Me: “It’s your birthday in a few days, I can’t wait to give you your present!”
Younger Daughter: “What is it what is it what is it?!”
Me: “It’s a secret!”
YD: “Aw. I want mommy to get me my present; I like mommy’s presents better.”
Me: “Well, mommy is getting you one too…but I can’t wait for you to see mine.”
YD: “Well, I bet I’ll like mommy’s better.”
Me: “We’ll see. What are you doing?”
YD: “Watching Minecraft videos. I love them! I just wish we had the real game.”
So! The Steam Greenlight Concepts site is up…right here!
Sorry this took so long; I decided I didn’t want to just do a video; I wanted to make a new demo version of the game…which you can get right here!
I am seriously thinking about trying to kickstart this game and the feedback I get from the various places I’m going to post this will probably determine whether or not I do.
If you have any problems or anything else to say about the game, you can leave a comment here or email me at anthony.salter@gmail.com.
Have fun!
EDIT: What the heck, I’ll inline the new video:
My new favorite trailer.
I know I talk about Understanding Comics on this blog a lot, but that’s only because it so succinctly presents so many fundamental ideas of human communication. (I propose, yet again, that you should read it. Yes, you. Even if you hate comics.)
One of the ideas presented in Understanding Comics is how the lack of realism in art forms like comics and animation actually lends itself to greater acceptance of the ideas presented. We see things that look real enough to be recognizable but obviously aren’t; this allows us to accept things happening to and with these things that in a realistic medium would look jarring and out of place.
Simple example: Batman’s ability to effectively teleport when nobody is looking at him (this trope is known as the Stealth Hi/Bye). Commissioner Gordon looks away for a second, the camera follows his gaze – and when he looks back Batman is gone. The comics have presented Batman as being able to do this in a moving vehicle. We accept it completely in those media. But in the more realistic medium of film, our first thought would not be “Wow, that’s cool!” but “There’s no way he could have done that.” Don’t believe me? Go back and look at the Christopher Nolan films and notice how few Stealth Hi/Byes Batman pulls.
Video games have the incredibly enviable advantage of having that same acceptance as comics and animation, while adding the additional benefit of interactivity. And video games aren’t stuck in a kiddie rut like American animation is. Creators of video games are using its advantages to give us visuals and situations that we couldn’t see/hear/experience in any other medium.
I guess this is a really long-winded way of saying that I’m far more enthusiastic about the release of games than of most movies nowadays.
“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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
So here’s my first pass at Planitia in Unity! Note: this version is non-interactive.
I apologize to anyone following this blog.
When things don’t go well for me, I just don’t want to talk about it. And I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear about it.
Hopefully things will change soon.
Here we go again!
Eight games. One thousand twenty four pixels from each. One guesser – you. Hardly seems fair.
