But the reason for this post is that I want to write about another indie game that friends of mine are currently developing called ‘Commander Cherry’s Puzzled Journey’.

Description

Commander Cherry’s Puzzled Journey is a hybrid motion game, using the PlayStation 4 Eye camera® and the Dualshock 4® controller simultaneously. The game is currently being developed by Grandé Games for the PlayStation 4. The genre can be described as “Yoga-Action-Platformer”. The player is shaping the platforms with his body silhouette, which is captured and isolated by the PlayStation 4 Eye camera. Furthermore, the player has to fit his silhouette into given shapes and thus perform energetic space Yoga figures. The Dualshock 4 controller is used to control Commander Cherry in a classic platformer manner.

My thoughts

I had a chance to play the game myself and while it is still in a very early stage, I could already see the fun this game could bring, especially when playing with two or more people, trying to create specific shapes. As I said the game is still in a pretty early stage though, but if you liked what you saw, give those guys a thumbs up, share it, or follow them on twitter. I’m certainly excited to see more.

Audio != Audio

While most browsers and devices already do support audio in general, that doesn’t mean you can just play any audio file in any modern browser. The following table briefly lists the support for Audio-codecs.

As you can see there is no single codec and format that is supported by all browsers and devices. In addition to this not every device does support the WebAudio-API and some devices only allow audio-playback upon a user-interaction or only allow playing one sound at a time. So what should you do? Setup an audio file for any codec and then check the browser’s support before loading and playing the file? While this would be currently the only way to do it right, this not only sounds like a lot of work, but also is. What about browsers that don’t support the audio-element at all? – Implementing a flash fallback is no easy task as well.

SoundJS

One possible solution is SoundJS – SoundJS is a JavaScript framework that will take care of all the compatibility issues with audio on different devices and even adds the ability of a flash-fallback should the browser support no audio. You would still have to provide different files for each sound to ensure that a soundfile is available for each device depending on the codec support but besides this, playing a sound with SoundJS can be done with 2 lines of JavaScript:

var src = ‘mySound.m4a|mySound.ogg’;
createjs.Sound.registerSound(src);
//…after the sound was loaded, it can be played by:
createjs.Sound.play(src);

What I also like about SoundJS is that it features a plugin-system, so you can write your custom playback-plugin for individual needs, for example I used it to write a CocoonJS-plugin for it.

howler.js

Another solution is howler.js, it is also released under the MIT license, so you can use it free in any of you projects it works very similar to SoundJS. One advantage over SoundJS is that it is very lightweight with only 9kb and offers pretty much the same functionality as SoundJS – with one exception though: howler.js features no flash-fallback, but if you are targeting mobile platforms, this should be no problem.

var sound = new Howl({
  urls: ['mySound.m4a','mySound.ogg']
}).play();

Another thing I like about howler is the support of sound-sprites:

var sound = new Howl({
  urls: ['sounds.mp3', 'sounds.ogg'],
  sprite: {
    blast: [0, 1000],
    laser: [2000, 3000],
    winner: [4000, 7500]
  }
});

// shoot the laser!
sound.play('laser');

SoundManager 2
A third option is SoundManager 2, (github), just like SoundJS it features a flash fallback if HTML5 audio is not supported. SoundManager2 is used by popular site like SoundCloud, last.fm or the Nyan Cat site. The focus of SoundManager2 is more on implementing audio-players on web-sites as it also features UIs for audio playback. Sounds are played like this:

// create "mySound"...
soundManager.createSound({
  id: 'mySound',
  url: '/path/to/an.mp3'
});

// ...and play it
soundManager.play('mySound');

Comparison

As you can see, all three frameworks have their pros and cons, you should check out their sites and see what features you need for your project. The following table is just a very brief overview on the differences:

*this doesn’t mean that you cannot use it for other cases, it’s just my personal evaluation

A last word: Beware of MP3!

What a lot of people probably don’t know: MP3 is not free!
Implementing mp3 into your app/game is no problem, but what you should know is that if your game is ‘distributed’ (technically that includes 1 user playing the game in his browser) more than 5000 times, you have to pay an mp3 codec royalty of $2500. But not only because of the licensing I would suggest you to use Ogg Vorbis(.ogg) or AAC(.m4a, MP4), OGG and AAC do have a better sound-quality while encoded with a smaller file-size than their MP3-counterpart.

If you want to learn more about the workflow of implementing audio into your html5- (mobile-) app/game and additional information on creating and publishing an HTML5 game, you should checkout my book at: http://indiegamr.com/zerotoappstore/

Here is an example (play around with the alpha threshold and toggle the detection mode):

// Rect Collision
var intersection = ndgmr.checkRectCollision(bitmap1,bitmap2);
// intersection is null if no collision, otherwise a {x,y,width,height}-Object is returned

// Pixel Perfect Collision
var collision = ndgmr.checkPixelCollision(bitmap1,bitmap2,alphaThreshold);
// true or false
// alphaThreshold default is 0, set to higher value to ignore collisions with semi transparent pixels

*Edit: This article is NOT intended to be against Let’s Play Videos – I love them! – It should more question the quality of (some) video games.

Let me start off by stating that I used to be but ain’t any more a hardcore gamer. There had been quite a few titles I kind of wanted to play and I was really interested in buying them, but here is why I didn’t buy those titles:

You usually don’t want to buy a pig in a poke. So I went to browse for ingame gameplay videos of those games on youtube and stumbled across a “Let’s play… Video” (I’m talking about on of these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi0WSKZzyls), basically a screencapture of someone playing through the game together with commentary of the player. So I started by watching the first part, however at the end of the first part I thought “Well, this was fun – how does it continue?” – so I watched the next part and the next part… more and more losing the desire to buy the game and play it myself. After I was done watching all parts(not all in one session ;-)) I had completely lost the desire to play the game myself since I already had seen everything and knew how it ended, however I did NOT feel less satisfied like finishing a game myself. And this happened with not only one title, but several that I considered buying.

Meanwhile I’m at the point where I pretty much only watch Let’s Play Videos, instead of playing a game and here are my points why:

• I don’t have to pay $50 for a youtube-video
• I get to see everything in HD, no matter how bad my system is(even on mobile)
• I don’t have to go through the hassle of installing a 10GB+ game
• I can fast forward boring parts or skip parts
• I can relax after work and don’t have to think while watching or I can choose to figure out the next steps myself and then say “Yes, I would have done it the same way”
• It’s just as rewarding as figuring out something by playing myself

I know that there is of course a big group of people, who won’t agree with me, who would put nothing over playing a game themselves and I do get their point.
However by looking at channel-statistics of accounts like this one: http://youtube.com/user/Toegoff or this one: http://youtube.com/user/RealistReviewer you can clearly observe quite a trend towards watching games instead of playing them and this thesis was also backed by quite a few people I was talking to who told me that they didn’t buy a game because they did watch it on youtube even though they did like it.

So at this point I would be interested how many people there are, who have done this, because I think there is quite a bit of money lost by industry because of peoply like me.

Another question is: Who is to blame? – Is it because games are still the same as many years ago just with slightly different content and a better graphics? Or is it because my habits as a gamer have changed, that I prefer watching a game instead of playing it?