I’ve been a bit tired of my old Wordpress theme for a while, but it took me a while to work up the energy to install a new one. In preparation, I spent several hours yesterday and today tagging all my posts. All my posts. That was a pretty boring job, but now it’s easier to get an overview of the topics I discuss here. Though TNM is one of the most used tag so far (I’m not sure I’ll keep it, seeing how it’s also a category, and that should be enough), I think these are probably the most interesting ones:
Summer Solstice Silhouettes
Admittedly I missed the equinox by a day, but as I found myself awake at dawn on the second shortest night of the year, I decided it was a nice opportunity to head out with my camera and grab some photos at 3:30 am.
One of the best things about North Europe (and, I would imagine, northern America or Asia) is the bright nights during summer. Close to the summer solstice, the sun goes down around 11-ish and already returns at ca. 4 am. As much as I enjoy the night, I really can’t function properly if I have to get out of bed before sunrise, but at this time of year I often find myself going to bed after the sun is up. Case in point: this entire weekend.
Unfortunately I only gave myself half an hour for my nocturnal expedition, because I didn’t want to go to bed later than 4 am, so I didn’t manage to find a really perfect place to photograph. The best I could do was an artificial hill in one of the parks near my house, and of course the view towards the east was mostly obscured by trees. I did manage to get a few good shots though, and these are them:
Posted in Photos.
– June 22, 2009
TNM Post-Mortem on GameCareerGuide
GameCareerGuide has finally published my post-mortem of The Nameless Mod, which they call “one of the most interesting total conversions out there”. I structured it in the traditional form of Game Developer post-mortems, and it starts like this:
If we’d known what we were getting ourselves into, we’d have run away screaming. The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex stands out for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a single-player total conversion, which isn’t the easiest or most popular category of modification on the internet. Secondly, it’s enormous: The Nameless Mod features over 14 hours of voice-over, the average length of a playthrough is 15 hours, and that’s just playing one of two significantly different, mutually exclusive plotlines. Third, and arguably most notably, The Nameless Mod has been finished and released to very favorable reviews.
The project was in development for seven years, two months, and 11 days by an international team of hobbyists who never met each other. It placed enormous demands on communication, leadership, and quality assurance, and to top it all off, it started as that most reviled of genres: forum fan fiction.
And then I go on to talk about the development process and describe 5 things that went right and 5 things that went wrong, in the usual fashion. It’s as honest as I could make it, and I hope you can find the time to read it, even though it’s quite long. The post-mortem may be found here.
Posted in Articles and stories, Game design, Off Topic Productions, The Nameless Mod.
– June 11, 2009
The OCD Game
I often joke that I have a mild Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I’m not sure how much that’s true, but the fact is that I often take pleasure in extremely repetitive, braindead tasks. The Nameless Mod owes a lot of polish to this fact; for example it’s unlikely that the advanced difficulty options would’ve been so thoroughly implemented without my semi-OCD, and the ogg files in the soundtrack were only ID-tagged because I had so much fun doing it.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy open-world games so much.
If you have experience with open-world games, you’ll know almost all of them base a lot of their gameplay on repetitive, “grindy” tasks. Assassin’s Creed was widely criticised for its repetitive, samish missions (four simple mission types, constantly repeated). STALKER had randomly generated missions likewise falling into four categories and literally endlessly repeated. Grand Theft Auto 4 has (as far as I know) randomly generated police missions as well, that you can trigger by getting into any police car anywhere in the world, and using its built-in computer interface to locate nearby crimes to thwart.
What’s more though, all of these games have some kind of explicit scavenger hunt element to them. Often it’s structured by an overarching optional goal such as an achievement for collecting every hidden item, other times the objects you hunt are their own reward to obtain. STALKER’s randomly appearing artifacts boost your statistics when you equip them, for example, but there is no reward for finding certain amounts of them. GTA4 on the X-Box 360 gives you an achievement for killing all 200 pigeons in its New York City and another achievement for collecting every hidden item.
Why does this appear to be such a prevalent design element in open world games, and are there any realistic alternatives? Is it even a bad thing?
Posted in Game design, Games.
– June 10, 2009
Still Alive
Man I hate these “it’s been a while since I posted” entries. Too bloody right it has, so get back to posting, don’t just tell me what I already know!
But this is such a post. After we released TNM, my creativity has quietly been on the rise as we’ve been gearing up for a new game. Took a while to arrive at a concept we like and decide what tech to use (we’re using Jim’s engine XR3D aka. The Jimgine, which is sort of proprietary in the sense that he’s on the team now), but now we’re on track to put together a tech demo followed by a gameplay prototype, and then we’ll be able to reveal what we’re up to. Hint: It’s probably not what you’re expecting.
I turned in what is set to be my last paper for Copenhagen University today, “User-created content – An analysis of user-created content in computer games” (it’s not my best work, but I’m pretty confident it’ll pass), leaving me with just a single oral exam left before I’m officially a Bachelor of the Arts (lamest superhero name ever), and then it’s off to the post-graduate programme, if they’ll have me.
I’m really happy to be designing a new game again, though it’s harder this time because we have economic concerns and we’re trying to keep everybody excited about the project without compromising the integrity of the design. It’s an interesting challenge. I love the way we’re headed right now, and I’m having tons of fun playing around with Jim’s early game editor. It’ll be really great to start prototyping and fleshing out the gameplay.
Real news is more likely to surface over at the OTP blog before it appears here. We’re looking into having it redesigned over the summer break too, because we don’t fancy using somebody else’s theme. So keep an eye on that 
Posted in Off Topic Productions, Personal.
– May 28, 2009
Narrative Flood
Richard Cobbett is a freelance journalist who writes very clever things about game design in every issue of PC Gamer UK. He also likes cats, hates spiders, and wrote a really positive review of The Nameless Mod, so I think it’s fair to say we see eye to eye on many subjects.
One of Richard’s primary obsessions is the narrative side of the game medium, particularly the writing. That’s another thing we have in common. Now he’s started a new blog, Narrative Flood, which is “a light-hearted look at the world of story and writing in games”. I’ve been following it for a few days, and it’s really quite good so far, so I recommend that you check it out and perhaps add it to your RSS list.
Posted in Game design.
– May 8, 2009
PCPowerPlay interview
This one was interesting for me because it’s the first time I’ve been interviewed over voice chat. It comes across a lot more authentic and casual than when you have time to think about the questions and formulate an eloquent answer, which often gets pretty artificial. Unfortunately it also exposes that I’m substantially less eloquent over the phone than in writing, because I don’t have as much practice speaking English as writing it. I ramble more and I pause more.
Also interviewed were Shane and Lawrence, both of whom contribute with interesting points, but since this is my blog, I’m totally going to use one of my own quotes:
Jonas: Yeah, I think the main reason a lot of mods are very traditional is that people like Star Wars, so they make Star Wars mods. And, you know, that’s fair enough, but we wanted to do something strange, and unique, because we could. We had no obligation to sell two million copies, for example, so we could be as strange and arty as we wanted to be.
Of further note is that the German magazine GameStar gave The Nameless Mod a full-page review in their latest issue. We scored 5/5 for Design, 5/5 for Scope, and 5/5 for Fun. This pleases us.
Posted in Off Topic Productions, The Nameless Mod.
– May 8, 2009
Ego: Unstoppable
Time to take a moment out of my flu to become temporarily invincible by absorbing this massive power-up from Australian game magazine PC PowerPlay:
A full two-page review in the actual games section of an honest-to-god print magazine. Not only that, but they gave us a bloody 9 out of 10. And somehow I got my own damn fact box. I’m almost famous among a small subset of hard core Australian gamers! I could basically take a walk on the water across the bay to Amager right now, I’m so psyched. The mag’s online editor promised to send me a copy of the issue free of charge so I can use it for some sort of trophy display.
And that’s not all. GameSetWatch just posted the interview they did with Larry and me a bit over a month ago, Making Mods and Taking Names. It turned out pretty well, except the beginning is a bit confusing. He managed to squeeze some interesting points out of us. I especially like this part:
TNM is probably one of the most meta games I’ve played. Would you like to explain a bit about what you were trying to accomplish with the mod?
Jonas: Initially, we just wanted to do something we hadn’t seen anybody else do before – a game set in a giant metaphor for an Internet forum seemed like a pretty original idea. As we experimented more with the concept and grew more familiar with our own setting, it became obvious that TNM was ripe with opportunities for intra- and intertextuality and self-reference. There was a period when I was looking for ways to imbue TNM with some sort of cultural relevance, because it felt like we were spiralling down towards self-indulgent irrelevance, and going meta seemed like the best way to realize the potential of our setting. I just hope we managed to pull it off without seeming too smugly pseudo-intellectual.
But really, I’m just proud to have been interviewed on the sister site of GamaSutra.
Posted in Off Topic Productions, The Nameless Mod.
– April 29, 2009
HAWX
H.A.W.X. (henceforth “HAWX”, ‘cuz seriously) is awesome.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a brilliant game, but I’ve found it enormously entertaining. I’ll concede that a very large part of the credit for my enjoyment is due to the HOTAS setup I bought before christmas, but HAWX – like the Blazing Angels games also from Ubisoft Romania – fills the gaping hole in the game medium that you might call the “action flight game”.
I’ve written before about my craving for flight games with a more arcadish than simulating approach to flying, and HAWX certainly fits the bill. There are no red-outs or black-outs, there’s no stalling as long as you keep your flight computer on, you can carry enough missiles on a mission to remove a small country from the surface of the planet, you have unlimited fuel, and the flight model is extremely simple.
Posted in Games.
– April 8, 2009
TNM High Quality
I’ve been messing around with the various graphic enhancement projects for Deus Ex recently, applying them to TNM to see how it looked. Turns out how well it looks varies greatly from location to location. Overall I’d say it’s an improvement though. The four graphics mods for DX are thus:
High Definition Texture Package
In which the aim is to replace all Deus Ex’s models and their textures with higher-poly, higher-resolution versions. Have released a demo, and are currently hard at work on their first proper release.
New Vision
One man’s quest to recreate every world texture in Deus Ex with textures 8 times as large. Currently in open beta, and about 65% done.
The ENBSeries
Which adds modern graphical technologies such as bloom, specular, and bump-mapping to so-called “last-gen” or even older games with brute force. Currently in some sort of alpha mode for Deus Ex, so there are quite a few kinks to work out, but it’s already fairly impressive.
DirectX 9 renderer
Which brings many fixes and improvements to the aging game. This one is necessary in order to run New Vision and the ENBSeries at all, so kudos to Chris Dohnal for coding it up.
I’ve taken a bunch of screenshots:
Posted in The Nameless Mod.
– April 2, 2009
