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.