31 Days Over

31 days over since my second last blog post.

Today was my second day at Microsoft. I have joined in as Program Manger – HED (Home and Entertainment Division).

So its time to start making GAMES.

It has been fabulous 2 days, I have an excellent team and looking forward for everything.

Elevators

One of the quietest times during my entire day is when I am in the elevator.

Elevator People Classification:

People looking at the ceiling of the elevator. These are generally standing in the middle.

People looking at the floor of the elevator. Generally these are people at the back side of the elevator, they know they have a long way to go so why bother.

People looking straight at the *closed* slide doors of the elevator.

Well enough of stupid classifications.

This is the time, where you don’t have anything to do, I mean you have nothing to do (physically), besides looking up, looking down or just a blank stare at the sliding door.

If by chance you are in one of those intelligent elevators, probably a good voice will keep you entertained while the sliding doors open and close on floors. (Something to learn from Hitch Hikers Guide To Galaxy)

Then there are people like me, When I am in a lift/elevator I spend my time looking around for something to read, hmm probably the instruction list of the elevator or some scratched graffiti, if you are in India. (“Raju loves basanti” kind of messages).

I can read the instruction list again and over again every time, I just don’t know why?

I know that this elevator cannot carry more than 600 kilos but I still want to read it again.
I know in case of emergency hit the RED button but I still want to read it again.
I guess I am reading it just for the sake of improving my score. The score of how many instructions can i read completely before my floor arrives.

This scoring system will not make sense for people who are from New York or like cities where you have a zillion stories to go, then probably you can try scoring for number of times you can read the entire instruction list :) .

What else one can do in an elevator

1. Talk on your cell phone.
2. Try to be friendly with your neighbor.
3. Try to read graffiti. (Jai Hind)
4. Try to make graffiti. (Jai Hind)
5. Poke your nose.
6. Try to learn voice over acting by mimicking the intelligent voice.
7. Read instruction list, maximize score and try to get you name in Guinness Book.
8. Solo Brainstorm about another point to add to this list.

Enough of wasting your time, reading this.

But before I end.

Don’t you think that intelligent elevators should add another piece of code to its fuzzy logic.

How many times have you seen a person repeatedly pressing the elevator button, he is trying to think that his tap..tap..tap..tap..tap..tapping the button will make the elevator understand….”Some one really wants me fast, and override everything and reach his floor” That would make an intelligent elevator really intelligent.

If you are a hardcore gamer read on otherwise this is the end of post.

Recently I have played lot of games which uses repeated button tapping as a form of game play.

God of war’s repeated tapping to make your killing move
King Kong’s repeated tapping to make the T-Rex not eat your neck.
Prince of persia’s repeated tapping to over power sword battles.

How about an elevator game ? Multiplayer real life elevator game.

One guy on the 10th floor, elevator on the 5th and the opponent on the ground. Ready, steady go..tap..tap..tap..tappp.ttapp..tapp.

Happy tapping and Cheers till next time.

31 days

31 days to go…..I am all excited, if computers could feel then I am probably feeling just like one fresh installed computer.

I got formatted, re-installed all the software in my brain, properly allocated correct directory structures and all set to test my new graphic card. (duh!)

31 days to go…. For me to start my new job as Program Manager, Microsoft – Games Division, I will be working out at the state of art campus as Gachibowli, Hyderabad.

Its is the largest development center of Microsoft outside of USA.

31 days to go….

I cannot talk much about the nature of my work, as there are bunch of papers stapled to my lip. (NDA) but all I can say I will be making GAMES.

Also wondering if I can get a role in the new upcoming Halo Movie, I was always confident about my acting skills :) , it would be great if I can convince Alex Garland to add a character to his script. Anyways jokes apart, I am really looking forward for my job to start at MS and a new journey into the mysteries of good gameplay.

Other things that i am looking forward for are:

1. Indian Game Developers Guild to start.
2. My sister’s wedding in December.
3. Permanent license plate for my new car that I bought 2 weeks back. (See)
4. My new Nostromo™ SpeedPad n52.
5. Peter Jackson’s King Kong – Both the movie and the game. Demo looked very impressive.
6. Coming weekend’s Italian cooking session with family.

From Vada Pav to Biryaani

This post has been long over due.

I left Paradox Studios and moved to Hyderabad in persue of my hunger to know more, to make more and to love more games.

Last 2 months was lot of reshuffling and re-settling. Its not easy to switch cities, till now I thought only To-Do lists (Note: Plural) on your desktops and approaching demo deadlines where the stressors, but Boy! Moving cities is a big pain in the *$$. Especially if the city you are leaving is Mumbai (THE CITY of India).

This recent experience made me come up with a To-Do List for moving Cities.

Assuming you know your date or month to relocate.

• Finalizing a place to stay in the city you are moving to.
  
  
• Fire up your internet and Google for the city’s websites
  
  
• Keywords – City Name – Cost of living – Rentals – Commuting
  
  
• Nice to have details
  
  
• City Map
  
  
• Bookmark Forum’s on rentals/sales.
  
  
• Telephone number’s of estate agents.
  
  Call up and pretend that you are the richest dude around, make sure you sound as if Bill Gates just applied for a job in your company. This will give you a list and rentals for the best localities around.
  
  Call up another agent and now pretend you just got fired and filed for bankruptcy yesterday. This will either get you nothing or bunch of cold words, in which you should try to figure out the names of the locations and try to remove the (int) part as they are the rental costs.
  
  So now you have yourself a price range.
  
  
• List of friends or friend’s friends and/or family members. (This might give you a good chance of locating few more in your family tree, the ones you have never heard off).
  
  
• List of Hotels/Motels/Guest Houses according to your price range.
  
  
• List out modes of travel to that city from yours.
  
  
• Optional – List of wine shops J
  
  
• Your bank Branches.
  
  
• Your Cooking Gas (LPG) Company’s Dealer.
  
  
• Your Mobile operator Branches.
  
  
• Plan a weekend trip to the city (you might want to extend the stay so have leaves applied for)
  
  
• Reach the city and park your gear at your decided temporary accommodation.
  
  
• Buy all local news papers having “Classified” section for rental ads, start calling, try getting lucky.
  
  
• Hook up with an estate agent, but make sure that you tell him your budget which is 20% less than your actual one. My trick: I ask him to show me two sets of apartments:
  
  
• 1^st is for myself and my budget is X (less than my actual budget).
  
  
• 2^nd for my brother (if you don’t have one, create a fictitious one) which is approx. 10% more than my Budget. This because I am a range guy I like things in brackets. That’s just me.
  
  
• Get lucky – strike the deal –get back home before you leave runs out. I recommend having few days extra, one never knows how much paper work needs to be done and how long it can take.
  
  
• Finalizing the Packing plan
  
  
• This can be quite tricky, depends on how much stuff you have, if you are like me, married without kids and with basic house hold stuff and the company is bearing the relocation cost, I strongly suggest hiring a Mover and Packer agent.
  
  
• Get the list of all the Packers, again I am the brackets guy, inquire the price list from the best to the one with the funniest name, which might sound more like a game studio than a Packer company. Inquire INSURANCE details. Ask details for
  
  
• Packing material that they will be using.
  
  
• Transportation vehicle
  
  
• Packing time
  
  
• Ask them to show you photographs (They generally have one)
  
  
• COST.
  
  
• Hidden cost
  
  
• INSURANCE (Don’t fail ask what if the good needs to be stored for a day or two at the destination city).
  
  
• Pay the booking charges and get all contact information.
  
  
• Finalizing the Travel plan
  
  
• If you already been to the city once for finalizing your apartment, you know how good or bad the last mode of commuting was? If its good book your tickets if not then choose another mode of transport.
  
  
• Confirm the dates to
  
  
• Your current landlord (Notice)
  
  
• Your new landlord (Inquire for availability of keys et al.)
  
  
• Your mover and packer agent.
  
  
• Your maid (Notice period for Mumbai Bai, that’s cool huh!)
  
  
• Your cable operator.
  
  
• Your news paper guy.
  
  
• Your friends and family (This will help them find time for your farewell party)
  
  
• Yourself (you don’t want to forget it yourself in all the stress and anxiety)
  
  
• Request Change of Address to:
  
  
• Your Bank.
  
  
• Your Telephone/Mobile Operator.
  
  
• Your Credit Card agencies.
  
  
• Your Game Developers Magazine Website.
  
  
• Your Tax agents and Insurance Agents.
  
  
• Your Cooking Gas (LPG) Company. (Request for transfer as well)
  
  
• Your internet service provider.
  
  
• You are all set now.
  
  
• Packing, Moving, Reaching and Settling.
  
  
• If you have followed the list above you will be able to ease out Packing, Moving and Reaching.
  
  
• Settling might take a long time.

It has been over a month here and I am still settling in.

Will talk about my New Job is the next post and man! It will be exciting.

True Spirit

26th July 2005 – Mumbai, the financial capital of India was hit by a cyclone and the city witnessed almost 944mm of rainfall in less than 24 hours. The city has suffered serious damage both in life and property; army has been called upon for help. Normalcy will take time.

But what makes me write this blog, it’s the true spirit of Mumbai that the world always talked about and yesterday I witnessed it myself.

A time of disaster in India means extra moneymaking time for the corrupt and taking sadist advantage of the situation, but Mumbai witnessed heroes rise.

The rains was so severe that the Local trains stopped (the heart of Mumbai travel), busses stopped, taxis and auto stopped and most of the personal vehicles lay stranded in more than 10s of kilometers of jam. More than 100 of thousands of people took the roads on foot with more than 4 feet of water.

My office is 32 kilometers from my home and it took me 2 auto rickshaws, 1 taxi ride, 2 truck rides and a 10 km walk to reach home in more than 5 hours. But I consider myself lucky as some had to suffer more.

What failed?

Government failed miserably, I would say India should again go back to the status of under developed country. Mumbai had no disaster management service. People lay stranded for more than 36 hours, 1000s become homeless, 100s died and only thing that one got to hear in media was -

Police blames municipal corporation, municipal corporation blames the fire brigade department, fire brigade department blamed it on the Navy and the cost guard, they in turn blamed it on the failure of the mobile networks.

So you can see this is what we are best at, I am sorry not the people, let me rephrase this

“So you can see this is what are MINISTERS and LEADERS are good at, eating away the money and at time of questioning blame it on each other”. It’s so sad.

What did not fail and will never ever fail?

It’s the people. No one was there except the people and citizens of Mumbai for each other. Shopkeepers served tea and gave free food to the stranded; truck drivers and taxis gave free rides to people, travelers held each other and became support for one another. The true spirit of Mumbai and its people filled up the air.

I will never ever in my life will forget this day, as this day I realized the country is not of its leaders but of its people, a company is not of its bosses but of its employees and instead of me wasting time cursing our corrupt leaders, I should utilize it by helping the needy and praising the Heroes, praising all those unknown faces who came to the rescue with a single motive of serving humanity, god bless them all.

Rains, Dishes and Dilemmas

Rains have started, water level is going up and so is the number of people falling Ill. I am down with fever and a terrible body ache. I am feeling very restless and i have not felt like this in a long time, I am sure it’s the fever and a very dull weather outside that is contributing a lot to this but I guess there is one more thing which in sub conscious state is adding to the misery.

I am stuck with one of the components of the game. Chef Rastogi

I have completed the Level Editor (more or less), its good enough for me to make levels, save them, load them and re-edit them, so that’s good enough for the time being.

When I started the design work for the Restaurant part of the game, in which the player decides what dish he wants to serve to the AIEaters, I landed in a dilemma. The problem is how can a Chunk of Computer Code figure out whether a Dish it just inputted was tasty enough or not.

A Brief on the Dilemma.

In the game dishes can be made up of a finite number of Ingredients (These are fixed).

Ingredients are divided into the following categories (If required these categories can be changed - but will be fixed for the final game)

• Non-Veg
• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Spices and Herbs
• Pulses and Cereals
• Others (Things like salt, Coffee, Milk, oil etc comes here)

So a dish can be made up of

• 3 ingredients from Non-Veg category
• 1 ingredient from vegetable category
• 0 ingredients from fruit category
• 4 ingredients from spices and herbs category
• 1 ingredient from pulses and cereal category
• 2 ingredients from others category

The name of the dish is a Chicken-Ham-Fish Sizzler with Rice and Potatoes

Sounds yummy

What are the various approaches for a Computer controlled entity - AIEater deciding whether it likes this dish or not?

Theory of Taste: There are in all 5 different kinds of taste buds

1. Saltiness
2. Sourness
3. Sweetness
4. Bitterness
5. Umami

My Approach:
Each ingredient has 6 properties

1. Salt Value [0-1-2-3]
2. Sour Value [0-1-2-3]
3. Sweet Value [0-1-2-3]
4. Bitter Value [0-1-2-3]
5. SPICE Value [0-1-2-3] (Note the difference here, not take Umami)
6. Non-Veg or Veg Flag (Boolean)

Each AIEater also has his set of taste values besides his living standards, health, thrill of dinning out etc ,which are not required here)

1. Salt Value [0-1-2-3]
2. Sour Value [0-1-2-3]
3. Sweet Value [0-1-2-3]
4. Bitter Value [0-1-2-3]
5. SPICE Value [0-1-2-3] (Note the difference here, not take Umami)
6. Non-Veg or Veg Flag (Boolean)

Computation of a dish

Ingredient A - 1 2 0 1 3 True
Ingredient B - 1 3 1 1 1 False

if you add the above to make a dish, the dish will have
Dish XYZ - 1 3 1 1 3 True (Higher value is taken; note 1 and 1 does not make the dish (2) twice salty as the proportion of food (Quantity) also increases.

Now AIEater will like this dish if the values match his taste buds (with some variance)

PROBLEM WITH THIS APPROACH:

The taste properties of more than 1 dish can be same, despite of being made up of different ingredients.

Therefore,

Chicken ADD SOYA SAUCE - Taste Good to AI
Chicken ADD ICE-CREAM - ADD Salt - ADD Vinegar - Taste Good to AI

But the later is YUCK!

Phew!

What I am looking for is a more practical and sensible (Making Sense out of a dish) approach for the AIEater to enjoy his food.

PS: AIEater are working on a very simple genetic algorithm (right now)
They are born with a set of taste buds and they evolve their taste buds as the game progress.

Any ideas or random thoughts on this can help me out. Please mail me

Chef Rastogi's Development Progress

A good set of tools is priceless for any game development, it streamlines and eases out the entire process.
So i decided to start off the project by making a level editor for Fight Arena. I am trying to make it as simple as possible for anyone to make good clean levels, place enemies, traps and play test it there and then. The test can be paused, things can be edited at run time and the AI and game codes will update themselves accordingly.

Here is a screenshot of the Chef Builder (Work Under Progress)

(Fullscreen)

Thanks to Amit's Game Programming Pages I also implemented A* algorithm for pathfinding, right now i am using Manhattan distance (Heuristic) for it, this is the simplest of all. Later i will modify it to accomodate moving obsticals and planned huntdowns.

I plan to have a alpha build ready soon, and i will post the executable on the website.

Next Steps for the editor:

1. Movable Objects in the Editor
2. Realtime level updation
3. Power-up/ingredients placements
4. Some UI thingis
5. Documentations

Next Steps for the game:

1. Collecting data on popular dishes and their ingredients.
2. Designing the FSM for the AIEater

So till the next update, cheers and have a nice time

Food for Aliens

Food for thought Aliens

Couple of week’s back I was playing a game called Diner Dash. This - a very simple game with cute art and good sounds really kept me engrossed. I always liked the idea of owning a restaurant. I am a food lover, the shear idea of going out to a restaurant makes my mouth water, besides the love for food a lot of time me and my friends have discussed this idea of opening up a restaurant of our own. Every time the discussion starts seriously and after couple of rounds of beer, we end up blowing up the chef and waiters with a bazooka.

But this time, at my friend’s place we landed up talking about how fun will it be to make a game on restaurant simulation with a prospect of some bad guys to be blown away. We all are die hard fans of Bomberman; I even designed and programmed - Bomberbabe a 3d make over of this game for my company around a year back.

Anyways so we decided that I will start putting up a design document on a game which has both the core fun of bomberman and a reasonably extensive toon restaurant simulation.

Chef Rastogi and The Food Stealing Aliens

Story: Aliens from planet ME-HA-RA invade and they steal all the food from planet earth (Dhuh! Don’t ask why please!). A group of earthlings develop a teleporter that can be used to travel back I forth between Earth and ME-HA-RA.

Mr. Rastogi thinks of a bright idea to use this teleporter. Steal back the food ingredients from the Alien planet and set up a restaurant in Khau-Gali (Slang for Eating Lane).

Yeah I know I am terrible story writer :(

So that’s the story for the time being, if you think that you can help me a bit more to develop this story please email me, though this story has nothing in practical to do with how the game will be played. But its always nice to have a good story.

So, what will be the game play you might ask?

• Buy space for your restaurant at Khau-Gali.
• But tables and chairs to start it all up.
• Invade ME-HA-RA, bomb their place to find hidden food ingredients, example find cheese, buns, and chicken.
• Unlock dishes from the existing menu, example Chicken Cheese Burger.
• Hire Chefs, waiters, bar tenders, valet parkers etc.
• Upgrade restaurant for better tables, chairs, lighting, music, ADD interesting DISHES.
• Buy bomb powers from the local arms shop.
• Control your won money the way you want.
• Get more ingredients to unlock different cuisines.
• Make your own dishes.

And yes competing with other restaurant owners in matching price, variety and quantity.

Who will come and eat food?

AIEaters – Computer controlled characters, they will have their own set of moods and taste buds.

I can keep on going with lots of crazy ideas, but I think its now time to write up a proper document and start planning and coding.

If you love food or if you love bomberman and would like to comment on this please mail me.