Month: October 2012

Planitia People (Planitiople?)

October 22, 2012
Game ProgrammingPlanitia
4 Comments

“My deadline for this is end-of-day Monday. By then I want this game up on Concepts. I’ll be blogging the process. Wish me luck.”
~cough~ It’s beginning of day Monday. Where’s the blogging? How’s your progress?

I’ve had the nose to the grindstone, pretty much. I’ve fixed several performance problems with the game and spent about a day trying to get animated 3D models into the game. That’s going to take longer than I’ve got so as a stopgap measure I had Mrs. Bogue render out frames of animation for each direction (thus making classic eight-way sprites) and I’ll be using those.

End-of-day today may be a bit premature; there are a couple things (like trees and rocks) I want to get in to make the terrain look better. But it should be very soon and I’ll be updating at least once a day.

Pushing Planitia

October 20, 2012
Game ProgrammingPlanitia
4 Comments

So Steam has this new thing on Greenlight called Concepts. It allows you to get your game in front of the Steam community. It doesn’t help you get your game greenlit, but it’s also free, and free is about all I can afford now.

I want Planitia up there. The majority of people I’ve told about the game have been very encouraging; I want to gauge that reaction on a wider scale. With the hope that I might be able to roll into a Kickstarter or something similar if there’s enough interest.

Well, according to Steam, to put up my game I should have:

  • A square branding image (similar to a box cover) to represent the game in lists and search
  • At least 1 video showing off the game or presenting your concept
  • At least 4 screenshots or images
  • A written description of the game along with the tentative system requirements.

That seems simple enough. Of course, I can’t do anything to promote the game (really) until I get the temp art I’ve been using out. (Icons from Populous II are a leetle too easy to spot, you know?)

So, in addition, here’s what I feel I need to get Planitia in visible shape:

  • Get animated villagers in.
  • Swap out in-game icons for the god powers and soldiers for ones either I’ve created or (better) are free.
  • Get rocks and trees in (fortunately I already have these models).

My deadline for this is end-of-day Monday. By then I want this game up on Concepts. I’ll be blogging the process. Wish me luck.

Evocation

October 5, 2012
FamilyFriendsGamesUncategorized
0 Comment

I love music. I don’t think I’m unique in this regard. But I will seize upon a song and listen to it over and over, memorizing the lyrics and singing it myself. As a result, certain songs remind me strongly of what I was going through in my life when I was listening to them.

Listening to “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel evokes sitting in high school, wishing desperately that I could kick the habit and shed my skin.

Listening to “The Boys of Summer” and other songs from Building the Perfect Beast evokes driving to and attending Macon Community College.

Listening to “Beyond the Silver Rainbow” by Genesis evokes walking the streets of Austin, looking for a job.

Listening to “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota” by Weird Al Yankovic evokes working at Origin, testing the PlayStation and Saturn versions of Crusader: No Remorse.

Listening to Body Count evokes that time I lived in a crack house. (I don’t willingly listen to Body Count any more.)

Yesterday, while I was shopping, “The Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders came on the overhead speakers and I was instantly transported.

Back when I was in high school, I didn’t have a computer. This was like not having oxygen. I played and programmed the computers at school and we had a family computer (a Tandy 1000, actually a pretty good machine), but I had no machine of my own and my time on the Tandy was always extremely limited.

But I had (and still have) a friend named Dennis Borders. He was one of a clique of young men at our high school that all had Commodore 64s. They would get together to play and trade games (ie, pirate them). They were constantly bringing game materials to school, which I would devour ravenously. I read the manual for Ultima III months before I actually got to play the game; the world the manual described enraptured me and it pained me that I couldn’t visit it right away.

And every once in a while, every 4-5 months or so, after months of me pleading and begging, my mother would let me stay overnight at Dennis’ house.

Forty-eight hours of pure, unadulterated computer gaming. It was heaven. I refused to sleep. We played Ultima III, Ultima IV, Ghostbusters, Gauntlet, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Hardball, Impossible Mission, Moebius, Winter Games, Summer Games, Questron, Questron II, Legacy of the Ancients, Uridium. We would also play some paper-and-pencil Dungeons & Dragons, which was wonderfully illicit, because my mother hates role-playing games; she thinks they are Satanic.

(Yes, that’s right, the two things I loved most in high school – RPGs and computers – my mother despised. We didn’t get along very well.)

In the late 80’s, a movie called Good Morning Vietnam came out. It was a good movie, but the real star was the soundtrack. Dennis made a mix tape for my sister (who he was sweet on at the time) that had “Game of Love” on it, and we listened to it like crazy.

So for a moment, I was transported back to Dennis’ house. For a moment, I was at his house, joystick in hand, staring at his TV, finally, finally happy.

It was pretty awesome.

Compare

October 2, 2012
FamilyFriends
0 Comment

Thought I’d mentioned this earlier, but I guess I didn’t.

In the picture below, the top is the model villager the inimitable Alexis Bogue made for my game Planitia.

The bottom is a picture of my son David.

No, she hadn’t seen David when she made the model.