08.23.08
Posted in Games at 23:21
Playing Viking makes me a peculiar sort of sentimental. Between the SNES and the Xbox 360, I was all about the PC, so I never played any of the typical console third-person action games. I did sort of brush up against a few of them when playing on other friends’ consoles, and I enjoyed what I saw for the most part, but I rarely felt like I was missing out in a big way.
Since I bought my 360, I haven’t played any games like that either. Gears of War, Army of Two, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto 4… these are all games I might as well have played on PC. Viking feels like a “return” to a “typical” console action game model… that I’ve never actually experienced. I’m not, however, ruling out that the feeling is based on a set of complete misconceptions about what most console action games are about.
So how about I start talking about the game that I have played instead?
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- Game: Viking: Battle for Asgard
- Music: Manowar - The Crown and the Ring
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08.17.08
Posted in Games at 19:50
Took a lot of effort to resist the temptation of calling this post “Braid Blows”, but I thought that would be a bit of a low… Blow.
Ahem.
I’m through Braid, though I haven’t yet completed it. The game consists of 5 worlds (numbered from 2-6) with a 12-piece jigsaw puzzle each. Each actual puzzle in the game yields one piece, and when you’ve completed the jigsaw, you’ve solved the world. You can, however, move through the worlds without solving all the puzzles, so while I have made it through the final world, I’m still missing 1 piece in world 5 and 5 pieces in world 6.
Braid is an important game, and a major part of the continuing effort to explore the artistic potential of the game medium. Braid’s major contribution in this context is an effort to merge narrative themes with the gameplay, using gameplay mechanics as metaphors for the existential problems the protagonist, Tim, is facing.
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- Game: Braid
- Music: Jami Sieber - Undercurrent
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08.14.08
Posted in Game design at 23:45
Yesterday I had a spontaneous impulse to write down one of my generic game concepts, thematically based on a long-defunct Deus Ex mod name of The Preachers - or rather, based on the impression I got of it from reading its website 7 years ago. Reading over the concept, it was starkly clear that in many ways it resembles half of my other game ideas. I mentioned this to Gelo, and he confirmed that he’s experienced the same thing: Before deciding to write the book he’s currently working on, Rebel Cell, he had half a dozen very similar concepts under consideration.
A few more people have since confirmed this, and it does make a lot of sense: When you have loose plans to make something creative, you’ll have a pretty good idea of the basic sort of work you want to do, but it’s easy to think of many different variations of this central concept. With that in mind, here are the three components that seem to appear in most of my game concepts:
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- Game: Viking: Battle for Asgard
- Music: Carpark North - Transparent and Glasslike
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08.12.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 14:15
I knew before I even got there that it was going to be a busy weekend. In preparation for our 2½ day recording session, Jeremiah’s colleague Friedrich had turned our exported Trestkon script into a tidy database to be read by VoxGrinder, T-Recs Studios‘ proprietary batch recording tool, and the script counted just over 6300 lines, slightly more than half of which could be expected to belong to Trestkon.
Trestkon, our player character, has about 34,500 words of dialogue, which at a business standard of 10 words per “line” is 3450 lines to record, otherwise known as a ludicrous amount of work. Our saving grace was that about 5-600 lines were duplicates, and only needed to be recorded once and then saved to different folders, so we “only” had to record a bit under 3000 lines. Even so, there were still serious doubts about whether we’d be able to record them all from Friday night to Sunday afternoon.
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- Game: Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer
- Music: Rammstein - Ich Will
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08.07.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 01:07
Or: Indiana Jonas and the Quest for Voice Acting.
…okay, just Heading to Hamburg then.
A couple months ago, our prospects for having Trestkon’s lines recorded were… a little bleak. Our original motivation for choosing poor Lawrence as the protagonist of The Nameless Mod, at the risk of his being forever regarded as the source of one of the most gratuitous acts of self-insertion fiction ever, was that he had a lot of time to dedicate on TNM so we reckoned he’d be able to record the many lines the protagonist would doubtlessly have. I mean the player character might have hundreds of lines!
Six years later, the situation is a little different for a couple of reasons. Lawrence now has a girlfriend, a job, and a college education, and our player character ended up with just over 3550 lines of dialogue (a grand total of 34,466 words by last count). It also became apparent during the creation of our first two trailers that while Lawrence is not a bad actor, he is not an actual actor, and our quality standards have increased substantially since 2002.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: LeoBad - Sol's Bar Ambient 2
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