Exploring Scotland - Aberdeen and Loch Ness

In my last post, I talked about some of my adventures around Scotland with my parents - specifically, around Dundee, the town in which I attend university. Today I'm going to share our trip to Aberdeen, Inverness, and the iconic Scottish landmark Loch Ness.

We'll begin in Aberdeen. We travelled by train up the east coast of Scotland from Dundee to Aberdeen. The train trip took us through rolling countryside and along the sea cliffs, through the town of Stonehaven, and further north until we reached Scotland's third largest city. Aberdeen is well known for its granite buildings - there was a granite quarry nearby and so all of the buildings were made of the same type of stone. It gives the city a gorgeous uniform view, in addition to making it the most radioactive city in Scotland due to the large amount of natural radiation found in granite.

Some of the iconic grey buildings of Aberdeen.

Beautiful graveyard in downtown Aberdeen

In Aberdeen, we were met and shown around the city by a good friend of Roy and mine, Michael. He took us through the Union Terrace Garden, along the main streets, past iconic buildings such as Marischal College, and through an ancient and surprisingly peaceful (almost cheery) graveyard.

After wandering through the city, we stopped for lunch at Slain's Castle. This quirky and fun eatery was a huge hit - designed on the outside to look like an imposing castle from a horror film, inside it is full of lots of film tropes such as trick bookcases leading to the bathrooms and fun "evil castle" decor.

Slain's Castle, an awesome restaurant in downtown Aberdeen 

After lunch, we headed back to Michael's for a lovely evening with his family. We went to bed early, since the next day was our day trip to Inverness and Loch Ness.

In retrospect, we really should have spent more than a day up in Inverness. We barely got to see the city at all, and we could have spent even longer on the Loch than we did. But it was still an awesome experience and was definitely worth the trip.

As I mentioned, we only really passed through Inverness on our way to the Loch. However, the city was a lovely one - smaller than Dundee, with more quaint architectural style. It immediately struck me as the kind of place I would like to retire - and apparently that's a popular sentiment, as it's an extremely fast growing retirement destination. Before we headed up to the northern city, we were told "The best English is spoken in Inverness." I was skeptical based on my previous experience with the sometimes gruff Scottish accent, but was immediately proved wrong by the beautiful, lilting accent of the Inverness locals.

For our exploration of the Loch, we decided to go on a boat cruise with a bundled trip to Castle Urquhart. The trip was absolutely lovely and a ton of fun. Thankfully the weather cooperated - while not completely clear and sunny, it didn't rain on us except for a light dusting which resulted in a lovely rainbow over the Loch.

The boat trip on the Loch was truly lovely

The boat cruised from a small harbour out to a dock next to the ruins of an ancient castle - Castle Urquhart. Until this point, I'd only been inside one castle, that being Glamis, which was much newer. My gamer nerd self was delighted to explore ancient ruins - this was what I imagined when I thought of visiting Scotland years ago. Unfortunately, while Urquhart was interesting and steeped in history, I couldn't help but feel that the ruins seemed a bit... fake. Yes these were ancient ruins, but they were clearly restored and worked to allow the thousands of tourists visiting each year not to injure themselves or break things. Everything seemed to have bits of cement holding them together, and the tumbled rocks weren't tumbled at all, but were in fact carefully designed and cemented in place. Don't get me wrong though - the scene of the ruined castle from the top of the tower was still impressive, even if the climb to get up there was harrowing!

Urquhart Castle was a beautiful sight, despite seeming a bit fake.

The Aberdeen / Loch Ness trip was a ton of fun, and we got to see ancient parts of Scotland and learn the histories of some of the most iconic Scottish landmarks. My favorite part of the trip, however, was still to come - if I was disappointed by Urquhart's perceived "fakeness", I was blown away by the mysticism of Dunnotter Castle. Look forward to my next post, which will cover that and more!

Exploring Scotland - Around Dundee

Just over a year has passed since I moved to Scotland, and it's been a while since I've talked about my adventures in my new home. In fact, I planned to do a lot more of this kind of blogging when I first arrived, but got distracted with other things. Now that I've just finished three weeks of running around the country with my parents doing tourist things, I'll spend a few posts reflecting on what we did and saw here.

We'll start in Dundee, the city I live and attend university in. While it's the fourth largest city in Scotland, Dundee is pretty small for a city. It's architecture, compared to some of the other places here, is pretty but not amazing. But to someone from the US, it's still fantastic to look at. I've met a lot of Scots who are confused by our fascination with old buildings and castles - but you have to understand, Scottish readers: some of the buildings here are older than our ENTIRE COUNTRY. We don't get a feeling of that gravitas, that weight of history, in many places in the US.

Some of the Dundee buildings and scenery

The family poses with Desparate Dan!

Anyway, we had a lot of fun exploring Dundee. I tried to cover all the main attractions, as well as a few of my favourite local places. First, we visited the high street and the fun statues there, including Desperate Dan. Dundee is famous for Desperate Dan, a character in a comic called the Dandy, produced in Dundee. Comics are part of Dundee's journalism industry, one of the "three Js" that made up Dundee's industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Food and Drink

Strawberry Daiquiris at Rancho Pancho

We visited a TON of restaurants while we were here. I took everyone to my favourites - Tonic, Nandos, Rancho Pancho, and more. Scotland isn't known for it's food (aside from the mysterious Haggis) but I know I've found lots of places that make my taste buds dance. Tonic is my all-time favourite, with a truly ridiculous number of burger choices, all of them amazing. My go-to choice is the Texan Hat, a burger with beef patty, Scottish bacon (which is WAY better than American bacon), cheese, hash brown, and barbecue sauce. SO TASTY!

The outdoor seating at Duke's Corner
was a big hit!

We also made sure to check out a lot of pubs, as my parents like to try different beers and wanted to taste as many Scottish varieties as they could while they were here. Duke's Corner, Tickety Boos, and more were investigated. I'm not a beer drinker myself, but I did enjoy trying different types of ciders - for my American audience, UK cider is by default alcoholic, and served cold. My favourite brand is Rekorderlig, a Swedish cider with many tasty fruit flavours. More commonly available, and still tasty, is Kopparberg.

Music

My dad moves in to tip the Trombonist

 As I may have mentioned before, my father is a blues musician. consequently, I was delighted to show them the active street busking scene in Dundee. On a dry day you can see a busker every block or so on the high street. Most are guitarists, fiddlers, and harmonica players, but there are a few exceptions, including trombone players and accordion players. The mix of music on every corner makes the city feel alive.

Dad busks near the dragons statue

After seeing some of the buskers, my dad decided to try it out himself. He brought his steel body resonator guitar from the US, which, along with his slide playing style, attracted quite a lot of attention. The guitar is quit shiny, and also a lot louder than a normal guitar, since it was developed to amplify sound before electronic sound amplification was common. While Dad didn't make a fortune playing, he had a lot of fun, met a bunch of other street musicians, got info on local open mic nights, and made enough money to buy a few beers and to tip other street musicians we passed by,

Jam session at the end of a crazy and
wonderful night at Clarks

As I mentioned, one of the fruits of his street busking was knowledge of where the local open mic nights were. One such establishment was a little pub called Clarks. We went there on one of the last nights of my parents' stay, and I have to say it was probably the best time we had for the entire visit. Clarks has an amazing atmosphere - it really felt like a ton of musically minded people all getting together to appreciate each-other's craft. Dad was one of the first to play, and met with an extremely warm and welcoming reception. People loved the blues style (it was a folk music themed night so he fit right in), and the novelty of him being American and his very shiny guitar helped too. They invited him to stay until the end when many musicians got together and jammed on stage. During the jam, they did one of my Dad's songs, which is a call back style song that the audience participates in. Everyone in the bar was singing, clapping, stomping their feet, and my Dad had a whole band of musicians behind him. I could tell it really made the trip for him, and it was damn fun for me too! I got to see a lot of new talent that I want to hear more of, and I plan to head back to Clarks regularly from now on.

Seeing the Sites

The family poses in front of the Discovery

In addition to investigating the local music and food scenes, we did a lot of tourist stuff too. Dundee is known for the ship the Discovery, the first ship to do prolonged research in the Antarctic. It was great fun crawling around the old vessel, and my Dad is really into ships too so it was perfect for him. The ship is old, from the beginning of the 20th century, and was powered both by steam and sails. It was interesting to compare it to my experience on the OMSI submarine back in the states.

One of the biggest sites to see in Dundee is the Law. Law means "hill", so the people who say "Law Hill" are being redundant. Basically, it's the highest point in Dundee and looks out over the entire city. It's a beautiful site and was well worth the cab fare to get up there.

Panoramic of the Law - the view was breathtaking

We pose on top of the Law

We decided to walk down from the Law, and I'm really happy we did. We found this very long corridor of stairs squeezed between old fences, gardens, and buildings, and it was a truly lovely walk.

At the bottom of these stairs was Dudhope castle. Fairly small and pretty modern as far as Scottish castles go, Dudhope was still a lovely site from the outside. It's a private castle so it's not open for exploration, but we got a nice picture from the gate.

The trip down from the Law was as fun as the hill view

The last major tourist attraction we visited in Dundee was the McManus Museum at the centre of town. It's a lovely museum with a mix of art, industrial history, and natural history/wildlife. It was a lot of fun, and is a really nice looking building for photo ops!

Pose in front of the McManus Museum

To Be Continued...

That's it for my Dundee adventures, but I'll have several more blog posts detailing my exploration of Edinburgh, Inverness / Loch Ness, Aberdeen, and several small towns and castles along the east coast of Scotland. Look forward to it!

Plannit: Post-Project Reflection

My, it has been a while! If you are wondering where I've been all summer, I've been participating in the Dare to be Digital competition at University of Abertay, Dundee. It has been a fantastic, crazy, wonderful experience, and while I am happy to have a break now that it's over (albeit a very short one, more on that later), I will miss the intense and rewarding work and all the great people who participated.

This post will cover my general reflections on the project, but we've also been keeping weekly video blogs on the Dare website, so go check them out!

The Premise

Plannit is a game made in Unity, targeting Android mobile devices. It started out a very different game than the one we showed at Proto Play. Originally, the game was an asymmetrical multiplayer title in which one player controlled the environment while the other controlled the character. The players would work together to drain the lava out of the centre of a planet and into their spaceship.

Here's the initial pitch video:

The first thing to go from this premise was the lava. We soon realized two things. First, liquid physics on a mobile device is not easy and no simple plugin existed for the kind of liquid we needed. Second, this goal was actually extremely convoluted to explain to a player, and in particular for mobile devices, that's no good. We decided to scrap the lava idea entirely and instead have players pick up crystals - several optional small ones and one required large one.

The second thing we changed was the multiplayer aspect of the game. We always planned to include a single player mode, for testing purposes and because some people may not have someone else to play with. However, we soon found that even playing on the same screen, the cooperative multiplayer was frustrating rather than fun. We briefly entertained the idea of a competitive multiplayer mode, but soon realized we'd be making two different games if we went this route. In the end, it would be best for the game in the time allotted to focus on single player.

Here's the final trailer showcasing footage from the game:

Development Challenges

We faced three main challenges during the development of Plannit, and all of them were due to the innovative nature of the game.

First, we had a lot of trouble with our digging mechanic. Modifying the level environment on the fly meant changing the collision body of the level (so that physics would work) along with the graphical representation of the level. We went through many iterations of brute-force collision attempts, but none of them worked very well and many looked quite ugly. Finally we came across the Unity plugin 2D Collider Gen, by PixelCloud Games. While the plugin was not designed for run-time mesh modification, it did exactly what we wanted - modified the collision mesh for an object based on the 2D sprite of that object. What followed was a tough but extremely rewarding process of learning to use the plugin for run time modification, with constant support from the plugin developer. It was a great experience, and it was wonderful having so much help from the dev.

Things weren't all rosy yet, however. Once we could represent the levels in the game, we still had to design them. While our image based system made the turnaround for getting levels into the game quite quick, the design process took far longer. Our game allows the player a huge amount of freedom when it comes to moving around and interacting with the level - but it turns out this makes puzzles very difficult to design. The player is able to rotate the level freely in a 360 degree manner, and to dig through the environment itself, modifying the world around him or her on the fly. It took the team quite a while to get a level design process down and get six solid levels into the game. It was also surprisingly challenging to gauge difficulty of the levels - as a puzzle game, the solution is always obvious to those who know it.

Finally, once the levels were designed, the player had to move around them. We had a lot of trouble fine tuning our controls, and tested several different control methods. It's actually very difficult to explain in words how the two methods of tilt/rotation controls worked. In the first, the perspective is fixed to the device, and tilting the device causes the world to rotate constantly, until the device is upright again. In this method, the device is only ever tilted up to 90 degrees to the left or right. This is the method we ended up going with because the player never has to re-position his or her hands. The second method we investigated was a one-to-one rotation, where the perspective was fixed to the player in the real world, and the device was a controller for the planet's rotation in a one-to-one fashion - so turning the device upside-down means the planet turned upside-down. While this allowed for more precision, it meant re-positioning of hands was necessary, and also resulted in a less smooth looking rotation. The choice was a very difficult one, but after a lot of testing we chose the first method.

Moving Forward

While we didn't win any awards at Proto Play, the team is extremely proud of our final product. Its strong visual and audio style and innovative gameplay means that it could be successful. We're currently looking into options for publishing the game, but if nothing pans out we plan to self publish. However, the team is taking a short hiatus until January while several team members (myself included) finish our dissertations.

Dare was the best experience of my career so far. It was intense, but I learned a vast, unquantifiable amount during those short nine weeks - not just about programming (though man did I learn a lot about that too!) but also about working in a team, organization, communication, design, business... the list goes on. The hands on experience, the mentoring, the feedback from the public - it was all priceless. If you are in the UK or one of the participating Dare countries, please, do yourself a favour and apply for this program.

Orbit Games thanks you for everything!

In Other News

A quick aside from my reflection on Plannit - as you may have noticed, I've actually been away for more than nine weeks. That's because the last three weeks, my parents have been visiting from the United States! They've headed home now, but I'll be posting some stories of our adventures here on the blog in the coming weeks. Look forward to it!