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This past weekend I was helping a friend out with his comic expo booth. He had a few old cartridges, NES and ATARI, that he had decalled up to look like games that never existed. The ATARI cart was done up to look like a Predator game and the NES cart had a Walking Dead decal. While it was entirely possible that a deal for a Predator game on the ATARI 2600 was in the works, it never materialized on that system. The Walking Dead, of course, is a more recent development and would never have existed on either system.
Several people through the day stopped to take a second look at them. They either pointed out the anachronism, and got the gag, or they picked up the cart with a puzzled look and asked if it was, in fact, a real game. When they were told that it was probably either RBI baseball or Krull stored in the chips of those cartridges, they smiled, but you could see them deflate a little. A few also went on to mention how they liked older games better than the current generation. I of course jumped into the conversation with both feet since there are few things I like more than talking about old games with fans of old games. Though I suppressed the urge to voice it, the thought of celebrating the past at the expense of the present or the future, still made me feel slightly sour. Of course it is really up to each person to decide what it is that they like, and I believe that they were genuine in their love of older games. It seems to me though, that denying the unfathomable bounty of games, and game types, that are currently available is sort of silly. It’s like saying that no good music was ever produced past the decade you were in high school. That may be how they feel, but it’s also sort of sad. Being a person who sees game mechanics in most things, I briefly entertained the idea of creating a real version of the games on that table. I considered what type of game would be made of The Walking Dead on a NES machine. It seems like something that would fit right in. Maybe a side scrolling zombie fighting game, Contra or P.O.W with zombie enemies. Maybe a sort of Sim City, but with a survivor's camp to manage. Each of those would take work and time. While it might be fun, you could never turn it into a marketable product without the blessing of the individual licence holders. My work and time could also be put into creating something original. I could even make something referential of old games, or properties like Predator, but if I’m creating something, I might as well make it my own. While I still enjoy a lot of older games, and I like a lot of rertro styled games that are coming out now, I think that when a game really works is when it feeds that nostalgia without being a slave to it. The past 30 or 40 years of game development is available to be mined, but incorporating new ideas and new developments into retro style games can lead to the creation of something truly unique and amazing. While I won’t be making a Predator game that runs on an ATARI 2600, it might be a fun challenge to image what that game would look like and then build something similar using all the new tools and techniques available. I know almost nothing about the intricacies of graphics programming. I don’t know how to swizzle a matrix or whatever it is graphics programmers do. I know that swizzling is a real thing, and I think I may have even done it once or twice, but I’m not sure I could tell you exactly how or why. I don’t have the words.
I recently updated a shader I had created so that it would work in Unity 5. There were some small bugs that previous version of Unity were fine with, but the latest version just could not abide. Every object using this shader would come up fuchsia. Fuchsia is a terrible color. That’s why it is used to spotlight an error. No one would ever willingly use fuchsia. To some part of our lizard brain, fuchsia means broken. The bugs were relatively minor, but it still took me quite a while to track them down and fix them. Not because the shader is particularly complex. It isn’t. It was because, even though I had created this shader entirely from scratch, adjusted and set each variable, and used elements of the render engine in ways that, at least I, think are somewhat clever, I had never actually looked at the code. I used a visual, node based shader editing tool to author the shader. I can already picture the indignant sneers of the coding grognards out there. There is a contingent of the game dev community who even regard a pre made game engine, Unity Unreal and the like, as if it were an especially pungent cheese. I may not have made the most inventive or precision tuned shader ever, but It creates a look that was not available through any simple means. It is unique, and while it may be a problem that a very few people have, the shader solves a problem. That’s what good tools do. I occasionally drift into the wonderful world of linux, unix, dos, and command line interfaces. I grew up using the command line. My childhood was populated with computers that were completely impenetrable to the uninitiated. Flashing cursor boxes and arcane commands like LOAD “*”,8,1 were common. I still habitually type ls when I mean to type dir. Z80 basic is a major part of my construction as a human. I have it in me to be the uber geek that looks down his nose at gui based tools, yet I bristle at the comment that using the command line is more efficient. I have driven many stick shift vehicles. They are not more efficient than driving an automatic. A practiced driver can accomplish things with a manual transmission that an automatic vehicle might not be capable of. They have more options available, but I think it is important to never mistake options for skill or efficiency. The learning curve of an automatic vehicle is significantly smoother. It lets the driver get better faster. Knowing how and when to shift gears is much less important than learning to be a good driver. I view writing code in much the same way. I often find that variances in syntax hold me back more than the actual problems I’m trying to solve. Since I’m not hip deep in the programming language of the day, I spend most of my time looking at documentation, and a small amount of time actually writing code. Gui based development tools are like an automatic transmission for code. The learning curve is smoothed out. That doesn’t mean that it’s not important to know what is going on under the hood. Since I had created the shader, even if it was with a gui based editor, I was able to walk through the code looking for landmarks that I had placed to ferret out the offending bits. Creating the program in a streamlined way allowed me to better understand what was actually going on in there. If I had sat down with openGL documentation and a book on shader programming, I would probably still be sitting there with no shader to show for it. As it stands, I have it running in two versions of the engine and I’m well on my way to making it work with the new Unity lighting model. Even now I feel like I’m being overly defensive of visual scripting and programming systems. There is a part of me that use to set up batch renders using small unix scripts that feels like shader editors and node based graphical programming is a cop out. It’s coding for babies. Maybe it is, but babies learn faster than any other human, and they learn by testing the world and getting feedback. They don’t learn by building up layers of theory that they eventually employ in one triumphant effort. Test, receive feedback, adjust, test receive feedback, adjust. That is what these tools let you do. Mostly I am just trying to justify buying Shader Forge, since the free shader editors don’t work in in Unity 5. forty years gone by
playing games more than thirty silly to stop now |
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Owen McManus