The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a bad game. Not all, entirely, 100% bad, but distinctly sub-par. I wouldn’t recommend playing it, but if you are going to then be warned there will be spoilers here. So, XCOM, in broad strokes: the voice-acting is ok, but the script is dreadful. The story has potential, but is told […]
Spotify has completely transformed the way I listen to music – and has probably changed how whole generations of people will think about music too.
These days, when I listen to music I don’t have to get up to change the CD, or flip a tape, or even download and play MP3s in Winamp: all my music is streamed from Spotify. I use it as a way to play music and organise tracks, share cool things I’ve heard and discover new music. It’s quick, and convenient, and above all it’s incredibly easy. But, sometimes, as I merrily skip from album to another with the click of a mouse, the 30+ year-old in me grumbles that maybe it shouldn’t be so easy.
In the same way that I tend to skim-read books on an iPad, I listen to music on Spotify as background noise. The act of having to get off the chair, walk over to the shelf and choose what to listen to next tends to make you concentrate on what you’re listening to more.
The fact that I can carry all my music around with me in a tiny box in my pocket is still amazing. The thought that it’s not even really in my pocket, but in the cloud, is even more mind-bending. No more boxes of records, shelves of CDs, bags of minidiscs or even folders of MP3s… almost every physical embodiment of music has disappeared, beyond an implacable block of solid state gadgetry and some headphones.
I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, of course.
If I was still DJing I’d probably have all my tracks on an SD card, rather than carrying a small selection in a 15 kilogram box of vinyl. I discover new music daily, with the click of a button, rather than through radio stations and record shops. I’ve got more albums and playlists on Spotify than I ever had CDs, although I don’t actually own any of that music, in a legal sense as well as a physical one.
There’s certainly a lot less music-related clutter in my house these days. My wife and I cleared out our stacks of CDs a while ago, and had a great time digging through all the old memories on the shelves. We both had quite a few albums that we’d bought on a recommendation, or on the strength of one track, but then found to be mostly crap. Back in the day, CDs were generally between £10 and £16 – not cheap, especially when it was an album you listened to once and then consigned to the dusty top shelf, never to be heard again.
I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad that new generations of music fans might never have the dubious pleasure of getting home to discover that your new CD is actually one great track and 40 minutes of unlistenable jazz klaxon wanking. They’ll never have to buy a whole album just to get one track. They’ll never know what it was like to not be able to get hold of a track, or an album – to scour all the music shops in a city looking for one slippery CD that mysteriously sells out five minutes before you get to the shop. Those were painful and frustrating but ultimately formative experiences.
Between Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud and other streaming services I doubt there’s anything you can’t find online to listen and download (be it legally or illegally). The concept of scarcity in music (and “scarcity” is a relative term, considering I grew up in an age of CDs, tape-copying and dozens of radio stations) simply doesn’t exist any more, and I think that must really change how people see (or rather, hear) music.
More after the break…
I’ve been working on a new game for the last couple of weeks, on and off. It’s called Radias, and it looks quite nice. The visuals are all shiny and clean, it runs well on various iOS devices and has a few cool little UI touches in it. I’ve got some interesting ideas for how […]
Because casting a vote legitimises the system. When you vote, you’re implicitly giving your approval of the current political system and players – the flawed vote counting mechanism, the unrepresentative parties and their policies and the choice that you are presented with.
The available parties are all equally guilty of massive hypocrisy, shameless spin and populist headline-grabbing, cheap political point-scoring and seem generally only interested in power for power’s sake. I don’t trust any of them to do the things I believe in: protect the poor and vulnerable (and the environment), prioritise the wellbeing of the people over the rich and powerful, not swagger round the world bombing, dividing, invading and drone-striking, stop mass surveillance of the population, redistribute wealth, act with long-sighted integrity at home and abroad, ensure equality in health and education, and not become corrupt and spend all their fucking free cash on moats.
I’m going to make another game. Hooray! At this point this is more of a declaration of intent than an actual announcement, mostly because I have nothing to announce – I’m still kicking around ideas at the minute, but I’m aiming to turn these vague ideas into an actual game some time this year. Possibly […]
I’ve been working with an artist called Lee Goater on an app as part of his latest awesome exhibition. The exhibition’s called Faces: The Anatomy of Autonomy, and it’s a collection of Lee’s distinctive black-and-white characters. Each little face is a simple but characterful little chap or lady-chap created from a variety of painstakingly drawn features and accoutrements. Make a Face is available now on iOS and Android, for free!
I’ve been getting stuck into TypeScript recently and hit a few bumps along the way, so thought I’d be all nice and internety and share some tips. Firstly and foremostly:
Use TypeScript. If you have to do Javascript, and it’s becoming something of an inevitability these days, do it in TypeScript. TS is object-orientated, strictly typed and you can have classes. These things make me very happy. For an old(ish) coder still pining for the days of Flash, TypeScript is much more like the structured coding of AS3 compared to the flabby, flaccid, unstructured mess that is JS.
You might not like the idea of strict typing the way having to declare what kind of things an array is going to hold irks me, but the discipline is good for you. Like porridge, morning runs, and getting hit with soap in a sock at a posh boarding school. So here are some of the things I had trouble with, in the hope of saving you time and frustration.
OK, so firstly: Far Cry 3 spoilers ahead. Like, game-ruining spoilers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Character development is a weird thing. Watching a character change and grow over the course of a story can be a fundamental to a satisfying narrative arc; the immature rich kid becomes a principled man, the girl from the streets flowers into a strong, confident woman who doesn’t need to smoke, and so on.
There are plenty of books and films that gift/curse their characters with interesting (and sometimes even profound) changes, but far fewer games that do it with any success. I think that this is partly due to a lower standard of writing in games in general, but I think it’s also much harder to write believable character development into a story when the character is controlled by a player, ie you. Unless the story and characters are written well enough for the player to relate to them, the player herself experiences nothing of the change portrayed on screen.
I’m facing a dilemma.
I’m sure it’s a dilemma lots of people (specifically: indie game developers) are facing around the world, but I’m just going to talk about me.
I made a game. It’s called CUBD. It’s a 3D arcade-puzzle game for iOS, and I think it’s pretty good. CUBD plays like a combination of a Rubik’s Cube, Bejewelled and Tetris – it’s fun, colourful, simple and addictive, and I know several people who are hopelessly hooked on it.
CUBD won an nVidia competition while in beta, and has been awarded a prestigious Mobile of the Day award by the FWA (it’ll be featured on the 31st August – check it out!). I’ve got a solid five star rating on the App Store with about 30 reviews, and have been retweeted with praise for the game by people from Mike Bithell to Flash’s own Twitter account to thousands and thousands of people.
All of which has resulted in a grand total of about 170 sales. Not bad, considering 60% of the apps in the App Store have never been downloaded, but hardly on the scale of Angry Birds. To be honest, it’s not even on the scale of Hair Removal (“Oh, my god, there are so many hairs on my face in such a short time. Who can help me, please!”), a frankly shit-looking game that’s currently invading App Store Top 10s around the world, but there you go.
“Oh, my god, there are so many hairs on my face in such a short time. Who can help me, please!”
170 sales equals a lifetime profit of just under £70. Considering I worked on CUBD for about a year (as a side project, not solidly) that’s not a great income. Thankfully I’m not a full-time game developer and I don’t rely on sales of my games to survive. CUBD was a labour of love; the whole project was a Fifty Shades of Grey-ish mixture of pleasure, pain, curiosity and stubbornness.
So what’s my next move?
You know what bugs me? Toilets. Toilet flushes, specifically – and even more specifically, toilets where you have a choice of a big flush and a little flush. This choice is usually presented to you in the form of a big button and a little button; sometimes it’s an actual big/small button combo, sometimes it’s […]