As I am writing this on Christmas night, I would just like to wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday with family and friends. Also, I spent most of yesterday immobile with illness, so I don’t really feel like writing more. Goodnight.

Dev Update! Believe it or not I have been doing some small amount of game development these last few months. In a sporadic fashion I reopen my project, consult my sparse documentation to see what sort of checklist items I had open, and proceed to decipher what it was I worked on last. The last time this happened, I went ahead and reworked the way my game used physics. I also looked at the next item on my list and started working on that, only to discover that my past self had already completed that particular system ( a way of dynamically creating objects from sub objects ) and had devised a simple and elegant solution to the problem. I haven’t done nearly enough work on this game, which is too bad, because it already controls pretty well. There isn’t nearly enough game there to be fun yet, but the connection between your fingers and the game feels nice. I’m not going to go into any detail though. I’m not going to write about what it took to revise the physics interactions. I’m not going to write about the slowly, but steadily congealing game mechanics. I’m not going to write about my concept sketches, the theme, title, influences, or game loop. The next time I write about it will be when I have something to show, and I have something for people to play and offer feedback on. Until then, I’m just not going to talk about it.

Best Games - Might and Magic Clash of Heroes During the reign of the nintendo DS a cavalcade of excellent games poured out of development studios and onto that small, two screened console. Many of them were overlooked, or had one or two weeks of notoriety before the next release from Level-5 or Capcom or Nintendo themselves launched, completely eclipsing any smaller releases.

I’ve been tracing. Sometime late in high school I decided not to copy other artist’s work. It wasn’t any sort of moral stance. I didn’t feel like I owed Erik Larsen an apology for redrawing one of his spiderman panels. I wasn’t selling them, or claiming that I came up with the drawing. I certainly didn’t come up with the character. Like a lot of kids, I was reproducing other people’s work as a way to understand it. I thought that if I could decode how Ron Lim put together a splash page of silver surfer fighting Mephisto, I could someday learn to draw like him.

Best Games – Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath Games that try to do too many things are usually failures. It’s the kitchen sink approach. The developers try to put a little of everything into the game and the whole thing collapses under the weight. Of course, there are times when that approach succeeds spectacularly. Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is a third person action platformer, a first person shooter, a stealth action game, and a character adventure game. That is a list of way too many things. There is no way this game should work. Each of those elements are handled well, but not polished to the level of a game dedicated to any single one of those genres. If you put that list before a room of game designers, they would unconsciously start crossing off items before they realized what their hands were doing. Putting all of those requirements together in one place is a terrible idea. Still, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is on my list as one of the best games. Imagine that there was a much loved animated series from your childhood. It combined a western backdrop with a Jim Henson-esque attitude to weirdness and subtle humour. Some years later, a game studio got hold of that license, and set out to make an homage to all the things you loved about that old series. All the characters, all the locations, all the inside jokes. Not only did they make that game, they did right by the material, and they did right by your nostalgia. Nothing less than a kitchen sink approach to game design would have worked. There was just too much material to cover. Of course that show never existed. The stranger isn’t an old beloved character. He exists only in the context of this one game, but he, and the world he occupies, feels like it springs straight from your fond memories. There were other Oddworld games before Stranger’s Wrath, and while they are all beautifully designed, and equally eccentric, they don’t share they same sense of being part of a much larger world. Stranger’s Wrath feels like a story started and finished during the second act of a much longer series. Stranger’s Wrath was first released on the original XBOX. Some of the textures and models are showing signs of age. I would say, that in terms of design, it still ranks up there as one of the more visually amazing games to ever be released. There isn’t a density of detail on display, in fact some areas are so desolate and barren, that the feeling of loneliness is suffocating. As you play through the game, you realize that the loneliness is intentional. It is as much a choice as the lush and vibrant setting you eventually pass through. The environment is an equal participant in this story. Just like it was in the source material. You remember that old show. You know, from when you were growing up. Yeah that one, with the magical creatures, and the old west, and the dark undertones. The one that is an allegory for growing up and the search for personal identity, while still being a solid adventure story full of silly humour and asides to the audience. Yeah, that one. Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, one of the best games.

This past Thursday I put together a presentation for the local game developers group. I said a couple months ago that I would do something based around animation. I had done a simple rundown of 3D graphics terms about two years ago and it seemed like it was high time that I did another one, but this time focused around animation. My goal with these is always to demystify 3D graphics.

I want to talk about fear. None of us is fearless. Fear is a great driver of human nature. Fear caused us to congregate in groups and tribes to ward off large predators. Fear moved us to harness fire, and to invent weapons and tools. It can cripple or it can motivate. Even when we lack a direct threat, we have evolved minds that can conjure new fears to propel us. We all feel it and we all use it. It seems fair to say, in that way, all people are equal. In fear, we are all the same.

Games used to be different. I tend to dislike “used to be” stories. You know the ones. The world used to be like this, or people used to act like that. Even when they are partially factual, they fall to close to “back in my day” stories. They reference a time that probably didn’t exist and tend to gloss over all sorts of terrible stuff in favour of some half remembered reverie.

Best Games - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy There was never any chance that text adventures would last. Not in any real way. There are a lot of people who still dabble in the genre, and a few techno hipsters that would swear up and down that text based games are more pure than games with graphics, or some such nonsense.

What you are really designing against is boredom. Somewhere along the path to writing that book or composing that song or staging that production, they have all had that thought. It might have been a twinging type of thought, ephemeral, just barely there and then gone. A thought not fully considered. Never rolled around the mind and tasted like rich liquor. The foremost design challenge is boredom.

I think pro wrestling is awesome. I try to stay current with the personalities and performers. I have read no fewer than four books by wrestlers about wrestling. At least the book jackets said that they were written by those wrestlers. I actively seek out news about the current state of wrestling every few months. I find the whole business fascinating. Now I haven’t actually watched a whole pro wrestling show in at least a decade. I have watched a few isolated matches, some great japanese and mexican stuff, a couple of smaller american promotions. I started out this paragraph by stating that I think pro wrestling is awesome. As a concept, I do, but I also think that, as presented, it is pretty terrible most of the time.

I have been doing a lot of 3D modelling lately. The tools I have to work with now are so much better, so much richer, more stable, and capable than anything I ever used in the past. This isn’t because, Blender, the suite of tools I am using is any better than the others available. In fact, strong arguments could be made to the contrary. Maya, Houdini, ZBrush, and 3D Studio Max, are all probably better in some ways than Blender. Still, through the march of time, all of the tools currently in use are quite simply the best they have ever been. Almost none of this clever software design makes it easier to make a model.

Best Games - Smash TV Did you know that The Godfather wasn’t the first gangster movie? There were a lot of them. Like really, a lot. All sorts. Funny ones, scary ones, true ones, boring ones. All the types of gangster movie. The Godfather is still one of the best. “How can that be?” you might ask. How could there be so many of the same type of movie, and one of them is somehow better than almost all of the others. Except Goodfellas. Goodfellas is better. 

The first game that I ever played networked multiplayer, was Doom. That isn’t true. I wish that it were true, but it’s not. Getting Doom to connect was an arduous task and we didn’t get it right the first, third, or 15th times. The first game that I ever played in networked multiplayer was Wing Commander Armada. A friend and I connected our computers across a ping pong table using a null modem RS-232 cable. I don’t know why we knew that it would work, but apparently the ancient nerd knowledge had been delivered unto us and it was our responsibility to carry it forward.