Draw Something is an iOS game I've been playing a lot on the iPad recently. I'm really enjoying it, and I think some of the reasons why it's so good are interesting. I've also seen a bunch of people on Twitter saying 'I don't get it', so this post is partly in answer to them.

First off, I should say that drawing one of very few things I enjoy doing that I'm not any good at. In the past I've been a fairly prolific doodler, but I've never got beyond 'complete amateur'.

Draw Something is basically 'just Pictionary'. But there are a number of things about its design which make it successful for me. But first up, for those who haven't played it, a quick summary of how it works:

- You choose the person to play with (currently by username entry, Facebook or email)

- You get given a choice of 3 words of increasingly difficulty to draw, and pick one.

- You draw something from which the other player will be able to guess that word

- The other player watches your drawing being drawn - exactly as you drew it - and has a set of 12 letters from which to guess the word. They can see how many letters it has.

- Once they guess (correctly or incorrectly), they get to pick a word to draw.

- Once they've done their drawing, you get to watch them guessing your word - exactly as it happened - you see them putting letters into the slots, taking them out again etc.

- If a word is guessed successfully, both players get the 'coins' (Draw Something's points + in-game currency) depending on the difficulty of the word guessed - from 1 coin to 3 coins.

You can have as many games running simultaneously as you like. I currently have 16 games running, with varying degrees of activity.

Here are some really good things about Draw Something:

- There's no time limit. You can take as long as you want to draw something. 

- It's a co-op game. No-one wins - you're both in it together, and you both benefit equally (in terms of coins awarded) for a word guessed correctly.

- The game reproduces exactly what the other person did - you see every mistake, every change they make - even if they decide to scrap their drawing and start over. This gives you a very close connection to the other player's thought process, and the sensation can be eerily powerful, in a way that a real game of Pictionary (where you're in the same room) could never be.

I think Julian Rignall nails it here:

- Although it's not quite an exact reproduction - because Draw Something removes any long pauses in the drawing, allowing you time to think (or google image search) without pressure.

- Once you've started the 'watch someone guess your word, guess their word, draw something new for them' loop, you can't easily escape it. Draw Something doesn't let you do just one of those steps - you must complete the entire cycle before you are allowed to go back to the menu and deal with your other games. This maintains the momentum.

- Despite a number of UI flaws, the drawing tools are pitched about right - you get enough power to be expressive, but not so much that you get bogged down.

- The Freemium stuff is very much in the background. I paid £1.99 for the full version, which removed ads. You can spend your coins on more colours to draw with or bombs to remove some of the letters or pick new words, but neither of these things are especially important to the enjoyment of the game. You can buy more coins with real money, or earn them by playing, but within a couple of days of (admittedly heavy) play, I have more colours than I can possibly use. The developers of Draw Something - New York-based OMGPOP were just bought by Zynga - I really hope they don't break this (or anything else)!

But the best thing about Draw Something starts happening when you've been playing with someone for a bit, and started to build a rapport with them. This is when the 'meta-game' kicks in, and Draw Something becomes more like a theatrical performance. The game stops being about trying to get the other person to just guess the word, and more about entertaining them. You start drawing extra stuff, unnecessary to the word, just for the hell of it. Then you start messing with the order you draw things in - perhaps leaving out crucial details for a little while, playfully teasing the word out. I've even seen people do rudimentary animation - rubbing things out and redrawing several frames.

I am not very good at this yet! But I feel like I'm gradually getting a bit better at it - and at drawing too - and it's a good new feeling to get from a videogame.

And now without further ado (and for posterity), here are a load of my stupid drawings. Feel free to try to guess what they are - but bear in mind that the order I drew stuff in may have been important:

Late last night, tired, grumpy and bored, I decided to check out Capcom's game 'Ghost Trick' on iPad, having heard a bunch of people raving about it on Twitter. About half an hour later, I tweeted the following:

Damnit Ghost Trick, yet another game that can't shut up & let me play for even 5 seconds. Destroying all surprise and wonder with shit text.

and:

This dumbing down of modern videogames; treating players like they must be very, very stupid is basically ruining them for me.

(nice fanart from here)

So last night, we did a thing, and an awful lot of people came to it, and helped to prove our theory that they would enjoy getting together to play a selection of awesome multiplayer indie games.

EDIT: Photos from the night are >here<.

There are a lot of people to me to thank, and potentially for you to follow on Twitter: I figured I'd combine the two.

Firstly, the people who made the games! They are:

Doug, who made Johann Sebastian Joust (and phoned from Utrect to offer advice on taping bottlecaps to controllers to solve a tricksy technical problem in the nick of time)

Vlambeer - JW and Rami - who made Super Crate Box.

Mike and Greg - collectively known as Mikengreg - who made 4Fourths.

Martin and Petri - who made Jesus vs Dinosaurs

The Copenhagen Game Collective - who made B.U.T.T.O.N.

Secondly, our sponsors - IndieCity, and their representative on the night, Deejay.

London now has it's first (but not last) indie-games arcade cabinet - The Beast! This is largely thanks to George and Joe who renovated it and filled its belly with computer parts, and Jerry - who did the beautiful art. Thanks also to David, who babysat it while it had its stickers applied, then helped us to host the games..

Ali did an amazing job hosting Joust all night - keeping the level of shoving and roughhousing at just the right level, and Nat managed to coerce many unsuspecting members of the public into doing stupid BUTTON nonsense.

Minkette and Mark on Team Rumpus, who helped out with a load of the preparation, and looked after various games throughout the evening.

Our marvellous photographer, Natalie Seery (who sadly isn't on Twitter, so you can't follow her).

Kokoromi, for providing part of the inspiration for doing it in the first place, and helping to demonstrate the way these things should be done. (There is gonna be a Gamma V, right guys?)

Almost-finally, my co-conspirators: Dick and Marie, who did the graphic design, printing, spreadsheets and all the complicated logistics!

And finally everyone who came, retweeted, facebooked - It was a blast! Thanks for making it work! See you next time x

Putting an unfinished game in front of playtesters and watching the results can be a bittersweet experience.

Hopefully, you've done some stuff right, and will get to see people enjoying your game - which is a huge morale boost.

Chances are you've probably also done a bunch of stuff wrong, and will end up with a big list of things to tweak, or even change completely.

The process that follows is akin to mixing a record, where you adjust the levels and sounds of all the instruments, in order to create the effect you were going for.. then invite fresh ears in to listen again, and repeat.

It's at this point that you get big rewards from having invested time in good software engineering earlier in the project, so that your game can be 'mixed' like this:

(thanks worldofstock.com!)

.. instead of like this:

(I love Heath Robinson by the way)

Yesterday evening I returned from Gamescom, Europe's Largest Consumer Games show, where publishers, platform holders developers gather together in a series of giant conference rooms in Cologne to unveil their new games.

We were there with Sony, where our forthcoming Playstation Vita game 'Frobisher Says' was announced (another one we're making with Dick Hogg). That side of things went really well - people enjoyed playing the game, and our trailer looked fab on the giganto screens above the Sony stand.

But overall, the experience of being at Gamescom made me feel sad. There are a number of reasons why gathering everyone together for one massive games show makes for a bad experience:

- The atmosphere is terrible. The rooms are necessarily dark, hot, cavernous, pooly-lit spaces, The sound systems thump over each another, creating an echoing bass drone everywhere you go. The resulting effect is a cross between being in the Grand Hall of the Mines of Moria, and a games arcade. This is fine for some games, really bad for others. 

- There are huge queues for anything really exciting. Want to try Diablo 3? Skyrim? Vita? Then stand in this queue for over an hour listening to shit music and people barking excitedly about some kind of promotional dancing event.

- When you are playing a game, there is a constant sense of distraction: there's not enough time to play everything, and there are always things luring you away in peripheral vision. Again, this works okay for some games, not at all for others.

It's like having a music festival where every band plays on the same day, and all the stages are right next to one another, making the experience of watching any of them rubbish. I can see how the industry has got itself into this model of announcing things - it makes sense to have events which all the journalists and public attend - but it's a bad model for all but the biggest games; everything else feels like a sideshow vying for a limited amount of press attention, and the experience of playing, say, Journey or the new Settlers game is so bad that it's actually better to simply not to bother at all, because you lose so much of what makes those experiences work. 

So instead of (or perhaps as well as) this feast-or-famine approach, how about something which works more like the way bands tour?

There could be a number of 'venues' in major cities which can host games-show-events, perhaps just for a group of developers, or a single large publisher. These would then tour around, visiting a cities and showing games for a couple of days in each, before moving on. It could be arranged so that over the course of several months (during the summer holiday season), you'd have all the games that would be shown at something like Gamescom, but spread out. There'd be a number of advantages:

- it would be more targetted. Not interested in what Bethesda are up to? Then don't go to Bethesda Day!

- it would be more local: you'd be targeting a number of cities (across Europe), so there'd be less travelling required, and you'd get a much larger number of people attending overall.

- it would be much nicer to be at. The venues would be small enough that they could have, like, windows! And carefully coordinated moods to the different areas, instead of a booming, one-size-fits-all dark-droneathon. Maybe you'd even have food that wasn't overpriced and shit! Imagine!

Probably Blizzard-Activision, EA and the platform holders would still want to show things exclusively at something like Gamescom, where they could guarantee the largest possible amount of press attention, but I think this approach could work really well for a number of other games. As the industry moves away (albeit slowly) from focussing soley on the interests of teenage boys, I really hope we can find an approach to announcing new games that feels more appropriate.

Over the past year, we've been receiving a number of requests for Internships at Honeyslug. One of these resulted in us now having an intern, which is going great (waves at Olivier) and we're certainly interested in continuing to run a (paid) intern programme.

But in the past three months, the volume of requests has gone through the roof. I aim to reply to every single one, and look at all the porfolio work people send, but I'm starting to get behind, partly being really busy with other projects.

It's hard to know whether to feel flattered at the level of interest, or depressed at what this might mean for the state of the economy in general and the UK games industry specifically.

Anyway. I can't help thinking that it would be good if there were some kind of internet place where people looking for videogames internships could go to meet up, and start working on games together: this would be a great experience for them - likely to be at least as useful as a proper placement, would help them to build a porfolio, and could possibly turn into something 'real'. 

I'm aware that there are a number of sites and forums focused on making videogames, but there are a number of things which recent graduates and current students seeking internships share - in terms of what they are looking to achieve, the time they have to spend, and their level of experience - which makes me think that a place specifically for them could work.

I mentioned this briefly on Twitter, and a number of people seemed interested in the idea, and made some suggestions. Maybe the comments on this page is a good place for an initial discussion: cos it's open and everyone can read it. 

I don't have any strong opinions about a sensible format (though I'd rather it wasn't a Facebook thing), nor do I have any development time to offer (and hopefully not much should be required in 2011), but any suggestions would be most welcome!

What I do have to offer is encouragement, advice, and most importantly, a constant stream of people seeking internships who can be directed to look at a thing.

Hello!

I'm scratching my head at a problem which I thought would be easy, and now I need the help of someone cleverer than me, because it's proving to be trickier than I thought.

I have a 1-dimensional array of integers, of length n from 1 to x, where n > 2 and x > 1. e.g:

[2, 1, 4, 3, 1, 4, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 4].

The catch is that no number appears consecutively - each element must be different from its neighbours.

I want to shuffle this array to produce a new array of the same length and contents, but preserving the rule above - no two adjacent elements in the shuffled array must be the same number.

(of course, this may not be possible. There is no way to shuffle [1,2,1,2,1] into anything different. In this case, output should == input).

It's harder than it looks to come up with anything like an elegant solution. Am I missing something? Can you help?

EDIT: I want to be able to generate an arbitrary number of different shuffles. I don't want to get a predictable output for same input. So for example, just reversing the array to get ONE guaranteed valid solution is out.

(if you don't have an iThingie and haven't played it, check out the Flash version here).

It is a game which is simple to explain, but hard to master. You have to control two characters, in two dimensions with one button! When you get into the rhythm of it, it will hopefully make you smile! (here is a hint: try to keep both of them roughly around the centre of the screen).

The iPhone version has a new way to play - different every time Endless Mode!  (whereas the original has a very definite end ;)

Here is the trailer:

Poto and Cabenga iPhone from Slug Vids on Vimeo.

PS: Sorry it took so long! We've been a bit busy with other things.

Nothing to do with games this, but too cool not to blog..

So earlier this week, my friend Polly asked me if I'd like to help her out by playing guitar on one of her songs in a recording session, where we'd record straight onto vinyl. And today it happened!

It took place in the Riflemaker art gallery in Soho, where they're running an Analog event, which includes these recording sessions, run by a marvellous chap called Lewis Durham (from Roots revival band Kitty Daisy & Lewis). Lewis has built an recording studio entirely from analogue equipment from the 40s and 50s (down to the huge BBC Radiophonic microphones), which usually lives in his house. While we were playing, he was hunched over the stylus, carefully blowing away the little chips of vinyl to prevent blockages and skips.

And the recording sounds great - when Polly digitises it for me, I will be sure to link it from here. Thanks Lewis!

(download)

Click here to download:

we-cut-a-record-uAFAvogtItzGowvwAFqf.zip (6.45 MB)