And finally the haters and tabloids shut up. About a year to late.
No matter what the man was like personally he gave us a lot of really good music. Even if you didn’t like his music it’s beyond question that a lot of people did.
Let’s make a pact, we’ll try to remember people for what they did, not what the tabloids wrote?
I succumbed.
It might be the designer in me or it might be constant frustration in having a trough of computers that never, ever, work as intended (Windows 7 is pretty good though).
I bought a MacBook Pro 13″. The cheapest kind.
Unboxing, great. Installing, no? No installation needed? Add password to wLan and it’s updated and functioning already? Wow.
Migrating images and itunes library form pc to mac, this has got to cause problems.
iTunes… done. Worked first time. Synced with iPhone without a problem. Oh look, up pops iPhoto and it’s already categorized and sorted my images for me…
Well then, no more fuss I guess. Just a beatuiful responsive laptop to use. Guess this means I can get back to actually working on my computer instead of configuring it continuously…
Shit
Difficulty in games is always a hard balance to find. Since a game is a continuous loop of events you want each iteration to be a little harder to keep engaging the player while being simple and enough to overcome with the training the player got from the previous iteration. Simply put, developers want difficulty to work for everyone and smoothly ramp upwards as the game progresses.
This pacing of difficulty is really hard. And today’s titles mostly do this by hand and play testing, which works great for many titles but becomes increasingly hard as games become more complex. One of my closest friend, a developer for one of Sweden’s largest game development companies, has told me that a few of their titles actually have a form of adaptive difficulty level, but in my opinion the system he explained was very crude.
This is my suggestion, bear in mind that it is purely theoretical and not based on any single product though I will use the shooter genre as my general example:
Stop using levels and number of enemies as difficulty setting. These elements affect the players emotional response to situations and should be used as tools to do that. Nothing else.
Instead, use adaptive AI to make the difficulty adapt to the players performance. This system can be susceptible to breaking if it’s not made to be imperceptible, which is a problem, but not near as big of a problem as pacing issues in current titles.
Take a shooter, make enemies miss ratio increase as players health diminishes, at the same time make enemies hits do less damage. Make sure however that these changes are small, I predict that changes larger then around 10% will be noticeable by players. Change things as much as needed, but strive to make it unnoticeable. Even 10% makes a huge difference. So far so good, this level of adaptability is surely used in titles already.
Next, monitor how often and how much damage a player takes, compare that to the kills or percentage of damage the player does (the percentage where 100% is a kill, this way HP won’t affect the statistic). Use this data to restrict or increase the difficulty decrease. If a player scores a lot of kills and takes a lot of damage but does not die the difficulty might be good. If the player doesn’t do any real damage however the difficulty is probably quite tough.
If monitored for the last 10 to 30 minutes of game time the numbers should give you a general performance for the player, in any situation and however good they get. And if a player tries to fool the system by playing badly it won’t affect the balance for very long, the player that does very low damage for a half an hour might take less damage for a few minutes but the player wont win anything by playing this way and therefore has incentive not to try to cheat the system.
Of course, this adaptive system would also need balancing: how fast should it react? what statistics should be most important? Should it keep track across game sessions? But the point is you’d only have to balance this system once. It could then balance your entire game, from tutorial to boss fights without the developers needing to tweak levels. They could instead spend their time creating interesting situations.
Faster iPhone. That’s scary. Why not let me boost my iPhone CPU Apple? Sure, I might get worse battery life but at least I can use the same apps and play the same games as the iPhone 3GS users.
Revamped MacBook line. Oh yes, it’s better and cheaper. And I’m buying a 13″ MacBook Pro
Snow Leopard. Looks great, not much different just faster. Which is really what we wanted!
iPhone OS 3.0. Still awesome, but I’m a bit irritated with having to wait another 2 weeks to use it.
I redid jesperbylund.com, finally hosting it myself.
It includes my portfolio and blog and was designed to be an interactive information sheet about me and my work.
Since all design is iterative I can't be sure this first version will work as intended. Only testing will tell. But since it's based on cognitive processes it should be an interesting website to most visitors.
Tele2.se was relaunched with a new design in Febuary of 09. The new design was created by Cordovan Digital and implemented into the CMS Reddot by myself, Jakob Neander and Tobias Lindman.
The black top was a redesign of the Business part of the site in the summer of 09. Designed once again by Cordovan Digital.
This was my third year project at the University of Skovde. Together with a team of 18 third and fourth year students we designed and implemented everything from the engine up. We had planned a 8 player cooperative shooter with online ranking.
The game was bought by the University and was intended to be used for PR purposes at LAN parties.
Sadly, the engine development was delayed due to changing demands from the University and in the end lighting and core gameplay progression was never fully implemented.
The game was however a great success as in it's final stages it did support online ranking and up to 8 players cooperating over LAN. The University even hosted a compitition in which new students downloaded the games and ranked for most kills during a week. A price was awarded and over 200 students did compete.
Dreamlords the Reawakening was the follow up on the critical success Dreamlords. Dreamlords never had monetary success and to reboot the brand and still retain the community Lockpick Entertainment created Dreamlords the Reawakening which was something of a cross between a sequel and an extension.
The lore was the same but the game play was not.
Dreamlords the Reawakening was picked up by several publishers and published in three territories. It was commercially successful for about a year before the economic crisis hit us and bankrupted the company.
Dreamlords the Reawakening is still being developed by active community members and former devs.
Dreamlords was the brain child of a group of student from the university of shoved. It was a unique mix of RTS gaming and web based long term strategy.
The game was released to critical success but we never broke even. Dreamlords also lost a number of developers as the profitability shrank at the same time as interest from other game developers grew.
Grim Breed was my second year project at the University of Skovde. It was a RTS game designed to be simplistic but offer a unique UI that let players issue complex orders to troops with ease.
The game was severely hampered by an external pathfinding library that we found out to late was not up to the challenge of guiding such a large number of units. The game was a great success for the members of the team and is to this date one of the most successful game projects to come out of UoS.
I'm just a really tall guy who happens to love to understand what people do and why.
I fell in love with what engages people early on and decided digital entertainment and products were the way of the future.
I work smart, not hard, to find the details that matter. And I love to see people feel my work without really percieving it.
IF you need this knowledge or the effects of it, I'd be happy to share it with you. Follow or contact me:
I design for interaction. No matter what the product or service.
And I make that interaction fun. Interaction and fun are closely connected, it's harder to create fun without interaction, most people just don't know why.
Ease of use and simplicity is a side effect of designing for interaction, and all my work echo this effect.
Download my CV