Alexis Bauchu - On est pas des machines

This is just a reminder of the search command template. It allows you to create in no time what must be the most used feature of Ubiquity at the moment.

Use the command-editor command, and type the following code in the editor:

CmdUtils.makeSearchCommand({
  name: "your-function-name",
  url: "http://url-to-my-search-engine/?q={QUERY}",
  icon: "http://url-to-my-search-engine/favicon.ico",
  description: "Searches 'my-search-engine' for your words."
});

And just replace your-function-name and url-to-my-search-engine by your own new values. You may have to adapt the query url though.

An example, which searches cplusplus.com:

CmdUtils.makeSearchCommand({
  name: "c++",
  url: "http://www.cplusplus.com/query/search.cgi?q={QUERY}",
  icon: "http://www.cplusplus.com/favicon.ico",
  description: "Searches cplusplus.com for your words."
});

Don't miss it (ends january 2nd):

• Portal at 4€ (ish) (if you get only one, get this one)
• Bioshock at 5€
• Opposing Force and Blue Shift at 0.99€ each
• and many other big discounts

While it's still the 25th, I wish you Happy Holidays! (cause not everybody is a christian). Enjoy the food, enjoy the family reunion, and see you soon :)

I discovered this article when I was blog surfing: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant. You can read a email Bill Gates wrote to his employees to complain about usability issues. The email is pretty old now (in computer time), but I'm not sure things improved that much since then...

Best bits:

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time? So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

It 's kind of a relief to see that even internally, people know that Microsoft does some things terribly wrong. But it's kind of scary and sad to see that many things haven't changed and won't improve, probably because they're don't care and don't feel threatened by any competitor.

At last, I'd like to react to what the author called "frustrations of everyday computer users". I would have said "frustrations of everyday Windows users". There are other systems out there that simply make updating and installing software a breeze. I will have other opportunities to talk about that.

At Enjmin, the second year is all about the project: we gather in teams of nine, with at least one person of each class, 2 game designers, 2 coders, 2 visual artists, 1 sound designer, 1 usability expert, and 1 project manager. We have 5 months (from October to March) to produce a playable prototype and a game design document. We're free to choose any technology we want. Even if the project may not be developed much further, the ambition must be the same as for a commercial game. There are three major milestones where the concept of the game and the prototype are introduced to professionals through a speech covering the gameplay, the visuals, the sound and the marketing.

The game we're working on is a PC multiplayer strategy game, which privileges planning and macro management over reflexes and micro management. Planning, constructing and training will be done during the night time (opponents can't fight), whereas fighting, exploring and gathering of resources will be done during the day time. Each player will be given the same opportunities of customization of their units, a bit like in a role playing game.

Tuesday was the first milestone, and we showed an early version of our project to a bunch of pros: Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia), Frédéric Raynal (Alone in the dark), Serge Hascoët (Chief Creative Officer at Ubisoft) and other French game developers. We haven't done as good as we wanted to. Next time we're gonna concentrate even more on the quality of the speech itself, as it's the most efficient way to make professionals want to know you better.

Just a thought like that: how much have you been playing lately? And to what type of game? I've been playing a lot of team fortress 2 this year and a bit of STALKER (Shadow of Tchernobyl). I've realized that every time I wanted to play Stalker, I wouldn't because the game is very involving. Not that you can't stop whenever you want, but that you're always in the middle of something, so you don't wanna leave the game, and because leaving the game would kill the atmosphere you've been immersed in. So I would rather play TF2 instead. Just for the comfort of knowing that I can switch off whenever I want. And paradoxically, I've been playing hundred of hours of this game, just because it is not involving!

It's exactly the same with TV series against movies. I've been watching tons of TV shows: How I met Your Mother, Chuck, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Futurama, Friends, House, etc, but meanwhile, didn't watch a lot of movies... What about you?

This year again, I attended the FITA 08. FITA stands for Forum International des Technologies de l'Animation, International Forum of Animation Technologies in english. It's one of the rare events of the small town of Angoulême, really. That's how they do it, nothing happens the rest of the year (the streets are dead at 12 on the week end...), and suddenly we have those big international events. You may not know it but it quite important though: people come from all over the world (USA, Japan, Europe), talks are given by famous people of the industry (Paul Debevec, Jordan Mechner, Bill Plympton, Richard Williams, etc).There are so many things to see and so many people to talk to, that these three days go way too fast. Plus we always have a lot of work to do at the same time on our projects.

I couldn't attend today's talks because of the work, but here are my big moments of yesterday:

• Jordan Mechner talked about the convergence of medias (internet, video games, books, films) through the example of the Prince of Persia franchise adaptations
• Emmanuel Laurent from Allegorithmic, a french company of experts in procedural texture showed us their technology. I already new that it would be very impressive, but it was really amazing. Their tool MapZone allows to draw textures that you would swear need SVG or bitmap parts to be achieved, but they do it fully procedural. Just go visit their website and watch their demos (Allegorithmic Demos) and checkout what kind of level of UT3 they can build with only 270Ko of data...
• David Barton and Emily O'Brien from Image Metrics: do you know the Emily project? Watch the video at Emily Project if you don't. It was a more detailed making of the project that what you can see on the net.
• Allegorithmic again, master class: "How to create a non-linear work pipeline". That gave us lots of clues about how to manage our project, how to organize team work, and we saw how tools like Zbrush or MapZone allow to build non-linear pipelines (for example: people can start working on what you've done even if it's not finished). Very inspiring.

I wish I could have gone to every talk...

Left 4 Dead came out yesterday. And it's a great game! How could it fail? It has zombies (and not the kind of zombies you find in Resident Evil, no. More like those in 28 days later), great coop gameplay (we waited that for years!) , lightning fast engine, incredible animations, etc. I love it.

Some of my friends were disappointed they missed the prelaunch of the game, because they finally bought it, but didn't enjoy the pre-purchase discount. Well, they're gonna be even more sorry now, because Valve is now proposing a "left 4 Dead - Four pack" for 150$, so you can play with 3 friends. Meaning you get 25% off the original price, right after the game has been launched. Crazy!

Hi, my name is Alexis Bauchu and I'm studying video game programming in second year at ENJMIN, the French National Games and Interactive Media School. It's a two years course that trains game designers of course, visual designers, sound and music designers, programmers, ergonomics/usability experts and project managers. I'll talk more about it in future posts.

I want to use this blog as an opportunity to share my experiences as a game developer to be and (hopefully!) get some feed back. I decided to write it in english rather than in french in order to reach a wider readership. I've heard my english isn't too bad, but I'll make mistakes, so please don't mind them. I'll mainly write about what I'm doing this year at school, also about my personal projects, and a bit of other computer stuff.

Ok, let's get it started!