Better by Design chronicles the adventures of Andrea Rubenstein as she makes her way through the game planning and development program at HAL in Osaka, Japan.
When I was younger I loved the game Master of Magic. I still love it — to the point that I have DosBox installed on my machine solely for the reason of being able to continue playing MoM. So, you can imagine my squee when, several years ago, my mother’s partner told me about a game Stardock was working on that was being heralded as the “spiritual heir” to MOM. That game was Elemental: War of Magic and it was finally released a week ago. I had been following the dev posts almost religiously for six months at that point, constantly agonizing on whether or not to join the beta testing when it opened (I opted for not because of lack of time).
So, after purchasing the game (which took a full week of back and forth with customer service, but that’s a story for another time) I immediately started playing the campaign. The campaign, like almost all campaigns in the history of strategy games, is A Story About A Manly Man Having Adventures With His Manly Friends. Well, whatever, I thought to myself, I didn’t buy the game for the campaign story, and anyway as soon as I build my first city I can balance the rampant manliness with female units. I should note that, customization — especially unit customization — had been a frequent topic on the dev posts and I was so excited that finally, after years of dealing with 99.9% of strategy games being-male only or male-heavy (with the female units being healing and other support and/or sexy sexy danger) I could design female units to my specifications!
luislavena @tekanji That is kind of old and completely uninformed. You can find better results using RubyInstaller and the DevKit: http://bit.ly/bIrSP7
tekanji @luislavena My installation was done with the RubyInstaller and I’ll check out the DevKit, but I have a feeling it won’t help with VC++?
tekanji @luislavena To clarify, Ruby is installed just fine, but I want to extend my C++ programs using Ruby (which I compile using VC++’s compiler)
Which doesn’t solve my problem, but does make me less mad at Ruby (and its developers) and more annoyed at the nebulous group of “People In Charge” who are uninterested in learning from the awesomeness of the OSI model and prefer to let things — like operating systems, compilers, web browsers (seriously, people, WC3 IS YOUR FRIEND) — be made without standards (or by ignoring proposed standards *cough*IE*cough*) that would make them cross compatible. I’m sure there is a Super Serious Reason of Reasonness to explain why this is so (capitalism being sucky and hating cooperation comes to mind), but, seriously, everyone doing things their own way makes it hard for newbs like me to use things we need to learn (like Ruby) in the way we need to use them (game scripting using C++ as a base program).
Oops, this was supposed to be less ranty than my previous post. Sorry.
Anyway. Ultimately, I am the “Joe” from Luis’s Ruby for Windows – Part 1 post who, frustrated with ruby’s inability to work with his version of VC++, ” decides to drop Ruby for another language.”
In my case, I’m going with Lua whose documentation (at least for what I need) is so much more awesome than Ruby’s that I’ve already found a tutorial, made it work, and translated the salient parts into Japanese which I will give to my teachers and classmates once I finish the README.txt for installing Lua itself using the English compiler for Windows. All that’s left is to actually learn Lua and make more tutorials to give to my classmates to help them understand what scripting is and why it is so very awesome. Seriously, my Game Algorithms class needs more materials (it’s heavy on theory and quite lacking in practical application).
Which is not to say that I’m dropping Ruby entirely. I can’t, really, since it’s used more than Lua is here in Japan. I plan on continuing read up on it (my teacher has put some books on order which should come in this week) and, at the very least, write some tutorials for making Ruby programs that run on MRI so that people can get a feel for Ruby syntax even if we can’t use it in our game programs.
Still, it would be nice if Ruby could integrate into C++ and compile under VC++ as easy as Lua did…
I spent wasted the entire day trying to get a simple Ruby extension program in C++ by tryingseveraltutorials (all of which had basically the same unhelpful instructions). SWIG was also recommended in many places, so I tried it out — only to find that it’s not compatible with Ruby 1.9.1 and that the sample .dsp files don’t convert properly in Visual Studio Express 2010. After wasting several hours scouring the internet fruitlessly for solutions for the problem, I finally realized that Ruby hates Windows (and especially VC++) users. Great. Since all my school projects (ie. the reason I want to learn how to embed Ruby in C++) are done using Visual C++, it means I’m basically screwed unless my teachers (none of whom have ever used Ruby) can help me figure out a non-broken way to get things working.
Oh, and, regarding my problem, the path for the config.h specified in the ruby.h is wrong; for reasons I can’t fathom, that is actually intentional architecture. I’m not the only one who finds the choice dubious, either. I was complaining about it on Twitter and 01d55 responded:
@tekanji Just read that bug report thread, not impressed. Include should be <> if they aren’t going to put the files in the same dir.
While I came across this semi-helpful guide for building Ruby 1.9 on Windows, it seems to “fix” the config.h path problem by manually copying it to where it “should” be. Not really a solution I’m comfortable with.
So, here I am 10+ hours after I’ve started, with nothing to show for it. I don’t know Ruby any better, I’m no closer to being able to get anything to compile. I should have spent the day making graphics instead. Sigh.
So, I was reading a post by Deirdra over at the Border House called We Need More Women in Indie Games (I recommend going over there and reading it in full before reading this article). It raises many good questions regarding why women aren’t better represented in the indie game community, since there are no hoops related to “breaking in” and as long as you “make something cool and post it online” you’re in.
In her post, Deirdra discusses some possible barriers: lack of interest (in games and/or in making games as a hobby), trouble getting into STEM fields in general, lack of information/knowledge about indie communities, sexism in said communities, lack of women in said communities, lack of role models due to lack of proper promotion of games made by women. Although I’m not familiar with indie communities in particular, the kinds of barriers that Deirdra describes are pretty common for any male dominated field.
Although the focus of the post is more on identifying problems than proposing solutions, Deirdra’s flippant proposal to “[j]ust write a game. How hard can it be, right?” and the ensuing discussion piqued my interest. Particularly because, as someone whose life has been consumed by learning the ins and outs of game development for the past three years, I have to say that making a game is pretty damn hard. And I think that the complicated process of game development itself can be a barrier to women entering the field. (more…)
For those in the four year game studies program at HAL, the third year is when students are divided into the programming track and the planning track. For those interested in the general curriculum for third year planning students, I’ve detailed my core classes (each with a brief description) in the table provided below.
Class Name
Description
Game Planning I & II
The Game Planning classes cover the ABC’s of planning: from the “big picture” stuff like writing proposals to writing specifications and guidelines to be used by programmers and graphic designers.
Level Design I
The Level Design class focuses on teaching how to put together all of the elements outlined in the proposal and specification documents (such as enemy number, movement style, etc) into a fun to play game/level.
Visual Design
The Visual Design class uses Photoshop and Illustrator to teach design basics that can be applied to proposals and other documents.
Game Algorithms Wii Programming
Game Algorithms and Wii Programming are programming-focused classes.
All third years also take a Business Training course and have an elective class where they can choose between studying for the bi-annual standardized tests or mobile Java (I’ve chosen mobile Java).
Candy Heist a simple whack-a-mole style game I made for my Flash class last term. It’s a little bit buggy and certainly not anything special, but it’s an example of my work that I can easily share online. Enjoy!
The object is to whack as many moles with your hammer as possible. This is accomplished by moving your mouse (represented by a hammer) over to moles when they appear and then whacking them by left-clicking.
Doubtless my fans (all three of you!) have been worried about my 2+ month absence from the interwebs. Since about mid-May I’ve been swamped with work — homework, tests, obligations from my student group, etc — and have had very little time to log in and read Iris’s forums, much less the time to write any posts of substance (or even lack of substance).
Where I’ve been
The big project I completed recently was making a DS game. Like, a real one and not just a “Look at the pretty collision detection!” homework assignment. Well, I consider it to be a completed alpha version. There are a couple bugs and the interface is crappy, but the main game runs properly. It’s a Tower Defense genre game called “Flower Defense”, in which the towers are flowers and the enemies are bugs. I don’t have any screen shots but if I ever burn it onto a ROM I’ll take some shots of it running from my DS. I intend to continue working on it over the next few years because I would like to use it in my portfolio.
I also submitted a “beta” version of an arkanoid game for my DirectX class and have to submit a “finished” version (with scores, sounds, and animations) by Thursday, but it’s actually a lot more rough than my DS game. Of course, the expectations were different and I spent a lot less time on this than I did on my DS. I’ll be glad to get it over with, because it really is crap.
Where I’m going
Today we decided the groups for this year’s Hal Event Week (HEW) project, which for us is to make a DS game. Our class is 32 people, which divided into 6 groups (4 five-people groups and 2 six-people groups). When deciding who would become the leaders, Masuda-sensei (our teacher) asked for volunteers and we ended up with exactly 6 people volunteering, myself included. So, I’m the leader of a five-person team for HEW.
I’m excited because, despite not getting all my first choices, I have a solid group of smart, dependable people and as long as I don’t drop the ball I think we’ll end up with a good end product. I really, really want to place in the competition this year, especially since I didn’t last year. Winning the gold would rock, but I’ll be happy as long as we win something. Of course, if we can make a really good game, we’ll get a chance to enter it in the Tokyo Game Show competition next June, which would just make me die of happiness.
So, what all that means is that my life for the next 6+ months is going to be devoted to working with my team to make the best damned game ever. We have our first official meeting on Wednesday, where I need to have the tentative Coding Guidelines written up as well as a tentative schedule worked out. This, of course, with me still having to finish my DirectX game and Flash game, as well as write up a one page report on the DS game I finished.
In summary, it’s probably going to be a long time before I update again. But I’ll try to keep a presence on the forums and not let e-mails pile up too badly. Wish me luck!
Due to a swine flu scare, school is out at least until Saturday. One would think I would be like, “Sweet, no school!” but no. For the first time in my life I was like, “Nooooooooooooo!”
Not just because school is awesome, but because it meant that I had to reschedule two meetings that were planned this week (one is going to be over MSN, the other at my house). I also can’t do any DS programming while school is closed. And with an extra week to work on a programming assignment that we get marked on, it means that I have to make it THAT MUCH BETTER because I don’t have the excuse of having no time.
Andrea Rubenstein