Oh, and if you’re just interested in a free game, you can download the new Death Rally for free at Remedy’s website.

Meanwhile, back at The Ranch, the even more incomparable Fat Man is gearing up to start offering classes in music composition for games at all levels of expertise. If you’ve got ANY interest in composing music for games (or for composing music at all) then even one session with him could be an incredible boost to your career.

As for me…still making Elemental, which is cool, but I can’t talk about it. Which is poopy. And Elemental is taking up so much of my time that I just don’t feel like coding anything else when I get home. I’m sure this will change though.

Go on, guess.

I’ll wait.

But that’s not all. Oh, no, that’s not all.

I’m employed, and have been for the last two weeks. I’m working for a company called Warped Productions, making (of all things) iPhone games.

It’s currently a temporary gig with no benefits, but I have every intent of proving that they cannot get along without me.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you guys earlier, but I wanted to clear with my bosses how much I can talk about (which boils down to, yes, talk about Warped and talk about our development process but give no details of the games we’re making).

Now, this is not going to affect Inaria one bit – I made absolutely sure of that before I signed on. Inaria will still be published, and it will be published under the “Viridian Games” label. (Label! Tee hee!) But after Inaria is done I won’t be making any more of my own iPhone games while I’m working for Warped.

And here I have to give huge thanks to Ryan Clark, who convinced me to port Inaria to the iPhone and even lent me a Mac Mini so I could do so. If he hadn’t pushed me in this direction, I wouldn’t have gotten this job.

So Ryan, thank you. Bottom of my heart, man.

This update is being guest-written by my friend/graphics programmer/tester, Ryan Clark. I’d tried to solve two problems at once by putting the towns directly on the overworld instead of having separate maps for them. I thought I was Clever Dan…until Ryan got a hold of the new maps. Take it away, Ryan!

Not being familiar with Mega64 and seeing guys exhorting their “indieness” my ETERNAL HATRED of “indieness” exerted itself. I immediately tuned out of the video and started castigating it in the forum.

Yes, really. No, I didn’t realize that it was a parody. Because I hadn’t watched it all the way through.

Needless to say, the entire channel was amused.

So I’m making a public apology to #tigirc. Sorry I was a jackass, guys!

(PS: Here’s another great one:)

Plus, I’ve got several friends with projects that deserve mentioning.

First, Tom Mauer has a brief but fun demo of the game he’s working on, Warriors of the Shining Star. It’s an action-adventure game that controls in a Robotron-esque fashion. You’ll need to have XNA installed and an Xbox 360 wired controller to play it.

Second, Ryan Clark has just released a new milestone version of his CrazyBump utility. What does CrazyBump do? Why, it procedurally generates bumpmaps from artwork, of course! What that means I have no idea, but previous versions of the utility got lots of very positive feedback so if you work with mumpbaps you should probably give it a try.

Third, SteelGolem is starting to get some real progress showing on his action/RPG game, ActionRPG. No demo yet, but if you want to watch his progress you can do so here.

And finally, Sol buzzes me about once a week with some new project he’s done and every time I forget to post about it. He’s got videos posted of some of the stuff he did for the demoscene, crazy photoshop filters (including one that makes your pic look like it’s on a ZX Spectrum), a simple 3D engine with source, as well as his video capture API and his text mode rendering engine, etc, etc, etc. Just poke around, he’s got tons of great stuff.

And if you’re an artist or modeller, check out Ryan’s new utility CrazyBump. It “creates normal maps directly from textures”. Not being an artist I don’t know what that means, but lots of people seem to like it.

This is the story of a cheese.

The story begins, like all great stories, with a road trip. This one was to GenCon 2000 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Only…I didn’t get to go.

Back then I was working at Human Code as a tester. There were two other guys with me in the test department, Nathan Regener and Scott Hazle (whom we called Shazle for short). All three of us were avid gamers. All three of us wanted to go to GenCon. But somebody had to stay behind and do the work.

Guess who that ended up being.

Okay, I’m not bitter. I really couldn’t have afforded to go anyway, so it wasn’t that big a loss. But since our boss was out as well, I ended up spending the week alone, working on a huge project that was already overdue. I ended up working about eighty hours that week and was feeling pretty unappreciated by the time they got back.

So, Tuesday morning, Nathan, Shazle and Jeremy (friend from another office who also went) waltz in. They unload the usual armfuls of posters, programs, book covers, tchotkes, etc. as well as copies of the Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition Player’s Handbook. I’m suitably impressed.

Then they pull out the Package. Now, I am fully aware of the custom of Wisconsin football fans, so I knew exactly what it was: a cheesehead. You know, one of those silly cheese-wedge-shaped hats that Packer fans wear to games. They told me that if I opened the package, I would have to wear it. Being in my right mind, I then refused to open the package until they threatened me with pointy implements.

I was right and wrong at the same time. It had started as a cheesehead. But it had become a magical artifact – a powerstone, in fact, charged with the essence of dozens of writers, game designers, artists, and other cool people.

And now I present the Cheesehead to you.

Pictures of the entire Cheesehead are coming. In the meantime, I was able to scan its various surfaces to bring you the individual signatures. Clicking on a name will give you a closeup of that signature and the story behind it.

The Top:

The Beginning

Richard Le Parmentier
Dave Arneson
Greg Stafford
Ramon Perez
John Kovalic
Neil Barret, Jr.
Tracy Hickman
Peter Woodward

The Curved Side:

Andrew Greenberg
Gary Gygax
Sam Wood
Phil Foglio
Owen Seyler

The Right Side:

Aaron Williams
Unknown Two
Kate Novak
Christian Moore
K.W. Jeter
Katherine Murphy
Todd Lockwood

The Left Side:

Toivo Rovainen
Kaja Foglio
Michael A. Stackpole
Jeff Grubb
Shane Hensley
James Ernest
I’m From Chicago – I Don’t Do Cheese
J. Michael Strazinsky

The Bottom:

Dave Mattingly

People We Didn’t Get To Sign

The Beginning

Nathan: No shit, there we were. GenCon 2000. It was me, Shazle and Jeremy. The decision having been made to get something for Anthony, we embarked on a quest to find the most heinous item we could. I came up with the idea of the classic Wisconsin cheesehead…

Shazle: No, we were at the mall and saw them and thought, “You know, Anthony wouldn’t want one of those. Let’s get one for him.”

Jeremy: What I remember is that we were at the mall and they fucking closed on us and we went to three different restaurants and we ended up eating at this Japanese place and we were leaving and laughing about how Anthony was at home doing all the work and we decided to get him something and Nathan said “cheesehead” and I said cool, but what we needed to do was write “My Stupid Friends Went To GenCon 2000 And All They Got Me Was This Stupid Cheesehead” on it and then we should get signatures from everybody we could. And then I went off and spent the rest of the time hanging with Melanie, so…

Nathan: So me and Shazle did all the work.

Nathan: Everyone met this with a degree of surprise and occasional dismay. But everyone took it well and seemed happy enough to be signing something that wasn’t a picture of themselves or their own art that they’d seen a million times. A lot of them took a little extra time and chatted just because of the break in routine. Even if we don’t have something special to say about them, everyone was great about it. A finer group of people I couldn’t have met.

John Kovalic – Creator of Dork Tower, Wild Life and various other comics.

Nathan: He touched my ass. No, he was very nice. He chuckled a bit and signed the damn cheese.

Tracy Hickman – Fantasy author; co-creator of Dragonlance.

Dave Arneson – Co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons.

Nathan: He was sitting there looking so bored before we got there. Then we said “Sign our cheese!” He laughed a lot and signed it. Then he yelled, “Photo opportunity!” He put it on and danced around while random assorted hangers-on took pictures. It was actually kind of disturbing.

Anthony: I can’t help but think that one of those pictures would make a wonderful companion piece. Hint, hint to our audience!

Ramon Perez – One of the main artists for Palladium.

Nathan: I knew Ramon through another set of friends. He’s Canadian.

Greg Stafford – Creator of the world of Glorantha.

Nathan: He touched my ass.

Richard Le Parmentier – Played Admiral Motti in Star Wars: A New Hope. Told off Darth Vader and got choked – you know the guy.

Shazle: He heard about the cheese prior to us showing up. We had acquired a small reputation by then – and this was when we were only about halfway done. He told us he had never signed a cheese before. He was English, and didn’t know exactly what it was, so we explained it to him. He was familiar with the concept of “rabid football fan”, though.

Peter Woodward – Played Galan on Babylon 5: Crusade.

Nathan: He touched my ass.

Shazle: He was autographing his Babylon 5 card or face shots for ten bucks.

Nathan: We walked up and handed him the cheese and he said, “Oh wow. I’ve never charged for signing a cheese before, I don’t think I should start now.” And he signed it for free.

Neil Barret, Jr. – Writer

Nathan: He was a writer. He did not seem amused. He was kinda cranky. He was the only one.

Shazle: He was at the booth with Michael Stackpole and K.W. Jeter.

Right Side:

K.W. Jeter – Writer.

Nathan: Writer who was at the same booth as Michael Stackpole and Neil Barret, Jr.

Aaron Williams – Creator of Nodwick.

Nathan: Kovalic handed it to him when he was done and he signed it.

Aaron Williams: It was the most challenging surface I’ve had to draw on, I must say. I barely made it out of the faux-swiss divots with my arm intact. I recommend that beginners practice signing styrofoam packaging before they attempt this feat themselves.

Kate Novak – Writer. Co-creator of the Finder’s Stone Trilogy.

Christian Moore – Line designer for Star Trek, and one of the founders of Last Unicorn Games.

Katherine Murphy

Shazle: She’s a vampire LARP player from Milwaukee. She’s 21.

Nathan: Cute girl named Kat who hung out with us for most of the convention.

Unknown 2: We don’t know.

Anthony: But someone out there probably does. Fill us in, please!

Todd Lockwood – One of the conceptual artists for D&D3. Big red dragon on page 124 of PHB.

Shazle: He saw that Sam Wood had already drawn on it and said, “Damn, now I have to draw on it.”

The Curved Side:

Andrew Greenburg – One of the primary writers on Fading Suns.

Nathan: Really nice guy. He’s recognized me at the con for two years running. Had a great time with his devil (marketing guy) last year.

Gary Gygax – Co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons.

Nathan: The man who first brought me to Satan worship…no, he was really nice. He seemed genuinely touched when I thanked him for fifteen years worth of entertainment. And then he genuinely touched my ass.

Sam Wood – Conceptual artist for D&D3.

Shazle: He was actually the first person to start drawing on it.

Phil Foglio – Artist of such great talent and so many things that to try to summarize him is to do a disservice.

Nathan: Laughed very hard.

Owen Seyler – Line Editor and primary designer for the Dune RPG for Last Unicorn Games.

Nathan: I gotta tell the LUG story. Back in ’92-’93, I was at Apple doing tech support and I get a call from these guys having problems with fonts. So I take the call and get their name and what company they’re with – turns out they are with Last Unicorn Games, and I was reading through Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth right when they called. So I started chatting with them and when Heresy came out (this was back when everyone was getting on the CCG bandwagon) I started demoing for them. Then I started playtesting Dune: The CCG for them. So they ended up paying my way into the first GenCon I ever attended. And we’ve been pals ever since. This year, when I got them to sign my copy of the Dune RPG, they signed it “To Nathan: You will be known as Usul among us.” Which I thought was awful damn nice of them.

Toivo Rovainen – Artist and Collator for Cheapass Games.

Kaja Foglio – Phil Foglio’s wife and artist of many Magic cards.

Nathan: She’s…just…cute. I mean, really cute. Actually, they were rooming about four doors down from us our group and theirs all went down on the elevator together.

Shazle: And, of course, Nathan says “Okay, whose hand was that?”

Nathan: Now, I was standing in the back of the elevator. Kaja was at the very front, and she pipes right up, “Oh, that was mine. Sorry.”

Shazle: And Nathan replies, “Oh, I’m not.”

Michael A. Stackpole – Writer extroadinarie.

Nathan: The first person who signed.

Shazle: No, the second. K.W. Jeter was the first. Well, all three of them signed it at once, I guess.

Jeff Grubb – Longtime TSR writer and fantasy author.

Shane Hensley – Creator of Deadlands at Pinnacle Entertainment.

Nathan: He seemed a little surprised when I whipped out the cheese.

James Ernest – Cheapass Games.

Nathan: I spent a bit of time with him hanging out. Really nice. Got to play his new game “Vegas, or Jame Ernest Writes Off Another Trip To Vegas” – that was fun. He signed it “US Government Property” just because he’s funny that way.

I’m From Chicago – I Don’t Do Cheese

Nathan: Cute girl at this booth that sold swords and assorted jewelry. She’s one of the people I’ve hung out with at GenCons past.

Anthony: It’s just reassuring to know that whatever she’s doing right now, it’s not cheese.

J. Michael Strazinsky – Creator of Babylon Five.

Nathan: The first time I went up to him I just shook his hand and said, “Thanks for improving the quality of science fiction as a whole in the last decade.” I apologized then because I didn’t have anything for him to sign. The second time through, he seemed to recognize me, and chuckled when I whipped out the cheese. Then he touched my ass.

The Bottom:

Dave Mattingly – Writer for ezhero.com.

Nathan: Not the baseball player. Just some guy I’ve played some games with.

Anthony: I think that’s Don Mattingly.

Nathan: Shut the hell up.

People we didn’t get to sign it:

Anthony Daniels (C3PO) – Twenty bucks for a signature on anything. If you bought a picture of him for twenty bucks, you got the signature for free.

Chris Druschel (Sysadmin at Wizards of the Coast) – We were never able to get him and the cheese in the same room. We suspect he’s the anti-cheese. We watched him possibly drink himself into a better job.

Johnathan Tweet (Designer for Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition) – Nobody could find him during the entire con. Pity.

But about a year ago AGD lost it sponsor and could no longer hold meetings. Things looked bad for a while, but Austin Game Developers finally managed to respawn as the Austin chapter of the International Game Developers Association. And they just held their first meeting a month ago.

Unfortunately I didn’t know about it, so I missed a talk by one of my favorite programmers, Mike McShaffry. Grrr….

But the grapevine did its job and I heard about this month’s meeting, which would feature a three-person panel talking about how to make video games fun. The panel? Richard Garriott of NC Soft, Harvey Smith of Midway, and Chris Cao of Sony Online Entertainment.

(Yes, yes, I know, go ahead and make your “Sony Online? What the heck do they know about making games fun?” crack.)

The meeting was held at Midway’s Austin studio. Just getting to the front door of Midway is an epic-level challenge, as construction has turned the parking lot into a maze. But once inside I was greeted by a very nice-looking game development space. Clean and well-laid-out, with lots of big conference rooms (one of which sports a beautiful projection TV). Big lounge and kitchen space, big offices. But it doesn’t feel too corporate – it definitely feels like a game studio, with Xbox 360s in practically every room you visit and posters, concept art and toys all over the freakin’ place. The only exception – tiny, tiny cubes. It seems that Midway Austin is growing.

When I arrived the Mingling Period was well under way. I saw several friends of mine whom I hadn’t seen since…well, the last AGD meeting. One of them was the Fat Man; it was great seeing him again. And I discovered that several of my friends whose fate I lamented in one of my video blogs ended up at Midway and seem to be doing just fine.

Then they fed us. The food was good but too spicy for me. I got a free alcoholic beverage and asked for a rum-and-Coke, then I put another can of Coke into it and it was drinkable. (Not trying to slight the bartender; please recall that alcohol doesn’t taste very good to me.)

So there I was, drink in hand, listening to some very good game developers speak. Frankly it was the most fun I’ve had in months, and I’d forgotten how much I missed going to those meetings because I always feel recharged and excited about game development afterwards.

Each person on the panel gave a short presentation on what they thought “fun in games” meant and then the panel took questions from the audience. It was fascinating to see how different these three guys were in their philosophies.

Chris Cao was first. His presentation was shortest and highest-level. His basic message was that you can make fun games by having fun making games and fostering an environment where crazy thinking can happen. He said that one of the imagination-building exercises he used was having every member of his team – no matter what their actual duties – make a board or card game so that they all understood the entire game-making process.

Richard Garriott was next. His presentation could not have been more different than Cao’s; the first slide Richard presented said, “Research, research, research!” Richard’s point was that “fun” is hard to define and a real “lightning in a bottle” quality, so the best thing to do was use rigorous procedures and follow basic rules of software design so that the fun could come out unmarred, if it were there. He talked a lot about things like not obscuring what would have been a fun game by making the actual software too hard to use. He also talked about the tropes that gamers tend to respond well to and understand, like numerology and symbolism.

Harvey Smith was last. His talk was closer to Garriott’s than Cao’s, but he had some unique things to say. He didn’t shy completely away from defining “fun” like Garriott did. Instead he presented a concept by Marc LeBlanc, another designer, called The Eight Kinds of Fun. Harvey seems to definitely subscribe to this philosophy and says that the first step to making games fun is to define which of the eight types you’re going to try to provide for your player.

Once all the presentations were over, they took questions from the audience. Some questions drifted away from the topic but nobody seemed to mind. Richard Garriott got the biggest laugh of the night when he responded to a question about game development funding and return-on-investment by saying, “I made Akalabeth in six weeks after school. The cost of development was zero. It made me about $150,000. That’s effectively an infinite return-on-investment, and somehow it’s all been downhill from there.”

Afterwards we retired to the large conference room with the beautiful projection TV I mentioned earlier to play some Guitar Hero II. The Midway guys had completed the experience by decking the room out with disco balls and strobe lights. It was awesome. Fat challenged me to play a song competitively against him; I accepted, sure that I was going to go down to ignominous defeat. We played “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”, and to my great surprise I kicked his ass even though I’d never played the song before.

And he calls himself a musician…:)

Final note: the official wrap-up of this meeting on the IGDA Austin site is here, and you can download the slides for all three of the presentations from that page. You can also see me if you really really want to; I’m in the third picture. I’m sitting in the front row and wearing a black shirt. I am apparently amusing my friend Jamal Blackwell by doing the hand jive.

His idea was to overlay a tactical strategy game on top of the simple arcade action, in the vein of Archon. The result: SpaceWar Tactics!

Give it a try and leave him some feedback, won’t you?