08.27.07
GROW!
Play it.
08.25.07
Polish is everything
Last time I worked on the third floor of WorldCorp HQ, my objective was just to connect it to the rest of the game and make sure the gameplay was all in place. Recently I returned to the map as a part of my balance testing - and I was immediately struck by how much that map was actually missing in terms of polish. The triggers and enemies were all there, but there were practically no items and no sound effects at all. So I loaded up the editor and got to work, this time more focused on making it a perfect level than making it work.
Sound design is important to me. If you’ve ever doubted the importance of sound effects, just play a random level of your favourite FPS with the sound turned of - it doesn’t work. I realize I’m preaching to the choir - all you guys know what a huge importance sounds have. You’ve experienced the waves of nostalgia washing over you just from hearing a soundtrack from a game you played a lot when you were a kid. The ambience of a game is absolutely critical to the experience, and sounds (including music) is probably at least half of that.
The difference in the feel of the level before and after I’d crammed all the sound effects I could (and then some) into the map was striking. Now it actually feels like a sinister biochem lab, it doesn’t just look that way. The lazily bubbling sound of a viscous liquid (thank you Epic for including pitch control in your AmbientSound actors) seems to lend meaning to the opaque cylindrical container nearby. It makes a lot of difference. I believe all the time and effort I’ve invested in placing sound effects in our maps will be one of the primary ways TNM will distinguish itself from previous mods - yes, this is me patting myself on the back again: Note the title of my blog. I am by no means a sound technician, but I’m pretty happy with my own work.
By the way, still working on an entry about resource exposure in games in general and TNM in particular, but I still have to find a better term than “resource exposure”, because that could mean anything. Suggestions are welcome. I may also discuss our improved difficulty selection in a later post, because my (admittedly somewhat scatterbrained) balance testing seems to indicate we may have struck gold with that. So stay tuned.
08.20.07
I recommend
Boil - Vessel
Excellent album from Danish/Icelandic progressive metal band Boil. For some reason everybody I’ve played this for has commented on its unoriginality, and I’ll agree they sound a lot like bands such as Tool or A Perfect Circle. But I really like that kind of music, so I’m enjoying listening to more of it. Stupefy was the original reason I bought the album, but Abstemious has turned out to be an extremely pleasant surprise.
The Bourne Ultimatum
Watch Identity one day. Then watch Supremacy the next. And then go to the cinema and watch Ultimatum. I know it’s “just an action movie”, but it’s one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen. Of course I read the original comic book series many years ago, so I was a fan of the concept before it ever became a movie. The Bourne trilogy has given me an immense respect for Matt Damon, who is one of the few Hollywood superstars to consistently transcend his own identity and make you forget he’s an actor. Ultimatum’s only weakness is that it’s sorely missing Franka Potente, but then on the other hand it features some moderate political commentary, and that almost makes up for it.
Not playing Knights of the Old Republic 2
…until Team Gizka finish and release their patch. That said, I’m glad I’ve played the original and experienced what a rushed and wounded game it is. I believe I’ve learned something from observing the choices Obsidian made when they had to cut important pieces, and seeing the consequences it had for the integrity and coherence of their story. Also, that game is in need of some serious balance testing.
08.19.07
Post-Alpha Stress Syndrome
The Alpha 1.7.5 build of The Nameless Mod has finally been finished and all its pieces uploaded to the TeamFTP - Larry is compiling the installer now. Most painstaking was uploading our music, which weighs about 200 megs. We may decrease the bitrate of those tracks for the final release so it’s easier to download. Perhaps we’ll also offer a version with high-quality music.
Anyway, it’s done. I’ve been working an average of 12 hours per day on this build for the past month, and tomorrow I’m taking the day off in a desperate attempt to preserve my sanity. I’m not touching anything to do with TNM beyond posting the weekly news update.
I’m sort of looking forward to returning to university, so I can actually leave the house for something other than work.
08.14.07
I am the God of hypocrisy, and I bring you: Cutscenes
I just spewed out another burst of bile about cutscenes over on the PDX forums, and while I mean every word of it, I can’t help but think about what a giant hypocrite it makes me.
First, allow me to clarify. Cutscenes can be great. They can serve as a wonderful reward for completing a certain mission, and they can (still) show sequences that are too special-case to show off in-engine. A good example of excellent use of CGI cutscenes is the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, where short cutscenes between planets show your ship taking off, jumping to hyperspace, and then entering another planet and landing there. KOTOR2 even has - in my slightly over-confident opinion - an exemplary example of how cutscenes can tie perfectly into the game as it combines bits of CGI to show the results of your actions in the previous gameplay segment.
The opposite example that I also bring up in the thread I linked to above is from Halo 2 where, after fighting your way through a shipful of boarding aliens to find the big bomb they brought on board, you are rewarded with a jaw-dropping cutscene where Master Chief pushes the bomb out an airlock and soars through space on it in what I can only assume to be an outrageously souped-up tribute to Dr. Strangelove (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). He then plants the bomb on an alien vessel and takes off back to his own ship again as the enemy ship explodes magnificently. Quite a reward, right? But throughout this scene, the only thought going through my head was a resounding “WHY CAN’T I DO THAT!?” Why must they pull me out of the game and degrade me from player to audience? It’s like printing in large white letters on the screen: “ATTENTION: YOU ARE NOT THE MASTER CHIEF.”
08.08.07
Extremely random TNM shots
I’ve been crunching almost non-stop on TNM for the past 3 weeks, pausing only to go to work, play a bit of KotOR2, or get my alloted 2 hours of sleep each night. It’s slowing down a bit now as we’re pretty much done with the first 4 of our 5 missions and Nick, who is currently our most active coder, just went away for 2 weeks. Shane, our lead coder, has a university education and a girlfriend to take care of, so he can only spare about an hour each day for TNM, which is definitely not enough to keep up with me.
Anyway, yesterday I played through our third mission. I played pretty deliberately to just see if the main storyline flowed the way it should, and I didn’t explore anything at all. It still took me about an hour and a half, so that’s nice. Playing through that whole mission for the first time without having to cheat to skip missing levels was a fantastic feeling, and it filled me with a strange pride that, well… I’m simply compelled to share with you all. Below is a random dump of non-spoiler images pulled directly from my DX screenshot folder.
08.06.07
OMBug!
Great Scott! Two posts in a day! Well if you’d call that last thing a “post”.
This is about KOTOR2. I am just about the last person on the Internet to play this game, so none of what I’m going to write will surprise you. Especially not this first part:
Holy mother of God!
It has a dialogue system! It has a star map! It has modelled the inside of the Hyperion!
Well I don’t know about you, but I’m psyched. Bring it on, Blizzard!
08.03.07
Beware the Budget
I have a problem. It’s one of the problems I am most embarrassed about, but there’s no reason to hide it. I gotta get it out and face it so I can work on solving it. The problem is that I’m no good at designing casual games.
I think the problem stems from the fact that I never play them. I’ve played some of the classics of course, including the old arcade games that used to be hard-core but are now considered casual: Pac-man, Tetris, Bejewelled… and my all-time favourite, Breakout (aka. Arcanoid, aka. Aquanoid, aka. Action Ball, etc.) I also played a lot of Solitaire once, when I had nothing better to do (during elementary school before I discovered game modifications). But in the last 10 years, the only casual games I’ve played are Sudoku, Bookworm Adventures, and the Peggle demo.
Almost all the games I play are AAA titles. Action games, roleplaying games, adventure games, platform games, and even the occasional strategy game. I play games with stories - if a game has a good story or allows me to create one, I’ll play it. But stories seem oddly incompatible with casual games. The most story you can get out of that is “…so I was just about to miss the ball but there was ONE brick left on the screen, up in the corner, and somehow my mind just shut down and by pure instinct I moved my mouse to barely hit the ball and…”. This is all good, but it’s not exactly dramatically satisfying, is it? I mean… you pretty much had to be there.
Now, if I was in a position to design AAA games, then this wouldn’t be much of a problem. I’d have limited my job opportunities a little, but I could just stick to what I can do: Making games with stories. Unfortunately AAA titles these days cost at the very least $5 million USD to develop, and that’s not exactly the sort of funding I have access to right now. In other words if I ever hope to get up there, I need to do some smaller games. Basically my choice is between text-heavy games with 2D graphics or casual games with no story at all.
What I want to ask is, if anybody reading this cares enough to post about it: Have you ever played a small story-based game with good visuals? Or a casual game with a story? Is it possible to have a story in a casual game at all, or is it too important to the genre that there be no storyline at all so players can pick up a game and play it for 20 minutes at a time?
