Quick update / Stayalive Ping

Been rather busy lately, not too much to say.

Some days, I hate Maya. That's all I'll say on that.

Quick Self Portrait

the "beefy laser"

A bit of concept art from our current game.

A pair of eyeballs

Did a bit of sketching this morning. Getting somewhat better.

Getting Rusty

I realized today that I hadn't made a start-to-finish serious map in a heck of a long time. So thus the idea for a project to bang out a series of small, polished maps that focus on the themes inherent to their parent games. Bit of a mouthful there.

So for Counter-Strike 1.6 and Counter-Strike: Source, I'd make a small, polished DM map, a defuse map and a hostage rescue map. And maybe a AS map for 1.6 for reasons of humor and nostalgia.

For HL2; DM.

[will add others to this list later]

Top priorities:

1. Level plays well.
(the world is littered with beautiful maps that no one plays, and maps that are ugly as sin, yet are the most played ones by far. Level design is based far more on tactics than looks and forgetting that will always come back to bite you in the ass)

2. Level has unique and beautiful architecture that contributes to the level.
(rather than just purely being decoration)

3. Levels are small.
(I don't want to create some monumental work that will take months and months to make. I'm look at stuff I can bang out in a week and still have it look good. That means 'small')

4. Multiple engines; Source, Goldsource, Quake IV, Doom III, Unreal engine.
(this is just sort of a hope, mostly on the basis that knowing more than one engine is a good thing)

Things are coming along nicely

Things are coming along nicely with the first game. Bit of a rocky start, but it's all taking a definite shape and direction now. Our new concept artist Khang Le is great - he could beat me any day of the week :D

I have a lot of things I want to do with this game, the hard part will be figuring out which ones are helpful and which ones are not aiding it. A lot of times you'll see a game that has all sorts of eye candy or spiffy engine features that are great in and of themselves, but don't really do anything for the rest of the game. A feature is useless unless it contributes to the game. The latest super-advanced water rendering is pointless if the rest of the game sucks.

One of the things I wanted to employ that will hopefully benefit our game is a film director's perspective - Hollywood has been making movies for over a hundred years and in that time, they've come up with a lot of very good visual techniques. I believe I'll be able to use a few of them in this game to good effect. And no, not with cut-scenes. You came to play a game, not watch miniature movies. And cut-scenes you can't skip? That is just cruel. As a developer, you should never punish your player. If the player wants to know more about the plot, you can set up the game to allow him to do that if he wishes. Quite a few players aren't that interested in the plot. Forcing them to sit through a five minute movie that pounds in the plot as subtly as sledgehammer seems like punishment to me.

Another thing that's irritated me is screens that show copyright notices, publishers and developers names that can't be skipped. I want to get to the game. If I am curious about particular names, I can click the 'about' section in the menu. Forcing me to sit through it is indeed punishment. Screw that!

Concept Artist Woes

So recently a few of my friends and I decided to make a game. It's rather interesting, but I'm not going to go too much into detail about it before releasing it, for fairly obvious reasons.

One of the hurdles we've had to face most recently is getting a good concept artist. We have a slight dilemma - we aren't making any money from our games yet and aren't independently wealthy. This means that we can't pay other people money.

Now, in the art world, the kind of people that do concept work for free come in two basic categories:

1. People who do concept art for free because they're not good enough at it to make money doing it.

2. People who do concept art for free because they're still in school or haven't made a name for themselves / built up a good portfolio yet.

Unfortunately, we've been getting a lot of the former category and not many in the latter category. I think that for future projects, if we recruit any people to do concept art for us, one of the first requirements they'll have to meet is being able to be better than me at it.



This is what I can do in a quick sketch. Personally, I don't think it's that great. But if it's better than anything a concept artist that's trying to get a position with us can do?

I'm a jack of all trades and a master of very few. Art isn't one of them at this point. So anyone who is good at art should be able to outdo me at it. And if they can't? Then they're not worth working with.

NB: This post was regarding one of the old concept artist we were working with, not the one we have now. He rocks, btw.

Halo Dominates

Halo Dominates
Originally uploaded by mapper-montag.

The great thing about making video games is that you can tell people that fragging your friends in Halo is "something I need to do for work" ;)

Why Do "Indie" Games Suck So Hard?

"Indie" video games tend to bring to mind images of brilliant developers forsaking the crass commercialism of the gaming industry to strike out on their own and make fearless new games that aren't just another rehash of the same old ideas. The sort of games that would exposes the shallow, insipid and repetitive pretenders for what they truly are.

Of course, this is only possible if "Indie" games are that good. They're not. Not even remotely close. The worst would have been still unpublishable an entire decade ago. The best are somewhat entertaining casual games.

That's right. The best are nothing more than games that are 'casual', a epithet for something that occupies the same social niche as Solitaire. Which, strictly speaking, is not a bad game. However, solitaire is the bottom rung of the gaming world and everyone knows it.

A game is worth how much entertainment it delivers to the player. No less and no more. If its weight in entertainment value is less than every other mainstream commercial game out there, than an "Indie" game is a total failure by the only standard that matters.

Check out www.manifestogames.com - a vendor that specializes in selling "Indie" games. What sticks out about those games? Not a single one is worth selling for any serious commercial vendor. Why? Because they can't sell refuse and make a profit! No one can!

Where are the good games that this movement was supposed to engender? They simply don't exist as anything other than an exception to the rule at the moment. The production values, compared to the main gaming industry, are completely mediocre. Why? Because there's no reason for people who are good at making games to make "Indie" games. The mythical demand that brought them about is exactly that - mythical. Could the commercial "AAA" games that are coming out now be better? Certainly! Are they bad enough to make "Indie" games a viable sub-industry? Nope.

And this is why "Indie" games suck at the moment.

Edit: Cris Crawford says much the same thing, but with better words here: http://gamasutra.com/features/20060612/murdey_01.shtml

Big Brother

So I'm working on a mod called "Big Brother" with some folks. It's for HL2 and set in the same storyline as the game, but in a period a little before the events in HL2 proper.

More or less, it's a look at how everything goes to hell in a hand basket while Gordon Freeman (the main character in HL2) is away. Gordon comes back to find that there's been an alien invasion, and the government has become something straight out of the pages of Orwell's "1984".

How did things get like this? Well, the mod we're working on covers how the government went from freedom-loving democracy full of honest politicians to an Orwellian-style authoritarian paradise run by jack-booted thugs.