The Global Game Jam starts in one Week. I made this useful app and I wanted to share with others also participating. It’s a Flash-based timer application!

This is the longest weekend of my life.

We are going to project it on a wall so every participant knows how much time they have left. It shows hours, minutes, seconds and centiseconds left until the Global Game Jam is over. It also shows a percentage bar. When the time stars running out, it will flash in a dramatic fashion. As an added bonus, it also connects to Twitter and displays the most recent tweet with the #GGJ2011#GGJ11 hashtag beneath the timer (update: changed to the official hashtag).

Get it here!

The app is customizable so it can be used at different venues. It can be even used for other 48 hour events, such as Ludum Dare.

Installation: Just unpack everything in a folder. Run ggjTimer.swf. If you can’t, open it in a browser or Quicktime. Press Control + F for full screen. You might get a security message from Flash. It’s because the app is connecting to Twitter. Just follow the instructions to authorize web connections for this file. You can also ignore this step if you don’t care about the Twitter functionality.

Customization: To customize it, open the file ggjTimer.xml in any plain text editor.

The value “enddate” can be used to change the exact moment when your event should be over. It refers to the system clock of the computer running it.

The value “hashtag” can be used to change what tweets the timer will display. You can delete this line to disable the tweet function. Note: the app will not show any Tweets that start with @ or RT (the screenshot lies!).

Finally, “limit_to_48″ will limit the timer to 48 hours. If you put in “yes”, the maximum value the timer will show will be 48 hours, even if there is more than 48 hours left. Use this to have a dramatic start. Put in “no” if you want longer events for example.

Let me know if you have any troubles. I have coded it just today so it may have some kinks. If it does, I want to fix them before Global Game Jam starts. Finally, if you are going to use it, I would be delighted if you would make a photo and post it here!

Recently at Cologne Game Lab we had a lecture by Claudia Küttel from the University of Klagenfurt. She is doing some research on Pen & Paper RPGs. She raised a lot of fascinating points during her lecture. One of them stood out for me personally. She mentioned a couple of reasons why Pen & Paper players disliked digital RPGs. The problem apparently was often the role-playing itself.

• Reflection Digital RPGs don’t do a good job at reflecting upon what the player already did. Previous events aren’t recalled. Of course they are in the embedded narrative but this part is not interactive therefore not really role-playing. Otherwise, players can often steal and murder and NPCs rarely remember. Of course there are attempts but they feel stiff and general when compared to the personalized, specific feedback you get in a Pen & Paper RPG. There, important events in adventures can have repercussions on many subsequent campaigns. Players build up a wealth of history they can draw upon. The recollection of the player’s actions become their character’s identity.

• Character Traits Pen & Paper RPGs are often about creating distinct characters. The characters go beyond simply a list of skills and a customizable appearance. The focus is very much on character traits, their idiosyncrasies. Those traits often heavily influence the kind of challenges the group will have. The example Claudia mentioned was having to cross a river with one of the characters being afraid of water. Again, some games try this (Fallout 3) but the traits often boil down to tame combat buffs. They do not inform the narrative like they do in Pen & Paper RPGs.

• Action / Reaction Possibly similar to the first part: in Pen & Paper RPGs characters change. The change is often influenced by big events happening. After almost dying in combat and being miraculously saved by a very lucky roll, one character may become religious, entertaining a belief of having been chosen (Pulp Fiction style). Changes like this may happen in digital RPGs (Cecil becoming a Paladin) but mostly in the embedded story, not because of events that were initiated by the player. This is basically what of Ludonarrative Dissonance is about.

• Crowded Storytelling more generally, Pen & Paper RPGs are more about participating in crowded storytelling, about experiencing a fiction in the making. It’s constantly about people throwing in ideas and other people picking it up, rolling with and turning it into something more. It’s closer to brainstorming than to what you do in digital RPGs. Digital RPGs are more about consuming a story. There are some aspects of leeway and exploration but the fundamental course of action is not something that can be negotiated. There is nobody to negotiate with anyway.

I don’t suggest this is something game designers can or even should fix. I’m just throwing it in here. I think it may be something interesting to keep in mind. It may help us to see digital RPGs in a differend light. Discuss.

Recently, I thought I look into Final Fantasy Crisis Core. I got the game way back when I first got my PSP. But I realized that the game was in German and it wasn’t Multi-Language like most European games. A few weeks ago I decided to finally put me out of my misery and order a used UK copy.

As a result, I played the beginning of the game at least 4 times now: the first time I got it, when I dug it it up recently, once the UK copy arrived (but on hard-mode RAAAWRRR!!) and then again when I realized the hard mode was a tad too hard for me. And actually the beginning is not that good. The game starts out way too easy on normal mode. So the battle mechanics seem very confusing. There is lots of stuff happening and you just smash the opposition anyway. I needed the negative feedback of the hard-mode to start figuring it out. Observation – you don’t learn anything from succeeding. You learn from failing at first and THEN succeeding.

The battle mechanics are an interesting evolution of the old-school JRPG battle system. You are still issuing commands in an Final Fantasy’esque ATB fashion but you can additionally move around freely. It’s an interesting blend of JRPG and action-RPG. I like how the battles all take place on the actual maps. There is no transition between a dungeon and battle-arenas like in other Final Fantasy games. The slot-machine system is something I still don’t really understand.

And yes, it’s dripping with fan-service at every second of the lengthy, lengthy (unskipable) cut-scenes. It’s easy to dismiss this and I normally would. But then I found myself walking through the street from the intro of FF7, where Aeris walks out of the alley and my heart turned into putty.

It’s not even that big of a deal in the game but it took me completely by surprise, probably even more than meeting the characters themselves. Apparently, the game as a place has a much more emotional impact on me than the story and the characters. I wonder of this just a quirk of mine or a universal trait of games. We don’t spend much time interacting with the characters after all. But we do spend a lot of time interacting with and exploring the environments.

Finally, the reason why I wanted to play the game now was the mission system. On every save point you can engage in missions. They are tiny, tiny instant dungeons. Each mission takes just a minute or two. You have maybe 3 monster encounters or so and that’s it. It’s perfect for a portable game where you may not have the half an hour to watch yet another lengthy melodramatic cut-scene fest. It’s also a system that reminds a lot of the Monster Hunter series. I wanted to see if there are noteworthy differences. And indeed there are. In Crysis Core, you rarely really know what enemies your will be fighting against. So there are no good opportunities to prepare. Like in the other Final Fantasy games, you just maximize your overall battle effectiveness. In Monster Hunter, a certain setup may be completely useless against a different monster. Knowing what you will be fighting and preparing accordingly is more than half of the game. And this is a good thing because it rewards forward-sighted thinking and the exploration of the equipment system. The Final Fantasy series had some very interesting systems but it rarely put players into situation where they would be challenged utilize them to achieve distinct goals. The auto-equip buttons are a terminal stage symptom. If all you need to do is to maximize your numbers, why even bothering? Let the computer figure it out.

But I like the super-short missions. They are highly addictive. Generally, the entire game is incredibly polished. The 3D models all look amazing. The animations are great. Personally, I can’t get enough especially of the interface. There are at least two beautiful pixel fonts in the game. One of them has even hand-made anti-aliasing. All menu transitions are fully navigated, the individual elements zip and squish into place. It’s a joy to look at. Together with the addictive missions and the sneaky faboy-button-pushing, it may keep me going all the way to the end credits. Let’s see.

Space geekout time! Have a look at this amazing photo made by the European probe Mars Express

Image is cropped. Click for full version

We are looking at Phobos (the Greek God of fear), the larger of the two moons of Mars against the limb of the planet Mars itself. There are at least two reasons why I find this photo fascinating.

First, it shows quite well how dark Phobos is. In fact many little bodies out in space (like asteroids) are dark as coal. But every time we get pictures of them, they appear grey, right? Take a look at this photo of Phobos for example. The reason is that they are often shot against the blackness of space. So the cameras are often set for over-exposure in order to see anything at all. The colors are often even greatly exaggerated in order to identify scientifically interesting features. Space photos show rarely what a human would see if they went there. The photo above is a very nice exception. It gives a much better idea of how those objects actually look like.

The second reason is because it shows how tiny Phobos is. When we think of moons we tend to imagine our own Moon. What many people don’t realize that our Moon is one of the largest Moons in the Solar System. There are a few slightly larger ones, but then our Moon is definitely the largest in relation to it’s parent body. Phobos is a good example for the vast majority of the moons out there. They are often just tiny pebbles… I mean relative to our Moon. Phobos is still 22km across, 2,5 times the height of Mount Everest. One hell of a pebble.

And it’s generally a very interesting moon. I have already written about the mysterious streaks on it’s surface. It’s origin is not really well understood either. Some think it may be a captured asteroid. However it has a very tight orbit around Mars which kinda contradicts this theory. The orbit is actually so close that Phobos will someday either fall to the surface or burst into tiny pieces due to the tidal forces. But don’t rush to mark the date, it may take around 11 million years.

Finally, there is also a mysterious huge monolith on it’s surface. I am not kidding.

The kicker is that there is a Russian mission to Phobos scheduled to launch this year. It will land on Phobos, take some samples and fly all the way back to Earth. Hopefully it will solve some of the mysteries in the process… and find even more new ones! I told you the Solar System is hardcore.

There is always a movie I’m looking forward to. These days it’s Battle: Los Angeles. If you haven’t heard about it it, have a Trailer.

(actually I like the first Trailer even more because of the music, but the one above shows more of the movie)

Sure it’s the standard alien invasion story. But so far the aliens do look bizarre, powerful and ruthless. So, as co-Tweep Sebastian Wupper mentioned, it might be finally a movie where humans wouldn’t win. I just hope he is right. If there is anything that could kill that movie it’s a Deus Ex Machina happy ending.

On a different note, the movie does remind me on my older post about the emerging realistic Sci-Fi genre. It seems like the Battlefield L.A. might be a new entry in this category. I’m eager to find out.

Finally, one of my favorite YouTube channels, TheFakingHoaxer recently announced he was working on special effects for an indie documentary about the event that kinda inspired the movie: The Battle of Los Angeles. In this case I’m hoping for a convincing re-creation but also skeptical research.