Diomades

Half way there!

2011-08-09T07:16:00.000+08:00

So it occurred to me a few weeks back that I am now well and truly half way through my studies. I've only got a year and a half left before I'm done with classes, and then I'll be faced with stepping out into the big mean world of job hunting. Well, that or doing an honors year at University - but that's something I'm still very much torn as to whether I want to do it or not.

With Show Us Your Bits coming up at the end of this month, I also realized the pressure I put on myself to achieve. I wasn't able to get much done during my month long break for numerous reasons, but it doesn't leave me any less disappointed that I don't have something of my own work to really showcase at the event. I'm starting to think it was more blessing than curse. Because I don't have anything to showcase, it means that I get to volunteer and help out. But it's also given me pause to consider what I should be doing in the time I have left at University. I asked myself a few questions.

Do I want to work alone or with a team?

What sort of role do I want to be working in?

What sort of thing do I want to be working on?

How much time do I want to dedicate to a project?

I would love to work with a team over the course of my final year and a half to make a game, the problem is really with finding a team to work with that is all passionate about doing a project. I find myself in a position where I'm not spectacular at art or programming, so I end out in design, production roles or all-rounder type roles - which means I'd be better off in a team. I'd love to be working on a game of my own design from the ground up. And with my studies being pretty much part-time as it stands, I've got time to work on stuff.

It's funny that - even with such a great community - sometimes it's difficult to find a reliable team. I've been a part of so many projects that have fallen through, it's kinda sad. There are so many good ideas that I have been a part of that simply have never gotten off the ground. Games that really had a lot of potential to be something very cool. I know there's one idea for a game I have that I think could be amazing - I'd LOVE to see it picked up by a team just as passionate about the idea as I am, and to make it a reality. It's all a matter of finding a team and being proactive, I suppose.

The other option is to spend some time on my weekends working on some TF2 maps. I realized when TF2 went free to play that it's a massive opportunity to get in there and make some really cool maps. TF2 was already a popular game with a lot of players, now it's even more accessible. This is the other reaosn I think not getting anything done during July was a blessing - I may have wasted time working on a project that I'd not see potential in. I've already got designs for a TF2 map that I am always polishing up on, perhaps it's time to just bite the bullet and start working on it - at the very least, until a team project comes along. Or hell, even during said team project.

In the mean time, I think I am going to simply try to be more active in seeking out a team to make a game with. I don't think there's much point in writing up a design document to pitch to others to get them on board, I'd much rather start with an idea and dynamically create it with a group of people so that we were all invested in it. It's really just a matter of finding the people.

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Viking Blood - An ECU Student Project

2011-06-02T00:25:00.001+08:00

People busy themselves playing the games that ECU students have to offer.

So for the last six weeks I've been working in a team of 3 on a game called Viking Blood. For those of you that missed out on the ECU Games Faire today, you would have missed out on Viking Blood. Well, if you want to download it and give it a shot, you can! All you need is the latest .net framework. If you have an XBOX controller for the PC, even better; that's how the game is intended to be played. Otherwise, you will need to use the debug keys (ctrl for attack, alt for block, arrow keys for movement, enter for start).

It's been an absolutely awesome experience. I felt like I was going to die at a few points there, but just to see the result work so well was worth it. There's so much that I feel we could go back and change, but I think every game dev feels that way when it comes to finally turning in a project; nothing is ever, truly, complete. But for a game made in 6 weeks that immediately had a lot of people saying "this is just like Goldenaxe!" I think we hit the mark.

So please, give it a shot, give feedback - I'll make sure the other guys hear about it. Huge thanks to Stephen Blencowe (our awesome programmer) and Adolfo Steinenbohmer (our spectacular artist) for being amazing team mates to work with. And a big thanks to Martin Masek (our lecturer) for putting us through hell with the 3 games in 3 weeks project to prepare us for this final game; it paid off, it really did.

... or maybe I'm just a masochist.

EDIT: Here's some photos of our game at the event!

The Menu screen. Fascinating.

The Boss Fight. His axe blade is as big as the player.

The team! On the left, Stephen Blencowe, the programmer. On the right, Adolfo Steinenbohmer, the artist. And in the back, myself, the designer!

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Three Games in Three Weeks

2011-04-26T00:32:00.000+08:00

Or "how I learned the importance of gameplay design".

At ECU in one of my classes we were given the task of making 3 games in 3 weeks with a different team of people each week. It was interesting to say the least, and I learned a lot - not only about myself, but how I should approach making fast games.

With the limitation of only a week to make a game in a 3D engine, we typically took to making games based on ideas of things we wanted to do from other games. Of the first two games I did the first was the original Super Mario in 3D and first person, and the second was the first level from Super Mario 64 in HD. These weren't so much games as they were re-imaginings. We got so caught up in a cool idea that we forgot that we needed cooler gameplay elements. Which - in a 3D engine - is really difficult to come up with an implement in the span of a week.

It really reflected that simple fact when the best games in the class were the ones done by programmers and artists that understood how to use Flash and code in Actionscript really well. This was really the second lesson learned - 3D games are three times as much work as 2D games. It's much easier to make a moving vector image in Flash in 30 minutes than it is to model and animate a 3D model for a game in a week.

When I was finally working with a team during my third week we decided on a single thing - it would be a simple game. We had big ideas in the first and second week that were just really difficult to implement. It was time to take out fighting any AI characters and look at making a game that had some other kind of conflict. I set out to make really simple models really quickly rather than making awesomely detailed Goomba's and Bob-Ombs so that I could focus more on learning to make a User Interface in Scaleform. And while the game in the third week was not pretty, it was actually a game.

It was funny that it was on the day that we were showing off this third game and I had this epiphany that Nick from Lets Make Games would be at the University to see our games. He'd said something to the tune of "when we look to make games in a short time, the artists have a cool idea they want to do and the programmers have a cool idea they want to do and the design gets forgotten in the process." And after thinking back on every game I was a part of making over those 3 weeks, I can see just how right he is.

So lesson learned. When it comes to games the best ones are the ones that aren't just cool programs with pretty art slapped on. The best games are the ones that are cool programs with pretty art and awesome design running it.

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Minecrafting!

2011-03-19T23:25:00.001+08:00

Ahh, Minecraft. Why must you be so addictive.

So a friend of mine has got a server set up that a whole bunch of us have been playing around on. Though admittedly, while they have all been off replaying Dragon Age 2 and Total War: Shogun 2, I've been messing around in Minecraft between stints of writing out ideas for a game I'm working on.

There needs to be something said about Minecraft just being a fantastic creative outlet. I can take breaks from my writing and work on something visual that others can see and enjoy. I played Singleplayer a bit, but there is something about surviving as a group - the whole hunter/gatherer/creator dynamic that can spawn from a Minecraft server with friends. It's fascinating and fun, and I think that's why I find myself playing so much of late.

In any case, my group of friends have all gone out and gotten themselves their own places to work in. I found a mountain with quite a spectacular cave system running through it, and set myself up there. I built out the cave rather than removing it entirely, and turned it into a living space that I started to grow out from. And days later, this is where I've ended up.

Where the circular tower is, beneath that is where the cave system was that I started in. From there I dug down and expanded out - I even found a giant cave system beneath my base that stretches all the way back to the spawn (quite a ways away!)

If you have never played Minecraft in Survival mode on a server, I highly recommend you do. It's fantastic fun, and the addiction factor is multiplied by the multiplayer aspect.

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The Problem With Dragon Age 2

2011-03-15T22:10:00.000+08:00

Well, besides the gratuitous recycling of the same maps over and over and over again, that is.

The narrative in Dragon Age 2 is a huge problem. Which is surprising - this is a Bioware game, after all.

For those that are not aware, Dragon Age 2 begins at around the same time Dragon Age: Origins begins. You are Hawke, a character that is escaping Ferelden with their family. You make the choice to escape Kirkwall - a city across the ocean. Once you arrive, you have to claw your way up into infamy over the course of 10 years. Game time, of course.

Whenever Bioware spoke about Dragon Age 2, the key word seemed to be 'personal'. That the story of Dragon Age 2 was a personal one, all about Hawke, being retold by his friend (or rival) the dwarf named Varric. The whole retelling is interesting - your choices in each act change the way the story is told. However, things take a turn for the worst as the game comes to a close. Literally.

All the way up to the end the story IS personal. It sees you going from street urchin doing somebody elses dirty work, to respected worker, to renowned noble, to the Champion of Kirkwall. But in the final 3 minutes of the game, everything is turned on its head. Your purpose in the narrative, it seemed, was only accidental. The entire story was being told because of two factions going to war, and you were at the center of it despite what you may have desired otherwise. The game is personal. The closing credits are anything but. And it is extremely, extremely disappointing.

Do not go in expecting any Dragon Age: Origins-esque prologue. The story ends with the story of what happens with these two factions, and Hawke simply disappears. Leaving behind nothing but loose ends and no answers for all those choices you made. Guess if you want to know what happens - the REAL ending - you'll have to buy the inevitable DLC or expansion, huh?

If there is anything I learned from Dragon Age 2, it's that if you are going to start with a narrative - end with that narrative. Do not make an entire game about a character and then end it talking about anything but. It's not satisfying.

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Something Worth Considering

2011-03-08T22:36:00.000+08:00

So one of my classes this semester is for Serious Games, with my lecturer being Dr. Mark McMahon. He's the program director for Game Development at ECU, and he has a history with games for training and education. I actually saw him speak at GO3 back in 2008, and even noted his talk on my blog.

The Serous Games class is turning out to be far more interesting than I'd expected, and it's leaving me with a lot to think about as far as my future goes in game development. Making educational games or training games is not something I honestly considered as a career path. But the more I am thinking about serious games... well, seriously; the more I am considering the potential of making games that teach.

During tonight's class, I was struck by something. The fact that Agile - the game project I'd started several months ago but simply couldn't finish due to a lack of skills with Actionscript - could very easily be made into an educational game. The whole inspiration for Agile was spurred on by the fact that game development has a very rockstar appeal; I've not yet come across something that appealed to people wanting to get into game development that, hey, this is way more complex than you realize. Seeing more than half the class drop out in the first year at TAFE was the motivation to start playing with the idea.

So when I wrote the game design document for Agile it was meant to be informative and fun, but not necessarily truly educational on game development methodologies. The more I think about it, the more I think that could be rectified - Agile could be an educational game very easily. And what more, I think I could make it fun, and teach a lesson all at once. The more I think about it, the more complex I see the game become in my head. Somehow, I don't see it just turning out as jumping around on platforms anymore.

I'll spend time making notes and writing a new document. This time I think I'll skip the "learning to program" and get an actually working game out of Torque or the like. I can remake it in Flash once I know more about actionscript rather than setting my goals too high.

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Realism vs Not

2011-01-29T07:24:00.000+08:00

So I'm really looking forward to the Old Republic - an MMO that Bioware is making. But it seems that every time a new video or screenshot of it is released on one of the big gaming news sites, the comments section devolves into discussion about one thing:

The graphics.

It seems that any game that comes out anymore needs to have the graphical quality of one of the recent generic FPS games to appeal to a large chunk of the gaming community (and note I say gaming community). I consider myself a pretty 'hardcore' gamer, and graphics has never been something that bothered me. Have the looks of the game become something so important now that anything that doesn't look near realistic is sub par? Did I miss the memo there?

I see games like Aion and FFXIV cited as beautiful looking MMO's.

But when I go and compare these to the stylized World of Warcraft and The Old Republic...

I know which ones I prefer by far - the latter. I see realistic looking games every day that don't even attempt to stylize themselves in any way. One of their big selling points is "shit, doesn't this look real!". I think that has its place, but when I am immersing myself in a fantasy universe, does it need to look like real life? I thought that was one of the many points of games, to escape reality and have fun. And I find that a cool and creative art style beats out generic realism any day. At least, for games where I am in a world other than our own.

Or is that just me?

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Movement On Gameplay Styles

2011-01-26T15:32:00.000+08:00

So during my break I've been playing (and replaying) a bunch of different games. One of the things I've noted - which is probably common sense, but not exactly something we discuss - is how the movement of the character you're playing sets the tone for the game.

Fluid movements are usually most prevalent in first and third person shooters - the action games where you quickly move from one fight to the next. Mass Effect 2 does this very well even though it has a cover system - your movements through a level flow from cover to cover, the characters animations are very fluid, and so it suits the action. Sliding in and out of cover is fast and easy, and this sets the tone for combat - the combat itself feels fast because of the ease of movement the character has.

However, if you compare Mass Effect 2 to Dragon Age Origins, you see something really interesting. The characters movements in DA:O are very weighted and slow. There is no sprinting from cover to cover. It's methodical and strong, and that sets the tone for the combat - which makes sense. Combat in DA:O Is meant to be slower paced and strategic than ME2. Now if you compare the movement in Dragon Age: Origins to Dragon Age 2, you can see how Bioware's feelings on combat in Dragon Age have changed - movements are fast and fluid all of a sudden. It seems like the intent is that you'll be flowing from battle to battle, not pausing between them for a break.

The main reason I have noted this is because I have been playing DC Universe Online, and recently Champions Online went free to play. So, I gave Champions a shot. Where DC Universe Online is very fast moving and flows extremely well, Champions feels very clunky and heavy - in the very early moments of the game, at the very least. This is not intentional design - the thing that makes DCUO so much fun (despite all its interface flaws) is the fact that your movements feel heroic. From the very start you can run up walls, fly or speed down hallways. In Champions Online your character feels heavy, more like a walking tank than a hero - it doesn't feel particularly heroic. And for a game where you are meant to be a hero, this is a problem. No Heroes I know of are incapable of running, feel like they weigh two tonnes and can't jump very high.

It's interesting thinking about it. I didn't realize just how much movement can set the tone for an entire gameplay experience until I began to think about it.

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2010 In Review

2011-01-23T07:51:00.000+08:00

Looking back at 2010, I didn't get as much done as I'd have liked to, but I feel like I made a lot of progress. I learned a lot about level design from working in the Hammer editor on my own Alien Swarm and TF2 maps. While I don't feel I gained much from my classes in my first year at University, I have about 5 Game Design related units to look forward to this year, so things should start getting better.

I've not made a lot of use of my blog, but that's mostly because there's not much to report on. The units I took in my first year were all really required intro classes - Contexts of Modernity, Representation and Interpretation, classes on WWW and Actionscript, as well as Visual Game Design. In the next 2 years all my units start really focusing on what I want to be doing rather than what the University feels I need to understand to do what I want, so I will have a lot more to talk about.

The Visual Game Design class was easily the one I enjoyed most. Which surprised me - Visual Game Design turned out to be a traditional art class. Traditional art scares the crap out of me. I do not consider myself a great traditional artist. I don't draw often, most of my skills are PC oriented. So when I found out that Visual Game Design was going to be a Traditional Art class, I started to panic.

Our lecturer, however, was amazing. The idea of the class was more to dedicate yourself to something for the long haul than it was to actually churn out amazing art. The plan was that we'd draw up a character of our own design for the first few weeks, then actually sculpt it by hand and in ZBrush (which I can now officially say I hate). So, I sucked up my concern about drawing and dedicated myself to it.

What I turned out with by the end of the semester I was actually... well, kinda impressed with.

I mean sure, it's no Picasso. But as the first sculpt I've ever done based on drawings I made, it's far better than I was expecting the end result to be.

I have to admit that I'd like to do another sculpt again some time. It's a lot of fun - very chill.

The past year has made me think a lot about my future and what I want. I was considering taking another 2 years at University after I graduate to get a Masters Degree, but I'm unsure. So much of this I have to play by ear - I don't know what the situation will be with Game Development in WA by the time I graduate, or if I'll even have the money to move interstate or overseas to get work by the time I do. I would love to be doing game design more than casually. To do it for a living. And it scares the hell out of me that I'll get out of University with all this debt for a course that won't benefit me at all in finding work.

I'm trying to live day to day and improve on myself as I go. I don't want to make plans that might never come to fruition. Self improvement is all well and good on a day to day basis, but self improvement isn't guaranteed to get me a job - or pay off the debt I'll have accumulated. In the mean time I intend to enjoy every moment of my time at University.

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The Room Beta

2010-07-27T06:59:00.001+08:00

In case you missed my previous blog, the Room is a map I've been working on for Alien Swarm. After sleepless night of testing and tweaking, I've got it to a point I feel it's release-ready. For testing, at least.

You can download it here. If you don't have Alien Swarm, you can download it here!

This is my first foray into both the Alien Swarm SDK and the Hammer map editor, so it's far from perfect, but I'm happy with just how much I've done. There's still some things to be done before I do a final, official release - but if you have any feedback or find any problems, let me know and I'll be sure to address them.

UPDATE: New map available, this one with the "style cam" implemented!

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Creating in Hammer for Alien Swarm

2010-07-26T18:26:00.000+08:00

So my mid-year break is coming to a close, and to wrap it up nicely Alien Swarm was released about a week ago. Alien Swarm is what you'd get if you merged Diablo with Left 4 Dead - a top-down playstyle with hordes of enemies constantly running at you. It's a whole lot of fun. The best part is that it's free - and it comes with the source code and SDK to tinker with.

So I decided, why not. I'll give modding a shot. And I have to admit, I've impressed myself. In this past week I've learned to model dynamic levels, create dynamic AI nodegraphs, and create interesting triggers inside of Hammer. The test map I've been working on - called "The Room" - is a holdout gametype where you are thrown into a building with a bunch of supplies and have to survive through wave after wave of increasingly difficult swarms of Aliens.

It's designed around 4 players on Hard, and intended to be an unfinishable scenario (simply because my friends and I love a good challenge). I've had to overcome a lot of issues - spawns not working, aliens getting stuck, models disappearing. I even had a few issues of my own design - how would I make a wall blow out, just as an extra special event during the level? And then that resulted in its own issues - how do I prevent the AI from wanting to go through the fake wall to get to the Marine?

Learning to create in Hammer has been a spectacular experience, and I see myself doing this a LOT more in future. I'd love to dip my toes into modding for TF2 or Portal 2 once it's released. And I certainly see myself working on more Alien Swarm maps in my free time even while my classes are going. It's really amazing the feeling of achievement you get when you create something with an idea in your head as to how you'd like it to work, expecting to go into a play test to see it break in new and interesting ways - only to see it somehow all fall into place in the most fantastic way.

I've still got a lot of work to do on the Room, and there's a few bugs (the non-alien, non-swarming kind) that I need to iron out. But then I will happily make a release for feedback.

You can download Alien Swarm for free over Steam!

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Designing it Differently - Alan Wake

2010-06-04T18:01:00.001+08:00

As games go, Alan Wake is... interesting. It actually reminds me more of Heavy Rain than it does any 'scary' game I've played previously. That is to say, it's an experience. You play through it and it makes you uneasy - you realize just how tense the darkness in the game makes you feel when it's closing in around you. There were several occasions when I said "oh, shit" when night came, and that says a lot for what the game does.

However, that isn't to say the game is without its flaws. It's just difficult to pick them out.

The Problem with Targeting
In the game, you are usually always equipped with a flashlight. This acts as the way you break down the shadows that protect your enemies. It's really cleverly designed - the center of the light is brighter, creating a sort of guiding cylinder of light that you don't really notice so much. It looks like a light should look like. But it's clear enough to act as your targeting method.

Which is where I have a problem.

On numerous occasions in the heat of a fight, you lose track of that light and where you are aiming - expending precious ammo on targets that aren't actually getting hit, because you're targeting just a tiny bit to the left. Not a huge flaw, but an annoyance.

How Targeting Should Have Been Different
Using the light to target is a brilliant idea, but a targeting reticule makes the game easier. On lower difficulties, have something akin to a targeting reticule - a white point or some such that lights up red when hovering over enemies so you know you're hitting them. Remove it for the harder difficulties.

The Problem with Light
The whole game is based around light and darkness, so it's little surprise there's a lot of contrast at points. When light is bright, it's BRIGHT. When dark is dark, it's DARK. And it's disorienting. The game looks fantastic (except for peoples robotic, plastic faces) and most of it is only seen in pitch black or glowing gold.

In levels without tree cover, this isn't so prevalent. The moon does actually light your way, and it's a fantastic sight. But it's obvious that the levels where the dark is SUPER dark is meant to make you feel trapped, with only a small beam of light to see what is going on, or enemies bathed in shadow.

It's been done before in games. Your flash light is all that stands between you and darkness, and it fades fast. It's cheap. And makes you feel like you're staring at oil most of the time. And when it's not oil, it's just way too bright to make out detail.

How Light Should Have Been Different
It's difficult to really say how they could have done it differently, because I understand it's an aesthetic choice of the game as mechanics go. It's MEANT to make you feel uneasy. The light is meant to be warm and welcoming. That's how the game was intended.

If I could have done anything differently, it would be to make light less bright and shadow less dark. Ramp up the reflective light from the moon in levels a bit. It's not easy to be scared by enemies you can't see. Which brings me to my next point.

The Problem with Enemies
Fighting pitch black figures in the pitch black woods with only small rays of moonlight and the light of your torch makes combat difficult, and again, I don't doubt that's the intent. The issue is sound. Alan Wake is one of the quieter games I've played. With the game sound turned up to max and my television turned up to max, I couldn't tell if there were footsteps I was failing to hear, or if enemies were near silent walking up to you save for their occasional insane rambling.

This made for some really frustrating areas of the game, where I'd be surrounded by enemies, think I'd have all of them down, and get an axe thrown at the back of my head which would kill me because I could not see or hear anything behind me. This was my biggest problem with the entire game. Some of the best parts were in buildings when I could hear footsteps on wooden floorboards thudding up behind me - it was intense, and put me off balance.

So why can enemies wander around the woods almost silently?

On top of this, there are objects that are your enemies. And these are way too common and way too random, unavoidable, and seemingly undefeatable. One of the most annoying parts of the game was crossing a bridge while the bridge was falling apart and things were being thrown at you from every direction - I only got across because of random luck, less than actual skill.

Enemies also make you stumble, which is really very annoying when they chain-stumble you, or you get stuck in a spot where you just get knocked about until you die.

How Enemies Should Have Been Different
More sound. The crazy ranting is fantastic and all, and great for directing you to the large group - but when surrounded by dark enemies in a dark level and being only able to see them with your light, it would have made things MORE tense if you were spinning around based on the snap of a twig behind you, rather than dodging at random to avoid attacks you can't actually see coming.

When you're dealing with the "object enemies", they shouldn't recuperate quite so quickly. It's easy to go through most of the game fighting and then die several times at one point, realizing your best bet might be just to run through - and it doesn't feel like how you were intended to do it. Near undodgable enemies in large numbers should be defeatable or dodgeable somehow.

Finally, enemies should not make you stumble quite so much. If you get smacked once, you should be briefly disoriented, for sure - but it should not be a continuing effect. If you get smacked, stumble once, but if you get a second smack in quick succession you should have a chance to avoid it.

The Problem with Movement
You can dodge attacks when you see them coming, but there are several factors that can prevent this. One of them is when you're picking up an item or object - you get locked into a brief "pick up" animation. During this time, a slow motion thing can play out pointing you in the direction of an enemy you may have missed and need to dodge - but you can't. You continue picking up the object, and the result is getting smacked about.

How Movement Should Have Been Different
Picking up an object shouldn't lock you into an animation - it should be able to be broken on demand. If I'm about to have an axe driven into my shoulder, and I'm currently in the process of reaching out to grab some batteries, I can't help but think that dodging the axe would be a higher priority.

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Designing it Differently - Alpha Protocol

2010-06-01T05:57:00.002+08:00

It's been a long time since I did a "Dio Review", and that's because I felt that reviews are easy to get wherever you go - my opinion means very little in that respect. However, looking at the actual mechanics in a game and then pulling them apart, analyzing them, and discussing what I would do differently is a different matter altogether. It's one thing to say what's wrong with a game. It's another to say how you'd actually improve it.

So here's the first DiD, looking at Alpha Protocol. This is probably going to be long, because there are a lot of problems.

The Problem with Weapons
There's two major flaws here. The first of which - the skill system around the weapons - I won't get into until later on. The second issue is the weapons themselves. Pistols are severely underpowered for the typical "secret agent" weapon of choice. SMG's are so dramatically inaccurate that they become a short range weapon, and are outdone by the Shotgun. The Shotgun has so much brute force you don't need to really put skills into it for close quarters. And the Assault Rifle is a great all-rounder.

Now, I'd say when your Secret Agent game favors Assault Rifles that you're getting away from Secret Agent themes and more into Generic Soldier territory. The power difference is just so dramatic that it's better to play through the game forgetting about stealth and just shooting everything up with the Assault Rifle and Shotgun. Which doesn't make you feel like much of a Secret Agent.

How Weapons Should Have Been Different.
If you're going to make people put points into weapon skills, make sure the weapons are balanced first. Pistols need to do more damage. SMG's need to have a tad less spray. Shotguns and Assault Rifles are at good points. But you need to be as efficient at killing with one weapon as you are with the next, or else the game becomes all about speccing into the best weapons.

The Problem with Skills
The skill system - when you first see it - is actually really boring. Your choice of things to level up in is Stealth, the 4 weapon skills, Martial Arts, Sabotage, Technical and Fortitude - and I don't even know if I got the names of those last two abilities right because I never used them. These skills all have different costs (Stealth costs 6 points, Weapon skills cost 5, Sabotage and Technical are 3, Martial Arts and Fortitude cost 4).

First, the ability costs. When you start out the game, you choose a 'class'. Soldier, Spy, Tech Expert, Recruit or (unlocked later) Veteran. This starting class effects some dialogue later on in the game, but it doesn't effect your choices much in the way of skills. Skills are always the same cost, no matter your choice of class. Which means you can choose to be a Soldier and move around all his abilities to be more like a Spy, right at the start of the game. The classes make more of a suggestion as to what would be appropriate for that playstyle, they don't lock you into it.

If I choose to be a Spy, shouldn't the ability cost for things like Stealth and Pistols be lowered so that I become better at those things? That is what made the most sense to me. But it's not the case here. Stealth is just as expensive a skill to level for an experienced Spy as it is for a Soldier - which doesn't make a lot of sense.

Later on in the game after your first mission you DO get to choose a specialization. And this is the only point where your choice actually means something. The Specialization doubles the amount of points you get to spend in an ability - which is important if you want to be amazing at Stealth. The problem is, every time you level up you get 10 points to spend on abilities. I've not played a game where I got any higher than level 19 - so that's 190 points to spend. Only enough to max out one or two abilities depending on what you choose - it's just not enough to work with.

The second problem is the fact that the skills are boring. Fortitude and Technical in particular offer no real "visual" feedback that you're good at those things. Sure, Fortitude gives you more health and recharges your Endurance faster, and Technical makes you better in all aspects of tech and weapons. But it's not like choosing to be an amazing martial artist, or fantastic at stealth - where the feedback is instant after you level it up. This is an action game, not World of Warcraft - why would I want to increase invisible stats?

Third problem is the weapon skills. Remember in Mass Effect how you had to level up weapon skills to increase your accuracy and give you handy little abilities to use in combat? Basically the same deal here. When you start out the game, your targeting reticule with every weapon is GIGANTIC. Targetting works in an odd way - the longer you aim down sight, the more accurate you become. So at the start of the game it might take 5 seconds to get an accurate shot with the pistol - by the end it'll only take two when you max out your pistol skill.

This is one of the most annoying mechanics in the game. I'm a Secret Agent for gods sake! I didn't much see James Bond aiming down his pistol sights for 5 seconds to get a head shot on an unwitting passer by. And once you take that shot, you better hope it hits - because the recoil will fling your reticule back out and you'll have to re-aim for another 5 seconds.

How Skills Should Have Been Different.
Firstly, picking a class needs to mean something more than bonus dialogue. If I choose to be a spy, I should be better than anybody else at using stealth, pistols and martial arts - that's what being a Spy is all about. Rather than just a set amount of levels in that ability, make the cost of the ability less.

Secondly, when you level up you should get more points to work with. This isn't such a glaring issue, but if I finish the game I want to be the best in my chosen fields - not just one or two of them. Mass Effect 1 was fantastic at doing that - even if you only did the main missions, you had plenty of points to throw around on abilities.

This extends out to weapon skills, too. The whole point of getting so many points to spend in Mass Effect 1 was that you became great in your chosen weapon quickly, which made the weapon easier to play with and use. If the leveling process is too slow, you're stuck for a long time dealing with a weapon that sucks until the very end of the game. Alternatively, just remove the weapon skills altogether - that's last gen.

Your choice of abilities need to provide interesting incentives to level up in them. Not just "25 extra health" or "pick up more ammo from enemies", but abilities like "do a roundhouse kick when you hold B" or "slow down time when you aim down sight". Something active and visual that makes you feel like "yeah, this is why I leveled that up".

Finally. Fire the designer that thought it was a good idea to increase your accuracy from "firing wildly" to "perfect shot" the longer you aim down sight. He's a dumbass.

The Problem with the Cover System
So one of my playthroughs, I was a Martial Artist. And it was a lot of fun, rushing in and beating up foes that would usually knock you about. But sometimes I want to take cover to use my actual weapons, which is to be expected. So to get into cover (on the XBOX 360) you tap A. To get out of cover, you tap A again or move the joystick away from the cover.

First problem with this is that you are locked in there. NOT a good idea for an action game where enemies can and will rush you with shotguns and melee attacks. The problem here is that while you're in cover peaking around the corner watching the guy rush up to kill you, you can't just wait for him to come around the corner and tap B to melee him - no. You can't use B at all while you're in cover, unless it's a stealth kill. So in order to melee somebody from cover you need to tap A or move the joystick FIRST, THEN start tapping B. This just seems like clunky design, and I'm surprised it was overlooked.

How The Cover System Should Have Been Different.
Tapping B from cover removes you from cover and does a melee attack.

The Problem with Boss Battles
They're stupid. They just make you feel hugely inferior with their massive health pools and powerful attacks. They're more bullet sponges than a real challenge - and try taking them on with your inaccurate weapons while they have perfect aim.

How Boss Battles Should Have Been Different.
They shouldn't have existed. If you want to put boss battles in a game, it should feel like a challenge - not frustrating, not like they're just a more heavily armored and higher damage version of you. Boss battles are difficult to balance. Look at Bowser in the old Super Mario games - he was another obstacle to be overcome, just like all the other enemies you'd squashed on the way here. And if you screwed up in taking him down, it was your fault. He was a different enemy - jumping on his head didn't work. It changed the way you played, even if for a moment.

That's the way Boss Battles should be. Figure out a weakness. Exploit it. Win. The challenge should be in getting to the "Win" part. A boss battle isn't fun if the weakness is "bullets" and in order to win you "apply more bullets". That's what you've been doing to get up to that point. Boss battles should mix it up. Change gears and do something different. But not so much that it feels out of place. Bullets should still be involved - just the how and how many should differ.

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Making Progress

2010-05-26T23:28:00.001+08:00

So after tomorrow, I have 2 months worth of time off from University. With my computer dead, the outlook on how I could actually spend that time is pretty grim. So I've been spending a lot of time working on my concept for Agile, and just yesterday made some inroads into actually making it happen. Even going so far to make a VERY simple Scrum board.

While not really a complex game by game standards, I decided I would take it a bit more seriously. Hence the (also relatively simple) scrum cards. The intent is to research and develop a working model in Flash by the 26th of June, which I can then expand upon with more complex mechanics before I make the return to studies on the 26th of July. Which means I can spend the rest of the year between classes fleshing it out, testing it and adding stuff to it where necessary.

The whole intent is that by setting my own time line and doing the work I can develop a better understanding of the processes and develop something awesome to complete. If this doesn't work out, I only have one person to blame - myself. So once the foundation is set, as I said in my previous blog, I intend to bring in other people to work on the project and expand its potential.

I hope to have something to show by the end of July.

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Long Time No see

2010-05-19T14:56:00.000+08:00

So it's been ages (6 months!) since I really said anything, and there's really no excuse why. For the first few months of 2010 I got admittedly pretty lazy. I quit my job at EBGames for a few different reasons. I've been hunting for a good part-time job in a studio for experience. My plans to get into University were almost undone by red tape, but I got lucky in the end and made it in to start my studies in Game Design and Culture and Interactive Multimedia at Edith Cowan University in Mt Lawley.

So far? It's been going really well. Much of the stuff that I've been covering has been stuff I learned back in High School (such as making websites using HTML) but one of my favorite classes is Introductory Flash. Unlike my time at TAFE where it was fairly head-first into making games, this course has introduced us to interactive elements bit by bit, and I am quickly getting to a point of confidence with my coding that I believe I may start making games in Flash.

Which is where this comes in!

Agile has been an idea in my head for a while now. I'm not going to talk too much about it until I actually have something to show, as I just started putting stuff together for it today. I'm hoping to set off working on this by myself for a few months until I have the framework down before I start looking for help or showing what I have.

The one thing I want to remember while I make this is that it's important to still work with a team. So once I have the design and a framework down, I expect I'll start actively recruiting to get it finished or even make a team to keep doing this sort of thing into the future. I think the biggest problem with the games I've worked on so far is that 1) I didn't push to get the game finished as much as I should have. And 2) I didn't have a totally dependable team that WANTED to be there doing it.

At least with Agile, if I want to I can go it alone the whole way through. But that's not what Game Development is about. I can only benefit from other peoples experience and thoughts.

In the mean time. Stuff!

Goblianz Advertisement by ~Diomades on deviant ART

Raven Cross Races by ~Diomades on deviant ART

How PC's and Macs Differ by ~Diomades on deviant ART

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The Five Year Plan

2009-11-29T16:06:00.002+08:00

I'm not really a believer in micromanagement of my life, but I think having a goal is always important. Currently, I'm seeing the fruition of one goal I had set myself - completing the Technical Art course at TAFE. Now with that out of the way, I've found myself at a crossroads - finding a direction to go from here. Do I find full time work? Or move on to further studies? All the while working on other projects in my free time from home.

I've been weighing up the pros and cons of both and come to the decision that I gain more from going to University than risking it on my own now. I might come out of University thinking "that was a waste of time", but it's preferable to looking back at my life some 10-20 years down the line and realizing it was a mistake NOT to take further studies. At least I gain a Bachelors degree and two years experience from one plan, and it doesn't stop me looking for work.

So with that out of the way, here's my 2009 showreel that I displayed at theTAFE 2009 Multimedia Expo. Looking forward to posting up more about personal projects in the coming months.

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Platforming Without Keys

2009-10-18T08:48:00.001+08:00

So I've been writing up the game design document for BIT - the game I penned previously for a project for class, but am now hoping to actually work on with the other students in my class to make an iPhone and PC release - and some fairly interesting issues have cropped up.

You see, BIT is a platformer. Now, this might not really sound like a problem but when you look at how the iPhone and iPod Touch work - there are no buttons. No arrow keys to bind controls to. No d-pad. Just a touch screen and an accelerometer. It has really cool tools to create games - but they don't exactly lend themselves well to 2D platformers.

So I had to come up with a solution. I went through several different ideas (using the accelerometer to control the character by tilting and flicking the console as you move, keeping a finger on the touch pad to guide the character around) but both ideas didn't lend themselves well to the kind of style of gameplay in BIT.

I got my hands on a friends iPod Touch and played around with a few games and got the answers I needed at least, and a few ideas. So I started writing out mechanics, sketching out some interfaces and came up with a boring (but effective!) answer.

When you don't have buttons to press, you make buttons to press.

With this in mind I decided to think about the way the game plays less like using buttons and more like using a mouse to press buttons. How would you make a platformer in that case? And so I penned an idea that the character is constantly moving - the moment you press a button to go forward or backwards, he immediately starts moving. Leaving you free to jump at your leisure.

Now the only way to make sure this will work is (obviously) to make a prototype. But I doubt we'll stray far from this sort of mechanic.

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Halo 3: ODST

2009-09-23T04:29:00.001+08:00

So I finished ODST already (I love Microsoft and Australian release dates) and I've gotta say.

The more I think about it, the more ODST is my favorite Halo game.

It mashes together the Halo 1 Mechanics with the Halo 3 engine, adds a spectacular moodiness to it and then throws in these very human characters.

A favorite part for me was the sense of actually being in a war. Being alone and having only yourself to depend upon. Scavenging what you could to keep yourself alive, and then using what you had on hand to get through - rather than what you liked best and being able to keep it the whole game.

I played through on Heroic and I found that - unlike playing as the Chief - I had to think strategically. Ducking out of cover to shoot enemies actually felt dangerous - taking a few hits quickly meant death if you didn't duck back into cover or kill them first. You can't rambo through the game. There are points where rushing the enemy becomes a viable strategy when you can flank them from behind as a result - but running straight up into a pack of brutes usually means being two-shot when they melee you, or use their far more powerful weapons.

To really beat your enemy you've got to use what you have on hand. For me, that was throwing a grenade at a car that a group of enemies was around. Or running off when I was low on ammo to flank around a building and take a foe from behind while he was searching about for me.

Possibly my favorite part in the game was when I was fighting about 10 Covenant. I'd managed to kill 5 when I ran out of ammo, grenades, and was at half health. Rushing off to recover, I managed to find a health pack - but after 15 minutes of searching, I found no ammo save for 2 hand grenades.

I snuck back to the last 5 Covenant. Managed to take one out with a stealth kill, quickly looted his weapon, and started spraying plasma fire as I backed off, tossed my only two grenades, and took refuge behind cover again. I used what ammo I had left to take down the shields on another, melee finished him, and grabbed his gun before ducking back out of sight. I waited for them to lose track of me, dashed back out and got another stealth kill before finishing off the last two.

This isn't Halo 3 - cover is your best friend and you'd do well to stick to it. Comparing ODST to Halo 3, in ODST you take cover behind the remains of a tank. In Halo 3, you feel like you have the tank strapped to your chest.

Also more interesting is just how much more intimidating everything feels when you're not 7 feet tall. A group of grunts actually pose a very real threat. And don't even get me started on a swarm of buggers. Indeed, perhaps the most difficult spots in the game are when you are pitted up against Hunters - whom the Chief would often overcome easily with his sheer speed - you can't just flank around behind them or jump over their heads. You've got to find other ways to beat them. And there's no perfect way to do it.

On the story end, it's really interesting to see the Engineers make it into the games finally after such a long time being just characters in the books - and their character is portrayed perfectly. They act just like they do in the books, and become a massive part of the story too.

Ignoring my gushing, I don't say lightly that ODST is my favorite Halo game. I loved halo 1, and I loved the city areas in Halo 2 and Halo 3 and would constantly replay them. I hated the Flood areas. And I always found it difficult to put myself in the shoes of this gigantic 7 foot tall spartan.

ODST is everything I love about Halo without all the things I hated. No flood (thank GOD), all on Earth (Awesome), in the shoes of a character that you can really imagine being your own (It's easy to put yourself in the glasses of Gordon freeman when he doesn't speak. The Rookie is exactly the same). It lacks the 'epic' feeling moments of Halo 3, and rightfully so - you're not a hero. You're a man. And you're just trying to get out of this city alive.

The thing I do dislike is that the game still suffers from some of that typical Bungie level design. Landmarks in the Rookie area are hard to come by, and you often find yourself wondering if you've come through an area before - making exploration difficult. There's also a point in the game that suffers from "Library" syndrome. If you've played Halo 1, you'll know what that means.

Overall, however, I see myself playing ODST over and over again for a long time to come. If you want to play Firefight with me some time, I'm up for it.

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Space Agents in Space

2009-09-18T22:53:00.002+08:00

Our Website is up, but consider it still a work in progress - there's a lot of stuff on it that will change in the near future.

It's been an amazing few weeks working on this project, and I've learned more about game design and what it takes in the past few weeks than I have in the years of actually playing the games. Last week was particularly hectic as I did two all nighters in an effort to get as much work pumped out for the game as humanly possible.

Next Monday is our last day to get a pre-Alpha version packaged and mailed out to judges at GO3 but even if we do not get a version for the competition, we'll be going to GO3 as a team to display what we had gotten done of our game to the masses.

I'm trying to prepare myself for the very, very harsh thoughts from the public at large that are to come.

Making a game in 10 weeks is a hard task. Setting your goals just high enough to strive for something but still understanding what is achievable is even more difficult. Probably only the last 2-3 weeks have been spent actually making levels to put in the game. Up until that point it was discussion and design.

Much of what we set out to do is simply impossible in the time span we had - multiplayer, an interactive menu screen, and MUCH, much more will not make it into the game at all. We'll have the basis of a combat system and - hopefully - working physics so that you can actually stand on something.

Fascinating for me was a lot of design problems that arose once we actually got levels in the game. I won't go into it too much but the way the camera functions and the way the levels are laid out made for some really big problems that likely won't get solved on the project.

For now, check out the news section on the website for team roles. I'm way too ready to do as much work as I can, I swear.

I hope to have a copy of the playable beta to share some time around early October.

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It's Gonna Be Awesome

2009-09-12T21:59:00.003+08:00

Direction

2009-09-05T23:37:00.002+08:00

The more I study, work on projects, research into the industry - the more my direction becomes clear. When I started attending these classes at TAFE I didn't really have a clear idea of my direction - I felt fairly generalized with my skillset and wasn't really quite sure if I wanted to get into a purely artistic path or something closer to technical art.

The beautiful thing about this course for me has been that I've been able to work in a role on a team, see how I fit in with other people that actually want their own specific roles and direction, and I've found myself slide fairly quickly into a design role. I usually spend as much time thinking, writing and posturing ideas or solutions to the members of my team as I do actually sitting down and doing artwork.

And it's a role I really enjoy. I play a lot of games, I love to play a wide variety of games, and I pay attention to how I play them. I think about how things work and the mechanics of simple things. It's something I've really tried to follow through with - getting involved in problem solving probably more than actual art. I know in the coming week I hope to sit down with one of our programmers and work out an issue mechanics wise so that we can move onto larger, untouched aspects of a game we are making.

My decision has been made for my direction, at least. And looking at job listings in big AAA studios, the only thing I lack is experience. The sky is the limit and all that jazz.

The big problem from here on out is "where to from here". And It's something I see myself considering very seriously after this project is over and done with and I'm not spending every waking moment thinking about it like some obsessive parent. How does one go and get himself into a Game Design position? It's a role that so many people seem to set themselves out for. I suppose the challenge is truly setting myself apart, working on (awesome) projects and really working towards it.

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Classes Started Again!

2009-07-29T20:54:00.003+08:00

So it's been a while since I last wrote, I had a month long break from classes and so I didn't really have that much to write about. Made a return to World of Warcraft and caught up with old friends, but now I'm back in classes and have plenty of stuff to write about again.

Though, mind you, I'm holding off on the best stuff for later on when I actually have a bit more to show.

Our classes this semester have expanded out into interesting territory with us covering a lot of Adobe After Effects and no more programming stuff. The most interesting class however takes up two full days of the 4 days we actually attend classes, and with good reason. I've spent the past week and a half in overdrive because of that one class.

In any case, you'll be hearing more from me again in the coming weeks as my classes progress and I do more that is worthy of being written about. For now, some of you WoW players out there might appreciate the PvP videos I made for my guild over on Twisting Nether. Video One, Video Two Part 1 and Video Two Part 2.

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Wacky Game Ideas: Voice Command Star Trek

2009-06-18T03:48:00.003+08:00

File this one under "ideas spawned from too much sleep".

So I rewatched Star Trek with my mother tonight - I really love it, I might add - but anyway, half way through the movie while commands were being thrown about to put power to forward engines, it occurred to me that Star Trek is one of the few titles out there that could easily employ voice commands realistically for a videogame.

Previous space sims in the Star Trek universe have felt like they fell short because they spent so much time focussing on the action and putting you in control of weapons and maneuvering - you were basically playing the roles of several crew members at once. I think a game that took you out of that multitasking and put you in the position of ordering around a bunch of crew members to do what you want would be a very cool experience, using tech not unlike that employed in Tom Clancy's: End War.

Besides the actual mechanic of voice recognition to tell crew what to do though, I can't imagine how it would actually work. It doesn't seem too hands on if it only uses voice, and I can't imagine what actual "controls" there would be besides the voice controls. What could keep you out of multitasking roles? Perhaps the game would be split into different modes of gameplay. Over the shoulder command of a ship and then over the shoulder gunplay (or would that be phaserplay? Har har) while you go on away missions in which guys in red die often.

Just a glance into my crazy imagination.

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Dual Dio Review: inFAMOUS and [PROTOTYPE]

2009-06-15T02:33:00.003+08:00

Two games. Two weeks. Two reviews for you today. So. inFAMOUS and [PROTOTYPE] (Yes, I do need to type their names as they are on the cover) are very alike games. They are both free-running, sandbox titles that see you playing a superhuman of some measure, so how do they measure up?

In inFAMOUS, you play as a man that's just woken up with very little memory of his history, and some pretty spectacular powers. As the military locks down the island that you make your home on under the threat of a highly infectious disease, you set out to unlock the mysteries of your skill and it's origins.

In [PROTOTYPE], you play as a man that's just woken up with very little memory of his history, and some pretty spectacular powers. As the military locks down the island that you make your home on under the threat of a highly infectious disease, you set out to unlock the mysteries of your skill and it's origins.

... hm.

Okay, so I kid. While the basic story template of both games is very familiar (isn't the whole "I lost my memory" thing a little cliche, though?) the familiarity pretty much ends there, as inFAMOUS comes out as a very refined but very restrictive sandbox, and [PROTOTYPE] comes out as a very dirty but very free one. They both have their pros and cons, and it seems fair to to measure them both at once, but not necessarily against one another - after all, one of them is a console exclusive, and the other is... well, not.

inFAMOUS - while it does feel very restrictive - plays extremely well. It's a lot of fun to spend hours just grinding around the city on electric wires to zap enemies. Your abilities sap energy that you need to restore by draining electrical devices, and so this sees battles progressing in what eventually winds down to hit and run tactics. You abilities, as well, are effected by your moral choices throughout the game - effectivelly crossing out the option of being a "moral grey" and forcing you into extreme choices on either end of the spectrum to be either a very good person or very bad.

Despite this though the story of inFAMOUS feels more like a superhero story than any game I've played recently. Most of the main support characters are memorable and interesting, but it feels like most of them have not been covered as deeply as they could be - pesumably for a sequel or DLC, or simply lackluster writing. In any case, the game has a fantastic twist at the end that - while somewhat cliche - is simply too "superhero" origins for me to dislike, and has me thoroughly looking forward to the inevitable sequel (and/or DLC).

In the end though, once all is said and done with the game - it's kind of sad to have to go back to the start without nearly so much power as you finished with, to play the game as the opposite of what you played your first time through. For this reason I ended out putting inFAMOUS aside and not playing it through a second time. Maybe one day I'll pick it up again and play through as an evil character compared to my good one, but otherwise - if you do all the side quests and open up every zone, there's very little to do in the world once the game is over and done with. Suffering from the same problem as Assasins Creed when all that is left to do is collect flags.

[PROTOTYPE] is very different. You're pretty much dropped into a massive world with some pretty awesome abilities and told "go play". Very quickly the game throws more and more abilities at you and it all becomes very daunting very quickly as you try to memorise certain button presses to maximize your damage output. These abilities do not drain any sort of energy, and as such you very much - at least for the first part of the game - feel like the monster this city should be fearing. The power they put in your hands is pretty spectacular, but it doesn't feel like enough as the game goes on and several unbalanced missions force the learning curve into steep, frustrating peaks.

The story is fairly disappointing despite some fairly interesting twists to what appears to start out as a struggle for revenge by a man that cares very little for those around him, and ends in a familiar tune about human nature and war. But there's nothing there that holds it all together, not even your thirst for vengeance. Cutscenes and communication between characters is sparse, usually ending with the main character talking to himself more than he talks to anybody else. And as a result, you DO grow to care very little about those around you by the end of the game. Particularly frustrating is the lack of detail ever cast on the events of several people half way through the game whom you never hear from again at the end. The story does unfold in some interesting ways, but all of it is so convoluted with no sense of when or where it's taking place that you don't really work out what is going on until a cutscene towards the end that ties it all together for you.

As previously mentioned, there's some really very frustrating learning curves in [PROTOTYPE]. When you start the game you feel like a monster, like nothing can stop you. But very quickly that changes and you find yourself feeling extremely weak instead, with blows very quickly draining your health. Also very frustrating is the lack of responsiveness - or too much responsiveness - to buttonpresses, as numerous buttons for numerous abilities need to be pressed to activate some of your more powerful abilities. This often results in you doing something unintended, and wastes enough time to get you killed before you can try again.

In summary, I enjoyed inFAMOUS a lot more than I did [PROTOTYPE]. inFAMOUS feels just so much more polished - and so it should, being a console exclusive. [PROTOTYPE] on the other hand has so many frustrating, helpless moments that you walk away from it feeling more tense and angry with the game than you do really, truly enjoying the experience. That, at least, was just my experience. By the end of the game I was disinterested in doing side quests or the like due to my frustration and decided to just play out the final missions which - in most cases - only got me so much more frustrated as there was so very little margin of error allowed.

I can highly suggest the both of them however, as they are both most definitely worth the try and you may well have different experiences with either of them than I. inFAMOUS is available only on the PS3 while [PROTOTYPE] is available on the PS3, XBOX 360 and PC.

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BIT: Postmortem

2009-06-13T18:55:00.002+08:00

So we didn't manage to finish BIT for our class, but we're so close to completion that I can practically smell it, and I'm happy to report that thanks to the offer of one of our programmers we will be continuing work on BIT so that we can eventually deliver a finished product.

The thing that we got stuck on was largely the programming side of things, and I do partly blame myself for it - I missed several classes because of work, and didn't really start organizing my team, finding out EXACTLY what needed to be done, and setting roles for people on the final sprint. It was all a learning experience at least - and I feel confident in being a much better producer the next time around. Though admittedly I really hate leadership roles. I'd much rather be designing the games, rather than telling other people to design them. Though saying it that way is unfair.

Recurring issues seemed to be with the collision detection, which the programmers spent most of the semester trying to iron out the system for. There are still problems with the system (the ability to jump into the collision map and such) but I think we're at a point now that the system really only needs tweaking.

Beyond that all that needs work is level transitions and loading, and we'll basically have a finished game

Given that we've got all our artwork done at least (and the fact I was bored a few nights ago) I decided to throw together an animation of all our current level artwork.

The 16 bit level looks fantastic, and I couldn't be happier with the way the whole game looks and feels. It really evolves the way I was expecting it to, which is no small feat. I couldn't be happier with how it looks. I'm thinking in my free time I might blend the art styles in it together, since the 16 bit level was made by 3 people. But for now, this is what we have.

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Fanboy Hipocrisy: Sequels

2009-06-07T04:20:00.003+08:00

I've always considered myself a Neutral Hardcore Gamer. Up until recently I only owned a 360 and a Wii and only really played the 360 actively. Only a few weeks ago did I finally get my PS3 and try out some games on it. But despite that, I've had no problems at all with any of the consoles and never considered myself a fan of one thing over another.

And if there is one thing I hate, it's Hipocrisy.

So while watching the live keynote from Microsoft and watching a live blog, it didn't really surprise me to see self-proclaimed Sony fanboys in there ranting about all the sequels that Microsoft was releasing and how they were milking their franchises dry. It certainly was not unexpected, and I simply just shrugged it off.

That was until the next day during the Sony keynote, and the announcement of Final Fantasy 14.

I've never been a massive player of the Final Fantasy series. In honesty, I look at it now and it's daunting - how many games are out there with the Final Fantasy name? I wouldn't know where to start playing. So I rolled my eyes a little as FFXIV is announced. Glance at the live blog.

And this guy - we shall call him Ricky214, who also happened to be ranting about the sequels released by Microsoft - chucks a spaz about how awesome it is that they are releasing FFXIV.

Facepalm.

There are 26 Final Fantasy games. That's not including spin offs and sequels to the spin offs like Chocobo, Kingdom Hearts and Crystal Chronicles, which brings the number up to 67 on my count. There are more Final Fantasy or Final Fantasy related games than there are editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. But that's unfair.

I'm not even sure of what my point here is beyond the fact that some people are just really, really stupid.

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In Which The Author Writes Stuff

2009-06-07T03:11:00.002+08:00

Another year and another E3 has been and gone. It seems the glitz and glam of E3 has returned once again, with a much larger turnout, companies seemingly putting in more effort and - gasp! - booth babes at the event in force.

But what exactly was achieved at the event this year? It seemed that most of the companies were working more on hardware than software. It's getting to that point with consoles where they are starting to wind down, companies have pushed the consoles to their limits - so the big players are trying out new and interesting things that might carry over into the next generation of consoles. Project Natal, Sony's Motion Controller, Nintendo's... heart rate monitor?

In any case, the actual "big news" coming out of the event seemed to be far between, at least for somebody that reads up on gaming news daily (if not hourly).

The big announcements for me were -
- Splinter Cell: Conviction getting new gameplay shown
It's been so long since we heard anything about it. And it's looking brilliant now.

- Assassins Creed 2 getting new gameplay shown
I loved Assassins Creed 1 in a fleeting kind of fashion. I'm hoping i'll love AC2 for good.

- Uncharted: Among Thieves getting new gameplay shown
I loved the first Uncharted, as I recently finished it. The next one looks jaw-droppingly good.

- Halo: ODST getting new gameplay shown
I'm a Halo geek, what can I say? It's going to be nice playing a story driven, average soldier version of the series.

- The announcement of Halo: Reach
If it's based off the first book "The Fall of Reach", then my god... it will blow every other Halo game out of the water.

- The announcement of Metal Gear Solid coming to the 360
Wow, Microsoft. Just, wow. First, Final Fantasy. Now, Metal Gear Solid? Next, Mario.

- The announcement of Metroid: Other M
I've never been a HUGE Metroid fan, but it looks good enough to just get me to start.

- The announcement of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
I've also never been a HUGE Castlevania fan, but a 3D version on consoles? Yes please.

- The announcement of new Monkey Island games
By the same people that bought us the new Sam and Max series! It'll be awesome!

- The announcement of Left 4 Dead 2
I love that they are making it a bit brighter, the characters a bit more colorful. It will be interesting.

- The announcement and demonstration of Microsoft's Project Natal
Wow. From what I've seen and reading of peoples hands-on with it, it's going to be something special.

- The announcement and demonstration of Sony's Motion Controller
While not seemingly as revolutionary as Project Natal, I think it will work better for gamers.

- The Old Republic and all the good press it's getting
Up until E3 I was not all that excited. Now? I simply cannot wait for the Old Republic to arrive. A story driven MMO? I'm in heaven.

There's likely stuff I've missed, but that's what comes to mind right away.

As far as the "competition" between Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo go - the battle for victory in some imaginary battle for dominance at E3 - Nintendo was most definitely the weakest company at the event this year. They didn't necessarily do worse than last year, but much of their stuff this year simply felt like old hat rehashes - a new Wii Sports, a new Wii Fit, a new New Mario Bros., a new Mario Galaxy, a new Metroid... none if it actually FELT really new as it was expected.

I liked the fact that Microsoft spent no time talking about numbers and getting straight to the good stuff. They didn't seem to suffer so much from "rehashitis", even with most of their games shown being sequels or prequels. I think it was in their delivery. They showed a game trailer, had a person come up and talk about it or play a little of it, and went onto another product.

Sony, for me, spent far too much time on the PSP. It felt like half of their keynote was talking about the new PSP Go, which feels little more than a last ditch effort at getting new PSP customers. It doesn't feel thought through (for an end or line product to not read their predecessors storage? It would be like the DSi being released without the ability to use DS cartridges). Their motion controller wasn't as interesting as Project Natal, and they didn't spend as much time as they could have showing off their upcoming exclusive titles.

And I'll leave my opinion at simply saying I believe Microsoft and Sony had a better idea of what they were doing at E3. Nintendo has gotten so caught up in catering to casuals that they treated E3 in the same way, but in reality their audience was all really hardcore gamers in some way or another - people working in the industry or writing for it. I think if they wanted to walk away with some better press, they should have treated the event like it was - a press event for Gamers - and not shun a lot of their crowd in the first few minutes of their keynote.

In any case, it was a great year for E3 this year. Here's hoping it only gets stronger from here on out.

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Learning, Bit By Bit

2009-06-06T00:46:00.002+08:00

So it looks - saddly - like we won't be getting Bit finished on time. I'm disappointed, but in a lot of ways, I am glad. The purpose for the class in which we were making bit wasn't to construct a finished game necessarily, it was to learn about the processes of CREATING a game. And we've certainly done plenty of creating. In not finishing the game on time I think I've learned more about what I did and didn't do right, and what needs to be done differently. In the end we have all our artwork done, but an incomplete code that doesn't implement everything we wanted. Close, but no cigar. A couple more weeks and I believe we'd be finished.

Despite a very busy semester and not being able to attend classes as often as I would like (fingers crossed that next semester proves easier to attend and far less busy. Though I fully expect I'll have the initiative to attend with us working 2 days a week on a game in XNA) I feel I've learned a lot about my role as a Producer, and just how team oriented working with games can be.

Going into game design it's very easy to forget that you're only a small part of a team, and this project has certainly showed me just how small a part you are - even when you are on a small team. A lot of work goes into the little details, that you don't realize had to be put there in the first place.

So what have I learned?

- Making a game is as much cooperation and coordination as it is talent.

- As a producer (or any member of the team) it's very important to keep up to date with where your team mates are at.

- It is very important to set benchmarks for where you expect to be, based upon the teams expectations and your deadline, to actually reach that deadline.

- Go in with a solid idea of the mechanics. Map them out, discuss how they will work so that everybody knows what needs to be done. (Sub Note - Don't expect people to read the GDD)

- Design an art style, give it to your artists and tip them as to how it is done exactly to get a clean style throughout the game.

- Have a plan. Mechanics and Concept > Code and Art > Test and Polish.

- Get a working prototype early.

- Keep in touch with team mates as often as possible.

In the end I hope I can convince some of our programmers to work on the game over the break so that we might come back to classes next semester with a finished game under our belt before we tackle the XNA stuff, and that it might give us the practice we need to excell next time.

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In Which The Author Sleeps In

2009-06-06T00:39:00.002+08:00

So E3 is over, and I didn't get on the last two keynotes like I'd hoped to (a full day at work and looking at class the next day, I slept in) but the big news that seems to have come out of the third day was Konami's announcement of a new Castlevania title for the PS3 and XBOX 360, and it looks simply fantastic.

Beyond that, the news seems fairly minimal. But if you want to read up more, I highly suggest going and giving Kotaku a visit for all your daily gaming news.

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In Which The Author Gets Bored

2009-06-03T04:11:00.006+08:00

Day two of E3 and the other two big players for consoles get up and give their keynotes. Overall, the Nintendo keynote was extremely disappointing and there was very little there actually NEW. The Sony keynote was very amusing and it feels to me like Microsoft and Sony came out of E3 this year with the most hype.

Tommorow: The final two with Square Enix and Konami!

NINTENDO

Nintendo opens with a bunch of facts and practically shuns hardcore gamers up on stage.

Talking about Mario and innovation, moving into the 4th dimension.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Big innovation is 4 player multiplayer
It's basically New Super Mario Bros. on the DS ported to the Wii
Cooperative competition

Wii Fit Plus
6 new strength and yoga activities
Target specific areas
15 new balance games
Coming in Fall (Spring in Australia)
Stand alone version for people with a balance board already

Wii Motion Plus
Being touted as the next advance for game innovation

Wii Sports Resort
Coming bundled with Wii Motion Plus
Thus far everything they are showing they showed last year

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10
Takes full advantage of Wii Motion Plus
Comes bundled with Wii Motion Plus

Virtua Tennis 2009
Takes full advantage of Wii Motion Plus

Red Steel 2
Gets a mention

Final Fantasy: The Crystal Bearers
Gets a mention

Kingdom Hearts
Gets an exclusive title on the Wii

Mario and Luigi RPG: Bowsers Inside Story
Coming from Japan

Golden Sun DS
Gets an announcement

Womens Murder Club: Games of Passion
On the DS

COP
On the DS

Style Savvy
On the DS

Flipnote Studio
Animation program
Coming only to the DSi

Mario versus Donkey Kong
Comes With Level Designer

New Warioware Game
Create your own minigames

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
Gets a mention

Upload photos from the DSi to Facebook

Wii Vitality Sensor
Detects your heart rate

Super Mario Galaxy 2
Looks... like Super Mario Galaxy. With Yoshi in it, too.

The Conduit
Built from the ground up for the Wii

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles
Gets a trailer

Dead Space: Extraction
Rail shooter horror game? It's more likely than you think!

Metroid: Other M
Team Ninja and Nintendo working together to make it
And it actually looks... really, really cool.
Coming in 2010

Talking about vitalizing old games into new ones. That could be read as milking big titles.

SONY

Sony knows damn well how to get you hyped for a keynote, I'll give them that.
And open with a good joke about press leaks.
364 games coming out on PlayStation platforms this year.
Sony did 30% of all retail game sales in 2008.

Uncharted 2
Multiplayer Beta starting tonight
Gameplay
Looks absolutely gorgeous
Shooter gameplay looks vastly improved
Grenade tossing made simple
Jaw droppingly cinematic moments

MAG
Gameplay showing a 256 player game in progress
Scale might be a bit TOO big, it seems daunting.
Commander figure tells the team what to do

PSP Go
Download focussed handheld
50% smaller than the current PSP
Built in Wi-Fi
16GB of Internal Flash Memory
Bluetooth Functionality
M2 Memory Port
Playstation Store on the PC - called Media Go
Sense Me on the PSP analyzes your music library to choose music for you
PSP dev toolkits now 80% cheaper
All titles for the PSP digitally distributed and on UMDs - for the Go and the other PSP versions
Available from October 1st for $249.99 in North America and Europe
Video Delivery service

Gran Turismo PSP
800 Cars
35 Tracks
60 Layout variations of the tracks
Standard Races
Time Trials
Drift Mode
Up to 4 player multiplayer
Trade and share cars
1st of October

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (PSP)
10 years after MGS3, takes place in 1970
Four Solid Snakes?
Very good trailer

Resident Evil (PSP)
Gets a passing mention
Coming in 2010

Showing a trailer for all the PSP games coming in 2009, there's actually quite a few.
That don't look too bad, either.

FF7 coming to the Playstation Store

Agent
Made by Rockstar, exclusive to the PS3
Takes place in the late 1970's

Assassins Creed 2
Kinda surprised not so much was shown at the Ubisoft keynote, but not complaining about seeing it now.
Gameplay
Starts right where the first one ended
Looks gorgeous, draw distance is massive
Leonardo DaVinci makes gadgets and weapon upgrades for Ezio
Double assassinations possible with the double blades
Connects with Assassins Creed on the PSP for extra weapons
Smoke bombs
Looks absolutely fantastic
Coming this holiday season

Final Fantasy 13
Trailer shown

Final Fantasy 14
Announced as a PS3 Exclusive
2010
Online only

PS3 Motion Controller
It looks just like a black wii remote, but uses a camera
1 - 1 tracking
Some pretty impressive mechanics
Spring 2010

ModNation: Racers
Highly customizable racers, cars and tracks
Mario Kart meets Little Big Planet
All sharable online
2010

The Last Guardian
Being developed by Team Ico
Same trailer that was recently leaked

WRC

God of War 3
Gameplay
Seems darker and grittier than previous games, is also the final game in the series
Very impressive demo, absolutely brutal

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In Which The Author Gets No Sleep

2009-06-02T10:16:00.004+08:00

E3 is upon us, and every year when it rolls around I find myself not sleeping for days straight as I attempt to stay up all night to watch the keynotes live, take notes of the happenings in them, and get hyped for the content to come. This year is no different, as I've spent the last - well, I don't want to think about how many hours - staying up and making notes on this years E3 happenings so far.

Today is the first day, with the first 3 keynotes given by Microsoft, EA and Ubisoft. If you don't want to skim through videos that go for hours, scan through websites that delve deeply into the news itself, or just want a scant summary of the games you're interested in - I have it right here.

MICROSOFT

Beatles Rock Band Shown – Not Exclusive

Tony Hawks RIDE Shown – Not Exclusive

Modern Warfare 2 Shown – Not Exclusive
Gameplay looks just like Modern Warfare, but no less amazing. Gun with a radar on it?!

Final Fantasy 13 Shown – Not Exclusive
Never been a big FF fan, honestly. So I won't give an opinion.
Spring 2010 Release Date (Autumn in Australia)

Shadow Complex - XBOX Live Title.
Very Metroid-esque.
Being made by the guys at EPIC Games, developers of Gears of War.

Joy Ride - XBOX Live Title.
Uses avatars with customizable vehicles, looks fun.

Crackdown 2 is announced
Trailer is gritty. Suggests zombie infected city.

Left 4 Dead 2
Very amusing trailer as we've come to expect from Valve.

Splinter Cell Conviction
Looks AMAZING. Much more action oriented gameplay.
Autumn this year (Spring in Australia)

Forza 3
October This Year
Player Created Content
Video Editor.

Halo 3: ODST
GAMEPLAY! Looks awesome!
22nd of September, 2009.

Halo: Reach
2010
Multiplayer beta with Halo 3: ODST

Alan Wake
Finally some gameplay footage.
Spring 2010 (Autumn in Australia)

Radio Stations & Music coming to XBOX Live. WORLDWIDE.

Live TV for UK and Ireland.

Zune Video this Fall (Spring in Australia)
Streaming 1080p TV and Movies. Worldwide!
Watch TV and movies with friends over XBOX Live!

Facebook partners with Microsoft for Facebook on XBOXLive.
Twitter partners with Microsoft for Twitter on XBOXLive.
Coming in Fall (Spring in Australia)

Metal Gear Solid Franchise on the 360!
Metal Gear Solid: Rising the next major release
No word on if it's a 360 exclusive, or on MGS4 on the 360.

Project Natal: Full Body Motion Control on the 360, with voice recognition!
Tech demo looks awesome.
Milo will be the end of us all.

EA Games

(Young)Girly games. Littlest Pet Shop Online. Some other girly game series with a minigame on the wii where you use hairspray to get the most bounce in somebodys hair. Eugh.

Need For Speed: Shift
Looks GORGEOUS
Different "Classes" based on driving style and skill.

Dragon Age: Origins
Much more mature RPG.
October 20th
Looks AWESOME.

Mass Effect 2
Construct a team to go into enemy territory on a suicide mission
360 and PC only (No luck PS3 owners)
So damn awesome looking

Fight Night Round 4
Heavy on the physics
June 25th, releasing a week early.

EA Sports MMA
Coming in 2010
Mixed Martial Arts fighting
Quite possibly the first fighter I'll enjoy.

NCAA Football 10
Customizable teams with Team Builder
Quite Robust

Madden NFL 10
Online Franchise
Trade players from anywhere, even from your iPhone

EA Sports Active
Looking at the impact it's had on peoples lives
Celebrity endorsements from some woman I don't know!
600,000 units sold of EA Sports Active
Expansion pack coming before Christmas with 30 new exercises and activities

Grand Slam Tennis
Can be used with Wii Motion Plus
Celebrity endorsements! Pete Sampras... that's not so bad as random lady

The Saboteur
Awesome looking trailer
Sandbox Gameplay in Paris
Looks like Grand Theft Auto: WWII

Brutal Legend
Tim Schafer is awesome, FYI
You recruit people to your army, all voiced by famous rockers
Rob Halford
Lenny Kilmister
Lina Ford
Ozzy Ozbourne in the game! Hah!
New trailer on Wednesday

Crysis 2
360, PS3 and PC
Pretty much just said "Yeah, we're working on Crysis 2" and walked off stage

APB
Basically a GTA MMO
Highly customizable characters
Looks great

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Story Driven MMO, lets hope they succeed. It’s Bioware, so I expect great things.
Fully Voiced: Unique voice for every player character
Each class has a unique story
Truly different experiences for different classes
Epic trailer of an army of sith fighting an army of jedi
So looking forward to it

UBISOFT

About an hour and a half of random, boring stuff. Talking about how Ubisoft is no longer a games company but an entertainment company. James Cameron rants on about his movie Avatar that Ubisoft are making the game for, for 30 minutes.

Red Steel 2
Uses Wii Motion Plus
Has a kinda lame trailer
Detects how hard you slash to do more damage
Looks kinda clunky
Red Steel 2 comes bundled with Wii Motion Plus

Shaun White Snowboarding 2
Trailer with more live action than gameplay footage

Academy of Champions Football
Soccer game
Talking about football now for 15 minutes. Dear god.
Finally, a trailer. Very stylized, looks quite cool
Kotaku says it best. Harry Potter meets Kimpossible. Meets soccer.

Splinter Cell: Conviction
Same trailer from the Microsoft Keynote. Disappointing.
And the same demo from the Microsoft keynote.
Sigh.

RUSE
... same trailer they released when it was first announced. Geez.
SO! Nothing new there. If you've not seen the trailer, it's a strategy game where you have to trick your opponent.

And onto Casual Games. Ubisoft keynote has felt really bad so far.

Tween Games 2.0
Imagine was Ubisofts biggest selling title in 2008.
And how they make money selling casual games.
All about Imagine and Petz.
And introducing Style Lab. DSi exclusive games, it looks like.

Your Shape
Talking about camera games.
Coming to the Wii bundled with a camera.

Rabbids Go Home
Oh god. Guys in Rabbid suits.
So, so silly.
... Rabbid in a Wii Remote? Oh god. It's hilarious.
The gameplay is pretty wacky, running around collecting items in a shopping cart.

Tenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Looks like Super Smash Brothers meets TMNT
Coming Fall 2009 (Spring in Australia)

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle
Only mentioned briefly.

Codename: Eden
Some game that a Japanese guy is working on for Ubisoft, also only mentioned

Assassins Creed 2
Fastest selling new IP for Ubisoft.
November 17
Holy shit! His blades can be SHOT at people. Awesome!

And that's it. Disappointing, no Beyond Good and Evil stuff.

Thus far the Microsoft keynote has taken the cake. Some really big, interesting announcements of new tech, some great sequels, and taking Metal Gear Solid from Sony? That's the second year in a row they've won a big IP like that. Nintendo and Sony will be hard pressed to top it, but who knows. Ubisoft started out well but just fell apart. Way too much time spent telling and not enough showing.

I'll likely do a writeup of the next set of keynotes tommorow.

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PS3 Get

2009-06-01T02:58:00.002+08:00

So I got a PS3 finally, after much badgering from friends, coworkers and my boss. Only paid about $150 for it and Killzone 2, as well. So I'm pretty damn happy.

Except Killzone 2 was absolutely terrible. The whole time I was playing I was SO frustrated with how very boring the world was. For a first person shooter, there was really nothing exciting about it. The world was all desaturated and brown. The characters had no character, they were more like machines that had an automatic "spout unwitty one-liners" function. Halo killer my ass. Halo 3 had more story than this!

The only thing it really has going for it is that it IS impressive in the graphical department, but when it's only using such a small pallette of colours in largely confined spaces, I'd expect nothing less. It's very, very shallow and very, very uninteresting.

And then I rented out Uncharted.

Uncharted justified my purchase of the PS3. It looked gorgeous, it was colourful, the characters were wonderful - it was all SO much like Indiana Jones, in the best possible ways. It had its bad moments, it's terrible moments - but the moments where it was just so, so good made them all just go away. THIS is what making games is about. Art. And while Uncharted is certainly not a Van Gough, efforts were made to make everything have a flavour. And to go seamlessly from art to cooking references, where Killzone 2 is a tin of soup, Uncharted is a veritable all-you-can-eat of different colours, sounds and stories. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Shadow of Absens - Completed

2009-06-01T02:52:00.001+08:00

Finished video. You can see HD images from the scene here, here, here and here.

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Dark Side of Absens

2009-05-23T23:12:00.001+08:00

Still a lot of work to do on it (the halo around the sun is only temporary). But sometimes I even manage to impress myself with what I can throw together in a few short hours of experimentation.

Gonna animate it later on in the coming week.

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The Alternate Reality Game: Notes

2009-05-18T00:54:00.003+08:00

I wrote before about the Alternate Reality Game I wanted to create, and have been inspired as of late to flesh out the details about it a little more. Consider this more a series of mental notes than anything.

-There are two ways the game could work. A large scale software release with a large, international team keeping the wheels turning and very little physical clues. Or a small scale software release with a small local team keeping the wheels turning and a lot of physical clues. Were I to be making the game myself, I would be keeping it local.

-In the case of a large scale release, clues would need to be limited to something in reality accessible to everybody. The easiest ways of doing this are by mail or by phone. The idea is to interact with the player in a far more personal way.

-In the case of a small scale release, clues would have very little limitations beyond A) Being difficult to remove from their location for other players to experience, B) Obvious to the player but not so much to passers by, and C) Not going to break the law in any way.

-It doesn't really matter what the games story is so long as it panders to the fact that the game that people buy and play at home is somehow related to the clues that they receive within it. While it may start out with the game playing more like a game, the reality of the game and the players reality begin to merge as messages and clues are funneled to the player about something, giving them a mission to solve something outside the game.

-The game should be playable on its own, and act more as a catalyst for the player to expand upon the game if they so desire.

-The game should also be something that players that do decide to expand upon their experience come back to for more clues and direction forward.

-An example is a game that acts like an MMO, with players able to do quests and interact with other players. However, they may be approached by another player that directs them towards searching for clues in the real world. The main issue with this is human interaction being so unpredictable, and the clue seeming less like a clue and more creepy or like a prank.

-Another example is a game that simply plays like any single player game. There are breaks in the game - subtle but eye catching - that hint at something happening around them in the real world worth investigating. This seems the better, more predictable route where the content feels more like it is meant to be there for some reason.

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The Business of Games

2009-05-12T09:40:00.002+08:00

There's been two things I've really learned working at EBGames. One, the customer is rarely ever right. And two, the current system of game sales is a lose-lose situation for everybody.

It's not exactly unknown that EBGames is hated quite a lot among gaming circles by both developers and customers alike. There's numerous reasons for it but it all seems to come back to one thing that developers and customers hate in common: Trading. Customers hate trading because they will never get the initial value of their purchased product back on a trade, and developers hate it for the fact that the money that is made from selling a traded product is never seen by the developer, it's money straight to EBGames.

The industry as it stands is growing at a crazy speed, and physical retail sales are one of the areas where the industry seems to have a metaphorical ingrown toenail. Nobody likes it but it's just grown that way out of necessity. EBGames has to sell something other than brand new copies of games in order to keep themselves from going out of business, since they make so little on new product. Some chains have tried to mix in hobbyist materials with games. Other, larger chains actively LOSE money over game sales but make money from clothing, homewares and a multitude of other products. EBGames and the stores like it all turned to trading in order to remain a Videogame specialist store while offering a useful service to customers and allowing them enough gross margin to expand.

But it sucks for the developer.

I've thought very often about the alternatives. How a win-win situation could exist for both Games Retailers and the Developer. Trading is the quick, cheap fix, but you have to wonder how much money is not being seen by developers due to sales of used products. At the same time, the alternative of retailers no longer selling used products would ultimately result in the demise of the videogame specialist store. Retailers make nothing on new product but everything on used. Developers and Publishers make everything on new product but nothing on used. And the only alternative to keep both retailers and developers happy is increasing the price of videogames so that both sides earn their fair share. But then what? Customers won't buy games at rediculous prices and everybody suffers anyway.

Some people will argue that a PHYSICAL retail system for videogames is going out of style anyway, but these people forget just how huge it is for everyday life - while systems like Steam are catching on very fast for the PC in particular, those systems to not yet exist on consoles, and Australia does not have a high speed internet solution for an alternative for completely replacing retail with digital distribution. Fact of the matter is, stores like EBGames will always exist, and the Gaming industry will continue to grow, with or without any change of policy on the behalf of EBGames.

I do think that alternatives need to be discussed and brainstormed. I'm not sure a win-win situation exists, however. I believe that - right now, as bad as it is - the situation is as balanced as it is going to get without one side suffering even more than the other.

Which, saddly, just seems to be the nature of business.

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The Burden of Inspiration

2009-05-10T11:28:00.002+08:00

For the past couple of weeks I've been very inspired, and it's resulted in my weekends becoming much less about relaxing and much more about working on class work. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I've been losing sleep because of it - I get an idea in my head and I just need to get it our right away. Even just writing the idea down and coming back to it later, it's just not the same. So I find myself sitting at my computer into the early hours of the morning just working on stuff.

It does concern me that I'll burn myself out at this rate and so I've actually been making a defined effort to be a little more relaxed over the weekend, but it's difficult. I don't even feel like playing games when I feel inspired. I just want to sit down, sketch out ideas, and make them on the PC. It's great for my class work and means that - if I'm not ahead - I'll have a higher quality of work when it comes to handing it all in. Not to mention, I've gotten a lot of work done for BIT while I've been like this.

But still. If I burn myself out over the weekend it concerns me I'll have nothing left in me to ACTUALLY work during the week. Especially with the next couple of weeks being particularly busy with a whole lot of meetings at work, my birthday rolling around, and BIT being on the final stretch of its production. The last thing I need is to be tired because I was kept up by the ideas in my head.

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What's Wrong with Evil Genius?

2009-05-06T06:47:00.003+08:00

Evil Genius was an RTS released back in 2004 to generally favorable reviews. I bought a copy, never finished it, and it sat in my room gathering dust for the past 5 years. Up until recently, when I decided to pull it out and play it again.

It's a game with a whole lot of character, the RTS equivalent to Beyond Good & Evil or Psychonauts in many ways. However, unlike those - I believe it was in many ways, over-rated.

There's something special about defeating a sexy, scantily-clad secret agent who uses her feminine wiles to disrupt your plans by giving her plastic surgery to make her ugly and fat, undoubtedly. But for an RTS, there's very little control over what goes on in your base. You can have up to 100 minions running around at any one time (not including your "super-minion" henchmen) that you really have no control over. This can create some very frustrating scenarios where you have just created a special upper-tier minion, and while he is in the midst of training more minions like himself - gets pulled away by combat outside the base, just to get himself killed. Forcing you to go through the painfull process of once more going through all the motions to gain a minion like him again, and train up other minions BEFORE he goes and gets himself killed.

It's like playing Command and Conquer, with no control over your units. Your only control over those units is a big red button that says "Attack". How, when, and why they do so is all up in the air. When enemy agents come into your base, rather than sending your minions to attack them - you "tag" the agent for capture, destruction, or weakening. Nearby minions will attempt to do whatever it is you tagged the agent for. But this means that if there's minions you want doing something ELSE, there is the distinct possibility they'll drop what they are doing to follow out other orders instead.

It's a very indirect control system, and in a lot of ways I suppose it could be said to be a little more realistic. It's not so much a game of unit control as it is creating a well-oiled machine that continues to pump out expendable minions, keeps your base defended, keeps out snooping agents, and keeps you well funded. It's a base building game at its core, the polar opposite to Dawn of War 2. With humourous references, great music and fantastic comedy. But as a mechanic and a control scheme, taking direct control out of the players hand to let an AI handle it is a recipe for disaster and frustration.

I remember now why I never finished it on my first play through, having gotten just as frustrated this time around. But I'll be damned if I don't see it through to the end.

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Alien Power

2009-05-02T02:30:00.003+08:00

So I finally completed my interior design for our Environments class.

It didn't turn out nearly as well as I would have liked. The more I've thought about it the more I realized I disliked the way that this map was turning out from the beginning. The colours are sickly (though mind you, that is what I was aiming for) and the interior was planned out to be so slick, rounded and shiny that it made to be very, very boring with little for me to do texture wise. It looks cool and it tells an interesting story, but compared to my Soffish animation and scene it just doesn't feel like my heart was in this one.

But then I'm also my own harshest critic.

In my initial sketches for an exterior scene I was planning to make the spaceship that this scene takes place on. But the more I think about it the more I dislike the idea. Mainly because the ship would be so slick and rounded and I could do very little in the way of detail on it. So I made the choice to scrap my original sketches thus far, brainstorm exterior design ideas thoroughly, and come up with something a fair bit more complicated and interesting than really slick alien spaceships can offer. I may yet still stick with the space theme.

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BIT: The Final Sprint

2009-05-02T02:09:00.003+08:00

So we are on a final two week sprint for Bit (well actually it'll likely be closer to a one week sprint. I think. I'm not sure if it's two weeks starting today or two weeks including today). The artists are working on getting collision maps done for the game engine and hopefully next week we'll be laying artwork over the top of it to hand over to the programmers and them throw into the engine.

The maps we're using are huge. I'm not sure they'll be enough given that our character does not lose velocity like I expected when jumping, so if somebody does a speed run they might make it to the very end of the world. The programmers assure me though that we can easily tweak that velocity to the maps once they're in the game engine, and we'll have a while with our testing phase to iron out that sort of issue.

I was originally pretty concerned about our remaining time. At least I was today. But the more I think about it the more I'm confident I can get around problems as to what "bug fixing" is exactly. Like if we don't get backgrounds finished and implemented next week, that's a fairly major bug - no background artwork displayed. Solution: Get background artwork to be displayed.

Speaking of artwork. The map size that we currently have is pretty huge.

You don't quite think about the work that goes into even the simplest of games when you play them. It's easy to forget that, even Mario, somebody made maps of every one of those worlds to be used. Mind you, they used tiles and the way our artwork works should be fairly different (read: better).

The one thing I was disappointed about was the way the levels themselves would be laid out. Originally my intent was to have the 3 levels actually be one massive map in the game. A lot more work but making for some really interesting transitions. Sad thing is that, unfortunately, this turned out to be way too clunky the more I thought about it (to avoid errors we'd need twice the artwork to prevent the game glitching out if a player just stood at the start of the game for the duration of gameplay, as it tried to load textures that didn't exist for that area.)

So our last levels artwork would need to span the length of 3 levels rather than just 1. And our second levels artwork would need to span the length of 2 levels rather than just 1.

I'm not really happy with the idea of the game transitioning on its own after 100 seconds. That makes for fairly uncontrolled gameplay, but maybe it might work. The whole idea I had was that time is going to move forward without you. We are likely just going to settle, instead, that if you don't get to the end of those 100 seconds without a certain amount of collectibles, the game is over and you start again.

We've still got a lot left to do, and a lot of features left to add before we're done. But so long as we get a very basic engine working with art and 3 levels, I'll be happy with where we got.

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Chainsaws taped to Chainsaws

2009-04-30T02:26:00.002+08:00

So a new trailer was released for Dead Rising 2 recently.

I was a big fan of the original. I loved the way it played and how "arcade" it was. It was fun to just run around killing zombies in the most ridiculous ways (My favorite weapon of choice was the shower head).

It seems that this hasn't been forgotten with Dead Rising 2 at least. While I'm not sure what sort of effect taking out the photography will have on Dead Rising 2 (it was such a fun mechanic) it looks like there will be plenty of other, interesting things to do.

Like finding mundane objects to strap chainsaws to.

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Sorry!

2009-04-27T03:08:00.002+08:00

Quick apology to all the guys at Planet Pigmi as it appears I just spammed their page with every blog entry I've ever done, which seems to be a side effect of me updating the design on my end and editing a bunch of old posts. Really sorry about that guys!

Alternate Reality Ego

2009-04-25T21:02:00.010+08:00

One of the fairly new concepts I've really loved that is just starting to grow is Alternate Reality Gaming. The whole idea is that you play a game that actually takes place in reality. My introduction to the concept was ilovebees, the Halo 2 Alternate Reality Game. It was pretty spectacular - getting phone calls from a fictional character that actually considered YOU a part of the story. People had a distinct effect on the way the story panned out and you actually felt like you were a part of it.

I've always wanted to design my owngame on the concept. I think it's something full of potential - actually LIVING a game rather than just playing it. Big businesses see the potential of it as well. But I'm not quite sure they have in mind what I have in mind with the concept. That's a story for another time though and when I get my thoughts more clearly down on paper for it.

One of the things I have considered deeply is what exactly I would be were I... well, not who I am now, and without limitations. It's an interesting thing to consider. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I'd be an evil genius of some measure. I would always joke with friends that I had a hidden base under Uluru with the genius plan to spike the worlds drinking supply with laxatives as the first step on my path to world domination.

So I came up with an idea recently to don a lab coat, goggles, and become that inner evil genius. It's silly and makes me look like an idiot, but damn if it isn't a lot of fun. It's very easy to get caught up in being serious, but in the end my pretending to be an evil genius is for much the same reasons as I want to make video games - making people laugh and enjoy themselves.

I fully expect I'll be going to events as the Genius, though I still need a name for him (I'm thinking of just Diomades or Dr. Dio, but there's been some pretty funny suggestions) , he's a character I plan to flesh out a bit more over time. I'm thinking of using him as a bit of promotional leverage - after all, going places as an evil genius is sure to gain a bit of attention.

I also did some artwork, which I plan to use on the business card I'm currently designing for myself. Just a bit of vector work done in my free time.

Sometimes it's fun to just be a little bit wacky... or very wacky.

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Learning To Game

2009-04-21T20:18:00.004+08:00

Easily the most interesting part of my studies at TAFE this year has been the fact that we're learning Agile in one of our classes while we make our own game (in the case of me and my team, that game is BIT). While the whole process hasn't been without its flaws (internet access, firewalls, repository use and blog use have all been substantial blocking issues) it's been a priceless learning experience. It really is one thing to talk about wanting to make games, and take a course with the words "Game Development" in the title - it's another to actually use a game-making methodology in the production of your own game.

It's been an invaluable series of lessons that you don't really consider when going into making a videogame. It's very easy to throw out some pie in the sky ideas with little consideration for the limitations of others on your team. For us, it was origionally a fairly major transition of gameplay styles that would see our programmers basically having to program two or even three games in one package, instead of just the one game. It's also been a fascinating lesson about just what work goes into making a game, and gives you a new found respect for the process.

One of the things I found really fascinating as the Producer on my team was the mathematics behind it all. When you play Mario, you don't really factor in how the countdown timer and level length actually factor into gameplay - you just play it with very little thought to the design. So when we proposed the idea for a platformer game that had a 5 minute countdown timer (as that is the limit on how long the game must last), three different, seamless levels with collection mechanics required to win the game before the countdown ended, I'm surprised I didn't think it might be a bit problematic to work out mathematically.

I think it might have truly started to dawn on me on about week five of our project when we were starting to discuss more precise mechanics with the programmers, and the first thing that really came up was Bit collection. The initial idea of the game was that when you started, you'd be tasked with collecting 8 bits to enter the 8 bit era. But how long should it take to collect 8 bits if you have to collect 16 bits and 32 bits later on in the game? It was fairly easy to work out how many bits you'd need to collect per second - but from that extended the issue of how would level transitions and length, and what was once simple mechanics became a lot more complicated.

By week 8 I'd worked out an approximate level length for the game and we'd decided that bit collection would not effect level transition - only character transition. So even while you might not collect all the bits that you need in time (or collect them sooner than expected) the game would continue to transition at a set pace, while your character transitioned at his own pace. This meant that while not only making our job a lot simpler, it also gave players a far better idea of where they should be at by a certain point in the game, so they would know if they were ahead or behind.

It did, however, reveal just how much work needed to go into the game - even for only 5 minutes. Measuring an approximate speed to transition from one side of the other in one of our games VERY early prototypes, I came up with an actual distance in pixels as to how long the world needed to be in order to prevent a player from running from one side of the other and getting to a dead end before the timer ran out. The result was daunting - for our little 5 minute game, we needed 48000 pixels worth of distance horizontally to prevent any sort of issues. Taking an average computer with a resolution of 1024x768, you would need 63 computer monitors lined up side by side to see the whole length of our 5 minute game.

Now, mind you, the mathematics is still relatively simple and does not factor in jumping times or obstacles - but it's a sign of just how much work has to go into a game of even a small scale, and it's really quite daunting. Especially when you are trying to construct an easy to read map for the programmers to put into code.

I don't think anything could truly prepare me for working in Game Development, but this project has certainly made me a fair bit more confident that I can enter the industry a bit more knowledgable about the limitations of myself, my team, and my ideas.

And I think that's a very important thing to learn before you actually enter the industry with your head in the clouds thinking that making games is as easy as making cool things appear on a screen and move around using some sort of voodoo magic that you have no intention of understanding.

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BIT

2009-04-16T14:01:00.003+08:00

WHAT IS BIT?
BIT is a platformer game about the evolution of Video Games over time. In BIT, you start off in the 1-Bit era in a game that is not unlike PONG. Your surroundings are all black and white and your objective is to travel around, collecting Bits. Over time, your environment will change around you and move forward into the 8-Bit era, and you can either be ahead of (or behind) the curve if you do not collect enough bits in time. You change as well, growing from a simple white square into something more. As more time passes by, the world changes again and becomes more complex still as it enters the 16-Bit era - the last leg of the race in BIT - as you're left with short time to collect all the bits you can to gain yourself a place in gaming history. Of course, there are plenty of things out there that would rather that not happen.

WHO IS BIT?
The team creating BIT are a group of students that call themselves "8 BIT" (8 for the number of people in their group and BIT for the namesake of their game).

WHY IS BIT?
BIT is being made as part of a cooperative class between the Programming and Technical Art students on the Scrum/Agile methodology. The two classes were merged, and then split up into two teams of mixed artists and programmers. BIT started out as a simple concept idea of having a game like Braid, but with a time theme rather than a time mechanic. As the concept was refined and the mechanics ironed out, BIT was born.

WHERE IS BIT?
BIT is based out of Central TAFE in Perth, Western Australia - though most of the construction of the game takes place from homes.

WHEN IS BIT?
We're currently on the last sprint to getting BIT finished and have about 5 weeks left before we enter our testing phase for the game. In late May early June, a downloadable version of BIT will be available online for play and testing purposes, and you are invited to help us make the game the best it can possibly be.

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April 14 - Indie Showcase and Mixer

2009-04-16T00:09:00.004+08:00

I've not had a chance to write about it yet because of how busy I've been, but now that I have some free time I thought I'd do a write up on the Indie Showcase and Mixer that I attended on Tuesday Night.

The event was - basically - to show off indie games. Finished, protypes, or even just concepts (as was the case with BIT, the game we took in to show. I'll get to that in a moment) about 6 games were being shown on the night and a massive crowd turned out, well beyond what I think ANYBODY expected.

We (being myself and Scott, one of the guys I am attending the course with that is on my team doing this project) turned up to the event to show off BIT. Despite several setbacks so far in its creation and not having a working prototype to show off, we gave people the general rundown on what exactly the game was all about. I'll talk more about BIT in the coming days and describe what, exactly, it is. But overall, the concept went over very, very well with attendees and everybody was very much looking forward to seeing us with a working version at future mixers.

The event - overall - was extremely successful and I've got to thank OneTwenty and their events organizer, Minh, for how much effort went into pulling off an absolutely fantastic evening. Here's to future successful mixers down the road.

And before I finish.

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Where To From Here?

2009-04-14T02:15:00.003+08:00

It's 2AM, I'm sitting here listening to Bond, and reading the blogs of several local game development studios and their staff. It's kinda got me thinking about where exactly I plan on going. Studying Technical Art at Central TAFE and all the things I've achieved since then have been massive, but I know I can go onto bigger and better things. But in all honesty, it's difficult to decide exactly what action to take next.

The Perth Games Industry Community Profile shows that there's a distinct lack of Technical Artists in Perth, which has me thinking a lot about the possibilities of me studying a Technical Art course and understanding composition fairly well, but unlike other positions in the industry there seems to be absolutely no information on what, exactly, a technical artist DOES. I'm probably going to have to research more and find out exactly what it means to be a Technical Artist... okay, research done.

What I've really been considering is exactly what I would do in a studio as far as Game Art goes. I've thought about it a lot. I'm pretty happy with my 3D Modelling, Animation and Texture Design. Not so great with my drawing, but it's certainly improved dramatically over how it used to be (I really should draw more often). I find myself fairly often getting wound up in the design aspect of things, but I think that's more to do with wanting to make games than actually being a decent designer - everybody has an idea they want to get in. Technical Art does sound interesting, I definitely believe I fit the role. Here's hoping we learn a lot more to do with Technical Art though.

I've considered the possibility of finding work mid year, or even going on to further studies next year depending upon how things develop. I feel confident with 3D modelling, but I understand it's something that I could learn even more - and I am not sure that just a year of mixxed studies would really be enough to be a great 3D Artist. I've really enjoyed animating so far and find that I'm pretty good at it. Texture design I'm pretty good at, but I'm trying - for once - to make my models look a little more cartoony, and it's turning out to be a bit more difficult.

The question I keep asking myself though is "where do I see myself in 2010?" I'd very much like for the answer to be "working in a studio on a project", it feels like I've spent so much time studying. I don't particularly like the idea of going into another year of studies, I'd much rather be getting some work experience, getting my hands dirty in the industry - even if it isn't necessarily in a studio, indie or otherwise. Then again, I'm part of the industry working at EB Games, and I've done a lot of work towards making a name for myself in the local community. I'd like to do more though, but I don't want to burn myself out at the same time.

I head into Perth tonight for an Indie Developer get-together to show off the progress on our game, so I'm hoping that I might speak to some of the guys there about my direction and any of their suggestions. I've also slotted away time in the coming months for several industry and local events in the hopes of getting out there and meeting people actively. I'm really looking forward to GO3 (And hey! The icons I designed for David Kazim are now on the official website! Awesome!) but who knows.

Worst thing is the world economic crisis always being in the back of my mind. I would rather it not factor in to anything I do in future, but I know it will. I just hope it doesn't effect my prospects too much.

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Is World of Warcraft Dying? Pt. 2

2009-04-13T23:34:00.005+08:00

It's been a little less then a year since I last covered World of Warcraft going on its way out, so I don't doubt that little will have changed this time this year. However, rather than simply covering the theory that it is dying, I thought I would look at WHY it might be dying.

I rarely ever log onto World of Warcraft anymore, and not for lack of trying. That is to say, I want to play because I miss talking with friends, but at the same time - I don't want to be paying upwards of $30 a month for what basically equates to now being a pretty looking chat room. Though, don't get me wrong, there's certainly a market for that kind of thing.

What I've been noticing when logging on is a major lack of the usual active players I used to always see around. It seems most of the more active, longer playing people are just disappearing from the face of the game. I don't doubt that the upcomming patch will bring many of them back but I am starting to come to terms with the fact that while I look forward to it myself, I don't see it being a reason for me to permenately renew my subscription.

MMO's are interesting because as a game, they are a matter of "Come for the Gameplay, stay for the Friends". And this is what makes them so powerful. A game like World of Warcraft very quickly forces you into group oriented activities, you make friends quickly, and as a result you - and they - stay around for longer to keep in touch. But once one of you gets fed up of the repetetive gameplay and leaves, what are the chances of the other staying?

On top of this, World of Warcraft is approaching it's 5th active year this year, and most of the players that are leaving now are the same ones that were there when the game was first released. These people may have started playing at the age of 15 (I would have been 16 when World of Warcraft was released) and are now in their 20's, going to college to study, working, or both. Their time is a lot more limited, and they are keeping in touch with people they met in the game outside of it with websites like Facebook and the many World of Warcraft community websites that have popped up in the 4 and a half years since WoW's release.

So I have to draw the conclusion that the reason World of Warcraft feels so much less active to me than it used to is because I'm at the end of my own play period with it - 5 years is a long time to be playing one game, even on and off, and most of the people I started playing with - some of which I am still in contact with now - are in the same boat as me and simply do not have the time to be playing it, and are playing many other games at the same time.

I do expect that recently quoted numbers on World of Warcrafts subscribers nearly having dropped to half since the release of Wrath of the Lich King are not so far from the truth, as many of these origional players will have returned to play Wrath and see what was new before going back to their day to day lives without Warcraft mixxed in.

But in the end? This is not a design flaw with the game. World of Warcraft has improved dramatically in its gameplay and storytelling since November of 2004. The people who started playing way back then will either keep coming back, or keep the MMORPG business afloat as they try out the many new ones being released in future or - hell - playing the new WoW expansions that will undoubtedly get released, and introducing their children to the concept. World of Warcraft isn't dying, and I do not think it will for a very, very long time. But it is getting downsized, and I think we might just start to see active account numbers dropping from here on out.

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Dio Review: Godfather II

2009-04-13T20:55:00.004+08:00

IN SUMMARY: The Godfather II is at least worth a rental, but I don't really see myself playing it a second time. It tries something new but doesn't really do much with it. Give it a try if you like games like Grand Theft Auto, but don't expect to get the same variety that other sandbox games offer.

I still remember fondly when I first played the original Godfather game on my XBOX. I absolutely loved the feel of it and it was actually my introduction to the Grand Theft Auto style of Gameplay - I went on to get San Andreas on the PC after I played the Godfather on the XBOX. When I heard that they were releasing a Godfather 2, I was both looking forward to it AND concerned about what they might do with it.

And what do I think? The Godfather 2 is by no measure a bad game. It's also not a GOOD game. It sees you playing as (who I believe to be) the same character from the original Godfather. All the families have gotten together down in Cuba to celebrate their newfound friendship and attempt to move into Cuba to start doing business. Of course, all hell breaks loose and you find yourself running back to New York with the Corleones latest don dead. So the Godfather names you the new Don and you set out taking over New York and hiring new made men.

Story wise, I just got confused from here, as the civil war in Cuba has for some reason made all the families worst enemies and plotting against eachother for an event that none of them were responsible for. But they, they ARE mobsters, so I guess they don't need much reason to kill one another.

The biggest change from the GTA formula is the "Dons View", a strategic map of the city. From here, you can order your men to take over different businesses that provide bonuses to your family, find made men from other families and kill them in the specific way required to finish them off once and for all, and manage the guards you have on the businesses you own. There's nothing really special about it as I had hoped it might add a layer of strategy - but as you get towards the end of the game and have 7 people in your family (you can only have 3 people with you at one time in the world) I found it easy enough to just have 4 of my family members on defensive duty while the rest of us went out picking off businesses.

Actually taking over a business starts out as an interesting mechanic, almost like dungeon-crawling as you enter the building and choose how to proceed - cutting off the buildings power to prevent them calling out for aid, blowing holes in walls to flank enemies, jumping through windows or finding a different route in. What you can and cannot achieve depends on the specialties of your made men with you at the time, so you can't get your demolitions guy to cut a hole in that flimsy metal fence because you apparently need an engineering degree to cut a hole in a fence, and to even attempt otherwise undermines all those people that spend so much time in school getting their fence-cutting degree.

Once you've blown up all the walls, kicked in all the doors, cut all the power, punched all the telephones, cut all the fences and shot everybody's face off, you come face to face with the actual owner of the business. To take over the business, you have to intimidate the owner into giving it to you. Now, after killing 20 men on my way here I'd think that the owner of said business might be just a tiny bit worried about their safety, but instead they stoicly deny you until you intimidate them. But don't intimidate them TOO much, or else they'll just tell you where to shove it and make you come back to try again later. It's like they WANT you to beat them up.

But wait! Just beating them up isn't enough if you want to get the most out of them - the different owners are all intimidated more by different things, and will give you more if you intimidate them the right way. So waving your gun around in somebody's face or even shooting them in the kneecaps might not be as effective as grabbing their shirt, drycleaning being as expensive as it is.

Half way through the game the mechanic of taking over businesses, sending defenders, killing off rival family members - it all gets very old, and I found myself struggling to come up with a reason to continue playing. The story becomes more convoluted as your family is attacked and you blame the family that you just made friends with, and proceed to blow up one of their warehouses and start a war - only to be surprised when the Godfather comes down on you for it.

Mind you, the Godfather later decides that they should all die anyway.

Finally, after all the families are wiped out, you're sent out to kill a guy, drive home, get named the Godfather, and live happily ever after. Well, as happily ever after as a mobster can.

The whole story, like the gameplay, is convoluted and reasonless and I found myself wanting to focus more on the gameplay than the story, as tried and repetetive as it was.

In the end, the Godfather 2 tries to be something different, but simplifies itself down to being run and gun, third person gameplay with no real depth. It's long, which is usually a bad thing - but there's very little here to keep your attention for as long as the game actually goes for.

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Jung Typology Test

2009-04-13T05:30:00.004+08:00

I always find these kind of tests really interesting, as - despite how very vague they can be in the questions they ask - the result is usually always something very truthful if you answer truthfully enough.

You can take the same test over here. I thought the result I got was very interesting and pretty much describes me in a nutshell.

Even more than the other Idealists, Teachers have a natural talent for leading students or trainees toward learning, or as Idealists like to think of it, they are capable of calling forth each learner's potentials. Teachers (around two percent of the population) are able - effortlessly, it seems, and almost endlessly-to dream up fascinating learning activities for their students to engage in. In some Teachers, this ability to fire the imagination can amount to a kind of genius which other types find hard to emulate. But perhaps their greatest strength lies in their belief in their students. Teachers look for the best in their students, and communicate clearly that each one has untold potential, and this confidence can inspire their students to grow and develop more than they ever thought possible.
In whatever field they choose, Teachers consider people their highest priority, and they instinctively communicate personal concern and a willingness to become involved. Warmly outgoing, and perhaps the most expressive of all the types, Teachers are remarkably good with language, especially when communicating in speech, face to face. And they do not hesitate to speak out and let their feelings be known. Bubbling with enthusiasm, Teachers will voice their passions with dramatic flourish, and can, with practice, become charismatic public speakers. This verbal ability gives Teachers a good deal of influence in groups, and they are often asked to take a leadership role.
Teachers like things settled and organized, and will schedule their work hours and social engagements well ahead of time-and they are absolutely trustworthy in honoring these commitments. Valuing as they do interpersonal cooperation and harmonious relations, Teachers are extraordinarily tolerant of others, are easy to get along with, and are usually popular wherever they are.
Teachers are highly sensitive to others, which is to say their intuition tends to be well developed. Certainly their insight into themselves and others is unparalleled. Without a doubt, they know what is going on inside themselves, and they can read other people with uncanny accuracy. Teachers also identify with others quite easily, and will actually find themselves picking up the characteristics, emotions, and beliefs of those around them. Because they slip almost unconsciously into other people's skin in this way, Teachers feel closely connected with those around them, and thus show a sincere interest in the joys and problems of their employees, colleagues, students, clients, and loved ones.

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OnLive: The Future of Video Games Retail?

2009-04-08T07:59:00.005+08:00

Announced at the Game Developers Conference recently was OnLive; an on-demand videogame service that requires very simple computer hardware to play the best titles at their highest graphical settings for little more than an internet connection and a connection device. The way it works is simple in theory - it's all server-side rendering. Rather than your key presses being registered on your computer, they are sent over the internet to an array of computers which are running the game, and they bounce back video of you moving through that game at said key press. It's like having your keyboard and monitor at home, but your computer tower on the other side of the world.

Frustratingly, however, rather than the discussion of the possibilities and pitfalls of such a system most people are going back to the old tried and true debate of claiming that this system will basically be the end of retail store chains, taking out the middle man in game transactions. I felt that I could write on both matters.

OnLive will not be the end of big retail chains like Gamestop and EBGames. Why? For the same reasons that Netflix was not -and will not be - the end of hard copy Movies. There is a large customer base in both alternatives - many people like the ease of shopping from home with digital downloads, others prefer the malleable ownership and rights that come with purchasing a physical object. But possibly the biggest factor is how flawed the internet itself is.

The world is not yet seeing a wide spread of high speed internet connections as seperate governments drag their heels on improving infrastructure. Slow internet connections means people becomming frustrated with long download times and going for physical media over digital. This is particularly prevailent in international server issues, as well. Any Australian that has tried playing on an American World of Warcraft server will understand the multitude of issues that can arise - from server or client-side lag, to any number of ISP issues (which can happen multipl times over as you connect through so many different servers to connect to the U.S.), and generally slow speed, no matter how fast your internet connection is.

Undoubtedly like World of Warcraft, such a system of networked computers would require down time for servicing. And I would not be surprised if - like World of Warcraft - the OnLive system needed to go down once a week to be checked up on. Imagine if you bought all your games via the OnLive system - you could not play them at specific times, have the issue of lag, random disconnects if you are unlucky, and god only knows what other problems might arise. Of course, that would be until Australian servers were relased, and then the problems would be far less prevailent - but changes little about the fact. The internet is not perfect. Neither are computers. But you can do something about your computer not playing a game well, there's little you can do about the INTERNET not playing your game well.

Which brings me back to my point. There are going to be people out there that will adopt the system undoubtedly. It is a far cheaper, inexpensive option to computer upgrades and servicing so long as you have the internet connection to handle it. But who is OnLive targeted towards, exactly? Considering all the different niche's, I don't believe there's any one niche that OnLive fits except small parts of ALL of them. That might be a good thing and a bad thing, but as the Wii has certainly proven - being a niche product means you sell a lot more of it.

At least you can buy more than PC games at retail.

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So we meet again, Mister Blog!

2009-04-08T02:10:00.005+08:00

It's been a very long time since I last posted (not that I expect anybody actually reads this rubbish) but I decided that it was important for me to have my own corner of the web to preside in rather than being dependant upon corners of the web owned by others. The fact that Blogspot is owned by others is not lost on me, I promise you.

A lot has happened in this time. The Soffish animation that I was working on was finally completed...

I graduated my Certificate IV Tech Art course...

... with a few honors...

Got some of my own art professionally printed...

Along with a whole bunch of other stuff. But I won't bore you with all the details. In summary: I'm currently studying the Diploma of Technical Art at eCentral TAFE, still work at EBGames in Maddington, am more involved with the Perth Videogame industry than I ever have been before, and have made a lot of new friends.

So stick around and see how long I can keep this up this time around!

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Dio Review: Watchmen

2009-04-08T02:09:00.001+08:00

It's not like me to do reviews on movies but I felt I could (and should) write up an opinion on the Watchmen. Now I'm no movie expert, but after seeing it this morning (since my classes were canceled), I thought I should give a spoiler free opinion of what you guys should expect when you go and see it.

Some of you will probably be in IMAX watching it right now by my watch.

I very recently received my copy of the Watchmen graphic novel that I'd ordered a few weeks back from Amazon and read through it all, so with that fresh in my mind I went into the cinema with a good idea of what to expect. There were quite a few occasions where I was grinning ear to ear because what I was seeing on the big screen was exactly what I remembered from the comic book. Other times, I was kinda confused as to what exactly was going on because it wasn't like the comic book.

In very brief terms, the further along in the story that the Watchmen movie gets, the less like the Watchmen comic book it becomes. Now it can be argued that this is both a good change and a bad change. I can understand why much of it was changed (modern audiences and all that) but some of it seemed just kinda silly to change. Many of the characters (The Comedian, Rorschach) retain their very 80's style costumes, while others (Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, Ozymandias) seem to have somehow gotten their costumes mixed up with the Dark Knight's rubbery looking... stuff.

Beyond the obvious visual changes that you'd already know about in keeping up with the movie, the advertisements show scenes very familiar in the comic book. To that extent I expected the movie to stick very close to the comic book story. It does, but it doesn't. Running in at just under 3 hours long, I can understand why this is the case - much of the "flavor" characters from the comic books don't see much air time in the movie. It is very much just about the watchmen. As such, things develop a little differently.

In a lot of ways though, I actually prefer the ending that the Watchmen movie has. The ending of the movie seems to tie things up nicely, but I fully expect that it's going to have major fans of the comic book very pissed. That said, there are other, smaller parts about the ending that I found slightly odd and couldn't work out why they were changed, but suspect that is because I perceived them differently in the comic book.

The opening scenes of the movie are VERY interesting - there's actually a lot of character development in the few seconds before the opening title that play out some very major historical events - fictional and real. The first half of the movie plays out almost exactly like the comic books (one scene was so eerily similar that I have to give the film makers credit, they really tried to stay true to the comic) while the latter half changes some things, doesn't cover others, and stays true to everything else. It was a far more action-packed deal than the comic book was (which is understandable, this is film) and the characters felt far more capable than their comic book counterparts.

Rorschach is acted exactly as I imagined him in the comic book, and every scene involving him is exactly as I remember it being in the comic book. Ozymandias has much of his story play out differently and he comes out pretty differently than the comic book had him turn out. Nite Owl felt over-acted in many scenes, but in a lot of ways it seemed... befitting of his character. Silk Spectre feels about as important as she felt in the comic book - that is to say, more a plot device than anything. There's not much to say about Doctor Manhattan, he feels very much unchanged from the comic books.

Overall? I personally loved it. I was extremely impressed with how much like the comic book it was, and fully plan to go back and see it again with my family. However, if you are a hardcore fan of the Watchmen and don't think any of the comic book should be changed when transitioning into film, I fully expect you're going to be frustrated with some of the changes they decided to make.

It is, in a lot of ways, Watchmen for Modern Audiences. It has the same moral as the comic book. It's dark and gritty like the comic book (I described it as Superheroes meets Saw to my family. After seeing the movie, I wasn't too far off in that description given some of the more bloody scenes). It has flashy action scenes, and the story ends slightly differently for a bit more of a refined ending that comes full circle.

It's definitely worth seeing.

Dio Review: Halo Wars

2009-04-08T02:07:00.004+08:00

I've been kinda iffy about Halo Wars since it was first announced. I've always enjoyed Ensemble's strategy games in passing and when I heard they were making a Halo RTS, I was admittedly concerned as to how it might turn out.

Now that I've had time to play it though...

I think Halo Wars succeeded at bringing RTS to the console. For sure. And one issue I've found when reading the reviews of other websites, it's that Halo Wars is reviewed as a PC RTS put on the Console rather than a straight-up Console RTS, and review it based upon everything but its own merits.

That is not to say it is without its flaws. The Rock-Paper-Scissors (Or should I say, Vehicles-Aircraft-Infantry) workings of the game can be quite frustrating at times. There's a fair bit of a learning curve to figuring out what works best against what, or what works best for specific missions during the campaign. But when the missions start to become all-encompassing and the enemy starts using vehicles of every sort, I found myself simply hanging back in my base, spending 15 minutes building it up, before just building 2-3 of every unit and going around decimating the enemy.

There are missions where it works really, really well - particularly missions where the enemy only uses two of the three different unit types. There is a real sense of strategy to what you retaliate with. Further into the game though it seems to lose that sense of strategy and it simply turns into an Age of Empires of old - pump out a replacement unit every time one of your current ones dies.

That said. The controls are fantastically well done and I'm glad that Ensemble's swan song could be an actual, working set of RTS controls. There are a few things missing (like the ability to map squads in order to call them separately, meaning it's difficult to have units spread out over the map rather than clustered all together) but otherwise it's a brilliant first step towards Strategy games being seen on consoles fairly often.

On its own, Halo Wars is a great game. The Multiplayer is not as good as the singleplayer (which is strange for a Strategy game) because it's all about zerg tactics. The singleplayer has a fairly interesting story if you're a Halo fan and actually animates much of the Spartan bad-assery that we've read about in books, but never seen in action. I found myself looking forward to finishing missions to watch the gorgeous cinematics. The story isn't anything to write home about - again, unless you're a Halo fan, or unless you just like really pretty cinematics - and there's a really interesting timeline mechanic where you collect black boxes to unlock little nuggets of information about the history of the Halo universe. Some specific to Halo Wars, some not.

All in all, the singleplayer is short but great and the multiplayer is OKAY, but nothing amazing. It's an average game that set out to do something extraordinary and succeeded. I think Kotaku put it best. "Too simple, or simply brilliant?" If you're an RTS fanatic that hates any sort of simplicity in their RTS, needs to have crazy resource management and hundreds of different units - Halo isn't for you. If you play games to have fun, it's at least worth a rental. If you're a Halo fan... well, you've already bought it most likely.

Dio Review: Dawn of War 2

2009-04-08T02:07:00.003+08:00

I've played a cool game (Halo Wars) and I've played an absolutely terrible game (Tomb Raider: Underworld. So bad that I refuse to review it.) in the past week, so it's nice to finally sit down and be playing an absolutely fantastic game like Dawn of War 2.

I probably should start by saying I'm no major Warhammer fan by any measure. I've played the original Dawn of War and MOST of the expansions, but Warhammer was never really huge over here, so I never really got into it. But while playing Dawn of War 2, I find myself really getting involved and interested in the universe.

Now I don't attribute this to the games storytelling. One of the major faults of DoW2 is that it's story is nothing amazing. It may be to Warhammer fans, but for somebody that is largely new to the IP it seems pretty run of the mill; space marines, fighting nasty aliens and a big evil race of creatures looking to wipe them all out (And Orks. They're just too awesome to not mention). Rather, it's the way the game PLAYS and how it draws you into actually caring about the characters.

A long time ago, Blizzard was talking about making Warcraft 3 an "RPG-RTS". In the end, that idea fell though. But now it has come back with a vengeance with Dawn of War 2. It's unlike any other strategy game I've ever played (perhaps besides certain mods of Warcraft 3). You have a limited amount of squads that you can fight with, you go around a bunch of different planets and can pick up gear to upgrade those separate squads.

It's a really interesting and effective system that makes the soldiers feel less like soulless entities and more like something you should actually CARE about. It's a pretty major feat in an RTS when you can make a player care about a unit for more reasons than them being super powerful - you come to care for your units in Dawn of War 2 because they are all you've got, and losing one of them means losing a tactical advantage.

Like Halo Wars however, I find myself enjoying the singleplayer campaign of Dawn of War 2 far more than the Multiplayer aspect - but then I've never really been big on multiplayer RTS. The singleplayer maps can get very repetitive as it sees you going back to the same places again and again, but it makes up for this in the fact that troop movements and your squad selections can so dramatically change the way each level plays. It's the kind of game I see myself leaving on my computer for a long time, and coming back to play whenever I'm in an RTS mood. Just like I go back to Halo to blow shit up, or Team Fortress to play multiplayer.

For hardcore RTS fans that love their RTS games as the standard mechanic, you may not like DoW2. But for me, I think in a lot of ways it's exactly what the industry needs in an RTS, and I fully expect many games with the DoW2 mechanics to come out in future. Dawn of War 2 has earned itself a permenant place in my game library, and I definitely suggest you go grab yourself a copy, even if you're not a big strategy fan. You might just find it grows on you.

Dio Review: Fallout 3

2009-04-08T01:59:00.003+08:00

Fallout 3 really is a fantastic game, if hindered by some really unusual design decisions. No matter what you play it on, it truly is an absolutely gorgeous game, and I think they did a good job of capturing the essence of Fallout's universe. It does feel like Oblivion and Fallout met and this was it's gorgeously deformed child in a way, a lot of the systems and graphics used are just so reminiscent of Oblivion (Butt-ugly people, for instance) that it seems that Bethesda just didn't try too hard to MAKE Fallout 3 different beyond it's look and theme.

I played a "smart" character that could sneak and shoot quite well, and it was really a lot of fun. Hacking computers is an absolute pain in the ass unless you have high luck and Science skill (which removes a lot of the options from the computer screen) but it feels too luck-based compared to, say, lockpicking to be as fun. Screwing up means you are locked out of the terminal and unable to use it again, and I hate to recount the times I ended going back to a previous save to try the terminal again. In the latter parts of the game I finally got the skill that let me retry terminals after they were locked down.

There is plenty of things to do in the world, with one big caveat - unlike Oblivion, Fallout 3 has a DEFINITE ENDING. This means that if you go through the game and finish the central storyline, you're thrown into an epilogue that details your effect on the world, run through the credits, and spat back out onto the menu screen. No running around in the world after you've made some big changes to it here, kiddies. You've got to go and either A: Start a new character, or B: Go back some time before the event at the "End" of the game and leave to do everything else in the world.

Why on earth they did this is beyond me. People, by definition, are going to play through their games with a lot of focus on that central storyline. The amount of people we have had come back to the store with their copy of Fallout 3 to trade it back in because they finished it is simply spectacular, and it drives me insane that Bethesda would DO something like that. If you make a massive, expansive world to explore and do things in, you don't put a cap on your time in it!

Furthermore, the games ending suffers from "Decision" syndrome. The same thing that Fable 2 suffers from. Only this time, it's much, much worse. Where the ending of Fable 2 was touching and could really make you feel depressed and empty, the ending of Fallout 3 is nothing but empty and frustrating to no end. When I finished my single player storyline, I felt cheated. And apparently, everybody that finished the game - no matter the ending they got - felt the same way.

I do not want to give too much away, but this quote from Destructoid I think is something Bethesda REALLY needs to read.

Therefore, game endings are generally difficult affairs that present the player with the largest gameplay challenge possible. Sometimes, this means a huge gunfight; sometimes, this means an escape from an exploding building; sometimes, it means a boss battle. If a game does not end in this way, it appears anticlimactic: imagine playing a game where you tracked a bad guy all across the world, always looking forward to the explosive duel that will result when you find him. After hours and hours of playing, you finally track him down -- and discover he killed himself a few minutes before you entered the room. Is that narratively shocking? Yes. Would it make for a great ending to a film or a novel? Yes. Would it absolutely infuriate a player if he was forced to experience it in the context of a videogame? Absolutely. Even The Wachowski brothers knew this when they helped develop Path of Neo: Neo’s martyrdom doesn’t work in the context of a videogame, because the player demands an ultimate gameplay challenge to conclude the experience. Whatever your opinions are on the Wachowskis (and, to be honest, they probably coincide with mine), they have a point -- right or wrong, the vast majority of gamers care more about an explosive finale than an interesting narrative denouement.

I was upset with the decision to stray from the Matrix's storyline with the ending of the Path of Neo. But after having played Fallout 3, I hate to admit it: The Wachowski Brothers could not have been more right.

If you don't want to be set up for disappointment, play Fallout 3 with no intention of ever finishing the central story. There are plenty of other things to do in the world, so do them. Otherwise, if you want this years big RPG title, look no further... than Fable 2.

Otherworlds : The Concept

2008-09-10T17:39:00.006+08:00

So in my Game Review and Design class we've just gotten started on the game design itself by being thrown into the deep end with doing a game concept. We found out going into class today that our concept would be scored based upon the concept itself and how we present it so that we know where we need work should we ever do a game concept, and my concept ended out coming out with the highest score of the two classes. So, I decided it would be worth sharing.

OTHERWORLDS
A HANDHELD MMORPG PROPOSAL

From GameConcept

HIGH CONCEPT
Otherworlds is a hand-held MMO directed for release on the Nintendo DS and making full use of the powerful wi-fi capabilities of todays handheld systems. To avoid issues of lag in the system, it will be by and large focussed on the use of simple sprites and turn-based systems for combat, abilities and social events. The concept work that you will see in this document has been taken largely from Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, using them as a proof of concept that the system can work and as a basis for the art design and direction. While the games main purpose is as an MMO, when a Wi-Fi connection is not readily available it will be playable in single player mode.

Unlike most modern MMO’s, Otherworlds does not start with the selection of a class and instead bases your class upon the things you decide to do in game. Character customization at the start of the game is simple to avoid over consumption of resources on the Nintendo DS and is limited to choosing a character and customizing their clothing colours. After a short tutorial, the player is thrown into Otherworlds and given simple pointers on their direction depending upon the choices they make. As they advance through the world, these pointers will become less and less frequent.

The game affects your class choice through the use of a core gameplay element triangle. At each point of the triangle is a base mechanic for the game: Combat, Ability and Social. The more a player does things leaning towards one corner of the triangle, the more specialized his class becomes. Doing two corners of the triangle means becoming another class. While trying to do everything means becoming less specialized and back where you start the game. In all, there are 7 classes. While this system is meant to influence your class, it is not meant to limit what you can do in the game-but encourages you to try everything. Changing classes should be simple and fun and not punish you for doing so.

From GameConcept

The game is not limited to combat in these scenes as ability and social gameplay also take place in a turned based format. In the example to the above, we see the screen a player that is an Engineer sees (the combat/ability class). This screen would be no different for any other classes, but the contents of the menu WOULD be different. A social class (the Tactician) might see – rather than Fight and Abilities – Tactics and Diplomacy, for instance. A combat class (the Soldier) might see a far more combat oriented menu – such as Fight and Retaliate. The possibilities are dependant only upon balance.

The only way Player versus Player combat would exist in the game would be through sparring or “practice fights” as duels to hone abilities and test them out, but even this could be problematic in trying to avoid bullies and less kind players showing up in the game. As such, I believe the core gameplay elements that Player versus Player combat introduce should be something investigated more closely before it is a decided element to create within the game. The focus of Otherworlds is teamwork, after all.

STORY SYNOPSIS
It’s the distant future and the world is in disarray after an experiment in a far off nation has gone horribly wrong. Portals to worlds unknown are opening up all over the planet, and strange creatures are pouring out of them. In an effort to contain the situation and understand what has happened, the nations of the world band their forces together and begin to launch squads to travel through the portals and discover what lies beyond them. As a new member of this team, you must band together to discover the secret of the Otherworlds.

UNIQUE SELLING POINTS
An MMORPG has never before been done on a handheld, and Otherworlds is designed to ride on the success of Pokemon and the current wave of MMO’s. After purchase, Otheworlds is free to play, with special game cards giving the ability to unlock special events, places and pets in the game. The ability to be anything you want in the game based on your choices is not something often seen in MMORPG’s and with the games mix of multiplayer, social play, singleplayer and minigames it is the perfect mix of extended and burst play for sitting around at home or while on the go.

GAME FEATURES
• MMO wherever you go! Portable and playable via Wi-Fi, Otherworlds is unlike any other MMORPG on the market.
• Don’t have a Wi-Fi connection readily available? You can still the game on your own with singleplayer with dynamic reduction of enemies and computer characters to aid you on your quest!
• Choose your path: Seven unique classes including Tradesman, Tactician, Engineer, Scientist, Explorer, Soldier and Guard, all obtainable based on your decisions in the game! Don’t like your class? Change it at any time!
• An expansive set of worlds to explore. Travel back in time or explore another planet, the choice is yours!
• Play with, talk to and make friends from all around the world! Group together and use your abilities to unravel the mysteries of Otherworlds.
• Simple and fun to play. Turn-based gameplay is easy to pick up and play from the very moment you buy the game.
• The simple chat tool allows you to draw and write to somebody with the stylus or even speak to them using the microphone!
• Having issues with another player? Block them with the press of a button and never worry about dealing with them again.
• Parental controls allow you to set play time or limit functions such as chat and online status.

GENRE
MMORPG, though this definition is subject to argument. While the game is online multiplayer for the most part, it also retains single-player facilities and has gameplay systems reminiscent of Pokemon and it’s turn-based style.

TARGET PLATFORM
The Nintendo DS. There are several reasons for this. The first being the popularity of the handheld allows us to reach a wider audience with our game. The second being the dual screens, as they suit the gameplay systems of Otherworlds and make UI creation a much simpler task. While the space available on the cartridges is a concern based on the usual size of MMORPG’s, this should not be an issue with simple sprite graphics.

TARGET CUSTOMER
Children between the ages of 8 and 16 are our core audience, though the game could easily sell to a much larger audience due to the popularity of MMORPG’s and handheld consoles currently. Though the oversaturation of the MMORPG market is a concern just for the sheer amount of games currently released (or to be released), it is believed that the differences in Otherworlds set it apart enough to make people of all ages still want to buy and play it, particularly if they already play an MMORPG.

COMPETETIVE ANALYSIS
World of Warcraft is currently one of the biggest things in gaming in the world currently, but it is not much of a competitor for Otherworlds as it is not nearly as transportable. Pokemon and other hand-held RPG’s are going to be our main competitors, but they still lack the ability for social interaction planned to be in Otherworlds. Otherworlds is a game with few competitors as nothing like it has been attempted in past. Though there are rumours in the Game Design industry of a port of a PC-based MMORPG to the Nintendo DS, it will not have the same strengths as a portable MMORPG purpose built for the Nintendo DS like Otherworlds is.

While it is not included in the document in any form, the "triangle" I was speaking of is this one. I simply showed it in my presentation rather than in the concept document itself.

DioReview: Spore

2008-09-07T13:05:00.005+08:00

Wow. My first ever review getting posted on my blog. I usually do these fairly often and with the big gaming season heading on over, expect to see these a lot more often. Readers from the TNG will know of my reviews already. Or at least, some of them will.

Spore, in a nutshell, is a lot of fun. As a game I believe it has the lasting appeal of the Sims, but in a far different way. With the Sims you could play the same family generation after generation as they grow up, get old and die off. But in Spore this is substantially different. Spore has five separate stages that your creature evolves through. That is Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space. You can usually cover the first 4 stages in the span of a few hours, but they are all memorable. Space, however, is where Maxis has obviously put all their work effort.

The issue is that Space is extremely expansive, and when you're first thrown into it, it is extremely daunting. The scale of things in Spore fluctuate - from the relatively small feeling of the ocean you start to evolve in, to the expansive world you must travel, to the small continent and then planet to conquer. But Space is on a whole different level of scale. Upon entering it and seeing your little home star cluster and meeting with other space faring races not far from your home planet, space doesn't feel all that big. But as you begin to explore, you see the galaxy is truly huge, and the scale of it is hard to fathom.

This is both good and bad. Spore stays true to the size and grandeur of things and makes you feel like the little fish in a big pond from the very moment you begin. But if this scale is daunting for a person that likes large scale games, how are the younger audience going to feel when they first begin to play? In this respect, it is easier to focus on your little corner of the galaxy - fleshing it out and gaining new planets and colonies, doing trade and upgrading your spaceship. But space is hectic and there's always something going wrong on one of your colonies somewhere, and it can make exploring or focusing on a single task even at the best of times a hard task. Spore suffers from GTAIV syndrome. Where it continuously pulls you away from what you're doing to do something else, and punishes you if you do not go to do what the game wants you to.

The other stages of the game do not suffer this problem. The Cell stage is small, and you very quickly evolve out onto land and start gaining new parts and more complex DNA to upgrade your creature with. The creature builder is a lot of fun to play with and several times I found myself just sitting around my home nest working on making my creature look just right. The Creature stage is special, in that even after you've gained the ability to become a tribe it's very fun to just run around, meet other creatures and continue to update your character for hours on end.

The Tribal stage is interesting. You are pitted against quickly forming tribes of other creatures for dominion over a small area, and you can either convince them to join you or destroy them. Just like the Cell and Creature stages, how you decide to go forward effects what you become in the next stage. For me, I was an industrious tribe, and this caused problems when they evolved into a civilization.

The Civilization stage is problematic. You are pitted against other, rival cities and need to take them over. As an Industrialist, this meant creating trade routes and buying them out. But creating trade routes is difficult when you are at war with the person, and the Industrialists do not get any sort of offensive power and are limited to defending using abilities you earned during the previous stages and the turrets of your cities - easily disabled by religious cities and destroyed by militaristic ones. And so you have to take over other cities quickly from the very start to get some sort of defensive power going. Because when you eventually piss somebody off, you're going to need some way to take them over.

Thankfully, once you get to the point in the Civilization stage that you earn Aircraft, you earn a very handy ability as an Industrialist that allows you to buyout any city without a trade route. This made the latter half of the Civilization period that much easier. But the first half is still extremely difficult if you come from an Industrial tribe. Thankfully I'm happy to report that the other types of civilizations have none of these problems, but it feels very unfair to be the only one without guns.

I won't go over the space stage again as I've made my point on it, but what this all comes back to is the replayability of the game. That replay value does not come from the Space stage and simply slaving away for hours and hours on end in it. The replay value of the game comes from going back and starting a brand new race from the very ground up to take into space. This is where Spore differs from the Sims. It's just too much fun to see your creation evolve based upon your choices.

Again, Spore is an extremely fun game and has a habit of just sucking time away. When I first played it it was 8:30 PM. It felt like only an hour had passed when I next looked at the clock and it was 3:30AM. If you have work to do and are a procrastinator, it's likely that Spore isn't going to be the game you should really consider purchasing, simply for it's ability to make you lose track of time.

In closing, Spore is the Sims on Crack that we all expected it would be, but on a totally different level than what anybody expected. It's not Portal, it's not redefining the game industry or the way we play games, but it is redefining player created content and "Massively Singleplayer" gaming. I highly suggest buying it if you're looking for a simply fun game and are of a more creative nature.

Glutton for Punishment

2008-08-30T14:39:00.004+08:00

Where to begin. I had last week off from my classes and work because I was extremely sick - sicker than I've felt in years, honestly. Thankfully it seemed to only be a week long bug and has since passed, allowing me to catch up with my classes this week. I don't seem to have missed much and I went into my classes having expected that I'd actually missed quite a bit, so I was all pumped up to have lots of work to catch up on. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed or relieved that's not actually the case.

I'm still waiting to hear back about what my lecturer thought of the retexture I did on my plane model, but I'm still fairly confident about it. There's a lot I'd liked to have done with it but in the state I was feeling at the time it just wasn't going to happen, so it didn't get the retexture or bump map that it deserved really. I like to think I made up for it with the work I did on my underwater scene over the weekend when I was starting to feel better.

When I turned this in yesterday my lecturer seemed pretty dumbfounded. I'd missed the class in the week before so I lacked a little extra knowledge and yet once more I seem to have come out on top of the rest of the class again. Mind you, when I handed it in the scene was lacking the submarine or the retexturing on said submarine (Which was fine, we were asked to remove it for the render we had to show). He seemed extremely impressed, ticked me off on the turnin sheet and told me to go home. Needless to say I'm still pretty damn stoked.

The submarine itself I am still actively working on. There are a few things I want to do with it that I'm just getting started on now, but in its current state it's by and large completed. The rest of the scene however is pretty much complete-I plan to animate the seaweed and coral in the final project of the semester, so that will change quite possibly. The scene is a lot larger than fits in a single photo but I've rigged it for a panning shot, so it should come out really nice. I also left in a little easteregg - a symbolic ode to the game design studio that convinced me to get into this course to begin with, see if you can't find it.

As for the coming weeks, there's quite a bit going on actually. Tommorow I head into Murdoch University for their open day, where I have a seat reserved on the Game Art & Design workshop. I want to see what they can do and give it a try for myself, as well as rubbing shoulders with all the big names that are going to be there. Interestingly, the course itself (that is, Game Art & Design) doesn't start until next year, so perhaps I can talk to the guy leading the workshop (Head lecturer and a game designer that's worked on more than 20 games from EA to Disney) about a scholarship. That would be fantastic.

I'm also going to be heading into one of the small Game Design studios here in Perth over the coming month to do testing on a PS2 game they are working on. From what I gather the game itself is only in the Alpha stages, but it will be nice to see what one of our local studios is doing and perhaps even drop a few names and learn some new ones. I've really tried to take to heart the fact that to make it in this industry takes equal parts rubbing shoulders wherever possible as it does creativity and brains.

I also came to the conclusion that my old PC needs to go after working on my 3D Modelling project, so I'm currently looking into a $2.5k student loan from my bank to buy a top of the line computer. After it took a full 5 minutes to render a 3 second test animation I decided that it was time to start thinking seriously about putting myself in debt to save my sanity and improve my work quality. So here's hoping that all goes through and ends well before the end of September.

Here's to another week of insanity and tight schedules. Oh! And Spore on Tuesday!

Class WIP Models

2008-08-16T23:56:00.003+08:00

I decided that while I had some free time I'd post some stuff up about my latest little pieces of work at the College.

Retextured model of an Me 26 Jet as part of a project for my Image Manipulation class. It's yet to get a proper bumpmap or metal texture.

Submarine I did in 2 hours in my 3D Modelling class. I still need to harden the edges but I'm overall very happy with it and plan to fully texture it.

Underwater scene which actually looks nothing like it is meant to look because of the lack of textures and proper lighting. This is one of my big assignments for the 3D Modelling class.

A Review of Reviews

2008-08-13T19:02:00.003+08:00

One of the interesting tasks that I have been given recently in my Game Design course was to write a "Review of Reviews". A review of 3 other reviews on the same game. Of course, I decided to do my review based upon Halo 3, taking my examples from G4TV, Game Critic and - of course - Zero Punctuation. The assignment was only meant to be 600 words long, but I found myself quickly going over that into nearly double the necessary word count. But I found the whole thing interesting enough to share. The first half of the document is more or less covering what these reviewers are like and their reviewing policy.

For this assessment I will be covering the reviews by Zero Punctuation, Game Critics and G4TV on Halo 3. For a good and fairly even example of the reviewing system, I chose these reviews because they cover the whole spectrum of Halo 3 Reviews – Opinions that range from perfect, to average and absolutely terrible. To start, I’ll go over the actual single reviews and reviewers themselves – as this can give us valuable insight into the way they work and why they review the way they do.

Zero Punctuation is a video review done by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw at the Escapist (escapistmagazine.com). His reviews were very quick to soar to popularity among the gaming community online for absolutely scathing reviews of videogames-bad games are terrible, good games are okay. There is only one game that Yahtzee has ever looked upon favourably, and that is Portal. In reviews of several games since, Yahtzee has expressed his absolute disdain for multiplayer games and his inability to enjoy them.

In a nutshell, Yahtzee found Halo 3 to be average. Right from the get go, he showed his resentment for the fact that other reviewers had given Halo 3 perfect scores, and revealed that he had not played the two other Halo games. He makes a lot of assumptions about the story that are incorrect, brings up several issues with the games lighting, graphics and sound effects, hates the AI, and found the whole game rather “inconsistent”. He ends the review with “A competent shooter… Halo 3 doesn’t do anything that other shooters have not done already and better”, referencing Bioshock when he does so.

The Game Critics review was done by Daniel Weissenberger, and before this assignment I had never heard of the Game Critics website. The only reason I DID hear about it was because (According to metacritic.com) they gave Halo 3 the lowest review score on the internet. A relatively small game review website by any standards, their mission statement in a nutshell is to provide “smart reviews for serious gamers”.

The Game Critics review opens up with the statement that the writer feels it is fair to review a game based upon its advertising and very quickly picks apart the advertising campaign and claims that Bungie (The studio behind Halo 3) “Promised a game they did not even try to create”. He dislikes the way that the combat is handled in the game but DOES say it is fun, thinks the AI is terrible, easily gets lost, all the levels are the same, the lack of the games scope, and how he believes the multiplayer is what makes Halo 3 at all decent. At one point he goes into a paragraph long rant about how the story in Halo should have been like another games story.

G4TV is an American cable TV station that does a bunch of shows based on technology, games being one of them. Their reviews, as such, are also in video form and widely accessible on the internet. They are well known but not well liked, and often give more extreme reviews on games than other game reviewers.

They cover the review of Halo 3 in two distinct halves, reviewing the Multiplayer aspect and all the tools that come with it before they cover the Single player aspect and all its extras. It is immediately clear just how much they are going to gush over Halo 3, starting with covering a few of the new weapons, equipment and vehicles, says the game can create spectacular sensory overload (in a good way), says the AI is impressive across the board, cover the Forge (Map editor) and SavedFilms before they claim that Bungie has raised the bar for other shooters. They give it a perfect 5 out of 5 and wish they could lower the score for Halo 2 just to show how much of an improvement Halo 3 is.

One of the major flaws with reviewing of any kind is that people have biases. No matter the person, no matter who you ask for an opinion on a game, if they tell you their honest opinion it is going to be in some way biased. This is more human nature and not something we control-some things are going to be enjoyed more by some people than others. The same goes for game genres and even mechanics, as this assessment has clearly shown.

Different reviewers have different ways of reviewing and different readers to cater to. Where Yahtzee appeals to social gaming circles as a whole for his humour, G4TV appeals to the public at large and Game Critics appeal to gamers as a whole, and with this comes different styles of reviews and different tastes. Many game reviewing websites have their reviewers split into sections of expertise, XBOX360, PC, PS3, etcetera. But these people have preferred genres on their consoles of choice, too, and it makes for muddled reviews and otherwise imperfect scores.

Because gaming as a medium is interactive and young, reviewing the things released upon it are difficult simply because everybody’s experience is going to vary based on their decisions. One of the things that Halo 3 does right is trying to cater to both the hardcore Halo fans with a deep story that isn’t going to take away from the experience that somebody new to Halo is going to have, however it can make the story seem far more watered down. Issues like the AI is not so much a problem of the game, but a problem of what we can achieve in games so far.

One of the interesting things about Halo 3 is just how separated the views upon it are as a whole. In one corner you have the people that love the multiplayer, others that love the story and the single player, and the people that just cannot stand the game as a whole. And where as the deviation between the reviewers scores and user scores vary little usually, the difference between player review scores and reviewers scores is a full 2 points (9.4 out of 10 by Reviewers, 7.4 out of 10 by Users).

In the end, it comes down to a need for evolution in game reviewing. I think a lot of reviews now are starting to lean away from using a point system and instead giving their opinions and saying ‘This is what is good, this is what is bad’. Personally, I loved Halo 3, am a huge fan of the story, own the two games before it and all the books. However, even I would not give it a perfect score. Why? Because there are always ways for games to improve (The AI in Halo 3 does need work, and that can only come in time). It’s all a matter of opinion.

Whenever somebody asks for my opinion about Halo 3, I tell them this: For the uninitiated Halo fan, it provides the “30 seconds of fun” that Bungie prides itself on. For the player that has played the previous Halo games, they will enjoy this one more than Halo 2 and find it on par with the original. For hardcore Halo fans, it’s the ending we’ve all been hoping for. To truly enjoy the single player campaign and appreciate the story for the depth it truly has, you need to have read the books. But the Multiplayer really is where the game excels, and the tools provided to customize your multiplayer experience are boundless.

But that’s just my opinion.

-Matthew Dyet

Just let me rest, for gods sake!

2008-08-11T21:32:00.005+08:00

I don't think I can say it enough that I've been amazingly busy these past few weeks, and enjoying every single moment that I have off. It's funny how you come to appreciate the quiet times much, much more when you're just that busy that you barely feel like you have time to think. Lunch breaks when I'm at class in particular offer some reprise for an hour or at least 45 minutes. Sometimes it's just nice to stare out at the grounds of the college, others are spent playing Pokemon Pearl on my DS. I'm hoping to get my standard issue 160gb hard drive from the school soon so that I might bring in Halo: Combat Evolved and play over the network with everybody else during my lunch break.

I spent today's lunch break working on some art though. We received a task in our image manipulation to re-texture a 3D model of a WWII fighter, which will also be our first assessment, and the best one in the class gets a prize. I'm dead-set on winning it, and have a sort of "iron man" color theme going on with mine now-hotrod red with black and gold markings. It's actually quite fun, but then, I find the oddest things meditative when it comes to my graphic design. I want to get the time and energy some day soon to actually finish off Project Elite, too. It's SO close to completion that it hurts to see it sitting there on my USB with no attention being given to it. Maybe tommorow when I have some time off.

I missed out on the 3D Design class I had the week before last, and found out when I went in on Friday last week that I actually had an assignment due that day. Thank the higher powers that be that I am awesome with 3DsMax. The task was to create a submarine. I went onto Wikipedia, grabbed a real simple spec drawing of a Submarine, created a sphere in 3DsMax and chopped it in half before extruding to my hearts content. Much of the rest of the class were already 70% of the way through their models that looked more like futuristic vehicles than they did like submarines, and our lecturer, Franz, pulled them up on it. When I finished my model within two hours (adding a few extra tidbits like torpedo bays and a pretty impressive propeller if I don't say so myself) he seemed extremely impressed with what I had done. It only served to make me all the more confident really. Particularly after I gave him help working out what was going on with another students model.

When on the train in today, there was apparently an issue with the signals in Perth, and so we were heavily delayed. We spent about 15 minutes at one point sitting on a bridge into the city. I was counting my lucky stars that I got off two stations before the city station, because the train was not going to make it into the city either because of the problems. Apparently it put the city in absolute disarray because it was at peak hour that the issue decided to rear its ugly head. I was lucky so many other students and teachers take the train into the college, or else I would have been that damn late. Instead we waited for another 15 minutes before deciding to start the class.

I think I am going to have to enjoy every last minute of staying home tommorow, because then it's the 3 busiest days of the week. As much as I try to enjoy my job at EB, I'm not looking forward to working on Thursday night. If only because despite my greatest efforts, the numbers I've been pulling in have been pretty damn pathetic-and not for lack of trying. I think that's why it's so frustrating. I don't know what's going on, but I guess that's really just part of working in retail. One week can be awesome and the next just completely terrible, for no reason whatsoever.

In any case, I'm going to finish typing up my "Review of Reviews" for class. It should prove to be an interesting assignment.

GO3, the Game Developers Conference - Day 2

2008-08-09T20:52:00.003+08:00

DAY TWO

The day started with Kay Gruenwoldt, the speaker for Nokia on Connecting People. Despite my better judgment I decided to take notes this time around and was-unsurprisingly-disappointed. He spoke more about their products and what was up and coming in Nokia's line of branding than he really did about innovation or connecting people. All in all, I don't even really feel the need to type out said notes on here BESIDES the Mobile Games Innovation Challenge, which you should go read about at http://developer.n-gage.com/innovation

Second speach for the day was Steve Blackenship again on Development Practices for studios. One of the first points he made was about how handling smaller ammounts of money as a studio is much harder than handling a lot of money (referencing Robert Spencers speech the day before about how Ion Storm went crazy with their large sum, though). He discussed he need to have a set concept to start with and then do the project in sections with tasks only 3 days to a week long to complete. This is the "agile" method of development. EA Games uses the Waterfall method where, as Steve put it, the developers are expendable and when 10 go down another 10 are "thrown into the trenches" as he so well put it.

He discussed the need to plan ahead and appreciate different priorities. Communication and having Milestones were things he emphasized particularly. Milestones should be connected to publisher payments in order to give them something to see on pay day. He pointed out the need to measure time, quality and work ethic with the milestones. When I asked him about how exactly these things should be organized-by area (The Artists or the Programmers) or by Level (The first level of a game). He simply said it varied too much to give an exact answer and simply stated that it should be organized by goal-where do we want to see the game next month?-And prove milestones or targets while dealing with problems as they come.

Other questions covered the need to start planning at the end of the project and work backwards-give yourself time to work out bugs and marketing so that feature complete is on time. The need for automated testing for bugs and employing resources in the right areas. I think the overall theme for Steves speech on day to is put very well by himself in this quote. "You don't win until the last guy crosses the line". Basically, you might get your stuff done early, but you should help out people in other areas of the studio to get their work done so that the game can finish on time.

Then it was time for Shaun Bonham from nVidia again with a speach about Online Videogames. He was talking about how the PC is not at all dying as a platform, with online sales from games like World of Warcraft outselling offline sales like those on consoles by Four to One. He emphasized DirectX 10 still being very much a work in progress and should come into its own by 2009 to 2010, which is also the time around which DirectX 11 will be released (which will be on all systems). He went on to give some details about where he sees graphics going in future with higher resolution textures, pixel complexity, vertex complexity and scalable procedural textures.

The whole speech seemed to start out well and on topic but quickly degraded into more marketing. He spoke about Dynamic Hardware Tesselation removing popping and using less memory, geometric detail and bump maps being phased out, how hair is being improved and using self-shadowing as well as control points in geometry so that there is less download for online multiplayer games. At least the whole speech ended back on topic.

Then we had Nathan Pearce speak again on the Future of MMO's and Social Networking. The first interesting fact right when he entered the room was that Facebook has more photos on it than Flickr. He then went on into a speech about Free Realms which, as much as it was very much marketing, actually had me quite interested. It's Free to Play, has direct and asynchronous interaction (that is, face to face and an improved over WoW system of mail), playing in paralelle-parents playing with their kids to help them, combat only making up a small part of the game. One of the really cool things was the fact that they are taking a page out of Facebook's... book and using a "news feed" on your characters specific site for any of your achievements.

Other points about Free Realms were that the character specific website is customizable, you unlock different jobs at the highest level, you can jump from server to server (within your region of the world). There are houses, pet raising, building, minigames. I asked him about possible expansions and jobs (Since he said that you could be a ninja, I asked if you could be a pirate). He said that expansions are already planned. I then asked about any pay options for the "velvet rope treatment" and he answered that you will be able to buy points from game stores such as EB for around $5 that can accumulate and you can spend on different things. One of the really cool additions to the game that may or may not make it is a google-maps based system for personalizing your own maps. There is no PvP system in place, and to close the whole session he showed us quite a bit of the friends system where you can go onto a friends profile online, click a link and appear next to them in-game.

Oh, and he also showed a slideshow of him and his son playing World of Warcraft. Apparently he has four level 70's. Heheh.

Finally to end the conference we had Kay Gruenwoldt of Nokia, Robert Spencer of Interzone, Shawn Bonham of nVidia, Stephen Blankenship of Total Immersion and nathan Pearce of SOE in a panel discussion on the future of Games in Perth. One of the first questions asked was about how to hire or get hired and what to look for or present. Nathan gave a story about how he got his job by offering to take homework. The shared consensus was Proof of Competence and a passion and knoweldge of Videogames. Robert Spencer was asked about the MMO being made at Interzone and he revealed that it is 10 weeks away from beta. The discussion went onto "overpatching" games and I bought up the point of games being released totally incomplete, which was a lengthy discussion on Halo 2, Army of Two and Warhammer Online. The general consensus from the panel was that things like this are unavoidable and sometimes to ensure quality, you have to make cuts. Even if it's the best part of the game.

The question about getting into a studio was asked again and they added the need to have a small, complete project that is well polished and can get people hooked within one to two minutes max. When trying to land an interview with a studio, ask who to talk to directly and volunteer for homework. Look for the business developer or acquisitions officer to speak to about a job. As a developer, don't reinvent the wheel and use previous tech to get yourself started. And overall, be proactive and persistant as that will be what really nets you a job.

In closing we were given links to game.net.au and igda.org/perth for more info. The panel discussion, overall, was really very interesting.

I then went on to attend the afterparty, met up with another two students studying at other universities and spoke quite a bit with the lead designer on Bioshock's PC counterpart done here in Australia, Jonathan Chey. We spoke for a fair while about games as an artform and I even managed to convince him to look into Beyond Good & Evil and even Halo Wars. I then got the chance to have a talk to Nathan Pearce and Shawn Bonham again and joked around with them a fair bit, teasing Nathan about the fact that now when some weird new technology makes it into a Sony Online Entertainment game, I know who to blame first. And now, so do you!

The conference was really very interesting and I took a lot out of it, but it was definately a lot quieter and a lot less "marketing material" than last years was. For now though, until next years conference!

GO3, the Game Developers Conference - Day 1

2008-08-09T20:12:00.005+08:00

DAY ONE

Friday started early with the doors opened a good while before the actual expo itself was even to begin. I recieved my name tag near the entrance and was standing around watching some of the areas being constructed still when I heard a woman talking behind me to a security guard. They were discussing the internet and gaming, and he pointed out that most internet usage to date comes from online gaming-what his source was on this, I do not know-but I turned and simply nodded. The woman he was speaking to looked to me and asked "You know about it do you?" and I simply replied "I'm studying game design at Central TAFE, and it really wouldn't surprise me." She reached out, shook my hand, and introduced herself. Turns out, she was actually Sheila McHale, the minister for Culture and the Arts, and who would be giving the first speech for the day.

Much of what she spoke on seemed fairly out of touch with what the Expo was being held for, but she was apparently a fairly last minute replacement for the origional speaker for the morning so I was not much surprised. The main theme of her speech was bridging the gap and making Game Design in WA one of the new key industries. She rattled off some numbers - the overall value of the Game industry world-wide being making around $400 billion. It makes around $21, is worth around $110 million and employs over 1600 staff just in WA alone. She then went on to say that WA was the economic powerhouse of Australia, spoke briefly on the Bentley Technology Park being constructed, some of the game design studios in WA (Interzone, Floor Company, Subversive Games, Giant Dice Games) and then about some sort of array that we're vying for with South Africa to be built in our state. What it had to do with game design, I do not know.

With that, we went to breakfast. Most of it seemed to be deep-fried pastries and the like that weren't really for my tastes. I met a student going to Murdoch University and we talked at length about game design. he was complaining about how he wanted to be doing 3D work, but most of what they were learning was programming and their lecturer had lost his passion for games when it was rumored Ubisoft was no longer interested in coming to WA. We were joined later by Jon Hayward, Producer from "Game Pride", who then corrected this and said that they were still interested in coming to WA. I went off and had a walk around the expo floor since most stalls were now open before I attended the first real conference for the morning.

The speaker was Steve Blackenship of Total Immersion Software, a studio currently working on military simulations for the U.S. Steve's previous titles span from Tiger Woods to James Bond, and he worked quite a bit with EA in past. The studios first project for the U.S. Military was a mod of Operation Flashpoint to turn it into a convoy trainer. It was so successfull that it is still being used today as part of a 16 week course for the Striker Brigade. The way the game worked was fascinating. In reality, it was multiplayer. The trainees played the soldiers in the convoy trainer and developers and trained soldiers played the attackers.

After their convoy trainer they went on to make a Rules of Engagement Trainer, though Steve didn't go much into detail about it. He made the point of saying that it was not a precise artform and did not need to be as a training simulation. Question time arose and I asked him jokingly about people that play Halo or even World of Warcraft actually being good in a military tactic situation because of their ability to cooperate and communicate. Steve was very blunt in saying yes, we could most definately make a very successful army of geeks. The whole room got a laugh. Other questions included the reveal of his next project, a Mission Practice Sim, and he went on to say that Micro Expressions on human beings are the next big thing in simulations.

The next speaker for the morning was Shaun Bonham, Content Developer for nVidia in Asia and Australia. He had a slide show on the new nVidia PhysX stuff, announcements about Direct X 11 and the next series of GeForce cards. He explained the way PhysX works (It simulates movements & physics in real time with interactive movement instead of pre-calculated animations. Duh.) before going on to reveal Apex. Apex scales physics and graphics based on a graphics cards quality, what he called a "fast path renderer", and went on to show some of the modules for PhysX.

The Destruction Module fractures objects, the better your graphics card the higher Apex puts the ammounts of fractures the object can handle. The Vegetation Module is (obviously) a vegetation simulator, the video we saw had an aircraft skimming the tops of trees and even flying into them-spintering the trunk or shearing off branches. Then he showed the clothing module, which was definately the standout for the whole hour. Again, scalable thanks to Apex, it's tearable and was absolutely gorgeous but I had to question what its value would actually be in a game engine. Finally he showed the Soft Body module, which generates blobby objects like skin or jelly-I imagine this getting far more use in game engines, if only for the amusement factor.

The next speaker at the conference was Robert Spencer on opening game studios. He is the cofounder ofInterzone, the biggest game design studio in Perth and currently working on an MMO. One of the first interesting tidbits I got out of his speech was that movies are tax deductable for the game design industry, but not for the movie industry. He went on to preach the need to have a passion about games and making games, both as a studio and as somebody hiring others to work in the studio. He beat on Ion Storm quite a bit and threw some more numbers out there. In 2006 the projected value of the Games industry in the U.S. in 2011 was $44 Billion. In 2007 the projected value of the Games industry in 2009 was $47 Billion. And now, in 2008, the projected value of the games industry in 2009 is over $57 Billion. Despite the recession in the U.S, it just keeps going up.

He spoke briefly about what it takes to join a game design studio and the four points basically were Passion, Team Fit, Knowledge and Communication Skills.

Then we had a speaker from Nokia about marketing mobile games for the N-Gage. LOL.

After that, we had nathan Pierce, director of Skunkworks at Sony Online Entertainment do a speach about having voice in videogames. Nathan was really very amusing and quite funny, but made a lot of interesting points about having people speak in games. We're talking players, not NPC's, by the way. Basically, Sony is launching a voice chat soon on the Station launcher for integration with all their games, and it actually sounds really cool. One of the coolest points out of the whole speach was about Voice Fonts, the ability to overlay your voice with some sort of character-like a Male Orc or Female Elf-so that the immersion was not removed. It actually sounded really very interesting.

Finally at the end of the day was Mark McMahon and Michael Garret on Simulations for the Mining Industry. It was actually quite fascinating. The simulation they were creating was for one of the mining sites out in the Kimberly region of WA to train miners what they should do in a situation where there was a fire or gas leak underground. It simulates tiredness, exhaustion, lack of breath and such with the end goal of training them faster and more efficiently than they would on site.

Much of the theme for the day was learning transfer and problem based learning, and as many interesting notes as I got out of it, I still found it fairly boring. However, thankfully, day Two was far more interesting.

GO3, the Electronics & Entertainment Expo

2008-08-04T19:58:00.005+08:00

What a weekend. I was hoping to get the time to sit and do a write up about my experience at the GO3 Expo and Conference over the weekend YESTERDAY, but I was so tired that I spent most of the day in bed catching up on sleep, and then today was spent in class. So I apologize for the time it's taken to get this up.

First, let me apologize for the quality of a lot of those photos. I had to scrap about 90% of the ones I took because of the quality of my camera. I think the shutter on it has died, so the slightest twitch makes it blur like I've been swinging it around like a maniac upon taking the picture.

So my adventure takes place on the First and Second of August, I did not attend the expo on the Third as I was imply too tired to do so-but the conference was over by then and so I was not missing anything in not attending. This was the second year of the GO3 and the first year that entrance was free (but they still charged you for a ticket to sit in on the conference) and all of the photos I'll have to show today will be from Day 2 of the Expo.

The Conference was a game developers conference, designed to help people in the industry or looking to get into the industry in Perth make it truly one of the big industries of the state. Compared to what it was last year, the conference was far more technical and the expo was a lot smaller with an emphasis on gaming and game design here in Perth. And personally, I have to admit I enjoyed it a lot more for it. Conference talks ranged everywhere from designing effective simulations for the mining industry (Western Australia's biggest industry) to Nokia on marketing mobile games for the N-Gage (LOL).

Everywhere in between you had guest speakers from nVidia (Shawn Bonham, Business Development in Australia and Asia), Total Immersion Software (Steve Blankenship, Founder), Sony Online Entertainment (Nathan Pearce, Director of Skunkworks) and Interzone Games (Robert Spencer, Co-founder)-the biggest Game studio here in Perth, currently doing an MMO based on soccer and some other unannounced project. At the end of the conference there was a panel discussion that mostly covered questions from the audience, and it was really quite amusing overall, informative in parts.

I hope to eventually get a list of little notes from the whole conference but one of the most interesting tidbits I took from it was that buying games, consoles and going to the movies are all tax deductable for Game Developers. However, for the movie industry, Movies are not tax deductable. Owned.

I rubbed shoulders with some big names. Not only the ones listed above, but some other large studios here in Australia were at the expo to listen in to the conference. Project lead at Take Two that handled the PC version of Bioshock was there, whom I had a substantial discussion with about the future of the gaming industry and when videogames might be considered an artform like movies (and also recommended onto Beyond Good and Evil).

I got some hands-on time with Midnight Club: Los Angeles (and stole a bunch of Rockstar stickers. Including a gigantic orange one that is AWESOME) and have to admit, it is a LOT of fun. The demo was only of one race, but it's the same challenging Midnight Club gameplay that you will know and love. It's certainly not easy to say the least, and it's difficult to get used to some of the physics (like "pedestrian" cars actually being as heavy in the back as they are in the front, so it's a generally good idea to avoid them all together) but I will definately be getting myself a copy once it's released.

I'll get my notes digitalized the next chance I get. For now though, in closing, good times were had and I can't wait for next years.

Busy, Busy, Busy.

2008-07-29T22:09:00.005+08:00

It's been an insane few weeks. What with work at EB and finally getting into my Games Design course which takes up four full days of my week. On top of that, I learned tonight of the GO3 "Entertainment & Electronics Expo" here in Perth and have been going absolutely crazy trying to get myself prepared for it. Turns out that Robert Spencer of Interzone Games fame is going to be speaking at the conference there on Friday and Saturday, too. So I've gone and booked my tickets and await anxiously for word back about them.

So while I got that all worked out, I also got e-mails sent out to several of the gaming studios based here in Perth (and one to Robert) and also anxiously await responses to them too. It feels like, once more, I've been thrown everything into my lap at once. I was considering a fair while back how exactly it was that I would be making contacts in the game design industry-and then here they all are, just dropping into my lap one at a time. Plenty of chances and opportunities to make myself known and make contacts.

The Interactive Game Design course is not what I expected, but in a good way. The core parts (or what I consider to be the core parts) of the Tech Art arm of the course are ones I'm fairly confident about-that is, texture design, 3D design and level design, animation-but there's also as many parts game reviewing, programming, flash programming, audio engineering, drawing, drawing tech... it's insane, but awesome. I was expecting it would take up a lot of my days, too, but not 4 full days of the week-that came as a massive surprise. In any case, I'm happy to be there.

The campus itself is absolutely gorgeous. It's situated right next to the train yard just 5 minutes out of Perth, so coming off the train platform it feels a little seedy. But then you get onto the campus grounds for the first time and your jaw just drops. The campus is shaped like the mirror image of a question mark and seperated into 2 buildings. Building A and building B. Building B houses most of the "new media" classes, of which Interactive Game Development is included. The innards of the campus are like something out of a sci-fi movie. Actually, when I first waked in I was reminded of the hospital from Bicentennial Man... which looking at images of it now, it looks nothing like at all, but hey.

The view from the campus is gorgeous, too. The city looks a fair distance away from the campus, but we have a perfect view of all the tallest buildings just over the treeline. I'm going to have to take my camera with me one day to snap some shots of both the campus and the view, and get them posted up here.

The GO3 expo took me by surprise, I never expected anything like it would ever come to Perth and yet here it is. The conference I have to pay in order to get into, $155 as a student. But I think it is going to be worth every penny. Not only for reading material and notes for my studies this semester at TAFE, but also for the contacts and shoulders I might rub with. They say that half the effort about getting into the Videogame industry is making the contacts required to do so, and this seems like the perfect opportunity to do just that. Get myself introduced, make it known that I'm studying game design and want to be a professional, and edge my way into the industry.

Work at EBGames is going swimmingly, and every week I work I get myself one step closer to that new PC i've been looking forward to for so long. I really have to get a new price on it, as I fully expect the spec I was going for has dropped in price by at LEAST $200 since the release of new parts/the release of rival companies parts. So here's hoping I don't have ot wait as long as I expected. In any case, I love working there, and look forward to this sale just being over so that I can finally not rush myself into learning everything in a heartbeat and focus on giving customers great service, and not getting them out the door as quickly and happily as possible.

That and not having to wear the sales shirts anymore. Shirt and tie, here I come!

I've also taken over the helm of the Raven Cross, the guild I helped found on Twisting Nether in World of Warcraft. It's going to be interesting to see how that goes because WoW is currently going through it's "Summer quiet period". Or for us Aussies, the "Winter quiet period." Being a leader there right now feels more like trying to keep a dying person alive than it does leading a guild. There's a lack of hands and cooperation, but hopefully it will pass in all due time. Though admittedly, I'm considering leaving World of Warcraft for Warhammer: Age of Reckoning full time should WAR prove to be the promised land us PvPers have been hoping for.

It's going to be an interesting week, to say the least, but I'm looking forward to every minute of it. Here's hoping good results come from everything.

Memoirs of an EBGames Employee - #2

2008-07-14T22:40:00.007+08:00

Saturdays suck.

I had a hell of a Saturday last week. It was really just not a good day. It started out with a issue that has been plaguing my family for several months now coming to a hasty conclusion that bought a lot of people to tears. I won't go into details, but needless to say, while it hurt at the time it's really going to be for the better in the end. In any case, I logged onto World of Warcraft only to discover my friends had postponed our Karazhan run once again. I then proceeded to get into an argument with several people about Warhammer's cut content.

Then work started. Saturdays at the moment are insane. With the big sale going on currently, there is a line in the store on Saturdays that usually extends outside the store. And that means a higher chance of running into assholes. One of my coworkers and I were abused by one particular woman who didn't like the fact that something we were doing on the computer for another customer took a lot longer than she would have liked. Unfortunately for us, we usually just have to suck up peoples bullshit and get on with our work.

I had my first meeting the other day. Only 5 of us turned up for it (myself included) so the whole meeting was by and large quick and painless. I learned quite a bit about the way that the stores are run. Working in EBGames very much feels like a competition-or at least, that's the way it's made out to be. Stores are separated into clans based on earnings, and the better a store does the more likely they are to move into the higher ranked clans. Our store currently is ranked third for the clan we are in. Our clan is a fairly mid-range earner, and has about 8 stores in it, so third is very good.

We had the fact that customer service is the most important thing we can offer preached to us, and it's a nice thing to hear considering the stuff I hear from friends in the U.S. about EBGames and Gamestop over there. Doing customer service in the middle of a sale is a challenge in and of itself, however, as there's so many customers to serve that you simply cannot have the long-winded friendly discussions about videogames that would usually give the customer a good impression of your store. Thankfully the sale is only on 3 more weeks.

We were also told about the "Mystery Shopper". Much like a restaurant, we can have somebody come into the store pretending to be a customer rate us based on our service. And they are, apparently, brutal. They don't just rank the store but the seperate employees within it, and according to my boss, he and his assistant got absolutely torn apart in their last review. It would seem that even like food reviewers, "Mystery Shoppers" are hardasses. I've seen the way my boss works and I am still in awe of the way he treats customers. In a good way, that is. To imagine that he got such a scathing review is difficult to fathom.

And yet, I could be on the recieving end of such a review in no time.

I was pulled aside the other day by my boss because of the fact that, apparently, our regional manager saw me and believed I was not doing enough in the way of customer service. Mind you, the day he saw me working was the same Saturday that I was having a simply crap day, and given how busy it was I just couldn't devote the time to customers as I would have liked to. My boss didn't seem so bothered, my scores have been great-for a noobie. But it is always something in the back of my mind now when serving customers.

How did my Saturday end though? Lets put it this way. I had to stay later to work because of how busy we were. During the drive home, the bolt holding the seat in my car snapped and the back came out so I had to lean forward for the whole ride with no back support. When I walked into my room, I discovered that the light had been taken out of my ceiling fan, and I couldn't get the light back in for some stupid reason, so I've just left it until further notice. It was one of those days where a bunch of crap little things just piled up. I ended out spending the evening slumped back in a couch, gulping down sodas and watching TV.

The Wii is a powerhouse. Our last stock of Wii's arrived last week. We got 12 of them. Eight were preordered. Within the day of their arriving, the other 4 were sold. Had we had 6 more arrive, we probably could have sold 10 within the day. We had another stock arrive today when I was at work, another twelve. Nine were already preordered. The other 3 were sold WITHIN AN HOUR of them being in our store room. WiiFit is just as insane. In the span of 5 minutes in one of our quieter periods I had at least 5 people come up and ask me if we had any in stock. One guy told us we needed to just order in 50 and we'd be set, but in all honesty, that might last us a week.

There's so many customers that come in and ask "Do you have any Wii consoles/WiiFit in stock?" and the immediate response is "You need to preorder, they just go too quickly". Only 30% of people seem to understand this sentence and actually stay to preorder and put a minimum deposit down on them, the rest walk out of the store and come back the next week to as the same question and get upset when we tell them that the new stock came in and we're sold out again already, like it's some obligation we held onto the console for them.

I wish I had more time to write. I'll hopefully have some more to say by the end of the week.

Oh. And Fallout 3 being banned in Australia SUCKS. Expect a big rant about that.

Memoirs of an EBGames Employee - #1

2008-07-08T18:05:00.005+08:00

Well, my first week of work is over and the second has begun at EBGames in Maddington. Despite quite a few mistakes last week, my boss, Terry, told me today that I'd gone above and beyond what they expected of me for my first week. He was extremely impressed. Despite all the games sold without any games in the actual case or the silly little computer screwups, I actually managed to come out neck and neck with their top salesperson, Cale. Needless to say I'm absolutely stoked.

The Wii is popular. Extremely popular. I always knew when I was going into this job that it would be extremely popular, but not nearly as much as I have seen. I get asked at least 5 times on any given day how much it is for a WiiFit, Controllers or the Wii console itself. We had a new shipment of Wii's come into our little store today, and in the last hour and a half of my three hour shift we had sold 2 of them already, not to mention all the preorders. However, as far as actual games go, the Wii doesn't seem to have nearly as much of a connection rate as the PS2, PS3 or 360. We sell as many Wii consoles as we do Wii games in all honesty, but I think that is by and large because of supply and demand.

The DS and PS2 are other big sellers. Again, much moreso than I had origionally expected. Particularly the PS2. It's still going strong despite my reading elsewhere that game sales for it were beginning to dwindle and Sony was considering cutting support for it. The DS was something I never expected to see so popular, we sell a lot of the hand helds and we sold out of Brain Training and More Brain Training in just my two weeks at the store. We've since got a new stock of them in that haven't been put on shelves yet.

I still don't quite understand the whole negativity towards EBGames, but it seems to be more an American issue that rubs off on Australian gamers than it is an Australian issue. The stores are run very differently down here, and-particularly the store I work in-if I don't give good customer service, I'm not doing a good job. This goes doubly so when selling preowneds and price matching.

Case and point. I had a woman come in today to ask me about buying Age of Conan. I say sure, let me grab a copy of it from out back. Go out there, get it, come back and scan it through. She tells me that JB Hi-Fi are selling it for $69 to our $79.95. I ask her if she has the magazine with her, she says no. So when I question my boss about what to do, he tells me to give JB a ring, get their price, and price-match for her despite us not having it written anywhere like we would usually require. Needless to say, she walked out of the store quite happy and we had a fairly long discussion about the merits of the game compared to World of Warcraft or the as yet unreleased Warhammer: Age of Reckoning.

Preowneds seem to be a big issue with people, though. The fact that EBGames does sell preowneds seems to give them a bad reason, that it's bad for the developers making the games and cuts the income that these starving developers get. The more I think about it though, the less sense it makes in my mind. If you sell your car, it sure as hell doesn't hurt the car company enough that they whine and bitch about it. And in my experience, the industry doesn't make a peep about EBGames sales policy. When I see somewhere "Game Developers Losing Jobs: Preowneds To Blame", then I'll rethink telling people about how they could save money if they buy a preowned version of that 6 year old PS2 game they've picked up. Most people seem hesitant to anyway.

There's two kinds of people that enter the store when it comes to preowneds. The quality, and the quantity. "Quality" shoppers are looking for a gurantee that the game they're buying is in good nick. They're more than happy to buy game gurantees on their new games or extended service agreements on their consoles. It isn't necessarily impossible to sell preowneds to these people, but it is a lot harder than selling it to quantity shoppers. "Quantity" shoppers want to save money, and are more than willing to pick up that preowned copy of Spyro instead of the brand new one in order to do so. They're more hesitant about buying game gurantees, after all, the game is old and preowned already.

I don't believe EBGames is forcing preowned sales upon people, I believe EBGames is providing a desired service to customers that wish to save money. Is that really so evil?

Super Busy

2008-07-06T17:39:00.003+08:00

It's been quite a while since I last posted and so for that I apologize. It's been an extremely tiring week. Between having a chest infection, getting a job at EBGames, finishing my semester at University, getting accepted into the brand new game design course in another University and reformatting my PC, I've had very little free time.

I did at least manage to get a screenshot of the process of Project Elite while I was at University on my last day, and get a little bit more done.

I finished off the skin suit while I was in class, and then started on the tan armor, but never got a screenshot of that progress. And since I don't have the Adobe Suite reinstalled on my PC again just yet, I've not had a chance to get a shot of it at home either. I'm hoping to get the time to get it installed later this week.

Working at EBGames is fantastic. Discussing it with my boss and coworkers, I'm definitely going through a "trial by fire" having got the job during the mid-year sales. I've made mistakes, such as forgetting to put games into their cases and putting through a preorder as a cash deposit when it was actually a debit card. But these are things I fully expect I'll stop doing in time, particularly when I get more, better training after the mid-year sale is over. They've also told me they want to train me up to be a keyholder, too, before Christmas.

But working there, you quickly come to have a much more intimate understanding of games and the people that buy them. The PS2 is still selling the most by far in our little store, and that's quite a thing to see. I always expected the Wii to be selling the most. But in reality, sales (at least, in my experience) of the three "next gen" consoles games are fairly neck and neck. Though, mind you, we'd sell more Wii's and Wii Fit had we had more stock of them.

The Nintendo DS has been a surprisingly popular purchase, along with Brain Training. And despite my assumptions going into the job, people are surprisingly timid about buying cheaper, preowned games even when they have a full year warranty where the new games have none.

It's actually quite fascinating, at least from the perspective of somebody that finds people interesting. I'll be sure to write a lot more about my experiences in the store as time goes by.

Cybering In A Cyber World

2008-06-21T20:37:00.003+08:00

This is one of the first all-encompassing issues that I'm writing about, and it's a biggie.

Cybering, or 'sex online' is something I think that most people that grow up with computers in this day and age will run into at some point or another, and it's something that fairly recently has become a larger issue that I've had to think about. Using World of Warcraft as an example, cyber sex is rampant on a RP server and it's not difficult to hear about it in passing conversation. But why is it so frowned upon by people, both in the giant community that is the internet and out?

Sex online has had its bad publicity. Well, all bad really. Cheating husbands using the internet as a medium, pedophiles stalking chat rooms to find and lure in young children, to young horny preteens getting caught with their pants down by their parents. It's not something unusual, sex is a part of life and people are bound to be drawn to it in some form or another. Were people not using the internet as a medium to find sex or play out acts of sex they'd be buying dirty magazines or using a telephone with their girlfriend.

In the relatively small community of role-players that I am a part of, sex is not hard to come by. Be it characters built around their desire for sex to the cities that have seemingly become magnets for sex in the streets. The big issue with this is that it undermines the reality that is a sexual relationship, and that is bound to make people uncomfortable. A person jumping from one relationship to the next and proclaiming their love to several different people in a week is going to raise alarms with people and put people off.

That is not to say that sex or cyber sex is not a good thing. Sex is a reality of life and I think that depending on person to person it should be explored. Using role-play as an example, sex and playing out sex can add to a characters growth and become a defining point to the exploration of their lives and personalities. However, it's when this sex becomes an act of pleasure for two parties that feel nothing for one another outside of the computer that issues begin to arise, and it becomes less about mental stimulation and exploration and more about simply getting your fix.

This is not something inherintly odd. There are people like that online just as there are people in the real world that will use others up for their own sexual pleasure before moving on with their lives. However, it's the fact that this sort of attitude is so common online now that makes the matter scary. From a role-play perspective, perhaps it is just the way that character is-that they use people up and move on to their next fling. But on a purely human to human view, it's scary to think that such a concentrated ammount of these people can actually exist in one place at any time.

And that is where cyber sex starts to get its bad wrap from. People like this are, unfortunately, not far and few between. There are quite a lot of people out there, role-playing and not, that are online and running around as sexual predators. They may not realize it, but it's the actions of these people that define the way the community responds to the actions of those that are innocent.

It's easy to log into World of Warcraft and walk into Silvermoon City or Eversong Woods at any time of the day and bump into a couple cybering somewhere. But the question you have to ask yourself when you find these people is how many of them are doing it for mental stimulation and how many are doing it for physical stimulation? Even more worrying, how many of them are underage with legal aged partners who do not even realize their mistake?

It's our responsibility as role-players and as adults to treat sex with respect, but I think sometimes that even adults can get sucked up into the whirlwind of emotions that is cyber sex. It's important that we never forget the importance of the act and treat it with the respect that it deserves, rather than flaunting it or ourselves. Not only does it make us look bad when we do so, but it is an example that reflects negatively on our peers, the rest of the online community and the game that we are playing, too.

I hope one day that sex on the internet will be treated with a lot more respect than it currently is but I think that the day that happens is one that is quite far away. The internet is still young as far as things go, and I think it's this unfamiliarity that scares a lot of the previous generation about its content and lack of moderation. But in the meantime, I hope at least that there can be people out there that make a good enough impression to stick and counterbalance-if only partly-the sex crazed ones that can find their way into our communities. Until that time, online role-playing is still going to be seen as a sexual outlet for the current generation of geeks and nerds.

Here's hoping.

Is World of Warcraft Dying?

2008-06-21T12:51:00.003+08:00

So I returned to World of Warcraft finally recently, after a month or two break from the game during my job search. And coming back, it seems like the game is very quickly going stagnant. A lot of dedicated players are disappearing to fresh turf like Age of Conan, which has turned out to be a much bigger hit than I think anybody expected.

The fact of the matter is, it's hard to keep your attention focussed on World of Warcraft at the moment. While the Sunwell Isle was a big hit, with Blizzard outright stating that there were going to be no other events like it before the release of Wrath of the Lich King, it seems that the game may well be drying up. Perhaps this is a fairly pessimistic point of view-there's still plenty to do. But it seems a large ammount of people are moving on to greener pastures.

The question is, how many more are going to leave WoW and how many more with Wrath of the Lich King draw back? It's difficult to say. I know a lot of people planning on quitting the game upon WotLK's release. And likely even more players that have never played World of Warcraft before will come to join the expansion. But it won't be the same game that we know and love today. Especially when Warhammer rolls around and a huge chunk of players leave World of Warcraft to play it. That is, unless Blizzard pulls something spectacular with Wrath of the Lich King.

So IS World of Warcraft dying? I hope not. But it is most definately becomming a much quieter game. Without anything to keep people hooked besides the same all dailies, playing in the Arena, pushing new content or replaying through old, or even just role-playing, I think World of Warcraft could be seeing the start of what is going to be a very quiet hibernation period before the release of Wrath of the Lich King.

Walking

2008-06-20T22:04:00.003+08:00

First and foremost, I got some more progress on "Project Elite".

It's getting there slowly but steadily now. The guns are finished basically, I MIGHT tweak them before the image is complete but otherwise I'm very happy with how they look. I finished the darker Khaki markings today while I was at university and so all that's left now is the brown marks and then the annoying larger spots of the body suit and khaki armor.

Which brings me to my day.

I was meant to go in to a workshop early today. Or at least, I thought I was. I'm having a hard time finding employment at the moment and so I've been working with an employment agency to better present myself, and so far they've been really helpful. So I was given an appointment last time I went in to go back on Friday for a workshop on finding work in the Hidden Job Market.

They were really impressed when I turned up today. I was a full week early.

Seems I didn't notice the "7" in "June 27th" and assumed they meant this Friday.

Now don't get me wrong, the trip was worth it just to get confirmation that my resume was largely improved. But this place is a bit of a trip for me to reach. It's a 30 minute walk from my house to the train station, a 30 minute train ride in peak hour, and then a 30 minute walk from the train to the place. So by the time I got there I'd been standing and/or walking for a full hour and a half.

Stupid me though, I leave the place and walk across the road to wander around the Shopping Mall (which was completely empty and most of the shops closed since it was only 9AM at this time) for another 30 minutes before I realized I had to walk back to the train station, take the train 40 minutes to the other side of town to go to University in a few hours, and then take it back to make the long walk back home.

I decided going home and making that 30 minute walk another 2 times was just not worth it and took the train straight into the university to spend 2 hours sitting around and reading Halo; The Flood before I finally had to go into a class I don't even need to attend anymore, but hey, I got some more of my project done as a result so I suppose I can't complain.

If I walk again it'll be too soon.

"Project Elite"

2008-06-17T11:58:00.005+08:00

My latest personal project is called Project Elite. Having been doing a lot of work in Illustrator as of late I decided that I needed to do a project the likes of Vector Chief or Fade to Black. Only this time I'd do it as a TRUE vector in Illustrator rather than a faux-Vector in Photoshop using the pen tool. So, going through my Halo 3 screenshots, I settled upon a picture of my multiplayer character and got to work.

It's coming along slowly but steadily. I'm trying to do it much the same way I'd have done Vector Chief and Fade to Black. That is, with a multitude of layers to keep some organization. Only the difference in Illustrator is that separate layers can house seperate objects, and so it's become a simpler matter of simply finding the different parts, placing them correctly in the heirachy of layers to make them appear in the right spot above or under other pieces of armor and then going to work. It's pretty much the same way I did previous 'vector' projects, only I'm using "layers" as a way of organization rather than "layer sets".

One of the popular things about Fade to Black and Vector Chief was the specs to the pictures. An exact number of layers used, the size of the .PSD, that sort of thing. I plan to do much the same thing this time around, only I have my doubts that it will be quite as impressive sounding. Except, perhaps, a full count of the paths and the time it took. So far I'm sitting at around 6 hours worth of work to get as far as you see above. It's getting there slowly but steadily.

Rather than starting out with the massive parts as I would have before with my previous projects, I've started out with the smaller ones to get a good idea of how many separate color layers and shades I'm going to want for the bigger parts. This way if I screw up or dislike the way that the number of colors I'm using looks, I can easily just delete it and start again without losing too many hours of hard work like I would working on the larger pieces first.

It took some experimentation to get it where it is now. I started out first with a 'silhouette' below all my color layers that I was trying to use as a sort of clipping mask-trimming the edges of the shapes without all that much effort. However, it worked out to be more clunky than useful and so I went back to the old style of using the layers themselves as masks. Layers higher up are more 'perfect' than the layers beneath them, and simply mask those imperfections. This allows me to be lazy around the edges of my images and not have to panic about quality until it's all done.

In any case, it's looking great so far and I'm happy with the direction it's going in. So I thought I'd give you guys a little sneak peak at what I've been doing with myself these past few days.

RC Website Upgrades

2008-06-14T13:12:00.004+08:00

While I had some free time today I decided to sit down and do some work on the Raven Cross forums. I've had it planned for a while now to update the old, annoying icons and buttons that were all over the site by default to something that better suited the theme. Since it's the weekend and I've got nothing else to do (and my internet connection is only running at 64K) I sat down for a few hours just working on the tiny little icons, buttons and even a set of emoticons to truly flesh the site out and make it 100% Raven Cross.

There's a series of at least 15 topic buttons of different variations. They posed an interesting challenge since there were two main colors to work with for the Raven Cross website (variations of dark grey or blood red) and so I added a third color (orange) and used some classic icons that would be familiar to any Raven Cross member (the... well, Cross) to create all the buttons. Buttons for topics with no new posts are surrounded with grey. Topics with new posts are surrounded with red. Hot topics with no new posts are surrounded with grey and orange. Hot topics with new posts are surrounded by red and orange. Stickied topics have an exclamation mark and any variation of the above. Locked topics have a tiny little lock in the centre of the cross in orange and any variation of the above. New topics have a little orange circle in the centre of the cross and any variation of the above.

I also added 5 new buttons for "Quote" "Reply" "Edit" "New Post" and "Mark As Read" that are all over the forums now, and much better than the text/bleary grey buttons that were in their place before. I duplicated the style of the red, grungy background in the Raven Cross logo for these buttons and used the same font that's used in all the graphics on the site to tie it all together nicely, so they look really good and like they actually belong there now.

Finally was the Emoticons which I decided to do to make up for the fact that this update has been a long time coming. Don't let anybody tell you that making emoticons is simple-you have a limited workspace to work with and are trying to achieve any number of expressions that will be instantly recognizable to people (See if you can pick out the "mischief" emoticon... that one was interesting to think up) but I'm happy with how they turned out. Again, stuck with the red and the black just because it suits the site.

In the end, it's a lot easier to view than the old design ever was. It looks really, very good now that it's finished. At least, if I don't say so myself.

Complexity in Videogames

2008-06-10T22:43:00.003+08:00

I was trying out EVE Online recently and the thought came to mind about complexity in MMO's. Most people I know that know of EVE Online don't play it because it's overly complicated. To quote one person, you "get launched into space to fly around in a spreadsheet". However, other games such as Halo or World of Warcraft get pounded for being too mindless, so what is it exactly that makes a game complicated or not and what exactly is a good middle ground?

There's no doubt that EVE is complex. Picking it up, it's not nearly so simple as it is to pick up and play a game like Halo or even World of Warcraft. That isn't to say that these games do not have their intricacies either - no, they can get quite complex when you're heading into the tail end of the game (or in Halo's case, a higher difficulty). The difference is, these games build you up to the complexities of their tail end or higher difficulties, where as a game like EVE tosses you in head first, gives you a little tutorial that explains the very basics of the world around you, and sends you on your way.

While this might seem like one of its greatest weaknesses, further thought and watching the development of the EVE community brings me to think that, rather, it's lack of accessibility is one of its greatest strengths. EVE has one of the largest, most interesting circles of gamers on the internet and is rich in roleplay the likes of which is difficult to describe. Just recently, EVE had a real-world council elected that is going to convene in Iceland. Even imagining a thing on such a scale as that happening with World of Warcraft is difficult to fathom.

And so going by simple logic, a more complex game means that there should be more complex players. From my short playtime in EVE so far, most of the conversation and chatter I've overheard has been highly intelligent-particularly for what is basically a newbie zone. In World of Warcraft, no matter what server you are on or what character you roll, you are pretty much guaranteed to hear somebody butchering the English language in a few hours game time-minutes, even, depending on the density and time on the server you're playing on.

But is there any perfect middle ground between highly complex and spectacularly mindless games? I don't think there is. People play their game of choice to become involved or to escape, or a mixture of both. While some games may come close to having that perfect balance of complex and mindless, to each person the more complex or the more mindless portions of said 'perfect' game are going to shine through more than the other, and so there's no real perfect middle ground. Looking at EVE, it's running quite healthily - not nearly so much as World of Warcraft, but well considering the competition it's up against.

The fact of the matter is, no matter what game you play, there are always going to be the vocal people who have something to say about what the game does. Right or wrong. Great or bad. I'd urge anybody that has never played EVE because it's too complex to give it a try, you might find you enjoy it. Because guaranteed; there will be a post out there, somewhere on the internet in the next few days that will complain about how numbingly mindless the content of World of Warcraft is before the person who posted it goes back to their daily in-game grind.

There's nothing preventing us from giving more complex things a try. Merely the fear that we might not be able to keep up with it or learn from it.

MGS4 & NDAs

2008-06-08T13:17:00.003+08:00

For those of you that don't keep up with gaming news, there was a bit of a fiasco recently where reviewers going in to play Metal Gear Solid 4 had to sign a non disclosure agreement. Now, this isn't unusual with any sort of game review - it usually pertains to basically not giving out information about the storyline and such - but the MGS4 NDA also had information on things that people buying the game should have a right to know about, such at the install and rumored long cut scenes.

Now this might not seem like a big deal but professional reviewers cut a lot of slack for the way they act or their ethics quite often.They don't have to buy games since they get asked in to review them ahead of time, so price is taken out of the picture, and the general way they can review games and have their views effected by advertising payments... they run a business, and giving a negative review about somebody that is paying your bills is a bad business practice (see Gamespot). But this also brings into question reviewing ethics and the ability of professional reviewers to be truly unbiased. Signing an NDA that specifically states you can't tell people about somethings that might effect a buying choice (MIGHT, this is MGS4 we're talking about) only further brings into question review ethics.

That isn't to say this is all on the reviewers shoulders here. The fact that such an NDA was even made in the first place doesn't make the issue look smaller or keep it out of the public eye. Hell, it only makes the issue look LARGER and like something that Konami isn't confident enough about to even let people KNOW about. So this hasn't gone and diffused as situation, it's only gone and made it that much worse. On the same note, however, what should a reviewer do when he's given an NDA like that? That is where a lot of reviewers views come into question.

If you could score a job where you played a game all the way through weeks ahead of the rest of the world, and all you had to do about it was write... wouldn't you do it? That is, of course, assuming that you are a gamer, but anyway... There are issues about reviews that makes a lot of people nervous. From point scores to the ethics of being paid to advertise the game that deserves a negative review. It's these things that are quickly making the big game review sites seemingly less and less popular and the smaller independent reviewers much more attractive. Case and point ; Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation.

So what can be done about it? Really, there's not much. As a medium, Gaming is still very much a child, and so growing pains such as this are to be expected. Before long, however, Gaming will come into maturity much in the same way as other popular forms of media, and issues like this will be left behind. However, it all needs to start with the reviewers, and as new gaming symbols like Yahtzee rise up and start taking their interesting, different approaches to game reviews, the bigger reviewing forces out there will start to take notice and change their own practices. In the mean time however, I expect Zero Punctuation to only become more and more popular among the masses, and that the NDA issue will have no effect on the sales of MGS4 - but will remain a permanent stain upon what is expected to be a squeaky clean release of a good game.

Pushing Forward

2008-06-07T20:00:00.003+08:00

I've been searching for work for the past couple of months now. I dropped out of World of Warcraft and immediately stopped playing as to start searching for work full time. The search, however, has not been going so well. I've put my resume in with countless businesses and gotten only 2 interviews to date. The most recent, of which, is the subject of this post.

I've been graphic designing as long as I can remember now, and I know I'm damn good at it. I found an advertisement recently about a photography studio called Viva that was currently hiring junior graphic designers. I put in my resume and cover letter, and before I knew it, I was called back and asked in for an interview.

This is only the second interview of my life and the first one-on-one interview I've ever had, but despite that, I am just myself and it goes brilliantly. I bought in my portfolio, and they were extremely impressed with it. They even ask me to sit down with their head designer and do some of the tasks he had set out ahead of time to show him what I could do. He's highly impressed and even thought I was currently doing a diploma course. He even went so far as to go and look at my deviantART while I was doing the work for him.

However, a few days later, I got a call back and was told that I didn't get the job, that I'd missed it by just a hair. Like any good perfectionist, I began to question what it was that made up their mind. Did I do something right? Did this other guy that got the job just have more formal credentials? What was the deciding factor? I got upset. Angry. Not with the studio but with the fact that I let such a job slip through my fingers. And I wanted to give up.

Cooler heads prevailed however as friends on the Twisting Nether Gazette heard my story and threw suggestions and their own stories my way, and after getting a good nights sleep and giving myself some time to screw my head back onto my shoulders properly, I came to a conclusion.

While things are hard, we have to keep pushing forward. Find new ways to tackle situations and take on board the praise of others while still picking apart what we do in our own mind. Becoming complacent and expecting things to fall into your lap does not make said things fall into your lap. Having a positive attitude and outlook doesn't bring positive results. Positive ACTION brings positive results. I acted positively in the whole interview process, and while I did not get the job, I made a distinct impression - enough so that they wanted to keep my details on record to keep in touch with me should anything happen in future. While it's not the job I was hoping for, it's a step in the right direction. A big step, at that.

This is why I have been trying to get work in the industry that I'd best be suited to. I'm not a salesman or a burger flipper. I'm a graphic designer. And if I want to excel in my career, the best way to do that, is to take the career most suited to me and keep on trying to get it. That means no giving up, no getting frustrated when being told no-taking everything in stride and pushing forward isn't the key to success. It's taking everything in stride and pushing forward while constantly trying to improve oneself that separates a dreamer from a dream maker.

In The Beginning...

2008-06-07T19:40:00.005+08:00

I suppose I should start off with the obvious. Hello and welcome to Diomades! My new blog on Life, Philosophy, Design and Videogames. That's assuming of course that you didn't see the gigantic text in the logo.

Introductions first. My name is Matthew Dyet, I'm a 21 year old student currently living in Perth, Western Australia with high hopes to get into Game Design. I've worked with computers for most of my life and done graphic design for more than half of it. Given the environment I grew up in and the way my life has developed, I can be quite philosophical at times. And I love videogames - any genre, on anything that plays a game - so long as it's a good game, I will usually enjoy it.

Now, an explanation. As you can see in the start of this post there are 4 small images, each with a part of what will be written on this site. As this is a precursory introductory post, it has every label. However, in future posts, expect them to be much more focussed - they will have one, two, three, four, or any combination of those images to label what the content of the post is. This way, if you only want to be here to read my stuff about Videogames, you need only look out for the Videogame tag at the top of each post. You can even click it to see all the posts marked with the Videogame label.

So thank you for reading and welcome to Diomades!