Parachronist!

Nothing good can ever come from staying with normal people.

2011-06-09T00:16:00.006-04:00

Along with a good deal of souls from my generation, I highly enjoyed coming home after High School to watch Toonami on Cartoon Network. It was an incredible block of action cartoons, anime and american alike, from Thundercats and Dragonball Z to more bizarre shows like Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo.

And it was awesome.

The host of Toonami was originally Moltar, of Space Ghost fame. Then it moved onto a little robot named TOM, who went through a couple iterations of coolness. They would have random PSAs, game reviews, and just plain neatly edited and soundtracked bumpers - in between commercials and programming. These extras really turned Toonami into a culture force instead of just another cartoon show.

Toonami essentially laid the groundwork for the success of Adult Swim.

I'm bringing this up because I just found ToonamiAftermath.com - a fan resurrection of all that was right during that period of television.

If you too miss one Cartoon Network killed, give it a shot. Just don't give the people in the chatroom much faith. They're a bit... well...

A mod called me a douche for calling out homophobia.

But, at least there's ReBoot!

It's BYOND me

2011-03-22T18:41:00.005-04:00

Yeah, that didn't last long.

It's very frustrating, understanding how to script but not understanding the particular programming language. Time and time again, in reference files and tutorials, I find myself thinking "That... doesn't make any sense..." or "But why do I do that?"

Then, if by some miracle I find out how to solve my problem, it's almost always something ridiculous. An answer that was just phrased in a fashion that I could understand. Generally, something that makes me say, "Well, why didn't they just say that in the first place?"

Maybe I'll take a look at Game Maker. Apparently they have a huge community there that's easy to interact with. (BYOND does in fact have a community of some sort, but it isn't very large. That and the forum isn't very inviting to me for some reason.)

***

What I'd really like to do right now is play with combat mechanics. I've been playing Darksiders lately, and on a whim visited Vigil Games' website to look at their job openings. They're the folks working on Warhammer 40k: Dark Millenium Online - and that alone can keep my eye on them like Sauron to the Ring. For their Darksiders franchise, they had a Senior Combat Designer posted, which got me thinking.

That would be ridiculous amounts of fun. How can I do that?

So I think I'd like to make a simple brawler, like a Streets of Rage - but with more dynamic fighting. Something more fluid and lifelike, less of the standard hit-it-til-it-dies.

I find that my enjoyment of hit-it-til-it-dies is waning quickly. Perhaps I've just been spoiled on Hit-Point-less roleplaying games, like White Wolf and Savage Worlds.

Into the great BYOND

2011-03-07T21:10:00.006-05:00

The rant of Brenda Brathwaite concerning the current state of new blood in the game industry hit particularly close to home. I completely fit the mold of the student sent out into the world with design docs and meager skills, without having anything solid to contribute to a game development team. Due to the structure of my undergraduate program, those of us without a programming or heavy art background were forced into support position.

Personally, this meant positions like 'project manager' or 'sound engineer' - two things I wasn't intending to focus on at all when I decided to go into game development. For the good of the many, though I did what I could - to the extent of a floundering undergrad's capabilities at least.

Fast forward a few years, and I am still not a published game dev. Even despite the frantic designer mind and incessant idea brain.

A few posts ago (which translates to about a year and a half) I was working on a game in Inform 7 - a natural language programming language for Interactive Fiction. It was an attempt to Make Something No Matter What, and it failed. The laptop that the game was being written on is out of order, and some very pressing things happened in my life around the same time. I suppose it is a good thing, however, since I'm not sure I quite have it in me to make that particular game work in that medium.

Since I don't have any formal training with a programming language, Inform 7's grammatical syntax made it very easy for me to leap into creating a game all on my own.

Which is probably why I'm having such difficulty with BYOND - or Build Your Own Net Dream. Kotaku recently shared NEStalgia, which is like the MMOG baby of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. I've played for awhile on the Zenithia server and rather like it. The program itself allows you to create your own worlds as well - for free - and seemed rather straightforward.

I'm stuck, but I know that it has a lot of potential for rapid prototyping of single- and multi-player games, so I'm going to do my darnedest to make it work. More to come later. In the meantime, I made this in Byond's icon editor in no time. Which gives me hope.

Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more

2011-03-07T02:41:00.003-05:00

After seeing so many of my friends having such a great time at GDC, I've reached the final stage of admittance.

It has been far too long since I've been a part of the industry community, and I need to get back into that sphere. Now that I have stable employment and a tiny bit of free time, I can devote more energy back towards my initial goals. The main reasons for me leaving Michigan and moving to California in the first place.

One of which is "attend GDC." So next year, that's exactly what I'm gonna do!

(Disclaimer: unless it makes absolutely no freakin' monetary sense for me not to.)

I wanted to get this post down and get the momentum going again, before I had a chance to tell myself "Ehhh I'll do it later."

Next time: "Learning BYOND" or "Why the freaking hell can't I finish a game?"

Weblit addiction: Eikasia

2009-09-24T16:22:00.005-04:00

So a friend of mine is the author for the weblit, Eikasia.

It's a serial fantasy story updated every friday. And it's good. The characters are fresh, the world is interesting, there's action, there's romance...

You should read it.

Here's the synopsis from the site:

Nyx is an Ailuran, a feline shapeshifter, who chooses to live on the outskirts of life. Elmiryn is an unconventional warrior who seeks revenge. Both are cursed. When circumstance places them together to fight an enemy whose very existence is in question, they find uncommon allies, life-threatening adventures, and cerebral danger waiting.

Yes. Cerebral danger. You read that right.

Give the story a chance. I ended up binging the entire thing in a couple nights, I liked it so much. If you do too, be sure to become a fan of it on Facebook.

Interactive Fiction attempt #2 - Campus Arcana

2009-09-13T03:28:00.003-04:00

I have an idea for a story I'd like to write one day. At first it was going to be a novel, but then I found Inform 7 and attempted to make it into an Interactive Fiction. This did not go well.

Now that I'm back on track for making progress with my life, I've decided to actually sit down and finish a damn game. For too long I've been telling people I'm "working on my portfolio," without much to show for it outside of networking.

Time to kill two birds with one boulder.

Rever, my pet storyworld, needs some loving. I need to do some hardcore worldbuilding. My plan is to release a tragic Interactive Fiction, where you step into the end of the world. 'The Fall' is the apocalypse that removes the Gods from play, as well as laying waste to the planet. In Campus Arcana, the player is a student studying for a test in a library when it happens. And they're doomed.

I'm aiming to make players want to be curious about the world, and to look for answers as to why the world is ending. If I like how Campus Arcana rolls out, I'd more than likely write other viewpoints - so players can piece together clues from different experiences.

Inform 7 lets me make a game without really learning a programming language. I'm not opposed to it, but right now I really want to have something I can say I Finished. That, and I'm still getting my writing to a worthy ability. Having to describe a lot of things you don't normally think about, while also attempting to guide a player, is a good exercise.

I just hope I can avoid playing Blue Lacuna until I finish, because I think it would absorb my life.

Subjective Space

2009-09-10T20:16:00.005-04:00

Expanding on what was written at the Artful Gamer on the subject, I wanted to bring up the difficulty of manipulating a player's perception of a spatial environment. It's a bit of a ramble, as I'm just now getting back into the hang of this writing thing.

The first thing that comes to mind is how effective straight up text can be at describing a scene. Right now I'm writing an Interactive Fiction, and it's very apparent how a game needs to balance pacing and information in order to give the player the best experience. In such a personal medium like Interactive Fiction, the player automatically fills in a lot of holes with their own imagination. At least for me, this is akin to how pixelated graphics can still portray emotion and style. They only represent spatial positioning in the game, and allow for the player's subjective description to stay on the surface of their thoughts.

Generally when something interesting is happening, there's a lot involved with it. Hearing a muffled 'whomph' come from outside can be somewhat alarming, but not as alarming as witnessing the van exploding with your own eyes. The fireball, the shrapnel, the bystanders being knocked back – these details all add to the severity of the scene. If we add more detail like limbs, car alarms, and a visual overlay of concussive feedback the situation turns towards distaste and even annoyance. It may be an extreme example, but I believe it illustrates the kind of balancing I'm referring to.

'Efficiently detailed.' That's the phrase. Underwhelmed vs Overloaded.

Please visit the Blogs of the Round Table's &amp;lt;a title="Blogs of the Round Table" href="http://corvus.zakelro.com/round-table/"&amp;gt;main hall&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt; for links to all entries.

Faceless in Post Apocalyptic Fantasy

2009-08-25T22:47:00.005-04:00

Much of my now scarce free time is spent participating in or even running table-top RPGs. In fact, as I write this, I have my newest character sitting in my lap while I wait for a new campaign to begin.

This array of different situations has given me a frustrating irritation when it comes to running my single online game, Rever. Using Maptools is great, allowing for dice macros and gridmaps to be shared amongst players. As it turns out, this was the only campaign which actually used gridmaps. As a gamemaster, I have had a growing hunch that my game wasn't really as fun as it should be.

I asked a player of mine a couple questions to try and get an answer to this hunch.

A week later, I realized why her favorite session was her favorite session.

I've been feeling obligated to use the gridmap software - to my own detriment. The best game sessions were when I never used the thing aside from showing a region map.

Next Sunday will be a test to see if this is in fact a correct deduction or if perhaps it's more of the faceless table that's causing a problem. I think I'm going to turn the map into a top-down view of a table and see how that goes...

Relocation Complete

2009-08-05T12:14:00.003-04:00

Hello everyone, from Monterey, California! Yes, yes, I have moved from dreary and depressed Michigan to weather-static yet economic panicky Cali. However, that I am now working for the Monterey Bay Aquarium and see the Pacific Ocean every day, I can assure you that my quality of life has skyrocketed. Sadly this is at the expense of time spent on the internet.

And yes, in retrospect I probably could have mentioned that I might be having a hiatus. I opted to instead tell you about the plan afterwards, like a supervillain. That and I was distracted.

Distracted with what, you ask? Roleplaying! I am now in at least four separate pen-and-paper campaigns. Two of which, I'm GMing.

The first campaign I joined was Exalted. "Real ultimate power," I was told as I made my character. There's a high Martial Arts edge to the campaign that's being run, so the game itself is a Demigod-powered mix between Kung Fu Hustle and Pirates of the Caribbean. (It's set in the West.)

I opted to go Lunar, since it seemed more my style. A high temperance and conviction No Moon who wants to bring social and natural harmony to the West. His animal form is, basically, a Dire Komodo. Though since we're in the West, it can swim. I took some Charms I probably shouldn't have during character creation, so all my character is currently good for at the moment is acting as a soundboard for planning. Still no perfect dodge, and I only have Mantis Form to the form itself.

It's really super fun, though. I'm really glad I've been introduced to the game. The backstory and expanse of fiction is really, really impressive.

The second game I joined was 7th Sea. Holy jeez, I had not gamed until this system. Swashbuckling through-and-through, with a clever filtering of Europe's history into a great fantasy world.

My character, Luca Caligari, is a nephew of the Prince Caligari, and one of his Lord's Hands. My virtue spread was very fortuitous for me, as I captain my own (gun)ship. Though now I'm little more than a taxi for the group I joined, it looks like my social and martial prowesses are coming into their own very quickly.

I even got a steampunk/Syrneth ring made up for me at Polycon, to wear during game.

The last two games are the ones I GM. Rever is my post-apocalyptic fantasy world that I use Maptool to run. I'm currently attempting to switch over from Fate 2.0 to Savage Worlds - last game we used the system and I really, really like it. Savage Worlds is indeed Fast, Furious, and Fun! Considering it's also only 10 bucks, it was well worth the purchase.

Then, finally, my Mutants and Masterminds game. It was meant to be a micro-series, while my roommate was unable to game on Sundays, but the players love it so much they want me to keep going with it. One of them even pulled me aside and thanked me, as he'd never written fiction for any of his characters before this one. Considering I think he's a great GM himself, this was quite a compliment.

The story is actually put together really well. Three separate plots all woven together, with a lot of extrapolation going on that allows me to easily expand the scope of the team's adventuring. It also helps that they all think we're heading for a 30 Xanatos Pileup.

Alas, the babbling has to come to an end now. Thanks for checking in, and let me know if you want me to expand on any of these next time.

Blogs of the Round Table: April '09

2009-04-20T08:55:00.012-04:00

Taking Games Seriously, Making Game Seriously: This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you.

While my topic of choice this month isn't exactly something of an inflammatory nature, it leads into a social issue that I believe a lot of people are avoiding discussion about.

"Today, 1 in 150 individuals is diagnosed with autism, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes, and AIDS combined. It occurs in all racial, ethnic, and social groups and is four times more likely to strike boys than girls. Autism impairs a person's ability to communicate and relate to others. It is also associated with rigid routines and repetitive behaviors, such as obsessively arranging objects or following very specific routines. Symptoms can range from very mild to quite severe. "
-AutismSpeaks.org

Autism is, frankly, a genetic epidemic. It is a massive drain on both private and public resources, and individual mental health. Unfortuantely, most people still don't understand the Autistic Spectrum, unless they happened to come across a serendipitous primetime news hour, or an issue of Time that deals with the subject.

This post will be an attempt to design a game that would allow people to understand what it's like to be in the mind of a severely Autistic person. I feel that much more empathy is needed by the populace at large, before they'll be able to make informed decisions on the welfare of Autistic people as a whole. The mechanics will be made primarily on inferance and intent, instead of psychological accuracy. I'll be basing the experience off of the habits of my step-brother.

I believe the best way to present Autism would be to have a particular Heads Up Display, on first person perspective.

The feeling I want players to have is that of frustration, caused by logic-based chaos. Glancing at a row of books would have them automatically count themselves off with both visual and audio cues. Subtlety would work best, so imagine a thin line with a circled number at the end of it. If an object is out of place in the arrangement, the line would be an angry contrasting color, to annoy the player into making things properly organized.

My step-brother can bang a plastic drinking glass on a surface in a perfect beat for hours, if his appetite allowed, while balancing random stuff on his head. His tactile sense is heightened and insatiable, compared to an average person's. These two factors will be represented as Hunger and Balance meters. Affected by those will be a Mood bar.

If you were to perform touch-based actions, place things on your head, or go swimming, your Balance meter will increase. If you eat, your Hunger bar decreases. And yes, they're supposed to be opposite, for the sake of chaos.

As your Mood bar suffers, so does the HUD. Your content semi-singing becomes more whiny or more bold and forced. More objects will be labeled as you see them, and they will be labeled with the most random pictures possible. Flipping the light switch will start producing pictures of dogs, clouds, and writing utensils. (He can also spend a long, long time flipping lights on and off.) Everything that should be producing pictures that group them together somehow, instead display things that have no logical connection.

As your Mood decreases, so does that of the people around you. As they become more stressed, they start doing the same thing as objects you see. In your vain efforts to understand what they're feeling, they begin making absolutely no sense in what they say and what they're labeled as.

It's meant to be more of a simulation, though attempting to play with the goal in mind of telling the NPCs around you something could work as well.

The point behind it all is that I feel very, very afraid about the future of disabled people. What's going to happen if we can't provide for them? What's going to happen when their parents die, and they're delegated to the government to be taken care of? Will their treatment be up to standards of human rights? What happens if the government can't? What happens when the people who need to make decisions, have to do so even though they have no idea about the subject?

Who's going to be there to prevent unethical scientific treatment? Who's going to be there to advise the parents after unfortunate genetic analysis of their newly-fertilized baby-to-be?

Who's going to answer the question no one can safely ask?

Please visit the Blogs of the Round Table's &amp;lt;a title="Blogs of the Round Table" href="http://corvus.zakelro.com/round-table/"&amp;gt;main hall&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt; for links to all entries.

Uzumaki Prototyping

2009-04-17T01:41:00.004-04:00

Had great fun tonight, making progress with the board design for the Uzumaki game.

Over the next few days I'll be going through the Manga, again, making World and Story cards, with plenty of different effects to test out. For example, a Story card from Chapter 3, "The Scar," could read: "Spin movement - all other characters move towards yours that many spaces, using shortcuts if possible."

Oh, that's another thing. I'm throwing out dradels for a few very good reasons.

1. No dradels = less cost

2. No dradels = no losing said dradels

3. Using the spinner instead will further reiterate the influence of Dragon Pond on the characters, and the player's influence on Dragon Pond.

Brilliant, really. Wish I was the one to think of it...

Resort vs. Sandbox MMOG Design Part 1 - Immersion

2009-04-10T16:58:00.021-04:00

As my adventures in Darkfall continue, so does the analyzing of its design concepts. This post was actually started several days ago, and has been slowly germinating ever since. Now it's just too big for its pot, so I'll be splitting it into two parts. Part 1 will venture into the systems which make players attempt to have fun, in Darkfall Online and World of Warcraft. Part 2 will contrast the risk and reward circuits between both games.

Despite Aventurine's self-destructive attitude towards its community, they are in fact continuing to make Darkfall Online a functioning game. Cities finally have gates to go with their gatehouses. They've balanced out more pseudo-exploits that take advantage of the macro mindset. More people have successfully purchased it. However, they still don't give warning before server restarts, even though players can lose their mounts or rafts when that happens. They say they're working on a fix for that, but in the meantime they give the cold shoulder to unfortunate players. Apparently, a clan managed to bring the entire server down just by building a guard tower, which was glitched to the point it attacked its makers. Two steps forward, one step backward, apparently.

They may not know what they're doing on a Public Relations level, but Aventurine did pretty well for themselves by designing a world system that empowers its playerbase to make their own fun. Experienced players are self-guided in their playspace, as they don't need missions or quests in order to procure a productive experience. Instead, other players and player-driven situations provide opportunities.

Darkfall, simply stated, relies heavily on players being responsible for their own immersion.

A game like World of Warcraft, however, makes the player into a tourist. They're shuffled from one location to the next activity, towards bigger and cooler locations, to more awesome drinks and fireworks. They can give themselves up, and go with the flow. The sweet, turn-off-your-brain river of repetition and reward.

Residents of Agon are left to their own devices, with little guidance outside of other players. They become engaged beyond the aesthetics and simple mechanics, quickly joining the rain of pebbles descending on the pond, each attempting to push back the waves from enemy players. In Darkfall, even a newbie can help influence the world stage, if they're at the right spot at the right time. That's pretty exhilirating.

For example, you start off in one of the racial starting cities - one of three surrounding fortresses per race Capitol. Quickly getting ordered to kill goblins, you run out with your newbie weapon and start the difficult fight, slowly collecting crappy armor as you watch your skill go up with the weapon. Passing by the city is a small patrol of a large clan, who you strike up a conversation with. Impressed with your outlook, they give you a mount so you can follow them to their home city. Along the way, you manage to spot a large enemy force stalking your party, and you alert your new allies. They quickly alert their clan on Ventrilo, and set up an ambush.

Because of you, 10 players lost everything on their characters. And it's your first day.

By limiting the game-driven influence on a player, they allow the user to take a larger ownership - and investment - in the game experience itself.

Contrast this with something like World of Warcraft, which is designed around holding the player's hand as their character simply follows the giant glowing exclamation marks to their next activity. Naturally more options become available to a player later on the game, concerning what they want to do in Azeroth, just as return visitors know what rides to attend or avoid when they go to Disneyworld.

This isn't inherently bad design, as WoW's success can attest. I do wonder, however, if people in Azeroth become more mesmerized than immersed in the world. I've heard somewhere that the human brain easily goes into auto-pilot when in a sensory-collection mode, as if in a grocery store.

Due to the ever-changing conditions that lie just under the surface of Darkfall, though, I find myself almost always engaged on a higher level.

State of Darkfall Online

2009-03-19T23:11:00.011-04:00

The steady fall of Ultima Online has taken with it the promised land of persistent, hardcore PvP. Nearly all MMOGs since have focused on the EverQuest/MUD-based model of gameplay. By simplifying and streamlining those theories, World of Warcraft introduced a huge audience to the genre. These 'carebears' ended up marginalizing the players out there who desired something more out of an MMOG since every company wanted to take a slice of Blizzard's multi-million-dollar-per-month cake.

Being 'gamers first,' and not businessfolk, Athens-based indie company Aventurine has struggled through nearly a decade of development. Often whispered as Ultima Online's 'spiritual successor,' Darkfall would reintroduce the concepts of risk, danger, and control to the MMOG playbook. Full loot, first-person style combat, and character skill-based stats had the hopeful drooling and the naysayers crying, "Vaporware!"
Finally, late last year, Darkfall entered its Closed Beta. Not everyone was let in, but I was fortunate enough to participate. While the world of Agon had its glitches, its potential was easy to see. Players didn't have levels, so there was no "you have to be this old to ride the mount" mechanic. Someone could come in game, get geared up by a friend, and start fighting other players. If they really wanted to, at least.
At the end of February, Darkfall was 'launched' in an absolutely terrible fashion. A sequence of hoops was created, and at the end was a pre-order which would allow beta-testers to have a head start. At least, that was the plan.
The Account Management that Aventurine used was inadequate for the demand, on top of ISP issues preventing a great deal of people from even seeing the webpage properly to begin with. Some Accounts which were made - like mine - were bugged from the beginning to never work. Others would only pretend to pre-order the game, instead failing utterly.
Unsurprisingly, the Account Management link that was given out to the Beta Testers as a whole was quickly posted to the forums. Aventurine was too busy trying to get its game launched to even apologize properly (read: give them Accounts) to the beta testers left high and dry. While they've since fixed Account Management and everyone who wants an Account can make one, not everyone who wants to purchase the game can, at the moment. There's just not enough servers for the demand.
This is all beside mechanics which had yet to be fully balanced while still in Beta. Mounted combat was given a huge boon right before 'launch,' but refinement of the new damage dealt had yet to occur. Sieges - the practice of, not neccessarily including Warhulks and Cannons - were far too rare to have given much accurate feedback. The servers would still shut down for maintenance at the drop of a hat, with no warning, essentially destroying any travel progress one has made along with their mount.
However, those who considered themselves fortunate enough to have taken their chance at purchasing Darkfall soon found intense sync issues once back in-game. At its peak, the most profitable thing to do was fish for lobster, since a player was unable to react to the goblins blinking around them.
While the syncing was being worked on, Aventurine prevented new purchases of the game. There was a new issue, with the queue to enter the game growing longer and longer. Players were leaving their clients on while they went to work, and were still waiting for a play slot when they returned home. In order to allow people to play Darkfall from any browser, the Darkfall Simulator was made - essentially a few images on a web-page showing Darkfall's unmoving queue. In essence, people were paying to wait to play an Open Beta version of Darkfall.
For those still in-game, lag is still a major issue when large groups gather. Though outside of that, I'm reassured that Darkfall is very enjoyable for those players who love skirmish-sized combat, as well as having a sense of pride for building a city.
It bears clarification: the players in-game are a fraction of those who want to be. The community is exceedingly frustrated with Aventurine. I clearly remember stating back in Beta that I would pay the subscription just to sight-see, since Darkfall's settings could be so beautiful. There were times I could just sit down on a cliff and watch the clouds go by. That charm is still there, but its being eclipsed by Aventurine's projected incompetance more and more.
It's harsh to phrase it that way, and I agree. If you think I'm overdoing it, you should visit Darkfall's forums. At least I have compassion. I think what Aventurine has done is spectacular, and they have the making of one of the 'essential' MMOGs. However, the cold shoulder that the Darkfall community feels from Aventurine only amplifies the game's shortcomings, and further threatens its longevity.
As can be expected, a lot of players and players-to-be are wondering about the true state of Aventurine's finances. It's not a huge step of logic to consider that the company was forced, one way or another, to launch before the game was ready in order to start some sort of cash flow.
Despite a stumble out of the starting gate, Aventurine and Darkfall can still rejoin the pack. There is an obviously neglected niche, which Darkfall (mostly) covers. Aesthetic and social details, which are outvoted by the hardcore PvP types, need to be addressed as soon as mechanics are balanced well. Otherwise, Agon will be a simulation instead of a world.
Even though the community is highly dedicated to Darkfall, 'forumfall' is quite simply too toxic to stand. Players are juggling the theories of arrogance, incompetence, and apathy in order to cope with Aventurine's vague and shallow-looking Public Relations. The company's image needs more than a pinata saying, "There will be ample compensation for any missed game-time."
I believe that offering up some transparency into the operations of Aventurine would go a long, long way. Several studios have successfully used developer video-diaries and mini-documentaries to help with an irritable playerbase. The outspoken players may tend to be fickle and crude but they're actually very forgiving. And patient, too.
In short, Darkfall is having trouble with its eggshell. Aventurine seems to be an aloof parent doing the best it can. The hatchling isn't exactly strong enough for the real world quite yet, but now that it's here the only option is to nurture it. The beast has a strong heart, and as long as Aventurine can keep itself alive I think Darkfall can grow out of its emaciated and bewildered state into a fire-breathing contender.

BoRT: March 09 - January Introspection

2009-03-19T08:49:00.006-04:00

The Blogs of the Round Table is a monthly extravaganza of talent orchestrated by Corvus Elrod of Man Bytes Blog.

If you submitted a post to either the January or February topics, feel free to write about the process you underwent in converting literary themes into gameplay. Did you struggle with anything in particular? Are you satisfied that your game design(s) communicated what you intended? Have subsequent comments or idea made you wish you could go back and start he process over? And how much does your design say about you and your own interpretation of the themes of the source material?

Back in January I transformed Junji Ito's manga, Uzumaki, into a board game.

Well, to be more accurate I was more of a hypnotized conduit.

The idea, for the most part, unwound itself into the new medium with little fuss. It was as if I were spinning thread, simply taking from the source and letting it form into something new. As usual, for me, posing the situation to a creative friend (or two) greased the wheels.

Due to how readily the process occurred, I'm not exactly about to attribute it to talent. It felt more like serendipity, as if I was fortunate to witness a thematic metamorphosis. The source was prime for being used in such an interactive way - the horror of Uzumaki relies on imagery and dread instead of endangered anxiety. As such, the art is naturally transferable. What was more difficult - and still not perfected despite my confidence - is the matching of plot and gameplay pacing.

I don't believe that my interpretation of the manga has detracted from the source or has even been distracted from it. It may very well be that my adoration is blinding me, as I willingly admit I can often become a zealot for my favorite fictions.

Nonetheless! I actually think this board game would reinforce the monomania of Uzumaki. It would allow players to further explore the tendrils of its icon into the physical. With some work on pacing, the metaphorical could also be cracked.

I intend to do it, too.

Please visit the Round Table's &amp;lt;a title="Round Table Main Hall" href="http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/round-table/"&amp;gt;Main Hall&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt; for links to all entries.

Enter Raptor Valley

2009-03-14T01:51:00.005-04:00

So Titan Quest is fun, but its mod creation tools are almost as much. Lavinia is there for scale.

A little peek into the transition area approaching the marsh of my level. I'm calling it Raptor Valley, in the hopes that later on I'll be able to replace the main player-character model with one of the 'Raptor' models. Then, I'm hoping to have a branching storyline, using the same map progressing through time - instead of progressing through different areas altogether.

Combat will be negligent, amazingly enough, and will be more about exploration and world interaction. Depending on certain factors when a level ends, the world will change accordingly. Kill too much prey, for instance, and you'll quickly die of starvation. Hunt too many humans, and they'll start hunting you back.

At least, I hope I can do all of this.

RE 5, Racism, Poverty

2009-03-10T00:22:00.009-04:00

Yesterday I reached a threshold with this Resident Evil 5 discussion on race. I'm extremely frustrated that everyone is talking about RE5's racist imagery, and essentially ignoring what I'm calling 'perpetuation factors' of African stereotypes. And yes, the trailer itself does have racist imagery, and being able to see it doesn't make you a racist.

The Game Overthinker said it really well in his take on the RE5 issue.

[Africa is] "...a region that's often scary enough what with all the wild animals, crippling poverty, near-constant civil wars, and an omnipresence of AIDS so thick that the local warlord's roving death squads can cut it with their machetes."

I highly recommend listening to it, as it's an essential side of the discussion. Here's another article which further highlights the viewpoint of privileged youth. Here's a good interview with N'Gai Croal (may he consult in peace) where he clarifies his take on the situation.

So yes. Capcom messed up by taking a baseball bat to the anthill instead of a decidedly more tactful approach. Even though the anthill is gone, all the critters are now everywhere and really mad. (It's not a perfect analogy, but I think it's close enough.)

Now, a lot of folks are arguing here and there that gamers as a whole need to start taking this discussion seriously, if games and games journalism are ever going to be taken seriously as a whole. I think that means we need to broaden the conversation from just racist imagery, to include perceptions of Africa.

Let me make this clear: I'm not saying that racism and understanding racist imagery is not important, or any less important.

It's a good idea to teach people that yes, a white guy shooting only black people appears racist, and this is why. I also think it's a good idea to teach people that yes, many parts of Africa do in fact brutally kill each other on a regular basis, and this is why. (Tribal law, religious tradition/superstition, lack of education, suppressing economic factors, etc.)

And, naturally, not all of Africa is like that. There is in fact some good in Africa. Probably. Somewhere. I would expect. I hope.

I'm not an expert on African history or culture, otherwise I'd feel much more comfortable going into the points I brought up. I'll see if I can cobble a companion post together, soon.

If you're still apathetic on why all this matters, or vehemently think it doesn't, than I invite you to take a look at the following two links, courtesy of Brinstar's fantastic blog: Acid for Blood.

A primer on privilege: what it is and what it isn't

“Check my what?” On privilege and what we can do about it

Fun with Blender

2009-03-08T01:51:00.002-05:00

Back in college I had an Independant Study to make a small gallery of creatures, in Blender. I enjoyed my time with the open-source software greatly, and didn't realize how much I missed it.

For some reason, last week, I had a sudden urge to model my trusted roleplaying character, Arcadian. He's a massive Lizardman - like a scaled Brock Samson without the lust. I decided to start with his head, to shake the rust off. The above picture is version 2, which is looking much better than the first.

Not that that says much. The goal is to mix an Iguana with a Tyrannosaur with a Crocodile. I don't think I've screwed myself up quite yet, but it's early in the little project and I have full convidence in my abilities.

I kept the jaws apart, because I may want to animate it opening and closing later on and didn't want to deal with cutting into the model. But apparently that's actually really easy to do in Blender (imagine that!) so there was nothing to be worried about. Oh well.

How not to release a MMORPFPRTSG

2009-03-05T22:51:00.006-05:00

[The following is mostly casual complaining with a bit of information and opinion thrown in. Hey, at least I'm posting again!]

In case you hadn't notice, Darkfall was released on February 25th after several weeks of extensive Beta testing, of which I was a part. Now that Aventurine has taken the liberty of denying me access to something I enjoy, I find I have time to do other things with my life again. So thank you, Aventurine, for sucking really hard at such a convenient time.

Anyway, it all started a few days before the star-crossed released date, when Aventurine figured out that a "large network provider in the US is facing a serious network issue and this is affecting an account management service we're using. As a result account creation and pre-ordering are timing out."

It's a hunch, but I think it was Comcast. They're prone to sucking.

On Sunday, February 22nd, we were given this update on the ISP issues:

"Two major ISPs, one in Europe, the other in the US are cooperating on the issue we've been facing. We've been supporting them, and they've been working around the clock. The issue has been escalated as far as it can go, and we believe it's just a matter of time before it's solved. The minute it's done we'll likely launch the pre-orders."

February 23rd, and the pre-order issue was apparently solved. Personally, this is when I made my account. What I didn't learn until yesterday, however, was that the majority of the accounts made on that day were bugged, and wouldn't nor ever would save information it needed for pre-ordering.

As can be expected, all pre-orders were sold out long before launch day. On that day, the 'retail' version sold out incredibly fast. A great deal of the beta-testing community, however, was still out in the cold. This is a huge group of players who stuck with the game for the better part of a decade, who believed that it would in fact not be vaporware, despite the majority opinion on the matter.

It seems as though Aventurine has simply decided to let serendipity decide who gets to purchase the game and play. For awhile there, people were spamming their F5 keys, refreshing the Account page, in the hopes that the server would wake out if its stupor long enough to let them pass. Then Aventurine went and got themselves some anti-multi-session software or something to alleviate the stress and auto-temp-ban the folks trying to give them money.

Why didn't they just email all the beta testers personalized links to purchase the game? Surely that would have been easier on... well... everyone.

It's been over a week since Darkfall launch, and I still haven't been able to buy the game. There is no 'retail box' that needs to be purchased. Are they using pen-and-paper to process accounts?

So, ultimately, there were people playing the game. Not a lot of people, but enough. Apparently the experience was like Beta Testing II: The Reckoning. A horribly laggy, unsyncable sequel to a a great college film. I don't quite understand how Aventurine went from having a stable game with lots of beta testers, to an unstable game with few beta testers, in such a short amount of time, without patching anything. I didn't particularly care at the time though, due to the large spite-filled tumor that started colonizing my brain.

I cannot wait to read the Post-Partum on this one! Dear Gamasutra, send someone to Greece to stare impatiently at Aventurine until someone talks.

Am I being too hard on Aventurine, an underdog developer trying to fill Ultima Online's big shoes? Maybe, but there's a couple pretty unacceptable things going on. Even now, Darkfall's servers still crash without warning on a semi-regular basis. Anyone using a mount, at the time, loses it. The moons of Darkfall's world can be seen through the horizon when you're in higher elevations. The front page of Darkfall's website hasn't been updated since before Beta started. The world is large and mostly barren of wildlife - despite having beautiful landscapes for them to inhabit.

This is something Aventurine did very well, that I must commend them for. It adds to my patience with them greatly. Darkfall has the most beautiful god damn sky I've ever seen in a video game. I am completely ready to pay them money to let me sit and watch their virtual clouds go by. That is genius art design right there.

What else would placate me? I don't even mind not playing at this point. I've got enough things to keep me busy. First, I'd stop calling this a 'launch' and admit that things went wrong beyond just the Account Management software. Level with the community on what exactly is being worked on and why, and what the timeline is for further development of the game - as opposed to its infrastructure.

Expect me to go into a much more intelligent consultation on Darkfall's mechanics and design, soon.

Did you get burned by Darkfall's release? Did I skim over anything crucial? Please comment and correct!

The Upper Hand

2009-02-04T20:50:00.004-05:00

Stardock is growing. They're investing $900,000 in an expansion to their Plymouth, Mi headquarters.

This is a super important really awesome thing for Michigan. Getting game studios to open up shop here would be a very strong sign of economic recovery, I think. It's not like the state is hemorrhaging talent because they can't find jobs here, or anything of the sort.

Combat Authorship

2009-02-03T08:20:00.006-05:00

One of the ideas that came shooting out of my small maelstrom of designing, last month, is already getting a couple folks excited. Like a spark to a powder keg, Jane McGonigal's Tweet about a book-writing game sent my imagination into overdrive. The resulting banter in and out of the public eye helped fuel my brain-explosion.

The biggest problem that I have with writing - or really, being productive in general - is my inability to focus on doing one thing for long periods of time without becoming distracted. I continually fail to clean my room or finish my laundry because it's just not very interesting. To solve this conundrum, at least for writing, I'm proposing the notion to make it much more of an edge-of-your-seat affair.

Many people rightfully bring up National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) when discussing new ways of writing. However, even though NaNoWriMo is technically a game in my eyes (at least in the same way as a marathon is) it doesn't have the mechanics I personally need to be productive. The only metaphor I can come up with is that of an engine; I need focus engagement for fuel, and momentum facilitation for the road. Something that goes beyond the driver and passengers all using their feet, as community can easily land somewhere between unreliable and dead weight.

Basically, the idea is to add a captivating power struggle to act of creative writing. The concept that stuck in my head most fervently was a split-screen, player-vs-player (or rather, author-vs-author) assault between their two word processors. As each author writes out their drafts, the game would keep track of the syllables being used, the average length of words, perhaps even more difficult concepts like ease of reading. It would translate these into attacks on their opposing document.

The margins of the player's workspace would have an ablative armor, which followed its relative text as the author continued to type. This would be the primary way of damage control, although mechanics based on particular writing styles could come into play to buff the document's resistance to damage. If a document does take some hits, it just starts losing random letters. I wouldn't want people to have to re-write huge chunks of their drafts, after all.

The combat aesthetic is something I'm undecided on, though I do have some definite forerunners. My first idea was that of arbitrary weapons being summoned out of thin air and blasted at your opponant, like those incredibly entertaining gifs.

Another option could be to have two opposing armies along the bottom of the screen, being reinforced based on your productivity. It would be equally minimalist as the previous suggestion - perhaps Patapon like in its graphic style?

A third could be a sci-fi ship-to-ship combat, with your diction forging turrets and torpedo bays and lance batteries which blast the crap out of each other at close range. Since I'm a huge 40k fan, I can very easily see this.

I do not have much else down at the moment, but it still seems promising to some degree. Hopefully keeping community a part of this kind of game will help foster creativity. Bonus rounds could pit the two authors into casual exercises of creative writing, such as having two of their current characters have a brief, meaningless conversation about an arbitrary topic. Checkpoints could allow you to take a moment, finish your thought, maybe plan ahead a little, and also look over your opponant's work for them.

I'm very curious to see if authors playing this for fun and productivity will be as petty as gamers can be in first person shooters, quitting the game instead of falling behind in 'points.'

EDIT: I hopped into #nanowrimo, and they told me about Write or Die. It's a nifty little program that warns and punishes you for not writing. Personally, I find this notion extremely stressing, and when it comes to writing novels I don't think it's something that would be particularly effective for me. Blog posts, on the other hand, and smaller pieces, will probably benefit greatly from it. /EDIT

So, what do you guys think? I wonder if this would be something good to continue to blog about, if enough interest arises. I know I'm going to need help prototyping this thing, because right now I'm thinking that the easiest way to do so would be to make it into a math-based version of the idea and go from there. And just for clarification, the 'competitive' part in this should be considered very light-hearted, and far more closer to 'co-op.'

I for one definitely have a novel I'd like to pump out using this thing, if it ends up being useful.

BoRT #2, Jan '09 - The Black Cat

2009-01-27T18:33:00.022-05:00

We're being given another round for this month's Blogs of the Round Table prompt. Which is good, because there have been some amazing suggestions by its participants. I highly recommend clicking randomly once you reach the drop-down.

I'm going to go ahead with the game that preceded the short story, 'The Black Cat.'

As with my previous post, the game will deal with spoilers in the story.

One of the most prominent factors in 'The Black Cat' is the narrator's ability to observe his mind and body turning against him. Not only that, but he eventually gives in, and embraces the damned being he's become. Naturally, that's one of the key ingredients to the game.

I imagine a first-person vantage point, to really put the player into the narrator's viewpoint. (The Source engine would be more than enough.) During transitions and episodes of mental dissent, having a narrative voice-over should help provide the immersion I'm looking for. Or at least, the foundation for it.

I don't think the game should take all that very long to play. In the beginning, as can be expected, you learn how to interact with the world. However, this is also a great time to provide backstory. (In retrospect, much like what Fallout 3 did.) For instance, the narrator speaks of how Pluto, the titular cat, would follow along everywhere as his constant companion. Pluto would even try to walk through the city at his side. To build upon the setting, there would be a moment where the character finds himself outside his house one morning, to discover that Pluto has escaped and is running out to join him. The player must then simply scoop up the cat, and return him to the house, to proceed to the next part of the story.

During these simple exercises, however, a lot of minor details can be used. In the above example, when the player picks the cat up, a simple animation of the cat resting in his arms will be just at the bottom of the screen. When you approach the house, the character's free hand can automatically pet and scratch the back of Pluto's head, which in turn elicits a loud, obviously playful, and loving purr from the animal.

To drive home the point that Pluto is inseparably fond of the player-character, every brief 'tutorial' segment would have the cat in a blatantly noticeable, attention-grabbing position. Just as important, Pluto should seem content and happy with this arrangement, as should the character.

In 'The Black Cat,' Poe makes the narrator's wife second-string to Pluto. Despite being very complimentary to the narrator, that's all she really is. Her introduction should reflect how much of a side note she is, to the character. All that needs to be done is to have her mention, teasingly, about the superstitious connection between black cats and witches. A friendly banter, culminating in a verbal pat-on-the-head from the player-character. Then she'll return to tending to the various pets, and the player-character will look down to Pluto and give him a playful scritch along the neck.

Once the player becomes infected with the Demon of Intemperance, it will be time to get into the real horror of the game. By this time, the player should have a definite attachment to Pluto, so the character's desire to be with his cat should hopefully be easily transferred to the player. Coming home one night, inebriated and swimming through a visual filter of blurs, Pluto will avoid the player in the most annoying way possible. Sitting just close enough to appear catchable, then running just fast enough to avoid capture, then climbing high enough to further elude the player's efforts.

Eventually, after more than likely knocking several things over trying to escape the player, Pluto will slow down enough to be caught. The cat will be hoisted by the throat in front of the camera, gurgling a screech as its eyes go wide with fear. (Personally, I find this sight equally frightening.) Drops of blood will form as the claws dig into the hand. Then, the cat will be lowered, and the screen will fade to black. The rapid beating of a heart should be very noticable, without anything on the screen.

I need to make a note about this scene. When first considering this post, I thought about the shock value of actually seeing the pen-knife referenced in the short story, doing its evil work. I then realized that 'The Black Cat' isn't really about violence. It's more about self-destruction. Besides, insinuated violence can affect the player more, when the moment is left to their imagination.

A secondary 'point' of the game could (and probably should) be the dangers of alcohol. Making yourself a drink will improve your state-of-mind, which I picture as a status gauge similar to Indigo Prophecy's. However, the longer you go between drinks, the more depressed you become. It's a vicious cycle, and one that directs you towards the climax.

Chasing will be a central challenge of the game. From the baby's candy ease in the tutorial, to the mechanically impossible later in the game, these moments will show the intensity of the narrator's emotions. He loves Pluto. He ends up hating Pluto. He replaces Pluto. He ends up dreading the new cat. The player-character will ultimately have to run from the cat, as it chases you merrily, due to the massive emotional trauma it deals you whenever its in range.

Once your emotional state reaches a certain level, the player loses control as the character goes into a rage. It will do everything in its power to either harm the cat, or leave the house. The character's fast heartbeat will echo loudly. As the game progresses, it becomes easier and easier to rage. Naturally, events will follow those of the book, with added context to the scenes. Keeping to Poe's vague descriptions would feel far too sterile.

I imagine the murder of the narrator's wife to be dramatic, but over with very quickly. The player-character randomly stumbles, and sees the cat take off. Rage takes over. The camera looks over to a nearby axe, and automatically moves the character to it. He'll pick it up, and be unable to drop it. The player regains control, and will naturally turn around. The wife will be there, and will attempt to calm down the narrator while grabbing for the axe.

The rage will return, and with one quick swing, down goes the wife.

The voice-over will demand that the cat join her. While the player walks around the house looking for it, bloody axe in hand and vision tainted red, an internal monologue will explain its plans to wall-up his wife's corpse and avoid imprisonment. Once this finishes, which will be connected to searching every area of the house, the scene will end.

After the next fade in, the narrator will be sitting in his house, nursing a small drink, wondering to himself about his good fortune that the cat ended up running away for good, as it hasn't returned for several days. A knock at the door will herald a party of policemen, and as they perform a search of the house the character's heartbeat will be subtle and calm.

When the search ends, the character's internal monologue will admit its growing pride, and the fateful arrogance will take over. The ending moments would be a scripted event, with the tapping of the wall and resulting flight across the cellar. The scream needs to be absolutely panic-inducing. A noise that is otherworldly, and as such fills the player themselves with anxiety. The narrator will back away, glancing at the fear-frozen faces of the officers, before stopping to watch them tear down the masonry.

The camera zooms in, as his wife's seemingly undead body falls partly out of the wall. Then, climbing up onto her head, the emaciated and demonic-looking form of The Black Cat will appear. The character's pounding heartbeat will follow the player into the rolling credits.

BoRT: Jan '09 - Uzumaki the Board Game

2009-01-16T16:29:00.008-05:00

I figure that the new year would be a good time for me to join in on the fantastic Blogs of the Round Table series over at Man Bytes Blog.

This month, we're Putting the Game Before the book. The question is asked, "What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first?"

Initially I considered Raptor Red, as it's one of my favorite books. That, however, would essentially be a Sim along the lines of Lion or Wolf. Passing over The Giver, I began thinking of Poe. For a time I was desigining something for The Black Cat - a maddening, Noir-esque piece where you control a hulking madman with an axe as he destroys his house hunting down his taunting pet.

I at long last settled on Uzumaki. It's a manga by Junji Ito, set very firmly in the horror genre. In english, the title translates to "spiral." This may not seem very scary at first, but Uzumaki is a fiction powered by monomania. Spirals are taken to the extreme and become instruments of insanity. Snail shells, fingerprints, suspension springs, hurricanes - anything is fair game. Once the insanity strikes, death is generally not far behind.

Ultimately, like a maelstrom, there is a point of no return, where you can no longer escape from your doom. The curse is just too strong to flee. I don't know about you, but Inescapible Doom is a powerfully disturbing theme to me.

(Read it top right to bottom left!)

SPOLERS BEYOND THIS POINT:

I felt that the best way to continue the spiral-madness was to make the town, and its events, into a board game. The track of play would become a spiral, ultimately turning into the swirling longhouse that appears later in the story. In the center of town would be the pond, which the players are attempting to get their characters to, first.

Why would players actively be trying to get themselves to their destiny first? No, it isn't the Cthulhu Cult mentality of 'getting it over with first.' Instead, the player is actually the Spiral-Cave itself. The board, on the other hand, represents the characters' desire to escape their destruction. In other words, spaces on the gameboard will push characters away from the middle, while the player's actions will drive them towards it.

I imagine a derivative of Chutes and Ladders for automatic gameboard mechanics. Switching places with another gamepiece, or otherwise moving your opponants around would also be present.

Now, time for the monomania. In the center of the board, inside the pond, is a dial-and-arrow players can flick to select directional effects. Instead of dice, dradles will suffice. Circular event-cards, with a spiral backing, would be an obvious choice for events. My co-worker suggested a Tornado Rex-style top, that can threaten to knock pieces down at certain spots as it parades around a spiral-track; it's a delightful idea due to the twister-causing troublemakers that show up later on in the story. I'm just not sure if I can have that 'track' built onto the board, and have the board roll-up when you're done playing - to get spirals on either end.

I think the point has been drilled home, though. This board game of troubling events attempts to affect the players the same way the story does: make you obsess over spirals. Personally, I will always remember the horrors of Uzumaki - especially when I have a visual cue that's so subtley prevelant in our lives.

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

Spelunky Goodness

2009-01-14T23:23:00.005-05:00

I absolutely love procedurally generated content, and it still surprises me how the vast majority of gaming seems to ignore it. I've played countless hours of Nethack, was absolutely enthralled by the first Jade Cocoon, and now I'm steadily losing my life to Spelunky. (Thanks to Darius for singing its praises.)

Imagine, if you will, an Indiana Jones-inspired platformer, forced onto the SNES. It's a dungeon-diving game, with a progression of floors, changing as you get deeper and deeper. For instance, you start off in a cave-temple - but at level 5, a curious overgrowth of forest appears. Monkeys and all.

Now, imagine that every time you play the game, the levels change. You'll never play the same thing twice. One playthrough, you may find yourself starved for bombs and grappling ropes by the second level. Another, you'll be merrily sending a huge wall-breaking boulder tearing through one of the anomalous subterranean shops.

You'll get to see a lot of different levels, because you'll be dying quite a bit. It's a brutal game - though much more forgiving than Nethack, that's for sure. Healing is often, but taking damage is even moreso. Even if you do manage to stockpile a lot of health, though, there's plenty of one-hit-kills to keep the game dangerous.

I'm going to put this up there with Dino Run, for quality retro-graphic games. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go play it again. Need my fix, and all.

Ciaphus Cain: Hero of the Imperium

2009-01-07T19:40:00.001-05:00

Once again I find myself vindicated for being so in love with the world of Warhammer 40,000.

A co-worker is letting me borrow "Ciaphus Cain: Hero of the Imperium," and it is quickly becoming one of my favorite series.

I actually started this post a long while ago, I was so psyked, but I wanted to finish the collection first before singing its praises.

For those of you unfamiliar with Warhammer 40,000, it is one of (if not the) largest Sci-Fi IPs out there. There is an incredible amount of background to the world, and Games Workshop does a great job of maintaining this by asking two questions for every one it answers. It is a grim and gritty pseudofantasy, full of gut-wrenching (and eating) terrors. Life can quickly go from bad to worse, no matter who's side your on. Especially because there's not really a 'good' side and a 'bad' side. There's the "kill them before they kill us" side and the "kill/eat them all" side.

40k's tagline is: "In the vast darkness of the far future, there is only war." Obviously, the galaxy is a serious place, 40,000 years from now. Which is what makes Ciaphas Cain such a delight.

It's hilarious. Dark, sarcastic humor that plays alongside epic Bond-quality action.

Cain is a Commissar in the Imperium of Man. The Imperial Guard army uses the Commisariat to insure that Morale doesn't drop too low. In standard practice, this means putting the fear of the Emporer into soldiers by any means neccessary - which generally ends with an unceremonious on-the-spot execution. As can be expected, most Imperial Guardsman don't like the Commissars attached to their ranks.

However, Cain is a coward. He doesn't plan on dying any time soon and does whatever he can to lesson the danger posed to himself. Amazingly enough, this usually ends up getting him in the worst danger possible, which he generally escapes by the skin of his teeth. Due to this unnatural fortune, he's garnered an incredible reputation for being the best mankind has to offer. Which, of course, gets him into even more trouble.

If anyone is looking for a good sci-fi series to get into, or are new/old fans of Warhammer 40k, or really dig the Dawn of War series, I highly recommend checking out Sandy Mitchell's work. You won't be able to put it down.

The Beat

2009-01-03T11:06:00.003-05:00

I was considering, the other day, the meaning of life. Generally, I had taken the scientific route - to reproduce mutable offspring or some such. This goes hand in hand with the similar definition (or at least a facet) - heritable genetics.

Now, however, I think the meaning of human life is undeniably attached to Having Fun. Is one really living, if their life is not enjoyable? Is Fun the metaphysical reflection of a pulse?

The reason I'm thinking of this, right now, is due in no small part to joining Top Secret Dance Off. Essentially, a social networking structure where teams of players get to challenge one another while wearing a disguise. Comments on the posted videos grant the players points for different aspects of the Dance-Off, like +1 Awesome or +1 Style.

It's part performance, part production, part social engagement, and all sorts of ridiculous fun. Even though Jane McGonigal (who is some sort of High Priestess of Meaningful Play) started it, there's no world-changing purpose to it. It's fun for the sake of fun.

That doesn't mean it's not enlightening. One of the players, who is wheelchair-bound at the moment, didn't think dancing was possible until TSDO prompted them to find Finger Dancing.

On more personal notes, I'm shedding the rust from my video- and audio-editing skills. Through tangential learning, I was instructed that the act of sleep 'locks in' muscle memory. Oh, and I'm meeting some really amazing people, too.

So come join us. You don't even have to dance, to participate. It's fun, I promise.

Prototyping Story

2008-12-21T12:23:00.007-05:00

I'm curious, from my amateur position, how exactly some of these professional game developers make decisions on story. Fallout 3 spoilers will happen beyond this point.

I've had two major incidents with conflicting story, in Fallout 3.

The first one occurred during my attempt to complete Blood Ties. While hunting for Lucy West's brother, I eventually found The Family's lair and bribed the guard to let me in. He soon went to sleep, and I started to take everything I could before killing the guy. Not only did he not have the bribe I gave him, but this also made The Family hostile towards me. Which didn't make a whole lot of sense, because there was no way for them to have known he was dead.

To make a long story short, I one-man-armied The Family and found Ian West. I woke him up and showed him his sister's letter, and he went back to sleep, promising to leave The Family shortly. On the way out, I killed one last member of The Family, and I had a little window pop up saying that "The Family and the residence of Arefu are now hostile towards you." Which didn't make any sense at the time, because Arefu hated The Family.

Then, Ian tried to kill me - despite being outrageously out-gunned. I let him run away twice, but despite his near-fatal wounds he attempted to gnaw at me one last time.

So I vaporized him.

Much later, I would find Reilly (leader of Reilly's Rangers) in a coma at the Underworld infirmary. Being told that waking her up could be dangerous, I decided to go looking for her Rangers, instead. I went to their headquarters, eventually hacked in, and found them to be gone. So I took a look around (as well as some loot that was just laying out) and left. Coming across their emergency radio broadcast, I would ultimately attempt to rescue them from being trapped on top of the Statesman Hotel by Supermutants.

When I met Butcher for the first time, he asked me about Reilly. Even though I knew her location, and had read her diary, the only responses I had for him were those of ignorance. I was forced to say I had no idea who Reilly was, despite knowing exactly where she is. As well as who she was recently sleeping with.

I was also rather shocked to find her back at Ranger HQ, after we escaped the Hotel. I was looking forward to bringing the Rangers to Underworld for a dramatic "she's waking up!" moment.

The point of all of this is that there seemed to be a lack of important story routes between certain nodes. Perhaps they weren't exactly obvious but still not hard to realize.

I wonder if these could have been remedied, had Bethesda made an in-house Interactive Fiction of Fallout 3 to prototype these kinds of situations. I've been watching the Alabaster project with interest. Emily Short and co. used Inform to solicit more branches of dialog for the story, where a player's conversation attempt would be recorded and then implemented in a future version.

Apparently, this whole 'attempt recording' feature is going to be packed into a future release of Inform. Is something like that crucial for the development of sandbox worlds? To me, it seems as though the QA phase of Fallout 3 was focused on getting rid of technical bugs, instead of some equally important ones in the storyline.

So I wonder if it would have been easier and more efficient for Bethesda to rip out all the combat and simply make a textual version of the game. I can't imagine that they actually did do such a thing, because of my previous examples.

Or is it simply OK for the developer to release it, then patch away those inconsistencies when the millions of players find them?

Feeling like a Hero

2008-12-08T15:40:00.003-05:00

Those who have known me for any reasonable amount of time would nod in agreement when I admit to having a hero complex. I often imagine situations where I put myself in harms way in order to protect the people around me. While I do have an ego, and will readily surrender to being fawned over, I don't believe this mentality is primarily for social reasons. Deep down, I believe that having heroes in the world is important, and that people must step up when the need arises.

Last night, I was playing on a private server of Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst. Having just started, I was still getting the hang of the proto-Fable combat style when my two-person team stumbled upon a Dragon's lair. My barely-equipped sword-swinging male avatar, and a slightly lower level, quite cute and short, female mage. Against a big huge dragon.

Now, this fight didn't pan out exactly like other MMORPGs. Normally you just run up and start attacking the dragon itself in those. In PSO, however, it was much more like a multiplayer Legend of Zelda boss. You had to attack its feet, until it fell over, when you could attack its head. When it flew into the air, you had to try and avoid its firebreathing. When it dove underground, you had to avoid its lava-burrowing "hax." Then restart the cycle.

After a few false-starts (as I learned how to fight the thing) the two of us found ourselves locked in a lasting fight with the beast. However, the mage's lack of health made it easy prey for one-shot KOs, and my character spent most of the battle fighting alone.

Well, not alone, as the situation translated as such: The dashing swordsman risks life and limb to fell an epic beast, racing against time as his companion watches, bleeding out on the sidelines.

The fight became not only a game-event, but it became a performance as well. This single addition made the experience more rewarding than any quest I had ever done in WoW, or EVE, and probably other traditional MMOGs.

I feel as though the key difference is that I, personally, had a higher stake in the fight. It wasn't just 'shin-kicking combat,' but an actual engagement. You tend to already have an audience in games like Guild Wars, but I never felt impressed by someone taking out a monster. I knew the mechanics behind the fight relied primarily on arbitrary numbers, instead of actual player skill.

My fight with the Dragon of Forest II had more than just stats involved. Knowing when to go all out with attacks, and from what angle to attack from, all played a part. It was much more fast-paced than the boss battles I've seen in WoW. I feel as though if I was in the mage's place, laying on the ground with a perpendicular view to the world - watching my partner in single combat in this game - I would have been just as impressed as she was.

The point being, I really don't like what combat has become in most online games. Yes, simplicity is very important, but there's the danger of detachment as well. I wonder if most MMOG players have simply come to accept detachment from their characters.

Or, am I just tainted by consideration of mechanics, when playing these kinds of games? If you play WoW, or EVE, or another shin-kicking combat MMOG, do you wish the combat had something more to it?

The best things in life are free

2008-12-01T09:23:00.005-05:00

Amazing that a week or so after starting my business, I find this little gem.

I'm a very tactile artist, so finding Inkscape is exactly what I needed. I would have preferred to use a.viary's Raven, but I can't beta test it yet. Which is a shame, because I want to very badly. Pheonix is just not my cup of tea.

Someday, though, that suite is going to be a powerhouse of productivity. I wonder if they're a public company...

Wait. Raven's in Alpha now? Why the hell didn't I get an email? I mean, I can't afford the 10 bucks a month to become a subscriber, but I still would have wanted to know about it. Sheesh, maybe I put too much faith in the company. They're private, anyway.

I installed Open Workbench last night, as I was working on my Path to Glory warband. Sadly, there was a massive Java error that I wasn't able to quickly fix - so that'll be tonight's project I think.

From the it's-good-to-know-people department comes RPTools. IneffaBelle, from Superstruct, pointed me that way. A bunch of free tools for over-the-net Pen-and-Paper roleplaying? Hallelujah! I can finally start Rever! Thanks again, Belle.

I just need to get OW working so I can effectively plan out how the hell I'm going to get all of this done.

EDIT: Massive afterthought, here. I just wanted to mention Mibbit as the best free IRC client around. Browser-based, no download, no plugins. And you can even see Twitter updates in it, as well!

Updates!

2008-11-23T17:34:00.005-05:00

So this month-long hiatus has been mostly due to waiting for my brain to piece itself back together after Youmacon and stuff. That was so incredibly fun - I highly recommend people give it a try next year if they've been wanting a good anime convention in Michigan. Here's hoping the Spoony Bards can make it again, as well as some more guests. While I was there, I found a small board game very similar in purpose to Shinobi, so I picked that up to review and analyze.

Which I still have to do.

The biggest note, however, is that Night Machine Entertainment, LLC is now a legal company! Now I need to finish writing the Operating Agreement, get Nate and Brennan signed on, register some logos and trademarks, and work on the website to make it worthy enough to be linked to. Then, the creative mercenaries can finally roll out. Or at the very least, start making a war-chest.

We're going to need it if Michigan is going to end up sucking as much as it looks like it will.

Oh, and figuring out what counts as a write-off-able expense would be up there, too. It's not like I can easily afford a CPA quite yet.

Next up: Gaia's zOMG MMOG finally launched. And it's really neat. When Gaia manages to iron out a few of the issues that still plague the game, I'll have a more in-depth review of it. In the meantime, I suggest trying it out anyway. It's free and browser-based, so why not?

Darkfall Online's Beta has begun, and so far things look promising. Hopefully this really will be the spiritual successor to Ultima Online. Quick and brutal combat, more intelligent enemies, and vast amounts of player-controlled territory? Sign me up.

Blink and you'll miss the Meaning of Play

2008-10-12T22:43:00.014-04:00

I apologize for not updating continuously throughout the conference. There was too much awesome for me to channel efficiently to either paper or laptop. As soon as I got home, a peculiar circumstance prevented me from putting the deserved analysis onto the Internet. I'll do that now. Thanks for the patience.

If this conference has done anything, it would be that it reaffirms my suspicions that games are really important. And very, very complicated.

People assume that a game is a strict relation between rules and fun. In reality, from a detatched non-subjective viewpoint, it's actually more like a big engine of rulesy -wulesy gamey-wamey highly-subjective variables.

The sheer amount of different inputs and outputs of this fun engine make it a fickle, but very powerful tool. You can do so much good, and fail so hard when you develop games. There are many more factors and implications than most people understand. Are able to understand. The truly eldritch powers of Play can elicit growth and peace, as well as fear and madness.

Play is also innate, within us all. Leigh Anne Cappello, a Vice President at Hasbro and a Play Futurist, was talking about how babies start to explore. They put their feet in their mouth. That is Play. How is something that is essentially programmed into our existance, not Meaningful?

While at the conference, I met Scott Nicholson, and got to play his final prototype of "Tulipmania 1637". In a half an hour, I learned more about stock speculation than the Mass Media has ever tried to teach me. This game should be in every elementary school. I can't help but ask, could our current economic crisis been prevented, had this game become popular two years ago? Personally, I think it would have. It's coming out in a couple weeks, and YOU SHOULD BUY IT.

[I'm making a note here - Tangential Learning does work: I had NO IDEA about Tulip Mania before playing this game. As soon as I got to a computer after playing, I went to Wikipedia.]

Superstruct is like a hyperanalagous version of that question. Could a game such as that help prevent future crisis? The Meaningful Play Conference has me convinced with a resounding "Yes."

We need to notice the benchmarks, though. Nick Fortugno imagined, one day, the President shaking a game designer's hand and saying, "So you're the one who started this..." It's a reference to Lincoln, who shook Harriet Beecher Stowe's hand while saying she started the Civil War with "Uncle Tom's Cabin." I believe that's going to be the last major benchmark, before Jane McGonigal's dream of a Game Designer winning a Nobel Prize comes true.

Reflections on Meaningful Play Day 1

2008-10-09T13:15:00.014-04:00

I'm enjoying myself here, to say the very least.

Others are saying it too.

Many people I've met here, who have gone to several conferences in the past, have mentioned the quality of both the content and attendees. For what it's worth, that's one of the reasons why this 'liveblogging' attempt has failed - I've been too busy hanging out with all these smart people!
Good thing there is another two days of stuff.

The rest of yesterday, however, went really well. The "Talent, Incentives, and Infrastructure: Growing the Game Industry in Michigan" Panel was very enlightening. The panelists were:

Gjon Camaj, CEO Image Space, inc.; Matt Toschlog CEO, Reactor Zero; Ton Wenson, COO Michigan Film Office; and Prof. Brian Winn.

Image Space is in Ann Arbor. Mainly racing titles and simulations. Toschlog worked on Ultima Underworld, and Descent long before founding Reactor Zero.

Good news, though: Wenson really does want to help build up the games industry in Michigan. He and the other panelists are going to get together in the future, because apparently the legislation really has no clue how to properly foster the growth of game design firms. They did pass some sort of start-up help, apparently, but it was never funded.

They did bring up some other things people generally don't think about. Michigan offers a lot of 'extracurricular' things, that dense cities can't offer. Like seasons, lower cost of living, and (generally) better schools. So developers who are interested in family as well as work would more than likely be interested in Michigan over a dense city.

Toschlog mentioned we have access to plenty of junior level talent, but not really anything higher.

Beyond that, Wenson seemed very open to meeting people and getting input. He wants me to send him an email, and I'm going to suggest that he joins the IGDA mailing list.

After that, Jared Riley from Hero Interactive described how he was making money making Flash games for Armor Games and Kongregate and such. Rumor has it they're doing rather well, so checking out his slides is probably a good idea if you're about to start out with that kind of stuff. (Like me.)

Afterwards, there was a Posters and Demonstration gallery at the brand-new East Lansing Technology Innovation Center. To my surprise, Jamie Antonisse was there, showing off Hush! It was great to meet him in person and talk about the incredibly engaging experience he helped make. He said that the turning point of 'hooking' someone into the game was when the audio guys added the initial radio broadcast.

It was a little loud in the gallery, but it was still an engaging experience for people who hadn't seen it before.

I didn't get a chance to check out all of the games, but it was a very cool experience. I got to chat with Nick Fortugno of Rebel Monkey games. They're gonna launch a casual Flash MMOG in the next couple months, and apparently it's from a position that no one else has taken before.

Okay, time to go see Leigh Anne Cappello, the play futurist.

Meaningful Play, Day 1, AM

2008-10-09T08:22:00.009-04:00

So I just arrived back in East Lansing, and felt that satisfying nostalgia of being back on campus flow through me.

I'm currently sitting in the Union, munching on a croissant, and taking tally of all the swag I picked up for being here early. Two T-Shirts, one of Meaningful Play and another of "Hackerteen," a graphic novel for young adults which apparently will demonstrate how to survive on the internet without getting your identity stolen, or your computer fried. I'll take a better look at that a little later. There's a few other pamphlets that I'll look into tonight, and small booklet of geek-related puzzles. Like a paper version of Brain Age, but that game designers would appreciate.

Excuse me if I'm too interested in this, but this is my first conference so I'm a little excited.

Not too many familiar faces yet. Though there is a guy here who looks like a really young version of Raph Koster. He's in the middle of a group of people right now though so I'll go say hello at another time. My old professors, who are running this thing, seem to be holding up alright, stopping to chat with people when they can. I guess that's to be expected.

I suddenly realize that in all the time I spent at MSU, I never once met Carrie Heeter.

Oh, hey, there's Ben Medler, my old TA and Spartasoft's last President. Ima go say hi.

9:14

So I just learned that the pen I got when I walked in here has a 1 gig flash drive on the back end.

Richard Hilleman's keynote is starting now. He's the Chief Creative Officer of EA, which means that he's in charge of making EA better; his talk will be about applying skills in designing games to other things in life, apparently.

"Pogo has 1.5 million customers, predominantly women... who play for around 20 hours a week. We call them Casual Gamers. Why? I do not know." - Hilleman

Hilleman also said that EA is going to change the way they spend their money in charitable contributions. They're going to give time and people towards highlighting social issues.

Apparently, Flash has had over a billion installs, total. How can I not want to make Flash games, now?

Paraphrase: "When it comes to narratives in video games, we're just starting out. We're developing the Greek Tragedy."

"Educational systems view us as The Enemy... once we get Mom, we'll get the teachers."

"Everyone is a 'Gamer' on some level."

Xubuntu, I'm choosing you... later.

2008-10-09T02:35:00.005-04:00

(Yeah. My laptop couldn't handle Ubuntu.)

Right now I should be asleep.

Instead, my mind is reeling from a few things. For instance, nailing a $1200 JVC HTDV for a mere $300. Primarily, probably, it's the discussion over here. Please, someone come save me before I make an ass of myself. I feel like I'm considering ideas and methods that are beyond my understandings.

Maybe that's why I'm feeling particularly non-euclidean at the moment. Like I might implode if my thoughts wandered a certain direction.

The second largest ingredient to my mania is the fact that I need to wake up from my nap in three hours, to go to the Meaningful Play Conference. (Link on the left)

Only, I don't really have a plan for what I want to see. So, I'll map it out here.

8:00a-9:00a

Registration and Continental Breakfast on the 2nd floor of the MSU Union [Ballroom]

9:00a-9:15a

Conference Welcome [Ballroom]

9:15a-10:15a

The Game Designer as Change Agent by Richard Hilleman (Keynote) [Ballroom]

10:45a-11:45p

Emergent Gameplay(Papers) [Green Room]

1:15p-2:15p

Talent, Incentives, and Infrastructure: Growing the Game Industry in Michigan (Panel) [Parlor C]

2:45p-3:45p

Player-Centered Design for Instructional Gamesby Robert Appelman and Sonny Kirkley (Speaker)

4:00p-5:00p

The Unknown Possibilities of Existence by Ian Bogost (Keynote)

6:00p-8:00p

Conference Reception, Game Exhibition, and Poster Session (Reception) at East Lansing Technology Innovation Center

I have no idea what the hell is going on with that formatting. I apologize for the silliness. I'll post my plan for the rest of the conference, tomorrow.

Note to self: When you wake up, grab a notebook and pack some nice clothes to bring with you. As well as your cell phone charger.

Ubuntu, I choose you!

2008-10-05T16:08:00.003-04:00

Now that I've scratched 'rescue laptops' off my List of Doom (which is kept as a scroll), it's time to install Ubuntu onto my old Toshiba 1115-S103. I didn't have a CD burner available, and my attempts at installing from my new 2gb high-speed thumbdrive failed.

That was probably due to the ancient BIOS being unable to play with it.

So I put the install CD's ISO on the thumbdrive, instead, and will burn it to CD when I get to an applicable computer and burner.

To help pass the time during these trials, I picked up one of my old GameBoy Colors and proceeded to start a new game of Pokemon Red.

So familiar, yet so foreign. I was happy, and having fun, until not 10 minutes after first getting my Pokémon I fought my rival for the second time. He not only managed to level his Squirtle five times, but he also had a level 9 Pidgey with him too. This was 10 minutes into the game! I turned it off for a little bit, after saving.

I went to bed, postponing both Pokemon and Linux for another day.

This morning I had a little bit of time to kill, so I started training up the pokemon I captured. Oh how I nearly jumped out of my seat when I found myself face-to-face with a pikachu in Viridian Forest. I completely forgot they were in there.

Needless to say, five minutes later I had myself a little rematch with Gary. Pikachu obliterated him.

It was then when I realized something. I don't enjoy Pokemon's fights very much, unless they make sense. When one side is dominating - even if I'm on the losing side - I have more fun than when two Weedle sit there Poison Stinging each other to death. [Side note: In Red, these attacks count as Super Effective. I can't figure out a reason for it.]

On the other hand, maybe it's a punishment for not fighting correctly? It's more time-efficient to bust out a higher level Pokémon and split the experience, than it is for two weak shin-kickers to go at it for awhile.

I'm just aching for something more dramatic out of these fights. The Pokémon world is so great, I really don't want to have to make up my own version just to have more enjoyable combat.

Now, excuse me as I continue reading up on Pokéthulu.

Let loose the fireworks

2008-10-02T18:57:00.004-04:00

I'm posting this from my tablet.

This is something I've been eager to type for some time now. My Toshiba R20 tablet laptop's power brick died half a year ago, and I had been unable to really afford a replacement. Well, now that I can (to some degree) I bit the bullet and purchased an off-brand. Which I returned today, and exchanged it for a Kensington after the other one didn't work.

I didn't realize how much I missed this thing. Looks like I'll be able to liveblog from Meaningful Play, after all!

So I've spent the past few days in quite a flurry. As far as games go, I've been quizzing every WAR player I come across about their experiences. Then, I ask them what makes WAR the most different from WoW.

You see, I'm very interested in playing Warhammer Online. Naturally my investment in Games Workshop plays a part in that, but the resounding echoes of "It's fun!" has me curious. However, I want to play something that is vastly different from the shin-kicking combat (see Zero Punctuation, EVE Review) of standard MMOGs.

My old laptop, which I also recently rescued, still has Diablo II installed. I attempted to play an old discarded Druid, and I found myself unable to do so. I still fondly remember the Necromancer that I made (the one with the army), and so I started a new version of him. Even starting out fresh, I was having more fun watching my skeletons shin-kick, than if I was physically doing the shin-kicking.

I believe I really am that fed-up with such a dated combat system. It doesn't help that Mutants and Masterminds, one of the best Pen and Paper systems out there, completely did away with Hit Points. Instead, the Damage Conditions it uses make fights much more realistic and dramatic; adjectives that are completely built into the system itself.

Now if only I could find my book, I wouldn't have to rely on a proxy in order to express my ideas.

For instance. I give to you, a song from the Battle Bard concept. Imagine a traditional fantasy bard, strumming on a lute as he casts a spell. Instead of affecting someone else, his lute suddenly explodes into a flaming axe of doom!

Dance of Destruction - Magic, Fire -.5pp/rank
Transform [Rank 1] - 3pp/r
Flaw - Action x3
Flaw - Limited (Requires Instrument)

It may need a little more work to get right, but that's it. The better the instrument, the more powerful the weapon.

Can't wait until that book shows up. Think I'll go hunt for it some more.

Blessings of the Old Ones.

2008-09-22T22:58:00.006-04:00

So, yeah. Ms. Hoffman of Philomath Games started following me on Twitter, earlier, and to my great surprise I recieved an email informing me of such. (Erin, I promise I'll buy Settlers, soon.)

I had forgotten about making that Twitter account. In any case, it's now a part of the blog.

Today I found myself at Man vs. Horse for the first time, reading their experiences with City of Heroes, WoW, and EVE Online. It's a good read, especially for those who aren't really paying attention to MMOGs at the moment.

One of the later posts, however, I found the need to reply to. The one about Warhammer Online and Wood Elves. Apparently I called for an air strike, because some fellow named Marty (who I may or may not know) came in and laid siege to the poor blog. It was pretty epic, but I feel a little bad for the overkill.

Mid-September Misc

2008-09-19T01:15:00.017-04:00

Gaia Online's getting ever closer to the release of zOMG. An essential part of that experience, though, was finally unchained - Gaia Instant Messenger. If you're logged onto Gaia, this spiffy piece of JavaScript can let you instantly talk to anyone on you Friendslist who's currently on GIM, in real time.

This is a really important step for Gaia, I believe, as it now offers something crucial that will really help when Guilds get revamped. Browser-based chatting is very helpful when you're not able or don't have time to download and install an instant messenger. I wonder how that thing works on smartphones? Now if people would actually use the damn thing.

The other thing they released is Aquariums. People have been asking for pets for a long time now, and this seems to be an extremely clever (if not passive) way of starting that code library. Being able to take care of your fish, make them happy, and get items for it sounds like a ton of fun, personally. I can only hope they add Terrariums later, so we can have reptiles, too.

These kind of releases make me confident about Gaia's future. They make some really stupid mistakes sometimes, but they learn from them. That, and they're doing their best, and you can tell. Lanzer's latest journal entry goes into a bit of detail that's nice to see from the head honcho, and apparently it's the first of three entries like that. It's interesting to note how much loyalty that the administration's transparency brings.

Just a passing thought, but could this be the seed for future professionals to demand that they see what their superiors are up to? Considering how many young people are using Gaia (at least a couple million), it very well could be. So, that earns Gaia even more of my respect.

***

Giant Bomb posted a link to Bethesda's new Fallout 3 site. It is epic, to say the least. A collection of short animations and videos that really drive home the world of Fallout. Not only that, but current fans are going to love it. I'm glad they're really making use of the internet with this game's marketing. They're not the first ones to do it, don't get me wrong; but between Penny-Arcade's comic series and all the other media that's available, they certainly know how to get people excited for a game.

***

I finally got to play Peggle last night. I finally understand what all the hubbub was about, when it was released. Now if only there was loot involved, people would probably never see me again.

***

Michael Abbott, who writes the Brainy Gamer Blog, also does the Brainy Gamer Podcast. I'm still rather new to everything the Gamerati Blogosphere has to offer, but I know for a fact that this Blog and Podcast is one of The Essentials. Especially now that he's doing the Gamers Confab, and inviting different bloggers to chat with him about things. I'm finding more people to listen to, who are smarter than I am, because of this one single Blog, and it's amazing.

Here's my takes on a few of the subjects they talk about. You might be a little lost unless you give the 'cast a listen, which I highly recommend.

On Singstar, and Karaoke in general:

Personally, I'd enjoy it a lot more if I had more practice. At one point in time I was able to harmonize with Brandon Boyd's (from Incubus). Now, not so much - but I feel that I'd really enjoy singing again if I could just sound better. Not that it prevents me from singing along with Paramore's Crushcrushcrush, in the car.

On Team Fortress 2:

I've been hearing so much about this game ever since it came out, but now it seems like I absolutely must get this game as soon as possible. Everywhere I turn it seems that people are saying, "this is how you make PvP".

On LittleBigPlanet:

I still don't get the excitement for it. It's probably because the creator tools didn't sell me, they seemed too clunky and they took far too long to deal with. Maybe once I get my hands on it, I'll change my mind. I'm sure some players are going to make some pretty incredible things, but I think they'll also have much more patience than I do for that kind of stuff.

On Pokemon-shame:

It's really interesting how many older gamers still love Pokemon, but don't really want to admit it. There's a huge undertow that Nintendo has yet to tap into, I believe, of fans wanting something more. Especially a Pokemon MMOG that's beyond what the gameplay currently is. Something similar to the drama that the Anime brings to Pokemon. Being able to make crazy fighting conditions and combos and level destruction. Heck, being able to have an Onyx as a mount would make my day. I'm very curious to know what Nintendo's up to - are they just milking this craze for everything its worth?

On Sporn:

Awhile ago I was thinking about all the news that the Spore Creature Creator was getting, due to people making phallic objects and creatures having sex. I was considering the similarities between some of the creatures being made, and ancient fertility idols.

(Interesting aside, Wikipedia's "Fertility Idol" redirects to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark)

Is it just a part of human nature to express our sexuality? Given something like Spore, that makes this kind of thing so easy to do - can we blame people for doing it? Is it actually a bad thing? As a culture, I mean.

On an individual level, I certainly don't want to have my Spore experience plagued by every race I meet having sex all the time. Can you imagine, getting into space, then jetting off to meet your first neighbor - only to find that they're always getting it on whenever you hail them, and they don't even stop? They just keep on going at it, while you talk to one of them. How rude.

Or, having an Epic Penis terrorize my creature phase. In fact, I just don't want to have to deal with an Epic Penis at all.

Gaining Traction, I hope

2008-09-17T20:15:00.008-04:00

So I finally feel as though I can take a break from Spore. Or at least, play it 'casually.' A few days ago I reached the Center of the Galaxy. Today, I finally killed an Epic in the creature phase. Took me twenty minutes or so once I actually set the fight up correctly. Really didn't work out the way I had hoped, having allies come in and help in the fight.

I really like Spore's website, though. Being able to view anyone's creation from your browser is really neat. Here's my profile.

And this is just neat:

I am quite proud of The Horrid.

To my surprise, I managed to find an Easter Egg in Spore. At the main screen, if you spin the galaxy as fast as you can, pictures of people will fall out of the center of it. I have yet to find out who these people are.

Moving right along, I was happy to find an email today from Metaplace, proclaiming my new status as a beta tester! If you haven't heard, Metaplace is the baby of Raph Koster, and is essentially going to be a virtual multiverse of related infrastructure. It is primarily for making virtual worlds, but the back-endedness of those worlds can carry over to other places. Or you can license your code to other designers, and get a chunk of the change if they start making money off their game. Just visit the site, that'll explain it much better than I can at the moment. Just know that it's kind of a big deal.

So now I guess I'll be looking into learning LUA. When Metaplace was first announced, there was a huge buzz about it and I quickly found myself helping a fledgling game called MetaPunk get organized. We wanted to make a cyberpunk game that was really worthy of Shadowrun and Johnny Mnemonic and Neuromancer. When I wasn't accepted as one of the early beta-testers, I decided that my efforts were better utilized elsewhere. Now that I'm here, though, I was just in time to see MetaPunk go into stasis. Until it gets more help, at least.

Buzzkill, man. Bad case of deja vu.

The Meaningful Play Conference is just around the corner. I'm waiting to hear back to see if I can be an Associate and therefore not pay the conference fee, but at least I have a place to stay, now. Courtesy of Spartasoft's current president, I have a lovely couch to crash on while we raid the conference for three days.

I'd do my best to Liveblog from the event, but I need to get a new power cord for my laptop still.

And futherspore...

2008-09-13T09:26:00.003-04:00

Giant Bomb's Brad Shoemaker sums up Spore.

Beyond that, I wanted to address the past, present, and future of this milestone game. Not to be confused with milestone gameplay.

I believe a lot of people auto-hyped Spore beyond Will Wright's suggested experience. That being said, Spore is definitely missing out on some really cool things that Wright himself mentioned. (I'll address those a bit later.)

Generally, my abilities of recollection tend to fail me. I'm pretty sure, however, that Spore has always intended to be more in the casual vein of games than anything else. Quite honestly, that's a very good thing. Spore is the type of game that makes non-gamers curious - if not outright addicted. It's a gateway drug - it even sounds like a drug.

"Hey. Buddy. Need a hit? I got Dyne, Jet, and this nice shiny ounce of Spore..."

Pardon me while I itch my forearms.

I have to admit this whole DRMgate has me worried. I haven't experienced anything happen with my own copy of Spore, but I really wish that Spore wasn't bundled with Fear. I didn't know about the DRM when I purchased Spore, but if I did, I would have been a little more hesitant. I guess they're lucky that the DRM hasn't destroyed my machine yet - if it had, I would have urged my group of friends not to buy the game. So that would have been ~$200 that EA would be out, for screwing me.

As for the future of the game, well, I summed it up nicely at Brainy Gamer. At least I think I did, but I'm biased. Spore is like Mona Lisa's Face. It's pretty, and important in its own right, but the most important part of the painting is still an empty canvas. For those of you unaware, the Mona Lisa is so important because of the perspective the viewer has with the background.

Completing the analogy, the best of Spore has yet to come. The marine expansion, for instance, which Wright wanted to be released with Spore anyway. Underwater cities, I hope, I hope! Anyway, as Spore evolves, so will the experience and its own importance. The game is very much set to reflect back upon the world as much as the world puts into it, and as much as EA allows the world to do.

Lastly, check out my Lovecraftian Glance sporecast, if you have it. I think I'm going to start doing a weekly comic involving the Omegaraptor Empire's abyssal journeys. Need to get all the tools, first. I may or may not be planning on having a giant shoggoth attack a city. Though, that would be an excellently vague videocapture for a machinima newscast.

Possibilities are nigh endless.

Spore!

2008-09-07T22:38:00.002-04:00

Oh crap.

We have contact: W40k Space Marine

2008-09-05T13:12:00.002-04:00

It looks like THQ is really going to town on the Warhammer 40k license.

Rockpapershotgun found a video of the still-in-development 40k-meets-Gears of War-title. Buzzwords aside, it looks to be an enjoyable experience so far. I am worried about a few things, though, which I mentioned in the comments. The video is definitely worth a watch, though.

Dumbing down the Intellectual Property is not a good idea. Space Marines use bolters and bolt-pistols, which fire a lot of little exploding rockets. This is not what the Space Marine had, in the video. A commentor was right to call the autogun a torch. I'm not quite certain why they would forsake ranged combat, anyway. Yes, Space Marines have a tactical advantage over most opponants, in hand-to-hand. That is not always the case. Genestealers, for instance, tear them up. Which is why being able to effectively fire is something which shouldn't be just arbitrarily stripped away. Give it context- a lack of ammunition. Hell, having a power sword - or better yet, lightning claws, which would remove the ability to fire at all whatsoever.

Naturally, I'd love it if you were able to pick and choose what kind of fighting style you'd prefer. I'd love me some lightning claw based slaughtering.

I need to see more of the combat to be sure of this, but it looks a lot like the conventional 'one on one' group combat system that Legacy of Kain and God of War used. There was that one scene where a chaos guardsman attacked the Marine while he was in a cinemaction, but I'm not sure how effective the damage was. Even though there was a red bloodspray, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless the guardsman was wielding a phase-blade or something crazy.

Essentially, there needs to be more ricochets going on. Power Armor is amazing, and should be treated as such. Sparks flying from being shot at, instead of the shots missing you all the time. That is how bad-ass Space Marines are.

The slow-motion 300-esque 'Cinemaction' kills are going to get old, and I hope they don't rely on them through the entire game. Unless they change often enough to keep things fresh and neat. Fallout 3 may have this problem, too, with their targeting system.

So far, Space Marine looks as visceral as 40k combat should be. A lot of what we saw just needs to make sense, before it's released. Hopefully THQ will have plenty of time to polish this baby into a quality title.

How to impress people

2008-09-04T14:05:00.004-04:00

I have to say, the new Warhammer: Age of Reckoning trailer is one of the best I've ever seen.

It balances itself very well, between being vague and being epic. You're left wanting to know more about the world, and the races that fight within it. Even the fans of Warhammer who already have a good idea of the world will enjoy all the little touches put in - like the Tzeentch Screamers flying in the background. Mythic has done a wonderous job bringing the Warhammer world to life, and I hope that Warhammer Online has the merits to do well.

Maybe I'll try it out, after all...

Deus Ex, Part 1

2008-09-02T14:27:00.002-04:00

Over at the Vintage Game Club, we've started talking about Deus Ex. I've been playing it like mad this past week, trying to finish it before discussion started. Turns out the game is too massive, and I've started a second game before finishing my first.

I need to mention, right now, that Deus Ex is only $10 on Steam, and it is worth EVERY PENNY.

Deus Ex is a wonderful blend of genres - first person shooter, role-playing game, Thief-like stealth - set in a cyberpunk near-future. The game is all about player choice - you can choose plenty of different paths through missions, bypassing entire portions of maps (and enemies) altogether if you can figure out how to do so. Your character is customized by both skills and augmentations, which are based on either achievements or items, respectively. Near the end of the game, your character could be seeing through walls and having bullets bounce off him.

The storyline is a basic, but very enjoyable, tale of corporate espionage and the fight for personal freedom. What's amazing is that - in the opening sequence of the game - everything is laid out in the open for the player to understand. You know who's pulling the strings right from the beginning, and you get to pay close attention to how these characters go about stabbing you and your interests in the back. It's true that you don't get the gasp-inducing plot twist this way, but I find it far more enjoyable.

It's definitely a violent game, but you don't have to play it that way. My initial play-through, I'm a sneaky ninja who knocks out innocents with a baton and one-hit-kills the bad guys, striking from the shadows and insuring no suffering. This actually affects some of the characters in the game, at least early on. My second time through, I'm playing rather brutally, and it's very difficult for me to do. Forcing myself to give into a predatory instinct and start acting like James Bond. The real one, that Daniel Craig plays perfectly.

It's still an enjoyable experience, though, because I'm finding a lot of things happen differently in the game, when you play the game differently. That's not a common occurrence in video games, especially as of late.

The Dangerous Storytelling of Daniel X

2008-08-29T15:53:00.003-04:00

Recently I was given the James Patterson/Michael Ledwidge 'page-turner,' The Dangerous Days of Daniel X. It's a brief book, to say the least, about young boy genius who can manipulate reality.

At first, I took it as an insult, as Daniel X is written for someone of a much lesser ability than my own to read. Patterson and Ledwidge kept the descriptions to a minimum, and quickly glazed over anything that was non-essential, leaving the reader to fill in the vast blanks.

Right before I was about to toss the book aside, it hooked me. The humorous, yet perfectly true-to-life portrayal of the young boy's first crush simply resonated inside me, and I continued to read for the sake of knowing what happens to the relationship. This, in turn, carried me like an on-ramp back into the main storyline.

When I finished the book a couple hours later, I found myself perplexed. Yes, in the end, I enjoyed the read. But why? It didn't really have a lot of substance, and much of the plot was easily forseeable. Stereotypical plot devices were everywhere.

I believe there are several reasons why. First, as I read, the world in my mind was mostly my own. Though it was mostly unfocused and vague, it made the reading seem more like watching television - a passive event. Second, due to the extreme lack of words, the storyline's skeleton was far less subtle than other books. For example - drive on Russian highways for a good amount of time, then come drive in the United States. The easy-to-navigate infrastructure would be a welcome break from the meandering randomness one's used to. Third, it was a study on balancing the detail in the scene-setting continuum, and not paying much worth to the small stuff.

It's definitely the last time I'll find myself insulted before reading a book.

The possibilities of Pretending

2008-08-19T10:37:00.005-04:00

For this year's Father's Day, I gave the first season of Pretender to my Dad. It was one of that our favorite shows to watch as a family, so beyond the fact it's an amazing series it holds a deeper meaning in particular to me.

Watching it again, though, with a more mature mind, made me realize something. The fictional organization "The Centre" was really onto something with their Pretenders.

Essentially, what The Centre would do, would get genius children into a state of lucid daydreaming in order to figure out major historical events. For instance, there's a flashback where the main character is pretending to be in Lee Harvey Oswald's shoes - only he realizes there's absolutely no way that he can be the only shooter. This was done with sensory deprivation and a loop of the assassination being projected in front of him, if I recall correctly.

Whenever I work a non-game related job, I tend to naturally break it down into game mechanics and possible video game representations. Door-to-door sales, for instance, became a mix of Paperboy and Pokemon to me.

Big Box Retail has become an RTT, similar to MechCommander.

I start to think about how I'd feel playing the game, controlling minions and barking orders. Equipping some of them with handsets and monitoring their charisma, morale, and endurance levels. Giving them re-stocking missions and setting them on autopilot. Or more specialized events, like fire drill. Balancing discipline with praise.

Very quickly I realized that I'd only be able to really monitor and develop a handful of employees at a time. What's weird about this is that the vast majority of people employed at huge retailers are actually not very talented.

In other words, they're the minions the User is choosing to ignore, while they focus on levelling up the store's Hero characters. You know, that one with the fast hands who can refill an entire aisle in the blink of an eye. Or that cashier that never, ever, screws up. Or that devilishly handsome ninja in the Media department who makes a sale whenever he opens his mouth. Everyone else just kinda coasts.

What's the point in thinking about this? Well, simulations can bring new perspective to situations that would normally take far too much time and money. Here's an example.

Big Box Mart holds huge pow-wows every shift, where the employees are all summoned to a point in the store by the managers in order to promote teamwork and competition and relay some relatively worthless information that doesn't actually effect how they do their jobs. Toss in a cult-like chant and applause reminiscant of yesteryear's pep rallies, and you've got a Bad Idea gone Worse.

Thinking about this situation, if put into the suggested game framework, would yield at least the following results:

1. Massive morale hits to employees, for humiliation
2. Lost sales, because guests can't find people to help them
3. Charisma reduction to managers, due to employee's lack of respect
4. Customer confusion as to what the hell they're doing shopping at a cult

Now, some of these are obvious to most people. However, the top brass of retail chains are not like most people. Most often, they're completely detatched from what the front lines are like. The kinds of people who let the ridiculous kinds of rules get into place - or better yet, put them there themselves.

Something blatant like a simulation, though (especially a 'consulting simulation' that they pay money for) will get their attention more than someone they don't respect telling them the obvious. It's a highly effective troubleshooting mechanism, but it's also a great way to discern paths of innovation.

Yet another example. Big Box Mart is Big. It is so big, you cannot see one wall of the store, unless you're jumping up and down at the opposite wall. Guests follow the 'flow' of the floor layout, and tend to hope that what they're looking for floats on by. Essentially, a bunch of question marks appear on the User's mini-map - and if they stay too long, the customer will stop actively looking for the item, and may very well walk right past it later without flinching.

So what would help in this situation? It's not like you can individually target these people and ask them what they're looking for, since real people can't read minds. Instead, you have to make your employees look inviting - but if their charisma is shot to begin with, they're not going to bother no matter how many ieces of Flair they're wearing. Even then, there's no guarantee they'll know the answer to their question.

This is where Pretending comes in. If I could drop stationary, designated help desks at a couple places in the store, then surely people will get the help they need. Well, with only two desks, though, what happens if more than two people need a question asked? If only you had a teleporting, telepathic employee...

Well, you can. Make several, cheap (video?) phones, and place them around the store, with maps next to them that can be manipulated. Then, stick someone behind a main Information desk at the front of the store, who can interact with each of these kiosks from afar, and highlight the areas on the respective maps, including routes to take.

It's almost as if Game Designers will become the blacksmiths of Common Sense, in the future.

Dino Run Review

2008-08-16T15:45:00.004-04:00

I was aiming to put this up onto Giant Bomb, but apparently it's not worthy enough to get an Article. Not entirely certain why that is, but I guess I'll stick a review of Dino Run here, for future reference.

So, Dino Run is one of the best browser-based games I've played, for several reasons. It's not just because it's addictive, either. A lot of nicely designed elements are squeezed into such a little package.

I found that Dino Run was addicting for a very different reason than Civilization or World of Warcraft. Civ's legendary "One More Turn" addictivity stems from the game's management/reward structure. The more you order things around, the more often you get new units to do stuff with - like order them around. Vicious feedback. WoW's engineered to give you just the least amount of reward at just the right time for just barely the most amount of invested time.

Dino Run, on the other hand, is giving you things to react to every couple seconds. Well before you get bored, the race is over, and you see your score go up as well as any awards granted. The game rests firmly in the sweet spot of a Good Story - you know, the "Interesting ~~people~~ dinosaurs doing interesting things in interesting places" thing. Then you get to do it all over again.

Sadly the stages aren't procedurally generated. At least, I don't think they are. With all the different landmarks shuffling around, it's kind of hard to tell. Especially when they change with the difficulty. Which only adds to the replayability - the levels are familiar, yet they're always different. Though what you've learned from previous levels can still be applied to the future ones, since the major landmarks are recycled. For instance, the long flat riverbed that has a large herd of Triceratops is featured in several different stages.

This leads me into the difficulty curve. It's spot on. Especially when you're able to control your dino's increase in stats. Wall of Doom catching up with you? Increase your speed. Having trouble climbing hills? Increase your jump. Hard Levels still too difficult? Drop it back down to Medium and gain some more DNA for your stats.

One of the really cool things about Dino Run's difficulty is that the game tends to generate a steady stream of emergent situations. For instance, I was running along rather merrily when I fell into the second hole of a dual-pit. Jumping to get out, I was snatched up by a blazingly fast pterodactyl, who just happened to be at the right place at the right time (or at least, appeared to me to be, which matters more). This was pretty awesome, as the Doom Wall was fast approaching, and that act probably allowed me to beat the level. On the other hand, the game can harm you this way as well - like blasting a fire boulder down the egg-filled tunnel you were about to hop into, destroying them all and making you work to escape.

The game's frosting would probably be the multiplayer races, which also allow you to customize your runner's coloring a fair amount. If you rock the main game, you can unlock a few crowns and helmets to wear during the race. If you donate to Pixeljam, they'll give you even more hats to show off (including demon horns and an Aliens head).

EDIT! I forgot to include one of my favorite parts about the Immersion experience. The graphics at a glance are very retro, but at the speed you end up going it's actually a boon to only have to process shapes and colors. Besides, your brain ends up extrapolating a ton of detail anyway when you fly past a Stegosaurus, so it's not really a big deal. On top of that, when the Doom Wall gets close, the contrast is ramped up to black silhouettes against a red background. The effect does a great job of accenting the immediate danger you're in.

There's just so many really neat things to this game. I hope it picks up more attention.

Then again, I may just be totally full of it. Who knows.

Dino Run

2008-08-10T17:41:00.004-04:00

Apparently I'm late to this amazing web-based time waster, but I am completely enthralled by it nonetheless. Via IndieGames.com's Most Addictive Browser Games.

Dino Run is a delightful game where you take control of a 'velociraptor' moments before the Yucatan asteroid hits the earth. You must run as fast as you can to the end of the level, before the encroaching blastwave (the Wall of Doom) catches up with you. Several levels of jumping, egg-collecting, creature-eating, and obstacle avoiding later, you find a sanctuary and survive the apocalypse.

This is all done with a minimalistic pixel art style, which lends itself very well to the basic gameplay. An uber-mega HD version would probably be amazing to look at, but the overall experience probably wouldn't change a whole lot.

So, let's see here. You have a skill-based dinosaur-themed time trial game, with branching tracks and semi-secret areas, along with a basic character editor and stat levels? No wonder I can't stop playing this damn thing.

Oh. Here's that background of The Melancholy I mentioned last time.
***

The gears of Night Machine turn once more.

Post-illness catch-up: Interactive Fiction

2008-08-04T19:15:00.004-04:00

Tonsillitis really kicked my ass last week. Been awhile since I felt the burning rush of fever, as well as the nigh-hallucinations of a Fever-Dream.

I managed to surf over to Emily Short's webpage, after finding her Homer in Silicon column on GameSetWatch.

This proved to be an interesting re-introduction into Interactive Fiction, for me. Which is pretty much how it sounds - stories you influence. Ms. Short has several of her own work on display, and so far I've given both "Floatpoint" and "Glass" a shot.

Now, I'm hooked. "Floatpoint" deserved the awards it won two years ago (yeah, I'm late, so sue me), and sparked onto some of my tinder.

Many of those who know me personally, know that I have one of those 'Novels' I've been mulling around in my head for quite some time. It involves a Faustian deal-with-a-devil, morality, and other neat things. After being blown away by the "Floatpoint" setting, and seeing how well a branching storyline can be implemented in "Glass", I believe I'm going to turn "Soulseer" into an IF.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, to be perfectly honest, there's a few reasons. A large one is the fact I'm a game designer, and not an author. Some people, including me, call that an excuse, so I have a back-up reason: malleability. I'm not quite certain where I'm going to go with Soulseer, so letting the reader decide seems to be a mutually beneficial.

To clarify, I'm not certain if I want to write it as a comic book, novel, series, screenplay, or what. With Interactive Fiction, the final part of the work can be a reflection on the choices the reader made, which plays very well into the Morality theme I'm going for.

Latest distractions: Bankotsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
Latest obstacles: Car trouble - coolant leak and headlight burnout.

edit: The image I had linked to The Melancholy was replaced with a giant passive-aggressive "HOTLINKING IMAGES FROM STARKEITH.NET IS NOT ALLOWED." So I'll upload the amazing background I found there to photobucket when I get home so I can share the wealth.

The Avatar MMOG

2008-07-25T23:46:00.003-04:00

So, Kotaku did a piece on an upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender "MMOG."

I haven't really been following the series, but I watched the final episodes yesterday. I'm definitely going to get the box set of the three seasons when it becomes available. Once I see the whole series, I'm pretty certain it's going to earn a place next to Gargoyles and Beast Wars.

Anyway, the Avatar MMOG looks to be a mix between Avatar (duh), Pokemon, and Unreal Tournament. As done by a student at Digipen.

I say Pokemon because of the wonderfully simplistic stat system. You only have room for four moves (done by clicking or double-clicking the first and second mouse buttons). The stats behind them are Power, Balance, Spirit, and Toughness. Then, Health and Chi, and a small inventory for stat-boosting or one-time-use items.

Combat is running around an arena blasting the crap out of each other. This is where Unreal Tournament comes into play. Lots of projectiles, lots of speed. Only, no gibbits.

Lastly, the characters are low-polygon and not that greatly animated.

It looks like an interesting game to try out - and it'll be fun. I just don't see any reason to play it for more than an hour or so, despite being able to customize your own 'bender.

Which makes me incredibly disheartened, because the Avatar series had some crazycool worldbuilding behind it. They could do what The Matrix Online failed to do - continue the storyline online, with player input. It doesn't really seem like that hard of a concept, and if I remember correctly it was moreso Sony's fault that MxO didn't do that very well - not the devs. I'll have to do some homework on that.

Interest and Disappointment

2008-07-25T01:47:00.002-04:00

First thing's first. Giant Bomb is awesome. Combine a wiki and a blog network, focus it on video games, and you have the Next Big Thing. It was created by Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot fame (or is it infamy now?) and couple other folks I don't recognize right away.

Anyway, it's essentially creating the biggest community-driven Video Game Encyclopedia in existence. Users can make their own reviews, as well as make really esoteric articles - like the Grapple. Huge bonus - articles are displayed with their relationships to other articles. For instance, Mortal Kombat's Scorpion is automatically mentioned as a character that uses the Grapple.

They just launched a couple days ago, so they still have to moderate the tens of thousands of articles that took them by surprise. I highly recommend checking it out.

That stench is the skaven currently running Gamespot filling their pants with the musk of fear. It'll go away.

Second thing is second. Gaia Online announced the official name of their Casual MMOG - zOMG! Seriously, 'zOMG!' is the name of the site's flagship game. The largest forum on the internet named their largest game after an Internet slang term. I think I'm still sitting in the "Shock and Numbness" kiddy pool of grief, after my Anger floaties deflated.

David Georgeson, the lead producer of zOMG!, defended the name.

"...names don't really matter that much in the great scheme of things. Games with non-sensical titles do well on a regular basis, and this one is no better or worse than most other games. You'll quickly realize that it's the *game* that matters most...not what it's called. "

Then, he turns around and proves one of my largest concerns is already happening:

"But I have to admit that I get a kick out of doing press interviews, calling it "zohmigod" and then watching peoples' faces either become gleeful at the unabashedly unusual name, or confused as they try to parse it out and figure out whether we're serious or not."

It is my opinion that this is a mistake. Now, let me paraphrase and expand on some of the earlier arguments I made on the site.

Yes, the game is what matters most. The fact that it's Flash-based, Free-to-Play, and full-featured is going to knock people out of their shoes. This name, however, is going to keep their socks snugly attached to their feet. Gaia had a chance to shake the Internet and impress other gaming sites with a name that easily balances between the Sillyness and Epicness of the Gaia storyline. After all, Gaia is a place where vampires get shot by high-caliber sniper rifles. Megalomaniacs often cause severe damage to the landscape.

And, once, Santa was turned into a cow.

zOMG!'s design is top-notch, and quite frankly deserves a better name. Jeremy -freaking- Soule did the music for it. However, it appears that the audience that the MMOG is targeting isn't those of us who desire more epic story-arcs. Which makes me sad, because I feel it could be one of the best games on the Internet. I hope it doesn't turn off too many people.

Gotham's next crisis

2008-07-23T13:41:00.002-04:00

Io9 sent me to Threat Quality Press, which presented A Compelling Argument for The Riddler.

Which, I must admit, makes a bit of sense. However, just because something makes sense doesn't make it gripping.

Instead, I've been mulling over a couple other possibilities.

The first logical one would be Harley Quinn. She would help set how much time has passed between The Dark Knight and the third movie, whatever that may be titled. We don't have to actually cast the Joker - just continue his antics through a proxy.

The main villain, though, should be Poison Ivy. The Green revolution will no doubt be picking up more and more steam, so having an eco-terrorist will absolutely resonate with audiences.

Toss in a strong character friendship growing between Ivy and Harley, and Nolan could make something almost as good as Dark Knight, I think.

Consolidation phase

2008-07-20T09:18:00.001-04:00

Still alive. Currently reallocating resources.

Not even death can save you from WoW

2008-06-28T13:47:00.002-04:00

First off, apologies for being absent for a few months or so. Had to lay down some new tracks for the railroad of life.

Anyway, Blizzard finally made Diablo 3 'official.'

And I am not happy.

Diablo and Diablo 2 were dark, miserable games which actively fought against madness and dispair. Diablo 3, however, screams of World of Warcraft's 'grab a buddy and go kill stuff, lol!'

Instead of 'Just... try to not die.'

That's the most disappointing thing, to me. The second most disappointing thing is that there is now ONLY class-based equipment. I'm sorry, but one of the coolest aspects of Diablo 2 was seeing what armor looks like what on which classes. I begrudgingly ignored the small amount of class-based items, mostly because they would look terrible and not mix with the 'feel' of the other classes, at all. Except for the assassin's weaponry - I wanted to have a punch-dagger wielding Barbarian so badly.

One can only hope that Blizzard will let Diablo 3 be easily moddable, so that an excellent team can be assembled to fix their drastic mistakes.

On colons

2008-05-06T00:23:00.002-04:00

It's finally reached the point where I need to say something about colons.

Sadly, these aren't the ones at the butt of so many jokes. These are the grammatical dividers between chaos and order, the essential part of emoticon evolution, and sadly the biggest crutch in the literary world for Titles.

"Condemned 2: Bloodshot" would sound better as just "Condemned 2."

"Uncharted: Drake's Fortune" would sound better as just "Drake's Fortune."

"Viking: Battle for Asgard" is just stupid. Fighting for Asgard is WHAT VIKINGS DO! Seriously. How about, "Viking: Raid and Pillage!" as a sequel?

This practice needs to stop. It's amateurish and people should be fired on the spot for suggesting Titles with colons in them.

"The Shawshank Redemption" did not end with ": Breakout."
"Citizen Kane" was not followed by ": The story of Xanadu."
"Reservoir Dogs" was not leashed to ": the slaughter."

Remember, kids. Colons are shitty!

Thoughts: Crisis Core Endgame

2008-04-27T09:05:00.003-04:00

My time with Crisis Core is rapidly coming to an end, so my furious attempts to achieve the upper eschelons of badassedry are becoming more and more frantic.

Thankfully, Crisis Core is still fun. So much so that, one day, I plan on picking up a PSP and a copy for myself. In the spirit of the original Final Fantasy 7, Mario 64, and Dead Rising - a great game has given me a reason to purchase an entire system.

Like the Final Fantasies beforehand, Crisis Core caps the player's Hit Points at 9999. It also caps your damage at 9999.

Enemies, on the other hand, can do more than 9999 in damage to you. So not only do you have to max out your health to fight them, but you're required to cast things like Barrier or MBarrier to survive against them.

If I recall correctly, Final Fantasy 8 was the first in the series to make a damage cap work-around. The Guardian Force Eden gave players an interesting choice - do you wait 2 minutes to do more than max damage to something? Granted, those two minutes would be spent watching something epic. That's really the only word you can use to describe something that would rather bend space and time than adjust its pitch or yaw. Before using a planet as a spell foci to fire an opponant into the center of another galaxy. Which explodes.

In Final Fantasy 10, the ultimate weapons of characters allowed them to break the 9999 damage cap. The challenges to get an ultimate weapon varied from child-like simplicity (Tidus) to controller-destroyingly difficult (Lulu).

In Crisis Core, there's accessories you can equip which break an individual cap. Arguably the most required of these is the Adaman Bangle, which raises your HP limit to 99999. You get this about the same time as you begin to meet enemies which will do 9999+ damage to you very, very quickly. I think they did a great job of balancing the difficulty curve with these kinds of things.

For instance, after you get the Adaman Bangle, you can take on two of the giant wutai ogres much more easily. However, after rocking the next few missions, you end up fighting against three bipedal death machines. One of which Criticals every hit, one of which is immune to physical attacks, and the last is immune to magical attacks. Even with my health above 20,000, it was still difficult since there's no way Zack can dodge every single burst of fire. Once I spent some time fusing materia though, and granting me an extra +60 or so to Vitality, the damage I was taking was much more managable and they went down with little fuss.

It's amazing that this kind of trade-off happens again and again, in this game.

HUR RAY FOR JIIIIIIIIM~!

2008-04-23T11:28:00.004-04:00

I loved Earthworm Jim. I can recite most of the cartoon's intro lyrics on command.

So it makes me happy to learn that Interplay and Doug TenNapel are going to be making an Earthworm Jim 4. (Courtesy of Kotaku)

It gives me hope that maybe they'll bring back Wild 9 (from the makers of Earthworm Jim). Where Jim had an off-the wall humor to it, Wild 9 consisted of using "The Rig" - the most powerful weapon in the universe - to throw robots into a wide variety of death machines. Churning, squishing, crushing, burning, slicing death machines. Sadly, despite its 2D telekinetics, it wasn't as popular as Jim.

Thoughts: Economic Analogies for Game Design

2008-04-19T17:07:00.005-04:00

There's a recent article at Gamasutra titled, "MMO Class Design: Up With Hybrids! An Economic Argument" that has my interest.

To summarize, the author makes points about how a party has 'Supply and Demand' for particular things during a battle - like 'Tanky-ness' and 'Damage per Second.' This seems obvious at first, but just like an economy, the demand for certain things changes (or at least, should change) throughout an adventure. So non-specialized 'classes' could (should) come in handy and be worthwhile at some point in time, so that pure-specialized tanks, damagers, and healers give up their respective monopolies in favor of balance.

It's an interesting point of view - I for one despise things like hit points and the concept of 'damage per second.' They're a crutch, in my opinion, even though they are a great conduit for simplicity. So while they're needed, I think they're used way too often.

However, I'm more interested in using economic theory to translate data collected by a metrics system, into something to help balance out the gameplay. A 'Supply and Demand' chart for 'tanky-ness' would be fascinating - if not completely vague. Unless your definition is simply 'damage taken vs. total party damage,' but even then it would still be useful to look at. Heck, it would be useful for a min-maxer to look at, too. "Oh, wow, my tankyness dropped 10% (or, demand for my tankyness fell 15 points, etc.) that last Raid, looks like I should go back to using my previous build..."

Could definitely be a useful tool, and something to keep in mind.

Gaia Goodness

2008-04-18T00:47:00.004-04:00

This may confuse you, if you're not familiar with Gaia Online, but the above character (Liam) is a playboy who has way too much bodily charisma, and not a lot of brains. The above amalgamation is his attempt at taking the advice of a gentleman, a fisherman, and a robot, in order to make amends to three girls he was dating at once. It makes me laugh every time I see it. Good job, Gaia.

Oh, and they released some updates to the Battle site.

Thoughts: Crisis Core

2008-04-17T11:19:00.005-04:00

One of my co-workers let me borrow his PSP, so that I could play Square Enix's new Crisis Core.

For those of you under a rock, Crisis Core is a prequel to Final Fantasy 7, focusing on Cloud's hero and Aerith's beau, Zack.

Most people who played Final Fantasy 7 would agree that the flashback scene about Nibelheim burning down is vague, as is the details of Cloud's history with Shinra and SOLDIER. Crisis Core seeks to clarify a lot of the misunderstandings surrounding the incident.

It does so, marvelously. It's fun, it's beautiful, it's a great game.

The most interesting mechanic is something called the DMW - a two-part slots wheel featuring the game's major characters and random numbers. In battle, it can grant you buffs if a one or more 7's pop up. If the two outside wheels land on the same character, though, you have a chance for a character-specific limit break, a level, levelling materia, or all of the above.

Perhaps most important, though, is that this wheel is influenced by Zack's emotions. If he has a memorable moment with the Turk, Cissnei, there's a bigger chance of her Limit Break coming up. Sometimes, before a character's Limit Break, you'll be shown a memory of the character that you didn't experience in-game. These could be enlightening, or simply for comic relief, but they work.

Especially since the backstory of FF7 can be so rich, when the writers don't get too distracted by Hojo's random experiments being whiny (if not powerful) annoyances.

If I had to choose between playing Crisis Core and watching Advent Children, I'd choose Crisis Core.

P.S.: Sephiroth didn't kill Aerith, Jenova did.

Warhammer 40k MMOG

2008-04-09T10:36:00.003-04:00

Courtesy of Kotaku: News on Vigil Games' (THQ) Warhammer 40k MMOG.

Essentially, Warhammer 40k's MMOG will have big battles and 'the coolest looking characters of any MMO, ever.'

Says creative director Joe Madeureira:

"All of the races important to Warhammer 40,000 lore (not to mention the fans) will be represented."
"We want each and every race to have weight in the game world... and feel distinct."

Note that he doesn't say, all races will be playable.

This doesn't bode well for Warhammer 40k, and I hope THQ leans hard on Vigil to teach them what they learned from Dawn of War.

Players want to play as their favorite race.

With arguably the largest Science Fiction setting in the world, it's very easy to alienate (no pun intended) half your audience, by only including the easiest races to make. For players like me, it's as simple as this:

Include playable Tyranids, I will give you money.
Don't include playable Tyranids, I will never give you money.

I worry that a half-assed MMOG will do no favors for the 40k universe. It's part of the reason why I haven't pursued a career with THQ in Austin - I couldn't handle watching people who claim to know what they're doing, wreck something I love so much.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is more than just war.

Mega Update #1 - Part 3 - Zombie CCG

2008-03-31T14:34:00.009-04:00

This is going to be large update to my ~~Zombie~~ Survival Horror CCG system.

I'm still working on the prototype decks at the moment, but here is my proposed ruleset. My big goals for the CCG are balance, atmosphere, and simplicity.

Quick Summary: Each 'side' has their own deck. The cards are split into seperate categories - creatures, equipment, resources, and tactics. The turn structure starts with Draw, then Deploy, Combat (shooting, then melee), and Reinforce. Endgame has yet to be decided.

(I should note, before we go any further, that some of these mechanics are highly inspired by my years of playing Games Workshop's games.)

Each card has a Power value on it, from 1-10. This value is used for balance reasons (let's play with 200 point decks), and for 'rolling.'

A card demands a 'roll,' flip the top card of the library into your graveyard,* if the revealed card's Power is equal to or above the needed value, the effect succeeds.

Types of Cards:
Resource Cards provide a player with the meta-currency to purchase other cards. For instance, a pistol's Deploy Cost is 4 ammo. Any unused resources are lost at the end of the turn.

Tactics Cards are miscellaneous effects or events - from Barricades to Sniping to Dramatic Returns.

Equipment Cards bestow bonuses to creatures when attached.

Creature Cards have several defining values:

Speed: Determinds order in combat
HP: The amount of times one can be damaged. Some attacks do more than 1 damage.
Hit: The number which must be rolled, or higher, to deal damage in close combat.
Aim: The number which must be rolled, or higher, to deal damage when shooting.

Turn Structure:

Draw
Deploy
Combat
Reinforce

Draw: Draw 1 card into your hand. This value be modified by other cards.

Deploy: Discard resource cards to 'purchase' creatures and tactics from your hand, and put them into play.

Combat: This phase is split into Shooting and Melee.

Shooting: Only creatures with guns can attack, but everyone may be attacked. Highest Speed goes first.
Melee: Everyone can participate, even if they fired in the Shooting subphase. Unless modified, everyone deals 1 point of damage. Highest Speed goes first.

Reinforce: A second Deploy phase, without offensive Tactics.

Current questions/ideas floating in my head:

Endgame: Victory Points? Survive x turns? If Victory Points, how to tally? Count up graveyards after x turns?
*Rolling: Into graveyard, or back into deck - shuffling at the end of the turn? (If into graveyard, player must change strategy based on potentially lost cards, in exchange for damage dealt. Or, recycle only successes/failures back into the deck?)
Damage: Strip creatures of equipment before dealing them damage. (Vehicles breaking down, guns jamming, dropping melee weapons.)

Whew. Now to copy and paste this into at least two other forums.

Mega Update #1 - Part 2 - Darkfall

2008-03-31T14:27:00.002-04:00

Check out this absolutely gorgeous screenshot of a Mirdain, the 'elves' of Agon. And as Tasos Flambouras, the head honcho behind Darkfall, has stated:

"I see official screenshots from other games that look amazing, then I see some in-game screens and they're an insult. We don't have a 'screenshot setting only' to sell you the game - all of Darkfall's graphics settings are fully useable."

Give it up for the Mirdain. Join us.

I'm very happy with how Darkfall is shaping up, and look forward to possibly partaking in the Beta.

Mega Update #1 - Part 1 - Gaia

2008-03-31T14:11:00.003-04:00

I apologize for being quiet for so long, after the blog just started, but I've been a tad distracted the past few days.

First thing's first, Gaia's Announcement on their grassroots advertising campaign: Mischief Makers.

I believe their mission is this:
One, create a database of their member's meatspace locations. And,
Two, get some free advertising.

Your reward, if you complete your mission that you choose to accept, and the Admins choose your entry to win, is one of three virtual items that go for quite a bit on the marketplace.

Now, I think Gaia's done some pretty stupid things in the past*, but this isn't one of them. It makes good business sense, and allows its members to participate in the site they enjoy. There's some very passionate Gaians out there - as the west coast's Conventions can attest to. They are also very creative, and I have no doubt there will be plenty of mischief making going on.

*Or not so recent past, like making money on lolcat memes that stemmed from Something Awful or 4chan. They risk wrath.

Gamasutra or Bust

2008-03-26T23:52:00.007-04:00

After that C & D letter, I really started to think about how companies view their Intellectual Property.

I'm still quite bitter about TEARDOWN being told to shelve their amazing Space Hulk remake until further notice - which hasn't come yet. Thankfully, you can hoist your sails and still find the game being torrented.

As I continued to dwell, I realized I wanted to publish an article on how fan-made products can be a really good thing for the IP's community, if fostered and cared for correctly. Harry Potter has a HUGE amount of fan-fiction written about it. How engrossed would fans feel, if Rowling picked a few of the best authors to help her write the Harry Potter encyclopedia? I'd have a lot more respect for Rowling, that's for sure.

Looking back to TEARDOWN, I'm very curious as to how many of the 327 Gigabytes downloaded, went to players who hadn't played 40k since they played the original Space Hulk board game. Or even better, how much nostalgia was nurtured. How much curiosity was piqued. If I were in the Public Relations offices of Games Workshop and THQ, I would love to get my hands on the curious folk who haven't paid attention to the IP in a decade or so. Chances are, they would absolutely love where the games have gone. Now, however, all they see is the traditionally cold Games Workshop preventing them from having fun.

Not cool.

This is gonna germinate for awhile.

Zombie CCG

2008-03-26T23:33:00.003-04:00

So, Mad Max - on the Exanimus forums - started a thread about making our own custom Exanimus CCG cards, while posting his own photoshopped Magic: The Gathering card as an example.

I went hunting for a MtG Card Generator, and ended up finding a Cease and Desist letter to a fan-made program. This kinda got me in a foul mood, but at the same time made my creative wheels start turning.

So, I'm designing a fan-made companion CCG, for Exanimus fans to play while they wait for the game to be released. I'm adding a 'roll' system, because I admired Warhammer 40k's CCG mechanic so much. Instead of die, though, I'm just going to give individual cards a designated Power, which have to be equal to or lower than an action for it to succeed. On top of that, I want each deck to have a 'Total Power,' which would have to be distributed among the cards. For instance, a deck with a Total Power of 100 could have 10, 10 Power, cards. Or 100, 1 Power Cards.

Currency: Ammo, Food, and Petrol. Subject to change, as Zombies would only have 'Food' resources in their decks. Dead food, that is.
HP: Health of a character
Aim: A value 1-10, of how good a shot the character is.
Hit: Like Aim, but for melee.

Types of cards:
Character: (Zombie, Outcast, or Survivor)
Tactics: (Leer, Ambush, Snipe)
Resource: (Abandoned Gas Station, Beat-Up Pick-Up)
Equipment: (Sledgehammer, Leather Jacket, Motorcycle)

All I got for now.

Monty Oum and his Dead Fantasies

2008-03-24T23:44:00.006-04:00

Tagra Nar has brought something to my attention. I'll share it by posing a question.

What do you get when you have the girls from Final Fantasy, and the girls from Dead or Alive, really pissed off at eachother?

Something amazing.

And its sequel.

Apparently, there will be three more of these.

Edit: Sorry, FIVE more of these.

Blogspam #3

2008-03-24T18:41:00.002-04:00

Okay, I know #3 comes almost a day after #2, but I forgot what it was I was going to talk about. I remember now.

I've been interested in Avatar: The Last Airbender since I heard whispers of its production at Nickelodeon some time ago. Now that it's incredibly popular - probably due to the great writing and production value - I'm bummed I still haven't had a chance to really dive into it.

I found, on YouTube: "Avatar: The Abridged Series"

It's great. Cheaply edited and subbed, hacking down episodes to 5 minute orgies of one-liners, inside jokes, and song snippets. And he does all the voicing, for every character.

Definately worth watching - though there's only 5 episodes so far.

Blogspam #2

2008-03-23T23:53:00.004-04:00

I've been eagerly awaiting Gaia's Flash-based Battle system for two years now. It seems like this year is definitely going to be the one.

The reason I'm bringing it up is because Qixter - the lead dev on the project - mentioned in his journal that the art team is working on 'monster variation for group leaders and demi-bosses.'

This immediately made me think of Diablo II.

I've been wanting to play DII for a long time now, but I can't find my damn Lord of Destruction CD. So the idea of having a browser-based pseudo-Diablo makes me very happy.

Blogspam #1

2008-03-23T23:31:00.004-04:00

First, dear future readers, forgive me for the rapid-fire posts which are about to commence. I have a lot to catch up on.

Due to my membership in the Darkfall clan Oromea, I got to sit in on a developer IRC open house for Exanimus. A zombie MMOG in the works.

I'm kind of worried, because RCT (Rotting Corpse Team - the devs) seems to be composed of a good chunk of people from outside the gaming industry. They say they've gotten a large part of prototyping out of the way, and are working on their middleware products playing nicely together. I don't know what to make of that exactly - I almost translate that as 'we have a ton of money, let's see what we can do.'

Jealousy is probably a large part of that, though. I'd love to take a look at their design document and see what kind of mechanics they're planning. The forums have spurred a bit of creativity within me and I have some pretty cool ideas that I'd like for them to implement. Hopefully, one day, they'll notice my wonderful posts and let me in on it. I think having an online world of dramatic horror would be simply amazing - with zombie abilities reaching into the meta-physics of horror. Causing survivors to stumble or trip with fear, reload slowly or drop the reload altogether...

...I can hear the heartbeat getting louder as the zombies get closer...

Making things easy

2008-03-23T16:49:00.002-04:00

So, funny story.

I decided to save myself a lot of hassle and just go with a blogspot blog, for my website.

Amazingly enough, when I was setting up my account I learned there was already a nordicninja domain! I was flabbergasted - I thought Nordic Ninja was the most original dubbing I could have been blessed with. Kudos to Eric on that one.

Anyway, it turns out that I already had nordicninja.blogspot.com. I made it a couple years ago, back in college, for class assignments.

Huzzah for me! Hopefully I'll be able to customize the blog to match the rest of my website's scheme - sit tight til then, though.