Underwater winners Aquaria: When we talked to Derek Yu and Alec Holowka, they were still feeling like zombies after winning the coveted Seamus McNally Award at the Independent Games Festival Awards last Wednesday during the Game Developers Conference Their game, Aquaria, received $20,000 and the label of Best Independent Game of the Year from their peers. Aquaria is an underwater fantasy action-adventure game. Players take the role of Nasha, who is trying to discover her identity as she explores her 2D underwater world.

 

Aquaria is proof that 2D graphics still have impact.

 

Nasha encounters numerous types of sea life, but also fantastical creatures inspired from the sea. As she travels through the corridors and caverns of her underwater world she can manipulate aspects of that world through song. She can do this through a circular tool feature (reminding one of the Neverwinter Nights’ UI toolset). Players click on Nasha, then click on musical notes in different order. This create songs which change Nasha and affect her environment. Each musical note is just a visual image; there is no text associated with the image, so there is no distraction from the rest of the game.

 

The 2D animation for Aquaria has a water paint artwork feel. Both Yu and Holowka feel that 2D is due a renaissance, and that developers shouldn’t be prejudiced against any particular look or technology. Aquaria will be released for Windows first, and then ported to the Mac soon after. Yu and Holowka are also looking forward to their next game, though they don’t plan to release a sequel to Aquaria. However, they do assure fans that their next game will "have a lot of heart."

 

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Insert Geordi La Forge joke here: If you are looking for a 3D experience of a different kind, check out the Icuiti iWear line of 3D glasses, demoed at the GDC this year. The iWear is a portable viewer that plugs into the electronic device of choice and allows the user to view video from that electronic device in simulated 3D. Iculti's Paul Travers walked us through the two lines of iWear available. The iWear for the iPod connects into the video plug at the bottom of the iPod and runs off of the iPod’s batteries. The glasses give the user a simulated 44 inch screen from nine feet away, so no more watching movies on the iPod’s tiny screen. Further, the 3D video feature allows users to view movies that support 3D, such as iMax videos. Unfortunately, games are not currently supported with the iWear for iPod because, according to Travers, game video does not currently run from the video port. Icuiti has contacted Apple about this issue, but doesn’t know if any changes will be forthcoming.

 

The iWear VR920 are the canonical 3D glasses for playing games, especially massive multiplayer online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. The video glasses have a pair of high-resolution screens built in that support up to 1,024 by 768 resolution but actually run at 640 by 480. Travers says a built-in tracking system allows users to move their head in all directions and the video moves with them, but unfortunately the demo units at the GDC didn’t have this feature implemented. A built-in microphone allows users to chat with other gamers while using the glasses.

 

Apparently, Clay Aiken likes to watch his own videos up close and personal.

 

When we put on the VR920, one thing we noticed immediately was that it took some doing to fit the attached headphones into our ears, but the armature is flexible and can be moved around to accommodate. The glasses also felt a little awkward, and didn’t fit like a good pair of sunglasses. But after a short time of using the VR920 to play a game of World of Warcraft, we started forgetting about that. Watching the desert environment around us and the way that animals, plants, and characters in the game increased their dimensionality - playing the game without the glasses is now boring. Incidentally, users can chat with other users via the microphone.

 

The current version of VR920 iWear are non-immersive - they don’t close off your peripheral vision to the outside world. But if you want that complete immersive experience, Icuiti provides snap-on shields, but we couldn’t try them out, since there were no snap-on shields available at the show.

 

The VR920 will ship in mid-April for Windows, and within approximately a month of that, Mac drivers will be available. Travers wasn't able to tell us at the time whether the VR920 will support Intel-Macs only or the PPC as well. In the future, Icuiti is looking to provide higher resolutions, console solutions, and slimmer eyewear.

 

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The future of online game content: We talked with Gary Croke of CacheLogic about a game content delivery version of its VelociX peer-assisted content delivery network (CDN). In a traditional CDN, a provider allows users to obtain their data directly from the provider’s cache of servers, so if one server goes down, there are other servers to take up the slack. However, as bandwidth demands increase, pressure increases on traditional CDN models to provide fast downloads without significantly increased costs.

 

With peer-to-peer, also called P2P, the content is distributed throughout a large number of peer computers, either through download to the peers, or the peers discovering the data. Other peers pick up the data, and it is distributed over hundreds and hundreds of computers, allowing large amounts of downloads to everyone on the peer network. Since many peers are computer users like us, large amounts of data downloads and uploads can significantly impact not only our bandwidth, but the bandwidth of other peers who we are downloading or uploading to/from.

 

CacheLogic’s solution merges P2P and the CDN model into a peer-assisted CDN. In this model, both traditional caches and a peer network, such as BitTorrent, are used. A game publisher, for example, who is distributing news and screenshots for a game might want to use just the CDN part of the network. But when the game is ready for digital distribution, Croke says, they can turn on the P2P side of the distribution network to augment the increased bandwidth that will surely result from huge numbers of gamers trying to download the game. Once the bandwidth demands taper off, the publisher can then turn off that part of the service until it's needed again.

 

The user interface for the service is also convenient and easy to use, with billing, technical support, and regular updating of bandwidth, upload/download speeds, etc available. We took a look at the map available of current global coverage, and were rather surprised to see that 90 percent of their data centers were either in the US or Europe. Only one existed in south Asia, in Singapore. We would have expected to see more in other parts of Asia, actually.

 

With impacts on bandwidths on game content providers and the increasing use of digital distribution of game content, a peer-assisted CDN seems to be the next logical step in digital content distribution.

 

Omaha Sternberg is the producer and host of the iGame Radio podcast.