Open Web Asia was an experience in the duality of the Internet. It was great to meet some new and old friends again. Talk to some of the people on what they were doing. It was of course filled with “Internet” personalities and the bullshit level was tolerable for this type of conference. There was real substance here. In Malaysia, you always get the feeling of us not quite being there yet. We have small portion of really great people surrounded by vast ocean of mediocrity. We tend to want to portray ourself as hip and happening (which is true, from my experience I’ve always found Malaysians more inventive and creative) but it always seems like …like  a flash in the pants..

Old money and older people trying to understand a rapidly changing world of infinite connect-ability with the same dog and pony show thrown into the mix counterpointed with a younger crowd of people born to handphone, twitter et al..

Still, I won a Netbook..now having Ubuntu LTS installed…met some interesting people..and the food was decent..I do wish however that I could meet more developers..

A creation of a new product is daunting challenge for any game developer and it is in pre-production where the basis of most of your ideas are developed. The creation of characters that populate your world are extremely important because not only are they going to be what the player ends up looking at the most often  but also the character becomes the games  mascot and spokesperson.

Over the last week, I have been working with Nicholas to develop some character concepts for Adventure. He did some concepts for me to look at, so that I could start the process of refining our vision of what the characters would be like in Adventure. I thought it would be useful to share some of the ideas I communicated with him explaining what and how to think about the concepts.

Character concept approach

1. In developing character concepts there are usually main characters and supporting characters
2. It is useful to give main characters names which personalizes the character to you the artist and provides an emotional connection. Use this emotional connection to give the character a personality.
3. Focus should be on the main characters first, the the supporting characters.
4. Drawing the main characters in various emotional states are also helpful (i.e. happy, sad, angry). It will also give guidelines on your art style etc and how to draw expressively for characters. Character sheets show these various states, poses are important as they will provide a way to carry the character forward to the future. Conceivably the character will not always be drawn by the same artists, so capturing as much detail of the original conception is extremely important.
5. Thinking about the personalities of the character(s) are also important. Usually this will reflect the default look of the character. Does your character like pizza? etc..
6. Manga novels (i.e. Bleach) are all built around characters concepts and the world. It is also a good source of character stereotypes.
7. There is no harm in imitation so long as you put your own personal touch into it. Character tend to follow archetypes and although critics may be annoyed at the “another young boy/girl exploring an RPG world”, the “hero’s journey” is the basis of 80% of an RPG game.
8. Characters developed should carry over to different mediums (i.e. plastic toys) as well as possible. Characters developed for games as in books are commercial and should be given the proper considerations in their development.

OpenID is being touted as the way forward in allowing the chaos of user identity management to brought to a manageable level. OpenID has been available for a while, but has finally started to build traction primarily because the “big boys” of the Internet have decided to get behind it. Unfortunately, what is being said and the reality are two different things.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft have all setup their own “unique” way for other websites to allow access to their user data with each requiring their own login step (and appropriate logos) to sign in. My initial naive exception was that I could key in a username and password and I would instantly be logged into the website that supported “OpenID”. Sadly that isn’t so, and the mess is left to  you to implement a login system. I won’t go into the theory behind OpenId as that is already well covered by many sites including Google, OpenID itself and by various articles. I will however include a diagram which illustrates the steps behind an login process as it is useful to keep in mind when implementing it.

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I feign ignorance on all things Apple. I may have a Mac Book Pro and  an iPhone , though I may think they are cool nifty gadgets I doubt very much that I am a fanboy. So when Bob came to town, I decided to find out “Who” this Bob was.

The crowd was a mix of entrepreneurs and corporate types. You can tell the difference, the corporate types  were dressed in their suits while the entrepreneurs were in jeans. Well most of them, except the entrepreneurs who have made it. Mingling not being my strong point, I sat down and proceeded to work out some outstanding bugs in the current build of Adventure. After the traditional introductions came Bob’s talk.

So Bob’s talk broke down into:

1. Don’t have to be the first or the best
2. Change the rules
3. Give an obvious benefit to your customers
4. Keep innovating and compete against yourself

Fairly general commentary, fairly useful…You know in the “Hmmmmm……” kinda way. What was interesting was the mix of people and the general undercurrent about how risk adverse local investors are. I think it’s a pretty regional feeling and the only people willing to put up risk capital are governments. However with Malaysia budget deficient, I doubt we will see less “money” being thrown out.

Private investors only want to “cash in” after you have made some money and “want to expand”. Still I can’t say that is the worse problem here in Malaysia. I think just finding capable people to work with is far harder especially complementary skillsets. I’m still looking for a Art director type person, a financial person and a marketing person in no particular order.

I leave you with iPhone Bob:

For the past week or so, I have been investigating various Remoting solutions that I can implement for the Flex Games I have currently developing. The basic features that I am looking for were:

• Translation of complex data types (being able to map classes on the client and matched on the server)
• PHP supported
• Compressed data format
• Transparent RPC mapping

I initially started with AMFPHP but switched to ZendAMF. AMFPHP seems to be falling behind in support with the last release in 2008 which is decades in Internet time. Zend AMF is also backed by Adobe which is a good sign. On the side note, iPhone integration looks pretty good to with a Cocoa AMF. I would have preferred C++ but I guess it will do in  pinch for now. I will be testing that next week or so.

Zend seems a bit fat, because you have to also include the Zend Framework as well. That’s something I’m going to have to figure out to see if it can add value to services I am writing.

Game developers are fairly practical in their implementations. The most practical of Design Patterns that every game developer should understand intimately are:

• Singleton – Singletons are needed but often abused as a design pattern. A singleton is basically a class with one instance. Most prior singletons were not thread-safe but with multi-processor architectures of hardware, this should be a consideration. Singletons are common used for creating loggers, database/networking access objects.
• Factories – Factories are usually coupled with singletons. Factories are often found in resource/assset managers allow  managed assets to be created. The role of a factory class is to “create objects” based on a template with specific functionality or generic
• Model-View-Controller – The Model-View-Controller is a way to separate (but not necessarily simply) functionality of complex systems. A Game Engine could use the MVC design pattern to sort out the various components into logical blocks of code.  MVC is used extensively in Flex development to break up monolithic applications into manageable portions. The Model contains all data used by the application. The View is what the user sees and the Controller is Application core, responding to events from the View and coordinating resources from the Model.

Right now there aren’t  any good open-source development environments for Flex. Everybody seems to be using Flex Builder, which you have to pay for. For me, I like things free especially since my primary web development platform is Ubuntu 9.10. I did find AXDT which, which I feel shows the greatest promise in evolving as a free alternative to Flex Builder. Plus it helps that the primary target seems to be Ubuntu.

For more information, you can go to: www.axdt.org. I have got it working with the latest Flex 3.5. I am having some trouble with Flex 4 though but that’s still in Beta. Primarily I wanted something to allow me to edit mxml and Actionscript files not caring much about layouts. I have also been able to get it working with AMFPHP. So far it has done most of what I want.

I finally had enough time to look at developing on the Android platform and got my test integration of C++ code with the Android NDK working. The biggest hurdle proved to be familiarity with the Android development environment itself. The following tips apply to NDK 1.6r1:

1) You DO NOT have to have surround your functions with a various extern “C”‘s. Unlike what people are saying out there about having to do it you do not have to do it.

2) Check the names of the class to make sure the packages match your JNI interface. (i.e. if your class with the native interfaces are com.examples.HelloWorld…..your JNI class should be Java_com_examples_HelloWorld_<class>

3) Check your android.xml file for the proper package export. When you refactor/rename things in the Eclipse editor it will not update the package export. This will result in Android not being able to find your JNI interface and complain in logcat.

As of 1.6r1, the NDK is something still to play around with and not really ready for production development. That seems to be way the Google Android teams seems to like to run things. Although the OpenGL ES 1.0 libs are available, other supporting libraries are not (i.e. those to load png or jpg’s for texture. The audio libraries). My initial experiments on writing xPhone with Android has a initial platform would prove daunting to say the least.

I was checking the Google Android site and noticed that the Native Development Kit release 1 is out. The exciting part of this release, is that now we can natively write games in C++ with access to the OpenGL ES 1.1 api. This should mean that we can start looking at developing proper games on this platform. This will also mean, that I will need to figure out how to get xPhone to start compiling against the NDK. Unlike my research into Windows Mobile and it’s broken Graphics API support at this time,  this means working with a 3D API versus having to support Direct Draw.

Still need to poke around it more. The bad part will probably be working via Eclipse to get things done. I already have to use 2 other IDE’s (Visual Studio and Xcode) and so a third is fairly unproductive.

I was working on integrating tinyxm into the current xPhone build to handle configuration files and was having a heck load of problems. It seems that that Windows Mobile doesn’t like it when you don’t specify the UNICODE/_UNCODE predefines and use other data types. Understandably a mobile device should Unicode ONLY targets because phones need to be able to support multiple language out of the box. Still, it didn’t help with me having to play around with compiler settings until I was blue in the face.

That’s part of challenge of cross platform development is that everything is different on different platforms even down to the way text works.