Plaidophile

Our first build was rejected, as expected, because of the last-minute crash bug which snuck in while James was fixing a memory leak (which was taking OMG a whole 4 bytes per level), but also because of a couple of other really minor problems, only one of which was code-related (and was due to an obscure bug in the DS SDK). So I changed one line of code and we built. Happily, we'd added quite a bit of polish after the first submission anyway (like I finally found and removed a few minor-but-annoying graphical glitches) and so I think what we submitted today is as perfect as a game can get given our timeframe and budget.

Since the submission check process seems to take around 24 hours, we should get word back tomorrow. Or it might be even quicker since now they only have to retest the bits they rejected us on (which means playing the walkthrough and then beating on the music/sound volume options).

Of course, none of us have made vacation plans, though I have a few ideas of how I want to spend my week off. Assuming we do get a week off (ideally not taken out of our paid vacation), which we should considering how many hours we put in over the last three months.

I want to work on music, now that I have stuff to work on it with. I also want to get a battery-powered guitar amp and hang out in a subway station and jam. I wouldn't even bring anything for people to put money in, either. I mean, I've paid money to have an audience.

Maybe I can find Shakerleg (or one of the many other subway drummers) and jam with him. That'd be awesome.

Right now I really don't want to be thinking about the next game, though. But Antoine wants me to start looking into brew so that we can port Sprung back to the cellphone, which is where it was originally going to go to begin with. I'm more than a little disgusted with the thought of going from a fun, hacker-type gaming platform to a mobile content delivery platform for enabling e-business and actualizing consumer eyeball-oriented cross-branded entertainment options (or whatever) which doesn't even have anything developer-oriented on the developer FAQ. On the other hand, making an episodic game based on the ideas in Sprung would be neat. But back on the first hand, why do I have to do that? Wasn't I hired as a graphics programmer?

We do also have a second DS project on the slate (can't really say much about it) but I'm not too interested in it either. But at least I'd be doing 3D graphics again, but it'd mostly be the less-fun parts of that. One nice thing about Sprung was that I had the flexibility to go crazy with all sorts of nifty 2D stuff, while the 3D for the next game will probably be pretty straightforward and boring. I do have some ideas for how to make 3D-animated characters come alive (which were going to be the area of my PhD research) but I don't know if our time and budget will really support such a major chunk of R&D. I mean, aside from learning the DS platform, the only R&D I had time for on Sprung was reordering bytes for word-aligning data in span-compressed transparent images. Which I really want to write a Siggraph paper on, or at least a Gamasutra article.

I'm still an academic at heart, I guess.

I think I'd also like to experiment more with my music recomposition system, since Sprung ended up only using only a very tiny subset of its capabilities (and not even that much in the game itself, though the "sound check" screen lets the player explore all the fun music they never actually hear in the game). I think some interesting gameplay concepts could come out of that as well, or at least some interesting interplay between some experimental gameplay and the music. Like Rez. (Yes, I know all about the Trance Vibrator already, thanks.)

Anyway. Right now I'm too burnt-out to think about work. So I think I'll go play Katamari Damacy some more.