Triella WI ask the hard questions

One tough audience. No really.

Some time back I was invited to give a talk about computers at Triella Women’s Institute. So today I went off to strut my stuff. It was great  fun. I talked a bunch of what I thought was computer common sense and then I stopped and asked for questions.

I’ve forgotten what the first question was, but I won’t forget the second one in a hurry. “Why did Blackberry go bust?”. Hmmm. Tricky. And not quite what I was expecting. Anyhoo, I thought I’d better have a crack at the answer. Blackberry have managed to go from Hero to Zero in a few short years. There was a time when everyone who was anyone had a Blackberry phone. Now just about nobody does. Personally I reckon they took their eye off the ball for too long and assumed that people would always want what they made because they always had.

Blackberry aren’t the only ones who have taken a pounding from the new wave of touch screen devices spearheaded by Apple but they were the ones that were last with a proper response. And they are now paying the price. And it didn’t help that their service broke more times than it ever, ever, should have.

Next up was a question along the lines of “Why is Windows 8 so horrible?”. Hmm. Tricky again. Actually Windows 8 is not that bad. It is just irritatingly different when you first start with it. My top tip is to use the Windows key to start a search for your chosen program. I just press Windows, type “WO” and then hit enter. And up comes Word. Much easier and quicker than any mouse powered start menu. Of course I didn’t help my case by being horribly inept when I was trying to show this off, because the keyboard to my tablet was safely stored in my bag….

Then we talked about all sorts, from Smart TVs, to password policies, to the perils of dodgy power cables. Great fun, and thanks for inviting me.

You can find the slides here.

Selling your games with Simon Grey

I think Simon learned a lesson today.He learned not to email me and say “I’ve got some great ideas for the Rather Useful Seminar this afternoon about getting your game to market”. I told him I had an even better idea.

He could do the seminar.

So he did. And it was excellent. We kind of did it between us (in other words Simon said things and I shouted out stuff from the side). We also had John and Josh come by to talk about their experience getting games to market.  They started by publishing games from Three Thing Game and are now planning proper releases, with game companies based down at Platform Studios. Points to ponder:

• Get something out there. Just do it. Don’t wait for it to be “finished”. Nothing is ever really finished. If you get stuff out there you will get feedback and make your next game even better. The experience of actually getting something approved and in a marketplace is an incredibly valuable one.
• Set yourself deadlines. Don’t just plan to “Get round to it”. You never will. Tell yourself you are going to ship at the end of November and then do that.
• Put yourself out there. Like everything else, it is all about networking and who you know. Get yourself business cards. Go to events. Shake hands with folks. Start a blog, get yourself a following and practise your writing styles.
• There is no such thing as an “Overnight Success”. Minecraft took four years of solid work. Lots of other independent games that came from nowhere actually had a long gestation period and lots of planning behind them. And they were frequently the most recent in a long line of releases that had previously gone nowhere.
• If something doesn’t work the way you thought it would, see if that makes the gameplay better, and use it if it does. Some games are built on “happy accidents”.
• Keep doing stuff.

Thanks so much to Simon for putting together such a good presentation at such short notice. You can find the slides here. 

Tiny Golden Owls

I tend to buy all my 3D printing fibres from Faberdashery. They are by no means the cheapest, but I’ve found their quality and consistency to be very good, and they have a range of really nice colours that go well together, at least to my untrained artistic eye.

There is one little trick that the company plays that is really rather cunning. When they send you a box of fibres they always include a few metres of a colour you haven’t ordered, to play with. This is sneaky because it usually ends up with me ordering a full roll of that colour. Today I got some new fibre and found that they’d included some gold stuff. This is not just gold, it has tiny flecks in it that look really nice. The picture above doesn’t really do it justice,

I’ve never really managed to get a happy ending when I print very small objects, they just tend to merge into one molten looking lump. However, I thought I’d have a go because if things went badly at least I’d not waste much raw materials, which didn’t cost me any money anyway. So I printed out a couple of tiny owl earrings and I don’t think they’ve turned out half bad.

A 3D printing tip: One of the things that determines the quality of the print is the “layer height”. The printer prints by laying down successive layers of plastic on top of each other. In theory, the thinner each layer the higher the resolution of the printing. My printer is supposed to be running at high quality when it prints layers which are a tenth of a millimetre thick. However I’ve found that in practice an ultra-thin layer doesn’t work very well. The print head is so close to the object being printed that it melts one layer as it puts the next on top, resulting in a sludgy looking mess. I’ve had much better results printing with thicker layers. The owls above were printed using layers that were a fifth of a millimetre in height. You can see each layer, but I quite like that, in the same way as wood has a grain, I quite like to be able to see how the object was constructed. I reckon it is worth trying to print out at with thicker layers sometimes. The printing will be quicker and it might even look nicer.

Three Thing Game Judging Videos Available

The judging videos from Three Thing Game November 2013 are now available on YouTube. You can find them on my YouTube account: https://www.youtube.com/user/RobMilesOnTheTube

More Big Lego Brick Storage Boxes

Today I bought some more Giant Lego Bricks today to store things in. I’m going to fit them together with the ones I bought last week. Number one son was not convinced. “You’ll have problems getting things out of the boxes at the bottom” he said.

“That’s where you’re wrong” I replied. “I’m not going to put anything in the bottom boxes”.

That told him. I think.

Three Thing Game Finals

Well, after a day of solid development we had our finals. I’d expected some attrition, particularly as the event came on the end of a tough day in a tough teaching week, but at the end we had 25 teams ready to be judged and so our three teams of judges sallied forth into the fray. They were looking for adherence to the theme of the three things, presentation quality and plain good old playability. After they had seen their assigned teams they each came back with three entries worthy of a finalist place. So we headed to the lecture theatre, fired up the Surface and gave each team three minutes to pitch their game to the whole audience.

First up was “Two Thing Game”: Episode 2”, otherwise known as Mateusz Bajer and Ben Convenley. They had taken “Super Saiyan”, “Hamster” and “Water Fight” and fashioned an island defence game, with you as the Saiyan in the title beating off hoards of hamsters intent on stealing your water. Above you can see the “Boss Hamster” about to enter the fray. Proper hamster blasting fun.

The second team to present had the best name I reckon. “The Bing Wang Theory”, Adam Brookes, James Briffa, Alex Belezjaks and Artur Neugodnikovs had made a Windows Phone game out of "Radioactive", "Spider" and "Racing". The game had you tipping the phone to dodge the radioactive bullets hurtling towards you, while trying to create chains of colour in the bullet stream that would change them into harmless isotopes. A nice balance of challenges in a single game that made really good use of the accelerometer and touch screen on the phone. They even had a back story in rhyme. I hope this one makes it into Windows Phone Marketplace.

Next up was “Teams are for losers, and so are graphics”. This was a one man team who did everything with ASCII characters. Living up to the name in the most literal manner possible. William Grey had fashioned an entirely text powered RPG around the things “Pork”,”Crates” and “Light Cycles”. After a slight hiccup at the start due to the fact that the demonstration machine lacked a numeric keypad,  William was able to show how to move around the environment searching for crates containing the life-enhancing bacon.

The next team to present were Spooky Elephant. To my eternal shame I was so caught up in the excitement of seeing the team I was kind of part of present at finalist level that I neglected to take any pictures of the presentation. Still, the team of Simon Grey, David Parker, David Miles, Lewis Jackson and others had produced a very playable game from a starting point of “Walrus”, “Swimming” and “Custard”. Above you can see Wilbur the Walrus being steered away from the impending custard tsunami.

The “Rusty Spoons” are a Three Thing Game institution. Thomas McPherson,     Tim Roth and     Matthew Narey have been involved since the very first competition, many years ago. As befits experienced developers they had created a stunning looking tower defence game from “Clouds”, “   Ship” and “   under attack”. The player has to stop the ships getting through bye using clouds to generate wind, whirlpools and all manner of bad things.

This was the first Three Thing Game for the Grant C team. But Matt Jemmett,     Matt Rose,     Luke Stewart and     Jordan Tavaglione put on a great show with their take on “Sidescroller, “Marvel” and “Zombie”. With guest appearances from Iron Man and a zombified Hulk, the game had frantic shooting action as the player tried to stop the hulks from passing. This game also featured custom recorded voice acting and “Rob Miles” bullets. Can’t be bad.

 

This team, the Cunning Stunts (careful how you say that) had made a game called “FlusterCluck” (careful how you say that too) starting from “Jetpack”, “sponge” and “chicken”. The chicken is the good guy, the sponges spawn at an amazing rate and after a few seconds things get very flustered indeed. Very good work from Jamie Hickman, Tom Richardson and Ricardo Real.

Betajester are another team of Three Thing Game stallwarts. And they used the skills they have acquired over the years to produce a frantic top down maze game from “Lasers”, “Trap” and “At Midnight”. We could see the traps, and the lasers, But we weren’t quite sure where the Midnight element fitted in. Then the clock clicked over, the screen went dark, the bad guys appeared and the whole game went manic. Great atmospheric fun (and good use of shaders) from Adam Boyne, Josh Porter and     Ryan Lay.

Team “88 Rob Miles Per Hour” had the less than enticing trio of “Database”, “Speed” and “goes fishing” as their things. But Daniel Pearson, Ben Redpath, Daniel Szczech and Chris Cawkwell stayed true to their theme and game up with a game that had you catching fish, measuring them and then entering the details into a database. All great fun and the best interpretation of things that I’ve seen in a long while.

So, after all nine had presented we got to the prizes. These three stayed around long enough to pick up their Third Place prizes. Well done to “88 Rob Miles Per Hour”. Their quirky gameplay and strict adherence to them got them into third.

The “Rusty Spoons” stunning graphics and neat gameplay got them into Second Place.

Which left Betajester as the overall winners this time. They hit the theme well with an excellent piece of gameplay presentation with genuinely scary elements. Fantastic stuff.

One of the judges remarked on me that the standard gets higher each time we do this. I agree. Kudos to everyone who took part. If you didn’t make it to the end, no worries. The whole basis of “Three Thing Game” is that you learn what you can achieve in the time, pick up more skills and come round again. Stay tuned for Three Thing Game Spring 2014.

These are the survivors of the finals. Great work folks. Everyone who took part in the competition is awarded a Three Thing Game certificate. Contact me if you want yours.

Three Thing Game Gets Under Way

We started the Three Thing Game competition today at 7:00pm. It’s going well so far. Around 140 students turned up who are keen to spend some time making games. At the moment everyone is sitting down and working on their game projects. We have a wide range of expertise, including some folks who have been programming for just a few weeks.

We stopped at around 8:30 for pizza and pop. We had 60 pizzas delivered in a mini-convoy and they were demolished by hungry developers in about 25 minutes flat. Many, many thanks to Microsoft who not only sponsored the pizzas today but also provided Lee Stott from the Technical Evangelist team who turned up to take a look and ended up helping me dish out the food.  Lee was at an event a little further up north, but couldn’t resist heading home via Hull to see what was going on. He was telling me all about the new Imagine Cup competitions this year. Most interesting, and a great way to take your Three Thing Game experience onto the next level.

I’ve put loads of pictures on Flickr, you can find them here.

Linux Format Coding Academy 2013

Computing is currently a bit fashionable, which is nice because there are loads of magazines of all flavours out there. And quite often a magazine will lump together a bunch of articles from previous issues and make a kind of “Greatest Hits” compilation. Linux Format has just done that and produced an edition it calls “Coding Academy 2013”.

It seems a bit expensive at 12.99 for what looks like a magazine, but when you consider that there are no advertisements it starts to look better value. There are introductions to Python, Ruby on Rails, Haskell, Scheme and Lisp along with features on Android development. It is all pretty well written, with examples and links to sample code.

If you have C# skills and are looking to find out the meaning behind some of the other words you hear bandied about when people talk computers you could do a lot worse than take a look. If you are complete beginner you might find the range of information a bit wide, but remember that you only have to learn one of these languages at a time.

I found my copy in the local newsagents, you can buy it online here.

XNA for Three Thing Game Rather Useful Seminar

What a great audience to get things wrong in front of….

I did the XNA Rather Useful Seminar today. Slightly enlivened by the fact that I finished the slide deck only a few minutes before the lecture itself. Oh well. Everything worked eventually…..

You can find the slides here. You can find the demos here.

Walrus. Custard. Swimming.

You might not know this (or perhaps even care) but I’m actually a member of a team taking part in Three Thing Game. I’m a part of the Spooky Elephant collective. I’m a sort of “sleeping partner” who doesn’t do much and then turns up to collect the prizes.

Works for me.

Anyhoo, David from our team was at the auction and managed to bag “walrus”, “custard” and “swimming” as the things we are going to have to make a game around. that sounds quite promising to me. But perhaps not as promising as “Team Bacon” who managed to get bread, cooking and,er, bacon. But you have to feel sorry for “The Elite Four” who managed to end up with “Rob Miles”, “Nuts” and “in a dress”. Who knows what they’ll come up with….

Auctioning Things at Enormous Speed

All the teams. All the things.

Sooooo. We had 41 teams and each of them needed Three Things. That’s well over 100 things to auction. In fifty minutes. And we did it.

By the end of the lecture we had a well oiled machine of David, Emily, Martin, Peter and myself who were clearing auction items at the rate of one every fifteen seconds. I’m not sure that everyone got all that they wanted but quite a few got some things. I was very pleased to see teams poring over the things for sale and strategizing before the auction. And the folks outside the lecture waiting to come in were amazed at what was going on.

For the teams, you now have three things. Make a game that involves them. It can be a new type of game, or a more traditional genre themed with the words that you have. Or just forget the things and make a space shooter. Anything goes.

I’m very pleased to be able to report that game developer Boss Alien will be sending some of their folks to take part in the event. They’ll be going round, looking at what is being built and giving helpful comments. They came along in June and enjoyed it so much they are coming back, which is great. They’ll be helping with the judging too.

Next date for your diaries is Wed. 30th NovemberOctober, at 1:15 pm. That’s when I’m doing an XNA overview which will cover how to get a game going and some things moving around the screen. It’s a Rather Useful Seminar and it’s in LTD as usual.

This is going to be so much fun.

Three Thing Game is Go

Well, we’ve spent a sizeable chunk of the weekend printing and cutting out “Bank of Thingland” money, stuffing envelopes with notes, printing coloured things and generally getting ready for the Three Thing Game auction tomorrow that starts everything off. The auction is at 2:15 in Wilberforce Lecture Theatre 2 (WI-LT02). Should be fun.

This year, for a change, we are releasing some of the things that will be auctioned, so that you know what is coming up. You can find the list, along with the briefing document, here. If you find that I’ve spelt your name wrong in the team list (it happens) let me know and I’ll update the registration spread sheet.

Great Big Lego Bricks

Just bought a bunch of these to put things in. They are great big Lego bricks, around 25cm x 50cm which you can put things in. And they fit together just like normal sized ones. So you can build a fort with them.

From the look of the reviews on Amazon they are very popular. Particularly with five year olds. But I like them too.

You must meet Henrietta Lacks–in fact you may already have done

Read. This. Book. It is not about computers (at least so far, I’m just past half way through). It is about medicine, race and human nature. Anyone proposing a work of fiction that followed the story in this book would be dismissed as being fanciful and having ideas that were just too far fetched. And yet it is all true.

It tells the story of how the death of one woman led to the establishment of a whole branch of science. It will also tell you how cells work, how they go wrong and how we found out about a lot of this, just because of Henrietta Lacks.

You can track down a copy from here. It is also available for Kindle at a very good price.

Data, Insight and Customer Weirdness at C4DI

Andy points out his achievements, including coming up with the slogan “8 out of 10 cats…”

We are all surrounded by data which is harvested, refined and bought and sold just like any other cash crop. In the C4DI meeting tonight two excellent talks showed how this “big data” can be used to deliver useful outcomes, but how you also need to be aware of the human context behind the numbers.

First up was Andy Parkinson who now works for Kingston Communications as their Head of Insight and Analytics. He used to work for Hull City Council and gave a great description of how the council has been using the data it collects to refine and target services to make them more efficient. He showed how we can all be clustered into groups and how this helps to target resources. It seems that everybody is unique, but we all mange to be unique in a fairly structured way. And when you can characterise and map this, you can work out where you need to target what you are doing with your resources.

Having told us of the power of all this analysis, he then went on to mention that people can also behave in untoward and unpredictable ways that don’t fit their profile, or just act on “auto-pilot”. This reminded me a lot of my favourite maxim of the moment “Plans are useless, Planning is crucial”. By all means analyse your data and take actions based on it. But be well aware that you will always have to deal with some weirdness around the edges and behaviours that arrive “built in” to people. Of course, if you can harness these you can get some really big wins. So don’t be afraid to try stuff that targets the “automatic self”.

Next we had a talk from Nick Thompson who is Managing Director of Hull City and was formerly Director of Consumer Services with Kingston Communications. Nick took what Andy said and added an even stronger human dimension. By breaking down the Hull City fanbase into sections and analysing their motivations and actions he provided a lovely example of how data can tell you some useful things, but that you need to understand what drives the people in your numbers and how they behave.

It turns out that the spending habits of the fans seem to follow the well established “80 – 20” law, which in Hull City terms means that that 80% of the income of the club comes from around 20% of the fans. And these are not necessarily the most fanatical ones, who see their passion for the club transcending things like replica shirts and other merchandise. Very interesting.

Nick make the point that you can make decisions based on the data, but this must always be done in the light of the emotional attachments and drivers of the people themselves. What made it all the more striking was that Nick has obviously been a huge fan of the club for a very long time, and presumably fits himself into one of his categories as well.

The talks fitted together really well and made for a terrific evening.

A Rather Useful Slice of Raspberry Pi

This is a slightly processed picture of the audience. It seems that quite a few people have a taste for Pi.

We did another Rather Useful Seminar today. It was all about the Raspberry Pi. I covered what is, how you use it, a bit about hardware interfacing from Python and then we had a bit of time to look at my Pi Arcade table, which I’m keeping in the department for now.

This is the table, showing off its Pi credentials. Normally I run Mame on it. You can find out more about how I built it here.

Thanks to a great audience. You can find the slides here.

Wrestling with Python

I’m only a bit sorry about the title. And the fact that the first program that we wrote was an “adder”. And yes, I do know that the language was named in honour of the TV show, not the snake.

Anyhoo, we had our first Python session for teachers tonight. A great bunch of folks turned up, wrote some Python, made it work and went home. If you are interested to find out what we got up to, you can find the slides and the lab notes here.

It’s not too late to sign up. If you are a teacher in the Hull area who would like to learn more about Python and has Tuesday evenings free then you can find out more here.

Stand Well Back–Three Thing Game is Launching….

Students and Things of Old.

The World’s Premier Student Game Programming Competition involving Three Things is now ready for launching. We are going to have all the usual shenanigans with a Thing Auction next week (on Monday 28th at 2:15 in Wilberforce Lecture Theatre 2 since you asked) and more fun and games than you could shake a stick at. Even if you were a really good stick shaker.

If you want to enter (and you should) print out and fill in a registration form (which you can find here) and bring it to me along with your registration fee (which helps pay for the pizza).  You can even suggest a thing which you might like to bid for on the registration form. Teams of up 4 can take part. Team members don't have to be Computer Science students, but they do have to be University of Hull students.

If you’ve never written a game before I’ll be doing a Rather Useful Seminar next week (on Wednesday 30th at 1:15 in Robert Blackburn Building LTD since you asked again) which will describe how to get started with game writing in C#. Don't worry if you are just learning to program. It turns out that spending a solid day working on a project is a very good way to build your skills. This is true whether or not you want to end up as a game developer.

We will start at 7:00 pm on the Friday night (1st November) and finish by 8:00 pm on Saturday evening (2nd November). So you can spend all day Sunday recovering. We even have some proper game developers coming along to join in the fun .

If you don't have a team, don't worry. We will be using the "Team-o-matic" to create teams for individuals who haven't got one. Just fill in a form for yourself and write "Team-o-matic" as the team name.

John Mayer at the O2–thanks to Hacked

In July this year I took part in Hacked at the O2 in London. It was an absolutely brilliant hackathon, made all the better by the fact that I managed to win one of the competitions. My Difficultifier got People’s Choice Award, which was completely wonderful. What made it even better was finding out that part of the prize was four tickets to any show at the O2 Dome over the next year. Splendid.

I mentioned this to Number One daughter. “John Mayer’s playing the dome in October” she said. Done.

So, thanks to those wonderful O2 people, particularly Cristiano Betta and Kevin Prince, today we were sitting in seats up close to the stage, having just come from the O2 Lounge where we had been preparing for the performance with a couple of cocktails. As you do (or as had been laid on for us)

This is Gabrielle Aplin, who did a sterling job providing support and had an absolutely cracking backing band.

.. and this is the man himself, with some good advice for us all. He started early and gave us a two hour demonstration of why he is just so darned good. If you’ve not heard of John Mayer, then seek him out. Blues, rock, country, playing the guitar behind your back.  The works.  Just really, really good.

A Trip to London

This is the fancy new roof over the courtyard of the British Museum. We’re here because we are having a couple of days in London and fancied seeing all the good stuff that our enterprising ancestors plundered from ancient civilisations far and wide.

I think that this is a very early prototype for the very first Simpsons episode. But I may be wrong.

We were looking at the mosaics and noting that the resolution was reasonable, but the frame rate seemed a bit slow. Great fun and probably even cultural.