Drublic

Yes more IdleThumbs Minecraft! Can I come in? username: Drublic

I kept feeling like there was something wrong with my computer whenever the cutscenes would play. What is going on with the timing there? I get the whole "remember when cutscenes used to be like this" thing, except that the value of that "tribute" wears thin after about 30 seconds. Then you have to spend the rest of the game with: "How do I disable the countdown?" ...no dialog as static frame pans across the screen... "Tap into the mainframe!" ...no dialogue as different static frame pans the other way... "Ok!" ...no dialog as different static frame pans down... I only played for about an hour but I had to skip the cutscenes after the second one because I couldn't handle it.

I really hope this is the actual music: https://soundcloud.com/powerglove/powercore The beginning reminds me of classic John Carpenter stuff.

I thought it would be appropriate to cleanse the palette of all this meaningful discussion about The Passage with a clarification I need to make about the Aflac duck. When the Aflac commercials started coming out, my grandfather was completely amazed that he was seeing a duck talking (he was born in 1919). I tried to explain compositing but that was a little beyond his world ("They put film in computers?" "Animation? You mean they draw in computers?"). So we settled on "they just do it with computer animation". A couple of years later I got a job in the video game industry. "Cinematic Artist" is kind of hard to explain even to people who work in video games but I tried to explain it to my grandparents anyway: "Someone comes up with a design, then they write a script, then someone else makes a drawing, then someone else tries to make a sculpture that's made up of geometry, kind of like a graph, then someone else puts a skeleton in the sculpture to make it move, then...animaiton library...proprietary software...gameplay authoring...Sam and Max...downloadable content...episodic gaming..." They nodded politely and I got a few "oh, that's nice!". There was a pause and my grandfather seemed to be processing some of this and then his face lit up and he said "Like the Aflac duck?" Yes, grandpa, like the Aflac duck.

Anyone encounter a crocodile yet? So good!

I attended the LA jam and was in a team with Brendon Chung (of Blendo Games) and we made this goofy thing: Nuka Baby It's pretty fun to play with 2 players. It was a fun experience. We fleshed out the idea of noise attracting one kind of monster and light attracting another. Pretty shortly after that, Wallace Huang just started building the game framework in Unity (like getting a thing to move when you hit the wasd keys). James Liu wanted to learn Unity so he started making random things like clicking the mouse to spawn enemies as a "debug feature". James and Brendon were also excited to have a whole physics engine with particles to play with so they started making placeholder enemies out of rigid objects, and started figuring out how they would move to attack the player. By the end of Friday night, we had these balls and cylinders that would follow the player and they would pile up and collide and fly off and do all sorts of hilarious things depending on whether the baby was glowing or the parent was singing. My favorite stage of the game was late Friday night. The "sound monsters" were rigid object cylinders that would chase the player. Their movement was based on physics and collisions and the "attack" was basically just a force toward the player. As the player sang the lullaby, the cylinders would move toward him and would almost immediately fall on the ground. After that, their only means of locomotion would be to roll. But if the player just stood to the side of them, they would pathetically roll back and forth, trying and failing to reach the player, like some rabid flipped-over beetle with no legs. On Saturday, we decided we were having too much fun testing these things out and the "test bed" became the game itself. So it was just a matter of tweaking gameplay mechanics, setting up some goals, rules and obstacles, and getting art in. Aside from chipping in with design and tweaking, I was mostly responsible for the art. I had a lot of issues getting things out of maya and into unity so the actual nuclear baby throwing a tantrum and crying nuclear tears at the end didn't make it in, even though the asset itself is sitting there in the project, mocking me. But that's also the charm of these jams, you can only do so much in 48 hours and you just have to let things go and focus on what's most important. Suprisingly, a game called "Nuka Baby" doesn't even need to have a model of the baby to be fun.