Archive for August, 2006
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
Someone around here, someone who is clearly the most amazing video games commentator on the planet, made a prediction about Crysis a while ago. In case you can’t be bothered to click there, I’ll summarise:
Crytek targets PS3 programmers, Crysis port possible
Mmm… Crysis. Yeah. Crytek are only doing this so in three months time they can very publically state that the PS3 isn’t hard enough to run Crysis, getting them a butt-load of publicity in the process.
OH WILL YOU LOOK AT THIS
Somebody’s the daddy.
Oh, the game’s fine.
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Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
As we’re not going crazy like we do every time we try and meet some kind of deadline, we didn’t discover something very unusual in the adverts in this months’ Gamer.
82Ask is a text service which claims to answer any question at all. It’s that simple. You can ask it literally anything and it will provide you with a response. If you put PCG before the question, you get the second question for free.
Obviously, the first thing I asked for was the email address of Kim Coates agent so we can use his voice for our Mode 7 Games ident. This unfortunately produced the response:
Unable to verify the name of Kim Coates agent. No charge
Undeterred by this, I asked why everyone is getting so excited about Spore when, in our view, it’s clearly just high-concept disjointanalia at the present time. Here was the reply:
Spore is eagerly anticipated because it simulates the complete history & future of life. However it is made, it is an appealing undertaking.
Exactly. More fun with 82Ask coming soon. Possibly. Back to work…
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Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
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Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
Tutorials.
The issue of what counts as “acceptable behavour” while using a tutorial is hardly a new one. Books have been written on the manner, and greater philosphers, politicians, and poets than me have tackled the issue. Today my esteemed colleague and I had a disagreement over this issue.
The argument: does pressing Escape, clicking on the “bots” tab, and then clicking on “add bot” qualify as acceptable behavour on a tutorial: ie behavour that we, the developers, should predict and make arrangements for. Or does it qualify as LUDICROUS BEHAVOUR that no idiot in their right mind would try and therefor a waste of this programmers’s PRECIOUS TIME to solve.
I rest my case.
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Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
We have been re-making the tutorial today. Tutorials are such a ludicrous business; they are akin to trying to teach a group of ants to build a toaster using only morse code. I desperately wanted this to be finished today but some bugs have held us up; however, I demand its completion tomorrow.
The game is still fun. Thank the lord.
Ian is about to write some crap about why he thinks it’s a good idea to allow the player to break the tutorial. You, me and everyone else in the world knows that what he is about to say will resemble a small pool of ludicrously self-justifying, poorly-punctuated liquid garbage intended to provide some kind of excuse for his utterly contemptible lack of finesse.
Enjoy.
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Monday, August 28th, 2006
Day 1 of the Week of Justice is almost done, and we’ve succeeded in our goal of finishing the tutorial. Good news.
There are rumours that Red Steel have put “proper” sword control in, rather than the “slash detection” previously shows. It seems very late in the day to add something like this, so let’s hope they’ve done it vaguely properly.
When it comes to competition on the Wii, we have a few things to say. First, it’s highly unlikely that anything would come out on the Wii that would actually
like DT – the flying, the way we use the sword for the duels are not the first thing that people will be designing. When it comes to mental space – the idea that it will be much more fulfilling to swing the Wii controller around than the mouse – we agree wholeheartedly, and we will be trying extremely hard to move our technology over to the Wii as soon as we’re released on the PC.
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Sunday, August 27th, 2006
I’m back from holiday in preparation for the Week of Justice. Holiday was good.
Standby for Week of Justice updates beginning tomorrow….
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Sunday, August 27th, 2006
Next week my esteemed colleague and I work our asses off to get a candidate ready for friday. We’ll be keeping you updated.
I went to Guildford yesterday to meet up with Tom Bampton and Craig Fortune, two guys from the GarageGames scene. We gossiped and showed our games and had a good time.
Chemeleon is working on the arena flags models as we speak, hoping we get something that looks good enough to release with soon. I’ve also been working on making the sword trails look acceptable; I think I’m doing pretty well.
Ian
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Friday, August 25th, 2006
There’s a new Red Steel video out (I can’t be bothered to find it again, google knows). My esteemed colleague had this thing where he wanted to show a video of someone playing Determinance, with both game footage and footage of a person’s hand on the mouse. I think it fair to suggest that Red Steel have trumped us in that area pretty comprehensively. The guy in the video even gets splashed with real water when he shoots a fish tank for Cryo’s sake.
The interesting thing in the video is Steel’s new take on bullet time. The game goes into very slow mo, and you move the WiiMote and shoot at various bad guys. But it doesn’t actually shoot when you press the trigger, it records what you’re going to do and then goes back to when you pressed the slow-mo button, and then replays your shots in real time. Kind of like a completely foetus-level prototype of a simultaneous turn based FPS.
Red Steel is clearly taking the “put everything that’s cool into the game and it will be cool” approach, and bullet time is cool. The feature is interesting though.
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Thursday, August 24th, 2006
On monday I introduced a bug where you were invincible if you dropped your sword and stood still. I just fixed it.
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