Yesterday I joyfully headed down to the first of the new BARG Meets at the MAC with a bulging pocket full of old train tickets. Why, well I was keen to to get some help in testing out a game based around those orange and yellow cards we all cram our wallets full of.

The idea for a game based around train tickets came after realising I, like others, spend approx 3% of my life passively collecting, then discarding them and am never without at least 5 or so on my person. So instead of just tossing them into the bin I wanted to take on the challenge of turning these disposable bits of rubbish into a competitive collectable.

So what sort of game is capable with train tickets? Lots of course, but I’m keen to develop something easy to pick up without requiring other tech or props. I’d started to think around other traditional card games and see what derivatives might be possible and of course top trumps was a natural first direction.

But where to start? As I’m still new to ‘officially’ developing games I foolishly started with a quite admin heavy approach that consisted of compiling a list of all the potential variables and the formats each ticket offers up, and there are a lot….an awful lot…..

- Return or single
- No of travellers
- Cost
- Date valid from
- Date valid till
- Date printed
- To & from
- Validity
- Various random nonsensical combinations of 5/ 10 letter numbers and letters
- Ticket validation, (stamp…hole punch….squiggle)

and this still isn’t all of them and doesn’t include seat reservations, void tickets, receipts, foreign tickets and others. After listing most of these I must admit I wasn’t a great deal further along actually coming up with a game and was just boring myself to tears. What I needed was to sit down with a group of people willing to just start playing some half baked games to see and discuss what worked and what didn’t.

And thankfully this is where the BARG meet came in. I was slightly worried when I was heading down that I wasn’t doing so with a perfect game, or even a playable one. Instead I just had a pocket full of tickets a few ideas and an extensively dull list of variables. But it turns out that’s all I needed.

I explained my semi logic and thinking so far to the group which lead to us playing through a few rounds of a trump based game with a variation of rules, discussing and deciding on these as we went along.

A personal favourite was the development of how to deal with the ‘to and from’ variable which moved from ‘distance from current location’, ‘longest distance travelled’ to the more qualitative measurement of ‘travelling up or down in the world’ (e.g. a journey from Coventry to London= good, but from Coventry to London = bad). Granted this can lead to debating (read: arguing) among players, but  this complimented the more defined numerical wins (e.g. £42 ticket trumping a £2.70 ticket).

By the end some things worked, some things didn’t, but I’m a lot further along in developing at least 1 game. I still feel that a trump based game is too much the ‘easy option’ but given the number of variables then there’s always room for a whole wiki of games (I’ve also been working around something in a domino format).

By the next meet on the 18th I’m hoping to have some further developed variations of the game we played to inflict on new willing victims. But in the meantime if you have any thoughts on games to develop with tickets then please get in touch!

(p.s. apologies for the awful picture quality, my lovely lumix camera is currently on holiday after I foolishly left it somewhere a week ago, no offence iphone camera)

Last stop was the Eurogamer Expo in London. I won’t go into a highlights list as I’m sure the diagram above does a good enough job of summing this up. I’ll admit that I’ve been a light weight this week and was on game/play overload at this point so I’m sure the expo wasn’t just the incomprehensible brown blur of boys, bombs, boobs, blood and guns that I remember.

But what I do remember was the Indie Games Arcade upstairs, providing an eclectic respite and creative safe haven featuring titles such as Joe Danger, Time Fcku, Fig. 8. You can read about more of the games featured and the Indie arcade here (I’m particularly sad I didn’t get to see the responses elicited by the Happening Game, but David’s write up goes some way to consolling this)

Again its a shame that so much was overlapping last week, but on the plus side running up and down the country (okay so only from Nottingham to London) to events made it feel like the country was buzzing with excitement and love for games and I only hope this feeling lasts.

And on the 3rd day Marie uprooted from the Midlands and journeyed down to London for Playful 09. And it was good.

Highlights (in order of how legible my notes where)

+ Free red liquorish rope at registration

+ Kareem from Media Molecule talking in regards to managing a creative business/team by incorporating ideas of ownership, responsibility and encouraging personal projects.

+ Robin Burkinshaw talking about the history of Alice and Kev

+ @stml calculating the odds of Christ’s resurrection at 96 billion to 1, then going on to present his analogue matchbox computer that takes on players at noughts and crosses.

+ Learning via Russell Davis that the world’s largest model railway is in Hamburg (I <3 model villages & railways)

+ @rexbox ’s retro projector presentation  (took me back to sitting at the front of assemblies at primary school and having to move the hymm sheets up and down  and usually back to front).

+ The way the lights reflected on the balloons at the end of the day creating evil smiles. Can’t find a photo to adequately demonstrate this so here is a doodle I did during the day.

I’ve had no intertubes for the past 4 days so my blog posts are suffering from a bit of a time delay.

Highlights (in order of when I remembered them)

+ Pretty much all of the GameU talks.

+ Wanting to bang my head against the table listening to Feargal Sharky’s variety of metaphors for piracy, chairs, trees and aids featured.

+ then Adam Atomic bringing some sense into the piracy discussion, and also stating that Canabalt’s iphone piracy levels were only 15%.

+ Hearing about Rex Box’s favourite childhood game (a cross between blob of dirt on a car window and space invaders)

+ Jon Burgerman agreeing to cry for  £1 at his sale on Saturday.

+ Deciding to stick around an extra hour to catch Robin Hunicke’s live projected performance of Flower in the Exchange Arcade.

image c/o Game City

Highlights so far (in order of appearance)

+ Keita Takahashi acting like a naughty school kid by playing random videos of Boy George on the Jonathon Ross Show, an ice hockey game and someone cleaning a goldfish bowl at the end of the playground announcement (which reminded me of the Friend’s with You one from a few years back)

+ 3rd place in a Canabalt tournament (even if my score ‘1800′ was still a bit shameful) resulting in some nifty over-sized shirts.

+ “Find something that allows you to build a game over a weekend or you’ll loose your mind. If its taking you any longer then whatever you’re doing, its too complicated.” – Adam Atomic on rapid prototyping and the origins of Canabalt. (coincidently it was announced elsewhere in the universe that Unity’s indie level software is now FREE… but also worth noting that Adam’s Flixel is also open source and free too)

+ Adam Atomic then explaining how he created the sound effects for ‘running on a crane’ using his macbook, a saucepan and some sneakers whilst his wife was out of the house.

+ Lord Puttnam commenting on how the game industry needs to be lead by the creatives and not the technology, and how he sees this coming from the independent and bedroom coders.

Goodness me, October has been (and still is for another week) a ridiculously busy month for Game events. For me it started back on the 1st when I crossed the Atlantic to visit LA’s Indiecade and will end on Sunday at London’s Eurogamer Expo (passing through Gamecity and Playful along the way).

Indiecade was a great ‘first ever’ game festival experience. From being surrounded directly by the developers of the games the festival was celebrating, to engaging discussions focused on culture, art and innovation and hearing talks by personal favourites Keita Takahashi and Steph Thirion.

However being a game festival novice I do admit  I was quite the Norma no-mates for the duration, which is especially difficult when surrounded by a such a well connected community. Anyhew- my inability to socialise aside, the games that lay at the heart of the festival were an amazingly eclectic selection that reminded me yet again why I’m so fascinated by indie games ..and a particular nod to Peanut Gallery’s festival favourite Minor Battle that was an excellent mix of pervasive and virtual play. (n.b. a selection of Indiecade titles will also be showing at Game City Squared this week in Nottingham).

So onto the week ahead, and although its a shame that so many excellent game events are clashing, its not going to stop me doing my darnedest to take in as much as I can! I’ll report back with my findings later on, but in the meantime here is a rodeo round up of things I’m particularly excited about…

Gamecity: Something Splendid I have nnnnnooooo idea what this is going to entail, but doesn’t that make it all the much better? (this week’s LFF suprise film being the exception to that rule).

Gamecity: Curry Session- Adam Atomic, Making Canabalt The guy who made Canablat, talking about making Canabalt… with curry. Yeah!

Playful: A one day event about games and play in all their manifestations with an eclectic and exciting line up of speakers, summed up well by this tweet

Gamecity: Frozen Synapse Beat the Dev: The cleaner almost threw away their prize pot, but thankfully its still there to win if you can take on indie devs Mode 7 as they peview their upcoming release Frozen Synapse (I hear its like chess with guns- this is a good thing).

Eurogamer: Indie Games Arcade: If you’ve read this far down, you’ll know by now that I like indie games, so of course I would always be looking forward to more.

Combined cooing over Steph Thirion’s games mod workshop and layer tennis over the past few weeks got me thinking about a project I’m looking into running that sits halfway between the two.

Currently lacking in a catchy title, the basic gist is a chain processed game/interactive art. Starting with an original (but basic) games code in Processing- this would then be passed along a chain of X people who would each make X number of changes to the code before passing it onto the next person and so on until it gets to the end and we’re left with some weird mutilated but (potentially) beautiful evolution of interactive art/ game.

Of course there are a lot of variables/ issues I need to work through before moving ahead (such as what happens if the code breaks, how many people to pass it through, what constitutes a change etc…) , and it was great to be able to talk through the idea and issues with some of the guys form FizzPOP on Weds eve who pointed out two main things,

1) Why just send the code through a linear chain, and instead allow it to branch out (e.g. one person passes on the code to two people and so on)- this way if the code breaks it doesn’t matter too much as it will naturally continue along another branch- (such a simple and good idea that I’m hitting myself for not thinking of it)

2) The original code Thirion used for his workshop was  ‘over engineered’ to provide it with the hooks that allowed non coders to adapt and change the game: e.g. you didn’t need to write the code to create multiple balls as it was always there waiting to be adapted’. This point was quite a hard one for me, as it left me with two options,

a) If the code is over engineered, then by doing so I’m potentially enforcing limits on the designs evolution – and also limiting the projects scope.

b) but if I don’t, then how accessible would the code be to those with little to no coding experience (and yes I do want to include these people within the chain).

hmmm well a little pondering on the way home allowed me to justify route a- because in creating any game a designer already enforces the limits of what a player can do- and this could also apply if I considered the processes of adapting the code as a game within itself. But also by spreading out when people with and without coding experience interact with the code then someone with experience might actually add new hooks/ code that we hadn’t even been considered at the beginning and those with no experience can move forward and evolve the code using these.

Does all this make sense? Well it does in my head, which for the time being is what matters. But I’m hoping to do some testing of this over the coming weeks with help from the people at FizzPOP (fingers crossed). But if you have any thoughts, interest then please drop me a line- and if you are s**t hot with Processing and might be able to help code the starting ‘game’ then I’d be super interested in hearing from you.

This week saw another fresh set of  indie game challenges cast upon a crowd of eager developers by the Experimental Gameplay Project and 2-Bee Games . And of course these two are not the only US based indie game projects which have popped up on my radar in the past year…

artxgame Attract Mode and Giant Robots collaboration that teams up artists & developers. Current projects include Jottobots a collaboration between  J.Otto Seibold and Kyle Pulver.

Gamma – Kokoromi’s annual contest, which last year ran with the too cool for school theme of stereoscope 3D giving birth to games such as Papermoon

Experimental Gameplay Project – a group of indie games developers running monthly competitions around a given theme (this month ‘bare minimum’), with the stipulations that they must be the work of one person and worked on for no longer than 7 days.

B2 (2Bee) And finally 2-Bee games who are running their second indie game competition – perhaps the most incentivised of all the offerings with a cash prize and ‘publishing deal’ for the winning game (which last time was the  visually and auditory stunning Auditorium)

So as I coo over these projects and their amazing output I’m always left wondering, why don’t I know of any thing similar based in the UK? Although there’s nothing preventing us Brits from taking part or engaging with most of those listed above, we still lack the fun and inspiring sense of community, collaboration and direct motivation that comes from events such as Kokoromi and artxgame.

And even with all the fluffy and loveliness of community aside these events have encouraged the creation of not only some amazing and well known games (some which have gone on to be fully developed), but they also form excellent PR platforms for the regions and developers involved.

So am I wrong, am I missing some amazing competition or event? The closest I can think of was the recent X48 challenge, or even at a stretch the pervasive games community brought together through Sandpit?  Or am I correct that there is a definite gap for a big monthly/bi-monthly indie game challenge and event- nothing big, just something lo-fi, fun and inspiring.

Well either way I’m not one to sit here and complain and wait for something to pull itself together, no I think its about time something needs to be done… hmmm where to start…

Aside from the mental debackle I’m currently enduring deciding between living on my own, or whether to move in with strangers there is another very important life changing decision looming on the horizon that I have to tackle shortly. Which is after years of simply owning a SNES and a Gamecube I need me a new console.

The much discussed lack of 4th iterations of the current consoles has left me feeling relatively safe for the time being to invest in on this far along in their life cycles (yes with the exception of Wii HD). So what should I go for???

Well first things first being a long time die hard Nintendo fan (well mediocre levels of die-hardness at least) owning ‘every other’ Nintendo console (SNES & Gamecube- as well as my trust DS) I now find myself striking Wii off the list straight away. Why, well this advert is one reason.

Opening up the market to casual gamers- is all fine and dandy, but i am really not down with the new branding especially in light of all the fitness and health games- its to clinical and weird for me- (much like the oddly photoshopped Wii fitness lady currently doing the promotional rounds).

So its down to Xbox vs Playstation 3, in light of the E3 and all the hubub over Natal combined with the upcoming Fez release I should be leaning towards this… and yes its still a tightly run race between the two- but still Playstation is edging in the lead with Little Big Planet , Pixel Junk, HD Katamari and of course… Noby Noby Boy (I mean how can anyone not be in love with a game who’s official site URL is o–o.jp ).

I do find it interesting that I’m leaning towards the least ‘exciting’ of the three consoles, but it is still ultimately the games that are swaying my opinion here- not the fancy technology interactions, or health benefits.  But as I’m still on the fence if anyone has any last minute interjections or can sway me over the Xbox- or heaven forbid Wii then I’d love to hear your thoughts.