09.08.08
Posted in Games at 16:55
I finally got around to playing the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed demo today, and it seemed mostly enjoyable. I was slightly worried that the demo was so short - not even a whole mission - which might indicate that the actual game is also very brief. This doesn’t concern me because I have anything against short games, but because I prefer short games to be accompanied by am equally modest price tag, and I prefer them to be at least mildly replayable.
Its gameplay was fun though - of course it’s really really hard to mess up lightsaber combat, but even then, it was more enjoyable than I remember Jedi Academy being, which was enjoyable indeed. The force powers were decent, though I was slightly disappointed at my apparent inability to pick tie fighters out of the air. Generally speaking, it was a good demo, but it ended on a very low note - it ended with a quicktime event (QTE).
I’m pretty sure it’s scientifically proven that nobody likes quicktime events. They often come suddenly out of the blue, they’re a diversion from the regular gameplay, and it rarely feels like you’re actually responsible for whatever awesome actions are being displayed on screen. So I think it’s time for some of my usual armchair game design (hopefully mitigated by the fact that I do actually hope to be able to put these things into use some day).
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- Game: The Force Unleashed Demo
- Music: Metallica - Imperial March
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09.05.08
Posted in Game news, Other media, Personal at 11:10
Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The content of the site is almost as fantastic as its name. Honestly I don’t know how all these brilliant words can exist on the Internet for absolutely no charge. Surely this state of affairs cannot persist?
It’s made up of some of my favourite people-who-write-about-games. In the beginning they were mainly favourites because I realized they all love Deus Ex almost as much as I, but I have since grown to love the way they write as well as their opinions on games and game design. There’s something very British about the general tone of the site, and I’ve always appreciated a good Britishness.
A lot of the best stuff on there was paid for by other sites or actual publications (more often than not the brilliant PC Gamer UK, to which I subscribe), and it amazes me that they’re allowed to post these commissioned articles on their own blog. But sometimes they do post some completely new stuff that blows me away. Here are a couple of my favourite posts of theirs:
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- Game: Castle Crashers
- Music: New Found Glory - Situations
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09.03.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 15:58
One of the great charms and the great frustration of modding is the amount of jury rigging, hacking, and general improvising which is often necessary to do the things you want. The more moddable a game is, and the more resources you have at your disposal, the less you generally have to improvise, since you’ll be able to actually implement things properly instead.
I started modding way back in the Warcraft 2 days, and it was barely really modding at all, just mapping. I remember various attempts to turn Starcraft into a roleplaying game. I didn’t invent the method, but I did make thorough use of it in my various maps. In Starcraft, the basic builder unit could pick up and move certain objects. We’d cordon off a corner in the upper right of the screen, give the player a builder unit, and then place a “drop” beacon and a “use” beacon. Certain objects would be repurposed as usable items (such as medkits or powerups) and automatically moved to this makeshift inventory when the player moved over them. To activate a medkit, the player would simply have to pick it up with his builder unit and move it over the “use” beacon.
Later, I moved on to Warcraft 3, which had way better scripting and mapping tools. WC3 also already had an inventory for your hero units, so I was able to construct an RPG scenario without having to MacGuyver too heavily. I did, however, use the nicely flexible scripting system to code a simple pop-up dialog to present the player with some riddles, which was fun.
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- Game: Castle Crashers
- Music: Metallica - Fixxxer
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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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07.31.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 20:26
I reckon that every game project will once in a while present a few interesting design challenges. That’s one of the reasons game design is fun: Solving creative challenges can be just as much fun as actually playing a game, especially when it evolves into a collaborative discussion about possible solutions. Recently, one of our levels in TNM has provided us with a new and interesting design problem.
The Concept
The map in question is a vast sewer system designed as a labyrinth, inspired by the Hong Kong canals level in Deus Ex. Like the Hong Kong canals, there’s nothing strictly plot-critical in the sewers, the player will never need to visit them, and indeed the first two playthroughs of TNM (both by Gelo) skipped the sewers entirely to make it through the game faster. Instead, the sewers are a vessel for exploration, a recontextualization of the good old dungeon to be delved into and investigated for the sake of adventure.
The sewer level is the only map created from scratch by me, so it holds a special place in my heart. But it’s a bold design, and it’s not meant to appeal to everyone. When I originally visited Hong Kong, I was immensely thrilled by the way entire parts of the map were hidden simply by virtue of the map being so big and intricately structured. I believe I’ve mentioned it before, the sense of a “secret” that’s grounded in the fiction of the world, rather than being some sort of invisible door that disrupts your immersion in the game’s world. The sewers were designed to be so enormous and labyrinthine that things could be hidden simply by placing them slightly off the beaten path.
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- Game: Quake 4! No, just kidding: TNM
- Music: Alphabeat - Fascination
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07.25.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 11:18
Modding is a hobby that carries its own reward. It demands an excrutiating amount of work, but if you’re into it, it feels more like fun than duty and at the end of the day you have a product to show for it. Hopefully a product you can be proud of.
As the project draws to a close, the rewards become greater and more numerous. In the beginning, you get a kick out of seeing your dialogue implemented, your characters animated, your world lit and ready to explore. Few feelings compare to the pride of hearing an actor interpret lines that you have written, however. And finally, letting people play the mod and hearing what they have to say about it is an amazing experience.
Also painful. But thrills like that don’t come for free, you understand.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod, The Nameless Mod, The Nameless Mod...
- Music: Silversun Pickups - Melatonin
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