It has been quite a while since I put up a new post and I assure you there is a good reason for it.  This website and blog was started while I was job hunting after I finished my degree.  As it would turn out, I got a job in the game industry at the end of November.

So I packed up and moved to Nova Scotia where I now work for HB Studios.  I’m not sure what this means for my little mod projects, but it certainly isn’t speeding them up.  My days are usually pretty full as it is, but I have to admit I recently saw some of the screens and videos I’ve done and it made me want to get back into them.  For now though they’ll stay where they are.

I might write some posts about games though, I have been playing quite a few of them lately.

I have been absorbed in another mapping project over the last week or so.  This time it is for Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2).  For those who haven’t played L4D2, it is primarily a cooperative online game where you and three teammates try to survive the zombie apocalypse.  Which mostly involves killing hundreds of zombies.

I had been wanting to try Hammer (the map editor for the Source Engine) again, because I hadn’t used it since the original Half-Life was released.  I was probably around 13 or 14 then.  Left 4 Dead has game mode called survival where the players are confined to a relatively small area and tasked with living as long as they can.  This provided a small, focused mapping task that I thought would be a good exercise to help me get a grasp of the editor in case I wanted to do something larger later.

At this point the map is fairly far along and I already have some videos up on YouTube.  I thought this would be a good point to talk about the design decisions behind the map and what is left to do before release.

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So this is the other half of the discussion I started the other day with an article about games I didn’t love, but still managed to finish.  This other half involves games that I thought were good, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to play.  Not that I won’t play ever them, but these are great games that always seem to sit idle while I play others, both good and mediocre.

So why do these otherwise great games get pushed aside?  In some cases the problem is clear.  GTA4, for example, has two very clear reasons.  The first is that not having checkpoints means enormous chunks of time can be rendered pointless because of small mistakes; ie. getting killed.  The other is that although the cell phone and the relationships that came with it were interesting and valuable to the story, being punished for not going to the strip club while I’m already very busy (ie. trying not to get killed) kept me from just fooling around.  Doing whatever you want in a GTA game is one of the great draws to the series, but you were constantly dragged away to play some dumb mini game.  If you didn’t get punished for saying no, I could put up with phone calls, but losing friendship benefits over darts was irritating.

Others aren’t so clear.  There can be much more subtle reasons that a game doesn’t get chosen for my occasionally sparse video-gaming time.  These are the cases I want to explore a little more.  These are games that I have enjoyed and have won several awards each.  Why aren’t I playing them?  Well, Mass Effect 2 is really good, so playing it keeps me from playing these others, but there has to be a reason I stopped playing them in the first place…

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A month or so ago when I was playing Red Dead Redemption I had written a blog post talking about everything that irritated me about the game and why it shouldn’t have gotten a perfect score from any reviewer.  I never posted that article because it became too much of a rant.  I still believe that all of my complaints are valid, I may even have some that I would add to the list, but it got me thinking about more interesting things than just complaints.  The main idea that came out, and was actually the title of the article, was “Why do I keep playing Red Dead Redemption”?

That article only touched on that question for a paragraph near the end, but thinking more about the question I realized that there were other interesting examples it could be applied to in my library.  The question is less about RDR and more about why I would keep playing a game I have so many problems with, but not play other, better games that I haven’t finished?  There are quite a few great games I haven’t finished in my library, which is odd because of how much I enjoy seeing a game through to the end.

So I have decided to write two posts on the topic.  This is the first and it will focus on games that I knew weren’t perfect, and in some cases didn’t enjoy, but still managed to somehow finish them.  The next article will be about those games that I have enjoyed, but can’t seem to bring myself to finish them.  I won’t bother to list good games that I have completed, or the bad ones that I didn’t, because those don’t require explanation.
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The website hasn’t had an update for a couple of weeks, so I decided that something had to go up.  The main difference to the website right now is that all of my information got updated to reflect my official graduation from the Master’s Degree.  With distinction as well!  Our class is made up of the guys with the green hoods in the picture above.  Not all of us were able to make it back for the ceremony, but it was good to see everyone again as we all head out to find our positions in the gaming industry!

Graduation was a busy time, so that partially explains the inactivity on the site, but much of it is gaming related.

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The time to reflect on part three is upon us.  I had predicted that this section would get completed much faster than the previous one, the type of prediction that usually curses a project.  In most ways it did go faster than the previous level, even though the overall time I put in was probably more.  This level is both larger and more complex, so my previous experience helped keep development from getting out of hand (I will talk a little about that later).

I have to admit that it wasn’t as smooth as I had originally hoped though.  Most of this is due to SunkenTemple tileset, which comprises most of the level.  I thought the transition to this tileset was going to be a straightforward as was to move from the Crypt set to the Cave one.  It didn’t really work out that way.

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The next section in my Torchlight dungeon is based in the caves tileset.  As the player leaves the crypt they travel through a cave that has some of the crypt architecture incorporated into the environment.  This section has moved along much faster than the first, but has been significantly larger and more complex.

I was also able to put the planning stages to better use during this section of the dungeon.  The cave section started out as an incredibly small sketch, one that I hadn’t given very much thought to when dreaming up the overall dungeon.  I had expected it to not be much longer than the crypt section, mostly just a way to get to the outside areas of the level.  It turned out to be much more.

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I often have random game thoughts, some more insightful than others.  A couple of times I’ve considered writing them down, but I’m finally getting around to doing it for once.  There are a couple older ideas I’ve wanted to elaborate on, but for now I think I will just stick to a couple of game thoughts I have had recently.

As the picture shows, the first of the two thoughts is about Super Paper Mario for the Wii.  It is actually more of a complaint.  The Paper Mario games are the slightly more RPG-like games in the Mario universe, though it hardly goes deeper than having more than one hit point.  One thing this game does have in common with many RPGs is a lot of writing.  Writing is fine, especially when there is quality humour to be found in the script, and I don’t mind reading in place of voice-overs.

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After playing through Torchlight I decided to try my hand at the editor (TorchED) in my spare time.  The editor is quite easy to get into, allowing for relatively quick creation of environments using the assets from the retail version of the game.  It also comes with a particle editor, logic scripting capabilities, and the ability edit and create a wide variety of other game objects.

So after a couple video tutorials and some plain old messing around I cobbled together a sketch of a level idea and dove in.  These short blog entries will briefly chronicle my progress over the next little while; I don’t expect this level to take too long to create.  I don’t plan on doing any sort of TorchED tutorial posts, these are more of a development diary for the mod.  Posted after the break are the plans and screenshots for the first section of the level.

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Alright, well it’s been just over a week since the final version of my paper was submitted for grading.  With the end in sight, I suppose it is time for another update.  This update does presume some familiarity with the project, so reading the previous update and the project page is recommended.

The testing went reasonably well, many participants who played through the demonstration preferred the adaptive music to a more traditional passive approach.  The application also ran correctly in all cases; the adaptive music was consistently successful at matching game events with specific elements of the music.  The seamless transitions between sections of the music appeared to go unnoticed by the participants (as they should, since they are supposed to be seamless) and there were a wide range of positive responses to this.

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