04.25.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 09:53
I generally consider myself pretty proficient at reading and writing the English language. I put this down to a heavy exposure to English TV, English games, English books (thanks, mum!), and lots of time spent on the English parts of the Internet (something about the Danish corner of the ‘net seems oddly restricted and… rural to me, I can’t quite explain it - everything Danish on the ‘net just seems a bit pedestrian). It’s gotten to the point where my vocabulary contains words that many native English-speakers do not know, and where I certainly spell better than many of them - though it may simply be due to the fact that I care.
There is, however, one area in which I am always at a disadvantage and may always remain so: Idiolects. This is a frighteningly important part of writing, especially in English, which is a language distributed across several nations. A person’s idiolect describes so much about them, things we may or may not consciously pick up on, but which at least a native speaker will almost always understand at a subconscious level. From the way a person speaks (inflection, choice of words, and other factors), we infer their area of origin, their level of education, their social standing, and often even their ethnicity, among many other things. This is indescribably difficult to manage when you’re writing in anything other than your first language.
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04.20.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 20:45
There are certain advantages to having your team distributed across 4 continents. One is that somebody will almost always be working on your project at any given time of day. When you’re sleeping in America, your guy in Europe is up working, and there’s enough of an overlap to meet up in before he goes to bed and catch up.
There are a lot more disadvantages though, sadly. The chief problem is communication, of course, which is a substantial but partially surmountable problem: Wikis, forums, instant messengers, voice chat, and video conferences all exist to help alleviate communication issues, though nothing will ever beat actual physical presence.
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- Game: Rainbow Six: Vegas 2
- Music: Enemy - Pressure
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04.14.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 15:12
If there’s one game design lesson I can take away from The Nameless Mod, it’s this: It’s impossible to overestimate how much help the player needs.
Among the fan community of games in the Looking Glass tradition (System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock, etc.), there’s a widely spread belief that games should trust their player to be intelligent and independent. Bioshock’s quest arrow and highlighting of important objects is often considered condescending and unintelligent - redeemed only by the fact that you can toggle it off in the game menu.
But the people who complain about that obviously hasn’t observed a playtest. If you make a game and let somebody else play it, it becomes painfully apparent that your player is always more stupid than you expect. If that sounds really bitter, it’s because I desperately wanted to create an intelligent game that trusts its player to be resourceful, yet ever since we started playtesting it, all I’ve been doing is to insert more hints all over the place.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Alice Cooper - Poison
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04.06.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 12:45
- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Queen - We Are The Champions
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03.24.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 19:18
I’ve started the first balance pass of the first section of TNM, which is the biggest and most non-linear part of our mod with its 26 maps offering about 30-40% of our total play time. I’ve chosen to split the balance work on these maps into two parts - first I’ll remove any items that I’ve placed too many of, then I’ll go over it again adding the items that are missing. This prevents the balance sheet from getting way too confusing to handle reliably.
My biggest problem now is the dreaded crates. Everybody and their grandmother would, if prompted, tell you that crates are a lazy design choice, and that’s why they’re increasingly rare in modern games. To the player, crates are just a weird, nonsensical design flaw that we’ve all grown used to through repetition.
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- Game: Gears of War
- Music: Nirvana - Heart-shaped Box
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03.01.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 01:56
There are presumably endless advantages to being able to meet your coworkers face to face, but right now I have one main reason to crave physical interaction with my fellow TNM team members: I want to celebrate. I want to get everybody into a big room, break out the campagne (hell, it’s on me!), maybe pick up a cake from a bakery down the street (it’s not a lie you gits!), and then put We Are The Champions on the PA.
I finished the third and last of our main endgame cutscenes. Each deliciously scripted, carefully framed, and with plenty of unique content like sound and art assets, not to mention special-case programming. And I have nobody to celebrate with. The best I can do is call a few guys into the same MSN convo and throw the little party hat smilies around. It’s just not good enough! I want to laugh, dance, and pat everybody on the back for a job well done. There is so little left to do on TNM it’s ridiculous!
And I can’t do anything about it. Except sit here and watch TortoiseSVN commit the last files to the repositories.
One day… one day I’ll win $100 million, buy a building in Copenhagen, and fly everybody in. And then we’ll have a damn party.
- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Alex Brandon - The Synapse
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02.24.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 02:22
So… simply for the hell of it, I just exported all of our conversation files from TNM, used Word’s excellent search and replace to clean out all the comments and name tags and seperators so only the actual lines remained, and then checked the count. I think the result entitles me to show off a little.
The Nameless Mod has:
13,224 lines
194,846 words
1,050,568 characters (with spaces)
868,897 characters (without spaces)
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Velvet Revolver - Superhuman
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02.16.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 15:00
If you think game balance is only important for multiplayer games, you are wrong. It’s true that balance can really make or break an MP game, and for that reason, a lot more time is often spent tweaking the way classes and weapons interact in a game such as Team Fortress 2 or Battlefield than is spent ensuring that the difficulty curve of a singleplayer game is nice and smooth on all settings.
But balancing a singleplayer game can be a pretty comprehensive project in and of itself. Seeing how TNM has been playable from start to finish for a couple of months, I reckoned it was about time to go over the amount of items in the game. Gelo complained a lot about a lack of equipment on his first playthrough, and initial datamining suggested that he was right.
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- Game: Thief - Deadly Shadows
- Music: Heroes del Silencio - Avalancha
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01.22.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 23:19
And that person in turn retaliates with lengthy self-indulgent ramblings. I did an interview with my good friend Rasmus over on his RazuBlog. Unfortunately he really understimated just how windbaggy I can get when asked to talk about game theory and TNM in particular. In the end, he had to split the interview into two blog posts for readability. Part one is here, part two is here. Hope you enjoy 
- Game: Mass Effect
- Music: Bear McCreary - All Along The Watchtower
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01.02.08
Posted in Game design, Games, The Nameless Mod at 18:47
Finally turned in my paper today and thought it was time to get back to the endgame script for TNM. When I looked through it I was struck by just how damn huge it is - and how little of it you’ll get to see on each playthrough. So far it’s 18 pages - 11 pages of endgame cinematics, 6 pages of what I’ve written of the denouement so far, and a cover sheet. That’s a lot, incidentally. Since I’ve used standard script format it more or less matches 17 minutes of cutscenes, and I’m not even half done with the denouement yet, my guesstimate is that just that sequence may end up around 15 pages or more. But at any given time, you’ll only see a couple of minutes of it at most.
This is a trend in the design of TNM: We deny you access to a lot of content based on your choices. Each main storyline has 4 maps that aren’t present in the other storyline, meaning at the very least you’ll be missing 4 maps on each playthrough, and a couple of these make up entire missions. Then there are the optional maps - the ones related to side quests, the ones with bonus stuff, the Corporate District sewers that you may never visit but in which is hidden a bunch of cool content… and that’s to say nothing of the dialogue, the background story, the characters etc.
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- Game: Mass Effect
- Music: Within Temptation - Ice Queen
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