Hi, it’s me, Dan Course, Co-founder and Technical Director here at Thought Den. That’s me on left. Hi! This week I’ve been lucky enough to begin mentoring a group of four College lads from St Brendens in Brislington as a part of the Bristol Young Talent Awards.
Our team’s project is to promote Bristol’s BloodHound Project with an app created with the AppFurnace platform (another Bristol thorough bred).
In making the promotional app, the students will receive training in Project Management from Everything Everywhere (T-mobile & Orange), Presentation skills from BBC and Work Attire from Cribbs Causeway.
The awards seem to have hit a national and local nerve. Businesses have offered cash prizes, coverage and one company have put forward a fully paid apprenticeship for one lucky student. I’ll be keeping you updated with how our group’s going over the next 6 months.
Hi, I’m Peter and I’m also a self-taught graphic designer and illustrator from Hungary (you can’t make a joke about that I haven’t heard already, believe me). I just got the opportunity to work here at Thought Den as an intern which I still can’t quite comprehend. I get to do what I love? Aaand a free sandwich? Gotta love it.
How did I end up here?
After getting a diploma in advertising I realized I’m not even interested in it. So I set off to find out what I AM interested in. Somehow I ended up working in an Irish monastery. As this still wasn’t my lifelong dream (surprisingly) I figured out I should do something with the one thing I’ve always really enjoyed doing: drawing. Thanks to a random series of thoughts I ended up in Bristol, where I am also working as a chef!
For my first task at Thought Den today I was asked to create a character that said something about my style, and something a bit about Thought Den:
You can see the result, Todd the thoroughly-nice bear, below some random facts about me:
In case you’re interested, I like freshly squeezed orange juice in the morning, and I like my tea with honey.
One of my biggest dreams just came true recently: I finally got my hands on a nightcap.
Things that inspire me lately: robots, bears, dinosaurs, ninjas, monsters, especially robot bear-ninja-dinosaur monsters.
Big thanks this week to Evoke Marketing Group and Sony Playstation 3 for inviting us to an “exclusive ticketed event at Motion, Bristol”, where they were showcasing some currently un-released Playstation3 titles.
We wheeled up on last Thursday evening and entered into a real gamers electronic wet dream (dangerous, that). The club was kitted out with comfy sofas, a free bar, a DJ and MAHUSSIVE HD screens attached to shiny games consoles, free for anyone to mooch on over and play!
So in we trot, eyes glinting and super ready to be bamboozled by mind-bending challenges mixed with fancy graphics and some of the best games the goliath of Sony could throw at us.
But… while the staff at the event were great ambassadors for gaming, geeing you on with silly chat and mini-competitions, I’m afraid I felt these “unreleased games” would stay better being unreleased for a while.
Playing on the console they were unresponsive, unnatural and failed to make me care about the character. It’s odd; that companies with so much gaming heritage can miss out on a few simple pillars of game design.
While I don’t presume to understand the complexity of design of a PS3 game, it just felt there were a few playful basics missing:
RESPONSIVE CONTROLS
Players don’t want to feel cheated by their character when controls repeatedly don’t react naturally. Play Booty Juggler!
NARRATIVE
Games need to have a reason, we like ones with playful learning. To be honest though. we’ve all played enough First Person Shooters and puzzle games, they now need something better than ‘just shoot baddies’ to keep me playing. Play Artist Rooms!
Last weekend about twenty of Bristol’s finest game designers, developers and associated talents sweated blood, sweat and more sweat (the PMStudio is WARM) at Bristol’s leg of the Explay Game Jam. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the games jam, let me elucidate the rules slightly in a dramatic film style….
24 hours. One theme. Some people. Their mission: make a game.
That’s about it really. No stifling rules on programming language, group size, games mechanics or the like. The games don’t have to be screen based, and the attendees don’t have to be in the games industry. What results is a rather lovely hodge-podge of talents, working styles, crazy ideas and heavy drinking.
Arriving on Friday evening, after a brief round of “I am X, I do Y and my favourite game is Dragon Ball Z” (not originally a game, but the pun doesn’t work otherwise, pedant) we split off into teams. The two Thought Denners in attendance, Technical Director Dan Course and Studio Manager/misc George Rowe were two facets of ‘Team Disco’, a six headed hydra also including sound designer/father Owen, film maker/Mohawk enthusiast Sy, script writer/games designer/sarcasm aficionado James and illustrator/dinosaur impersonator Nat (who also wrote a blog post about this).
Team Disco in full effect: misc, sound, develop, film, program and draw
Ben Rhinehart of Mutant Labs, who are part-organisers of the Explay festival, then proclaimed the Jam’s theme to be ‘mirror’. While we reflected on this (ho-ho) we were also treated to the first of Jam’s amazing meals, a home cooked Indian feast.
Curry + beer = ideas
Much post curry brain storming ensued, with different coloured pens and post it notes in full effect, and after a couple of hours of solid synapse bashing we had whittled our ideas down to a streamlined game of disco themed British Bulldog with Medusa and vampires which happened in a temporal cycle of light and dark, with a dating element that also used Chat Roulette and AR…
We quickly adjourned to the pub before our idea got anymore out of hand, where we discovered another team were working on EXACTLY the same idea (well, it had Medusa in it). What to do?
Saturday dawned, and we discovered James had been up all night with our idea spelled out in scrabble pieces, a common practice in the game script writing paradigm. Fortunately, it turned out that our original idea was an exact anagram of ‘turn-based game that’s a bit like Frogger with bugs, but they have mirrors and are being attacked by an angry kid with a magnifying glass’. Who knew?
The place was starting to look like a morning at Thought Den
With the final idea down on paper, another amazing meal, and late comer George arriving with a mirror ball, the stage was set for some serious game creation action. James and Dan cracked on with creating the game in Unity (which Dan had never used before), while Nat started drawing some lovingly detailed bugs and Owen attempted to create the loudest laser/klaxon noise he possibly could. Film maker Sy decided to document the whole game creation process and managed to create a great five minute snapshot of the event:
What was the resulting product? Well, I think Nat described it very well in her blog post on the day:
You are a bug trying to reach the discarded sandwich, but a kid with a magnifying glass stands between you and the gingham paradise, trying to fry you to a crisp (with an entertaining fizzling sound, thanks Owen) It’s a tactical multiplayer, each turn a player moves forward a small distance and positions their mirror anywhere in a circular radius around them, once all the players have moved you hit a button and the kid with the magnifying glass randomly spawns and sends out a ray of sunshine-death which can either hit a bug directly or bounce off another bug’s mirror and potentially hit a rival. The first to the sandwich wins.
It’s not exactly ready for release, but what do you expect in one day? We had a lot of fun making it! You can play it here: http://us.thoughtden.co.uk/GamesJam/
Some quote highlights from Team Disco:
“But I supplied the graphics to you beautifully?”
“Yes, but what YOU fail to remember is that I am massively incompetent”
“Guys, you know how our game is like Frogger but with bugs? Would anyone be offended if we call it Bugger?” [Bugger was later contracted to Buggr to make it well currentz]
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Our rival teams created some fantastic little games in their time. Team Mirrornaut created ‘Mirrornaut’, a side scrolling 8-bit platformer programmed in C Sharp. It’s a bit like Canabalt but with a button to swap to a mirror image of the level. The character also looks like he has an awesome afro, though I think that is just the Team Disco influence and it’s actually a helmet. The graphics are really cool, as is Nick Dymond’s soundtrack, and the whole game is very polished.
Team ‘Late’, as they were dubbed in the DropBox race to the finish, decided to show off and create two games in the 24 hours. One was an iOS app for two players created in GameSalad, based on reading mirror images of words, and could quite easily have been submitted to the app store at the end and gone on to international acclaim. Their second game was a 3D affair, where you play Jason (of Argonauts fame) who must fend off the deadly gaze of loads of attacking gorgons; it left us both awe-struck and a little scared of David from Echoic’s “Medusa, give me back my fleece!” sound effects (though I don’t think they remember the story of the myth quite correctly!)
The Bristol Game Jam was a fantastic event, and we met a lot of great people who do and love similar things to ourselves. A massive thank you has to go to Debbie Connor and Tomas Rawlings of Aurochs digital for their hard work in organising the Jam, everybody who attended and contributed, Korash, Ben and Ella from Explay, Debbie’s neighbour for the amazing food and Lethal Bizzle for providing the post jam entertainment (seriously).
Here at TDHQ, we’ve been keenly following the progress of a new database with designs on knocking the grand-daddies from the likes of Oracle off the top spot…
Did you know that the databases which most companies rely on today were designed to be stored and accessed on computers with only dinky sized memories? At around 4Kbits, these beasts had less power than your watch and were about the size of your mate’s car (or the other way round for you automotive-sans-chronometer types).
With MongoDB, they addressed what was wrong with the current system of database design and improved it, utilising a modern company’s access to computing power. Eg, HUGE Memory and multiple servers in MANY physical locations
Here’s the benefits,
Easy scalability
“Automatic sharding”, makes it easy to add another server your system. Just install and type this…
High performance
No joins and embedding makes reads and writes fast
High availability
Replicated servers with automatic master failover. So if the main server blows up, pow, another one is “elected” to take over and the service continues
Training Day
We were lucky enough to get tickets to a specialist one-day training conference in shiny London to learn more about its progress. While learning, we heard from The Guardian (a national newspaper), the National Archives (the UK Government archive) and mngr.it (a tech start-up), all who are currently using mongoDb in their applications for both sideline and critical systems. Interestingly, two of them moved to mongoDb because their normal supplier, Oracle, was adding too many 0′s onto the end of their quotes!
Sounds cool, right? A new piece of software that should be able to handle Facebook sized databases, but available to everybody from SMEs through to multinationals corporations. That’s a lot of power!
Thought Den’s official line
So, will Thought Den be using MongoDB in their apps? Well, in time we’ll be trialling it on our own internal apps before moving it into production, but it looks very promising:
PROS
- Faster
- Easy to replicate/manage data across different global cloud data warehouses
- Auto-recovery from other cloud servers if main database fails
- Compatible with Amazon EC2 computing power
- Open Source
- Received lots of investment $$$ to secure its future CONS
- Global Write lock, causes issues
- New technology
- Other new tech is available, like Google’s BigTable.
