Independent Game Thoughts

With the newest Guitar Hero announcement, "Warriors of Rock", I'm convinced that Activision doesn't really know how to handle the Guitar/Band Hero brands.  I'm basing this on my experience with the game Band Hero and as a novice rhythm game player but let me put it this way, Activision has left a lot of my money on the table by not giving me what I've looked for in the Band Hero game.

There's three problems with the way Activision is handling Guitar/Band Hero.
1) They are not offering songs that my kids can play or that my kids want to play.  Every song is from some obscure rock band or from a popular band from the last four decades.  The song list starts and ends with the inclusion of Taylor Swift in Band Hero.
2) They do not offer many songs that are party play oriented despite outfitting the game with party play modes.
3) They've almost completely ignored Country music.
4) Activision doesn't release nearly enough DLC songs.

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Over a year and a half ago, I wrote about the difference between Facebook and the rest of the Internet.  The post was sparked by a conversation that I had with my wife about the content of this blog. Reflecting back on that post, most of what I said remains true to this day.  However, if I rewrote that post today, I would not use the term avatar as much.  What I was really talking about with my references to an avatar was the notion of having a public and a private persona.  My understanding of this has changed since the first post.

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Bing Gordon has certainly earned the right to his opinion on the game industry's latest golden child genre, social games.  His successful career with Electronic Arts is evidence of that.  Unfortunately, I don't exactly buy his assertion that social games are the singular future of games.  His article wants the reader to believe that console games and PC gaming are a thing of the past now that we've discovered social gaming.  He supports that argument with the sheer number of people playing these games and their "Mother-in-law"-as-in-not-a-core-gamer demographic.  He's also a significant part of Zynga which immediately makes anything he says about social gaming suspect; at the very least biased.  While it is true that social games have taken off to unexpected heights and it is true that the analytic mindset of the web is coming to game development, it's folly to believe that social gaming will replace traditional gaming.  Instead, the face of gaming will change and evolve in ways we can't truly predict today.

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Today, Roger Clemens is getting indicted for perjury that happened during his testimony against Brian McNamee in Feb 2008.  When will Major League Baseball get beyond the Steroid error?  That cloud is what is wrong with Baseball in my mind.  The sport itself has been cleaned up but for the next year or so, we're going to be flooded with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens trial reports.  Barry Bonds is scheduled to go on trial for the same in March of next year.  Can't we just be over it?  I just want to watch baseball. I long for the days where we discussed these guys positions in the Hall of Fame.  Look, I understand that steroids is wrong.  I understand that athletes using steroids is something we don't want our children seeing for fear of their doing the same.  I get it, parenting responsibilities and all.  Hopefully, the trials will go swiftly and we can get back to watching baseball and enjoying the game.  Simpler times will never come again.

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Silicon Sisters is a women's game development company that is making games for women gamers.  Information about how they are going to accomplish this goal is scarce and mostly  present in today's video game industry media outlets. (ArsTechnica, IGN, Gamasutra) They want to create games that appeal to women without specifically excluding men.  The common perception is that the video game industry is dominated by male players and to an extent that is true but I'm not so sure that the statement holds nearly as much weight as it used to.  Regardless, every so often someone raises the notion that games can be created specifically for women and I don't buy it.  I don't believe you can specifically create video games for women without stereotyping women.  If blatant stereotyping is the goal then I'll reverse that statement and tell you that I think it is easy to create games for women.

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Over the weekend, I received an email from Netflix telling me that my Wii Netflix disc was on the way and would arrive at my house sometime on Monday.  At first I was excited for my kids.  The Wii is on our television in the living room and my father-in-law has introduced the kids to the cartoons and Disney stuff that's available through Instant Watch.  I figured the kids could get some good use out of the subscription but my enthusiasm for Netflix on the Wii dropped considerably when I looked into the specifics of how this service would work for my family.

Recently, I've been watching the Showtime series, "Weeds".  I'm on season one and I am enjoying the series.  The problem I have with this is that "Weeds" will now be available to watch on the Wii and that's certainly not a show I want my 10 year old daughter having access to.  So, last night, I spent some time trying to figure out the parental controls for Netflix and left their site less than impressed.  Before I get into this, we watch what our kids watch but I don't sit by their side 24x7 while they watch TV.  We trust that they'll make good decisions but let's face it, good decisions and curiosity are mutually exclusive.  The line gets blurred even more when their best friend's parents let their 10 year olds watch a movie I wouldn't consider appropriate for my 10 year old.  So before you jump on here and tell me to parent my kids, I'm going to pre-emptively tell you that that is exactly what I am trying to do.

Netflix has three major faults that I can see as a parent.

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When I developed the WCF Membership Provider, I envisioned it being used as the basis for authentication across a wide array of products on any number of platforms.  The only requirement that the client application would need to have is that it could speak to web services using SOAP.  Out of the box, the code I presented in my article does not directly achieve that goal.  More work is necessary to make that a reality. 

Specifically, I would implement System.Web.ApplicationServices as the front end of the WCF Membership Provider by adding these services to a web site in the DMZ.  Non-ASP.Net clients and external web sites that did not need to have CreateUser/CreateRole/DeleteUser/... functionality would use these services.  ApplicationServices implements the subset of functionality required to authenticate against an ASP.Net membership store.  The Sql Server membership store that I chose to use is installed into a database in your application's database layer.  There's a command line tool that ships with all versions of the .Net framework.  I used .Net 4.0 for the code in my article.

Click here for a walk through on how to install SqlMembershipProvider's membership store.

Click here for a walk through on setting up System.Web.ApplicationServices.

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I haven't done a programming article in quite a while. The Sql Server Code Generator article continues to get a decent amount of hits so I thought it would be nice to give again and post some more code from one of my current projects.

A bit of background before I get started. The web site I am working on will require access from a variety of clients. The current list includes web browsers on all OSes and dedicated applications on Windows Phone 7 (via Silverlight), iOS 4(iPhone/iPad/iTouch) and Android. What I wanted to provide to these platforms was a unified method of authenticating against the backend services. Did I mention that I need to get this up and running as quickly as possible. My only other real goal was to build it in such a way that piece of it could be factored out for scalability.

Since I am using ASP.Net to create the web site, I immediately looked to the provider model for help. ASP.Net comes with a pretty robust Sql Server based user database. Will it scale to a million users?  I'm not sure but considering that I don't have the first user, I figured it was a good place to start.

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Yesterday, I wrote about the mayoral candidate debate that took place during Wednesday's Louisville Venture Club meeting.  I don't write alot about politics but when I failed to find funding for Ages of Athiria partly because the deal couldn't be done in Louisville, I decided to see what the three candidates for mayor were going to do for small businesses here in the city.  Today, I am going to finish the writeup and draw a couple of conclusions based on my own political beliefs.  They are my own opinion and as soon as I am done, I'll go back to game design and other such topics.  As I did yesterday, I'm recapping and adding color to my Twitter stream.

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As I grow older, local politics seems to be more important to me for some reason that I cannot fully explain just yet.  Many of my friends couldn't care less as long as Calipari is recruiting good recruits at UK or their daughters are progressing along in softball.  You could have said the same about me as early as last October. (Ok not the Calipari part but you get the point.)  Perhaps it is because I failed to raise money for my company that I've become interested in local politics.  One of the reasons why I couldn't raise money was because the deal could not get done in Louisville.  There is exactly one firm here in Louisville that is large enough to fund a company with $15+ million and they met with me under the preconception that they were not interested in funding a video game.  The other reasons why I failed to raise funding are outlined in my post to the Ages of Athiria community. 

When I heard that the three candidates for Louisville's Mayor position were coming to the Venture Club, I immediately registered for what eventually became a sold out event.  It seems that I am not the only one interested in hearing how the next mayor will work to create jobs and empower small business.  I wasn't left wanting for more answers when the meeting was done and now that I've let the experience simmer for a day, I'm blogging about it for others to read. 

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