( An Anorak Pack is a collection of odds and ends and ramblings about a game and is only intended for those folk interested in the creative process behind the game )
(If you can't see the pictures then you may not have extracted the files from the zip folder yet)
Who's Making the Tea?
History.
Once upon a time in 1985 on a sunny morning in a leafy town called Sutton Coldfield, in an office of a software company called Forth Dimension Products Limited there was an argument. The argument was about whose turn it was to make the tea. It was to be the first tea round of the day. "It is your turn", one said pointing with an accusing finger, "It was me, then him, then him, so it is your turn." "Ah, but..." but the other said, "... I made the tea twice in a row yesterday morning so I miss a turn now, anyway he was not here yesterday so surely he must owe us a couple of rounds to catch-up". "No, no!", protested the one previously absent, "I didn't make any yesterday, BUT I didn't get any either so that day is just void for me". "Well in that case", said another "it's definitely not my turn because I didn't have a cuppa last thing yesterday".
... well it was pretty much just the start of the argument. There was beverage making dead lock, and the tea making facilities were a hive of inactivity, and thirst grew.
So what I did was write a simple computer program in VAX Basic on our MicroVAX. Ah, VAX/VMS those were the days. The program was probably only ten lines of code and most of that was the list of our names because the idea of the program was to randomly select the name of a person and unseromoniously spit it out on the VT220 computer terminal screen. (The VT220 model was the popular successor to the better known VT100 teminal, it was much more refined and did not have a keyboard that was so stiff it literally left you with brused finger tips)
After only a short while the simple program was done, compiled and linked. I checked round and we all agreed to abide by the decision made by the computer. Colleagues gathered around my terminal... there was Russell Hill, Cedric Griffis, Guy Dawson, Peter Pickford, and Andrw Peters. I typed 'RUN' and the program name (like you did on proper computers) and there it was... a name came back from the ether on the pure green phosphor... 'Andrew'. So the unfortunate Andrew Peters trudged off to make the tea, dutifully yet somewhat grumbly. Well we thought, this could be the answer to all out tea making arguments, even Andrew, the first victim, seemed up for the solution. All was well, it appeared, The next tea making time time came and I ran the program again....oo...it came-up 'Andrew' again. Well, I said, it's random, it's like tossing a coin it could come-up heads 5 times in a row or anything. Well Andrew was satisfied and grumbled-off to make the teas again. ....... it is much to the credit of Andrew's good nature and team-spirit that it was not until he got picked by the computer for the fifth time in a row that he threw his arms-up and refused to co-operate any more and demanded the program code was examined with a fine tooth comb. Err, well, I have to confess I had made a serious omission in the code: I had forgotten to randomize the random number system: so it would have for ever come-up with the same number and hence the same name from the list: 'Andrew'. Oops. Despite fixing the problem and some testing to prove it, alas, the program had fallen well out of favour and was not used again.
I did not reserect the idea until 2002 while working in an office in Pinewood Studios for Digi-Guys. This time the same mistake was not made when Hermit wrote the program using his copy of VB6, and because I had already told them of the 1985 debacle by that point suspicion was already high, Marc Lambert and me peered over Hermit's shoulder
as he typed, scrutinizing the code as it was written to make sure there was no mistake, and also to make sure that no sneaky weighting system was coded into the program that would make the program choose the programmer to make the tea less often. Such was the suspicion the program had to be built onto a floppy disk and the write-enable tag removed from it to make tampering more difficult, and the floppy was signed by the three of us so that a ringer could not be substituted...not only that but we kept the floppy disk in a locked draw between tea makings... and I think if we had had time to engineer a physical three-key system on the draw we would have.
Despite the intense cold war style suspicion and paranoia, the program was well used this time, and although, like the original 1985 version, the program simply and unseramoniously just spat-out a name, the actual event of getting the disk out and inserting it in the computer and all gathering around for the verdict in itself made it into quite a ceremony, which tea making should be I think.
It wasn't until after I had worked at a fruit machine software-house/manufacturer called JPM International for 5 years and was thinking of possible projects to do after finishing there, that I realised that what the tea maker choosing program needed was a bit of interest and suspense added to it in a similar style to gambling machines... and so "Who's Making the Tea?" was born....except now the terminology had changed and instead of being called a program it is now called an app or application.
Art.
All the art and fonts are original and hand drawn in this game, the designs are orininal too except of course for elements drawn from home country flags. The main (initial) screen of the game features a made-up flag for the UK. I love the UK, and the Union Jack is a stunning, beautiful design but I find it far too English-centric (despite actually being English myself) with the big fat Saint Gorge's cross slap bang in the middle, seemingly upstaging the other elements. Not only is it too English-y, but for historical reasons Wales isn't even on the flag, and personally at least, I think it should include Cornwall too. One thing that we definately like in the UK is tea, we can certaily differ on other likes/dislikes accross the UK but tea is one constant (perhaps with a few other loves like like fish and chips, curry, doner kebabs etc )... so that is the reason for the UK theme.... and since I don't like the Union Jack so much I have tried to design an alternative that includes all the countries and tries to give equal space and prominence to each. Well it's a pretty impossible task and I don't think I have done too well. A perfect design is pretty elisive to me, perhaps someone will do better some day. And in the process of trying to please every one, enevitably some will be displeased... for example the diagonal red stripe is used for Northern Ireland not for any political reason but because that is how it appears in the Union Jack and if I was to use Saint Gorge's cross twice in the same flag ( for N.Ireland and England ) that one symbol would again seem to dominate which is what I was trying to avoid. Below are some thumbnails of rough alternative designs I sketched and rejected. If anyone wants to pick-up any of these designs and improve on them then be my guest -- I consider these flag designs public domain...
including the one below that I used for the game:-
I was entertaining the idea of making the game support all UK languages so that the instructions, buttons and so on would be in English or Welsh etc, but when I considered how many UK languages there were, just the ones that I knew about: Welsh, Gaelic, Scots, Cornish... I realised I had not got the the resources for doing it for this project, but any translators are welcome to contact me, since maybe I'll have the opportunity in future. Plus after writing the instructions for Ace of Spades in mock upper-class English, I wondered how that could be translated to Welsh for example, but it would be worth rewriting it if necessary.
By the way, incase you were wondering: the Welsh Dragon isn't on the above flag skecthes because they are only rough work-in-progress graphics, but talking of the Welsh dragon, I was really impressed by how good it looked on the teacup as I was mocking-it-up.
I'd love some of those tea cups, they look fab. Does anyone make them? Let me know if they do I might buy a few... or if nobody makes'em I think someone should, maybe Portmeirion. The dragon tea cup is an example of some of the graphics in this game that I did via photos of mock-ups. Despite having programmed CAD software for 5 years for a local engineering company I did not choose to model the tea cup in 3D and render as CGI, but instead I chose the photo-mock-up method that probably takes a little longer but is a lot more fun: much nicer to be messing about drawing and cutting-out and sticking things rather than staring at a wire frame on a computer screen.... and in anycase for the hand modeling it is probably best done in real life.
... as you can see in the above photo I taped printed out graphics or hand drawings to one of my Mum's tea cups and simply traced the perspective off that. If you look closely at the right-hand photo bit you can see where I have simply pleated and creased the flat print-out to get it to hug the contour of the cup and taped it down before it could retaliate.
Playing Cards
Then when drawing the royal playing cards for Ace of Spades it occured to me that I could get Hermit back for something he did back in about
2001. What he did was use my face as a texture in a Marble Madness/Monkey Ball type game he did for the Playstation Yaroze called Roller...he actually used my face as the texture of one of the balls, so essentially the ball was my head :-(
[although Hermit has since said that this might not have gotten to the release version or if it did it needs some secret button presses or something to unlock it]
So I attempted to repoduce his face on the King playing card, but I had to give-up doing anything that closely resembled him beacause I only had about 30x30 pixels to work with for the face, plus the fact it had to be just a line drawing to look like a traditional playing card.. it would have been much easier with a drawing syle where you could use shading, in fact a 32x32 pixel photo of someones face is very recognisable because of the graduations of shade. While I was struggling with the King it occured to me that I really had made a rod for my own back because if Hermit was the king graphic then logically his girl friend Mary would have to be the queen...fortunately I happened to have a photo where Mary was standing outside her new house that they had emailed me which just so happened to an ideal pose for the queen on a playing card. Although, due to the restrictions of line drawing in such a tiny area, it still wasn't a recognizable likeness, but it proved a lot closer than the king/Hermit picture.
The fact that the playing card pictures had to be traditional line drawn playing card style, unlike all the other graphics they could not be drawn a 4x scale and shrunk down because the antialiasing meant you'd end-up with a grey mush -- each pixel had to be placed manually for best effect,
I decided to break tradition with the graphic for the Black Joker playing card because it was such a high ranking card in the Ace of Spades game...I imagined a kind of ninja joker, shown just by his shiloette...
Incase anyone is interested: when it says "Shuffling..." in Ace of Spades it really is shuffling a pack of virtual cards... or at least it is for a split second: the computer working considerably faster than the fastest croupier. And there is a full virtual pack of cards that gets split at a viritual random position just as you see it in the game.
Random Numbers.
The whole app relies on software generated pseudo random numbers. These are not perfectly random but any non-randomness would be only favour an arbitrary person depending on where they are in the list... which is a matter of luck anyway. If you're worried you can always change the position of your name in the list every so often, but personally I wouldn't bother. The full version will have a button to shuffle the names. At the time of writing this, software generated pseudo random numbers are used in almost all fruit machines that you find in pubs and clubs to determin the outcome of each spin of the reels or each gamble, but the results are moderated to keep the machine to the required percentage of winnings (compared to how much money you put in) when measured over maybe a few days or even as much as a couple of weeks.
The results for this game are not moderated however, the random number that comes-up is used no matter what has happened in the past. As you may find-out, random numbers can be quite cruel, you may be selected to make the tea on a number of consecutive occations, but you should start to see things become a bit more fair on a long term basis - keep checking the stats page and as more and more games have been played you should see the proportion of games lost compared to the number played become very roughly equal accross all players.
Sound
"Sonic Shoebox" Jim did all the music and sounds for the game. Most of the timing of it he married-up to the visuals perfectly using various demos I emailed to him over the course of the project. It was only places where the timing of a sequence on screen was variable where I had to do a bit of adjustment. I am pleased with what Jim has done. For the main theme it matched closely what I specified... especially considering all I did for the specifcation
was say a few words and phrases, I can't remember exactly the words I used but they were similar to the following:
"Humour, tea break celibration, old British Empire". I said old British Empire so that there would be a link to the past in the sound track to where the tea comes from and how we became to be inseperable from this subcontinental treasure. He came back to me a couple of days later and said something like: "I've had a bit of a play around with this, and basically what you've asked for is something sounding a bit like the Monty Pyton Theme, or a marching band, or seaside-y music.", so I said good because that pretty much described what I had been thinking of but didn't fully know it until Jim described it.... and the graphics were starting to look somewhat Pythonesque in anycase with the hand animations so I thought it'd fit well and I think it did. Fortunately Jim only lives a couple of miles from me so we were able to amble down to a local cafe in Erdington to have meetings. Jim usually brought his laptop and a huge pair of can type head phones for me to listen to his sample work in progresses. It must have looked a bit odd to the ordinary cafe punter: us two huddled at the back of the cafe in a corner, Jim tapping away on the laptop keyboard while I sit there with big head phones on nodding agreeable at what he did.
Audience.
I aimed the game specifically at a UK audience, but hopfully instead of spoiling the enjoyment of the game for non UK folk this will make it more interesting and authentic to those outside the UK. Conversely I think I appreciate things from abroad that don't try and pander to everyone world wide and so keep a lot of their national style and culture.
That's it for now folks, 'til the next anorak pack, Thanks to every one that tried "Who's Making the Tea?", I hope you had fun.
Jon.
10-Oct-2010