In the course of my research, I went through a lot of interesting material.  Arctic Dreams was revelatory, Mind of the Raven was illuminating, and the documentary series Blue Planet was breathtaking.  But this post is about a piece of wisdom that I find myself returning to again and again.  A marine biologist from UCSD advised me thus:

Arctic ecosystems pulse on the border between the land and sea.  Seals and walruses dot the shoreline, polar bears roam the ice floes, but they all depend on the vast food source beneath them.  Huge schools of Arctic cod and herring, and clouds of plankton feed the top-level predators of both land and sea.

A digression:

Lemming Soup

Every four years, lemmings, which form the base of the food chain for snowy owls and other predators, almost go extinct.  It’s not clear why (lemming suicide is a myth).  If you’ve played Venture Arctic far enough to unlock collared lemmings, you know that it’s very difficult to keep them alive.  They tend to breed exponentially.  Once every four years or so, their population gets so large that they eat all the available food.  Then they die.  Snowy owl populations are directly related to the availability of food: the sine wave of the lemming census.

Cod, herring, and plankton fluctuate in yearly cycles (rather than every 4 years like lemmings).  Their lives depend on the seasons.  Why don’t their populations boom during good years and and bust once they overpopulate the way that lemmings do?  What keeps their populations healthy and stable year after year?  What keeps the sine wave of major marine animal populations in balance?

Calming the Oceans

This is the piece of wisdom that the marine biologist had for me: apex predators (like sharks) provide stability to ecosystems by feasting as the fish populations rise and living on a meager diet during lulls.  If the apex predators disappear, the cod, herring, and other animals at the base of the food chain would breed in spikes and then crash once they ate through all their food.  Without the apex predators, the whole ecosystem would collapse!

Safety (and stability) in numbers

The Venture games distill ecosystems down and lets you play with manageable numbers of animals.  In the real world, particularly in marine ecosystems, populations are huge — the animal count no longer fit on the three digit score counter in the corner.  We’re talking about millions of animals.  When you have a population that large, it’s easy for a small portion of those animals to live through a particularly difficult time.  In Venture Arctic and Venture Africa, that last zebra or caribou often has no place to hide.  The smaller populations in the games lead them to be much more vulnerable to extinction.

Creepy

There’s a cat in my neighborhood that my fiancee has named Creepy.  It is an odd looking cat, and more than once we’ve seen it bring a mouse to various neighbors’ doorsteps.  I saw Creepy the other day, and it got me to thinking: house cats were originally bred to take care of mice.  These cat/mouse ecosystems are similarly small to the Venture games — why are they not more fragile?  What keeps the cat alive?

We do, of course!  When an apex predator (like a house cat) is trying to survive in a limited ecosystem, their food supplies must be supplemented by some external force.

Conclusion

Apex predators are extremely important in an ecosystem: they act as population control for the lower levels of the food web.  But in small, self-contained ecosystems like we’ve got in the Venture games, the diets of the apex predators must be supplemented.  The player must be able to engineer the balance of life by acting as provider to the top of the food chain as well as the bottom.

What does this mean for gameplay?  In Venture Dinosauria, the player will be able to provide meat for their predators to help them through hard times.  The health of an autonomous ecosystem depends as much on the health of the top of the food chain as much as the bottom.

Anyways, I highly recommend following them — I haven’t played the game, but Lugaru, their previous game, is well regarded, and they are active and interesting indie bloggers.  Take a look!

Being a judge probably precludes me from handicapping the race this year, as I traditionally do.  However, it’s interesting to see some trends emerge.

Trend #1: Short-form games dominate the Innovation category.  Games like Coil, You Have to Burn the Rope, The Graveyard are all experiences that last under an hour with a focused artistic or narrative purpose.

Trend #2: Console games are accepted as equally “indie” to their PC counterparts.  Examples: Carneyvale Showtime, The Maw.

Trend #3: INNOVATION INNOVATION INNOVATION: While on their face the individual games may not be more innovative than stuff we’ve seen in the past, almost ALL the games are innovative, even downright WEIRD.  It will be interesting to see if the press about this year’s IGF matches up to last year’s killer lineup seeing as how the games this year may be slightly less approachable than years past.

This is also a sad day for those games that weren’t nominated.  A few that I would have liked to have seen get recognition:

• Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaidan
• DROD RPG Tendry’s Tale
• Project Aftermath

Anyways, congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!  See you in March!

My mother was working on her family Christmas card… she was looking to do something Wall Street Journal themed since my father sold his business this year.  She usually relies on me for graphical work and this year she asked if I could make some Wall Street Journal hedcut effect.  There is a photoshop filter out there that appears to do a woodcut-looking effect, but it’s 80 bucks.  There’s also this tutorial which is pretty good, though it’s a bit more work intensive than a Photoshop plugin.

I made a couple of changes to the process described in the tutorial.  Rather than doing a simple wave to modulate the points in the pattern, I warped them to the shape of the face, giving the face more dimension, using the Liquify filter that came with my Wacom tablet.

Secondly, I did a smart sharpen after I was done with the process rather than Poster Edges as my image was too small for poster edges to work, and the sharpen effect gives it more of a newsprint look to me.  Anyways, you can see the output above.  That’s my dad and me.  I did myself second once I was a bit better at it.

I hiked up the valley known as Palm Canyon (miles past where the tourists stop). The canyon turns from desolate, cactus-filled desert to a lush river valley, complete with waterfalls, ferns, and frogs. I had several encounters with Bighorn Seep up there as well, which are endangered. They are curious creatures — one herd of 3 rams and a juvenile came within 10 feet before I got too scared and had to slowly back away! It’s rutting season, so you never know what the males will do!

The first is that I wanted to learn to make pixel art.  I suppose I already knew how, since I did this sort of thing when I was a kid and resolutions were much lower, but it’s probably been 15 or 20 years since I last picked up the pixel-brush.

Here’s my first pass at some goofy little animals:

A couple that I wasn’t as happy with (they didn’t fit the boxy style I was going for):

My first attempts (not pictured) were miserable.  So I did a little research.  Turns out Derek Yu of TIGSource and Aquaria fame has done a nice little tutorial on making pixel art.

I used Graphics Gale to make these, as suggested by this other Pixel Art tutorial.

Artie performed two 3 minute segments during the quarter finals.  During the second segment, he performed several limericks which were written (but not actually used) in Venture Africa.

If you’re in the Boston area, and you want some GREAT entertainment tomorrow (Saturday, Dec 2), head to the Middle East (472 Mass Ave).  An All-Star showcase starts at 8PM, the Poetry Slam starts at 9PM.

Artie is an incredibly funny and talented poet.  Check out some of his poems on his website here:
Poem 1 (Note, there’s two pages)
Others

If you’re in Boston, go cheer him on, and say hi after the show!