Pinball Panda: Ultimate Toy Box

So, I made a game at 480x272 (PSP screen size) for a competition. Possibly the only thing that has kept me sane over the last few months. UK Higher Education feels a little fraught at the moment, and I am now on the Dark Side and of management and can't just keep my head down and on my academic work. Anyway, this has been fun to make, for all its flaws, and I still fantasise (as the makers of Game Maker imply) that they might have a runner up so that I could see this running on a PSP. It is either that or get my head around Unity or Flixel. In all my spare time.

You can access it here, should you be so inclined. PC only, and you have to play at 480x272. Controls are Space and Arrow Keys. Esc quits to Windows.

Ninjas

I am really quite pleased with this.

Brunel Talk 2008

Yay -- what is a year between giving a presentation and letting anyone have access to it? Anyway, this is the Brunel Conference Keynote I gave from September 2008. It lacks the video and still clocks in at a 4.5 Mb Pdf, but it does cover some of the ground I am now working on related to videogames as essentially excessive. I was reminded of this when Ian Bogost gave an excellent keynote at DiGRA 2009 about videogames as 'a mess'. I am not sure how much sense it makes as slides alone. Stumbled across as I tried to finish up a presentation I am due to give next Saturday in Dublin. Busy busy busy.

[Oh, and I forgot to mention that this was an attempt at an analysis of where Spore fits in relation to Game Studies -- I am always intrigued about the process of allowing oneself to held to ransom by a quick response to games shortly after release, but so far this seems to have held up well enough.)

Nasty Bugs

I wonder if there is any relationship between the fact that the corridors are now full of returning students and I feel utterly ill? Laptop out and feverish I stumble across a developer page (!?) at a site have never heard of Softpedia.com that has a stack of my little games on it. Strange -- there is even one there that I have never taken out of WIP because it doesn't really work (a garbage sorting game titled Junk). I am well aware of the complete and total lack of control you have when you put things online, and that I have never bothered putting a licence or anything more than a vague copyright sign on my games, but it still feels odd to see things travel without being told. I guess that is what Freeware is.

Meanwhile I have been tinkering with the layout and vocabulary of Pinball Panda. hence the screenshot:



And now to bed with a fever.

Panda Postscript

So I have two more working days before I can switch on my out of office autoreply. And on Friday I taught for the last time for a while, as I have been asked to shift role away from front line teaching at least for a time. I probably won't have responsibility for a whole course again until next September/October, and that makes me a little nervous -- I like teaching, and I like students. On Friday, for example, I took a group of students from never having made a functional bit of interactive software before to having built a basic SHMUP. In about three and a half hours. What's not to like about that job?

Shooters have been a little on my mind lately. I am not a big fan (my reflexes are appropriate for my age, as I might politely say to my own parents), but I have seen Pinball Panda confront three in a row in the GMC Cage Match (a Game Maker Community bit of nonsense where members vote on two games in an online poll, with the winner going on to face a new opponent the next week) and I have a feeling that the poor little thing will lose this time (to I Have the Gun, having survived voting against Ever Scrolling Hue and Shoot 2008). A shame, but it has done well for such a casual game, whose core audience is unlikely to be the same demographic as that of the GMC.

Some random numbers: Plays (from all places) 322+8+27=357. Not bad, I feel, although minute by internet standards. Ratings: 2.7/5 (YoYo :(), 8.2/10 (64 Digits :)). Entries in Online Highscore Table: 42. Entries in Online Highscore deleted because of offensive tags: 2. Times Table Hacked: 1.

Ho ho ho, and happy holidays.

Online Pinball Panda

Pinball Panda continues to be well received, which is nice, and is currently wrestling with Erik Leppen's lovely Shoot 2008 in a Cage Match on the GMC, for those who know about such things. It does suddenly occur to me that it isn't flagged anywhere that the version sitting in the Box.net widget to the right somewhere is offline only, if you want to play the version with online highscores you will need to go to YoYo or 64Digits.

[Edit] I have just uploaded the version with online highscores to the box.net widget. That'll be the zip file rather than an exe. Remember to unzip into one folder and keep the game file in that folder as it uses a DLL to access the magic of the internet.

Panda Reviewed

I can't remember now if I was academically interested in User Generated Content before or after I started toying with Game Maker, but I have always seen it as an amateur pursuit that gives me access (and hopefully insight) into something I see as being more and more significant to commercial games. I have played around with Unreal, toyed with machinima, modded NeverWinter Nights (remade as Lilliput just by scaling -- much fun), and recently messed around inside Spore and now Little Big Planet, but I suppose my little experiments with Game Maker have been the closest thing to really making games. At some point I must write the article that all this is supposed to be informing, of course.

But sometimes it is just nice being inside the community. I missed it when it first came out, but there is a lovely little review of Pinball Panda in a community online magazine called GM Weekly (site here, issue with review here. I really like the concluding line: "a perfect casual game". Therefore am I happy. :)