Digital Amusement Game Development
  
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I've found an important trend that must be discussed. Entitled: Playground VS. Competition This is a concept I've founded without any other documented influence. Pay attention readers, this one is important. In an industry-shaking move, Nintendo has become an unstoppable force once again, due to the smash hit of casual gaming. What happened here? How did Sony, Microsoft, and the major publishers miss this boat? Let me discuss an important observation. I noticed how the very young age group was more interested in chasing down an enemy in Super Mario World (SNES), stomping on them, then running back to where the enemy spawned to do this again. Not intentionally mind you, but because there was stuff to immediately do. There was no rush to the end. Didn't matter if the time ran out. Guys would reappear, Mario is back doing the same thing in the same 300 feet of virtual level. Again, and again, and again, not straying too far from the beaten path but still lightly experimenting with a maneuver here and there. This is the playground. Our young player was being called out to finish the level, out of their supervisors necessity for completion and moving on. Why? The gamer is entertained here, figuring things out, not interested in moving on, or jumping into a new situation. This is the playground. This is where they remain, with the environment they've been handed, finding new and interesting ways to exploit their surroundings to their pleasure. To move them into another territory robs them of the potential they believe they could have known with the original environment. Discomfort, boredom, dissatisfaction, and apprehension ensue. Keeping this casual or fun-loving player within the bounds of the playground strengthen their knowledge of minute details. They become engineers of their environment, finding solutions to problems that exist only due to their dedication of finding new uses for old/familiar surroundings. continuous observation of detail and intracities allow them to bring understanding of underlying fundamentals - ultimately creating "Replay Value". This, is the playground. There is then the "Competition" players. They demand progress, the push to stare into the developing void while only glancing back at the path paved. Details are only meaningful in macro. Remaining on top, being the strongest, fastest, most powerful with minimal setbacks. Repetition is boredom, however remaining only loosely within familiar patterns. Stray too far and the competitive player has to strengthen their adaption rate - unless this player allows a certain balance of Playground with their Competition, the adaption rate will be frowned upon, as it works against their strive to hold the number 1 position. The major difference in the two mentallities is acceptance of recursively recycling details, and purpose of refinement. The "Playground" player operates without consequence, yet enjoying the relation with their given ruleset, while the "Competition" player operates in a survival sense, securing their position at the top of the environmental food chain. Both player types will digress the other with heavy bias. Here's where a companies like Nintendo and Rockstar are making a killing. The competitive crowd will tear up a strictly built, heavily thought out, well-designed level/game, then bounce to the next challenge. This creates a difficult burden to the developers. The ratio of "Effort to Return" is very unbalanced. The end result, for example, is that the money invested is greater than the sales produced. While the immediate effect of an extensively designed Competition game will be recognized immediately, only those who wish to dedicate themselves to becoming masters of the game will fuel the game. If this leaves little to no room for the Playground players, there is no continuous adoption of the game, and thus no growth, resulting in an eventual short-term death. Such a waste. Let's take "Heavenly Sword" for example. Super pretty! Short and no replay value, except for those who want to become masters of the game. God of War - many hours of play, a rewarding experience, not a great deal of different things to do, but entertaining - here we find some balance but still weighted towards the Competition minds. Super Mario Galaxy - still about the same, relying on finishing a level, moving on to the next, but returning to familiar places to further explore or try new techniques - a circulating balance of Playground and Competition. Grand Theft Auto - missions? you can do those? let's steal that car and go shoot stuff - for hours, days! fun! I can go there? How can I do that, let's find out! This is the playground. This is what really sticks in players' minds, this is what makes people talk. "I was doing the thing, then there was this other thing, and alluvasudden I did that thing!" [making reference to something both parties could relate to, potentially experiencable in reality and virtual]. Interest is drawn, the playground is on the map, the territory accessible, the experience quite familiar but different and exciting even when returning again. Amazingly enough I've captured the true playground experience in my Superman maps. Really should have called it Supersoldier right off the bat, ah well. The map remains at full capacity at most any hour, day in, day out. Players are given time to try new techniques, or given limited time to execute any technique, but must execute SOMETHING or experience nothing. While everyone else is doing something, one must join in to do something, which means thrown into limited time of technique execution. Here's where God of War excelled - from the start, BLAM ZOMBIES! and they're going to kill you in like 3 seconds, unless you do SOMETHING. Suddenly you go. I mean that in the worst grammatical sense, you go! Do something! That something is a technique you're forced into making, or do nothing. In the case of Superman, jumping off a building is that something. Landing without dying is the technique. It's an OMGWTF challenge for those just thrown into the fire, yet easy to walk through. The fire then remains hot, but one realizes their skin is tough, however still mortal. As long as they're doing SOMETHING, their interest remains at attention. However there are significant examples of doing nothing when the effect of doing something is being portrayed. Running through a large hallway, to run through the hallway and reach whatever is at the end of the hallway, is doing nothing. Collecting the mystical 3 things does not count towards doing something. (how would you feel if I told you to go collect three random things around your house, just to know what you needed to go shopping for later? no, those groceries are same ones you got last week.) A linear prefabricated playground with a limited set of fun things to discover, purposely excluding exploitation of the environment (i.e. Metroid Prime 2) becomes doing nothing. Doing anything without steps toward growth within ones' perception is essentially doing nothing. A player who thrives without change, without tolerance to being anywhere but on top, they need a competitive environment. Those who just want to play wrecklessly, need a playground. This concept must be considered when deciding the overall value of the game/level to be produced. -wily duck
That post didn't occur as a result of reading the slashdot article. Actually, I had be surmizing my next post here in The Pond for a few days previous. I was intending to write about my dismay of games' futures. Perhaps I'm becoming more seperated from them, or just bored with gaming in general, or have other issues in my life contributing to feelings like those. But that doesn't affect the end result of the industries' future. I've been known in the past to be somewhat of a pioneer of fate, being called pessimistic. Unfortunately, it is not pessimism that drives me to revealing problematic events, which is a challenging and very irritating position to those whom require measurable proof of my concepts. The big dogs of the game industry are in trouble, because they're trying to become the same executive rockstars that plagued internet companies of the 90's. Yes, sure, live it while you can and forget that tomorrow will come, live blissfully, forget that socialogical patterns can actually reveal trend divergence. EGM rates 2008 as the year of the PS3, cool, great. Programmers are finally getting a good understanding of the machine. Their tools are honed. Let 2009 be even better. I expect Microsoft to release a new console fall of 2009. Wow! awesome! cool! stand in a line! ebay! marketing buzz! rinse and repeat until the carpet gets pulled from under and the lights go out. What just happened?! Games need a more practical future. Educational games have a huge nitch that have hardly been tapped. Take Cooking Mama and Train Your Brain for instance. Or Endless Ocean. Or a number of education-centric games currently sitting behind the glass, not in the bargain bin. This is one of the ideas that will help push the physics era of gaming (as mentioned on the forums). People are interested in interesting things, doing intreguing things, things they can relate to. Take Google Earth for instance - it's effectively a game, although not branded as such. I inadvertantly shut down my previous company's surveillance NOC (a large data telecom now bought and gone) for two days when someone caught a glimpse of me flying around earth. They played Google Earth intently as if it was shareware Doom 15 years ago. Practical gaming is something Nintendo is attempting to focus on with the Wii. Game For Everyone aren't always triple-A dense storyboard rpg's or fps's, they're something people can relate to. What do you think made old-school games (NES) so incredibly popular? They were effectively the digital counterpart to the board game. It was like board games, but with motion. Pull Stratego out of the box, maybe not even follow the rules right, but move pieces. Chess. Sorry! Crossfire. Fireball Island. Mousetrap. Life. Don't Break The Ice. Jenga. Operation. In some way each of the games that are still stocked at Toy's R Us have influenced video games. I don't do narrow views. Board games are but the beginning. Poker, legos, mythology, World Wars, cooking, running a household in everyday life. Call of Duty really made waves because it was practical - gave the gamer an insight into something they couldn't have witnessed themselves. This is interesting. In fact, if you need a benchmark to determine if your game is going to sell well, use a simple 0-10 scale of how interesting your game is. 0 being the shoe size of the fat chic at the drive-through window 10 being you'd give up a bottled genie for the game. To go into detail, practical issues should be assessed. Time constraints are the worst thing for a game. Spending 2 years to produce a game that sells 1000 units pales to the potential of tacking on an extra year and a half and sell 50000. Why did you waste 2 years in the first place? Issues that need upfront attention: 1> Decay - directly influences replay value. Did your final boss suck? Music redundant? Slow pace? 2> Puppeting - completely ignoring the intended audiences' actual likes/dislikes by synthesizing them on assumptions/guesses. 3> Hope - having no idea what's going. Somehow you're on payroll AND have a big mouth. Arrogance fuels you. 4> Addictiveness - the odds of a PR problem when you're sued by the gamers' family for mental anguish losing their loved one to GameX. It's simple. Your game sucks if it meets any one of the 4 criterias: if items 1 through 3 are rated high, and/or 4 is rated low, your game sucks. I shall repeat myself - meet ANY *ONE* of those items, and you've wasted huge amounts of money in salary, resources, equipment, licenses, etc. The rockstar executives of present care little of the above formula. They care of business models, competition, and mainstream industry trends. Sweaty-nad anti-socialites posting to their forums? They represent the millions of others Just Like Them! we're all apparently forum trolls working at Pizza Hut drinking excessive amounts of Mountain Dew. That's the impression, and we're made to believe it's true. Eventually those very same anti-socialites won't have reproduced like they might have away from The Glow, significantly reducing the numbers of the lower age groups that make up a great deal of their sales. Didn't factor that into your growth projection did you? What does the knowledge of all this change? Little to none. Unless the knowledge is administered by force, the course of history continues to trudge forward to meet whatever original fate is in store. How much do I care about Changing The World? Not much, though it's interesting when it happens. Gaming has been a significant part of my life, but I won't cry when the drug known as video games eventually crumbles to chunks and dust. Play on. :V
More on Urban Terror. For the first time since probably summer, I got on the FSK405 server, now playing UrT 4.1. Within a short amount of time playing ut4_bath, I realized how clean the network code has become. Hits hit. Every normal frustrating shot of the past was gone. If I missed, I missed and I knew it. If I hit, even sweeping past at inches away, my hits hit where I expected. Movement and gameplay brought me back to 2.6. For the first time in possibly years, I was having fun playing standard maps. There were plenty of "holy shit!" and "WOW" moments that I've only experienced in Unreal 2004 for the past couple years. The intensity is back, because the game plays/behaves in the expected way. This is why I/we have hung on to UrT...hoping to get that solid gameplay feeling back. I'm pleased. No development work to speak of. Haven't had any time to dedicate. Now that I've played 4.1 and liked it, there's a better chance of working on a map sooner than later. One of the things I've noticed with even the newest UrT levels is the lack of visual sharpness - specifically the abundant use of mipmapping. To make sure you're clued in, instead of rendering sharp pixel edges when a texture is scaled larger than 100%, mipmapping smoothes/blurs those pixels to create a finer image. Unfortunately mipmapping is an old technology, almost a decade now. The textures in these UrT maps look dead with low contrast, little detail, incorrect/inappropriate lighting, lacking lighting behaviors, no depth. The last two could be attributed to engine limitations. However these issues can be overcome with more detail. The potential rendering speed of any computer that might be considered 'modern' should be able to tear up Urban Terror's rendering desires. This means using much higher fidelity lightmaps, 512x512 pixel textures (minimum), texture stitching whereas multiple textures are placed adjacently to become one large texture, layered texture run-off (like grass edging), etc. While other mappers worry about performance, I look towards minor details that make huge visual differences/impact. When a game (any game) is delayed for touch-ups, you can guarantee the mainstream difference is miniscule, however replayability increases. A Great Game always includes replayability. Over in the other UT world, Unreal 3, I've seen something quite interesting. I've gone so far as to saying U3 is what Quake 4 SHOULD have been. It's incredibly fast paced, incredibly well balanced, network code feels optimized, feels like a next/current gen FPS, utilizes gameplay shortcuts to keep lull points moving. For example, you get a laid out path that generates in front of you to clue you in to what to do next - the execution is unobtrusive. The vehicles feel more solid...and some are -weird-. A walker-thing that has robotic tenticle legs? A rolling thing that turns into a ball and also tenticle-walks? It's weird! A lot of the levels appear to be based around tenticle-ism...but one just blew me away. Somewhere in the far distance this Thing that looked dormant and XBOX HUEG would 'deploy' tenticles to capture zones...WOW this giant nasty tenticle thing comes writhering at like light speed from the thing way, way, way out there and sinks itself into the capture point. If you lose the capture point, it retracts very much the same, all while the announcer is giving you the grisly 411 on the situation. It's seriously creepy! If you heard of CompUSA's OMG SALE you may have perused their store had one been near you. If not, don't worry, their deals barely put them on par with Newegg. However, all their games were 10% off. In an amazing find, Raiden 3 for the PS2 revealed itself! I nearly threw money at it while preparing to kill anyone even attempting to enter the area. Until last night the box stayed within it's original plastic wrapping. It's been almost a month, savoring this most excellent game. I played it, but can't say I was totally blown away. It was absolutely amazing how they rendered the background into a sudo-scroller, like fighting for a minute at some extreme angle in reference to the ground, moving fast or slow non-linearily through a variety of environments. Raiden isn't for everyone, but it's a blast watching. Lastly. I bought a pair of Bose headphones - QC2, second to none with acoustic noise cancelling. They set me back $300. That's a serious set of headphones. Are they worth it? In short, HELL YES. All white noise gets nulled. Most background noise is gone. Only significant sound remains. When also listening to music/sounds through the headphones, all noise is gone. What does this mean? Two things - first, CONCENTRATION. I can think with these on. It's a beautiful thing to wipe out the filth from the air one's brain is constantly trying to surpress. That on it's own is worth far more than what I spent. Second, sound reproduction. All frequencies are produced with most excellence. So much so, that while playing Crysis, the first time I used the headphones vs. the logitech 5.1 surround system, something happened. I switched to my cloaking power, found as I cloaked, the surrounding environment muffled - birds fell into the distance, wind hissing left, insignificant sounds cleared away. This was Crysis's testiment to audio quality in games. I found a gameplay heightening experience in audio by having the hardware to produce it. I was overly impressed. I found sounds throughout the game that weren't obvious because I was using the high-end headphones. Like a high-end videocard, high-end audio hardware really makes a difference in the gaming experience. :V
First, Mario Galaxy has finally been released. Got probably 4-6 hours on it now. Initial thoughts? It's pretty damn fun. It flavors structure somewhat similar to Sunshine, with gameplay like 64, and a SMB3 undertone. This adds up to a "Good Thing". I can tell Nintendo spent a great deal of time on pacing. When my woman complained the game was taking too long, I told her "this is not just a game release, this a game of ages. This is a game that will be expected to be played for the next 20 years." It is. Mario is what I'd consider a AAAA (quadruple A) title. There are no software updates. There are no second chances. The game must apply to the utter hardcore, mainstream gamer, and casual gamer. Gameplay and details must be thought out in every way possible. Miniscule details are as important as the flashy ones. Sound and music have incredible amounts of attention paid to, environmental, variety, and quality are prime. Framerates never cough. The game is as easy or difficult as you want it to be. This is a AAAA game! The funny thing is, as entertained as I am about Mario Galaxy, it's not my favorite game. This isn't due to any lacking qualities, simply gameplay preferance. I'm more of an FPS type, so that leads me to my next game. Crysis. Without a doubt, this is the most intense, beautiful, fun-driven game I've played for the PC in a long time. Here's what you're dealt. You have a super-suit, i.e. you're a super soldier. It's actually interesting how much I could see these guys running around a particular unnamed city I've built... Anyway you get 4 powers. The powers are picked in a unique manner - hold the quick-switch key (I bound 'alt'), a menu consisting only of 5 icons in a circle appear on the HUD, mouse into the direction of the power, release the key. What happens is you can switch between powers extremely fast with minimal fuss, minimal key bindings. Your powers: cloak (predator style), speed, strength (including high jump), armor. Each of these are prefixed with 'maximum'. By default you use max armor. This is effectively your shield armor, which regenerates not only itself, but your health. Speed gives you a flash-gordon boost for about 50 feet. Strength is extra fun because you can grab a guy, and tether-ball punch him a good long distance (normally you'd just throttle them while jabbing). And as mentioned it makes your jump super too. The fifth ability is modifying your weapon, like adding a grenade launcher, scope, laser, etc. Now the graphics. Would you believe me if I told you I got lost in the jungle? Not some sparse trees with a few leaves and bushes here and there, no. DENSE thick jungle. Volumetric. Massive. Expansive. Standing at the side of a waterfall admiring 'the view'. The density of folliage, bush, trees, is incredible. Part of the gameplay is being able to hide in those bushes right under an enemies' nose. It moves when you push through the thickness. Wow. Now let's talk about the AI. Wow. These guys think, plan, react, freak out. Moving around cloaked, which you can't do for too long, guys will be looking for you and one might see this weird hallucination in front of him. As he's still walking slowly checking things out, his head and eyes start paying closer attention to the odd distortion. Sometimes exclaiming 'what the hell?'. They appear to use curiosity in their tactics. Suddenly appearing in front of them by dropping the cloak usually makes them freak right the hell out. It's almost too funny. They're smart though, I'm really, really impressed with the AI. I'm very critical about AI, so take it as an earned compliment. There's so much detail and depth to the exploring nature of the game it's difficult to summarize the experience. The world is wide open, I know this because I got lost somewhere way far from where I should have been and hung out for a while til I sorta found my way back. Let's move on. Age of Empires 3. Tonight, I bought the Gold Edition with the Warchiefs expansion. What does this mean? Let's just say I've paid my dues for a 'demo'. For an RTS, AoE3 is an excellent game. Another game coming to me (also bought tonight) is Unreal 3. I won't open it for another month, but I hope to find an intense, deep FPS. In an incident with Newegg, I became the proud owner of a second 8600GTS. I've decided a new motherboard is in order so that SLI becomes feasible. I shouldn't have to think about a video card upgrade for a few years after. Screw directX10, MS can't even keep their own spec straight. The Wii is back to kicking ass. The library is currently as a respectable variety and number of games. With Mario Galaxy out, it will be nearly impossible to purchase a Wii off a shelf. Oh hey did I mention DBZ3 is coming out soon? It's a good time for games. Wait! The burning question! Am I doing any dev work? Negative. No time. What? Spend less time gaming? Tell you what, if I spent any less time gaming, I wouldn't be gaming. See the spread between this post and the last post? Like 2 months? Yea. Urban Terror isn't going anywhere. 4.1 will happen eventually, but interest just isn't there. How I'd love to finish supersoldier. Maybe I can - I won't touch it until after 4.1 though. Remember I said the same about 4.0. One more version is still a possibility. Speaking of dev and Unreal... I got the extended package which has lots of training vids on their devkit and other unreal engine dev stuff. Eventually I'll learn unrealed, maya, or max... have to. I need to pick up an advanced 3d modeling tool. Until then... lots to do. Work, family, projects, games even. Yikes. Gotta have fun sometime right? :) :V
But! This is a GOOD thing. One thing I also noted back then, the Wii is the next coming of the NES. If you recall the NES has some bad, suck-ass games. The concept I give you today is that a console with only "great" games dilutes the greatness of the games. The bar can only be pushed marginally higher and boredom strikes. Why are B-movies still made? Some people love them! They also are a breeding ground for unique concepts or risky ideas. Bring on the crap, and let the people decide. I want to take this time to make a (possibly another) note about sound and music in games. I see games highly rated, sometimes with near to perfect review scores. However, the music, or sound effects, suck! Such as, a music loop that's 2 minutes long, and used for most of a 50+ hour game! On the spot, that's -2 points (if say we were on 0-10 scale). Repetitive audio, such as the main character making the same noise when they attack or get hit, for 50 hours? -1 point. The game now can acheive a 7 if the rest is flawless. I have two games to single out whom are offenders: Legend of Zelda for the Wii/Gamecube, and Dark Cloud for the PS2. For goodness sakes developers - do one of two things: enable a music/sfx volume level function, or spend some real quality time on your audio then enable a music/sfx volume level function. Perhaps even a function that allows muting the volume, and the audio that directly affects gameplay now has a visual cue instead. For the sideline gamers, those whom are not playing the game, this functionallity is a neccessity. Game Developer Magazine has dedicated countless articles to the above issue. People just don't get it. As long as the marketers have a shiny poster to flaunt, audio will be an afterthought. I believe I failed to mention - there's a program for the mac that allows bluetooth communication to a Wiimote, where you can watch the accelerometers in action. You would see a real-time graph of each axis upon the other, movement on an axis produces your gain/loss input. It's simple yet captivating. The controller does not care where in space it is, only it's relative position against gravity and motion. The program also enabled the wiimote to be used as a mouse. Sounds cool, however the speed of movement and acceleration really needs to be tweaked to be useful. Ok it's cool anyway. Nothing else to talk about for the moment. Thanks for stopping by as always. -wily duck
I studied their patterns for a little while as I assessed how to rid myself of the pests, while minimizing the genocide factor. Jumping ahead for a second, as my adventure went on, I began to see striking similarities as mentioned, to AoE3's A.I. My first attack was pretty blatant, Raid right down the pipe, equivilent to a strike at the base permimeter. The next day I found this to have zero affect on their operations, all resources were still being gathered, colony in full effect. I noted their very streamlined pattern of traffic. Almost like a deck of cards shuffling, 3 bees active at the perimeter at all times, 2 in, 1 out, or vice-versa. Very organized. Their main entrance was obvious now. I found some cardboard, folded it to a size that would block the hole, waited for an opportunity when the hole wasn't guarded, and struck! Hole plugged, I stood back to watch the event unfold. Sure enough the returning drones start piling up in a big 'WTF' moment as each of them had to individually find out what the clusterfook was all about. I left them to hash it out for the night, giving them the opportunity to MOVE, cause I just evicted their ass. The next day I found them hard at work eating and tearing through some rather dense cardboard to make a new door - they succeeded. With this I decided to arrange another piece of cardboard and perform another plug, which should surely stop them this time! In doing so, I made a bungled move of protecting my hands with gloves that had a yellow logo on them. I got spotted. While they went into a second 'WTF AGAIN?" frenzy, I know a few of them saw me do it and I'm pretty sure that got communicated to the others. One flew directly, and I mean NO curve, into my arm like a dart, a blow has been landed to the oppressing human! I didn't blame the little guy, and jumped into my house. Still watching them, I start realizing the patterns between the game A.I. and the swarm mentallity. The next day bee traffic was down to just a couple total. The few that did hang out were searching diligently for a new entrance. The next day I see what appears to be another possible entrance they found, but only slightly used. This reminded me of when an army would come in, wipe out like everything in the village/base, except a few guys I had run for the hills and search out a venue to rebuild. Knowing those few survivors can rebuild a new colony/army, I had to make a move. That night I went out with dish soap and blasted the potential new entrance. Thought I won this time. Nope a few days later, after some sacrifices I'm sure, they've got a new hole and new operation. The saga continues, but all observations I've made are nearly identical to the resource generating methods AoE3 uses. Noting the bees aggrevation and behavior when the holes were plugged, the military aspect of AoE3 started emerging. I can see how a swarm of 'killer bees' can be extremely effectual. These kinds of observations in nature can surely improve gaming A.I. -wily duck
Now the hard part. I'm going to go to the UrT forums and plead and beg and snivel to 27 to add exploding entities into 4.1. Damn I want that so badly!!!! Here goes...
A great deal of effort has gone into troubleshooting the problem, with no success. It's baffling... I'd like to point the blame towards my new video card. However - other maps work fine, in q3ut4 and quake3. Not sure what the quirk is... so for now this is a setback that will delay a new version of laberinto. :(
This is most awesome news, certainly a priviledge. At this point as mentioned above it's a matter of time to make this happen. Once I'm in the flow, great things are sure to follow. A setback however, my main machine has suffered an apparent motherboard failure, seperating me from my RAID array. It's on a PCI-E x4 slot, and I've got no other board like it... so off to newegg for some quick replacements. Meanwhile, my previous machine which I've made most of my maps on makes a comeback, allowing the digital dependancy to continue with only minor obstructions. Let's talk gamedev business. The model is getting clearer - game companies are swallowed up by an ever growing corporation - i.e. EA, Microsoft, etc, and their public focus is not on games, but sales. Their public position is strongly entrenched not in fun, but in profit. That means the game industry is squarely in the core of the corporate business engine. Here's the problems that result: First, in American business, all corners are cut to squeeze out the most profit. Second, established business formulas are followed and applied to automate as much of the development -> sales process as possible, to the point that any creativity outside the established flow is considered sticking one's head out, or standing out from the crowd. This in turn becomes the immediate attention to either get in line or shine. If shiny, exploit until everything else around is equally shiny. The point of business is exploitation - and the more lucrative the market, the more aggressively exploited. This is why the race for graphics has done a great deal of damage to the industry. Games with great graphics have been easy to rate against each other, simply by looking at them. Gameplay went to the sideline for a few years. Since graphics being the driving force, hollywood and the movie industry became heavily involved. Those guys are cutthroat, and arrogant. Game publishers getting bigger and bigger, requiring executive muscle to steer the company. Enter the real business baddasses, the guys that will step on toes with razoredge cleats. They bring in the marketing force, whom doubtfully are gamers themselves. They advertise their games to some fictional consumer persona, a puppet image of the actual buyer. Market research is done. Many are interviewed whom probably started gaming with the Playstation, skipping the many generations of strictly gameplay-over-graphics gamers. Games are made to satisfy those who want weak games with the top visuals. There have been great games that have stood out, or found an excellent balance. Many are then lost to the puppeted sequels (Guitar Hero 3 seems to be the latest victim). What does all this amount to? An eventual backlash by the gaming community to satisfy the old school urge of quality gameplay. It seems there are many out there who claim to know gameplay, but do not appear to know their customer. Urban Terror stands in the forefront of my mind - the design path had turned badly, alienating the many people who play, leaving only the few hardcore veterans. Although Nintendo has done an admirable job by making the correct hardware to fuel the necessity for gameplay over graphics, this coming chri--uh holiday season I guarantee a load of shovelware games are going to hit the shelves for the Wii. The only reason: sales. The machine has dominated the sales charts, so publishers are pushing HARD to get something, anything on that console to get a slice of the pie. See? Remakes, shovelware, undercooked low content poor quality "games". What happens is eventually the great game makers are pushed away by the political bs, leaving incompetent designers to push onwards. The game is over when the gamers declare: "We don't care anymore." It's 1985 all over again. This time it'll be about 2019. :V
Finally beat DBZ in story mode for the Wii. I see on the Atari forums there's another coming in Fall, looking forward to that. Age of Empires 3 is taking up a bit of my time at the moment. Speaking of, we went to a game store, looking for a puzzle. Interestingly enough I found people playing tabletop miniature wars. Among other things, a very respectable amount of advanced board games lined the walls. Wish I could play a couple a them... Spose AoE3 will have to do for the time. Nothing new on koth or sb5. Had to break up the boredom with joust. :)
However that's all visual/gameplay. The real work was localizing the map - meaning you can play ut4_superman_b4 in other quake3 mods without urban terror. I had to spend a lot of tedious time going through the .map source file in notepad replacing everything and moving content files into one source directory. The result of this was that I was able to, in one fall swoop, modify the map to change from beta 3 to beta 4 in minutes with no missing textures, media, etc. The pk3 acts as a standalone map this way. Yes it's bigger, but the payoff is portability. This proved to work excellent with pre-production beta 5. Everything slid right over, so there's no beta 4.1 or whatever. This is the fate that became of temple, being handed a version 1.3 map. I released superman beta 4 quite quickly, as I set a deadline and met it with about 2 minutes to spare, literally. The gold copy cd's were delivered to FSK405 Frog for a lunch meet. Unfortunately a very minor bug slipped in, which derailed the whole map until I was able to recompile it later that night. This bug did not appear in my testing. That's the price one pays for crunchtime releases. Overall I'm quite happy with the new release. There's new gameplay to freshen things up, and of course Urban Terror now has its long-awaited Big Map for version 4. I've gotten a great deal of positive feedback, which I'm very appreciative of. :) 
 
 I'm also working on ut4_koth. I'm particuarily proud of this new flowing water shader made last night... some of you know my long-standing hate for water shaders... Well the new superman was a great step in making a great water shader. I've upped the quality again to produce the best looking flowing water I've seen yet in any UrT map. First is a before-after of the original koth. The water looks and flows beautifully! 
I haven't been successful with either gensurf or ez-gen to recreate the hill correctly. The original hill was done by hand, vertex by vertex. Looks like that's the way I'm going to be handling things again. Hey, I'm not a professional at using the tools, but I do get the desired results from them. Next up will be a matching moat water shader, then onto the hill. Expect a max damage experience. I want a serene, peaceful hill blown into a post-apocalyptic disaster. Let's see what I can come up with.
:V
Amazingly enough after over 5 years playing, 4 years working levels, I got a quick spot on Oswalds' radio show about the mapmaker. He baffles me. I had a lot of frustrations pointed in his direction. As I stated in my clans' forums, I don't want to play his game any more, even though I still want to play Urban Terror. Rather than cause any more ruckus, which has been backed up by other players, I figure spending more time having fun in Unreal2k4 Onslaught beats stirring up the llamas pen. I've got a project going on outside the digital world right now, yes, in the analog. The time I spend on the computer pretty much involves wikipedia and google for the moment. I'll be taking a trip for a while too, so that puts me to about next month before anything significant happens here. One gaming note I do want to make. There is a pattern of inevitibility I've called out before, now obvious. We are in a game industry bubble, i.e. the internet bubble which blew out in 1999. We've got until around 2019 until the whole industry goes 1985. For those that don't understand, video gaming went from "wow! cool!" to "the hell with this" really quickly, the whole damn thing suddenly imploded on itself, retailers were as quick to stock game consoles as they were to stock anatomically correct barbies. The businessmen-sharks (yes the kind with lasers on their heads) have gotten a foothold on the industry and are prepared to drive it into the dirt while holding a net out the window catching dollar bills flying by as they burn off the engine. I'll explain all the gritty details in another post. Next page |
