Why Blog?

Every other day I think of writing a blog, but when I sit down my mind is not able to decide what topic to touch and moreover why should I talk about it.

In last few months I have had many interesting stuff nudging my brain. Things from Gandhigiri, Super fast prototyping, pattern recognition, moondust the first trance festival of India, cops and corruption, but whenever I sit down to write about this, I feel a complete lack of motivation. My brain struggles to understand why you would be interested in my yapping.

Let’s be honest here, I write blogs for you. I like when you comment on them, when you praise them and even when you shred them into pieces. I like getting your viewpoints as well as giving you mine.



Few days back I was gulping some pints at a friends place and all three of us had very interesting view points on practically every topic we talked on – Democracy, Genetic hard wiring, Joe Stariani etc. The more I gulped the more I realized that generalization is the mother of all stupidity and that there is no way to convince a drunk. :)

Let’s try few generalizations and see how wrong they are:
1. All shows on Sony Television are crap.
2. Females are horrible drivers.
3. Nokia handsets are the best.
4. Shedding clothes is the only was to break into Bollywood.
5. Bollywood is about movies :)

The point that I am getting too is whatever – really; whatever I write here will be agreed upon, disagreed, liked, hated, shouted, screamed, cheered and commented. (of course unless I am stating scientific facts; in which case it holds true; but hey I know people who are ready to go upto the challenge of proving Einstein wrong but that is a whole different story.)

Therefore all I need to do is initiate any topic, give it a view point, add some facts and garnish it with assumptions and I have a juicy post ready. Gee Sumit Generalization!!!! Oops my bad. Consider the above as my recipe for a blog post 

So what makes you blog, what is your view point on blogging and do you think there are things like good blog and bad blog or maybe a good blog post vs. a bad one?

TRANCING AGAIN

Hioooo Guys

First time in India, the mother of all festivals....

MOONDUST: 96 hours of Trance Mahem.....(www.moondust.in)

Watch out for a DETAILED REVIEW here soon

Cheers

UNO Released :)

Would love to hear your comments on the game that i was involved with

http://zone.msn.com/en/uno/default.htm

Absent Without Setting Expectations

It has been a while since I have blogged.

I will start this post with some news:

Our team has released a new MSN Messenger game. UNO!

This game is currently available to all MSN Messenger users in USA and over a period of time will be available in localized languages in other countries as well.

This is what was keeping me extremely busy and also the reason of me being AWSE.

Over this period of time I have developed a new hobby and that is playing Bridge. I always knew about this game but never really bothered to dig deeper into the Zen of bidding and playing and now I am totally addicted. I can play bridge at any given time of the day or night. Well probably not at night.

I am amazed by the amount of research and data available on bidding, and this is only one part of the game. That being said, I would love to talk to people who are avid bridge players and think Bridge is not just sitting N-E-W-S 

I also came across this extremely funny and gamey flash animation

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvdkuyp/flash/see.htm

More excitement:

My dear old and good friend Manjit is moving to Hyderabad (you can find a link to his Blogs on the right hand side links set)

Boy it will be fun, though I am sure he will be quite upset seeing the drastic reduction in my Alcohol drinking capacity.

Some more excitement:

I am traveling to Aravalli Hills to visit the FIRST TRANCE FESTIVAL in India. www.moondust.in. I am really excited about this. You need to see the web site and the number of Artist that will be performing. For those who don’t like this music or are simply lazy this festival is open air and will play music for 80 hours NON-Stop. Boom Shanker.

On that note, I will take off, as it is time to play some Bridge with friends.

Dreaming or Reality

It has been a while!

Here I am in Redmond, Washington, sharing room with Steve Conard.

Yes I sit here all day besides Steve; getting ZERO official work done but yet having the best time of my life.

What I am doing?

Designing Games!! Steve Bleeds Game Design.

After spending something like 3 weeks here I have started to convince myself that I am not abnormal :). I am not alone in this world who goes to buy vegetables and instead buying them just stare at them and think…..is there a game here….

I have spent my last 3 weeks with some of the most creative, intelligent, funny, caring, soulful, friendly and just plain awesome people on the planet.

It has been an overwhelming experience.

My day starts with a cheese sandwich, 5 miles of care free drive to office and then doing nothing else but games for 12 hours straight……by the way it ends with couple of cans of Budweiser.

Today I realized something interesting; Lot of people ask me “I want to be a game designer”, I have a different thought for all of you aspiring game designers and let me try to put it in once sentence. “You don’t want to be game designers, as you are already are game designers, and it’s just that you want to get paid for designing them”.

There is plenty to share, but time is running out right now, day after tomorrow I fly out of here back to Hyderabad…..more enlightened :)

I am on a weeks vaccation, will write a more detailed blog soon.

Till then…happy deisgning.

Freaky Teen Age of Games

Time for some fun;

So some how I always thought India will go through 3 distinct phases in games development.

Birth, Freaky Teen and Adulthood

I was lucky to get involved with it during its Birth phase. Everyone had the real passion and love for games. We were working day in and day out to achieve our dreams. No one had a clue how-why-what but there was no lack of commitment, it was fantastic.


I think today India has reached the Freaky Teen age, everyone and anyone wants to MAKE A GAME; it’s so funny that you can actually entertain yourself by searching and reading about the companies in India doing games development.

It’s hilarious, so let’s have some fun, below are 2 companies which are just fabulous.

First one on the list is:
Bitscape IT Solutions
http://www.bitscapesolutions.com/game-development.htm

After reading it, go hit yourself with a hammer, maybe you will be able to make some sense out of it all.

Second in the list is

7Seas Technologies Limited

Nothing much about this one, people say “I bitch too much”. So I am just keeping quite, only one thing, they want to make cross platform game engine for PC, Xbox 360 and I guess PS3 as well but their DirectX interview test paper has wrong questions ;)

http://www.7seastech.com/WorkCulture.aspx

Read their corporate work culture, funny for an office fitted into a 3 BHK apartment, shhhuuush did I say anything ;)


I have few more names up my sleeves but no point ripping them without any reason, investigations are on.

If you are getting bored till then, think of opening up a game studio ;)

A Designer's Imagination

This blog is actually a part of an email that i sent to my dear friend Nick Chionilos.

You asked whether the Microsoft offer was simply too good to pass up, or did I get frustrated with the limits of the handhelds, well to be frank it was both.

Microsoft’s offer was very good, and it gave me the job profile that I always wanted. The handheld games business is also very interesting from a technology point of view but from games and game design I feel it is still a rat race.

Mobile game mantra is “Make a side scroller for every IP in store”.

It will take sometime for the mobile gaming market to mature and realize people are no longer interested in playing Peters’ Jackson’s King Kong, who is barely a inch in height and couple of pixels in width.

I feel mobile is great platform to make games on, I would love to play the turn based Dungeons and Dragons on it; something that excites my imagination but still keeping the game form simple.

Game designers who presume gamers will do a 4 key combo in time on a mobile device TODAY are either not game designers or they are NOT GAME DESIGNERS.

Well I will be lying if I said the same is not true on console and Pc side as well.

As a game designer I feel the strongest, most adaptive and a highly stable tool a designer has is the imagination of the gamer, and we should never fail to let it wander.

People say Immersive is what makes you believe and I think immersive is what makes you imagine.

The former is forced upon your brain but the later is by choice.

Next Gen consoles and games will make you believe what you see; you will see the most realistic bomb explosion, with millions of physics simulated particles taking out a 100 story building in real time physics controlled mesh deformation. It will *watched* with awn.

Not to my surprise as I already imagined this almost 2 decades back while playing super contra.

But it was my imagination, it was pure, not governed and it was mine.

I live in a world which is not made by me, I follow the rules which were not laid down by me and everything looks so real, you damn right it’s just a next generation game.

But well, I guess today’s games industry has become too big too soon. It’s the biggest entertainment with the deepest pockets, but nevertheless there will be some genuine games with a burning core, that will be made off an on.....

....... and for the rest of the games.

I am happy paying $20 per year on Gamespot and *Watching* all of them.

Show me the books

Lot of my friends and acquaintances often ask me, to name some of the good books on games development and design. I end up answering “Read all of them, but be choosy when it comes to what you learn from them”

Here is the stuff that I have enjoyed reading off late





btw: the beer book takes a place along with others because it helped me design one of my favourtie games (Still under development) Chef Rastogi and Food Stealing Aliens

My Games in Italy

I just got the news.

While working in Paradox i had developed many game out of those following 3 games;

1. Battledust (Lead Programmer)
2. Bomberbabe (Game Designer)
3. Shatranj (Game Designer)

.. are released in Italy, i can't read Italian, but here are the links:

1. http://www.ludonic.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=36

2. http://www.ludonic.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=34

3. http://www.ludonic.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=37

Royalties would have been great but nevertheless cheers to all

Intention gone bad

Have you seen the new State Bank of India’s debit card advertisement on the television?

This is what it wants to say

“Welcome to cash less world, its fantastic even pick pockets need to look for jobs”

This is what it says

“See this hard working, under fed, man; “bholu” ( bholu means simple), he is dying to make his ends meet and can barely have dry bread by the end of the day, but hey viewer you don’t need to worry, you can use our debit card for all your lust”

Somwhere on the screen you can read that the guy who is doing all the hard work is actually an ex-pick pocketer.

Actually the “ad” is very S”ad”.

Such ads are the outcome of forced innovation / forced style of a wanna-b- creative director.

SBI being a non private bank, a government property, it’s hard to imagine of what can be the motive to air such an ad.

Broken and Slow

I FELL

I Broke my knuckle and i broke my wrist.
My typing speed has reduced by 50%, and now i realize the importance of customizing mouse clicks :)

4 weeks to type with both hands again :( hopefully

Will there be an awakening

Why does it happen, that you believe something is right but you still can’t convince yourself to do it. Does your brain repel the discomfort that the right thing can/will cause if you do it? Is that the reason? Or does the reason lie in a deeper Zen?

My wife was forcing me for more than a month to go and watch “Rang de Basanti”, well I was aware of the reviews that were in the air, some of my so called same bandwidth sharing friends also gave some seriously high ratings and I was very sure of what I would be getting to see on the screen.

So, the day came, today and we went for the movie, this was the second time for my wife (now I know why).

This movie moved me, I felt different. This was not the first time something moved me I have had this feeling many a time, while watching seriously good movies, playing seriously good games, listing seriously good music, but this good feeling also had some not so good about it.

I got the message in the movie loud and clear and I know it’s correct. I consider myself above average in connections, deductions and conclusions. My mind can extrapolate, differentiate and statistical figure out problems. But after watching this movie and giving it some serious thought on the drive back home I cannot stop questioning myself as what can I do as an individual for my country. (Or is it really just about my country, my home, my continent or my earth or my universe, or is it just about me?)

Okay seriously, coming back to the country thing, I am not talking about any killing or going against anything and all that.

I am talking about just myself and my country as a place, what can I do about it?

Do you feel guilty (ever) when you throw an empty Pepsi/coke glass on the road? Well I do feel guilty quite often, but then I think “What the hell”, who cares and why should it matter.

If my grandfather reads this he would say, “Yes it matters, if everyone stops doing this we will have a cleaner place”. My mind computes the logic but does not respond to this statement emotionally well.

When one thinks, “hell no one will stop doing this’ - OR – you might think “most of the people will not stop doing this”. Both of these thoughts are correct but the deduction is wrong.

What deduction?

Hell no one will stop doing this - OR - most of the people will not stop doing this, therefore what difference it makes if I just throw the damn glass here.

Will you see the place cleaner if you don’t, will you see the place dirtier if you do?

The answer is we don’t care, its SEP (Somebody else’s problem). Its invisible to us, till the time it becomes so much that you start noticing it and start hating it and then you say “this place stinks man, is desh ka kuch nahi hosakta hai”

I don’t know what the solution is and neither am I looking for someone to give me a solution. Or for that mater if there is a genuine problem for which I need a solution

All I know that the tag line of the Movie “a Generation awakens”.
…..Is true…It’s true for me.

Genius He Is

For last one week I was forcing myself and convincing me to do something which I just did not wanted to.

I am not much of a music person, I can say I love trance music (especially psy-trance) as my brain readily understands the underlying pattern. Besides this genre of music I don’t listen much of anything else. I don’t mind if someone is playing the latest bangra tune or the new hindi remix or even pop, rock, blues, jazz, its just that I don’t go out of my way to groove on these.

Coming back to the point, I had promised my mother and my wife that I will take them to the Jagjit Singh Show. When my wife called up a week back that the tickets are available and whether she should pick on extra for me to tag along, I don’t know why I just agreed to it.

Well glad I did, it was one of the most fantastic times I had in a long time. What a voice. Okay, all of you JS fans must be going “You didn’t knew that”, well I knew he is considered a maestro gazal singer but had never really heard his pieces the way I did today.

Genius, he and his team were on fire, speaking and playing their own raga language. I will be lying if I say that I understood the lyrics. But I could clearly see the rhythm, I was able to find the slightest of pres and posts, the ups and downs, the pattern was beautiful.

Today JS has added one more to his fan list of millions.

Gaming Life

The more and more I think of game design the more I realize how closely it relates to life itself.

Objectives --> Rules --> Obstacles --> Resources --> Actions --> Feedbacks/Results

Objective: Gurus talk about how to live better lives, how to set good targets so that you can achieve them. In Professional life they talk about setting smaller objectives and achieving them instead of the bigger ones where there are higher chances of getting lost. Each smaller objective takes you closer to your bigger one and eventually takes you to your aim.

How about no objective in life? That’s impossible; you will have some objective or the other. Maybe to become a lead programmer for valve or maybe to find the route to the next Rave party, but in either case there will be some objective. Let’s consider the positive case, you know your objectives and you know how all these objective lead to your monster objective. This gives you clarity of thought and focus. You will still need to figure out means to achieve them but you feel confident as you know exactly what you are aiming for.

On the other end, if you have no objective (that’s never true IMHO), or you don’t clearly know what it is - you feel drifting, with nothing to look forward for. (Lazing around in a Goa shack with a beer in hand, also has an objective: Having fun – Its in back of yeah head)

Therefore knowing your objective is very important and Clear Objective is good.

Rules: Everyone’s lives are governed by rules, rules of nature, social rules, rules laid down by self etc. Some rules can be broken and some can’t. When you break a rule to achieve your motive, it gives you instant delight but with a long term insecurity.

How people feel lost in new places, have you ever seen a tourist, holding a notepad and looking hopelessly at a railway station in India, as what to do next? Rules!!! , he has no clue how the rules work. Rules of where to inquire from; rules of where to look for train schedules; rules of how to catch a cab, rules of where to get their tickets from all these make him feel alienated. In this example since the railway system in India is quite different from most of the westerns counterparts, the tourist’s brain is not able to readily match patterns in his head.

Now have you seen a tourist, with a smiling face eating a chicken tikka roll at an Indian Airport? Rules!!!
His mind recognizes the patterns better, he understands the symbols, he understands the rules and he feels in control of the environment. Our mind is continuously recognizing patterns; we try to find order in any chaos. If we are unable to find this order, that thing is useless and the brain rejects it. (Off no interest)

Let’s take a bizarre example.

Imagine yourself meeting a 4 headed alien and being invited to play “HUU-HUU-HUU-BAM-BAM”, you go with him and he puts you in open pink field with purple gates all around you and goes “HUU…aek….HUU duo…HUU…teen”, you are now praying to god of what’s going to happen next.

God is kind! The gate opens and you see 19 aliens coming out with a ball wearing 2 sets of colored clothes. Are you feeling better now? (Does you mind recognize a pattern and gives you a small sub-set to think about)

Not quite; may-be the word BAM-BAM is still making you pray god.

If you build up the story the way you like it, you will notice the more you understand the rules the more comfortable you get.

What if the game was called “MUUAH-MUUAH-HEE-HEE”?? Probably less scary but still alienated.

So knowing rules does not make you feel safe but it does give you a lesser sub-set to worry about, it makes you feel knowledgeable, which is a good feeling. Assuming in our game “HUU-HUU-HUU-BAM-BAM”, the alien friends tells you that the purple gates a permanently locked. This definitely gives you one less thing to worry about.

Being aware of rules is good, learning the rules fast makes you feel knowledgeable and more in control.


Obstacles: Anything that impedes progress; progress in achieving objectives. What kind of obstacles do we get in our lives’?

Dilemmas: Whether to do this or do that?
Human Competition (People): Work front, personal front.
Enforce Rules: You cannot buy booze today as it’s a dry day. (Breaking some rules and achieving objective is always fun, but has its own challenge)
Physical: Damn the Highway No. 6 is jammed; you will need to take the longer route. Or you can’t make it to the final 10 for the finals as you have a sore knee.

The realization that a thing is an obstacle holds true only if you have an objective and the current thing impedes your progress. Otherwise the thing is not an obstacle for you. (Brain is very good in distinguishing things as obstacles or not an obstacle.

Now, which of the following way gives more delight or more feel-good emotion?
Is it?
Achieving your goal with no obstacle at all
Achieving your goal by over coming all the obstacles within the rule set.
Achieving your goal by over coming all the obstacles within and outside the rule set.

Can it be generalized?

My answers are all 3 holds true in different scenarios and it cannot be generalized, but most of the feel-good emotion comes out from point number 2.

(There is another way which results in maximum feel-good emotion – and that is when you create something - will write more on this later)

Why do people give up on something?

The challenge provided by the obstacle is too difficult and the objective you are trying to achieve is not worth it. So you just forget about it and move on to some other objective.

Is it correct to say that the challenge bar can be raised by having the objective more needed? I would say yes, but within a critical limit. After that both the objective and the challenge seems stupid and absurd.

So obstacles are good, in most circumstances, good challenges make achievements feel better.

Resources: Anything that assists or acts as catalyst in achieving objectives or takes you closer to it.

It will be hard to include all kinds of resources available to humans. Various types

Things improving your physical ability.
Things imparting knowledge on subject. (Learning rules). Increases mental ability.
Things improving your social status/standing.

So if on one hand we have obstacles impeding the progress, Resources on the other tries to balance out your ability against the challenges.

Resources are always limited; one can never have an infinite supply of any kind of resource. (No there is no alternative of “give all” in real life)

The existence of resource in itself leads to certain level of challenge or dilemma. Ask yourself when to use the resource. (If money is a resource, should you spend the money now and buy yourself a commodity A or wait for sometime and buy a better commodity B available in time T. If time is a resource, should you spend this time reading this crap or go on and do some real work.)

Resources are useful; it helps you keep up your confidence level and chances for success. If you efficiently utilize the resources it also increases the feel-good emotion.

Actions: Things you do or perform in order to achieve your objective or move closer to your objectives.

Each action comes with a procedure, which explains how to perform that action.
Each action comes with a set of rules, which explains if the action is limited to space, time and/or resource.

Actions are must to achieve your objectives; having a bunch of actions to choose from, choices for actions (Dilemma) always makes you feel safe, even if the action does not lead to your objective.

Feedbacks/Results: For every action performed, their will be a resultant reaction. When you will achieve an objective, it will result in satisfaction-emotion.

Feedbacks are important for us to fathom that we took an action, if there are no feedbacks you will probably try to perform that action again in order to get one. If you don’t get any result or feedback you would probably feel that it was a wasteful action.

Have you ever sent job mails to some pathetic organizations, who don’t respond to your mail? (Not even saying “you pr**k, we don’t want you!”

Action: You start punching in the keys.
Result: you see letters appearing on the screen.

Action: You click browse button to attach you resume.
Result: A window opens for you to locate your document.

Action: you click send button.
Result: Web page shows acknowledgement of message being sent.
Conditional Result 2: A delayed mailed demon mail of failure to deliver message.

At this point you are waiting for a feedback, a result, a reaction.

If you don’t get any response, then the dangerous thing starts to happen. Assumptions (any body a fan of steven segal movie Under siege and the train dialogue “Assumption is the mother of all f*****)

Quick responses, feedbacks are good; it makes you aware of your actions.

Let’s sum it up

1. Clear Objective is good.
2. Being aware of rules is good, learning the rules fast makes you feel knowledgeable and more in control.
3. Obstacles are good, in most circumstances; good challenges make achievements feel better.
4. Resources are useful; it helps you keep up your confidence level and chances for success. If you efficiently utilize the resources it also increases the feel-good emotion.
5. Actions are must to achieve your objectives; varied set of allowed actions makes you feel good.
6. Quick responses, feedbacks are good; it makes you aware of your actions.

Good game are those that uses these points well, so that they fit together in maximizing feel-good emotion.

Games mimic life, they form metaphors.

There is lot one can learn from one and use it in the other.

Sketch

Highly recommended

http://www.isketch.net/

Beware: Highly addictive.