The central concept behind the main character of Atmosphir, Hero, is that he’s the 3D equivalent of a stick figure. Simple, neutral, universal, and iconic. A fun little guy who has some pretty great athletic abilities….which luckily allows for some nice gameplay possibilities.

Simplicity was a primary driving force in the character design right from the get-go. I remember watching a television special on the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, and one of the architects was talking about his rationale for the unique shape of the building. He felt that things became iconic when you could sketch them on the back of a napkin in ten seconds with only a few simple shapes and lines…like the Eiffel Tower, Mickey Mouse ears, a Coca-Cola bottle, the Nike Swoosh, and so on. Well, that’s exactly what we were shooting for here.

Running and jumping are our Hero’s biggest strengths, so we developed the character around those abilities and exaggerated the corresponding parts. In that sense, gameplay was the most important justification behind character design decisions. His oversized features and spaghetti-style limbs are meant to emphasize these actions in animations. And the eyes and mouth alone have an effective range in displaying emotion; I mean, Mr. Potato Head taught me that.

We definitely wanted to give people plenty of options to personalize who they’re controlling, so you can think of this little guy as just a mannequin. A rough draft. The kid under the Halloween costume. He’s a neutral body who might be covered in layers of special objects and articles to become more individual, so you might make him look like a giant robot or panda or human or whatever…but more on that some other time.

We also threw together several quick 2D animation tests in Flash to explore how the Hero came to life when put into motion. This one was done just using the simple shapes from the vector concept art. As you can see, Hero’s got some mad ups.

The leap from 2D to 3D is always a big jump, and with our Hero, we quickly realized that some things got lost in the initial translation. His features were a little too human-esque, and his rounded bulging eyes made him seem more alien or bug-like.

We basically started from scratch again with the 3D version of our Hero, but the changes really helped give him a look and personality more in line with our original intentions. In short, we wanted him to be more like a plush toy and less like an action figure. By de-emphasizing the shoulders and elbows/knees, he gained a more cartoonish and fun feeling, as if he had been modeled out of Play-Doh.

So there you have it. With a few more animation tweaks and graphical enhancements, this is the guy you’ll be controlling in the not-too-distant future, and I think he embodies most of the ideas we’re going for with Atmosphir.

Solid gameplay. Simplicity. Imagination. Emotion. Fun.

Now if only he had an interesting world to explore…

I thought you might enjoy seeing the design progression of the Atmosphir name and logo. We wanted something clean, fun, and iconic that somehow represented the platform-based gameplay. I went back and poked through some old draft files and folders, and these were some of the more interesting variations:

I’m happy to announce that our first video game will be named Atmosphir. It’s a platform/action game with a few modern twists and ideas, which we hope will create a fresh and imaginative experience for everyone. Much more will be revealed in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is a U.S.-based group that helps video game companies as a resource for research, anti-piracy, and other industry issues. I was skimming through their site the other day and was pretty impressed at some of the findings. As games continue to gain mainstream acceptance and shy away from solely the stereotypical male gamer (um…like me), I think we’re going to see these results diversify even more. Some of the more interesting stats:

★ US computer and video game software sales grew 6% in 2006 to $7.4 billion, almost tripling industry software sales since 1996.

★ The average game player is 33 years old and has been playing games for 12 years.

★ The average age of the most frequent game buyer is 38 years old. In 2007, 92% of computer game buyers and 80% of console game buyers were over the age of 18.

★ 85% of all games sold in 2006 were rated E for Everyone, T for Teen, or E10+ for Everyone 10+.

★ In 2007, 24% of Americans over the age of 50 played video games, an increase from 9% in 1999.

★ 49% of game players say they play games online one or more hours per week.

★ 36% of American parents say they play computer and video games. Further, 80% of gamer parents say they play video games with their kids. 66% feel that playing games has brought their families closer together.

★ 38% of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (31%) than boys age 17 or younger (20%).

You can check out more of their findings here.

Miyamoto was a small piece I put together while starting to learn Flash about 3 years ago. Named after Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, the game is a short musical adventure where you click on various objects and characters to produce certain sounds, which play against a simple beat and melody in the background. Clicking things at the right intervals makes them sync up in time with the background music, creating unique interactive compositions. This was an evolution of the “Concrete World” idea I played around with in college (but we’ll talk more about that another time).

The game starts like a typical level from the original Super Mario Brothers. Mario and Luigi are bouncing around, and you can click on them and other Nintendo objects and characters to emit sounds. There are also a few hidden sounds in the blocks if you explore around, but the screen continually scrolls to the left, creating a constant sense of forward motion. Most of the sounds you’ll find are based off of themes from classic Nintendo games. There are also three background beats to choose from in the upper left corner-beat #3 is a mixture of the Zelda theme and the beatbox percussion from Spoon’s Stay Don’t Go.

As you progress through the landscape, new environments and characters pop up, which includes everything from a pixelated Punch-Out Mike Tyson to a Star Fox Arwing. All the characters were imported into Flash using free pixel sprites from several websites; video game characters are popular Flash cartoon/game subjects, so it’s not uncommon to find large libraries of incredibly detailed pixel artwork online. The artists whose work contributed to Miyamoto are thanked and credited at the end of the game.

Also included are 3 secret warp zones, where the scrolling stops and you have a set of stationary characters to play around with. You can experiment with these screens as long as you want before being warped ahead to a new section-but that also means you might skip ahead and miss out on some scenes and sounds. Between the warping and the timing of your clicks, no two playthroughs will sound entirely the same.

The game ends with a boss battle (of course), where Bowser from the Mario games rides atop a giant floating skull. This part isn’t about keeping in time with the melody as much as it is finding weak points to click.

Ultimately the game turned out a little buggy, and I wish I had gone back and cleaned things up a little bit. The sounds play immediately when you click something on a Mac, but there’s an unfortunate short delay on a PC. The game is coded through the Flash timeline, so the animation and fluidity isn’t as smooth as it could be. More diverse sounds would have been nice; many sounds are repeated and not as surprising or interesting the 86th time you’ve clicked them. Despite these flaws, it was a fun experiment and taught me a lot about Flash in the process.

I’m a big fan of any sort of interactive music experiences, particularly when game elements are part of the mix - all the way from Milton Bradley’s Simon to Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution. I’d love it if the iPod Touch allowed Flash support - a concept like Miyamoto would work even better as a mobile touch-based game, I think. Guitar Hero III and Rock Band are promising the exciting possibilities of playing along and competing over a growing catalog of downloadable songs. Maybe one day people are going to say “What? You only listened to music?”

Yesterday afternoon, I was lucky enough to stop by the TechCrunch40 Conference, which was being held just a few blocks away from our offices (my neighbors over at 8020 Publishing presented their new travel magazine Everywhere during the previous day). In the session I attended, 5 companies got 8 minutes each to announce and demo their online product, and then an expert panel discussed what sounded good and what could be improved. Greatest surprise for me: one of the panelists was none other than MC Hammer! He’s apparently helping out with an internet company of his own, and often had some great comments that got laughs and applause from the crowd. The 5 companies I watched were Flowplay, Metaplace, WooMe, Zivity, and Kaltura. While they were all interesting, I was primarily interested in the virtual world / gaming ventures Flowplay and Metaplace.

Flowplay is a casual game site and community primarily aimed at the teenage market. They started their presentation with a pretty cool character creation demo which, like the rest of the product, was done entirely in Flash. The custom characters could rotate around to face 8 different directions, giving off a fake semi-3D effect. Then they played a video about using the site as narrated by a teenage girl, which was a little over-the-top and too cutesy for a lot of the crowd to handle. Despite that, there were a few interesting ideas. While you were playing a little Flash game on one side of the screen, you could see your character and some of your friends’ characters on the other side, hanging out and chatting. Playing games gets you tokens, which can be used to buy new outfits or dance moves or typical stuff like that. The game they demoed was unfortunately pretty bland - a cartoon guy doing a wheelie on a motorbike for about two minutes. And of course, there are also dance clubs and non-game places to go to as well. I think Flowplay has good potential to reach its target market, but the games seemed to take a backdrop to the social aspects.

Metaplace was presented by the energetic and passionate Raph Koster, and the idea is that a virtual world should live anywhere - on Facebook, your phone, your blog, and so on. They went through a nice little demonstration in an isometric perspective, where their character (a girl with a backpack) was in an apartment. She walked up to an arcade machine to play a game, and then walked over to some magazines to read RSS feeds from news sites. Then she went through a nearby door and entered a world that looked completely different, with an illustrated style and a flat, 2D feeling. This was the really cool part to me; the part that got my imagination whirling. Not limiting people to one art style (or even one dimension) is pretty great from a creative perspective, and you never know where a door might take you. They also raced through some world creation tools, which looked interesting but there wasn’t enough time to go into too much detail. As for traditional gameplay, Koster explained that he was creating a massively multiplayer game using only Metaplace worlds. Nothing looked like the typical 3D virtual worlds of Second Life (whether that’s good or bad is up to you), but it sounds like they are still developing the 3D aspects of their platform. There’s a lot of potential with Metaplace, and if everything clicks like it sounds it might, this could be something really special.