Category: Games

Video Blog 3, 10-01-06

October 1, 2006
Cool PeopleGame DesignGame HistoryGame ProgrammingGamesVideo Blogs
9 Comments

Video Blog 3 successful!

In this blog I talk about how game development and game publishing work, tell two stories about game development, and even have a guest star at the end!

Edit: Google Video version is here. Gamespot’s player doesn’t seem to work well for non-Usanians. I’ll be uploading the Google Video version more promptly in the future.

Okay, let’s test something here…

Woohoo!

Well…

Except that the quality on the Google Video version is MUCH worse than the Gamespot one. Crud!

Edit: Direct download link for this video blog is here.

Halo Wars

September 28, 2006
Game DesignGamesThe Game Biz
2 Comments

Doh. I really think Ensemble has dropped the ball on this one.

For one thing, this feels like something mandated from above, rather than something they came up with on their own. “It takes too long for Bungie to make a Halo game,” I can hear the Microsoft execs saying. “Surely we’ve got another studio who can be working on another Halo game somewhere….” Hell, it’s conceivable that Microsoft ordered Ensemble to get working on this because they knew that if they didn’t, they wouldn ‘t have anything Halo-related to show at X06.

Second thing: the FAQ states that this game is an RTS and it is 360-only. I’ve never felt that real-time strategy games belonged on consoles. Of course, I’ve never felt that first-person shooters belonged on consoles either, which is why I never really got into the Halo games.

Third thing: this is why Microsoft stepped on Halogen. Which is fine, its their right, but they did it in the worst possible way – with a cease-and-desist right before Halo Wars was announced. Very ham-handed, and just the type of thing that can create a fan backlash.

This will probably end up being the first Ensemble game that I don’t buy. Which makes me sad.

Video Blog 2, 09-24-06

September 24, 2006
Cool PeopleGame ProgrammingGamesThe Game BizVideo Blogs
16 Comments

And here it is.

If the above video doesn’t work well for you, here’s a Google Video version.

And if neither of those work, here’s the direct download link.

Video Blog 1, 09-16-06

September 16, 2006
Game HistoryGame ProgrammingGamesThe Game BizVideo Blogs
4 Comments

Surprise!

I’d been meaning to do something like this for a while, and since Gamespot will kindly host them (since I’m a subscriber), why not? Enjoy!

Edit: Here’s an embedded Google video version:

And here’s a direct download link.

Yesterday

September 9, 2006
Game HistoryGame ProgrammingGames
4 Comments

And then something strange happened…I describe it as “the best week’s work I’ve ever done in my life”. It was something I started on a Monday morning and finished on a Sunday afternoon; it was a game that was written in a week start-to-finish. And that was what was so nice about the industry back then – you could just do that. You could sit down and bang out a game; 3.5k of code didn’t take a lot of time to fill.

And I wrote this game. I was very fond of Centipede, but Centipede was too cutesy for me, with its flower gardens and little centipedes – I wanted something more hard-edged for this game.

I actually had the name of the game before I wrote the game; I’d been up at a computer show in London and they had posters for this new Harrison Ford film that was out called Blade Runner. So I saw the posters and they had this very distinctive font that said ‘Blade Runner’ at the top. But I didn’t want to use ‘Blade Runner’ because my game wasn’t anything like Blade Runner; it was a game based on this grid so I thought, “Hey, I’ll call it Gridrunner.”

So I wrote it and I thought it was a very nice little game, but I didn’t think that much more of it, really. And I sent a copy out to my friends in the States who were distributing my games, and one night I remember the phone going at about four o’clock in the morning. I crawled out of bed and answered the phone and it was this guy from Human Engineered Software, and he was ranting! He said they loved this game and had been playing it for hours and I should stand by to make quite a lot of money, and I thought, well, it’s just this silly little game I made in a week, but okay, fair enough, and I put the phone down and went back to bed and went to sleep. Got up the next day and thought I’d had a weird dream where I was sure they’d said that this game was so good I was going to make loads of money! But it turned out he was actually quite serious and they turned it into a cartridge and it did turn out to do really well! It was the first major success for Llamasoft. It was number one on the VIC-20 charts in the States which was really surprising, and made me enough money to keep me going for several years.

Like I said, the best week’s work I ever did in my life. I wish I could have another week like that!

– Jeff Minter, from his “History of Llamasoft” presentation at Assembly ’04

Now, I could go into a rant here about how games were better in the old days, but I don’t really believe that. True, there were some fantastic games made back then, but there was also a bunch of crap that nobody remembers any more.

What I will say is that modern software development has become very abstract, with layers upon layers upon layers upon layers, and this is simply the worst possible thing that could have happened for game development which really has to go straight to the hardware in order to be fast. So we get APIs that do touch the hardware directly, but because they have to play nice with these abstracted operating systems we have to jump through all these hoops and do things like raw memory writes just to put a damn pixel on the screen. And God help you if you forget to set your pitch and your width correctly…

This is why I like making and playing little text-mode games. I’m honestly fascinated by things like Roguelikes, even though most Roguelikes frustrate me because they are too damn hard.

And of course, the company that could have given us a very straightforward game development API because they control both the hardware and the OS refuses to do so because they hate gamers. Well, screw you too, Apple…see if I ever buy an iPod.

And this is just the Price that Must Be Paid in order to do modern game development (at least on the PC). It’s difficult, and it’s going to stay difficult for a good long while. But in the end, we do it because we are compelled. And it’s not like there aren’t any rewards…

Time For Zombies!

August 10, 2006
Game DesignGames
5 Comments

Dead Rising is a proper application of next-generation technology. Observe the following hypothetical design discussion:

Capcom Designer 1: Okay, what can we do on the Xbox 360 that we couldn’t do before?

Capcom Designer 2: Make the exact same kind of games we’ve been making, only prettier?

Capcom Designer 1: Dude, we’re designers, not artists. What can we do from a design standpoint that we couldn’t do before?

Capcom Designer 2: I don’t know…um…instead of putting a small number of very highly detailed models on the screen, we could put a very large number of moderately-detailed models on the screen instead.

Capcom Designer 1: Okay, that’s a good start…what kind of game could we make with that technology?

Capcom Designer 3: How about a game where you can run around and kill hundreds of zombies using anything that comes to hand?

Designer 1 + Designer 2: JACKPOT!

In other ways, though, the game is quite conventional:

Capcom Modeller 1: I’m giving every woman in this game really big boobs.

Capcom Modeller 2: Why?

Capcom Modeller 1: Because I can.

Capcom Modeller 2: AWESOME!

But it’s not about the boobs. It’s about cutting zombie heads off with a scythe. And as a result, this is the first game to ever make me really want a 360. Maybe that’ll be my Christmas present to myself…

The Voices of Hit & Myth

July 21, 2006
Cool PeopleGames
7 Comments

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.

And finally, this is my favorite bit from the intro movie.

The Dragon’s Lair

July 13, 2006
Cool PeopleGame DesignGame ProgrammingGames
2 Comments

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.

Boy was I surprised.

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.

Next Step

July 11, 2006
40-Hour GamesGame DesignGame ProgrammingGamesStar Revolution
5 Comments

Okay, time to figure out exactly what I’m going to do next. I feel that I’ve got three options:

1. Star Revolution Redux. Finish Star Revolution, but with fewer features. The ground combat will be cut because it will require the most resources. Trade and alien interaction would be abstracted to menus. Players would land on planets solely to mine them or capture lifeforms. The game would then feature space combat (based on the combat prototype I’ve already written), contact with alien races, mining and trading. The game probably won’t be 3D. This isn’t too bad, but it’s only about 50% of the game I wanted to make…

2. Inaria 3D. Ryan really wants this, and honestly, so do I. But Inaria 3D would have pretty much all the problems of my original design for Star Revolution. However, it might be possible to work something up using sprites from another 3D game like Final Fantasy Tactics. A possibility, but it’ll be hard.

3. I’ve had this irrational desire to make a game in the style of Dungeon Keeper. This could very well make a very good first 3D project because of the simplicity of the 3D involved – Dungeon Keeper was actually a 2D game that was simply presented in a 3D manner.

4. One of the other projects I was considering after Inaria got finished. From these I’d probably pick either the simple real-time strategy game or the simple Master of Orion-style game. These probably wouldn’t be 3D.

In any event, no matter what I pick, I am going to be limiting myself to 40 hours again. Why? Because that actually worked. By embracing that limitation, I actually made a game (a pretty crappy game, but a game).

So, thoughts?

Subconscious Weirdness

July 9, 2006
Game DesignGamesUncategorized
1 Comment

I just woke up from a nap.

Sometimes when I sleep I dream stuff very vividly. Sometimes I get really good ideas from those dreams. Heck, sometimes dreaming for me is like watching a movie – the dreams are that clear and that complete. I’ve gotten more than one story idea from my dreams.

While I napped, I dreamt about making a console game (specificially, a PS2 game). I was showing it to someone and we go to a boss fight. This was where I revealed my cleverness…the button pattern to beat the boss was:

X, Square, Circle (Pause) X, Square, Triangle, Circle. The final Triangle and Circle presses had to be done faster than the others.

I explained to whoever I was showing the game to that this was a subtle homage to Guitar Hero, as the timing and button presses were the same as in the song “Smoke on the Water” for that game, even going to far as to hum the classic baseline for that song while I pressed the buttons.

Now I’m awake and I can’t tell if this is a good idea or not!