mozidesign.com Unorganized Thoughts of a Game Designer

In Texas Now.

Well I just moved to Texas and tomorrow is my first day of work at Gearbox Software! Yeah, the same company that just released Borderlands, which I can’t fucking wait to play tomorrow night! It’s out on consoles but waiting for the PC copy to be unlocked on Steam.

Anyways I am going to be doing some level design work, for what project I have no idea and even if did know I can’t share it (yet), the power of NDA’s is to be feared and respected.

Only thing I am bummed about is tonight in Albany is the most brutal concert and I am not there. I had to sell my ticket for the Mastodon show featuring Dethklok, High on Fire and Converge. I am fan of Mastodon but was really looking forward to see Dethklok live. Oh well, I guess I’ll see them whenever the tour for the third album is on.

Skydiving

A bunch of us from work went skydiving yesterday.  It was a great day to do a 14000 ft jump! All of us did a tandem jump with a pro skydiver. Check out my jump below:

My only “oh shit” moment was when I actually left the plane. Before that I was relaxed and as I was falling I had a blast, major adrenaline rush!

I got to do this again sometime.

Gastronauts

At work a few co-workers and I do something known as “adventure lunch”. An adventure lunch is basically a trip during our lunch break to random restaurants in the Albany area. Some of these trips are good, others ok, and some cause one or two members of the crew become sick. Which is rare but makes the lunches that more adventurous! For a while our crew was thinking about documenting these adventures and now it has finally happened. Thanks to Dave we finally have our own site, http://gastronaut.us/. The most recent adventure has been posted but stop on by more often as we continue to document our weekly adventures. For convenience the link to the site has been added on the right panel. Now go to the site and read up on the tales of Gus’s Hot Dogs.

Site Upgrade

It’s been a while and some change was needed. This new design is from Andrei Luca, which I got from the main Word Press page. A nice clean design, props to Andrei for sharing it with the wordpress community.

On a completely different tangent,  prank emails, http://www.dontevenreply.com/index.php

Some really funny stuff on that site. Thanks to ilkman at Beyond Unreal for that link.

Urban Decay

A couple of weeks ago I went out exploring with a friend of mine and we came across this old factory. The place is called the ‘First Prize’ center but the nick name is Little Chernobyl. As a level designer I found this location to be a great source of inspiration for an industrial themed level or a Gears of War level.

Around this place there were a lot of signs like ‘High Voltage’ and other warnings of impending doom. However, out of all the signs this one cracks me up for some reason. Though I am sure if someone actually got stuck in a conveyor belt it probably is that not funny.

-Photography by Rappo. Full gallery link http://www.flickr.com/photos/rappo/sets/72157616043190444/

SP_Forrestal Village Update

Thought I post a quick update that this level is still in production, it’s just that I have been really busy at work and was unable to spend anytime modding. Recently I managed to find some time and I fixed some critical bugs with the checkpoint system which caused various encounters to be triggered only once. I also tweaked the lighting a little from totally orange to adding in subtle blue shadows for contrast in various parts of the map. Below are two updated screens and more updated screens can be found in the level design page.

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Hopefully sometime soon I will be able to iron out  other low level bugs and post a beta build on Beyond Unreal and the Epic Games Forums so keep an eye out for that.

Blue Screen of Death

Have not seen one in ages, until the other day.

Found it to be amusing, not sure what went wrong but all I did was shut down my PC for the night and next thing this happens. Oh well, mild PC humor.

Anyways, as quick follow up to my last post about melee weapons being swift instruments of death in gaming, I found a good answer to my question as to why that is. As a game designer I kind feel that I should have known the answer or at least had a reasonable one, but nonetheless a friend told me his view and answer to my question, which was… (more or less their words, but the idea is there)

If melee weapons were not instant kill in some games no one would risk to use them. It would totaly suck if you tried to stab someone with a knife only to damage them and alert them that you are being either extremely brave or stupid to attack with knife when they have a shotgun which they will use to turn you into giblets as you continuously try to stab them.

Hence, it makes sense, that some melee weapons are instant kill to reward the player for having the balls to run up to an opponent wielding a bigger gun and taking them down without a barrage of bullets like everyone else playing the game.

Speaking of attacking bigger opponents, if you have not already seen it or wish to see it again, check out the Meet the Scout video for Team Fortress 2.

The other Meet the [Soldier,Engineer, Demoman, and Heavy] videos were good and funny but this takes the cake. Absolutely, hilarious. Though I am sure whenever ‘Meet the Pyro’ is released it will probably be funnier since the Pyro is practically inaudible behind his gas mask.

Best Week Ever

Got back from GDC yesterday afternoon, but was so tired from the past week and from the lack of sleep I had on the red eye flight back that I slept all day. Now that I am awake I thought I share what went on last week.

Monday:

I spent most of the day at the Indpendent Games Summit, though I did plan to go the Game Design Workshop, but given that the workshop was a two day commitment for all day Monday and Tuesday I decided that the Indie game was a better choice so that I could do something different for Tueday. Actually the Indie games was a two day event as well but since it was a series of mini postmortems there was no need to attend both days.

Anyways the Indie Game Summit was quite informative to see and hear some of the problems and solutions Indie game developers face while making and distributing their games. Some of the stuff they talked about are similar in nature to things that established dev houses face when creating their games. The best session of day was from folks at Introversion Sotware, creators of Darwinia and Defcon. Their session was basically about establishing a brand and supporting it by working with consumers and listening to their needs and using their feedback to make great games.

I skipped out on the last few sessions becuase I was feeling a bit sleepy so instead of falling a sleep during someone’s session I decided to head back to the hotel. A few hours later I met up with the other VV folks that came down to GDC and headed out to dinner. We planned to go to some Thai resturant near by but on the way there we bumped into Jamil Moledina, the head honcho of GDC! Our little group chatted with him for a bit on the way to resturant, then he asked us where we were headed. We told him to a Thai resturant, Jamil told us to go to a different one called Osha, that was closer. We took his advice and damn was that place good.

Tuesday:

Again another day long session, Creativity Boot Camp. Bascially in nutshell this session was about creativity. There were a bunch of fun little exercises that involved different facets of creativity such as problem solving, concept drawing, working within time constraints, etc. Then all of these concepts were applied at the end to creating a game using a particular game board and set pieces. Each group gave a one minute pitch and quick demo of their game to other session attendees.

That night was the IGDA party, met some old friends from last year and made some new ones as well. Also at the party I met up with level designer friend Tynan Sylvester, (check out his blog link on the right side).

Wednesday:

Started out the day by heading down to Ken Levine’s talk on storytelling in Bioshock. Very cool talk, full of spoilers about the game but I assume for the most part everyone in the crowd had already played the game. Before the talk I went up to Ken and introduced myself and asked him, “Would you kindly, sign my copy of Bioshock.” For those that have played the game the phrasing of the question will make sense out side of being nice. Ken did sign my copy of Bioshock, very cool.

After Bioshock talk I went to a round table session entitled, Designing Conflict without Combat, quite interesting to hear peoples thoughts and ideas about the subject. But in the end it seemed at least within the context of video games most conflict in the end is resolved with combat in some form or another.

The Microsoft Keynote was on this day as well, and the two cool things out of it, Gears of War 2 and the XNA games info.

Took the rest of the day off to perpare for my own talk with Leo on Spider-Man 3. Finally at 4:00 PM we started our talk. The crowd turnout was good, half the hall was full and got some great questions at the end of the talk so overall I think it went well. Also Craig Harris from IGN was at the talk as well, he usually comes down to VV to review our DS games, nice to meet up with again at our talk. Cool thing was that after the talk at the booth crawl and last two days at GDC people kept coming up to me saying they were at the talk and really enjoyed it. I am sure Leo had the same experience after the talk.

Thursday:

Headed to the talk from some Lucas Arts folks about their new game, Star Wars: Force Unleashed. If you have not heard or seen previews of this game then check out this link full of videos down at IGN. At the end of their talk they gave out some cool swag from the game that included some mini action figures and vehicle model.

The annual Game Design Challenge was a lot fun, last year’s winner Alexey Pajitnov had to face off against challengers, Steve Meretzky and Brenda Brathwhite. The topic of this year’s challenge was the inter-spieces game, which had to be game that could be played by both humans and another worldy speices. Alexey had some crazy design that invloved people playing a game of virtual paintball with dolphins, Steve had an RTS game played against bacteria, and Brenda proposed a social networking game with dogs. In the end Steve’s concept entitled Bac Attack won.

That night I went to two parties, the first was the Level 99 party for GDC speakers. Met some fellow speakers and had a good time there. After an hour or so I headed to Microsoft party which was really good. They had this really cool live band not sure what their name was but they played some sort of jazz/funk music great stuff. There were couple of games setup around the party such as Call of Duty 4 and Crysis. Met quite a few people just from playing a couple of rounds of CoD 4.

Friday:

The final day of GDC, I spent most of my morning at the Activision booth in career pavillion, answering questions of people interested in gaming jobs and played Guitar Hero 3 with some people down at the booth.

Soon afterwards I went to the annual Game Designers Rant, which is where a few designers get up on stage and rant about what is bothering them about the games industry. Following that I headed down to the Unreal Tournament 3 postmortem, presented by Mike Capps and Jeff Morris. Very cool and informative session on the behind the scenes of the development of UT 3. At some point during the session Jeff said his famous quote of “Carnage, Carnage, Carnage!” At the end of the session I got the two to sign my copy of the UT 3 art book.

After that I headed out to the airport for my long red eye flight back home.