Posts Tagged ‘linkedin’

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.

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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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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This website was created specifically to show off my own work and since my current project is my Master’s Dissertation, I decided that it was about time that I wrote an update.  I have been making small updates to the official dissertation page, but that mostly discusses what the project idea is about.  It has come time to give an update of the project’s actual progress.  For information about the goal of the project check out the aforementioned page, because I won’t be going over that type of thing here.

The first thing to note is that controlling the music and changing game objects based on the musical events are both working features right now.  The examples I have running are extremely simple, but more will come.  The first screenshot, shown above, shows the early level example.  The goal cubes are used to motivate the player through the level, changing the colour of each one by touching it.  The visual style is obviously minimalistic, and won’t be changing significantly, but it is all that is needed to demonstrate the project’s goal.

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I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the original Unreal Tournament.  There is something about the original’s unbridled ass-whoopn’ that has never quite been matched by any other game.  The game was violent, blunt, and unforgiving.  The arenas were rough and dark, abandoned structures given a second life as the perfect places to watch competitors fight for their own.

The games that followed (2003, 2004, III, and Championship 1 and 2) never retained that feeling.  The environments became overly intricate, even delicate looking in some instances.  The players went from simply dodging to flipping and twirling off walls.  These are supposed to be hardened warriors, not ballerinas!  Nevertheless, these games have added some great things to the series and still provide a fun, competitive gaming experience despite how far they have strayed from the original game.

Even with the series’ advancements there is one thing, or rather a collection of things, that the Tournament has never gotten: a true sports game treatment.

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Making it to the end of a game has always been a significant milestone.  Many early arcade games didn’t even have “endings”.  They were often a constant barrage of harder levels until the player finally succumbed to the difficulty and hopefully got their name on the high score sheet.   Most older console games didn’t have the ability to save your progress and provided a limited amount of lives.  So even if a game had a story, getting to the end in single session was challenging, to say the least.

In the time since then gaming has made many changes, including saving, checkpoints, difficulty levels and regenerating health, that have made it somewhat easier to reach a game’s conclusion.  With the popularity of multiplayer, some stories are also getting shorter as more development time is spent focusing on online features.  Some game still make it difficult.  Fallout 3, Oblivion, Far Cry, and now Dragon Age all push the length of a single player story to the extremes.  But the point of this article is not to talk about how the difficulty of games has changed.

The point is that reaching the end of a game usually takes a certain amount of dedication from the player and it should be a momentous occasion. Unfortunately, sometimes it is not.  An unsatisfying ending can really tarnish an otherwise good game.  So I’m going to take some time to jot down my thoughts on what a good ending should have.

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It is important to know that I am a big fan of Harmonix and my music gaming platform (yes, platform) of choice is the Rock Band series.  I have also played several of the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero games, but they just don’t provide the same level of enjoyment for me.  It is also important to know that as much as I have enjoyed these types of rhythm games, there is no doubt in my mind that the video game market is seeing a few too many of them right now.

I also haven’t played DJ Hero.

So then why am I writing about DJ Hero?  I am writing because of all of the new music titles being released since The Beatles: Rock Band, this is the most interesting idea.

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Was NHL 09 the best sports game of 2008? I hope not.

This story was originally written in July of 2009 for a video game blog idea that has not become a reality at this point in time.  Rather than leave it in limbo, I thought it would be a decent first post on my personal blog.  Stay tuned for another NHL story talking about how NHL10 met or didn’t meet my expectations.

Ever since the release of NHL 09 I have had a confusing opinion of it. On the one hand I have played countless hours of the game, but at some points I don’t know that I’ve hated a game more. Normally this wouldn’t be that significant, but the fact that the game won 12 Sports Game of the Year awards leads me to believe that some publications are letting some things slide that I simply cannot stand. So I decided that I finally have to write this down before NHL 10 hits the shelves and hopefully corrects all the points that have been driving me crazy. Read the rest of this entry »