The trailer is here:

You can download it from the App Store here

It has been rejected by Apple 3 times because it “contains content that ridicules public figures”.  While I believe its all in good fun, does anyone in the community have suggestions on how we can change the game so it isn’t objectionable to Apple?

See http://www.sadninja.com/ for more information on the game and the associated short comedy film.

Additional Screenshots:

“We believe the Spielberg game will set a new bar,” … “That team has the right goals and they’re going to try to get intensely game-oriented emotional experiences.”

We’ll see if we can live up to that

I also posted some details at my gameplay prototypes page on a little experiment from awhile back that explored playing a Guitar Hero-like game on a portable touchscreen device by modifying the open source FretsOnFire game. YouTube video of the results embedded below…

For my project, I modified a PC clone of the popular PSP rhythm/puzzle game Lumines to be controlled with the following trackpad, mimicking the iPod clickwheel in software:

The idea that you could play Lumines levels based around your own favorite songs was also something I wanted to explore. Microsoft later implemented this with their version of Lumines, featuring songs from artists like Madonna, now available in the XBox Live Arcade. There was a popular iPod commercial at the time featuring Eminem, so I also created a custom mod or “skin” using graphics from the commercial and looped sections of the audio from the song “Lose Yourself”. The current dropping piece could be moved left and right with counterclockwise/clockwise motion on the trackpad and rotated with pressure on the center “button”. The following is a video of my hacked up game composited within the iPod interface:

Most “rhythm” games work on the premise that the specific beats or melodies in a song statically determine when a player’s actions should occur, such as where to place your feet in DDR or the notes to play in Guitar Hero. However, it looks like there is lot of room for innovation in how players can inject their creativity into a game’s soundtrack. When thinking of how gameplay can change a game’s musical score, I’ve found that player actions usually fall into one of two categories:

1. Actions that Augment the music (as in Rez, where the player is remixing or composing new aspects of the music through gameplay)
2. Actions that Progress the music (as in Lumines or the upcoming SSX:Blur, where player achievements trigger progression in the musical score)

The second category is core to the Lumines game, which you can see in the video when big combos are scored, resulting in changes to the graphics and progression to the next looped section of the song. I experimented a bit with the first category by adding “DJ scratch” functionality, where scratch gestures on the trackpad triggered appropriate record scratching noises, which in theory would allow the player to add his/her own style to the song. It didn’t work too well in Lumines because the scratching motion would annoyingly cause the current dropping piece to move left and right, so I just ended up playing a random scratch noise when rotating the pieces.

It will be interesting to see how these ideas could be further developed into future iPod games. More details on this project (and hopefully other experiments) at my new gameplay prototypes project page.

The games inside displayed some impressive engineering efforts such as Sig Ep’s “Force Pong” game, where you waved your hand over a screen to hit the virtual ball back at your opponent. KDR had a magic carpet ride where you leaned left and right on an actual carpet to control a virtual carpet through a 3D world projected on the wall. You can tell these things were a collaboration between students from a bunch of different disciplines.

This reminded me of the game project I worked with a few others for Phi Kappa Theta’s Magical Kingdom booth at Carnival in 2004 (my final year at CMU):

The Magic Kingdom Monorail Racer challenged the player to race a monorail car around the interior of the booth without running out of fuel. It was unique in that it combined a typical joystick controlled videogame with objects in the physical world – in this case a real RC car. Custom hardware circuits were developed to interface the PC game with the real world to accelerate the car, toggle lights in the booth in response to game events, and sense when the car crossed the finish line. I have posted more technical details, screenshots, and movies on Monorail Racer’s project page.

Below is a video and some pictures of the game in action:

Update (4/5/08): iWork ’08 shipped earlier this year and was my last project at Apple. I worked mostly on improvements to 3D Charts – resolution/hardware independent tile rendering allowing infinite zoom and high quality printing, improved materials selectable in new texture browser, integration with the new spreadsheet app Numbers, and lots of performance improvements under the hood. You can watch an Apple marketing video showing some of the new features here.

It occured to me after watching the Nintendo Revolution trailer that my old undergrad game project from 2002 used an interface very similar to Nintendo’s new controller concept. The *very* unfinished project was a simple 3rd-person action game with sword combat enabled through a controller that tracked your hand motions. The player had the following setup:

Left Hand	Right Hand
Nintendo 64 Controller	P5 Tracking Glove

You would use the analog stick from the N64 controller to control the character’s movement while swinging your right arm with a closed fist to trigger the appropriate attack animations. Its not hard to see the similarities between this setup and Revolution “remote” coupled with the analog stick attachment:

You can download a video of my system in action here or watch below:

If you’re feeling lucky, you can download the rough demo of the system I released a few years back. It actually ended up being pretty intuitive having precise control of the characters movement via the analog stick, while feeling involved with the attacks through the motion of your other hand. You’ll probably notice the lag between the hand gestures and the character’s response – but with some proper tweaking, I think this kind of interface would be a nice change from what’s out there now. And you gotta wonder if this is the kind of gameplay a future Revolution Zelda title might use…

After finally moving over to a good hosting service, I decided to get with the times and use some blogging software to make updating the site easier. You can still access my old homepage here, however, I will be tranferring most of the old content to this site shortly.

Credits: Thanks to Craig Cafaro for the Quake 3 Mario model