My wife and I recently had the first full-fledged collaborative painting session. Using our two dev-kits, I shared a painting session that she connected to, and we painted together on a single canvas.

While I spent a lot of time just testing collaborative paining to make sure everything functioned correctly, I haven’t really been able to really just play with the feature until now. It might not have been pretty (I can’t really paint, if you didn’t know), but it was definitely fun. We fought over canvas space, painted things behind layers for the other to find and “improved” each other’s creations.

The feature is called “Paint with Friends” and is a local multiplayer feature that supports 2 players. We initially intended to make it a 4 player feature – but then realized that we don’t have that many dev-kits. :) (those things are pretty expensive.) And really, it’s a pretty small screen to fit 4 people onto anyway.

I’m really excited about the collaborative painting feature, partly because I don’t really know what people are going to use it for. Playing checkers? Sending secret messages back and forth? Teaching each other how to paint? You tell me.

Or better yet, you’ll be able to show me, once Colors! 3D has been released. We just implemented collaborative painting playback in the gallery, so here you go. The first real collaborative painting in Colors! 3D.

(Click the image to visit the gallery and see the playback)

Colors! 3D won’t get an exact release date yet until it has passed Nintendo submission. Our best guess is that it will be out in 2-5 weeks. It will be $6.99 in the US eShop and something similar in the European one.

Posted: January 25th, 2012 under Colors!, Projects.
Comments: 8

Painting in 3D is obviously one of the core features of Colors! 3D (duh), but it is quite hard to get people to see how cool it is without showing it to them on the actual Nintendo 3DS. There is plenty of stuff happening in getting 3D to work in browsers, but the fact is that not too many people have a 3D monitor hooked up to their computer.

Because of that, we haven’t even tried to tackle displaying stereoscopic 3D in the Colors! Gallery. However, Read more »

Posted: January 20th, 2012 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 22

The year is almost over, and Colors! 3D is not in your hands yet. This is due to the gallery integration feature. The term that Nintendo uses for features like the integrated gallery is “Rich User Generated Content”. This is not something we see too much of on consoles, so it’s been taking quite a while to work through.

Read more »

Posted: December 30th, 2011 under Colors!, Game design, Projects.
Comments: 10

I’ve been told that I’m over-zealous about latency. Having spent more than 10 years working in the video-games industry as both an engineer and a designer, I’ve found latency to be one of easiest things to point out that differentiates a good experience from a bad one. It’s usually not easy to fix though.

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Posted: November 2nd, 2011 under Colors!, Game design.
Comments: 7

Welcome to the first hopefully many Colors! 3D development diaries. In the time left to the release, I will try to give some insight into what’s gone (and goes) into the development of this… game-app-play-thingy. Yep, we are not really sure how to categorize it either, but that’s ok – that’s one of the things we like about it.

But first, I know that many of you are asking. We still don’t have a release-date or a price. This is the first time we are releasing something for the Nintendo 3DS eShop (well, duh), and there are still things we haven’t figured out. We are feverishly working getting things ready, but there is still a little bit to go before it can go into Nintendo’s submission.

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Posted: October 24th, 2011 under Colors!, Game design.
Comments: 43

Nope. Despite the semi-nerdy name, this is not a technical post. Now that Colors! 3D is finally announced, I wanted to talk about all the fun I get to have now, talking to various entities who are interested in all that we’re doing at Collecting Smiles. And one thing I have learned in the process is that it helps to have a buddy.

For the last year, my friend Shara has been helping me take Collecting Smiles from the loose organization that I started so long ago into a proper company. Just like me, Shara also spent time at LucasArts –and managed to pull off some great feats while she was there. I felt very fortunate to be able to work with her there, and so much more to have her with me at Collecting Smiles.

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Posted: September 29th, 2011 under Colors!.
Comments: 2

The last 6 months have been quite interesting. With an office setup in downtown San Francisco, we are now pushing to grow Collecting Smiles into a full fledged developer. Our initial goal is to build on Colors!, the small hobby project I started working on it 2007. Read more »

Posted: March 20th, 2011 under Colors!.
Comments: 2

LucasArts day 572. Last Friday was my last day at LucasArts. It’s been a fantastic time, but now it’s time for me to move on. During my time there I got to lead a design team working on experimental games focused on creating new IPs. As a designer and programmer having worked on both small and big this was an amazing opportunity to really focus on rapid prototyping and building things ground up. It’s surprising how similar and different things are when you work on 6 month projects versus 2 year projects. As we are constantly reminded nowadays, the games and entertainment industry is in rapid transition and it was a luxurious opportunity to be able to touch some of the fronts of that from within the hallowed halls of Lucasfilm.

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Posted: August 12th, 2010 under LucasArts, Personal.
Comments: 2

LucasArts day 112. So, I never followed up on GDC. The weather was beautiful and I had a great time seeing some of my old friends. I only had chance to attend one day of sessions but that meant that I got to see industry-legend Hideo Kojima’s keynote about Metal Gear Solids evolution and Keita Takahashi’s heart-warming talk about Noby Noby Boy. But the session that gave me most was the Experimental Gameplay Sessions. Again, it’s clear that innovation within games is often not coming from the established developers. It almost seems like we are returning to the age of the bedroom coders with very few right and wrongs. Read more »

Posted: May 4th, 2009 under Game design, LucasArts.
Comments: 2

LucasArts day 46. I’m starting to count down for Game Developers Conference. Even though I’ve been working in the game industry for over 10 years, I’ve never been there. I guess that having it across town makes it easier than it being 9 time-zones away. Today I got a mail from Nifflas, the maker of Knytt which is one of my favorite independent games, Read more »

Posted: February 27th, 2009 under Game design, Games, LucasArts.
Comments: 4