Bowling for beginners

Bowling is known to many nowadays as a fun and novel offshoot of the popular Wii Sports title. Like LARPing, it has attempted to bring a social and imaginative activity into the "real world" through the use of special equipment and as few rule adjustments as possible. Its remarkable level of success is due in part to its notable inclusion in The Big Lebowski (still considered by many critics to be the Citizen Kane of 20th century film) that caused the game's popularity to skyrocket in the mid-70s.

As a player who regularly cracks at least a hundred bowl-wickets per session (often in as little as 20 balls), I thought it would be nice to introduce beginners to this fascinating modern ballgame. Here's a few pointers that everyone would do well to learn:

- One of the most frequent problems that beginners face is the matter of ball selection. There's a wide range available and it can take a while to figure out which one you'll be most comfortable with, but a general rule of thumb is matching the ball's Rolling Value (RV) to your shoe size. The RV should be prominently displayed on the ball's surface, though the occasional Mystery Ball is manufactured without this number displayed. This is the bowling corporation's way of keeping players on their toes and you can usually find at least one of them in every pack.

- Don't make the mistake of using your thumbs for the bowl itself. More experienced players will see this as a sign of weakness and attempt to attack your pins earlier than usual, sometimes even during your own turn.

- As a beginner, you should also take care when YOU decide to attack an opponent's pins -- it can backfire easily and most decent players are quick to punish any mistakes you make. It's generally best to play defensively until you get a little more comfortable with your own bowling ability.

Diagram of typical bowling lane. Markers (a) and (b) denote pin and player positions respectively, (c) is an attacker's slip-lane and (d) is the Lagrangian Point. Nobody knows what (e) is.

- Approximately 20% of a bowler's success lies in how they place their toss, while the rest is down to manipulating the ball's path through emotive gestures and fluid dance techniques. the art of post-throw influence is deep and nuanced, but professional bowl-swingers generally agree that the most important modifiers are your shoulder positions, hip swings and overall sexiness (The Big Lebowski was able to subvert this through extensive use of facial hair, but its value in actual high-level play is questionable at best).

Having a nice butt helps.

- It should be noted that the above is a good reason to secure a decent pair of bowling shoes. Flexibility, support and low friction for the more advanced dance manoeuvers are all essential. Bear in mind that you want to preserve the aforementioned match of shoe to ball RV -- if you find that such a pairing isn't possible, consider temporarily changing your shoe size.

- If you want to bowl a straight ball for the middle pin, make sure that your throw is fluid, leading into a graceful release pose that can be maintained for at least three seconds (five if you bowl a slow ball, seven if someone is attempting to take a picture). If the middle pin is the only one left and you know how to moonwalk, you may opt to try that instead. Be mindful of other bowlers behind you, as a disrupted moonwalk can spell disaster for your long-term strategy.

- Dealing with split pins is a simple matter of bowling a curve ball with your off hand, aiming for the most laterally inverted pin first. As soon as the ball leaves your hand, begin the process of bending your body in the direction of the second target -- and don't forget those hips! From here, it's all about moving at the correct pace: bend too quickly, and you'll waste your empathic energy before the ball has enough chance to curve. Bend too slowly, and you may wind up in the Alligator Grotto. Tread the line carefully.

- Gutterballs are a tactically important but emotionally draining technique used by players of all levels to get ahead. If you plan on making these a significant component of your strategy, make sure that someone in your group has a kitten. Its soft fur and gentle eyes will offer you the support, comfort and resolve needed to face the challenges ahead.

Do not bowl the kitten.

- Throwing the ball, turning away and putting on sunglasses like you're an action hero walking away from an explosion will not earn you any extra points in standard tournament play. It will, however, look absolutely amazing in the event of any real explosions in your bowling lane.

That should be enough to get you started. Sally forth to your nearest bowling ring and try these techniques for yourself -- though far from perfect, they'll get you going in the right direction and you'll have oodles of fun in the process.

Happy pin running!

GDC: A guide to caffeine satisfaction

The annual Game Developer's Conference (or GDC) is a bitchin' yearly event in San Francisco which has people like me flying halfway across the world to experience a unique and uncomfortable blend of jet lag, American culture and industry peer engagement -- often without the assistance of even the most rudimentary illegal narcotics.

Didn't get violated by US security on the way in, but there's always hope for the journey back.

For many, this will be a simultaneously exciting and draining experience. And if you're not psyched enough to fight off the despair and/or Thai food poisoning, you're going to get doubly fucked over. Techniques for beating back the madness differ from person to person -- a little "time out" here and there, an extra hour of sleep per night or maybe just a simple hotel bathtub filled with custard and/or rabbit blood.

But let me tell you this right now, dear reader: if the mere thought of caffeine deprivation has you in tears faster than watching The Descendants on a (hypothetical) booze-soaked international Emirates flight, then don't make the mistake of coming to San Fran unprepared.

Until approximately three hours before writing this, I hadn't touched coffee in a week. I regretted this decision more than the time I punched that kid in seventh grade. I was on a miserable anti-binge of socially disastrous proportions, and the GDC Moscone Center provided me with just the fucking remedy for that:

Bottomless. Motherfucking. Coffee.

Look at that shit. LOOK AT IT.

And this isn't just some whiny, bitch-ass "yeah I'll spinelessly sit down at some restaurant forever and be happy with it" bottomless coffee. No, we're talking about a smooth $12 flask that bags you a right to refill it forever.

FOR-FUCKING-EVER.

As long as you're packing one of these metallic-finished tickets to heaven, you can haul ass to one of several stations that exist throughout the conference, shove your face under the taps and begin chugging your way to a medically irresponsible oblivion of caffeine intoxication. I have seen it with my own eyes, brothers and sisters: Jesus has returned, and he's baptising kittens in the fucking Cafe Mocha river.

Now, you may just be thinking right about now: hey, that sounds pretty nice dude, but it's not as if I'm saving enough money to snort coke off a hooker's ass or anything. And you can just shut your brain the fuck up right now because IT IS WRONG.

SHUT IT.

So you're nice and cocky, and you think that you can get by on, say, a single cup of Starbucks magic per day. Just spend a little bit here and there and that'll do you, right? Yeah, good luck with that -- especially if you're swinging over from a place like South Africa. A single drink from Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe can cost up to ten US dollars -- in SA money, that's approximately seven hundred thousand million BILLION Rand. This is bullshit, and you should get that damn bottomless coffee already because it will also turn you into a fucking viking.

It turned me into a fucking viking too. Look at that damn hair.

If I don't start seeing more of these glorious orange-and-metal flasks doing the rounds at GDC tomorrow, I will *officially* declare the whole conference a failure and do my best to single-handedly ensure that the entire industry collapses upon itself out of sheer shame.

Developers, I am coming for you.

These damn flasks were formed from the steel-coated titty hairs of Odin himself, and have been single-handedly responsible for bringing the light back into my life. Thank you, GDC 2012, for definitively showing me the true joy of being a game developer.

ArGeeBee: ready to play

If you're keen for something different and rather experimental, I've just finished work on my Game.Dev Comp 24 entry, ArGeeBee. It's basically a mashup of platforming, top-down RPG and match-3 puzzle goodness. Or something like that. You basically need to get three very different little characters to work together to finish a variety of head-scratchy puzzles.

Control three separate avatars in a unicorn-puking array of colour contrasts!

Is it brilliant? I dunno. It was very difficult and maybe a bit awkward for me to develop, but it was stacks of fun too. Give it a shot if you have a few minutes to spare, and maybe (juuuuuust maaaaybe!) you'll have some fun while you're at it. You know, if you're a cool person and all.

In the meantime, I'll probably be returning to my other love in life:

Borderlands. Oh hell yeah. That creepy fat Christmas man has been very kind this year.

Foley for people who suck at sound

Oh look, a blog post! Gosh, it's been a while. Must have something to do with me changing this to an Official Dev Blog (TM) and then not doing any significant game creation for a good two months. Holy crap, I've been a naughty boy.

So anyway, I've been working on a little something called ArGeeBee for Game.Dev's comp 24. It's nothing much, but I'm quite proud of the ad-hoc sound effects that I've made for it. Why? Well, because I'm about as amateur as one gets when it comes to working with audio. I've taken a radio course and done my own fiddling about, sure, but aside from knowing how to hold a microphone and pressing the "record" button, I can't exactly say that I'm an experienced sound engineer.

Fortunately, one doesn't need to be a pro to make a delightful range of sound effects for videogames -- I do it all the time using a technique known as foley.

Foley is better known as the art of grabbing everyday objects and banging them near the microphone. It's used by professionals all over the world in a variety of fields, but few people realise that it's pretty easy to do at an amateur level too. Here's a few examples of how I made some pretty exotic sounds with some very rudimentary techniques and household objects. The results aren't studio quality, but they're a damn fine alternative to relying on your "1001 Free Sound Effects" CD.

Don't forget to grab my game if you wanna hear these noises in action. Because hearing them would be half the point, duh. Oh, and I edited most of my sounds using the basic options in Audacity. You should get it and learn to use it. You can still get quite far without knowing any funny sound jargon.

Now, on to some examples:

1) If you want to sound like something, grab that something

Enough ice to choke a polar bear.

One of the characters in my game has the ability to lay mines that can trap enemies in ice. I think the resulting sound is still my favourite effect in the project because, well, it was so damn simple. I needed a crackling-icy-freezy noise, so I looked inside my fridge, found a bag of ice and played about with it near the microphone. Afterwards, I cropped the recording to the bit that I wanted and with no further editing had a sound effect ready to inject into my game. Totally freaking awesome, right?

2) If you don't have something, grab something else

I don't own a Zippo, but I thought it would make for a sexy picture.

In situations where you need to use a jetpack, but don't happen to have one lying around (where do all those jetpacks go, anyway? They're like lost socks in the wash), there's still hope. Instead of going to the bother of borrowing a friend's jetpack for the weekend, I simply consider what else sounds like a small combustion chamber and throw that in instead. And that's how I turned to the jetpack's humble little brother: the humble lighter. A nice one, mind you -- mini-blowtorch style. In what's probably a very irresponsible move (kids, don't try this at home) I used one to light a coal by my (cheap) PC mic and got a pretty acceptable burst of "jet noise". After a bit of editing to make it sound sci-fi (just flanging the hell out of it, really), it was ready for game use.

Of course, I could also have simulated the noise using something else:

3) Blah blah blah ...

DISCLAIMER: Not my mouth.

Pretty much every other sound effect that you'll hear in ArGeeBee emerged as a product of Tongues 'n Teeth Incorporated: home-brewed and packed with lots of love, squirrels and other fluffy things. Those high-pitched voice clips are obvious enough (DISCLAIMER 2: Not my original voice), but everything else I got across just by making an approximation with my mouth and then fiddling with (literally) random filters until I got a sound I liked.

Given all of the above situations, I now ask myself three questions.

How was my expertise? Laughable.
How satisfactory were the results? Passable.
How fun was it making my own sounds compared to picking through a minefield of free sound libraries? Dear reader, it was enough fun to kill a whale.


On a final note: I'm not a professional foley artist. Heck, I'm not a professional when it comes to any form of audio. As a matter of fact, I probably even got the definition for foley wrong. But, you know, doing stuff this way is still pretty damn fun. If you're hopeless with sound like me, give this easier stuff a whirl to whet your appetite, even if you initially make someone's ears bleed.

Game update, travel update

Oh man, it's a busy Monday. I've just released a game patch for Onslaught of the Electric Zombies, have tried in vain to pay proper attention to various writing commitments, and am now preparing for an overnight bus trip to the noisy ol' province of Gauteng. While I'm no stranger to such journeys (heck, I got pretty deep about them once), I still can't say that I'm looking forward to it.

I obviously need to train up more and get a taste for travel again. Being lame and nest-ish in Grahamstown has its perks, but I'm steadily losing my vagabond mentality. A pity. Maybe hitting the rAge expo this weekend will do something for me.

Hawright!

For those of you who aren't familiar with rAge: well, it's a bloody big game/tech expo -- at least by South African standards. Fancy overseas buggers may be taking a freaking slice out of the moon to hold their own showfloors, but I don't really care as long as I'm surrounded with bright lights, loud noises and lots of like-minded people. Which kinda describes the average student party except for the fact that people aren't, you know, fall-on-your-face drunk. It's quite novel in that respect.

I'll try write a bit more about rAge if I have the time: it's starting this Friday and lasts for three days, so I'm quite sure that something newsworthy can come out of it. At the very least, I'll have an opportunity to flog my- OH YES, GAME UPDATE BY THE WAY! ONSLAUGHT OF THE ELECTRIC ZOMBIES NOW HAS A GLOBAL LEADERBOARD! Check it out now and upload your scores: if you get to the top of the leaderboard, everybody will think you're totally awesome and stuff.

This guy is riding a freaking dragon, and even he isn't as awesome as you are.

Unfortunately, that's all I can afford to write for now: my remaining time in Grahamstown is ticking down, and I don't really think that I'll be able to get everything done in time if I spend too long on this blog post.

Cheers for now. And try my game if you haven't done so already.