Kraig Walker

Playlist: Just Drive

2014-01-04T00:00:00-00:00

I love the aesthetic of Drive. It plays and feels like a short love story, interspersed with the honest grit of a gangster movie. The soundtrack is a standout. I added some of my own influences to a collection of highlights.

I watched some interviews that were done around the time of the movies release. Ryan Gosling talks about the early days of production, when he would take long late night drives with director Nicolas Winding. Music blasted endlessly through the radio. “This is what this film should be about!” Gosling procclaimed, and shortly after, almost all of the “Driver’s” dialog was cut, and the script we know today took form. Legendary.

As a minor tribute to the film I’ve assembled a small collection of songs that are from the movie, with a few personal favourites on the same line scattered here and there.

Playlist: Just Drive was originally published by Kraig Walker at Kraig Walker on January 04, 2014.

The Importance of Considered Outreach

2014-01-03T00:00:00-00:00

Many of us will be in the habit of releasing things. Emails, journal articles, essays, blogs, games, apps, videos, songs. We are empowered to create content. So create we do. I feel however we often give little thought to how we publish our material short of the format.

Academic articles aren’t difficult to work with because of the citation format, or the decision to use PDF over Microsoft Word. They’re difficult to work with because the majority of portals to find and view them are just so badly designed and formatted, that you often can’t be bothered reading anything you find even if you are successful.

We don’t do ourselves justice when our efforts to reach out to our audience are flawed or half-baked. That tweet with the link to your purchase page, blared out to strangers with no prior knowledge or intent, is lost amongst the noise of the networks we use to communicate with each other.

By focussing on fine tuning our signals - by optimising them so that they are both discovered by the right people, and making our end-goal as relevant, frictionless, and considered as possible - only then do you stand a chance at being heard amongst the noise of the crowd.

I believe thinking about this at every point of outreach is important. Sure, it might mean that tweet you were going to send out takes a couple of minutes to compose rather than a few seconds (you’ve got to get a shortlink, a good image, select some relevant hashtags and format your call-to-action) but if you’re asking for minutes of other peoples time, isn’t it worth at least breaking even with them than expecting astronomical returns that come from barely any effort?

So this year, try to spend more time being considered in your outreach. It may feel like a waste of time at first, but as more people begin to actually hear your, more people will subsequently listen.

The Importance of Considered Outreach was originally published by Kraig Walker at Kraig Walker on January 03, 2014.

Google Added User Experience to Pagespeed Insights

2014-01-02T00:00:00-00:00

Google recently snuck in a new beta feature to Pagespeed: User Experience.

While the new score sheet doesn’t actually have an impact on how pagespeed scores are calculate - nor do pagespeed scores really have an impact on a website’s overall search rank yet - the new additions do however highlight where Google are heading in terms of mobile search. Typical Google crawls don’t carry out the same in-depth analysis as Pagespeed, but the new user experience checks could be used to eliminate incompatible or badly formatted sites from mobile search results.

The tests are pretty base, and unless you have a solid, justifiable reason for making your mobile experience shitty, you should be striving to maintain perfection over these metrics. I was pretty surprised to find more than half of my visitors did so on a mobile or tablet device, as I do most of my considered browsing on my big beautiful Retina Macbook…

Keeping tabs on your site’s loading performance does have an impact on user experience. The average loading time for a site on mobile is ten seconds, when we know that half of us won’t bother with that thing we tapped on Facebook after just three seconds which is a real shame. And the cruel thing is that most sites can optimize in some way. You might not believe it, but this page used to take 12 seconds on average to complete it’s entire loading process. It wasn’t even a pretty loading process as well… Now, the typical load time of someone who’s never swung by before is just under 5 seconds, with the majority of content usually displaying after two. I force the social buttons and plugins wait until the end, so while five seconds may still be over our little three second rule, the more human “percieved” loading time is signifigantly less.

Better still, if this isn’t the first time you’ve browsed my loopy musings, you’ve already downloaded 90% of the content required already. Page loads are virtually instantanious in this case, thanks to clever caching and the use of the rather terrifying appcache system that enables offline navigation when the train goes through the tunnel.

Give Pagespeed a try, and see how well your site does. I looked at my site’s performance really pedantically, which is why it sits at a score of 98 on mobile and 96 on desktop typically. A score of 80 or more however is a good site.

Google Added User Experience to Pagespeed Insights was originally published by Kraig Walker at Kraig Walker on January 02, 2014.

Resolutions

2014-01-02T00:00:00-00:00

I’m starting with WeeWorld next week doing QA, a world apart from the startups and indies I’m used to minglining with, but it’s also exciting to work as a small part of a team that have command over hundreds of thousands of users every month.

I also have a day in the week for personal project, which though I think in the early days will be dominated by learning the latest in web app testing; something that’s always taken a bit of a back seat roll in the other teams I’ve worked at, as getting it out the door first was always top priority. If things improve that day will go back into working on my own games and experiments - primarily Game Dev City which currently exists as a crude server-side AI simulation.

I’m also really interested in publishing solutions and have become increasingly aware of the importance of SEO in building this new-look website. I really love Jekyll - the static blogging tool I use that generates static html pages rather than using serverside templates to render them when requested. The benefit of this is faster, more efficient content delivery (and people can opt to have their site hosted for free on Github Pages)

The jekyll blog method does take longer than typical workflows, primarily because it’s all text files and terminal commands. The best alternative I’ve seen to date is Ghost, but I’d rather edit everything on my local machine and push the pages out to a server or github repo to be hosted statically rather than having a whole CMS dashboard on my website. This could be a thing to work on in the future: A kind of user-friendly version of jekyll that combines the nice user experience and flexibility of ghost with efficient static file publishing…

My interest in content publishing has also extended to cross-media publishing. I’ve seen more than a couple of projects that have been searching around for a one-stop-shop which can turn their markdown files into both websites, epubs and pdfs. You can cobble something together using plugins and tools, but still people are opting to manually compile things into multiple formats, which has it’s challenges in it’s own.

Only three-hundred-and-sixty-something days to do it all! I’m excited for this year. Last year was really tough on me. I think I’m finally rising out of my “blues” period as one dear friend called it. Here’s to me. Here’s to you.

Resolutions was originally published by Kraig Walker at Kraig Walker on January 01, 2014.

9 Predictions for the Games Industry in 2014

2013-12-31T00:00:00-00:00

1. Episodic Goes Primetime

Episodic games are nothing new, but they’ll represent a much bigger opportunity for developers and players who perhaps feel a little exhausted by the rather in-your-face nature of common freemium monetisation strategies. Already moving into 2014 games like Kickstarter lovechild Rèpublique and season two of Telltale’s The Walking Dead are leading the charge, offering high end games at a price which will make core gamers feel right at home.

There’s a good sense of balance that can be achieved if episodic games are released correctly. Developers can spend the time the need making each section of the larger story work as planned, while reducing the risk that’s involved with shipping it all in one package. Titles can benefit from sustained press coverage over the year as new episodes roll out, and gamers who are perhaps a little harder to turn into committed fans feel less pressured when it comes down to taking the plunge.

Freemium isn’t going anywhere; but as mobile gamers become more demanding of the experiences they play on their shiny new tablets and smartphones, Colin Anderson’s idea of the “Post Core” gamer is a reality that might be worth warming up to.

2. An “Arty” Game Could Beat A Triple-A Title On Launch Week Sales

My money’s on the next Mike Bithell game personally. Charlie McDonnell’s narrating it, which means lots of teenage girls and Doctor Who fans are already interested regardless of what they know about Thomas Was Alone. Triple-A games will try to fight back, Call of Duty might experiment with a gay romance scene inside an alternate reality 1980’s laser tank to attract a fresher fan base, much to the horror of the existing fan base who are still wondering whether the chick who just fragged them really does see their mother at pilates…

3. Video Games Will Achieve Knowledge Graph Recognition

You might not know what ‘Knowedge Graph’ is exactly. In short, it’s a semantics-driven database of how Google understands the world. Google a famous person, artwork, city or company and you’ll be presented with not just a list of relevant search results, but also rich snippet summaries of the subject in question. Currently Google has not extended this recognition to Video Games, partly because as a medium we’re really bad at making our key info machine readable. If you want to rectify this, make sure you mark up your site with schema.org properties, and get your Wikipedia entry in order — you have my permission. I’ll be writing more about how to do this, and why it’s important, in the new year.

4. We’ll Start Seeing How Smart Our TV’s Can Really Be

Change always happens from the bottom up. It’ll start when Tesco start building a Blinkbox user interface into their televisions. The successor to that will be a custom Android interface, not that different from what OUYA is already running with. This will be a huge leap in terms of the user-experience low end TVs have to offer — Panasonic and Samsung will wet themselves — but also an explosion in the number of competing ecosystems.

5. Games Will Transcend into Malleable Ecosystems

This is something which Steam employees have been speaking publicly about over the past year, but we haven’t really seen that come into full phase. More games will offer rewards over typical achievements, rewards that are only redeemable in other titles. This presents a big opportunity for large publishers with multiple franchises releasing at the same time, but it’s also an opportunity for indies to band together and make things more interesting. Imagine a DLC pack that isn’t unlocked by just buying it, no, you need to earn it in a completely different (but slightly related) game!

Not appealing? Then imagine a weapon skin that’s not just playable in DOTA 2, but also as a melee weapon in Sir, You Are Being Hunted. Or as a tattoo for your player character in APB? That’s something that could really happen. It’s possible that it could happen today actually, but it’s really going to happen tomorrow. Just you watch.

6. RSS Rises from the Dead

Why the hell is this relevant to game developers? Because the way people are finding out about your stuff is changing. Both developers and the games media alike will have to react to this, making their sites look good not just on Chrome, but on Feedly, Instapaper and Pocket. I’ve already taken steps to make sure my blog works good with these services, but then, I’m like that.

Make your blog readable, and make sure there’s stuff worth reading on it. It will pay dividends in 6 months or less.

Again, I’ll be writing more about this sort of stuff in the new year.

7. Mainstream Media Will Realise Games Are Cool

More of a dream than a prediction, I wish some day that the Guardian Games blog won’t have to pitch itself against the inexperienced columnist, looking to take a cheap, and reliable, shot at a medium they regularly don’t understand. The BBC News website will choose write about a game in it’s Entertainment section rather than tech, and more mainstream newspapers will wake up to the readership potential, and advertising potential that could come with having serious, hard working games writers in a dark corner of the office.

Fox News will continue to drum up local news scandal as a parent discovers their child has been walking around with not one, but two Disney Infinity toys in their large intestine since Christmas, and ESPN will start streaming online coverage of eSport tournaments to the US, putting an end to scenes like this.

8. Cross Platform Will Become A Base Expectation

I’ve all but gone off the Mac App Store entirely because of SteamPlay. What’s the point in buying a game that’s Mac only when I know I can find it on Valve’s marketplace at the same price (or better) and play it when I’m running Boot Camp as well?

A really wild guess would be the possibility that Apple extend the reach of Universal Apps from not just iPad and iPhone, to the Mac (and Apple TV?) platforms; saving players from buying multiple versions of the same game and juggling different levels of game completion.

New storefronts like Humble Bundle have championed cross platform from existence, and with the Steam Box raising gamers interests in Linux and micro consoles, the diversification of platforms could peak new heights in the coming year.

9. We’re All Going To Need to Learn Data Analysis

This kind of circles back to how were all going to get good at publishing things. Being able to collect and listen to the right signals is an important skill in any business, and hiring a full time Data Analyst solidifies an intent on understanding your audience, or potential audience even better.

Of course, many studios have been doing this for years — decades even. But with the tools and techniques being passed down and made more readily available to everyone, you’ll start finding it’s not just the thirty-man development team plotting pivot graphs and pie charts, but the kid in his bedroom as well…

The Future is What We Do With It

This is all blue sky thinking. I’ve heard people love to do this. 2014 will mean something completely different for all of us, but I hope you have a good one, and if you are doing any of that silly resolution nonsense, if you forget just one day, don’t worry, just keep going. Don’t tell anyone…

9 Predictions for the Games Industry in 2014 was originally published by Kraig Walker at Kraig Walker on December 31, 2013.

Creating an Isometric Camera in Unity

2013-11-28T00:00:00-00:00

In addition to rendering a typical three-dimensional perspective, Unity also allows Cameras to use Orthographic projection instead, making it a fairly simple process to create your own isometric camera.

Game Isometric vs True Isometric

True isometric rendering requires a camera rotation of (54.736, 0, 45). You can see that that 54.735 isn’t really a clean number, and actually creates a lot of hassle when rendering things on the grid of pixels that is your monitor screen.

Thankfully, smart 2D graphics programmers identified this pretty quickly, and found that a similar perspective can be created by using a camera rotation of (60, 0, 45) - much nicer to work with. It may not be true isometric, but it’s the camera angle you’re most likely used to when playing games, and maintains a 2:1 ratio of pixels. If you use grid paper to design your levels first, you’ll be able to replicate the on screen visuals by drawing two squares along for every one square up.

Down To Business

Math lesson out the way, create a new scene (or open one you’d prefer to work with).

In the default blank scene you get with Unity all you’ll have is the basic MainCamera, which we’ll modify in just a sec. In my scene I added a Quad Primitive (available from Unity 4.2 onward) and rotated it so that it was lying on the XZ axis (like the ground, basically) and scaled it up a bit.

The next step is to modify the MainCamera that we want to use modifying it’s properties in the inspector panel like so…

The key changes worth paying attention to are the position, rotation and the projection variables of our camera. I also modified the size variable and the Near Clipping Pane to avoid cutting off our view if we stray too far.

If you find yourself seeing things like the screenshot below, adjust your clipping panes.

Adding Keyboard Controls

To add a bit of interactivity we’re going to need to write a CameraController script that will update the position of the camera in response to user input.

Highlight your Assets folder in the Project pane like so. Click the Create dropdown and create a new C# script. This will create a barebones MonoBehaviour for you.

Rename the script to call it CameraController.cs and open it up in your favourite text editor.

All of the default code can stay. We use the Start() function to setup our initial variables, getting the initial position of the camera that we set in the Inspector. Update() handles key input, and moves the camera.

Fin

That wasn’t too bad. There’s still more to do if we want to really polish our camera.

In the next post we’ll look at how to rotate the camera around the the center point of the viewport and how to zoom in and out.

Creating an Isometric Camera in Unity was originally published by Kraig Walker at Kraig Walker on October 09, 2013.

An Idea: Pimp My Issue

2013-09-21T00:00:00+01:00

One of the things I’ve seen more and more when working with other developers is a sprawling variation in the organizational and presentational structure of Issue tags in projects. Issue tags are one of those little procrasta-tools in Github Issues which you could play with for hours, creating your own labeling system, setting out a colour system that’s just right, before any actual work has even been done.

If you’re someone who enjoys working with Github Issues - and I know I am - you’ll appreciate how being able to tag issues according to their type, priority, complexity, cost or subject area make searching through a seemingly endless list of tasks easier and more intuitive.

It’s not possible to create a single collection of tags that work against every project, as every project has a different scope and set of priorities. The default Issue tags leave a lot to be desired, and most programmers and project managers aren’t known for their superior colour theory skills.

I’ve had an idea for a site for a while now that runs in a similar vein to COLOURlovers or Adobe Kuler. It’s a site which allows people to easily adopt pre-packaged Issue naming schemes and colour themes that cater to their projects. People can also create and upload their own issue schemes for others to use - it would be interesting to track what schemes rise to the top.

I’ve recently read through a fantastic book called Execute by Drew Wilson and Josh Long, which they were able to write in three days and had published to print just five days after that. It’s a pretty inspiring and beautifully made book, and in the authors footsteps I’m going to see how quickly I can produce a web app of similar build quality with openness and community at the core.

I’ve drafted up a very brief spec of what I’d like to do so far:

Hosting - Heroku, Appfog or Nodejitsu (something that’s Node.js and has an open source or free option)
Database - CouchDB (I read good things about it)
Creators Login With Github - this allows for creative attribution to the theme’s original creator, and we can add profile information about the author to a theme’s page.
Be As Static As Possible - I like the idea of working with simple JSON files to store different themes. That’s why I’m choosing to use CouchDB. It’s also because I’m not much of a back-end guy yet, so being able to work with JSON files throughout and Javascript calls to the DB are a big plus.
Data Export - Although there is ability to import Issue tag schemes into Github (not yet anyway) I feel it’s important to allow people to export the data that makes up the theme, either back out as the JSON file, or as a text file of some sort.
Theme Previews - Preview each tag like it were in Github - different lightness values will influence whether the text colour of the issue tag is dark or light, so a preview option is important.
MVC - I also want to build the app using AngularJS as a front-end MVC framework, with Express mirroring the back-end. Despite needing to tweak express a little bit to work with Angular, I think it’s a fairly sensible move.
Responsive - Because it’s 2013.
Copying colour codes needs to be as easy as possible

I’d appreciate any feedback or ideas if you’re interested in getting involved, or if you’ve had any quibbles with keeping your Issue system clean and tidy. Comments are below :)

An Idea: Pimp My Issue was originally published by Kraig Walker at Kraig Walker on September 21, 2013.

Blog Like A Hacker

2013-07-31T00:00:00+01:00

Oh look! It’s another complete refresh of your website Kraig!

I know, I’m not really bothered about migrating 6 or so posts and reformatting them again. Progressively my blogging systems have become more and more minimalistic, starting out with a full-on Wordpress installation and now having everything being held in a bare-bones Jekyll setup

It’s a simple premise really. Rather than having a server churn out posts based on PHP code at run time, Jekyll precompiles sites into static HTML pages. That site is then pushed not to a server, but a git repository linked to a domain name, thus you have your own personal website - complete with backup service - from a mere Github Repo.

It’s not for everyone. You need to be okay with command lines and the closest thing you’ll get to a WYSIWYG is opening up a markdown file in Sublime Text, but by distilling the writing process into the absolute bare essentials, I can minimize distractions one might have if they have a whole suite of plugins and buttons to play with.

I’ve tried things like Octopress and DocPad in the past. I think DocPad is far superior to Octopress, as it doesn’t suffocate you with pre-existing theme and layout decisions, but for my needs it’s a bit of overkill to make my templates compatible. Focussing on content, for me, is a much more enjoyable use.

So yeah, pretty bare so far. I want this new approach to be more about posting useful stuff: Code snippets, handy projects, tutorials, workflows, etc. rather than comment and opinion stuff. An opinion is only valid when there is hard proof one knows what their talking about after all…

How very hipster of you, Mr Walker…

Blog Like A Hacker was originally published by Kraig Walker at Kraig Walker on July 31, 2013.