Critically acclaimed game Fez has now sold over 200,000 copies on Xbox Live. Phil Fish, one of the games creators, blogged to thank players for their support.

The plot of Fez revolves around Gomez, a 2D creature from a two dimensional land. He encounters a mysterious artifact which gives him a magical hat, the hat allows Gomez to perceive the world in a 3rd dimension. After a massive explosion a floating hypercube explains he must collect fragments of the shattered artifact which have been scattered across the world.

Fez will be released across other platforms this year. Due 1st of May on PC it will also be coming to iOS, PS3 and PS Vita all going well.

Related articles

• ‘Fez’ (XBLA) Coming To PC, Gets Dated (worthplaying.com)
• Fez sold 200,000 copies on XBLA to date (joystiq.com)
• A Quick Note on the documentary Indie Game: The Movie (spiritofthething.wordpress.com)
• As ‘Fez’ celebrates its first anniversary, Phil Fish talks Xbox Live sales and the future (digitaltrends.com)

I got to wear some of my new socks, bought on Fifth Avenue.

Krystal, reflecting her usual practicality, gave me a birthday gift for the office which meant she no longer has to look at my previous collection of plastic spoons and forks.

Time for some mid-week game playing.

In fun work things, I went to E-Oz’s c0nference on Women in the Energy industry. It was excellent and inspiring and fascinating to hear about the challenges women have faced and continue to face in these industries. I got to put my total feminist hat on, and was privileged to hear the stories from other women who have forged their way often where other women had never been before. You wish all work days could be that brilliant.

I could not resist buying this book. It is brilliant.

Sebastian was nearly as interested in the arrival of one of my birthday presents as I was – here he is absorbed in Hit and Miss.

Sunday morning, Jude’s actual birthday, all his guests had left by 9.30am. James had some work to do and it was a beautiful day, so there was time for a birthday park visit with added icecream.

Despite getting a Wii U, Jude’s favourite birthday present may well have been his fez and bow tie set. Fittingly I note there is a Tardis also appearing in this photo. Would that all presents were so enthusiastically embraced.

And finally it was back on skates after about three weeks. Hard work but awesome fun, resulting in unexplained bruises….

Blogging about games has its share of common tropes. We love top-10 lists and giving out year-end awards, but one in particular is so common that it’s driving developer Phil Fish a little nuts.

Last night, Fish (designer of mind-bending puzzle platformer Fez) tweeted his annoyance with gaming blogs that continue to post about pop-culture icons re-created in the block-building game Minecraft. For example, this post about a bunch of gamers that built the various realms of author George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire in the popular indie title.

hey bloggers, no more “blank rebuilt in minecraft” posts, please. we get it. you can make things in minecraft. thanks.

— PHIL FISH (@PHIL_FISH) April 12, 2013

Naturally, the Internet didn’t miss the opportunity for a clever (or obvious) joke about Fish’s feelings.

Minecrafter Nick Gilmartin responded barely an hour later with a near-perfect facsimile of Fish’s Tweet built in the game. Fish responded well to Gilmartin’s quick wit.

@nicknovelline @DrKarateChop HAHAHAHA. thank you for that.—
PHIL FISH (@PHIL_FISH) April 12, 2013

Gilmartin has made the schematic available for download for those who want their own Phil Fish tweet in their Minecraft world.

Yes, we’re fully aware of the irony of this post.

As I was walking out of the port into Tangier, the Islamic sunset call to prayer was ringing out of the speakers placed in ornately decorated minarets throughout the city as the clouds over the hill to the west turned crazy colors. It was one of those quintessential “fuck yeah, I am someplace new” traveler moments.

After a brief stop in Tangier, I headed to Fez, where the old city center has remained largely unchanged for the last several hundred years. The entire thing is in effect a massive labyrinthine marketplace. The old city in Fez is supposedly the largest car-free urban zone on the planet. Yeah, it’s that big of a maze. And the best thing about it was that during call to prayer in the city center, the constricted alleyways and numerous mosques made this massive echo of slurred yelling, that was completely hilarious. It sounded like a raucous out-of-control party, rather than the gentle reminder to pray, that it is supposed to be.  Religion is a never-ending source of comedy :)

OH…and then there are the CATS! South America was the land of dogs. There are just…wild dogs roaming around…everywhere. Almost like something out of a horror movie. Except bizarrely they’re usually pretty well behaved. Morocco on the other hand…is the land of cats. Lots of wild cats, everywhere. Kinda the same horror movie feel, haha. But sometimes it’s cute and all, since cats at least kinda keep to themselves. Well, until some dolt at a cafe decides it’s a good idea to start feeding them. (Why the f*ck do people feed wild animals anyway? That ranks just below “entering an elevator before letting people exit” on the fail-o-meter). Then the real fun comes 5 minutes later when there are 18 feral cats twitching and doing laps around said dolt’s table, and they sit there going “um…oh my god…why won’t these cats leave me alone?!” Hmm. Could it be the huge “COME HERE AND I WILL FEED YOU” sign you just held up to a group of wild animals?!

So as you can see I have started place the world blocks. I got rid of the place holders and will begin UVing the world blocks. I’m going to break the world up into 2 separate texture sheets. One will be dedicated to the world (so the grass and world blocks) while the other will be for the sign, tree, house, house border, chimney, ladder, fence, and flower. I decided to cut the jar and treasure chest due to time constraints. I have had a good deal of time to finish the assets I wanted, but due to other classes, trip to GDC, and a bit of forgetfulness I had to cut those two assets. Although they are a bit basic I just felt that along with the time crunch to get this all UVed and textured, they didn’t fit the world that well. From this point I’m going to start the texturing process.

I will finish placing all assets in their respective places with the exception of the fences, flowers, grass, and world blocks. The reasoning behind this is I can lay out the UV set once and by duplicating the assets, I won’t have to use a huge amount of UV space for technically one asset. This process will also help shave off a small amount of time in my final stretch.

When I start texturing the assets, I will use Photoshop and the tweaked color palette (based off the one I posted earlier). Along with that, I plan on baking out an Ambient Occlusion (or AO) map. It has been a little bit of time since I baked an AO without a high poly to get a basis from. A little research has led me to two options: I can try to bake it in xNormal by importing the mesh as the high and low poly or there’s a tutorial video I came across on how to bake an AO on simple objects. I plan on giving both a try and use the best of the two for my final map.

Once in Photoshop I am going to just overlay base colors on the AO map. Once I have all the base textures laid out, I’m going to go over them with another brush (specifically the a square one) with a jitter to get the color variations that FEZ has. This should take up the majority of the last two weeks I have to work on this. I’m confident in my skills that I will finish this before the April 25th dead line.

My time line for the next two weeks will be: UV entire set in 4 days, setting the UV deadline to Sunday the 14st, bake AO map using the two found techniques putting the deadline at the 16th, begin texturing on the 16th, and finish polish by the 21st or 22nd. My final presentation will be the 22nd or 24th, final blog post the 25th, and I’ll do a 6th blog post as a postmortem.

–Josh

It isn’t just the buildings that are green, however. To our great surprise, Fez is hugged from all sides by gentle green hills, a veritable shock when you consider the bare rocky desertscapes of Spain. High up on the hillside are the crumbling Merenid Tombs, from where you can view the entire great sprawling medina, like a heavily breathing animal struggling to stand. And it is struggling. The seething traffic, hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and mountains of waste flooding its streets are stretching it to its limits and provoking its gradual deterioration, something Unesco is desperately trying to prevent. But this is not something you get a sense of from up here, especially at dusk, when the sky is speckled with rosy clouds and the valley overflows with the sound of the Call to Prayer drifting out from each minaret.

If you thought a stroll through Marrakesh’s souks was overwhelming, Fez’s are like a jump down the rabbit hole. It is virtually impossible to not get lost, especially as no accurate map actually exists. As you make your break down one of the main drags from Bab Bou Jeloud, dodging the many faux guides and touts crowded there awaiting tourists, you will suddenly be attacked on all sides by delicious smells, shop-owners trying to guide you into their tiny cavern-like boutiques and the yells of mule drivers as they charge through the streets with their very weary-looking and heavily laden animals. While Marrakesh’s souks offer an endless array of ‘traditional’ gifts – leather slippers, silver jewellery, lanterns, scarves – Fez is a snapshot of Moroccan life underneath the tourism. Everyday items, including multi-coloured arrays of fruit and vegetables and sticky sweet pastries glistening with flies, dominate the markets. That said, during our explorations we also encountered giant camel heads, a man whose job it was to throw sawdust on the fire that heated the local hammam (baths), and a desperate pharmacist who attempted to sell us something he had apparently extracted from goat poo. We thought that we might get more unwanted attention in Fez due to the smaller number of tourists, but in fact many of the salespeople treated us with relative indifference. The tourist comes and goes here, and life continues as it did before.

For this reason, Fez is a concealed city. A small, battered door could be hiding the most stunning mosque or medersa, and no-one is particularly concerned with unmasking its secrets for a wandering tourist. Its world-famous tanneries, for example, are only accessible by a few leather shops that aren’t easy to find – unless you follow your nose. Pigeon poo, urine and various animal organs are among the apparently ‘necessary’ ingredients added to the dye. And although the leather produced here is seen as some of the finest in the world, if you purchase some you should be prepared for the smell to linger, and so to get some funny looks back home if you wear it in any enclosed spaces (taking my bag with me to lectures has made me particularly unpopular). Only from the leather shop terraces can you see this ancient craft jarred in time as it continues day after day in its traditional form. The earthy vats look like brightly coloured honeycomb surrounded by rigid animal skins and rickety terraces teetering on the roof of the souks. Like a silent crater in the middle of the chaotic and cramped medina, the tanneries form a sort of centrepiece to Fès el-Bali (old Fez).

My Lonely Planet (bible) described Fez as ‘a city which doesn’t easily bare its soul’. Looking out over the tanneries as dusk started to flood the city’s alleyways, and music and smoke drifted above the surface of the souks, I felt I had at least had a little peek.

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

The title of this post is not as alliterative as it first seems as the Moroccans pronounce “Ch” as “sh”. So Shefshaouen was our penultimate stop- not as tiny as Taghazout but not as large as Fez and certainly nowhere near the size of Casablanca. The touristy blue-washed old medina where we were staying was the perfect size to just about get lost in then with a sigh of relief find yourself within sight of the Kasbah, an old castle-type thing in the main square that I never quite got round to finding out what it was.

Not that I tried hard.

Chefchaouen is just one of those places- slow and sleepy, where days drift easily past without you really noticing and where you never quite get round to doing everything you plan. And that’s before you start smoking the readily available hashish! I could have happily spent more time there.

I met a fair few people in Chefchaouen who had done a TEFL course and then had spent or were spending a large chunk of their lives country-hopping and teaching English part time and doing all sorts of other fascinating things- from a woman who’d spent ten years in Hong Kong to a guy who had taught all around Spain and South America. I’ve been considering TEFL for a while, as a post-uni gap year sort of thing, but meeting such people made me realise there is no reason I couldn’t do it for longer. I guess I always figured at some point in my life I’d come up with a plan and then follow it, but as it turns out I am much better developing my wings on the way

We had one day of blazing sunshine which we spent looking for God’s Bridge- a natural stone bridge over a river in the mountains- but we went the wrong way and ended up swimming in a different waterfall. It was icy cold but so nice to jump in then slowly dry in the sun then jump back in again. We weren’t so lucky on the next day and were treated to drizzly rain- very reminiscent of England- so instead of climbing up to a nearby mosque as we’d planned we ended up poking around the medina. Walking past one shop a guy invited us inside for a “mind-blowing view over the town,” which we decided to check out. It wasn’t, but he introduced us to two English guys visiting him and we ended up spending the rest of the day inside, hanging out with them, out of the rain, so we weren’t too bothered about his fib.

It was an amazing, surprising, unexpected 3 days and I would definitely return. It’s also very beautiful and there are mind-blowing views to be had, which aren’t very hard to find at all.

Description: The game of Tetris involves positioning falling pieces of block shapes and rotating them so that they fill up the bottom of the screen, without any gaps. When a row is created without gaps, it disappears, and the object of the game is to keep the pieces from filling up the whole screen.  The more gaps, the faster it fills up, and the player loses the game.  The speed of the falling blocks increases each level, so that the player must think fast when rotating and placing the blocks as they fall.

Justification:  Tetris is a classic example of a game that involves spatial reasoning skills.  The game requires the player to utilize mental rotation and spatial visualization skills.  The player must rotate and determine the best fit of the blocks in their mind as the piece is falling.  Some studies have been conducted that measure the ability of games like Tetris to improve spatial reasoning skills.  In one particular study, where spatial reasoning skills were measured after playing games like Tetris for an allotted period of time, researchers noted that games like this have the potential to improve mental visualization and spatial rotation.  However, these skills vary between males and females and the effect that playing games like Tetris have on males and females may differ (Terlecki et al, 2008, p. 1008).

2.  Fez (2013)

Description: In the game of Fez, the character, Gomez, lives in a 2D world.  Gomez meets a “hexahedron”, who gives him the power to see his world in 3D.  But the hexahedron explodes and its fragments are scattered all over Gomez’s world.  He is informed that he must collect all the scattered pieces of the hexahedron, or his world will disappear.  He must collect 32 cubes, which are scattered about, and as more cubes are collected, they allow Gomez to open doorways and explore new areas.  What is unique about this game, however, is that the player is able to change perspective from 2D to 3D at any time, and this movement reveals doorways and paths.  This allows the player to move to different areas by shifting perspectives, as well as giving new ways to view the landscape.  In Fez, there are no enemies to avoid, and there is not death.  It is a game solely based on exploring the game landscape to collect the cubes.

Justification:   This game was chosen for several reasons.  The sweet and cutesy design and visuals are engaging and appealing, and in fact, Fez has been praised for this aspect.  There are tons of hidden puzzles and pathways that engage the player.  Each new discovery or advance poses more questions for the player, and more opportunities for exploration.  More importantly, this game forces the player to think about their navigational strategy, and what dimension to shift to, to get ahead.  This game is based on visualizing different perspectives, and using that to successfully navigate the game world.  There is a plethora of small and hidden details, puzzles, clues, and visuals that combine seamlessly to form a thoughtful, intelligent, and visually engaging game. In terms of spatial reasoning, it is evident how this game fits into this list.  Although not directly dealing with spatial reasoning, this game has certain elements that make it a good candidate, which are largely based on cognitive tasks, such as mental rotation and visualization.

- Dasha Grigorieva

Works Cited

O’Hanlon, C. (2011). Don’t Play It, Make It! A New Generation of Gamers is Not Just Picking Up Skills By Playing Video Games–They’re Learning By Designing and Creating the Games Themselves.  T H E Journal [Technological Horizons In Education]. 38(8).

Ott, M., Pozzi, F. (2012). Digital Games As Creativity Enablers for Children. Behaviour &       Information Technology, 31(10), 1011-1019

Terlecki, M., Newcombe, N.S., Little, M. (2008). Durable and Generalized Effects of Spatial   Experience on Mental Rotation: Gender Differences in Growth Patterns.  Applied Cognitive Psychology. 22(7). 996-1013.

“Fez Review.” (2012). Retrieved from: http://www.edge-online.com/review/fez-review/ April 6   2012.

blue skies!

Our last few days in Fez were interesting. The place we were staying, Hotel Cascade, was grubby and vast and I fastidiously avoided the toilets, but it had a weird charm to it- there was a fab roof terrace which looked out over Bab Boujeloud, a square at the entrance to the medina filled with restaurants and tourists, and the building was elegant and grand in a faded sort of way.

We spent our first day wandering round the medina, which was gorgeous, hurrying past stalls I’d've loved to have had a poke around but didn’t as we were reserving our shopping for our last day, so as not to spend all our money and not be able to eat. A wise choice, as our extravagance on our final day left us with just 40 dirhams between us (about £3.10) for our final dinner and breakfast.

Wandering Fez’s medina, the largest urban space in the world without cars, I’m told, is an adventure in itself. We were spoken to in English, French, Spanish (I like to think because of my tan) and Arabic, walked past rows of butchered goats heads and hanging carcasses, offered mint tea, shown round exotic spice shops- it was a complete assault on the senses. Particularly the smells by the butchers’ stalls. I very much enjoyed haggling for my tajine pot and souvenir shot glasses and am having trouble now back in England accepting set prices; in a supermarket earlier today I jokingly said to the cashier, when told my purchases added up to £3.60, “I’ll give you one pound.” She didn’t find it as funny as I did..

Whilst lost deep in the medina we fell for the oldest trick in the book when this guy, a “student” who “wanted to practise his English” said he just wanted to be friends and show us the way to an amazing view point. Geniuses that we are, we followed him to this random residential part of the medina where he suddenly turned nasty and tried to make us give him money, for “guiding”. I (fairly, I think) tried to point out that leading us to the middle of nowhere was in fact the opposite of guiding, as we were more lost than when we started, but he wasn’t having any of it. He accused me of not liking him because he was Moroccan, to which I (probably not the best idea I’ve ever had) replied that I didn’t like him, not because he was Moroccan but because he’d tricked us into following him to the middle of nowhere. He misunderstood me, by this point he was pretty worked up, and said that I was racist “like all Japanese people”. I told him I wasn’t Japanese and he said Chinese people were racist too. He wasn’t scoring any points for logic, but it did get pretty scary as he started swearing at us and though he wasn’t big, neither are we, and we don’t run very fast.. noticing that when older people walked past he kind of backed off a bit we started to walk away, and bumped into a real life angel, a middle-aged Moroccan woman who only spoke a tiny bit of English but in my jumbled French I tried to explain what was happening (the guy had fallen back and was just giving us evils- seriously, if looks could kill) and she, the absolute star, told us to ignore him and to come with her. She walked us all the way back to Bab Boujeloud, refused any thanks, gave us hugs and told us not to wander in the medina as it was dangerous for two girls alone, and hustled on her way. A true angel, and for her timely appearance and whatever guardian spirit pushed her in our direction I am very, very grateful.

It was pretty irritating to get back to our hostel room and find this passage in the Lonely Planet: “Many Moroccans genuinely believe that Westerners are infinitely naive, gullible…. a common starting point is claiming to want nothing more than friendship, wanting to practise English…” the rest of our experience was then described, from pretty much the exact questions he’d asked us to a line about how when they turn on you they’ll often accuse you of being racist towards Moroccans, to try to wrong foot you. Naive strikes me as not being quite the right word for our situation though- it sounds sort of sweet and innocent, and we were just plain stupid.. looking back at it, there were so many hints as to what was happening, I can’t believe we fell for it. Maybe it comes down to being English and too polite to say no, not wanting to be rude and all that.

We spent our final evening in Fez playing cards and eating Moroccan onion pancakes (2 and a half dirhams each- an absolute life saver) before getting an early night as our flight the next day was at 9. Had a bit of a panic the next morning as the clocks went forward and our phones changed automatically so we thought we were going to miss our flight, but luckily Morocco doesn’t bother with such nonsense. Overall, Fez was an experience, and I would go back, but probably not for a few years, by which time I will hopefully be less stupid and more street savvy.

Royal Air Maroc took me from Boston to Fez and I stepped off the plane into scorching heat. As soon as I looked around me, I was grateful I’d packed a couple of long cotton skirts.

The children in Fez wanted to touch me – well, after all, I had white skin (quickly turning pink) and yellow hair. I was either magic good or magic bad. When I smiled and held out coins, I was magic good. But when I spoke, they ran away screaming.

I was independent at 24, and when my friend attended to his duties during the day, I intended to walk around the area by myself. I’d memorized the way back to the place where we stayed (take a left at the stubby tree, straight past the pissoir, turn right where the beggar leans against the wall). And yet, the first time I attempted a walk, I was surrounded. Men approached and buzzed around me like gnats. They wanted to practice their English, they wanted to buy me a coffee. They did not understand the word “no.”

Residence in Fez photo by M. Reynolds

We took a bus out to the oasis. It was full of people and animals. Yes, animals. Chickens, roosters, even a goat, I think. All in crates tied to the roof of the bus. Oh, and when I lowered the window for some fresh air, I was admonished in Arabic by an old man seated in front of me. My friend explained that if I opened the window, the old man believed his soul would fly out. So all the windows remained shut for the trip.

At the oasis, everyone stared at me, from the young Moroccans lounging by the pool to the old men in djellabas standing like sentinels along the perimeter. I was the “Nazarene,” or Christian.

I remember the hole in the floor that was our toilet and the lizard that occupied the bathing room.

We bought a chicken at the open market and I turned away while it was slaughtered. Later, we carried it home, unwrapped it from its paper shroud and put it in a pot. We had to cover it with oil and vinegar because Fatima wouldn’t cook it until the next day and there was no refrigerator.

Martha and Fatima

The smell of the tannery is still with me.

Tannery at Fez – photo by M. Reynolds

I remember the guy who sold beautiful rugs. Because he assumed I was a wealthy American, he brought me upstairs, where girls as young as eight or nine stood for hours weaving intricate patterns. He served sweet mint tea and unrolled carpet after carpet, even after I made it clear I wasn’t buying.

With the brass guy – photo by M. Reynolds

The medina was filled with one mesmerizing display after another. This guy hammered brass circles into gorgeous platters and trays. Another man sold blue pottery. I wasn’t adept at bargaining, but you have to bargain, so my friend did it for me. I was supposed to bargain to save him from embarrassment. After all, there were other tourists around. In the end, I picked up a few lovely small olive bowls and a decorative tajine. And today, I will make couscous for dinner.

Good morning. On the 7:15AM into the the City. The NFI is one.

I wanted to wear my Fez today. I didn’t. I thought about it, but realized that it wasn’t a day for Fez. Fez is for days of respite. For contemplation. For special occasion. Today wasn’t quite there

Handsome and pretty people just boarded. The guy in front of me looks like the assistant principal from the Breakfast Club. He has a size 15 shoe (and you know what that means), a dated striped shirt, and blue jeans. He’s staring at a spreadsheet- probably financial data. Oh, he’s got his pistol holstered under his black coat. Dammit man, at least wear a proper jacket! Meh.

Chuck Norris is here. Also in jeans and wearing alligator-leather boots, Chuck’s black leather jacket that he took from the set of…  oh, just pick one…hangs from his surprisingly broad shoulders. The goatee needs trimming. His mullet is exquisite, combed back so as to hang lazily off of the back of his neck. He is of course armed. His karate must be getting rusty.

Congressman Dick Gephardt is here. His still-ginger hair looks thick and well maintained. If it is a toupee, it’s a great look for the aging former Presidential Candidate. He must be visiting family, because I know plumbing contractors that dress better than a robin-egg blue colored sweater and khaki slacks. His. 22 must be in an ankle holster.

Also here are Genevieve Gorder, Boris Yeltsin, Grant Imahara from Mythbusters, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, and Larry David. All are armed.

Happy Friday.