Silence

I’ve not posted much recently, namely because I have a new job – another QA position, but this time at a development studio – and I’ve been busy acclimating to my new situation. I’m happy with it so far, I’ve only been there for just over a week and I’ve already learned a lot of things. Having hands-on time with some professional grade tools is great, as is working in an environment full of like-minded people with great ideas and passion, and seeing the day to day of a game developer’s life, as opposed to just interacting with the product in a finished or semi-finished state.

I’m looking forward to doing more writing once I’ve settled in. I also have a few things going on on the side. So it’s busy busy busy all the way. Still, I’m not complaining. I’ve been working for this for a long time now, and I’m grateful for the payoff.

More soon.

 

Steamscape

I’ve been hearing about Trine lately on Twitter, so I figured I’d get the free demo from Steam to check it out. As I was perusing Steam’s selection of free stuff, to my great surprise I saw the demo for Starscape was on there.  I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoyed Starscape, so now that the demo is available on Steam, you have no excuse not to try it. Plus, Moonpod are pretty awesome as a whole – they also developed Mr. Robot – and they’d probably appreciate your patronage.

Of course, you could always download the demo directly from Moonpod, whether you have Steam or not, or even buy it directly from them.

 

Game Maker 7

Spent most of the night working through some tutorials in Game Maker 7, I now have a scrolling shooter with a ship that shoots and enemies that blow up. Will write something more meaningful tomorrow, still not completely recovered from our little ordeal earlier this week, but hopefully that will be remedied by tomorrow.

 

Casual or Core? A Matter of Investment

A number of different tidbits on the web this past week have had me thinking about the whole ‘casual vs hardcore’ debate. For one thing, I disagree that casual gaming is the death knell of hardcore gaming, for a number of reasons:

 

Ultimate Crossover

Cryptic, NCSoft, SOE and Gajillion have reached an agreement to make Champions Online, City of Heroes/Villains, DC Universe Online, and Marvel Universe Online compatible with each other. Deciding that it would suit their business needs and would fit in with series crossovers, the four developers have agreed to place all 4 MMOs in ‘parallel continuities’ (akin to Marvel’s and DC’s penchant for alternate realities, as exemplified by Marvel’s classic ‘What if…?’ comic series). Players will be able to purchase any of the above mentioned MMOs, and after attaining a certain level, will be able to travel between the four ‘worlds’ by means of time machines, interdimensional vortices, wormholes, and assorted other means. Also, all 4 games to become free-for-all permadeath PvP so the age old antagonism between fans of the rival comic book publishers can finally settle once and for all who kicks more ass.

More news as they become available.

 

There’s a game idea right there

Also from Kotaku is heads up about this video on Youtube. The moment I started watching something jumped inside of me. There is definitely a game to be made based on that idea right there, and luckily for me I already had a bunch of stuff that would fit in perfectly with how it would play. If I had the means, I would probably be working on a prototype right now, instead of just blogging about it. Still, GDC is next week, and I can almost feel the magic in the air.

 

Blogs of the Round Table

I recently followed a link to Man bytes Blog and discovered Blogs of the Round Table. After reading a few of the January and February entries I was hooked – Corvus’s ‘a lego orange’ would be a great example of what I was talking about when I wrote the piece on legitimacy, a game that depicts violence without glorifying it, and allows the player to experience that truth withouth the real consequences. Also, his  ‘an incomplete life’ for the February BoRT is definitely close to what I had in mind when I posited a game that put the player in the shoes of an African American slave in the pre-Civil War years. Among the many excellent entries, Hero’s Blade is probably one of my favourites on paper.

The March edition of BoRT continues the literary theme, this time focusing on aspects of authorship. Now I’m wishing I’d discovered this earlier this year so I’d had a chance to get in on this sooner.

 

Thinking of the Children

For the longest time, since back in the days when I played EQ, I had this conviction that maybe the activities players undertake in MMO’s could be harnessed to affect the real world. I’ve thought about the subject a few times, but never really sat down and tried to come up with a practical example of how it might work, but yesterday, a news piece on Kotaku jolted the idea from it’s dusty shelf in the back of my mind and into the grinder of conscious thought.

 

Post-Vacation Ramblings

After returning home from our short vacation, one of the first bits of news that drew my attention was the trailer for Cross Edge. While developer collaboration or IP-crossover games aren’t exactly new, I always find it interesting to see what comes out of them. I thought the inclusion of Dante from Devil May Cry in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne to be pretty cool and actually plausible, and Kingdom Hearts is high on my favourite franchise list. It’s a credit to the developers’ creative ability when two IPs get a crossover that manages to do the source material justice. Alien vs Predator is a great example of this.

I’m rather curious to see if the Tecmo/Koei merger talks might inspire someone to make a Soul Calibur Warriors game, whether the actual merger goes through or not.

 

Nuclear is the New Green

Via Slashdot, news comes that our beloved leaders are once again pulling rabbits out of thin air – not to mention their exhaust holes - and telling us that in order to fight the burgoning energy/oil crisis, we can and must rely on Nuclear power to save the day. Woop de doo.

I mean seriously, Nuclear Power might have cut our reliance on coal, oil and gas, but think about it for a minute. The current hysteria about global warming – and it is hysteria, with people crapping their pants left right and centre and the usual snake oil vendors making the most of the situation – has come from our realisation that the climate is changing due to our activities in the last 150 years or so. Put simply, back in the 18th century when we started burning coal and other stuff to power the industrial revolution, no one had the foresight of wondering what would happen to all that black smoke that was being pumped out of the smokestacks. But fast forward a couple hundred years, and here we are, still burning oil because all of our infrastructures rely on it. It’s exactly the same story with nuclear power. Yes, we can vitrify the waste and store it deep in the earth, but how long will that work? Considering that some of the stuff we’re cooking up has a half-life in the tens of thousands of years, isn’t it somewhat naive to think that if we dig a deep enough hole we can throw all our crap in there and never worry about it again? I mean, seriously. Tens of thousands of years. Millions of years? Have the studies undertaken taken into account continental drift, plate tectonics, geological activity as a whole? Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but if I remember my high school geography correctly, mountains are formed when two tectonic plates push against each other, forcing the earth’s crust upwards. So, maybe, burying stuff under a mountain isn’t the brightest idea? And thank goodness the whole proposal to bury it all at the bottom of the bloody sea didn’t pan out. Rather than worrying about the fact that there’s no fish left in the sea, we’d be back to the age of sail, worrying about the sea monsters coming up to eat us.

/rant off