack

In progress. Jason has been doing a good job at keeping followers updated with the project. Jason did an amazing job on his first kickstarter project, Get Lamp, and the self-funded BBS documentary before that, so I’m confident that this project will be completed successfully, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the final results when they’re ready.

Light Table

I consider this one a success. Beta builds have been released, the latest 0.5.0 in August 2013.

Metal Savior

A game developer friend of mine recommended I back this one, but it failed to achieve goal.

Neurodreamer sleep mask

I received my reward (the “trip goggles” that serve as a sort of prototype for the sleep mask) for backing this one a long time ago, and just saw Mitch announce about a week ago that the sleep masks had been produced.

OUYA: A New Kind of Video Game Console

The fundraising effort for Ouya was a huge success. I received my console a few months ago. It’s

Project Maiden – a Zeldalike in reverse

I only backed this one for the minimum level, which gets my name in the credits. I figure if/when the game gets released I’ll buy it… but I see that he’s actually releasing it DRM-free, free to download, forever — a gift to the world. Really amazing, and I think if the game is as good as it looks that I’ll send him a rather large tip as a thank-you.

Looking at the project pages update log, it looks like Kevin & Co. have been working diligently and productively on this project. I’m really looking forward to playing this when it is released. Considering that the team only raised $12000 for this project, the fact that they’re releasing the finished product as a free, no-DRM download is amazing.

SPORTSFRIENDS featuring Johan Sebastian Joust

I backed this project on the strength of BaraBariBall, which I had the opportunity to play at the Cleveland Game Developers booth at Cleveland Ingenuity Fest in 2012. The game was quite playable and fun even then, and so it’s a bit disappointing to have waited this long and still not seen the game officially released yet. The release was supposed happen in October 2013, but has been pushed back. I don’t really care about the other games, I want my Barabariball!

Spriter

Still in progress, but they have been releasing beta builds and making strong progress for some time.

Star Castle 2600

Completed successfully. I received my game cartridge and downloaded the ROM to play on emulator. It’s a VERY difficult game in emulation. I would have liked a slower-paced version of this game.

Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Anita Sarkeesian has been somewhat slower than expected at churning out her series of videos, to date having produced just four videos of the series so far, out of a total of 12 announced (7 of which were made possible by reaching stretch goals). The videos have been about what I expected in terms of quality and content, which is to say pretty good, overall. They have generated a lot of negative response from certain segments of the gamer community, which deserves more analysis than I’m prepared to give here.

The twelve topics announced on the kickstarter page were as follows (the bolded ones have been produced):

  1. The Damsel in Distress (parts 1, 2, and 3)
  2. The Fighting F#@k Toy
  3. The Sexy Sidekick
  4. The Sexy Villainess
  5. The Background Decoration
  6. Voodoo Priestess/Tribal Sorceress
  7. Women as Reward
  8. Mrs. Male Character
  9. Unattractive Equals Evil
  10. Man with Boobs
  11. Positive Female Characters!
  12. Top 10 Most Common Defenses of Sexism in Games

So, despite the four videos being released, it feels like there’s still a long way to go for this project to be completed. It would be nice to see the release schedule sped up, but not at the cost of quality.

Kickstarter… Good? Yeah, I’d say so. YMMV

Over the last year or so, I’ve read and heard about backers regretting backing one project or another because it was poorly managed and failed to deliver once successfully funded. And, to be fair, there have been some high profile projects that raised a lot of money and ended up failing. It seems that there is a danger with overfunded projects succumbing to scope creep, hype, and unrealistic expectations.

It’s definitely worth keeping in mind that fundraising success doesn’t guarantee project success. If you look at kickstarter projects like a pre-order system, I think you’re more likely to be disappointed. If on the other hand you look at kickstarter as an opportunity to give an inventor or creative person a chance at making something cool, it’s a different story. While a failed project is still disappointing, understanding that failure is a possibility and that fundraising success doesn’t guarantee project success, it can put things into proper perspective. Limit your contribution to what you’re comfortable losing, and hope for the best.

At some point I realized that, despite there being many projects out there that seemed interesting and worthy of support, I couldn’t possibly keep up with all of them if I wanted to, so I limited my backing to projects that I really wanted to see make it, and that I felt would deliver rewards that I would enjoy or find useful. I also begged off funding projects if I heard about them after they were already above goal, so as not to contribute to the overfunding leading to unrealistic expectations problem. I figured if the project was successful I could probably go out and buy the product when it became available.

Overall, allowing leniency on time, I’d say that the kickstarters I’ve chosen to back have been mostly successful. With the exception of Code Hero, I haven’t felt like I’ve been burned yet. Delays are disappointing, but understandable, and as long as progress is communicated regularly and honestly, I can live with them, within reason.

PayPal are Jerks

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It’s no secret that PayPal is a favorite target of hatred among web-centric companies, for many reasons, but basically boiling down to customer-unfriendly policies, poor customer service, and abuse of a more-or-less monopoly. PayPal has competitors these days — Google and Amazon most notably. But because PayPal is owned by eBay, and eBay has a commanding marketshare in the online auction market, they can be dicks with almost complete impunity.

Everyone hates PayPal for something. Everyone. Except maybe the founder, the CEO, and the CEO’s mom. So I am not anything special in hating them and using them only grudgingly, and when I absolutely have to.

Over the life of my use of their service, I’ve been the buyer approximately 90% of the time. It’s relatively simple to send money to another PayPal user using PayPal. Bravo. Congratulations to them for figuring that out.

I understand the headaches are even worse when you’re the seller receiving funds at your PayPal account — or more to the point, extracting funds so you can put them into a real bank account. I’ve done a little selling on eBay, and for the most part the process has gotten better over the years, but it’s still almost too much work to list things when you consider the payoff that you get when you actually sell.

Since I recently started selling again, I basically had to connect a bank account to my PayPal account, so I could transfer funds back to myself and get my money. At this point, using my PayPal account to make payments has turned into an unpleasant experience.

Previously, when I’d used PayPal primarily to make payments, I used my credit card to provide the funding source. It was the only account connected to my PayPal account, and it was actually beneficial since using the PayPal account as a proxy for my credit card keeps the credit card number from being exposed to anyone but PayPal. So as a buyer, I kindof liked PayPal for that.

But now, with a bank account connected, PayPal’s strong preference is that I fund my PayPal purchases with funds from my bank account, because doing so avoids giving business to the credit card companies who they regard as competitors, and having to pay merchant fees to the credit card companies, so they basically force me to use my bank account to be the default payment method. Meanwhile, I vastly prefer to use the credit card, because I can never overdraw my credit card, and also because my credit card gives me reward points for spending money through my credit card.

So PayPal and I am at loggerheads. I want one thing, and they want another. And I’m not really a believer in “The customer is always right.” but I am a believer in “You should make your customers happy.” They… are not making me happy.

So… I can override their default setting, but only per transaction, not by setting my default account to the one I prefer. And it turns out, even when I’m really angry and determined to make sure that I always change the funding source, I still somehow manage to fail to do so very frequently. And even when I succeed, it’s several extra steps, which is an inconvenience and reinforces my tendency to feel angry about the whole thing. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to order the payment source priority to my preferred order.

So I wrote to their help, asking them to help me arrange things thus. I got a response fairly quickly, in about an hour, which is pretty impressive, but it wasn’t a helpful answer. Basically they told me that I couldn’t do it, and that if I didn’t want the bank account to be my default payment source, I would have to remove the account. In other words, they don’t care what I want, it works the way they want it to work, and if I don’t like it I don’t have to do business with them. Or I can, but I can just not connect a bank account with my PayPal account, which makes it a one-way proposition and not very useful if I’m trying to receive money.

Well, that sucks.

So, what to do?

Well it occurs to me that I could solve the problem pretty effectively by holding TWO PayPal accounts.

One account, I’d use ONLY for spending money and receiving payments. That account would have my credit card attached to it, so that when I need to make a payment, the credit card comes into play, I get reward points, my credit card number is protected so that only PayPal sees it, and I’m happy.

The other account, I’d connect to my bank account, and use ONLY for receiving transfers from the first account, and then transferring again to my bank account.

I haven’t read the Terms of Service yet, but I expect somewhere in there I’ll find some clause that prevents me from doing this, such as a rule allowing only one account per person, or something, but I expect that there’s still some way around it, such as setting up one account for a business, and another for me, or another business I create. Either way, it’s a lot of extra work, but if I really want to do it, I can.

So, that being the case, then, PayPal, why don’t you stop being jerks and allow me to fund my payments through your service as I prefer?

Reflections on Mortal Kombat

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Mortal Kombat came out in 1992, the year before I graduated from high school. It’s 2013, which means that MK is old enough to drink. Last weekend, I met it at a bar and caught up with it for old time’s sake.

I first saw Mortal Kombat at the local bowling alley in my hometown. The graphics looked impressive, the photograph digitally sampled sprites and rotoscoped animation giving the game a lifelike feel that no other game had. Yet, somehow I felt turned off. I wasn’t really interested in playing it at first. It looked like it was trying to be too hardcore, and the blood and violence felt more like gimmicks to me. Plus, it cost $0.50 to play.

It wasn’t until I went away to college that I first played it. The student center building at my college had a bowling alley in the basement, and there were a few arcade games there, one of which was a Mortal Kombat. There weren’t that many options, and it seemed to get a lot of play from the other guys who hung out there, so I gave it a try. It wasn’t long before I grew very well acquainted with that machine, and I probably dropped over $100 into it by the time I graduated. It was the first videogame that I ever played that I felt was worth two quarters to play.

Mortal Kombat was mega popular in its day, and notorious for its blood and fatality moves. Frequently cited by social critics who tried to call for censorship of games, it was a game parental groups hated, and it rode the publicity to the top. But all that controversy masked that the gameplay was solid, and the game was a lot of fun to play, offering tight balance, considerable depth, and a learning curve that took weeks if not months to master.

I got pretty good at it, but always felt like a second-rate player compared to some of the other guys I played against. I could hold my own against anyone using Scropion, but I secretly felt ashamed, like he was an entry-level character, certainly the first one I tried with any success, with easy to learn moves that did a lot of damage and were easy to land a high percentage of the time, and I felt like my victories were cheaper when I used him, though I never would have admitted it.

I got to like the cheesy Bruce Lee ripoff character, Liu Kang, and, to an extent, Raiden, who seemed to have been ripped off from the cheesier (though great) Big Trouble in Little China —although, due to an unfortunate leg-sweep vulnerability, bug he was a broken character.

But there were two players at my local arcade who were definitely better than me all around — who knew the moves of all the characters, not just three of them. I watched them play, and tried to learn the moves and the timing, and with a lot of practice I developed skill, which was what caused me to respect the game. Mostly I tried to play the single player tournament mode, where I had a decent chance of lasting a few rounds, but when they were around, I’d inevitably have to face their challenge. I got my ass handed to me a lot, but eventually I got good enough with Scorpion that I was pretty evenly matched against anyone.

Still, I never managed to beat the single-player tournament. I got to where I could get up to Goro, occasionally on one credit. But beating Goro was a seriously difficult feat, which I might have managed a handful of times. And then Shang Tsung, seemingly a weaker boss than the underboss, was somehow deceptively able to beat you before you knew what was happening. I had a rule about playing, I would never let myself spend more than $10 at a time, so if I couldn’t do it for that much, I had to walk away.

Last weekend, I was at 16-Bit Bar in Columbus, where they have a lot of great classic arcade games on free play, and I got to give Mortal Kombat another run. It’s been a good 15-16 years since I put my last quarter into it, and at first I couldn’t remember Scorpion’s fatality move. Embarrassingly, I lost a round in the second fight. I continued a lot. But it was on free play mode, and it started coming back to me.

Somehow, this time I managed to beat the single-player tournament. I’m not sure how I managed to do it. Somehow, it didn’t feel as difficult as I remembered — despite having noticeably diminished skills, I just kept trying until I got to the next level. Oddly the game felt slower than I remembered it — probably, I think, because of how later fighting games have gotten progressively faster over the years. Also, I started to notice what worked and what didn’t, and figured out timing and spacing that would enable me to land the powerful attacks that normally get blocked. Instead of going in headstrong and aggressive like my old playing style, I took a more methodical approach and picked apart the AI’s defense. I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt to me like I was able to see the weak points in the AI, and exploit them with predictable certainty.

I actually wondered whether the old game I used to play was set to a higher difficulty level — it’s certainly plausible, although I hope not. The endurance matches took several rematches, and it took a bunch of rematches before I beat Goro. I worked my way up the ladder, and knocked Shang Tsung off the top. I felt elated and accomplished for hours afterward. Taking 20 years to beat a game that has taken your measure is pretty indescribable.

And yeah, when I did it, I screamed “Mortal Kombaaat!!” like in the movie soundtrack, and felt every eye in the bar directed at me for a few seconds before turning back to whatever it was they were doing. Let me tell you, it enhances the experience, even more than you’d think it would.

 

 

If I had a nickel…

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One of the nice things about being an indie game developer is the community of devs who find each other through the internet. On one community that I frequent, I posted an idea a few weeks ago:

Starving Indie Marketing idea: Add a global counter for the total number times the game has been played by anyone, anywhere. Every time the game state reaches “Game Over”, the counter increments.

Then as the game over screen is displayed, the text: “If I had a nickel for every time someone played my game, I would have $” + global.games_played/20 + ” dollars…. In reality, I have $” + revenue ” dollars.”

Then display the IAP screen.

I’ve been wanting to see this tried, but haven’t been ready to set up a game for commercial release, so I just put it out there for anyone to run with it if they wanted.

So, one of the guys did! Jason Artis, of Hurgle Studios, is working on a Sudoku game for Android called Sinister Sudoku. Currently in beta, it will implement my “If I had a nickel” idea. So I’m really looking forward to seeing if it helps draw revenue.

My theory is that by providing immediate and direct information to the player about how well the game is doing, it will help provide the necessary incentive to the player to pay for a game if they enjoy it, to encourage the developer to continue working and release more games. I believe many players justify not paying for games because they rationalize that the game must be a success and must be making the developer all kinds of money, when the reality facing most indie game developers is anything but that. I like the free-to-play because it lets you experience the game to see if it’s worth paying for before you sink any money into it, and I like pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth models because it removes the excuse that many freeloaders use when pirating games that they’re “too expensive” and that they “would pay something, but not that much.”

Hopefully, by showing just how much revenue a game has generated, it will get players to realize how much labor and expense goes into producing a game, and drive home an understanding that it’s not free to produce them, and that good development cannot be sustained by low revenues. As a result, my hope is that those who are able to pay for games will be more likely to pay what they can and what they think the game is worth.

DRM signals early death knell for legacy GameMaker development

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It’s generally known that GameMaker 7 and 8 use a DRM technology called SoftWrap to manage license and product activation. Today, YoYoGames released the following announcement, regarding this technology:

http://yoyogames.com/news/172

Update for GameMaker 7 and 8 Customers: Please Read

We want to inform all GameMaker 7 and 8 customers that Softwrap, our exclusive technology provider for GameMaker 7 and 8, has announced a change to its business. By August 31, it will no longer be possible for GameMaker 7 and 8 customers to install or reactivate their licenses. After August 31, if you are having issues reactivating GameMaker 7 or 8, please register a ticket that includes your Softwrap license code via the YoYo Games Support Center and our agents should be able to help you.

In reaction to this news we would like to help migrate users to GameMaker: Studio. “Studio” is the current version of GameMaker and the only version where we offer regular updates and support. We’re therefore offering customers of GameMaker 7, 8 and 8.1 an upgrade to GameMaker: Studio Standard for only $9.99., which is a $40 saving on the regular price.

To upgrade to GameMaker: Studio Standard, simply click here and enter your Softwrap license number to purchase a license for GameMaker: Studio Standard.

For more information on how to migrate games from GameMaker 7 and 8 to GameMaker: Studio Standard, please read our Wiki entry “Porting GameMaker 7 and GameMaker 8 to GameMaker: Studio.”

We apologize for this inconvenience but hope you find our offer to upgrade to GameMaker: Studio compelling enough to take advantage of it.

Thank you for your continued support of YoYo Games.

The YoYo Games Team

It’s not entirely clear from this what the help YYG plans to offer GM7 and GM8 users will consist of, or how long they’ll continue to offer this help.

A consumer friendly failsafe for the contingency of the DRM license servers going offline should be to unlock the product for all users. Not doing so can present a great inconvenience. If YYG and Softwrap goes out of business, or simply change their policy, that’s it for your GameMaker license. Short of hacking around its product activation, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to use it again.

That’s for a product that you paid for. This changes the nature of purchases into something more akin to a subscription or rental — only, your continued right to access that which you have paid for is contingent upon the continued existence and goodwill of the business entity who provided it to you.

Imagine having a tool chest filled with expensive tools that you paid for, but then finding one day that the chest has become permanently locked as a result of the manufacturer going out of business. That’s what it’s like to use DRM-encumbered tools.

Offering a discounted upgrade path to developers who haven’t yet adopted Studio is better than nothing, but it’s likely that developers who are still on these old versions have not upgraded yet not because of financial reasons, but because of legacy projects that are not easily ported to Studio due to a dependency on now-deprecated functions that are no longer supported in Studio. For any such developers, migrating their codebase from GM7 and 8 to Studio could involve substantial re-engineering.

YYG no longer use SoftWrap DRM with GM:Studio, but does continue to use a DRM solution, and YYG have stated in the past that they will likely never abandon DRM. I disagree with their stance on the matter, but I recognize that it is their decision to make. I continue to recommend that they abandon DRM in the future, and figure out a business model that allows them to do so.

I also encourage them to release a non-DRM encumbered version of GM7 and 8 for existing licensees who wish to continue supporting legacy codebases that they are unable to port to Studio. When a business elects to cease support for a product that they released, the most ethical thing to me would be to release the source code for the product, so that those who wish to continue using it can develop their own patches and updates. Failing that, at the very least they should unlock any DRM that would prevent customers from being able to use what they’ve paid for.

Pretentious Game 3 proves that narrative matters in games

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Tonight I played through a short, but very memorable and thoughtful puzzle platformer, self-deprecatingly entitled, Pretentious Game 3. I have yet to play the first two installments, but shall seek them out forthwith.

What would otherwise be a fairly challenging but mostly nondescript puzzle platformer is elevated to a touching experience though the thoughtful application of narrative and a simple, but emotive piano piece.

The game’s simple mechanics and puzzles are made memorable by the narrative bits, which make literal the metaphors in the prose, imparting greater meaning to both. The simple geometric graphics, with their absolutely abstract nature, invite the player to impart their own life experiences into the game, reliving key moments in your own life, mapping them onto the episode presented in each level.

This is ingenious minimalism, with the beauty of a black and white silent short arthouse film. The effect is magical.

Ninja Baseball Batman: OMG BEST GAME EVER

Best Of, games, reviews
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I was at a local bar called B-Side, which recently installed an arcade full of classic videogames and pinball tables. They have the first Pinball2000 game, Revenge From Mars, and a Star Wars pinball table. They have a good selection of arcade classics from the 80’s and 90’s, from Galaga, Defender and Centipede to Contra and NBA Jam.

But I was absolutely blown away by a game called Ninja Baseball Batman, which I’d never even heard of before. An Irem-produced side-scrolling beat-em-up from the 1990’s, themed with what can only be described as Japanese wackiness taken about as far as it goes. You play a member from a 4-person team of superhero robot ninja baseball players, each with their own statistics and special moves. This game is so chock full of WTF, you initially go “what the heck IS this??!?” but pretty much right away you get into it and go with it. You fight a menagerie of odd robots and monsters made out of junk, vaguely reminiscent of mega man enemies, but (mostly) baseball themed, with some casino-themed monsters and some halloween-themed robots. Nothing makes any sense at all, but that’s the point. Just go with it and have fun. There’s even living hamburger monsters that you can eat for a life bonus after you defeat them. I can’t even describe this game, you have to see it. Fortunately, there’s YouTube:

The gameplay is absolutely fantastic. I beat the entire game on $2.75 — I don’t know if it has an easy mode, but it felt pretty easy, but it was so fun. The game is generous, not a quarter-sucker, takes no cheap shots, and is a pure joy to play. The movesets for each player are extensive, and I couldn’t get over how fluid the fighting system was. It felt similar to the Konami beat-em-up Ninja Turtle and Simpsons Arcade games, but with unmarketable characters with no built-in audience. But it was so incredibly surreal and awesome, I couldn’t help but fall immediately and utterly in love with it.

Having done so, I must evangelize it. It is worth hunting down and playing. Go do so. Now.

Here’s a bonus Angry Video Game Nerd review:

I agree COMPLETELY with every word he says in this video.

Apparently only 43 arcade cabinets were ever imported to North America, making this game ultra-rare. I feel incredibly fortunate to have found this at B-Side.

GameMaker Studio: YYC beta promises performance boosts

development, reviews
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A few days ago, YoYoGames released some new features in the beta channel that will be a part of GameMaker Studio 1.2. I took a few minutes today to test out the new YoYoCompiler.

I tried rebuilding my Radar demo project with the YYC, and found that I was able to get up to 8000 objects with it still running at ~30fps on my workhorse Lenovo Thinkpad T61p, 2GHz Core2 Duo, 8GB RAM, purchased in 2007. When I tried to run 40,000 objects in my radar demo, fps dropped to around 6-7. Presumably on a modern Core i7 CPU, one would expect to achieve much greater performance than this.

Using the old compiler, on this same hardware I was getting about 27-28 fps with just 4000 objects in my Radar demo, so it looks like the new compiler is giving about a 200% performance boost for this project. Not bad!

Of course the exact improvement depends greatly on the implementation details of a specific project.

Ouya Support: needs improvement

development, reviews
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A few weeks ago, my kickstarter Ouya console arrived at my house. I was excited. Since every console is also a dev kit, I wanted to set it up and see if I could build a simple game for it.

I went to the website and tried to download the SDK, but found that I couldn’t. When I clicked the link, I got served an error message.

I sent an email to Ouya support to notify them about the problem, and received an auto response immediately, thanking me for contacting them.

The next day I figured out that I could get the download link to work, by trimming some unnecessary information from the url.

Weeks passed, and I forgot all about the email I had sent them. Today, almost 2 months later, I got a follow-up message. This time, it was a generic response, written like a form letter, advising me to go read an FAQ that might answer my question. Nowhere in the response was there any indication that a human had been involved at any point in reading my email, or generating the responses.

Obviously, I am disappointed by the experience. On the bright side, I figured it out for myself, and it didn’t cost anything. On the negative side, I got the impression that Ouya support is inadequate.

I imagine that they just don’t have the resources to provide higher quality free support for developers at present, and are overwhelmed by their success. This is somewhat to be expected, so I am understanding, but I do hope to see improvement from them in time. Developer support is, obviously, going to be crucial to the success of this fledgling new platform, and I do want to see it succeed and fulfill the potential that I saw in the ideas that they outlined in the original kickstarter pitch video.