How to be a games designer

There's a variety of different ways of learning something. Some people are visual learners, others auditory and a few tactile learners. There's also different ways of telling people things. You can use demonstrations, proofs, rhetorical persuasion or rules of thumb.

Rules of thumb are useful as a short-hand guide to life, but not necessarily convincing. I could tell you that the best hands only strikes fighting style is boxing, hands and feet striking style is Muay Thai and ground fighting style is Brazilian jiu-jitsu. To demonstrate that, you and I would both have to engaged in years of martial arts training, possibly in differing styles, and then make a qualitative judgement which we would not necessarily agree on. Luckily, I'm able to give you a second hand set of rules of thumb from John Will, saving us both a lot of time and effort.

My rule of thumb for games design, stolen shameless from David Sirlin, is to study games that have longevity. Years of playing games is not necessary: a comprehensive and well-written survey of how to play these games is probably sufficient to give you an overview.

The games David recommends, I've already quoted once today: Chess, Go, Poker, Starcraft and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. I'd add NethackSangband and Magic: the Gathering to that list.

I'd like to add an RPG as well - perhaps Call of Cthulhu. Unfortunately Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller, Runequest, GURPS etc. having changed and expanded their core rule sets too often to qualify (Nethack and Magic: the Gathering have just tweaked theirs).

The other rule of thumb, of course, is to design games and play them. Constantly.

As for being a good blog writer and amateur journalist, I'm still working on that. I've yet to see a good set of rules of thumb for this. Give me another ten years and I'll be able to write some.

iPhone native development

The iPhone didn't feature extensively in the recent poll on roguelike portable platforms - but you may be interested in this nonetheless.

The Register developer has a great write up by David Jewell on the current state of play for developing native applications on the iPhone. I recommend you read it, then write a main-iph.c for Angband: something the world sorely needs.

How to make the DVD drive on a Intel MacBook DVD region free

I've finally found the Achilles heal of using an Intel Apple MacBook. Note that I never noticed this with my Intel Apple MacBook Pro, but we had a region free DVD player in the house which cost approximately £20. No more however.

I've just emigrated from Europe, which is Region 2, to Australia, which is Region 4. I do a lot of DVD purchases via the States using Amazon: the States is Region 1.

Apple lets me change the region code on the DVD player 4 times. That's 4 times total. So for example, I can watch one region 1 DVD player, then one region 2, then one region 4, then another region 1. And then no more DVDs on this machine ever, except for whichever region I end up selecting last. That means approximately 2/3rds of my DVD collection will be unavailable to me.

Now, the savvy amongst you will suggest using a region free software DVD player like VLC. Unfortunately, on the Intel Macs this doesn't work. The Matshita DVD player itself compares the DVD region of the disc to the DVD region held in the firmware, and prevents any access to the disc if the regions differ. This means any access, including at a data layer - you just end up with read/write errors using any of the suggested workarounds you may have found on various Mac forums.

The only option is to download a hacked firmware downgrade that changes the DVD player from an RPC-2 player to an RPC-1 player. This of course immediately means the hardware is unsupported - and you risk the OS/X software updater overwriting the downgraded firmware, potentially cause system instability, brick the DVD drive etc.

Here's how you do it:

1. Download the DVD info utility from MacUpdate here.
2. Run DVD info. You'll get output of the form shown at the end of the article.
   
3. Check this thread and this thread on RPC1.org to see if you've lucked out, and a hacked firmware is available for your particular make and model of DVD player.
   
4. If it is, download the firmware and install it.
5. If it isn't, you need to follow a slightly different process. This only works if you have DVDs of 4 or less regions.
6. Take all the DVDs of your current drive firmware and rip them using Handbrake, DVD Backup or another DVD ripping software. You'll probably want to DivX or Xvid encode them to reduce disk utilisation.
7. Locally back them up to your Buffalo TeraServer.
8. Remotely back them up to isohunt.com using Vuze or another bittorrent client. By doing this you ensure the files are available later - effectively an offsite disaster recovery solution.
9. Repeat steps 6-8 for the remaining three regions worth of DVDs that you have.
   
10. File a suit with the World Trade Organisation against Matshita, Apple, the DVD Forum and other suitable bodies for violating the WTO agreement against region based restraint of trade. The Australian and New Zealand governments may support you, as may Antigua.
    

Thanks for your patience. This is a public community service announcement. Please note that I strongly support copyright and believe a 14 year copyright term should be the maximum provided for in law. Please ensure before proceeding with any actions outlined here that you are covered by the fair use conventions of your relevant jurisdiction and you are not circumventing a copyright protection mechanism.

DVD Info X v1.0.2, by xvi ([email protected])

WARNING --- DVD Info X will only list DVD drives that have some WRITE
capabilities, like combos, DVD-R, DVD-RW, etc...
DVD-ROM-only drives will NOT be listed.
WARNING --- You also must eject any inserted medium to list the drive.

Vendor: MATSHITA
Model: CD-RW CW-8221
Firmware: GA0J
RPC-2 (region locked)
State is SET
4 vendor resets left
4 region changes left
Region 2

Getting Unangband/Angband from SVN and Compiling on Windows

If the above sentence scared you, I definitely want you to read on.

I'll translate: 'This is how you get the latest, up to the minute version of Unangband (or Angband) made easy for Windows users.'

At the moment, you rely on the benevolence of strangers compiling and releasing a Windows version of Unangband every so often. However, you don't get to see the many improvements that are made at the time they happen, and have to wait for this period release and download process. What is good about these projects, however, is that there is a publicly accessible version of the program. You can get this program straight from the source, as it were, so you can see the latest and greatest improvements as they happen. And its not that difficult. Honest.

A word of warning: the steps I'm outlining pretty much demand you have a broadband connection of some kind, because you'll be downloading over 100 MB of files and installing them on your computer.

1. Download a Java Runtime environment from this link. You probably have one on Windows already, so you may not need to do this step. Choose the Windows Online Installation, and don't forget to check the box next to it to say you've read the licensing agreement. The installer is straightforward. Don't forget to allow this application out through your firewall software, if you're running any.

2. Download Eclipse for C/C++ developers from this link. Expand the zip file to your C: drive, in C:\Eclipse. Right-click drag Eclipse.exe to your desktop and choose Create shortcut. That'll give you a nice way of starting Eclipse, since the people who packaged this program didn't give you one. Then double-click on the shortcut to run Eclipse. Launch Eclipse and click OK to accept the default workspace (place where you save things). You'll want to click on the rightmost of the coloured balls (they clearly wanted documentation people to have to write that) and the actual workspace will appear.

3. Once you've got Eclipse running, follow these instructions to download and install Subclipse. Of course, like everything in free software, they're not correct. When it comes to step 2, there's no submenu to the Software Updates. Instead, when you choose this option and the new window opens, change to the Available Software tab and click the New Site button. Skip to step 4 and enter the http details for Subclipse version 1.4 and click OK. When the site expands, choose the Subclipse (Required) and JavaHL Adapter (recommended) as shown in the screen shot below. Click Install. Then click Next, accept the license agreement and click Finish.

4. Download the minimal Gnu Windows environment minGW from this link, whilst saying this phrase 6 times quickly. Whoever comes up with these names? The installer will run and prompt you to install lots of additional stuff. Because its an online installer, you need to allow the installer out through your firewall software, if you're running any. Accept the defaults, pretty much everywhere, but when it comes to the list of things to install, you'll also need to check MinGW Make, which is where a lot of smarts are. You can ignore all the g++, g77 etc stuff on that page.

5. Follow these instructions. You want to add the directory C:\mingw\bin to your existing system path.

6. Run Eclipse off the short cut you made earlier (You've already done this once, when you installed Subclipse). Re-open the workspace. Right-click on the left hand panel and choose New > Other...

7. Click on the triangle next to SVN and choose Projects from SVN. Click Next.

8. Select Create a new suppository location. I mean repository. Location. Click Next.

9. Next to the URL, you'll want to type either:

http://angband.rogueforge.net/svn/trunk

or

http://cvs.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/unangband

depending on whether you want Angband or Unangband. Then fill in the Custom Label field with either Unangband or Angband. Click Next, and breath a sigh of relief that the idiots who made this form didn't tell you that you were holding the mouse in the wrong part of the screen as well as all the pop-ups telling you that you hadn't finished typing.

10. Select trunk (some random number), and click Finish.

11. In the Check out Ass dialog, click Yes. I mean, in the Check out As dialog, click Finish.

12. In the Select a wizard project, you want to select Standard Make C Project. Click Next. I have to breath slowly when I say phrases like this, in case I inadvertently cast a spell from Harry Potter. Or worse, sound like I'm trying to cast one.

13. In the Project Name field, type either Angband, Unangband or Mildred. Click Finish.

14. Eclipse will miraculously starting downloading the Angband or Unangband SVN repository for you. Note that this is the first time the computer has done any work on your behalf. Up until here, you have been labouring on its behalf.

15. We're almost done.

16. Wait until the computer is done downloading however. Click the triangle next to Angband, Unangband or Mildred.

17. Right-click on the src directory, and choose Make Targets > Build...

18. Click Add.

19. Target name is default. As in, actually type in the word default. Make target is default. Again, type in the word default. Uncheck the use default under build command, and type in the box mingw32-make -f makefile.cyg.

20. Just to be clear. There are no spaces between mingw32 and the minus sign, and make, and there is a space before and after the minus f. It might be easier if you just copy the above.

21. Click Create.

22. Select the default build target, and click Build. You'll see lots of gibberish in the console window that people who should know better get wildly excited over. However, at the end of it, you'll have an angband.exe sitting in C:\workspace\angband\trunk\angband\src or something similar (or unangband or mildred).

23. Don't double-click on it. Instead curse the incompatibilities between windows and Unix, and copy the angband.exe file up one level, so it sits in the folder that holds the src folder. You'll be doing this particular activity a lot.

24. Double-click on angband.exe.

25. You're done.

Now to keep up to date with any more recent changes, all you have to do is run Eclipse right-click on the Angband / Unangband / Mildred project, choose Team > Update, then repeat steps 17, then 22, 23 and 24, in that order (and nothing in between).

Hopefully this will get you addicted further to tweaking around with Unangband source code, and ideally contributing to one of these projects.