mozidesign.com Unorganized Thoughts of a Game Designer

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.

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

Speaking at GDC 08

So I mentioned in my last post that I may be doing a talk at the Game Developers Confrence, well it’s official now, I’ll be giving a presentation along with Leo, the lead designer of Spider-Man 3 DS, about the touch screen controls design for the game. Here is the link to the summary of the presentation.

Now on to a compeletly unrelated topic…inflation. Over the weekend or sometime recently the price of pop-tarts in the vending machine has gone up from 85 cents to a dollar… went to get some a few minutes ago and put in a dollar bill and did not get any change back… oh well a loss of 15 cents.. not a big deal really, just found that to be odd. Anyways I better get started with work now…

Back Online

My aplogies once again for the down time, got a few comments from people asking what’s wrong with page, basically the old host server had issues causing the site not to load. My friend’s friend that ran the server usually did some quick fix and it would be back online, but recently it was going offline quite a bit. Anyways long story short I decided to change hosts, and actually start paying for it. So after a bit of research I went with Drem Host, so far so good and hopefully there will be no down time from here on out.

Even if the old hosting server was running I probably would not have posted anything due to work. Just finished our Alpha milestone for the next game I am working on, and the last two weeks have been a bit rough, long hours, bug fixing, etc. Funny thing is that in my two years in the industry my last few projects did have their share of crunch time but not as intenese as this, but now that I look back at those two weeks it was a good learning experience and I survived it, still a bit burned out, but in the end things worked out. I guess another reason why it has been a bit harder on me is that I have gig coming up on December 1st at Drexel University (If your in the area come on down!) and have had to drive back and forth to Philly every so often for band practice and within the next three weeks I am going to have to do three consecutive trips back and forth between Philly and Albany. The drive is not that bad, but doing a couple eight hour trips, ( four hours each way), gets a bit boring and tiresome, but what has to be done, has to be done. Without solid practice sessions the band won’t have a good gig… though I think we are doing alright and will have a good show.

Moving on, the gaming scene is getting crowded now and days as well. I got so much to play and not enough time to play the games. Recently I picked up Gears of War for PC, which looks great running on my 8800GTX, though have not played the game that much since I already own it on console. The main reason why I got the game is to make levels, right now got one in the works, not sure when it will be done but as soon as I have anything worthy to show I’ll post some screens in the near future. I also got Tony Hawk’s Proving Grounds and Guitar Hero 3 for 360 as well, both fun games, though I have some reserves about the GH 3 setlist, not metal enough, other than that it’s good. UT 3 is also on my slate of games to play and make maps for, think that comes out next week. I’ll probably crank out a UT 3 level after my Gears one, not sure if I want to do an original one or do a quick re-make of one my older releases.

What else… oh yeah, I may be going to the Game Developers Confrence again next year, this time as a speaker, with a fellow co-worker. What are we talking about? Well that’s still being sorted out, but it does focus on Spider-Man 3 DS. As soon as I find out more detials from the GDC folks I’ll make a note of it here.

Well that’s all I got for now… it’s good to be back online again!

Cheers!

Halloween Antics

It’s halloween today, and as usual I really don’t care. But it’s cool I guess to look at what other people have come up with for those that do care for the pagan festival of samhain.Times have changed people no longer stockpile grains and livestock for the winter instead they horde boat loads of candy… guess the prinicple is the same…

Anyway, the office has been decorated for halloween, check this video out from one of the tools engineers, it’s a time lapse of him and other tools guys creating a monster’s jaw using the office furnishings and some construction paper.

Other people in the office are wearing costumes some quite interesting others are make shift, but still look cool. I’ll see if I can dig up some pictures from someone. As for me, people ask me why I am not in costume, and I reply that I am dressed as roadie with my Iron Maiden shirt and jeans…that counts right?

New Look

The last template I had was pretty good, but I was browsing the web to see if perhaps I could find something else that looked neat. Well I found this template from one of those wordpress template sites, made some minor changes mainly to the side bar from the orginal design. The orginal designer is still credited in the footer of course. I have no web design skills to make something is awesome…

Nostalgia…

Time does fly by…fifteen years ago I played Sonic 2 on my Sega Genesis, and today I am playing the same game on my 360.Â

DM-Runoff Released!

Well my last and final UT2k4 map is out the door. Head down to the level design page to download the map. As usual I had a ton of fun making the level and got some good feedback during the design from a couple of people from the Unreal community that overall helped improve the gameplay and visuals of the level.

PC Upgrade!

So with my motherboard dead I ordered some new parts for my rig. Actually everything is new aside from the optical drives and hard drive. Here are the new specs for my rig :

-Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R Intel Core 2 Dou Motherboard

- EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX Video Card

- Intel Q6600 Quad Core Processor

- 4 Gigs of DDR 2 1066 RAM

With this setup I should have a lot of fun with the PC games coming out this fall/winter!

PC Troubles

My gaming rig has been acting up lately, doing a lot strange things such as turning my usb devices on and off on it’s own and restarting it self without warning. Tried a few things, one suggestion I was given was that it may be due to poor power support and new power supply would do the trick. So I got a new 650 watt power supply, took while to get it in with all the cables it has. I fired up my machine and for a while things were good, but then it acted up again with the same problems.

So I called some friends up told them what was going on and what I did, and then got another suggestion to check my heat sink for dust. It turned out that there was a layer of dust over the heat sink which was probably causing my CPU to overheat and shut down. I cleaned it out and rebooted, and with no luck the same shit happened. My guess is it is either a virus or my motherboard is dying. I tried to scan my system for viruses but it won’t stay on long enough to complete scan, so if it is a virus, it’s done one hell of a job to my rig.

But I guess this is also sign to upgrade my rig as well. Seeing that all these new games are coming out this fall/winter like Crysis, UT 3, Blacksite: Area 51, etc. that will need alot of power to run and which I don’t have at the moment. Not sure what I would upgrade to but been looking around and will most likely bump up to a quad core system with top end graphics card, probably something from Nvidia this time around. Currently I am running an ATI 9700 Pro, was pretty decent a few years back but now it won’t cut it for the games on the way.

Though if anyone does have any suggestion as to what I can trouble shoot on my rig to pin point the problem please feel free to leave comment about it.