Check out the introduction of Anton and Toph Karrento, the Silk Gatherers, the latest clip from my lo-fi sci-fi feature Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

This is actually the segment I directed, and although I did it reluctantly (I figure my real skill sets are producing/writing), it was a joy to work with these two super-talented guys. Fantastic at improv, they totally internalized the 2040 world in a way that just floored me. And I felt they nailed the dysfunctional brothers dynamic. After we wrapped I made a text adventure game starring them that you can play here, just so I could spend some more time hanging out in my head with them. Is that weird, bro?

Mare Sheppard and I decided to start the Difference Engine Initiative.

As part of the OMDC-supported TIFF Nexus, the Hand Eye Society will be running two gamemaking incubators for women in Toronto, one in August-September, and one in October-November. By introducing new gamemakers from under-represented groups into our community, the Difference Engine Initiative aims to diversify what kind of videogames are made. Our first focus is women…

Find out about next week’s info session and how to apply for this free program over here.

Lots of people are making their own games these days — point-and-click tools like Scratch and GameMaker are making it more accessible for non-programmers, and it’s easy to get your game out there via the internet. But wouldn’t it be even cooler to get you and your friends’ games out there on an old-school arcade cabinet?

The old cabinets are generally made to play one specific game, but you can re-fit it with a PC and a display and wire up the existing controls to make playing new games possible. Many people have been doing this to run emulators of the classic games – MAME cabinets can run hundreds of old games on a single cabinet. The Hand Eye Society, Toronto’s videogame culture collective, wanted to do a similar thing, but with locally made games. They debuted the Torontron, which plays six hand-crafted games by Toronto indies, at the last Canzine. Jph, who did the retrofitting, takes us through the steps he took.

Step One: The Cabinet – Retrofit or built from scratch?

First I began looking for an old cabinet that we could stuff all the gear into. In Oakville, Ontario we found The Original Pinball Exchange Club, offering various scrapped amusement vending machines for sale. I visited the shop and chatted with the proprietors. Walking through their stores of machines – and machine parts — I was amazed, and was fully inspired.

The hardware we got was old and unique — it originally played an Italian clone of Centipede. It worked for our purposes because it was not recognizable as any specific machine shape and the graphics printed on it were also generic enough that we would not need to change them. The down side of getting a machine that was built in 1982 is that it is almost 30 years old, and though the build quality was reasonably good, some parts of it where quite worn and broken. If I were to do this again I would consider just building the box myself since the reconstruction needed inside to make sure it held the display properly was extensive. However there is something nice about the nostalgic old machines as well. If you plan to use a retro cabinet be sure to measure your display and check that it will indeed fit in the box. This will greatly depend on the orientation of the display and where it will sit in the box.

I got a cabinet with simple controls — one joystick and buttons — but you can get cabinets with more elaborate or specialized control schemes. If you plan to use the original controls (as opposed to buying new controls) then make sure the games you plan to run on them just need those controls to play.

Step Two: The CPU – Find a computer someone’s throwing out.

I used a laptop that was being thrown away, but any old PC will do, as long as it will run the games you intend to play on your machine. Our machine is intended to travel so the ruggedized nature of a laptop was desirable. If you intend to keep your machine in the basement/garage for your own use then a standard desktop PC will work just fine.

Step Three: The Display – CRT or LCD?

Next we need a nice display. The tube-style CRTs are easy to find these days on garbage day as people upgrade to flatter LCDs , but you have to take care in mounting them within the cabinets — they’re heavy. (Seventeen inch screens are very common but look a bit small in a full sized cabinet.) I went with an even heavier option, an old 21″ Trinatron TV with an S-video in that I connected directly to the laptop. Although this would limit us to 1024×768 resolution, and it’s a bit blurry at that, it does provide a proper, large and bright image that is more authentically “arcade”. But the weight and fragility of the old TV has made moving it difficult when we don’t have a vehicle big enough for it to stand up in — setting it on its back has caused the TV to come loose in the past. So it’s a trade off.

Step Four: The Controls – Buy a kit or rewire the original controls?

Since I wanted to use the original controls that came with the cabinet, I got a USB controller, opened it up and then soldered the outputs of the original controls to the corresponding buttons on the USB controller. You could also consider purchasing all new controls since two new sticks and 20+ buttons runs around $40. Then you could replace the original controls and plug them directly into your CPU via a USB gamepad interface for another $40. $80 would have saved me many headaches indeed.

Step Five: The Mounting – Securing the display, CPU and speakers.

By reworking the old monitor mounts – the wood planks that held it at the right height and angle — and adding some new bracing to work with the oddly shaped and situated TV, the TV was mounted inside. Adding the TV monitor had the added benefit of making the whole box more solid. The TV speakers, which we removed from the TV, were mounted where the original single speaker was in the cabinet and wired in, giving us some nice stereo sound. If the display does not have sound, a pair of computer speakers could also do the job.

The old marquee light did not work and was replaced with a simple under counter florescent fixture and was wired in. The laptop fit in the coin box area, and everything was plugged into a single power bar mounted near the back of the box.

Step Six: The Interface – How to launch the games?

Windows XP was what we used as an operating system, but anything that runs on your hardware and the game(s) you want to play would work. I used GameMaker to build a menu that lets the player select and launch between the six games. The menu keeps running, and when a game is exited, goes back to the main menu so the player can select another game. We used six games in the Torontron and we had all the game creators make a version of their game that conformed to our control requirements, such as quitting when the red button on the coin box was pressed.

Step Seven: The Glory – Is there anything cooler?

As with any hardware/software proposition, there’s a lot of work and a lot of testing required to get it looking and acting like an arcade machine of olde. We had particular trouble with the controls which are inclined to be glitchy. But once you get it working right, it’ll inspire spontaneous high-fives and many exclamations of “awesome!”

~~~

Jph Wacheski and the Hand Eye Society are hard at work making five more arcade cabinets to be presented as an indie arcade at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for Nuit Blanche 2010 on October 2. Want to help out with the Arcadian Renaissance event? Drop them a line at info@handeyesociety.com.

Got any questions? Additions? Suggestions? Add them in the comments below.

So if you’re up for a bit of transmedia fun, you can play the game before the movie’s released. Check out the cover art, a description of the game, and some info about the competition after the jump.

You and your brother’s job — scouring the city’s highest spots for a rare building material in the year 2040 — is already hard enough. Now Anton’s gone and gotten you trapped on a rooftop. Your acrobat bloodline will help you with the deadly heights, and your brain will figure out the genmodded plants — but will you be able to cope with having the most annoying big brother alive?

Play it now.

The jayisgames Casual Game Design Competition #7 gave people two months to make a text game with an “escape-the-room” theme. It’s got a cash prize of $1000, pretty high for a IF comp, and an engaged audience of game players. I’m looking forward to checking out the other 30 or so entries! UPDATE: My game placed fifth. I think my favorite game this comp was Ka — it starts off pretty sparse, but by the time it gets to the sphere puzzle you’re entered a rich and weird world.

It’s been tremendously encouraging to see the response to Everybody Dies, so much so that I’ve started planning a new adventure game with crazy-talented artist Ben Shannon. Click through for more!

A Nose For Trouble puts the player in the small shoes of Cynthia. Unknown to her friends and family, she’s a synesthete (an actual neural “crossed-wires” condition) and sometimes she “hears” smells, or sometimes even “sees” something when she sniffs it. This gives her clues about her environment that the people around her don’t get, and she uses them to solve mysteries in her colourful island community.

But the strangest mystery of all is that there’s a monster on the loose, and Cynthia and her nose decide to track it down. When she does, Cynthia’s faced with a choice: turn it in or befriend it?

Depending on what choice is made, Cynthia’s life goes in two radically different ways. Ten years later, living in a world torn apart by Monster vs. Human conflict, she has to deal with the consequences…

In other IF news, Everybody Dies won a XYYZY award for Best Non-Player Characters! They had a pretty funny real-time text award ceremony. And the excellent e-zine SPAG did an interview with me about my interactive fiction.

Update: Kotaku warns it causes GDC flashbacks, Offworld said it “manages to capture quite accurately the collaborative, socially supportive and intellectually curious aspects of what it’s like to actually be there”, and Rock Paper Shotgun declares it an “oddly human little thing which captures quite a bit about the human side of development.”

If you haven’t yet, you can play it here. I’ve added Invisiclue style hints.

The response to the project has been terrific, with people who want to make games in future Rounds, people who are looking to start groups in their cities, and industry coverage of our Artcade event, so we’re expanding a bit. To apply to participate check this out!

It starts with a metalhead, Graham, realizing that throwing that shopping cart over the bridge was not the great idea he thought it was. Even if it did get him out of washroom duty at Cost Cutters.

UPDATE: Invisiclue Style Hints provided below, Windows exe customized.

You can download, unzip and run the .exe for the Windows version; or download an interpreter for Mac or Linux and then open this gblorb file through it. Nothing’s more than a couple megs.

Special thanks to:

Michael Cho for the illustrations in the game, which I feel took it up a real notch and a half. I think it’s that we both find these character types lovable and ridiculous at the same time — there was a real dovetailing of sensibilities there that made it more than the sum of its parts.

People who criticized my previous game. Punk Points came in 22nd in the IFComp 2000, and was rightly dissed for poor implementation (“guess-the-verb” issues) and I heard from several people that they never got beyond the first puzzle. This time more than half of the hundred hours I put in on Everybody Dies was in revisions. (Which, incidentally, is way more time than I’ve ever spent revising my books or movies, percentage wise, but after asking around seems to be pretty average.) Type in ABOUT and you’ll see I had eighteen beta testers, which were spread over three waves, and about what I needed to get to a suitably deep implementation. Thanks guys!

People who liked my previous game. Despite its flaws Punk Points achieved a certain cult following, an award nomination for best Non Player Character, and I came across this transcript (spoilers!) of people playing the game together online recently. It’s twice as long as Everyone Dies, and the puzzles are harder both intentionally (I like tough puzzles) and unintentionally (the guess-the-verb issues). If you’re up for it, check it out here.

People who write great interactive fiction. It’s pretty much the only reason why I write IF. My favourite game of this comp, Jeremy Freese’s Violet, is funny, touching, and clever as all get-out. Play it online here, especially if you should be writing your dissertation.

People who write about interactive fiction. It’s a super-thoughtful, honest, responsive and ultimately nurturing community. I was avidly reading the reviews of Everybody Dies. Thanks to everyone who took some time to write about the stuff that they liked and didn’t like in this years’ comp. I credited some of you in version 2 of Everybody Dies if I squashed a bug you wrote about. And the fact that my primary inspiration to write another piece of interactive fiction, Emily Short, wrote favourably about my game? Well, thrilled doesn’t quite cover it. Go play her amazing, dandy-down-on-his-luck game, Savoir-Faire either online or from her site.

If you get stuck, feel free to use the clues below — they go from 1) slight hints to 3) explicit commands. They’re coloured in white so to see them you need to click and drag the mouse to range them inverted.

********I’M GIVING HINTS BELOW AND IN THE COMMENTS, SO: SPOILERS!*********

I keep dying a watery death as Graham.

1) Death isn’t as permanent as it is in other games.

2) Did you keep reading? Wait around a bit.

3) You can’t avoid dying. You will continue as another character.

I can’t find the seventh cart as Ranni!

1) Remember where Graham found the cart?

2) There’s two ways Graham can help you get to it.

3) GRAHAM, EXAMINE RIVER from the Bridge will give you the incentive you need to brave the prickleys and GRAHAM, WALK NORTH from West Side of Bridge will accomplish the same.

I can’t get rid of the woman and her kid as Lisa.

1) You need to confirm there’s no peanuts in the Snax.

2) If only you knew someone who might speak another language…

3) RANNI, READ SNAX will do the trick.

I can’t figure out how to get Patrick fired.

1) Have you tried GRAHAM, OPEN GRAHAM’S LOCKER? Weird, huh?

2) If only Tim was to find something incriminating in Patrick’s locker… or even a locker he thought was Patrick’s.

3) TAKE GRAHAM’S LABEL. TAKE PATRICK’S LABEL. PUT PATRICK’S LABEL ON GRAHAM’S LOCKER. Busted!

It’s a good excuse to interview one of the founding sponsors of the AGI project, Jon Mak, a Toronto game designer who Newsweek dubbed a “wunderkind”. His abstract videogame Everyday Shooter came out for the PS3 and now it’s available on the PC — if you’d like a chance at winning a free copy, leave a comment in response to the MP3 interview I did with him below. In it Jon explains why Guitar Hero is fun despite being a sucky game, that he learns best through failing, how he made ES while working part-time for money thanks to context switch, & how the work gets better the more you take away.

No Flash? Get the MP3 here.