However, I won’t be doing a lengthy post on its design process this time around. Instead, I made a video in which I tell you a bit about the process and show off some timelapses of the game graphics and icon. Consider this an experiment, and let me know what you think!

Viewing in HD at Vimeo is recommended!

Quake Live is actually the (almost) 10-years old Quake 3 Arena with a lot of tweaks and adjustments. Not only have the graphics been improved: the overall gameplay has been balanced, and the entire game is launched through a website that also facilitates chatting and meeting friends, keeping tracks of your statistics, and finding servers to play on. It’s also entirely free. There’s no catch.

A Quake 3 / Quake Live icon is included in this post, so you can put it in your Dock when this all sounds appealing.

It’s not a big secret that I’m a huge, long-time fan of Quake 3 Arena. More recent parts of the series failed to interest me, but Q3A has always fascinated me thanks to its pace, balance, and art direction and despite being almost ten years old. Since its release, it has been ported to a vast range of platforms (including the iPhone during the jailbreak days) and open-sourced by id Software, which was followed by a lot of free and non-free games coming out using its engine. Eliminate, an iPhone shooter recently released by ngmoco uses it, for instance. Quake 3 is still played in competitive ‘eSport’ tournaments and ladders, using the Challenge Promode Arena (CPMA) mod, much like the aged Counter-Strike 1.6. A true classic.

Apart from the practice mode, that lets you fight bots or try your tricks, the entire game is played online on servers in your vicinity. For me, server locations range from Amsterdam, to France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. This ensures a minimal ping time, which the pace of this game absolutely mandates. The slightest increase in your ping time can mean the difference between virtual life and death. Coupled with its social features like friend lists and realtime chatting (which is done via XMPP – the same protocol Gtalk and Jabber use), it’s a very nice integrated gaming platform. I hope to see more of these ‘web-based’ games, where the game is an actual native application as opposed to something done in Flash, but the online services are neatly knit together in an intuitive and usable way.

As a goodie, here’s an icon for a Fluid or Prism version of Quake Live, so you can put it in your dock as if it were any other game.

Quake Live Icon – 963 KB

Grab Quake Live for free – Mac, Linux and of course Windows are all supported. My Quake Live profile is here, where you can also add me as a friend so you can play with or against me.

A LAN party is an event where a bunch of computer-loving geeks take their computers with them to play games and have fun together, which I certainly had. I made a little video to show what it looks like when over 730 people come together and go crazy. It’s HD – fullscreen playback is recommended!

While using Windows was a bit bumpy at times, the party was great and I’ve had a lot of fun.

Already looking forward to next year.

It made me incredibly excited about the prospect of native games on the iPhone. Fantastic iPhone-worthy design coupled with addictive games was a reality I couldn’t imagine. That turned out to be a positive limitation on my brain, since the introduction of the App Store has brought about mostly horribly ugly (yet sometimes quite playable) games. It’s Ramp Champ that brought me back to those good thoughts, though.

Ramp Champ has been designed by the Iconfactory and developed by DS Media Labs. My friends at the Iconfactory are quite renowned for their amazing design skills, and Ramp Champ is, if anything, a great showcase of their talents. I was glad to see that the graphics aren’t the only strength of the game, though. Ramp Champ is a very addictive and fun game inspired by the typical game booths at carnivals that let you win tickets that you can redeem for prizes.

Fortunately, Ramp Champ doesn’t cost you your precious dollars to throw a few balls. You can explore the beautiful and adventure-packed (seriously!) ramps at your leisure, and save up your tickets to adorn your virtual shelf with prizes. You’ll have to do quite some power-throwing and tossing to make your way to the premium prizes, and that’s where Ramp Champ’s addictive nature sets in. I’ve played the game for days, in queues at shops and while waiting for important email to arrive, often finding myself entangled in the quest to win the mystical plushie.

It’s very nice to see four extra ramps were added as purchasable content last week. As expected, they feature gorgeous design and a solid extra number of hours of gameplay for the Ramp lover.

It’s a pity how Ramp Champ illustrates how horribly incompetent the App Store is at showcasing and featuring great design and attention to detail. Games designed with love, care, and attention like Ramp Champ wither when they drop out of the all-or-nothing iTunes charts, making way for mediocre titles that sell fast thanks to their 99 cent price tags and/or brand names. I hope to see its pretty face pop up in an iPhone commercial some day.

After the beta test of Ramp Champ, I bought the game without a moment’s thought to support such great design and in hopes of bringing them into the charts. I encourage you to also grab Ramp Champ off the App Store: at $1.99, it’s a bargain.

With some recent client work, I’ve been doing quite a bit of homework on strategy game interfaces; I dug out all my old games, played and screen-captured over two dozen game interfaces, mocked up a massive amount of approaches to problems, and talked with some friends in the gaming industry. As a UI designer, I’m fascinated to see how it’s developed in the last 20 years and in which direction it is now headed.

It’s quite interesting to look not just at where we’re heading, but also where we’ve come from. Since the invention of chess and other similar strategic board games, it’s clear that people love the tactile experience that manipulating ‘units’ gives. However, with today’s world of massive virtual representations of battlefields, this feeling has been diluted significantly. The relevant question for me is, obviously, how multi-touch devices like the iPhone can bring back the sweaty palms and rush that you experience forward the first pawn in a game of chess.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried playing a strategy game on the iPhone, but most of them aren’t very usable. Modern strategy games typically require a very large amount of screen real estate to show interface elements, and even then use diverse solutions to compress information into smaller areas while allow for a large area in which you can command your units.

A nice example of taking this tradeoff into consideration is Dune 2.

Dune 2 was released in 1992 by Westwood Studios. Westwood is famous for the Command & Conquer series, but Dune really kicked off their defining series of RTS games. It was also the first strategy game that allowed you to command units with the mouse, as opposed to traditional controller or keyboard input. The mouse soon dominated the strategy game world, and I grew up with games like Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Starcraft, Dark Reign, and my personal favorite: Total Annihilation. These games could all be played with nothing but a mouse; as far as I’m aware, only Total Annihilation used keyboard modifier keys to allow more complex commands with the mouse.

Between then and now, large strategy game titles have followed existing conventions, but have advanced significantly in terms of graphics and scale. Interaction-wise, the mouse scroll wheel was standardized. Then came 2007: I was delighted to see that Chris Taylor, who once led the development of Total Annihilation, released Supreme Commander. Supreme Commander follows in TA’s footsteps, but the scale of its battles is somewhat more massive. However, the scale, graphics, or graphic design weren’t the most interesting aspects to me. What Supreme Commander astonished me with was unifying the traditional minimap, a small representation of the battlefield, with the actual view of the battlefield.

Essentially, Supreme Commander introduced the Zoomable User Interface to the strategy game genre. The user could seamlessly zoom in and out of the action to get a birds’-eye view of the situation. In retrospect, what truly enabled this type of interface to become feasible was the introduction and standardization of the scroll wheel. However, it’s still not a very tactile experience.

Similarly to the age of Dune 2, we now see the uprising of (multi-)touch devices, and this allows for an even more direct interaction with units. It’s probably no mystery to you that playing games that use multi-touch well on the iPhone is great, but as we are approaching more varied applications of touch interfaces in our daily lives, there’s much more innovative interfaces we can create, and we’re presented with the opportunity to make the Zoomable User Interface a ‘natural’ experience.

This is the trailer of RUSE, an upcoming title by Ubisoft. As you can see, they are using a Surface-like multi-touch table as a gaming platform. Quite a beautiful way to play a strategy game; where interfaces on the iPhone may feel tactile, a powerful hardware platform that can deliver accurately rendered battlefields would be very immersive.

Of course, only time can tell where we will be taken in the future when it comes to interface design. However, it’s interesting to note that we’re gradually making the experience more tactile. While giving users a controller that resembles a gun to play a shooter game doesn’t work very well and feels rather gimmicky, making a realistic landscape that the user can reach out to and touch seems like the natural evolution for strategy games. It shares some of the best characteristics from the origin of strategy games: the board game.

I think this is a pretty intriguing history of gradually evolving towards a ‘natural’ interface metaphor that completely changes gameplay. But for now, I suppose will have to cope with making great games for small screens and relatively large fingers. Back to the drawing board.