CVG had a great interview with Peter Shea, Creative Director at Firebrand Games, talking about the forthcoming DS version of Race Drive: GRID. (See IGN UK's preview for a more general overview.)

The interview really focuses in on what Firebrand is doing differently for the handheld version of the game. It sounds as if they're really doing a great job in taking the special capabilities of the DS into account when it comes to track creation, as well as tweaking gameplay to match the handheld experience. I'm glad to see that more and more developers are taking this approach. Shoveling out ports helps no one.

Race Drive: GRID does user-gen content

Perhaps the most interesting bit for me, though, was Shea's discussion of how they're taking all of the user-created content the track editor is going to spawn to really make GRID something special:

Shea: It's very straightforward. You can save six different tracks on your Game Card, and then by connecting to Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, you can upload any of these tracks to your own space on the Gamespy servers.

You can then tell your friends about it, and they can look for your tracks online using your Friend Name, and download them to save on their own copy of the game. They are then free to race or edit the track, or upload it to their own bit of the server.

There's a wealth of great content out there that people are creating every single day. The hardcore folks know to head over to FilePlanet and look for the latest maps or mods on the PC. The more mainstream gamer, and those on the console, aren't necessarily going to want to jump through those hoops. What they need is a dead simple means of sharing that content from directly within the game.

That, my friends, is exactly what we built Sake, our Persistent Storage system, to do.

We saw a similar approach taken in Mini Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2, a single player title, and the first game to ship with Sake. The additional content spawned a thriving, if small, community and gave the game huge legs. You can read more about it in my presentation from last year, Breaking the In-Game/Out-of-Game Barrier.

I'm excited to see Sake put to great use again on the DS, this time by Firebrand. We'll definitely be doing a case study on this bad boy when it hits shelves later this year.

Well, that certainly didn’t take long!  Super Smash Bros. Brawl was unleashed upon Japan just two short weeks ago and, already, the game is breaking sales records.  (I refrained from making any “smashing” jokes.)

Kotaku, courtesy of Famitsu, are reporting that Super Smash Bros. Brawl has become the fastest selling Wii title, beating out hits like Wii Fit and Wii Sports.

We’re hoping that the killer online feature set - from straight-up multiplayer action, to betting on replays, to sharing home-brew stages - are helping to contribute to those numbers.  Nintendo pulled out all the stops when bringing one of my favorite franchises to the Wii.

Look for a full case study on Super Smash Bros. Brawl when the game becomes available to the rest of the world in a few more months.

November was a prolific month for online play across all of the different platforms we support. More PSP goodness from Red Lynx and THQ with Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command after last months PSP resurgence is always a good thing to see. Timeshift kicked things off for the PS3 this holiday... look for more PS3 titles in December and gaining strength into the new year.

• Panzer Tactics (DS) 10Tacle
• Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (Wii) Sega
• Empire Earth III (PC) Vivendi Games
• F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate (PC) Vivendi Games
• Ultimate Mortal Kombat (DS) Midway Games
• Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command (PSP) THQ
• Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 (Wii) Ubisoft
• Need for Speed: ProStreet (DS) Electronic Arts
• Crysis (PC) Electronic Arts
• Word Jong (DS) Destineer
• TimeShift (PS3) Vivendi Games
• TimeShift (PC) Vivendi Games
• Unreal Tournament 3 (PC) Midway Games
• Geometry Wars: Galaxies (Wii) Vivendi Games
• Trauma Center: New Blood (Wii) Atlus Software
• Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2008 (DS) Konami
• Tank Beat 2 (DS) Milestone

Word on the street is that there's this great new game in town. Halo something or other. I hear it is breaking all kinds of sales records, causing rampant truancy at schools across the nation and is also the future of gaming.

What impresses me most, though, about Halo 3 aren't the big things but rather the small things, the niceties, that most people are probably going to ignore.

The Forge? It reminds me of the skate park editors in early Tony Hawk games. I've seen better level editors and, let's face it, most user-created maps are crap. I admit, though, that I am curious to see what the little twist playing games while editing takes place will turn up. Those of you who played SourceForts can probably relate. An 8-player deathmatch with all eight players simultaneously editing the very same map has fascinating potential. A small twist sure to reap rewards.

The replay system, too, has all be done before. There's a long history in the Quake community of making games, Half-Life gurus took it to another level and then, of course, there's the rabid RTS replay-consuming community. (See also the great BattleCast feature we worked with Command & Conquer 3 on earlier this year.) What I love about the replay system in Halo 3 is just how drop-dead easy it is to use. A hallmark of the Halo series is the attention paid to usability. While usability is certainly no "small thing" it definitely is oft overlooked.

Truth be told, I think the matchmaking in Halo 3 is just average. It's fairly easy to find a match but, being the fast-twitch gamer that I am I'm frustrated any time I have to sit and watch my Xbox tell me "Searching for close match." Thankfully there's a gorgeous little map on the matchmaking screen that has little dots on the globe showing me from where online players hail. (We had a similar feature in GameSpy Arcade's lobbies - see "Playing Peer to Peer Games.") I love it! I could stare at this thing all day. It's a tiny little feature, but one that distracts me from the tedium of matchmaking and makes me feel connected to the community.

I haven't seen much hooplah about the player stats shown on Bungie.net perhaps that's because, given what the Battlefield franchise and others have done on the web many find it fairly ho-hum - aside from the slick presentation. What I absolutely think is a small but important feature is the feed available for every player. I can now add a friend's feed to my favorite reader and get hourly updates on his ownage.

All of these little things, along with dozens more, take a game that is "merely great" to all new heights. I hope that more developers take note and start sweating the small stuff. As consumers grow more savvy they're going to expect these niceties and, maybe, start to punish developers for "merely" making a great game.

I was recently listening to Science Friday on NPR and heard a fantastic interview with John Maeda, Associate Director of Research at The Media Lab at MIT. During the interview Maeda discussed his book The Laws of Simplicity.

The laws range from the obvious (Law 1: Reduce "The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.") to the nearly contradictory (Law 9: Failure "Some things can never be made simple.") You can - and should - read more about each of the laws on Maeda's blog. It struck me as I was listening that complexity is among the greatest barriers we in the game industry face.

Complexity prevents us from expanding our audience.
Need proof? Just watch a non-gamer struggle with a controller. The 360 controller, which I consider quite usable, has two stick controls, a D-pad, 7 buttons on the top of the controller and 4 triggers hidden from view. Over time, of course, using the controller becomes second nature - a natural extension of the player. But not everyone has the time to commit to learning, nor the desire to learn some new skill in order to play a game.

Touching is good. And intuitive.

A large part of Nintendo's success with the DS and the Wii, I would argue, comes from stripping away the complexities of the controller. What could be simpler than tapping directly on the screen of the DS? Or swinging the Wiimote just like you would a golf club? My three year-old quickly figured out how to pet her Nintendog (named 'Anchovy' in case you were interested) and my father has no problem playing Clubhouse Games - online, even!

That's Law 1 in action, folks. How could you put it to use in your game?

Complexity prevents users from discovering (and enjoying) higher-order functionality.
We've focused a good bit in recent years in adding more and more complex functionality to our suite of products. One of the questions that constantly comes up during design meetings is how to add Feature X such that the interface doesn't become needlessly complex? Or, perhaps more importantly, whether or not anyone will really make use of a feature if it requires too much thought on a user's part?

We are, for example, big proponents of lots of filtering in a server browser. It allows users to get a smaller list, making the browsing process faster (Law 3: Time). It also makes the list far more relevant, making it easier to select a server that meets your criteria. Great!

So many options, so much complexity.

Sort of. In practice, though, we often see filtering implemented as a jumble of drop-downs, multi-state checkboxes and text-entry fields. Worse still? The filter options are all present but defaulted to none. Why not pre-select some? Like "not empty/not full" or "not passworded." Law 5, people. Simplicity and complexity need each other.

Complexity causes frustration, fatigue and failure.
As a game developer you want to evoke emotions in your players. You want them to feel attached to the characters. You want them to feel a rush of adrenaline in the heat of battle. You want them to forge strong friendships with the people they play with online.

You don't want them feeling frustrated because they don't understand how a feature works. Or feel fatigued by having to do the same tasks every time they play. Law 7 states that more emotion is better than less. So long as it is positive I'd say that's true. The last thing you need, though, is more negative emotion.

Immediately after hearing the interview I put in an order for The Laws of Simplicity. Download the podcast and see if it has the same effect on you. Who knows, maybe the game you're working on right now could use a little simplicity!

I'm getting a little tired of all the hype over cross-platform play recently. First it was Shadowrun. Now people seem to be all gah-gah over Universe at War allowing PC vs. Xbox 360 play.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think cross-platform is a good thing, especially when it comes to building a community around a game. No more segmentation of audience by platform. You don't have a little group of Xbox gamers and little group of PC gamers; you have a great big, happy group of Universe at War players. Nothing but goodness, there.

We've been big proponents of cross-platform play for a long time. Together with Terminal Reality we successfully brought PC, Macintosh and Dreamcast users to play against each other in 4x4 Evolution... in October of 2000. Yes, the Dreamcast (R.I.P.) and, yes, in 2000.

4x4 Evolution multiplayer on PC, Macintosh and Dreamcast

Since then we've worked with a number of developers on PS2 vs. PSP games, including the World Series of Poker games. Our long-time friends at Aspyr do an admirable job of keeping PC and Mac users playing together in the same universe in the Civilization IV and Battlefield ports to the Mac. Hell, we even powered the cross-platform Halo on PC and Mac!

Cross-platform isn't rocket science. It's just smart community building.

What rubs me the wrong way about all of the recent cross-platform news is that it is being touted as something new and technically amazing - and that journalists seem to be buying it. I said "Universe at War allowing PC vs. Xbox 360 play" in the first paragraph and I meant it. There's nothing new here, other than a change in Microsoft's attitude.

The story really ought to be, "What's taken you so long?"

Several weeks ago Terra Nova posted an interesting opinion piece on The Inevitability of Voice. The piece focuses on an interesting phenomenon in-game voice had introduced: suddenly who you are in "real life" can have in impact on your role in a virtual world. (Tip via Fargo's FileBlog at FilePlanet.)

Suddenly a player who you assumed was a grizzled warrior turns out to be merely a child. Women are harassed by adolescent boys instead of being allowed to simply play the game.

This shouldn't stop you from building voice into your games. While initially found only in a select few games or something only the hardest of the hardcore did using external applications, voice is now seen as a standard feature. There's no perfect way to solve this problem there are a few approaches you can take.

First off, make it easy to mute the voice of both individual players as well as disable voice all together. Most of the games that have used our Voice SDK have taken this approach. See Lord of the Rings: Online or SWAT 4 for a good example of this.

Or take it one step further and make voice an invite-only feature. This approach was taken with great success by DICE in both Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142. Voice communication is only enabled for those within your squad. The player must consciously choose to join a squad and participate in voice chat.

Give your players the features they expect but do so by apply some thought and care to how they may be treated once it is discovered that a 13-year old girl is whooping up on them.

The team working on GameSpy Comrade are always trying to figure out ways to help you get more out of gaming. First, they took the best elements of our previous software and rolled it up into a nice, sleek little app that lets you chat (across platforms) with buddies and allows you to instantly join a game server that any of your friends join. If you haven't downloaded Comrade yet, you should give it a try.

Nowadays the Comrade engineers -- and when I say that I want you to imagine that they all wear lab coats and hard hats, because I've been pushing for that for years -- have developed a new tool for quickly getting into a game. Instead of forcing you to scan through a massive list of servers (or instead of picking one for you), the "SmartMatch" tool uses some basic criteria to give you a 'short list' of the four or five servers you'll probably care about the most. It gets you into a good game, quick.

All this was done with some clever UI on top of the Server Browsing SDK. You, Mr. Game Developer, have this technology in your hands right now. All you need to do is spend some time deciding what criteria you can use to pare that list down to a manageable size.