Category: Cool People

Quoted on Gamespot!

April 19, 2006
Cool PeopleThe Game Biz
1 Comment

I regularly listen to Gamespot’s Hotspot podcast. They’d been poking merciless fun at Stefan Eriksson for a while, but with his arrest it looks like that story is over (for now). On April 11th’s podcast, the guys briefly mentioned Warthog Studios and how it sucked that Gizmondo’s sleazy execs managed to take us down with them.

So I sent them a short email thanking them for mentioning Warthog positively and not lumping us in with the seedier aspects of Gizmondo.

And what do you know, they quoted it on yesterday’s podcast, and even mentioned the URL of this site! That was darn nice of them.

Thanks Rich, Bob, Alex, and Jeff!

End of Oblivion

March 21, 2006
Cool PeopleGames
0 Comment

I ended up watching about four hours total of Gamespot’s Oblivion stream before I had to go to bed.

That was a fantastic idea, and I hope they do it again with other games. Watching someone play a game for an hour or two will tell you much more about whether or not you’re going to like it than a review.

Greg played for 12 hours straight, taking only a few short breaks. When he got to the twelve hour mark at 6 AM, he was actually willing to continue playing, but had to stop when the fire alarm went off! The maintenance crew was testing the alarm and had assumed that no one would be in the building at that time of day.

As for the game itself…it’s basically Morrowind on steroids with a lot of bugs and interface problems fixed, and there is nothing wrong with that. I like how bashing someone upside the head with a mace really looks like it hurts. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see anything in town, so I still don’t know how effective the much-touted Radiant AI is. Plot looks interesting, but not really exceptional. Horses were extremely difficult to control, but the “travel anywhere” feature makes them pretty much irrelevant anyway.

I’m still completely stoked about the game and can’t wait to get my hands on my own copy. Collector’s Edition, with the making-of DVD, of course.

Day of Oblivion

March 20, 2006
Cool PeopleGames
1 Comment

Oblivion arrives today.

I don’t have the money to buy it.

Woe, woe is me.

So I’m going to do the next best thing, and watch a live feed of Greg Kasavin playing it for twelve hours straight.

This by itself is worth my yearly Gamespot subscription fee.

Spore

March 6, 2006
Cool PeopleGame DesignGame Programming
3 Comments

Spore is back in the news, now that an edited version of Wil Wright’s presentation is available on YouTube and Google Video.

We’re all gushing superlatives (myself included), but it’s actually quite difficult to overemphasize how important this game is. Games used to use generated (instead of pre-created) content all the time – read this excellent Guardian article on the creators of Elite for an instructive example. (Try to ignore the completely irrelevant Reagan and Thatcher-bashing.) They did this simply because they didn’t have enough room on their media to store all the data for their worlds.

Then CDs came along, and suddenly that room existed, so we (as game developers) ditched generated content for the much prettier custom-created content. Now we’ve got games on DVD, and we’ve got the opposite problem – so much room, and such high player expectations, that the content takes forever to produce, driving the cost of the game up and driving the actual game playing time down (witness all the games that can be beaten in ten hours or less).

If this game comes out and is successful, it will prove that triple-A titles can be made with generated content. Generated content will become easier and easier, and finally it’ll become another standard tool in the game development toolbox, like first-person controls and streaming levels. This is something that has been needed for a long time.

Oh, for crying out loud…

March 3, 2006
Cool PeopleGames
10 Comments

If Tycho loves Macs so much, I suggest that his next move should be to use one exclusively for a month. Pity about Galactic Civilizations II shipping…and Oblivion is coming out on the 20th…but surely the fantastic user experience of using a Mac will itself be sufficient to sustain him.

Inaria Postmortem

January 14, 2006
40-Hour GamesCool PeopleGame DesignGame ProgrammingGamesInariaRole PlayingSelf-Improvement
7 Comments

Around the end of October 2005, I decided to try to write a complete computer role-playing game in forty hours. I was inspired by this article by Jay Barnson on GameDev.net, Jeff Vogel‘s excellent work, and by my own love of RPGs. I am a professional game developer, but I’d never written an RPG engine and considered that a “hole” in my experience.

I picked a time limit because I’ve also been fascinated by people being forced to do the best they can with their skills under such limits; this was one reason why I wrote my Iron Gamedev article (the other reason was that I was feeling really goofy that day). And of course competions like the Ludum Dare also inspired me.

The project is now complete. You can download the game here, and the source files for both the game and the editor here. Here’s a screenshot:

Mmmm...pixels.

Now, the point of this project was to learn, not necessarily to make a complete and fun game. That said, I did want to make the game as good as it could be in the time I had. Here’s an excerpt from my original design doc with my goals:

We need four things to be able to call the project a success.

We need to create the map structure and populate it with an initial terrain layout.
We need to allow the player to walk around the map and be blocked by passability data.
We need to create monsters and have them move toward the player and attack him when they get in range.
We need to allow the player to attack back, and to have the player somehow gain in abilities when he succeeds in killing monsters.

That’s it. If we get that, we can publish it without fear of too much ridicule.

But that’s not enough. What I want is:

A map structure where every map cell is a list of critters placed on that cell. When the cell is drawn, all objects in that cell are drawn, from bottom to top. Since the terrain object will be pushed on the map on load, it will always be drawn first, on the bottom.

A map structure that contains data for map links.

An inventory and a current equipment screen.

If we get all this implemented, I will consider the experiment a resounding success.

Finally, what I’d really like is:

An overworld, three towns, two castles, and eight dungeon maps.

An overall plot, no matter how thin.

Quests and quest objects.

If we get all this implemented, I’ll be damn suprised.

Well, I didn’t get quite everything on my list done, but I’m still very surprised at how much I accomplished. I got the map structure I wanted, an inventory, buying and selling, NPCs with different AI behaviors, levelling up, one town, two castles and eight dungeons. And a very, very thin plot, but not quests or quest items.

I kept rigorous track of my time, but since I have a full-time job and a family, I wasn’t able to spend my hours over the course of a weekend or even a week or two. It took me about three months to finish the project, and I actually feel I did well completing it in that time. I am actually alloting myself four months to complete my next forty-hour project.

I would break down my time spent as follows: about five hours was spent fiddling with graphics, about thirty hours was spent writing code, and about five hours was spent creating the NPC data files and game levels.

What Went Right

Kicking it Old-School

Emulating an old Ultima-style RPG was the right tack to take. If I’d tried to write a 3D RPG, I simply would have gotten overwhelmed and probably quit. The feature set I wanted fell into the “tough but doable” range and made for a perfect forty-hour challenge.

Using the SDL

I wouldn’t have completed what I did if I had not used the SDL and instead just used DirectDraw. End of story. I cannot imagine why someone would not want to use it for a project like this, it was so easy to use and saved me so much time.

Grabbing Graphics off the Web

All the items, monsters and NPCs in the game came from this page of free RPG tiles. This was a lifesaver – if I’d had to create the graphics myself, not only would they have looked like crap, I would have burned so much time on them that I would not have had any chance of completing my goal. As it was, I could not find any decent terrain tiles that I liked, so I ended up grabbing a lot of the ones I used out of Ultima VI. This cost me at least two hours, unfortunately.

Making an Editor

I spent about five hours making an editor for the engine – you can see a screenshot of it here and it’s included with the source package linked above. I think this may have been my smartest move. I ended up spending far too much time on the code and far too little on the maps (see What Went Wrong, below), but if I hadn’t had the editor I probably wouldn’t have gotten more than one or two maps into the game.

Using my PDA to Sync Projects

I have an Asus A620 PocketPC-based PDA. I love it, and one of the things I use it for is to keep projects synched between work and home. This way I was able to work on my project at work, sync my PDA, take it home, sync it at home, and pick right up where I left off. Now that I’ve got some webspace, though, I’ll probably set up a Subversion server to make it even easier, and give me real source control features like versioning.

Blogging the Process

This was vital. The fact that I knew people were watching kept me going when I got really tired of the project 🙂 I’d like to thank my friends Ryan Clark and Tom Mauer from work who tracked the progress of the project with interest, as well as Andrew Wooldridge and Gianfranco Berardi who linked to me, and to Sol who piped up with helpful suggestions when I mentioned I was using his tutorials.

What Went Wrong

Hoo boy, where to start?

Well, first, here’s a screenshot of the most visually interesting bug I encountered during development:

I'm walking on mouths.

Multiple Mistakes with the Editor

I made two huge mistakes with the editor. First off, I made it too early in the project. I made the editor when I felt I needed map data to work on, but once I had the map I then added lots of features to the map structure…which the editor then didn’t support. I had to add the map level number, map name and map links all by hand. The editor still saved me time, but it could have been even better if I’d just made a temp map by hand to work on, finalized my map data structure, and then made the editor.

My second mistake was a doozy. I split the editor off into its own project, instead of simply creating a new editor source file in the base project. By splitting the editor off, I ensured that all maps would have to be moved from the editor folder to the actual game folder before they could be tested – and then moved back if additional work was needed. Maps quickly got out of date and filenames got confused. I finally fixed this by putting a hardcoded path into the editor source so that it saved and loaded from the game folder, a terribly hacky solution.

Secondly, I ensured that all the changes to the source files I made while writing the editor had to be merged back over to the game project, and then changes made there had to be merged back into the editor…it was just bad. Still much better than no editor at all, but these mistakes caused me to eat up time that could have been spent making the maps better. Which leads me to…

Too Much Time on Infrastructure, Not Enough on Content

Now…this is a thing that went wrong, but in the end, this was a learning exercise, not an attempt to make a publishable game. I wanted the game to be as good as it could be, but in the end the quality of the game is not that important.

That said, the game could have been twice as good with just one or two more hours spent on the content – and I’d have had those hours if I’d both planned better and not made those boneheaded mistakes with the editor. There are features in the engine that the player will never see…because I didn’t have time to write content that uses them. Yay!

Schizophrenic Source Code

I almost didn’t want to post the source…in just about every case, I started doing things the “right” OOP-ish way, and then reverted to procedural programming when time got tight.

For instance, there is an NPC class. Great! Do I subclass from that for all my NPC types so that I can program in individual unique NPC actions? Nope, I simply use that one class and have the Update() function determine the NPC’s type and perform actions based on a classically bad switch/case statement. The input code is atrocious; I’m doing tons of stuff there that have nothing to do with input. I felt like crying when I put the code to draw the hit marker and projectile marker inside the input function with their own frame pumps…but it was either do that or cut them completely. I guess I can console myself with at least knowing that it was bad.

Conclusion

Despite all of that, I do consider the project a success. I learned a lot and created a fair amount of code that can and will be reused for other projects. And I’m planning on doing three more of these forty-hour learning exercises over the course of the next year.

My Co-Workers Are Funny…

December 19, 2005
Cool People
0 Comment

As evidenced by this comic strip by one of our artists, Mike McKinley. Yes, that’s Ryan Clark, the lead programmer on Hit & Myth…and that’s only a slight exaggeration of his behavior.

My Story

October 25, 2005
Cool People
2 Comments

Hi! I’m Viridian. My real name is Anthony Salter and I reside in the rolling plains of Austin, Texas, USA. I currently work for a game company called Gizmondo Studios, making games for the Gizmondo handheld device. I’m just finishing up my first game.

I’ve been playing computer games for at least 25 years. The first video game I ever played was the original Magnavox Odyssey, which I played in the late Seventies. I graduated to the Atari, then the Colecovision, and it was about that time that I got exposed to computers at school. Once I realized that I could actually teach the computer at school how to play a video game similar to the ones I already enjoyed, it was pretty much all downhill from there.

Like most computer geeks I also enjoy role-playing games. My first role-playing experience was when my sister and I would give each other free-form situations to figure out, ie: “You’re in this bad situation and you have this, this, this and this. How do you get out of here?” I finally got exposed to “real” roleplaying in middle school when I got to read both the original AD&D Player’s Manual and several Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. I was quickly hooked.

In high school I was constantly programming. I wrote a program to utilize the 4-voice sound of the Tandy 1000 my parents owned to play a short piece from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker”. I arranged the music myself by ear, since I had no sheet music and wouldn’t have been able to read it if I had. I wrote several programs that attempted to randomly create RPG overworlds…none of these worked particularly well, but I was pretty proud of them. I wrote another program that used the Tandy’s 16-color graphics to present a town from an overhead perspective that the player could walk through – stepping over the threshold of a building removed the roof of the building so the player could see inside. I was pretty proud of that. I wish I still had all the projects I did back then, but I was saving them all on a single floppy disk (it was my favorite color, green) and it went bad. I lost everything.

High school was also where I was exposed to the Ultima series of computer role-playing games for the first time. They weren’t the first I’d ever played, but they were the best by far and they grabbed my frontal lobes like few games I’d ever played before. I found them fascinating, and also appreciated how the designers tried their best to enhance the experience by including trinkets and maps with the game and by writing the game manuals “in character”. I decided that I either wanted to work at Origin Systems or at Electronic Arts (this was back before they were evil).

In college things kind of went sideways. I had expected upon starting a computer science major that I would finally get some practical instruction on how to program. I was looking forward to this because everything I’d previously done had been self-taught. But back then you didn’t even touch a computer for a computer science major until your third year, and you didn’t learn C and assembly (the things I was most hankering to learn) until almost your fourth. And I was paying for college myself, and was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to pursue more than an Associate’s (two year) degree. This was very disconcerting to me and I began to grow disillusioned with college. When combined with a very hectic schedule (I was working two jobs when I wasn’t in college, and then dropping one job when school started) plus a bad home life with my parents, and I finally cracked. Practically on a whim I withdrew from college, gathered up my savings, and moved by myself to Austin, Texas – home of Origin Systems (I decided against EA). It was November, 1991, I was 20 and I’d never lived away from home before.

To this day I don’t know if that was a good decision or not. I still wish I had gotten my Associate’s degree, but I don’t see how I could have. Back then I was skinny, shy, fearful, and had no self-confidence. And my situation at home was so bad that it forced me to overcome all of that and move to a city I’d never lived in before, with no job propects, no place to live, and hardly any money.

Without a college degree and without anything to demonstrate I had experience making games, I ended up working fast food for a long time – five more years, in fact. It took me years just to be able to save up enough money to get another computer, and of course I couldn’t learn much until I did. Once I finally overcame that hurdle I worked fast food during the day and at night tried to teach myself programming and game design. I met a wonderful woman who I married, and we had a beautiful daughter.

And then one day I just got sick of working fast food. I quit and applied at the local Motorola plant. Despite not having a degree, I scored very well on their aptitude tests and landed a job there testing microchips. It was a strange schedule – midnight to noon two days, then midnight to eight AM two days, then three days off – but it paid better than any other job I’d ever had. This was very encouraging to me. I had started thinking that maybe I’d missed my shot and would just be stuck in fast food forever due to my lack of higher education. Getting the Motorola job proved to me that I could do better.

My wife was actually friends with one of Origin’s HR people. She had asked me several times in the past if she could put in a good word for me with her friend, which would increase the chances of me at least getting an interview at Origin. Always in the past I’d told her no, because I didn’t feel I was ready and because I was scared to death of being rejected by Origin. But, buoyed by my success at Motorola, I finally told her yes. She asked her friend at Origin HR if they had any openings, and it turned out that they needed someone to give game hints on their hint phone line. This seemed right up my alley because I’d at least played every game Origin had ever made, and I’d beaten quite a few of them.

So in 1995 I finally got an interview. I was so scared driving up to Origin I nearly threw up in the car. I got there early, made sure I looked okay, dried my hands in the men’s bathroom (interviewing tip, prevents clammy hands) and then reported to the front desk.

The interview went…well, there really aren’t any words for how well that interview went. Once I got started my fear went away and I answered every question the two ladies interviewing me had to ask. I got to demonstrate that I knew about Origin’s games, about the people there who made the games, and Origin’s history. And it was clear to me as the interview progressed that I was telling these ladies exactly what they wanted to hear. Then it was over. They thanked me and told me they’d call me if I’d gotten the position.

The drive home felt really good. But things got even better when I got home. I found my wife on the phone with my interviewers and they were telling her that I’d gotten the job! They couldn’t tell me when I was there because Origin had a policy of not hiring people on the spot!

My time at Origin was half-wonderful and half-horrible. I was working the job of my dreams but I got to Origin just in time to watch EA close in, take over, and gut it. (This article at The Escapist has the details.) I got laid off about eighteen months later, just when I would have been able to start moving over to a programming position. The good news was that during my time there my role had expanded to doing both general tech support and game testing, which helped me later.

I’ll be honest. Leaving Origin hurt bad. It took me a long time to get over it. I quickly found another job doing tech support so my family didn’t hurt financially. And I kept hacking away at my own stuff and trying to figure out exactly what pointers were for in C. But I just didn’t know where to go after Origin. There wasn’t another company that I felt as strongly about. I had had an unhealthy fixation on that company, and it was necessary for me to break it before I could continue. It didn’t help that my new job was close by, so I had to drive by the Origin building twice a day.

But finally, after doing phone tech support for about two years, I managed to worm my way back into the gaming industry as a tester at the 3DO office here in Austin. I worked on a game called Crusaders of Might and Magic, which was a good game made by some very good people (it was their first PlayStation game, though, and suffered for that). When that project was over I asked if I could become a designer on the next game. Despite having a good relationship with the director and having exhibited the necessary desire, the director turned me down because I had no experience. And since they weren’t going to need a tester for their next project until they hit alpha, that meant that my time at 3DO was drawing to a close.

I was kind of at a loss as to what to do next when a friend of mine from Origin called me. She was the testing lead at Human Code, a company that made edutainment software, and needed someone so I jumped over there.

Human Code was…odd. They had some really talented people there, but the process by which software got written just didn’t seem to make for fun software – at least in the opinion of me and the other testers. There were no designers at Human Code. Game screens were typically just laid out by an artist, who of course was more concerned with how it looked than how it played. It got to the point where we, the testers, volunteered to do design work for free just to make the software better. We finally got our chance on a game called Jessie’s Wild West Rodeo, which was based off the Toy Story 2 license. One of my testing buddies became the game’s designer and needed an editor to design the levels. So I wrote it for him.

That editor caused a small sensation in the company. I had a constant stream of people tromping through my work area just to take a look at it…I guess the concept of a level editor in an edutainment product had never been tried before. I was told that I was going to be promoted to programmer (finally!) and would be writing more tools for other games.

Then, two weeks later, Human Code went out of business. My wife was six months pregnant with our second child.

I was out of work for about six months, and during that time my son was born. I spent the time ostensibly looking for work, but I mainly focused on getting my programming skills up to snuff. I bought a book called Jamsa’s C/C++ Bible and worked straight through it, taking notes and writing little programs to demonstrate knowledge of every function in C and C++.

Then the same friend who got me my job at Human Code managed to wrangle me a position at her new job, Multimedia Games. MGAM was a company that made stand-up video bingo and video slot machines for Indian reservation casinos. The games were programmed in Windows using Visual Studio and DirectX, and ran on very cheap generic boxes we got from Dell.

I learned a lot at MGAM. I finally got to polish my knowledge in a production environment, and became one of their best programmers. I worked at MGAM for three years alongside some fantastic people. I worked on over 30 games, and was the sole programmer on at least 10 of them.

But MGAM wasn’t really game development, and that kept nagging me. MGAM paid well enough, allowed me to grow my skills to a point, and was a very stable job (casinos always need new games). I was perfectly aware that “real” game development wasn’t nearly as stable. And we had a third child on the way.

I initially decided to go the indie route. I’d been reading and posting on the Dexterity forums for a while, and I’d been reading interviews and articles about successful shareware developers like Jeff Vogel. I bought The Indie Game Development Survival Guide. I bought this web space doman and started designing my first game. I figured I’d work MGAM to pay the bills and make indie games on the side to scratch my “real game development” itch. But it didn’t work out that way.

Practically as soon as I decided that I was going to make real games no matter what my circumstances were, this opportunity at Gizmondo fell out of the sky and into my lap. I was hanging out in the #gamedev IRC channel when a call went out for game programmers in Austin. I figured, “What the heck” and responded.

And now I’m here. I love this studio. The people here are great, they are all hardcore gamers, they love making games, and I really like the games I’m working on.

But, despite having not gone the indie route, I still feel a kinship to indie developers. After all, that’s how the industry started.

Holy Moley, Someone’s Reading!

October 20, 2005
Cool PeopleGame Programming
0 Comment

No, really! Someone is actually reading this blog, and has even gone so far as to link to this blog from his blog! A red letter day, this is!

It appears that Gianfranco Berardi read a couple of my posts and liked them. Well, I like his blog, too – it’s just the kind of blog I like to read. He’s a budding indie game developer who is doing things like Game in a Day projects to sharpen his skills. Kudos!

On a related topic, Lordamighty, but there are a lot of game development blogs and sites out there now! I remember back when there barely weren’t any. I could spend all day just following links…but no. Must be strong! There’s work to be done and games to be made!

Iron GameDev

August 2, 2005
Cool PeopleGame DesignGame ProgrammingGames
3 Comments

Voiceover: One year ago, a man’s fantasy became reality in a form never seen before: Coding Stadium. The motivation for spending his fortune to create Coding Stadium was to inspire innovation in game development, and observe the making of games which could be called true artistic creations.

To realize his dream, he sent invitations to the top men and women in the field of game development, challenging them to claim the title of Iron GameDev. The challengers have just forty-eight hours to create a complete game from start to finish. Using all their skills, senses and creativity, they are to create games never experienced before!

And if they emerge victorious, they will claim the title of Iron GameDev and receive the people’s ovation and fame forever! Every battle, reputations are on the line, where master game developers pit their artistic creations against each other. The heat will be on!

Chairman Kaga: If I recall correctly, it was just one year ago that, having experienced fifteen years worth of exquisite cuisine, my palate became bored and I turned my attention to that other obsession of my people: video games! My mind began to turn as I imagined how I might be able to do for the development of games what my Kitchen Stadium had done for cuisine, and I realized that a similar format might produce similar results. Thus, this is our first battle in Coding Stadium. The format of the competition is simple – using provided computers and resources, two teams of three developers each will have only forty-eight consecutive hours to produce new games that I have never experienced before.

Now it is time to introduce the teams that will compete for the title of Iron GameDev. I could not be more pleased with the response I received from the game industry, and I have two superb teams today.

I present to you…TEAM ENSEMBLE!

(The curtain rises and smoke billows out, obscuring the forms of three men. They are ROB FERMIER, SANDY PETERSON and LANCE HOKE. They step forward and cross their arms.)

Chairman Kaga: Rob Fermier, programmer on System Shock and lead programmer of Age of Mythology. Sandy Peterson, designer of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, designer on Doom, designer on Quake, and designer on all three of the Age series of games. Lance Hoke, lead artist of Age of Mythology. They will represent Ensemble Studios in this battle. They are worthy warriors, with many excellent games under their belts. They deserve a worthy opponent, and I believe I have found one.

I present…TEAM BLIZZARD!

(The right curtain rises and three men step out of the backlit smoke. They are ANDY BOND, ROB PARDO and SAM DIDIER.)

Chairman Kaga: Andy Bond, programmer on Diablo II, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft. Rob Pardo, designer on Warcraft II, StarCraft, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft. Sam Didier, the artist who came up with Warcraft’s unique look. These men will represent Blizzard.

Fukui-San: And now let’s introduce today’s judges. In the first chair we have Richard Garriott, founder of Origin Systems and creator of the Ultima series of games.

Richard Garriott: Great to be here.

Fukui-San: In the second chair we have Alex Seropian, one of the founders of Bungie.

Alex Seropian: It’s an honor to be here.

Fukui-San: And in the third we have Chris Taylor, founder of Cavedog and creator of Total Annihilation.

Chris Taylor: I’ve really been looking forward to this.

Fukui-San: Gentlemen, welcome to GameDev Stadium! I’d say there’s just as much talent up here as there is down there; you guys could form a team of your own!

Richard, Alex and Chris: (LAUGHTER)

Fukui-San: And of course, our commentator, Dr. Yukio Hattori.

Hattori-San: Always a pleasure.

Fukui-San: Doc, the change in format here has been dramatic! Since this is our first battle in Coding Stadium, let’s go over what the new competition entails.

Hattori-San: Very well. Instead of choosing a stable of game developers, like he did Iron Chefs, the Chairman has chosen to invite game development companies to send teams of three people each to compete in the stadium. We recommend a mix of one coder, one designer and one artist, but the actual makeup of the team is up to the company.

We have outfitted the stadium with three identical computers for each team, each preloaded with an identical loadout of the most popular compilers, 3D modeling software, image processing software, music creation software and level editors. The developers must use what is on the machines – they are not allowed to bring in anything from the outside. Nor will they be allowed internet access for the duration of the battle.

Since the competition takes so long, we have also provided places for the teams to eat, sleep, watch TV and play video games. Once the competition is over and the winner has been announced, both games, along with their sources, will be available on the internet.

And yes, the teams will be given a theme for their games by the Chairman that they must follow.

Fukui-San: That sounds fantastic, but I gotta ask: with so little time, won’t the developers just come up with derivative games using tried-and-true mechanics?

Hattori-San: Well, that’s always a risk, just like it was in Kitchen Stadium, but the Chairman is hoping that the severe time limit will force developers to boil their games down to their essences, allowing the purest form of the art to shine through – as often happened in Kitchen Stadium. Okay, the Chairman is ready to announce today’s theme.

Chairman Kaga: I thought long and hard about today’s theme. Both of your companies specialize in real-time strategy games, so it was my initial decision to give you something completely unrelated, like first-person shooters. But that would have been…too obvious. I finally decided on a theme related to your specialities, but with its own quirks. Today’s theme is…TURN-BASED STRATEGY!

(DRAMATIC MUSIC plays. The members of both teams look SHOCKED.)

Fukui-San: All right, a definite change of pace in the battle today, the Chairman choosing turn-based strategy as the theme, the teams are in place, let’s get it on!

Chairman Kaga: ALLEZ FONT DES JEUX!

And then I wake up 🙁