A week ago over 5000 people streamed through the foyer of the Brighton Dome to see and build hundreds of amazing things at the first Brighton Mini Maker Faire. Luke and I went along with 2 laptops, a scanner and a pile of pens, paper, glue and scissors to make a video game with what felt like most of those 5000 people.

We arrived at 9:30 in the morning and were still working out how to plug out laptop in to the big plasma screen when the doors opened at 10:00. From then until the doors closed at 17:00 our table was a tornado of cutting, gluing, drawing and colouring as dozens of children and adults dived in to the task of drawing bosses for our shoot ‘em up with wild abandon. For a while my picture scanning, data wrangling and game copying efforts kept up with the stream of submissions and people were delighted to see their creations flying around on the big screen within minutes of their creation. Soon enough though, the stream turned in to a deluge and by midday I had a sizable backlog of pictures to process.

Despite working non-stop all day with only a 20 minute break to grab a milk shake and have a quick look around I ended up with a backlog of dozens of pictures at the end of the day. At that point another problem emerged: the game is designed to slowly get harder at each level, but with so many bosses to add the game would get impossibly hard before half of the bosses were seen. Realizing that I had a lot more work to do before the game would be finished I released an initial version at the end of the faire and collapsed in an exhausted heap at the after party.

All of this is by way of being a long winded explanation as to why “You’re The Boss 2” wasn’t finished a week ago. Last night I finally got around to scanning in all of the remaining images, tweaked the difficulty curve to make it possible to get to the end and released “You’re The Boss 2 Extended” which can now be downloaded here.

Despite being one of the most exhausting days of my life, it was also one of the most enjoyable. It was incredibly rewarding seeing dozens of children and adults alike delighting in creating something fun together and watching Thomas Truax perform with his DIY instruments while talking to a professional gingerbread house maker made for a truly magical end to the day. I’m very proud to have been part of the first ever Brighton (not-so) Mini Maker Faire and look forward to taking part in many more (although I might bring along a friend to help next time!).

I hope you enjoy playing You’re The Boss 2 as much as we enjoyed making it.

Back in 2005, while I was working on Second Life in Nottingham, before Linden Lab Brighton existed, I ran a workshop as part of the Screenplay “Boss Frenzy!” day at the Radiator Festival which allowed children to collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with collage.

Dozens of people came to the Broadway in Nottingham and got busy with pens, pencils, paper, scissors, glue and magazines to design bosses for our “You’re The Boss!” shmup. We had an amazing time and created a charming and delightful game which I talked about on the original Second Life blog.

I immediately thought of it when we started planning the Brighton Maker Faire a couple of months ago and was delighted when the project was accepted. Unfortunately 6 years of bit rot had taken it’s toll and disaster loomed after discovering that I’d hosted the Game Maker files on the web space provided by an old ISP account and didn’t have them on my patchy backups. Luckily the ever amazing Torley had a copy of the executable and with the help of a decompiler I was able to recover the Game Maker files I needed to run the project again.

So, if you’re near Brighton on the 3rd of September and like the idea of collaboratively making an arcade game with scissors, glue and pens then please come along. If you have a Windows machine then check out the game we made in Nottingham in 2005. I think it’s still charming and delightful 6 years on. You can download it here.

This time round I’d like to make the game completely out of Creative Commons licensed works, so please suggest CC licensed books, comics and pictures that might make good source material in the comments, or bring them along on the day.

Last week I took some time off to spend with Luke and Natty during half term and we spent Wednesday having a lovely time finishing off a game we started a couple of months ago: Bouncaline.

Luke has been interested in making games for a while: he made a level for the You’re The Boss game at the Radiator festival in Nottingham in 2006 — when he was 3!

More recently Luke started designing a game that I was helping him put together in Game Maker. He drew lots of backgrounds and characters that we scanned in and there were vague ideas about treasure hunting game play, but it felt a bit like Luke was biting off more than he could chew.

So, when Luke and Natty inherited a trampoline over the summer I suggested that we build a bouncing game and we started building it with Scratch, an educational programming environment that I’d been meaning to experiment with since seeing that it had been ported to Second Life.

Scratch has a very simple model based on plugging together blocks that is similar to the Lego Mindstorms environment. Luke quickly got the hang of it and built a significant portion of the logic with just a few leading questions. Like Mindstorms and LSL it uses multiple flows of control within the same scripted object for complex behaviour, which can take some getting used to when making an object that simultaneously waits to be touched and for a timer, for example.

In some respects I wish Scratch was a little purer — although message passing concurrency is possible, it’s very easy to share state between objects — something we shouldn’t be encouraging the programmers of tomorrow to do. It’s also harder to do multiple levels or screens than with Game Maker, but given Luke’s propensity to lose himself in Zelda style epics, the tight focus might help learn the basics of logic.

Overall it’s a delightfully easy and rewarding environment to use. After spending a couple of hours finishing the logic, we went in to the garden to take pictures of the trampoline and Luke and Natty striking poses for the animations and quickly got them imported in to Scratch along with some very cute drawings and sound effects by Luke.

Scratch also makes it very easy to share your work on the web, allowing Luke to proudly show off his handy work to his Grandparents over the weekend and for me to proudly share the game with you here. I hope you enjoy Bouncaline!

Use the left and right arrow keys to move and try to collect the food.Learn more about this project

At the recommendation of John and [Alice] (http://www.wonderlandblog.com/ “Wonderland”) I took a break from [Develop Online] (http://www.develop-conference.com/developconference/develop_online.shtml?x “Develop Online”) to listen to Jon Blow‘s talk at Games:Edu this week and was totally blown away.

Jon talked about whether games are poised to enter a golden age similar to films in the ‘30s, when they transitioned from visual spectacle to an art form capable of touching people emotionally. Currently many games are broken by the conflicts between the game play rewards and the needs of the story. The canonical example is Metal Gear Solid, which pauses all interactivity to deliver exposition, but even more nuanced games suffer from the lack of control over the framing of the story. A narrative is likely to be much less powerful if the protagonist is jumping around while another character opens their heart. Equally the illusion of interactivity is completely broken by a character that refuses to acknowledge the player’s actions by simply reeling off scripted dialog.

I wonder whether games too often sacrifice interactivity in the pursuit of realism. When you can simulate a city full of cars, the desire to populate it with people is almost overwhelming, but without solving the hard AI problem the only way to add people that say anything nuanced is to script them. The world seems more real, but adding scripted people to the center of the world compromises the interactivity that should be fundamental to a game. When we read a book we accept a lack of agency as we are empathizing with a character and following their journey through the narrative. When we’re in a game the story should be ours and the world should respond to our actions. There will be limits to our freedom, but placing scripted characters in the world rubs those limits in our face. Many forms of art touch us without having to realistically represent people. No one would mistake the people in Guernica for real people, but the work touches us and the image could be interpreted as a game environment without solving the hard AI problem. Maybe games should spend more time trying to be Guernica and less time trying to be The Godfather.