I was fortunate enough to go back-country skiing in the Selkirk Mountain Range this past week. Back-country skiing is really neat because you’re getting to ski in untouched powder snow that is soft, fluffy, and uncrowded to ski in, unlike regular ski hills. Using Alpine-touring skis and fur skins (to give you traction) you hike up to the top of a hill and then switch to downhill mode and ski down. Skiing down is different from on a groomed slope because the snow is so thick it would slow you down to a standstill if you used traditional techniques. So you have to kind of “bounce” your way down the hill. It’s neat because if you’re used to doing blue runs with an occasional black diamond, like me, you find you can do much steeper hills and get a real nice flow to your skiing. It’s lots of fun!

I even got to check out a natural ice cave! It’s quite pretty inside with the sunlight turning the ice shades of blue.

It was a useful trip because it also helped me refine my ideas for a snow-level for a game I’m working on called “Abscond”. It’s a game that uses the “Escape the Room” game motif as a starting point to springboard off into something quite creative and new. I’m planning to use that as a featuring point for my new website design. (coming soon…)

Recently I travelled to Europe for four weeks as a post-graduation celebration trip. It was fantastic. I had a good mix of adventure and touristy visits. Everything from Museums to biking through small towns of France, to visiting friends in Berlin, and meeting new friends along the way. Most importantly though, I got to attend the Netherlands Game Developers Festival (or NLGD Festival).

It was an amazing conference that had a large focus on Alternate Reality Games and Urban Games. It was fun and I even got to attend the Game Design session that spanned two of the afternoons. One for design, one for play. My partners and I got to take home the trophy for “Most Played” game. It was very neat to see what was happening abroad as far as games. Netherlands also has a large serious games community developing games that teach you everything from English to Project Management.

It was quite a bit smaller than GDC, but had an enthusiastic group of developers attending.

Museum of Musical Instruments

One other worthy mention for my trip was the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels, Belgium. This is a great example of a smart use of digital media. In the Museum they give you wireless headphones to wear. You walk in and find cases upon cases of musical instruments. When you walk up to each case you suddenly hear the sound of the musical instrument in front of you. As you walk around the room the music changes to each instrument, so you spend the next few hours wandering around hearing music of all varieties. A strange experience is to quickly walk down an aisle and hear the music rapidly change from Classical to bagpipes to rock to drums to panpipes all in the course of a few seconds.

I would love to use that technology for a real-world game.

So last week I had the great fortune to not only present an Artificial Intelligence paper at Stanford on behalf of my Summer Internship Employer but also to attend a little of the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

The AI Conference
The conference I was presenting it at was the AAAI Symposium and had lots of interesting people. Including a professor working on a story system called Twig which allows you to direct the characters and create scenes using structured english. It was quite neat – especially when he setup his Monty Python sketch.

The paper I presented was about using evolutionary fuzzy cognitive maps in creating believable characters for telling stories in virtual worlds. It took the idea of fuzzy cognitive maps, where a collection of entities or concepts have relationships that impact each other, and added the random probabilities of Bayesian Networks. The author of the paper is in Singapore and was not able to get a visa in time for the conference, so with one week to go they quickly gave me a call and I happily agreed to help them out.

GDC
The day after I headed north from Stanford to San Francisco and roomed with other friends who were attending GDC. I only had Tuesday available but I made the most of it by attending the Canadian-Dutch Breakfast, taking a tour of Three Rings Studio, and attending some evening networking events.

Canadian-Dutch Breakfast
The Dutch Breakfast was excellent I met some exciting entrepreneurs. This was very valuable for me as I am looking to work in the Netherlands for a change of pace. I really would like to see what working in Europe would be like and the Netherlands is my preferred place in Europe to be.

Combustic is being founded by a passionate developer looking to bring more digital media to the real world. I really liked the ideas he brought forward and am wanting to learn more.

ranj designs serious games. Getting to talk with one of the heads of the company in a booth was amazing. GAF showed me their game for aiding Dutch People to get used to speaking English and using it in public places. He also showed me their award winning Shark-world: an innovative game that gets players used to working as a project manager and dealing with the day to day troubles that a project manager has to work with. It even has some Alternate Reality Game elements when you get texted by the game on your cellphone! These are games I would love to work on.

Three Rings Tour
Later when I went to Three Rings I must admit that I was so excited to be exploring a company’s headquarters that looked like a pirate ship! It was very cool! I’m a big fan of Puzzle Pirates and have played it for many years. Their Whirled version of their office is cool, but doesn’t do the full justice of how mind-blowingly great the office really is! (They have a secret room!) And to be able to listen to Daniel James, the CEO and designer of Puzzle Pirates, tell about the history of Three Rings was awe-inspiring.