After watching the documentary I decided I wanted to do the same thing. How cool would it be to drive a vehicle that painted with its tires? What kind of artwork could I come up with?

Not wanting to take forever on the project, I moved quickly to create a gameplay prototype. The first problem I ran into, though, was that to reuse my existing 3D codebase would require more work than I wanted to spend on a prototype, particularly since I needed to integrate a physics engine to get the effect I wanted for the vehicle dynamics.

So, I took a look at Flash, noticed that there were a few 3D render engines and a few physics engines, and figured "why not?" Granted, I've never used Flash before, but I went to Adobe's site, downloaded the Flash 30-day trial, and went to town.

A few days later, and I have a prototype of CarPaint: http://www.gamesunplugged.net/CarPaint3D.html. If you check it out, be sure to click the Help button to see the controls and instructions.

It turns out that BMW also created an iPhone App off this idea – something I just found that out as I searched for the name of that documentary for this post. I'm going to download it and check it out. In the meantime, I'm going to let the Flash version cook for a little bit as I look at porting it over to a Windows-based application using my engine – and of course consider I'll consider the iPhone App route.

3D Realms is one of the developers I wanted to work for at one point in my life, so it's a little disappointing that they've gone down. Then again, if it's taking over 12 years to make a game that will likely never be completed, then it was probably not all that productive of a place anyway.

Earlier in December, Advertising Pawn posted an impressive presentation entitled "Gaming Trends" that I suggest everyone browse, regardless of your techie geek affiliation.

As a sample, did you know that 65% of households in the United States now play games? Or that the average game player age is now 32? Or how about that 2 million Spore creatures were created and shared in a month? And as if that wasn't enough, worldwide the gaming industry is a $34 billion dollar industry – that's bigger than DVD's, the Box Office, Movie Rentals, Books, or Music. Here's the video:

Around 2001 I believe the industry was valued at around $8 billion dollars.

The major causes of the massive growth consist of a few things:

For starters, the first gamer generation has grown up, gotten married, and had kids. As a result of their own childhood exposure to games, they know that video games can be good for their kids and are more willing to involve their kids in gaming activity. In a lot of cases the parents even encourage it.

Second: The platform explosion. In the 1980's, outside of those fun-but-cheesy LCD games we only had a few choices: Sega, Nintendo, Atari, etc., we had to play them at home, and we had to play them on the television. Some cool kids also had PC's or Macs they could play games on at home. Then one day Nintendo came out with Gameboy. That changed things. Now you could play games anywhere. Real games. Not those fun-but-cheesy LCD ones. Then mobile phones got smaller, and faster, and suddenly they could play games. Then more Gameboy-like devices came out like PSP and Nintendo DS.

In the meantime computers became more and more powerful and somewhere in the middle of all of it the mass public discovered (or invented, in some people's view) the Internet. And now look at today. iPhones, Blackberries, general cell phones, PDA's, Nintendo DS's, PSP's, Wii's, 360's, PS3's, websites, PC's – all connected to the Internet. Platform explosion.

At this rate your toaster and coffeemaker will be able to play a game of Pong with the eggs that your refrigerator pooped out on the counter signalled by your character dying in WoW 3, from which they could then upload their scores to a website so you can compare your appliances' scores on a social network of other Toaster-Coffeemaker Pong player-owners from your BlackBerry iPhone. Watch. It will happen. And your 2 year old will love it.

And finally, video games add value to our lives. They can de-stress, entertain, educate, connect people, connect people more, let them lead virtual lives, become a job, help with marketing, recruiting, and probably things we don't even know yet.

And so, to me it's no surprise that video games have exploded this much. When you think about it, it had to. Gaming has been a part of our human history for thousands of years (earliest known, 3000 BC), and it's only natural that our gaming pasttime be extended to our latest and greatest technological innovations. The only question is, what's next?

Cross-posted at GameDev.net.

I'm not one to give game reviews, especially since my tastes tend to differ from many other people, but this is a great game. I've been surprised at the depth, as it's near impossible to just skirt by to win, even at a lower difficulty. This adds another level to the game that wasn't required in the original: resources must be managed, not just from production within your cities but also through trade routes between your cities.

Back in the original, I remember I could mostly ignore the wagon trains, which handle resource transport between cities. I could win by focusing on city production alone, which led me to build massive armies and destroy everything, including the Redcoats (nothing against the British).

But this game is different, and as a result of repeating my old strategy my first play ended in crushing defeat. I like that. It's challenging, it's different. It's not just a remake - it's an entirely new, well-designed strategy game.

If you haven't played it yet and have any interest in good strategy games, then do yourself a favor and get a copy. It's relatively inexpensive ($29.99 USD) and doesn't even require that you own Civilization IV.

Forrester Research released a new study that you can purchase for a cool $775 USD arguing that serious games are “poised to take off” in the next seven years.

I wholeheartedly agree. This is a space on the verge of hitting it big, and the evidence is mounting after the success of the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and all the Brain Age and Wii Fit games.

Why are serious games about to take off? As this article indicates:

“Forrester cites the “green revolution,” which is pushing major corporations like IBM and SAP to experiment with virtual world technology as a way of saving on energy and operational costs, as well as the pervasive popularity of technology, especially among the Net-savvy Generation Y: “This comfort with virtualized workspaces has opened the door for the use of video games to help reduce long-term expenses in other cost centers, like training, learning, and team building,” the report reads. (Forrester’s authors distinguish persistent virtual worlds like Second Life from serious games, which are developed for specific goals in a limited time frame.)

In case there was any doubt, big industry players are taking notice. For instance, Microsoft. It’s one of the reasons they got into the simulation market with Microsoft ESP. I expect other industry players to dive in over the next few years as well.

"One of the ways in which we explore possible design directions is by building simple, playable prototypes that we can play around with to get a sense for a particular system.

Usually these prototypes are never seen by the public, but we thought some of the more intrepid players out there might enjoy playing around with a few of our early Spore prototypes. Keep in mind these are not tested, supported or even easily explained."

This is a rare opportunity to learn about a team's creative process, so I'm going to download each of these games to try to gain some insight into their design approach and thought mechanisms.

A few of them remind me of old demo simulations I used to build as a hobby (i.e. Conway's Game of Life), while others look like they're stripped down versions of specific gameplay used in Spore. Cool stuff. I look forward to playing with them.

I actually used to chat online with cliffski a number of years ago about technology, games, and software in general. He's a good businessman, has had success with Positech Games, and his attempt at gaining a better understanding of pirates demonstrates his ability to use customer feedback to improve his products and business operations. It's just smart business, and the pirates answering his question probably don't even realize it.

Anyway, he received a lot of responses to his question that propagated through the technology and game-playing web world, and he posted his summary and new strategies yesterday.

Having read through the summary of responses and what cliffski plans to do about it, I have to say I'm glad a lot of this is coming to light. While I suspected a lot of the piracy reasoning, the changes he is making to his own business model as a result of this experience are a great start to combat the piracy that plagues the small developer. Unfortunately, it's also a fresh for the games and software industry, but one can only hope others will follow. I know I will when I reach that point.

Best of luck to Positech.

Oh, and Happy Birthday to me. Thanks to everyone who sent the birthday wishes.

Embedding non-image data inside an image isn’t a new trick, but some reddit commenters are finding that data for a Spore creature is uniquely embedded in the .PNG file that can be downloaded from the creature’s Sporepedia entry.

While some commenters originally discovered data embedded in the alpha channel of the image, they now believe the data is embedded in the RGB channels as well, possibly giving up to 8k of extra data storage in some estimates.

Again, storing data in an image is nothing new, but as Troy Gilbert points out, “it’s a very clever, modern, web way of handling it. It allows for trivial sharing by the user through whatever means they’re accustomed to because sharing an image is an almost universal feature of any collaborative software. So, user’s can attach the thumbs to their e-mail, or post them to their Flickr account, or put them on Facebook or their MySpace page, or send them in an IM.” Then when a friend opens the image inside the game, they’ll get the creature.

It’s definitely an inspiration for some work I’m doing, and you can bet I’ll be considering ways to incorporate this into some of my solutions. It also kind of gives a new meaning to file sharing.

But I'm not here to talk about how fun it is to workout using the Wii Fit. Instead, let me tell you the brief story about how I acquired one.

Two of my coworkers and I left work shortly before 10:00 this morning, the time at which most retailers open in my area, to go on a hunting trip for the Wii Fit. Short of driving to one of the gaming places, we really only had two retailer options in the vicinity of our workplace: Best Buy and Circuit City.

Now, a little background on these two. The Best Buy is smack in the middle of everything. It’s always busy there. Circuit City, on the other hand, is only ever crowded on the weekends. Of course, at 10:00 in the morning on a Wednesday we didn’t expect either store to be busy.

So, we headed to Best Buy, mainly because it was on the way to Circuit City. As we pulled into the parking lot we saw a line stretching about 150 feet from the door (mostly young people – we knew what they were there for), so we came up with a plan: we would drop off one of my coworkers at Best Buy while myself and the other coworker would go to Circuit City. A lot of people were in line, and if they were there for the Wii Fit we doubted Best Buy would have enough in stock.

We arrived at Circuit City about 5 minutes later (it’s about 10:05 at this point), walked in, went to the Wii area, and found… nothing. With confused looks on our faces, we asked a sales rep and he told us they were at the service counter. So, a few minutes and $90 USD later we walking out of Circuit City with Wii Fit’s in our hands. It’s 10:12 when I turn on my car.

We drive back to Best Buy to get our coworker, who of course did not get one because they were gone in seconds, and we take him back to Circuit City so he can get one (and he does).

But here’s the reason why I’m telling this story: my coworker said that a lot of the people in line were very mad when they found out Best Buy was out of Wii Fit’s and stomped out of the store with plans to come back when the next shipment arrived (apparently in 3-4 days).

That is pretty much the definition of ”thinking inside the box”. It’s a mindset that never looks to see beyond from what they already know into the realm of what is possible. Notice how it doesn’t get those people anywhere closer to their goal of acquiring a Wii Fit.

If these people thought outside the box, even just a little, they would have remembered that Circuit City is a few minutes down the road and they just might have been able to get a Wii Fit there.

I know it’s a silly analogy, and maybe a silly story, but I bring it up because today reminded me of the importance of always trying to get outside your comfort zone, to think outside your box. One reason it’s important is that it’s practically required in order to improve anything in life, whether it be your product, your business, your relationships, or yourself.

It sounds simple, but if it’s simple then why do so many people have trouble thinking outside the box?

So next time the hot New Thing^TM comes out, remember that Best Buy probably isn’t the only place in town that sells the New Thing^TM. It’s possible that Circuit City has it too.