Jun/090
Bonus Round
Many of you may recall the bonus rounds from Street Fighter 2, such as the car smashing mini-game:
Well here is some dude actually doing it! Dressed up as Ryu, this guy destroys this car with his bare hands!
Badass!
Apr/090
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/
Feb/090
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.
Jul/080
Yeah…I am a Gears fan boy…
The other day my Gears of War box set figures came in and damn do they look good. The box set has highly detailed models and weapons, featuring Marcus Fenix, Cole Train, and Two Locust Grunts.
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The picture quality zoomed in is not the best, thanks to the camera on my phone and the reflection of light on the plastic cover, but nonethless I have the figures and they look bad ass next my other figurenes on my desk at work. Was debating to take them out of the box but they look better in the orginal packaging.
Speaking of Gears of War and me being a total fan boy for it, tons of new Gears 2 footage was released recenty with both single and multiplayer footage!
Single Player Footage:
Multiplayer Footage of the new map Day One:
Gears 2 really shows a lot of improvements over the first game and looks more brutal as well! More bloody executions FTW! Nov 7th is the release date, can’t wait!
On completely unrelated matter, I have temporarly locked commenting, why you ask? Spam…it’s really pissing me off getting email after email of comment updates filled with nothing but gibberish or canned replies from what I assume are spambots. To those that do leave me spam or use spambots…FUCK YOU. To everyone else that does not leave me piles of spam I apperciate your visits and please continue to, the hits keep going up and forces me to actually write something every so often.
So until I can find a nice and simple way to ‘Bury those ‘Cockroaches’ of spammers, comments will be down. Not that I got that many anways but nonetheless spam sucks….
Apr/080
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.
Feb/082
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.
Feb/080
Off to GDC 08
My flight is in a few hours, just finished some last second packing. Really looking forward to going this year, not only for my own presentation, but the current line up of talks are great. Some of the presentations I’ll try attend discuss the games, Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3, and Portal.
And like last year I’ll have a lot of notes and information to share once I return. Hopefully this trip will go well, becuase so far I have had a bad start this morning with some serious plumbing issues in my apartment, which resulted in an overflowing toilet…not cool.
Jan/080
Review of Reviewers
Had nothing to write about for the last few weeks, but now I do, my topic…movie reviews. They suck, sometimes they portray an accurate picture of what to expect but sometimes it’s a load of bull shit. People have their own expecations and for the most part are not in line with those of reviewers that get paid. I personally perfer a friend to tell me if movie is awesome or sucks, but somtimes you can tell just by the preview. I say sometimes… as the quote goes, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”.
For example, recently I saw There Will Be Borderm… sorry Blood. Previews looked intersting, title sounded cool, good reviews. Personally I did not want to watch it, wanted to see Cloverfield, but a buddy of mine already saw it so got dragged into the other one. Anyways, long story short, that movie was boring, too me. Not to say it was not interesting it had it’s moments but damn was it long and not what I expected. From what I heard and previews I saw, it seemed to be a psuedo-ganster type film, love those types of movies, where the main character would be total bad ass to get what he wants. Well it was there in this film but the way it was done was so slow and drawn out that I lost interest. And there was no blood till the end. Funny thing one my other friends started to snore during the film so that was a sure sign of it’s bore factor.
Now take the new Rambo. You already know what to expect given the last three iterations, part two was the best in my opinion. However the review scores are low, my thinking is reviewers are a bunch of old farts that look at movies with a ‘technical eye’ rather than just the fun factor of it. Of course Rambo has no story, well maybe some basic premise, but the gist is people die left and right and shit blows up. And it’s fun, hell you even laugh at times at how cheesy somethings can be. As I said I kind of knew what to expect, I know this is not going to be one of those movies that supposed move you in some way or be made to win awards like the other one, There Will Be Blood, but sometimes senseless movies are cool and great way to just forget about things and spend two hours having a blast than thinking about characters and detailed story. Of course each person is entitled to enjoy the films they like and walk away from others that are not their cup of tea, but slamming poor reviews on a fun movie like Rambo was just a cheap shot from critcs, I say. There were some decent well rounded reviews discussing good and bad points, but still more focus on the bad.
Oh well, it seems reviewer opinions seem to drive most movie goers to certain films and get paid for their comments good or bad, but honestly lack the value of hearing how something was first hand from a reliable source like a friend. Then again there are contradictions to that statement, take the 300 spoof that is out now, low ratings, like 3% from reviewers, and still people watched it and made it the best box office movie for this week! Now a movie like that is not my cup of tea, but I can see how some probably watched it for the hell of it to have fun, no matter what people say about it.
So again movie reviews suck, just watch stuff on your own gut feeling of it being good or bad, or take the safe route and ask someone how it was, or save your wallet ten bucks and wait for the DVD and not regert wasting money on a movie that people said rocked, but sucked for you.
Dec/070
Quick Post
So some people wanted to leave comments but could not, my fault… was not intentional, well it kind of was got too much spam rather than anything constructive. But for some reason in MySQL there was global lock on posts as well. Not sure why but nonetheless comments are open, I moderate them of course but if you write something interesting it shall appear here.
Also MP_Asylum is nearly done probably post final build tonight before I go on vaction so keep an eye out for that soon.
2000 hits! Thanks, keep stopping by really apperciate it.
Dec/070
Insomnia…
Been a while since I have posted anything, things were a bit hectic last month and currently busy with work as well. Also lately been lacking a lot of sleep, not sure why but I can’t fall asleep till like 3 AM or so. Perhaps I just need a nice long break from things and thankfully one is coming up next week! Again, I thank those that keep visiting even when there is nothing new, the hits keep going up!
As for this week things as I mentioned are busy, got a major milestone coming up for the current game I am working on. Can’t say much, surprised my self that it’s not annouced yet, but then the other games I did had late annoucements. Anyways, things are looking good on the project, but won’t see it through to the end, becuase after the holidays coming up I’ll be on a new project… but the rest of the team remaining will continue with the bug fixes and what not…
Anyways, enough about that… not sure if you recall but I mentioned that my band mates and I were doing a show at Drexel University this month. Well two weeks ago we played the gig and it went well, could have been better but nonetheless it was another learning experinece for us as a new group getting the hang of the whole playing live thing.. Overall we did like eight songs which took about an hour with in between setup changes, and my drum solo. From what I have heard from my band mates is that the crowd really digged it and found to be one of the many highlights of our show. To check it out for yourself you can download the video of my little on stage endavor… as you can see the crowd did enjoy it to some extent… some blank faces in the crowd but overall a decent reaction. Oh yeah and halfway through the solo my kick drum was sliding but I managed to moved it back into place and start a new groove quickly. By the way some of the grooves may sound familiar can you recognize them?
The band has other videos as well of our songs and covers we performed from that evening but they are in need of some minor editing and final approval from the group as to which ones we want to share online. Once those are up I’ll post a link to them as well.
What else, video games still keeping me busy, right now my main focus is on UT 3, and with the recent patches released and installed the game is badass! I had some doubts about it with demo but the full game is well worth it. On the subject Unreal related items, Gears for War PC is completely FUBAR, well for the moment. I can’t get the game to work, well not the game it self but one of the main components, Games for Windows Live. For some odd reason the game does not want to load it, and with out it you can’t play the game… really quite frustrating. I got some patches for that as well but it didn’t help, even tried Microsoft phone tech support, that seemed to be going somewhere but while I was being assisted my cell phone disconncted twice… well I am going to try some other things to get Gears PC running but if nothing works, I’ll just set aside and wait till some decent fixes are released so I can play the game…
On the subject of my cell phone I hate the damn thing, never works when I need to make a call… or if I do get to make a call, over time the signal bars start dropping one by one till the connection dies. I think on average during a long conversation I will have three to four dropped calls. That shit isn’t funny, but the Cingular (my phone carrier) ads on TV make seem like it is… and their motto is pure bull shit, “More bars in more places”… except Albany. Unfortuneately I am stuck with them for another year, but I am looking into changing my service and phone hardware.
Oh yeah one last thing, came across this while at work today and had a good laugh, though if you don’t play Team Fortress 2 the humor won’t make sense… Saving Private Ryan Team Fortress 2 Style... so wrong yet so funny at the same time.
—End Rant