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Pollinator — a casual game prototype made with Mobile Processing

Last sunday I sat down and coded a prototype of a casual game in Mobile Processing. I got the idea for it the evening before: You’re a bee who needs to collect as much honey as possible in his hive while at the same time keeping a flower-bed blooming by pollinating… Play it and let me know what your high score is in the comments!

Thinking and making

I’ve been looking for an excuse to get some experience with Processing (particularly the variant suitable for developing mobile stuff) for a while. I also felt I needed to get back into the making part of the field I’ve been thinking about so much lately: Game Design. I agree with Saffer, Webb and others – making is an important part of the design practice, it cannot be replaced by lots of thinking. The things learnt from engaging with the actual stuff things are made of (which in the case of digital games is code) aren’t gained in any other way and very valuable.

Get the game

I’ve uploaded the first version of the game here. You can play it in the emulator in your browser or if your phone runs Java midlets, download the file and play it like you’re supposed to: While out and about. The source code is provided as well, if you feel like looking at it.¹

How to play

You’re the yellow oval. The orange triangle in the top left corner is your hive. Green squares are grass, brown squares are seeds, red squares are flowers and pink squares are pollinated flowers. The field is updated in columns from left to right (indicated by the yellow marker in the bottom). A seed will turn into a flower (in rare cases a pollinated flower). A flower will die, a pollinated flower will die and spread seeds to grass around it. Move your bee with the directional keys, use the centre key to grab nectar from a flower. You can cary a maximum of 100 nectar. Drop your nectar off at the hive (again using the centre key) to up your score. When you first grab nectar from a pollinated flower and subsequently from a normal flower, the latter is pollinated. Try to keep the flower-bed in bloom while at the same time racking up a high-score!

You’ll get 10 nectar from a flower (in bloom or not). Pollinating a flower costs 5 nectar. If you try to take nectar more than once from the same flower, you’ll loose 10 nectar.²

Improvements

Stuff not in here that I might put into a next version (whenever I get around to it):

Animation — I need to get my feet wet with some scripted animation. Thing is I’ve always sucked at this. For now it’s all tile-based stuff.
Better feedback — For instance show the points you earn near the bee and the hive. I think that’ll make the game a lot easier to understand and therefore more fun.
Menus, pause, game over — It’s a prototype, so you get dumped into the action right away. (The game starts on the first key you press.) And there’s no actual game over message, the field just turns green and you’re left to wonder what to do.
Balance — I’m not sure if the game like it stands is balanced right, I will need to play it a lot to figure that out. Also there’s probably a dominant strategy that’ll let you rack up points easily.

The aim was to create a relatively casual game experience that will almost allow you to zone out while playing. I think it is far too twitchy now, so perhaps I really should sit down and do a second version sometime soon.

Mobile Processing

I enjoy working with Mobile Processing. I like the way it allows you to program in a very naive way but if you like structure things in a more sophisticated fashion. It really does allow you to sketch in code, which is exactly what I need. The emphasis on just code also prevents me from fiddling around with animations, graphics and so on (like I would in Flash for instance.) Perhaps the only thing that would be nice is an editor that is a bit more full-featured.³ Perhaps I should grab an external editor next time?

Feedback

If you played the game and liked it (or thought it was too hard, boring or whatever) I’d love to get your feedback in the comments. Anyone else out there prototyping games in Processing? Or using it to teach game design? I’d be very interested to hear about it.

Not that it’s particularly good, I’m an amateur coder at best. [↩]
I’m not sure this is the right kind of negative reinforcement. [↩]
The automatic code formatting refused to work for me, requiring me to spend a bit too much effort on formatting by hand. [↩]

Work with me in Copenhagen (or where-ever)

Now that I’m over three months into my stay in Copenhagen I thought it would be good to post a short update. Here are the facts, bullet-wise (with apologies to Mr. Tufte):

I have been in Copenhagen, Denmark since July 1^st 2007
Until now I have mostly been working on Playyoo, doing interaction and game design
I also presented on Playful IAs at the Euro IA Summit in Barcelona
No later than July 1^st 2008, I will return to Utrecht, the Netherlands
Yes, I intend to continue freelancing when I get back (I officially left Info.nl on October 1^st 2007)
I am available for freelance interaction design gigs that involve social media, mobile technology and/or gaming
You can also invite me to speak at your event or company, particularly on the topic of applying game design principles to the user experience of products and services

Oh and of course, if you happen to be in Copenhagen, don’t hesitate to drop me a line when you feel like going out for some drinks!

Slides and video of my Reboot 9.0 talk

So I’ve been busy uploading stuff. The slides to my Reboot 9.0 talk are up at SlideShare. I uploaded a video recorded by Iskander with his N70 to Vimeo. Finally, since SlideShare still doesn’t import the notes that go with the slides in PowerPoint, I’ve also put up a big PDF (almost 50 MB). Please refer to the notes in the PDF for all the Flickr photo credits too.

Slides

Video

Mobile Social Play @ Reboot 9.0 from Kaeru on Vimeo

Notes

There’s a bit too much um-ing and ah-ing for my tastes. I need to do more practice, practice, practice before these things!
This will be the last time I use Darth Vader as the opening slide, I promise.
It’s too bad I didn’t have more time to go into the examples that go with the last part. Next time: less stage setting, more meat.
Still, I had fun. :-) Thanks again to Thomas for having me, and all the cool people at Reboot for going easy on me.

Reboot 9.0 day 2

(Waiting for my train home to arrive, I finally have the opportunity to post this.)

So with Reboot 9.0 and the after-party done, I think I’ll briefly write up my impressions of the second day.

Stowe Boyd – Good talk as always, offering a new definition of ‘flow’. I guess his attempt to have people open themselves up to the beneficial sides of being intermittently connected was a success.

Marko Ahtisaari – Interesting character with a good story to tell. His free mobile operator for teenagers scheme made a lot of people curious. (Free stuff always does that, it seems.)

Lee Bryant – Very fitting to the theme of human?, a touching story of how former inhabitants of a Bosnian town used social software to reconnect and rebuild the town.

Julian Bleecker – Cool stuff on new ways to interact with computing technology beyond the utilitarian and efficient, into the realm of play.

Dave Winer – An interesting character having a nice conversation with Thomas. I enjoyed his offbeat remarks and dry wit.

Guy Dickinson – Another round of micropresentations, this time with me participating. I stumbled several times. Next time I’ll prepare a custom talk for this. The other presenters were awesome.

Rasmus Fleischer and Magnus Eriksson – Two cool young anarchists with interesting ideas about file sharing and the future of music. Too bad large parts of their presentation were read from a sheet.

Leisa Reichelt – A carefully put together overview of ambient intimacy, what it is and what it’s for. Next step: coming up with design guidelines for these types of ‘tools’.

Matt Webb – Delivered on the expectations raised by his performances previous years. Interesting to see him move into experience design territory and hear his take on it. Very much applicable to my daily work in designing web services.

Dinner and the after-party were great (although it seemed that the reservations scheme had gone awry, they had no place for us at our chosen restaurant). I guess drinking and talking into the night at Vega with a lot of confused locals around was a fitting way to end another great Reboot.

Reboot 9.0 day 1

So here’s a short wrap up of the first day. I must say I’m not disappointed so far. The overall level of the talks is quite high again. Here’s what I attended:

Opening keynote – Nice and conceptual/theoretical. Not sure I agree with all the claims made but it was a good way to kick off the day on a gee whizz way.

Jeremy Keith – Good talk, nice slides, didn’t really deliver on the promise of his proposal though. I would’ve really liked to see him go into the whole idea of life streams further. The hack day challenge sounded cool though.

Stephanie Booth – Very topical for me, being a bilingual blogger and designer often confronted with localisation/multilingual issues.

My own talk – Went reasonably well. I guess half of the room enjoyed and the other half wondered what the f*** I was talking about. Oh well, I had fun.

Ross Mayfield – Could have been much better if it hadn’t been for technical screw-ups and perhaps some tighter pacing by Ross. Still the work he’s doing with social software is great.

Matt Jones – Very pretty presentation, nice topic and Dopplr looks cool. I’m not a frequent flyer but I can see the value in it. Still not quite sure it will improve the consequences of air-travel though.

Nicolas Nova – Came across as the high concept, theoretical twin to my talk. Lots of cool pervasive game examples. Nicolas always boggles my mind.

Jyri Engeström – Cool to see how he’s developed his talks throughout the past Reboots. I guess he delivered on his promise and stayed on the right side of the ‘I’m pushing my product’ line.

The evening program – No micro-presentations (which to be honest was fine by me, being quite exhausted). Good food, nice conversations and plenty of weird generative art, live cinema etc. All good.

On to day 2!

See me talk on mobile social play at Reboot 9.0

I got awesome news the other day: my proposal for a talk at Reboot 9.0 has been accepted. I’m very honoured (and a little nervous) to be presenting at a conference with so many smart attendees. Now to get my act together and create a kick-ass presentation.

If you have anything related to this (pretty broad) topic that you’d want me to address, please do leave a note in the comments.

One thing’s for sure: I’ll try to build upon what has gone before at previous Reboots, such as Ben Cerveny’s mind-blowing overview (MP3) of how play is essentially becoming a new language for us to communicate with and TL Taylor’s great talk on the dynamics of virtual worlds.

What I will be addressing is still slightly unclear to me, but the direction I’m headed is:

Games can be social play, which means they can be used to forge and experiment with social relations in a ‘safe’ way. This happens whether you design for it or not, but can be nurtured.
When games go mobile, the borders of the space and time in which a game is played are blurred. In this way, games bleed over into culture in a gradual way.

Enough to chew on for one talk, I guess. Again, any questions, comments and suggestions are more than welcome. See you all at Reboot 9.0.

Mobile Social Play — my Reboot 9.0 proposal

I’ve just submitted my proposal for a talk at Reboot 9.0. It’s on the three areas I am most fascinated with at the moment: mobile, social software and gaming/play. After attending this great conference twice it’d be really cool to get the opportunity to present there.¹

Take a look at it and let me know what you think², I’d love to get some feedback up-front so I can maybe work that in there. What do you want to know about this topic?

Curious what this might be like? Take a look at the Pecha Kucha I delivered on mobile gaming for a taste of what’s to come.

If it doesn’t work out I can always turn it into a micro presentation.
If you like it, vote it up!

iPhone

There have been so many posts on the iPhone lately that I’ll try not to add to the noise with things that have already been said. Web designer Jeremy Keith and interaction designer Dan Saffer have both tried to gather all the worthwhile posts on the topic, from differing perspectives. I’m sure they’ll make for plenty of (more or less interesting) reading.

My own view is that Apple have proven once again that they’re great at integrating tech that was already out there in a package that offers a pleasing user experience. I’m curious about the multi-touch screen and the apparent gestural and tangible interaction it offers. I’m underwhelmed by their choice to have the device work only with Cingular (which apparently is kind of crap) and am curious if they’ll do the same when it’s introduced on this side of the ocean.

In short: I’ll have to actually use the thing to decide whether it’s as good as it seems; it’ll come down to not just the UI, but also the performance of the GSM, WiFi, camera, and on and on. For now, I’m having fun watching the online demos (at least that’s one thing Apple is very good at).

A few weeks of Jaiku fun

I’ve been playing around with Jaiku for a bit now. I first downloaded the client and gave it a spin a while back (before the site was there). When they launched the site, I reinstalled the client, and after some initial screwing around with my N70, I got it to work. I should note, however that Jaiku has become great fun even if you don’t have a S60 phone.

Thanks to the enthusiastic use of colleagues Tom and Edgar I’ve gotten a taste of what the service would be like if all my (non-techie) friends would be online. Especially Edgar’s regular updates during his vacation in Australia were… interesting. I’m still not sure if I enjoy seeing his “having a cocktail here and there” updates while I’m posting a message that I’m hard at work. Oh well.

I first encountered (the concept of) Jaiku at last year’s Reboot thanks to Jyri’s talk. The talk was cool, and mainly focussed on how IM-like status messages integrated with your phone book would result in something Jyri and friends like to call ‘rich presence’. It seems that (as is so often the case) real use by real users, combined with the introduction of the web front-end is slowly but surely transforming it into something more like a personal presence publishing channel.

I find myself regularly updating my status message, be it through the S60 client, their text messaging interface or the web site. I’ve also hooked up most of the RSS feeds that track my activity on a number of social web services. This might just be my obsessive urge to cache all my (on- and offline) activity somewhere in an effortless way, but I can imagine more people would enjoy using it once tying together the loose ends becomes more intuitive.

I would also like to thank the Jaiku guys for being very helpful, supporting me with all the N70 woes.

For those interested in more, check out the following links:

An article on Jaiku in the Herald Tribune
The Jaiku FAQ
Reboot adept Peter Rukavina’s Jaiku PHP class, Mac OS X GUI for updating your presence and Adium integration script
Mika’s Merkitys-Meaning (the cooles Flickr uploader for S60) is unofficially included in Jaiku

Finally, if you happen to be using the service and would like to hook up, my nick is ‘kaeru’. Let me know yours!

My Mobile Game Directions Pecha Kucha

Yesterday I presented my talk on mobile gaming at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Rotterdam’s Off_Corso. I was programmed as the first speaker, which was exciting (and also allowed me to benefit from the primacy effect, as my girlfriend pointed out). Colleague Iskander was kind enough to record the whole thing on his N70 (fittingly) and I present it here for your enjoyment or aggravation, whichever you prefer (please take note that the talk is in Dutch). The slides I used are over at SlideShare.

I’m still not sure the subject matter was appropriate for the event, considering the majority of speakers were either graphic designers, autonomous artists or architects. The crowd might’ve been a bit underwhelmed by my commercial and pop cultural references. Oh well, I had fun, I guess that’s the most important thing.

Many thanks to Nadine and Bart of Hunk Design for letting me loose on stage. ‘Nuff respect to all the presenters for taking the trouble of preparing a presentation. There were plenty of cool and inspiring ideas on show. Finally, thanks to the creators of all the images I used, you can find the credits in the SlideShare show.

Update: I’ve deleted my YouTube account so here’s an embed of the video on Vimeo: