Last week I received my Oculus Rift DK2 headset which I ordered back in August. I had my eye on the Oculus DK1, the first version of their headset, but I was too busy getting Antigen out of the door to let myself be distracted by other projects. Now Antigen is out of the way, I can let myself experiment a little while I figure out what my next big project will be.

It comes in a padded, reusable cardboard box, which is fine for storage but if I was going to take it anywhere I would probably get a Pelican camera case or something similar, and cut some custom foam inserts for it, like this Oculus user has done.

The headset is surprisingly light, and connects to your computer with a sturdy cable that runs over the top of your head along one of the headset’s straps. I imagine this was done for weight distribution and to help keep the cable out of the way when you move around.

The cable connects to your computer via 1 USB and 1 HDMI port. There is a motion tracking IR camera that clips to your monitor like a webcam. This uses 1 USB port. There’s also an optional power supply if you want to use the USB port built into the headset. One device that uses this is the Leap Motion, which I’d like to get my hands on sooner or later…

The Rift also comes with two sets of detachable lenses; a longer lens that is already installed in the headset, and a shorter lens intended for nearsighted users.

Setup was easy. I downloaded the drivers from the Oculus website, installed them and as instructed, updated the headset firmware using a simple and straightforward preferences utility. This tool also lets you create user profiles for the Rift, containing your height and other details.

The Rift appears to your computer as a second monitor. You can view anything you drag on there, but it will look like crap unless it is rendered stereoscopically and positioned correctly. There is a DirectX style “Direct Mode” that lets applications talk directly to the Rift, but it doesn’t work on the Mac yet. (The Mac is a bit of a second-class citizen for the Rift at the moment. Unfortunately, most of the coolest demos are Windows only too.)

At this point I could hardly contain my urge to jack in to the matrix and become the console cowboy I’d always dreamed of being, so I hit “Show Demo” and braced myself.

I found myself sitting at a desk in cyberspace, somewhere on an infinite Tron-esque plain. The first thing that struck me was the stereoscopy, the 3d-ness of the lamp and the tower of playing cards on my desk. I really felt I could reach out and touch them.

The resolution is good at 960×1080 for each eye, but I don’t think it’s high enough for consumer use yet. I suspect that in order to approximate the usability and experience of a desktop monitor, VR displays will require a much higher relative pixel density. There is also a kind of “screen door effect” where you can see the pixel grid. Most of the time this isn’t too bad, but it is noticeable when you try and view details that are further away, such as the faces of game characters.

Text is readable as long as it is large and in the middle of the display. It’s a bit like looking at text on a C64 with a bad TV set. Towards the edges of the display it gets blurry and there is some chromatic aberration. You need to look at text directly in order to read it properly, which will have ramifications for UI design, particularly games where information is usually positioned at the edge of the screen.

All the same, these aren’t really criticisms, they are just statements about where the developers kit is right now. The DK2 is a prototype that a deranged experimenter committed person works with and adapts himself to, rather than a consumer product. I’ve not had a chance to try the new Crescent Bay prototype, but reports suggest that it eliminates the screen door effect and that we can expect the consumer version to be a real advance on what is currently available.

There’s a nice demo included with the SDK where you can walk around an Italian country house and its surrounding grounds. The house is on a cliff over the sea. You really feel like you can fall off when you approach the cliff. One thing I found interesting is how your body is tricked into reacting to things when you accidentally bump into them. It feels suddenly like there is something real there. This demo also shows how high quality shading and lighting can mitigate some of the shortcomings of the headset such as the resolution and screen-door effect. Another demo I tried, 4thFlrStudio by Brendan Coyle demonstrates this clearly, with its remarkable lighting and detail.

After a bit of messing about I got Steam and Half-Life 2 working on the Rift. Within minutes it gave me motion sickness! It clearly showed how VR requires both a rock-solid framerate and well-calibrated motion settings in order to be effective. Anything less than 75fps will likely send the user running to the toilet!

The presence of other characters in the game is startling. This was the first time I had encountered another being in VR, albeit a simulated one. At the beginning of HL2 you go through a police checkpoint and one of them thumps you in the chest. I actually felt it! The enemies were extremely intimidating. I dread to think what it is like on the later levels when you encounter the Hunters and Striders! I really felt I was inside the game, it’s kind of like a fuzzy lucid dream. I will have to experiment with the settings to see how far I can minimise the motion sickness.

The next thing for me to do is get the SDK going and see what I can create with it. I might also need a more powerful computer. Some of the demos I tried only ran at 16fps. My 2012 Macbook Pro is a great for general use and for my iOS development, but its NVidia 650m has about 1/7th the power of a top desktop GPU.

Sorry I haven’t been posting lately, I have been very busy finishing off Toxin, or Antigen as it is now called. Unfortunately I had to rename the game as there was already a game called Toxin on the app store. Antigen was originally going to be the name of Toxin’s sequel. Now I’ll have to find another name for it.  The game will be out in the next few weeks. I am working round the clock to finish it.

Once Antigen is out the door, I will be able to devote some time to writing. I have a bunch of articles in the works on mathematics, self education and game design.

And I’m already planning my next game…

These screenshots were from a game called Ancient Mariner.

Although I couldn’t have explained it at the time, they helped form the original vision that got me into game development in the first place; a vision that one day technology might allow us to externalise our imaginations and let us experience them with all the intensity of physical life.

Described in one preview as “what could be the most grand and impressive game so far”, Systems Architects’ Ancient Mariner swashbuckled its way through the games press inspiring excitement and wonder before vanishing, unreleased and without explanation. One year later, in response to a reader’s inquiry, a Games Machine staffer wrote: “As for the legendary Ancient Mariner, we’ve heard nothing of it recently, seen nothing of it and can’t make contact with Systems Architects themselves.”

As anyone who follows the games industry will know, cancelled titles and vanishing companies are nothing out of the ordinary. But some unreleased games seem to stand out as talismans of creative potential, symbols of what gaming could become. These games often appear during the axial ages of the industry, when technological shifts raise up new continents of possibility, inspiring developers to embark on foolhardy voyages in search of distant visions.

Ancient Mariner appeared at the beginning of one such age, at the time when the Amiga and Atari ST really began to make their mark on game design. Up til then, many 16-bit games still bore the impressions of the 8-bit era; some were little more than C64 games with a few more colours. But from 87-89 developers began to get to grips with the new technology and started to design games which broke with the past.

The game was programmed by Manuel Caballero, who previously wrote Imhotep for 8-bit legends Ultimate: Play the Game. C&VG quotes him as saying that Ancient Mariner is probably the first Atari ST game written completely in assembly language.

The artwork was produced by Mike Jary and Emma Hughes. I suspect they had a background in traditional animation; the artwork has a confidence and expansiveness rarely seen in games of that time. The most impressive shots don’t seem to restrict their lines to the axes of movement like so much game art. This is partly what made these images so evocative. You can’t quite see what the game mechanics will be just by looking at them.

So what kind of game was Ancient Mariner? According to C&VG, it was meant to be a trilogy, with each part coming on three disks. The player takes the role of an “impoverished 16th century seadog whose lands have been lost through gambling and bad business deals. To regain his former status in life he must trade – both legally and illegally – all over the world”.

The game “will contain play that will appeal to the traditional adventure game player” as well as combining “fast arcade-action with icon-controlled elements”. The arcade sequences would have included “battles in the Spanish main, skirmishes against cannibals, raiding and boarding parties and hand to hand combat”.

It seems to me that Ancient Mariner might have been something like a cross between Sid Meier’s Pirates and a Cinemaware game, perhaps with something of the eccentricity and high art of Captain Blood mixed in.

Sid Meier’s Pirates needs no introduction, It’s probably the best known and best loved pirating game there is. It was released in 1987, and reviewed two months after Ancient Mariner was previewed so I’m not sure how much of an influence it would have been. Pirate games were definitely in the air that year. The C&VG review of Sid Meier’s masterpiece compares it favourably to others available at that time, such as Cascade Software’s Pirates of the Barbary Coast.

Left: Sid Meier’s Pirates. Right: Pirates of the Barbary Coast

Cinemaware however, might be less familiar to the gamers of today. Cinemaware were one of the outstanding developers of the early 16-bit period; their games had production values few others could match at that time and had a distinctly American “bigness” which still counted for something in my corner of eighties Britain.

Cinemaware’s Rocket Ranger (1988) and King of Chicago (1987) 

Their games were early attempts at interactive movies, and usually featured arcade, puzzle and strategy sub-games within a well-animated linear narrative.

Ancient Mariner sounds very much as if it could have been a moodier Cinemaware game, taking its cues from European comics and animation rather than Hollywood.

And that is pretty much everything I have discovered about this mysterious game. If anyone knows more, or has even played Ancient Mariner, please let me know.

Also, Toxin is the first game I have worked on since the Smartphone stuff I did around 2002-2003. I was desperate to get back into game development and I mistakenly thought I could begin again where I left off. It was like running into a brick wall. The first artwork I did was so bad I deleted everything, took the bus into Stratford on Avon and spent the rest of the day sitting by the side of the river in despair!

It took me some time to reach my old level again and then improve on it. As much as I have enjoyed developing Toxin and the creative discoveries I have made, there has been a great deal of struggle and fruitless experimentation involved.

The interior designer and UK TV legend Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen was an unlikely influence. On his TV home makeover shows he’d get his clients to collect images they liked and pin them to a board for inspiration. I had a Toxin folder on my laptop which I filled with images from ffffound and other design inspiration sites. When I got stuck I’d fire up IrfanView and spend half an hour blanky staring at images until some ideas popped up. I highly recommend this practice. A few of the images from my Toxin folder are in the image below.

That watch is a Dievas Aqualuna Blue Professional. No I can’t afford one yet. Buy Toxin!

The first thing I did was the main ship, which is the only thing I got right first time; it remained unchanged throughout development whereas everything else got remade at least three times! I think it works really well and has a nicely balanced, iconic look. I designed it in a vector drawing package which I later abandoned in favour of using rendered, animated splines created in a 3d program.

The background was next. It was essential to get the background style nailed as it would define the look of the whole game. I tried a few different styles as you can see in the rough drafts below.

One of my biggest goals here was to create something that looked good within the phone. Too often, mobile games just present windows on to the game world without any consideration for the device that is running the game. To me this is like designing a watch face without taking the case into account.

Next time I’ll talk about how Toxin uses procedural graphics and describe how I used Photoshop scripting and Processing, a Java based generative arts platform to create much of the game’s artwork.

Over the next few months I want to write something around the idea of a language of game design. I say “around” because the subject is so tricky that it doesn’t let itself be approached directly; it must be circled carefully, with a keen eye for the subtle tracks it leaves in the gaming landscape.

Glimpses of our prey are fleeting; a movement in the long grass, the flash of an eye in the shadows. It’s a beast that none have seen clearly, yet tales of it are told wherever its hunters gather.

What do we mean when we talk about a language of game design? Over the past ten years, many designers have had the intuition that it might be possible to create a notation for describing game ideas like those that exist for music and choreography. Although the idea has been floating around for a while, it came to prominence in 2005 when Raph Koster delivered his lecture, “Game Grammar” at the GDC in San Francisco. Since then, many more game developers have started to explore the idea from a variety of perspectives, and for a variety of reasons.

But to talk of a language may ultimately mislead us. It’s important to keep in mind that we are using the word “language” as a metaphor. We might as easily say a mathematics of game design, a biology, or an architecture. Each of these designations points toward what we are looking for, but the contours of their meanings may scatter the light in other, less helpful directions, just as they reveal new and novel ones.

To create a language we first need an ontology. We need to know what fundamental entities games are composed of, and what fundamental relationships exist between them. (Actually, if we were really doing ontology, we’d have to be a bit clearer on what we mean by “entities” and “relations”.)

The search for an ontology raises some interesting questions. How are game entities similar to or different from their counterparts in the real world? How is creating a language of game design different from creating a language of surgery, of truck-driving, or of tasks and events in general? Given a real world-system of entities, a supermarket say, or a cowboy’s corral, what do I need to add or take away to make it into a game?

The central question, for me anyway, is not how I might write down my game ideas, or lay out their anatomy, but how do I see a game in what is around me or in what I feel? An artist looks upon his subject and sees form, colour, line and space. What does a game designer see? How can I teach someone to see it?

The posts in this series will be fairly loosely linked. I don’t have a grand unified theory or anything like that. I just want to share my thinking and get my ideas out there to anyone who might find them useful.