I really should check my incoming links more often. Casey Dunham from Somewhat Structured Thoughts wrote a post about my combat prototype and apparently didn’t hate it. Thanks, Casey! Hopefully I’ll finish it one day!
The Voices of Hit & Myth
Hit & Myth had a budget of roughly three dollars and some pocket lint, so we were forced to do most of the voice acting ourselves.
Forced to. Really. We had no choice. It’s not like we liked making silly voices.
And, okay, I’ll admit it. I’m posting this stuff because I did a lot of voice work for this game and I want people to actually hear it.
If you’ll recall, when I came on the Hit & Myth project, it didn’t have a sound engine and it didn’t have any sounds! I came on at the end of March and E3 was in May, so this was a priority. We grabbed some stuff from our libraries but a lot of stuff had to be done from scratch, and fast. So one evening TJ O’Leary, our sound designer, fired up his recorder and I spent about an hour doing a bunch of zombie, wraith, ghost, alien, and skeleton voices. TJ liked most of them enough that he left them in the final game.
Later, after E3 was done, it was time to record the actual dialogue. Just about everybody pitched in. Here’s what everyone did and some samples.
Wynne McLaughlan, our chief designer and writer
Cadbury (the hero) – Wynne said this was his best Monty Python impression.
Michael Morlan, our producer and an experienced filmmaker and actor
The Narrator
The Big Kahuna
Santa Claws
Billy-Bob 209
The Jabberwock
Cthuluhoop (the main baddie)
Eric Peterson, our studio head
The Cheshire Cat
Mike McKinley, one of our artists
Santa Claus
Dave Shramek, designer
Pervis the Poltergeist
Steve Garcia, another artist
Jerry the Elf – Steve beat me out for this part, and I’m actually glad, because his Jerry was much better than mine.
TJ O’Leary, our sound designer
The Caterpillar
Robie Kentspeth, the only non-Gizmondo employee. She is a professional filmmaker and actress and a friend of Mike Morlan’s. She did all our female voices. I especially liked her Alice.
The Cyber-Reindeer
Mother
The Red Queen
Alice
Me
Zombie
Skeleton
Crypt Keeper
Scary Beast
Flesh Golem
Ghost
Alien
Brainiac
Robie the Robot – This is basically our homage to the classic arcade game Berzerk.
The Balloon Elves – I insisted this line be in the game. It’s a reference to the Gnomish Flying Machine unit in Warcraft II.
The Suicide Elves – And this line was a reference to the Troll Batrider unit in Warcraft III.
The Snowman
The Scrinch
The Card Knights – For this voice, I basically just imitated the Spy unit from Command & Conquer: Red Alert.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum
The White Rabbit – I hate this voice; I pretty much came up with it on the spot. Wynne liked it, so I guess that’s all that matters (Wynne and Mike Morlan were co-voice-directors).
Shub Nogginsplitter (the last boss) – This is my standard demonic voice. My kids hear this one a lot.
I ended up doing almost every non-boss enemy in the game, plus a couple of the bosses. Ryan once described Hit & Myth as a continual battle between me and Wynne, and every time Wynne kills me I pop up in a new form.
The Dragon’s Lair
This post on the Rampant Coyote’s blog got me thinking about the Bluth/Dyer games in general, all of which I loved despite their frustrating gameplay. So I typed “Dragon’s Lair” into YouTube.
All of that footage was cut from Dragon’s Lair (except the dragon fight at the end). The most intriguing to me were the scenes where there were several different possible exits from certain rooms. This footage got all the way through the animation process before being cut.
I think with that footage, a very good case can be made that Rick Dyer originally had a very different design in mind for Dragon’s Lair.
The Dragon’s Lair we got is a tightly linear game, where rooms are thrown at the player in random sequence and the player must memorize the moves necessary to beat them by rote. But the animated sequences that show Dirk leaving some scenes through alternate exits strongly suggest that the castle was originally designed to be coherent, not random. Which would have given the game an aspect of exploration and required the player to not only figure out the correct sequence of moves to get through each room, but also to figure out the best path through the castle to the dragon.
This, frankly, would have been fantastic and would have given the game much-needed depth. It also would have paved the way for future games to do the same. It’s a shame that the feature had to be cut.
Cliffski’s Podcast
This is the best podcast I’ve heard in a while. It’s basically Cliff Harris talking about his work in the game development business and how he went indie.
As I listened to the podcast I took some notes, which I am posting below. These are kind of stream-of-consciousness and may not make much sense unless you listen to the podcast (which you should!) I’m basically just posting them because…well, I wrote them and I don’t want to lose them.
Yes, we got the ZX-81 here in the States; it was sold as the Timex Sinclair 1000.
Yes, we had Astrosmash here in the States! It was created here, for crying out loud, for the Intellivision!
Interesting that Cliffski calls Asteroids “the default game” that most people write first…I remember reading an article from Andre Lamothe where he says that whenever he has to learn a new game development API the first thing he does is write Asteroids in it.
I firmly believe that all the best game developers are completely self-taught. I believe this because it means that one day, I might be one of the best game developers!
Evil Genius came so, so close. It was almost a great game, it just lacked…something.
“Take the mickey out”? Good grief, you Brits and your language constructions…
Ah, the parallels continue…I was terrified on my first day at Multimedia Games (my first real programming job). Heck, that lasted for the first few months. If it hadn’t been for my friend Brendan Segraves I would never have made it. I remember when I sent my first game to test, Brendan said “Congratulations! You’re a game programmer now.” That was really nice of him and I’ll never forget it.
And this is why finishing stuff looks so damn good on the resume. You can have a PhD in applied artificial intelligence, but that does not mean you know how to make a complete game. The only thing that proves that you know how to make a complete game is having made a complete game yourself. Cliffksi was probably a more competent overall game developer than any of those guys with their fancy college learnin’, and here he actually felt unworthy to work with them! (See “the best game developers are self-taught”, above.)
“I learned what the hell source control was and I learned what the hell a debugger was” == me collapsed in paroxysms of laughter. I didn’t learn what a debugger was until my first job either.
At Gizmondo, we played poker, darts, foosball, Heroclix and Magic as well as computer games. Cliffski’s right…the environment and attitude at a proper game company is just awesome. It’s almost like belonging to a club instead of working at a company.
Yep, failure hurts. But it makes you savvy, and it’s hard to become savvy without failure, so the best thing is to simply consider it part of the process.
Well, Star Revolution looks like it’s going to turn into a fantasy combat game, so I know all about games not turning out the way you plan at the start 🙂
The Dexterity forums! I miss them; yes, IndieGamer forums are the proper successor, but the tone seems different there…
“The whole of game development is full of code hackers who do everything their way” – true. This is a natural side effect of “the best game developers are self-taught”, and Cliffski’s right – you need to read Code Complete and Effective C++ and take what they say to heart, even though it will probably be completely different from how you taught yourself to program.
Cliffski’s dancing around what he really wants to say about Lionhead…it’s unfortunate to have a story to tell and not be able to tell it.
“Terribly badly paid”? What fool wouldn’t pay his game developers properly?
Ah. I guess Peter likes to have lots of low-paid, low-skill developers instead of a small team of highly-paid, highly-skilled experts. That’s…well, completely wrong.
Wow, the parallels between Lionhead and Origin are scary…both companies had initial success, grew too fast, got overextended and then had to be bought out (Origin by EA, Lionhead by Microsoft). All that is left to the Lionhead story is the inevitable dissolution of the company.
Recruited by Maxis. Wow. And it turns out they picked him because of one of his very early games, Starlines…which has been my experience as well. You honestly never know which thing you’ve done is going to get your next job 🙂
He’s definitely got his wheel spun up, which is fantastic. He’s making the games he wants to make, he’s already got companies courting him, so if he starts having trouble making ends meet as an indie he’ll have no trouble finding another industry job…perhaps with a company that isn’t going to fold next year.
“You have to be shameless and creative about promoting your game.” Absolutely true, and it’s why I’ll probably never be humongous because…well, I just don’t feel that my games are worthy of such self-promotion 🙂 This is something Dan “Gibbage” Marshall also obviously understands.
Ah, Guildford…birthplace of Bullfrog. God, I miss Bullfrog. We were supposed to get a third Dungeon Keeper. And a third Syndicate.
Yep, design is hard when you don’t have an existing design to copy. That’s why there are so few truly new game designs.
1. You must learn proper software development and stop hacking everything.
2. You must become a good self-promoter. You must be willing to spend as much time on supporting and marketing your current games as you do making new stuff.
Well, starting a company is a HELL of a lot easier in the US than the UK…
Gibbage and Angst
Gibbage is a potentially-great little 2D platformer/shooter by Dan Marshall. Gibbage is simple and fun to play (except that the double-jump is too hard to do, in my opinion, and…I can’t seem to beat the computer).
But as I read through Dan’s blog about the development of Gibbage, I couldn’t help but notice his attitude throughout the project. Yes, there were lots of coding books hurled at poor, defenseless walls as he learned, but for the most part his posts are things like, “I’ve got a little guy! Whee!”, “I can run him around! Awesome!”, “Now there are two of them, yipee!”, “Now they can shoot each other! Brilliant!”
Basically…well, he seemed to have more fun developing Gibbage than I did writing Inaria…and a lot more than I’m having writing Star Revolution. Star Revolution in particular is turning into a real slog. I’ve got procedural textures, procedural planets, procedural cities on the planets, aliens, ground combat, space combat, trading, mining, talking and questing in this game. It is possible that I, flush with the moderate success of Inaria, bit off more than I can chew.
Now, I can see flashes of fun in the future for Star Revolution. In particular, when a friend at work pointed me at this site and I saw these pics of the starship interior molds they sell, I thought, “Wow, that’s exactly how I want SR to look!” And I can foresee putting that together inside the computer as being really fun.
But the amount of infrastructure I have to put together before I get there is just huge, and trying to get it all together is just grinding me down.
Plus I just got a really good book on DirectX and now I’m thinking about moving the whole project off of SDL and OpenGL and onto DirectX and Direct3D…
Harmonix Convergence
There is a rumor floating around that Guitar Hero II will feature a track from the Megaman 2 soundtrack as played by the Minibosses.
That much geek coolness in one place could destroy the universe if misused.
Lazy Linkage
Yes, it’s a cheap way to get a post up, but I found some interesting stuff I’d like to share:
Oblivion just got its first patch (ironically, a day after I beat it). Lots of players won’t be installing the patch, because if they do they won’t be able to do stuff like this.
Real Tekken. Little else to say.
Here’s a site with a bunch of connected stories about the design of both the hardware and software of the original Macintosh. It’s a great way to waste an afternoon. Start with “I’ll Be Your Best Friend” and just read them chronologically.
And I actually worked on Star Revolution last night. It’s slow, but it’s coming…maybe by this weekend, we’ll see.
Stressed Gamer
To the left you will see a new link for my friend Tom Mauer’s website. Ryan and I have been telling him to get his own site for a while now, and he’s finally gotten smart and complied. Click the link to see his attempts to make a renderer that looks as if everything is colored with crayons!
Masters of Doom
I love this book. I think it’s one of the best books about the history of video games ever written. It tells how John Carmack and John Romero both got into video game development, how they met, how Id Software was formed, and how it all fell apart. The writing style isn’t quite conversational, but neither is it as dry as most histories; the book is very easy to read. It’s also thoroughly indexed and documented, just like a history should be.
The book has its critics. Some people mentioned in the book have stepped forward to say “That’s not exactly how it happened”. Which is fine; no history book is going to be perfect (and there’s no real reason to think that these people’s versions are any more accurate than what that actually did make it into the book).
But most people who criticize the book do so on the grounds that it’s not harsh enough on Romero at the end. They point to the author’s relatively even tone as he details Romero’s actions during the development of Daikatana (which, of course, is simply the same tone the author used throughout the rest of the book). They even point to the fact the author thanked Romero in the afterward for letting him crash at Romero’s place, thus proving his inability to be objective!!!1!!lots of exclamation marks! I guess the author should have dropped his objectivity, allowed his blood to boil, and thoroughly castigated Romero for trying to make a game. Jeez.
Anyway, the book is great. You should definitely read it if you have any interest at all in the history of PC gaming.
E3 Reaction
I watched all three press conferences live. My reactions:
Nintendo: By far the best of the three conferences. They managed to present a great sense of fun, starting the moment a grinning Miyamoto took the stage with a Wii remote (I guess I’m used to the name now) to conduct a virtual orchestra that was playing the Zelda theme. The only odd part of the conference was the fact that they didn’t announce a date or a price…even though both should be obvious. The Wii will ship in either October or (more likely) November, and will cost $250 at the most. Why not just go ahead and announce?
Nintendo is in a great position for this round of the console wars. First, they are at the bottom, so there’s nowhere to go but up. They will have the cheapest console by far, with the most interesting technology. And the Wii is basically just a souped-up GameCube, which means that GameCube games will run natively (no emulation or extra hardware required) and their third-party developers already know how to make Wii games.
Sony: Sony’s conference was literally “more of the same” – the same game types we already love to play, only with graphical improvements. The PS3 is going to look fantastic, and apparently every game made for it is going to be a dirty, grimy post-apocalyptic first-person or third-person shooter. The only innovation they actually have is the tilt control, which of course was added after they saw the Wii remote and doesn’t work as well as Nintendo’s version. Tilt control is one thing, but the Wii remote actually gives you what is effectively a mouse pointer – this was explicitly demonstrated in Nintendo’s demo of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Microsoft: Boring, boring, boring. Halo 3 trailer was terrible. The crowd snickered at Viva Pinata, even though that’s just the type of game Microsoft needs to expand their audience. It’s telling that Microsoft is currently struggling to expand its audience out of the 18-34 male demographic while Nintendo, which already has a market across all demographics, is fighting to expand the entire gaming market. And in the end, I’ve got no sympathy for Microsoft here…they are simply reaping what they sowed with their “She kicks high” crap.
It wasn’t until near the end when they demonstrated how the Xbox 360, Windows Vista and cellphones could be integrated that I perked up. That type of close integration has been necessary for a long time, and it’s strange that a game studio is having to be the one that gives it to us. So at least Microsoft can say that it has truly innovative new technology, unlike Sony.
Microsoft has one big problem, though. They launched before Nintendo announced the Wii remote. Sure, they can still make a controller with tilt features, but it won’t be standard in the box and thus developers won’t be able to rely on it being there. Now, it’s possible that Microsoft will come out with a tilt controller and push it hard and it’ll effectively become the “standard” 360 controller. Sony was able to do this with the Dual Shock controller for the PS1. But it’s going to be tough.
Big winner: Nintendo, though if they had just announced date and price it would have been a Flawless Victory.
Second: Microsoft. They truly innovated with Live and now they are extending it even further.
Loser: Sony. “We’re afraid to try new things! We’re going to give you everything you already play with better graphics! And we’ll charge you six hundred freakin’ bucks to do it!”
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