Brett E

For some reason I find this genre particularly fascinating so I thought a thread might be in order to highlight the best of the genre. My Recommendations: The Road by Cormac McCarthy Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel The World Without Us by Alan Wiseman - This one isn't a novel but (educated) speculation on what would happen if people just disappeared. The Passage by Justin Cronin There is another one that I liked but have totally forgotten the name and cannot find it... Anyway please share any recommendations you may have even if they're pretty obvious like mine

I wonder if No Man's Sky has started a trend in games for (in want of a better word) esoteric titles.

If either of you aren't familiar with Miles Davis - Kind of Blue then you need to check it out. I don't know much jazz either but I know it's great

I'm an artist, mostly 3D environments but may be able to help with other stuff (I won't be much help if you want character rigging/animation though). Best way to contact me is probably on slack: @brett_e Timezone: BST(GMT +1) Sample work

I just finished Erased, I thought it was pretty good although most of the last episode a little far-fetched.

Post Rock PSA: There's new albums from both Explosions In The Sky and Hammock.

https://soundcloud.com/fatherdaughter/follin-roxy

I might have to come back and watch that after I've played the game. In other news Austin mentioned a piece he'd like to write about the philosophical points The Witness is making and I want to read it real bad but sounds like he might not have time to do it

Ah ok, thanks Biggy.

I'm almost at the end of this game now, I just have the treehouse and jungle left of the main puzzles. I really dislike the audio based ones so I'll probably skip those. I've done everything I can find in the treehouse except

In big picture mode, got to settings > display > resolution > target monitor.

I just got a steam controller and I wasn't too keen on using big picture but I realised you can set it to use specific screens which is real helpful for me as I have my PC near my TV but still want to use it as a PC on my monitor, so I just hit the steam button on the controller when I want to play games and all games I launch through steam will default to the TV. It doesn't sound like a big deal but I found positioning windows perfectly on the TV a pain.

I'm looking forward to the new Daughter album, out on Friday.

According to CPUbenchmarks.net the i7 920 is about 5000 something number and the i5 2500k is about 6000 something number so yours is a whole 20% better I was ok with waiting for Fallout 4 but with X-Com and Tomb Raider coming out I may have to upgrade a bit sooner, I'm thinking a new card this month and a new CPU (and thus new motherboard) next month. I'm leaning towards the R9 390 and probably a high end i5.

The only reason I'm apprehensive about this game is that Psychonauts 1 is such a unique weird thing, it'll be very hard to follow that up. The mini doc episodes about its development show how unusual it is and now that Double Fine have matured I can't help but wonder how it'll affect the sequel. Which isn't to say that I think they need to crunch like hell and almost go under but the first game was (for better or worse) undoubtedly a product of a troubled development/inexperienced team. How much of what makes the game special is tied to that is probably impossible to say though, they did highlight one example in the docs, the little hidden areas that they spent a disproportionate amount of time on when very few people would ever see them. Oh well, unlike a lot of the internet I actually have quite a bit of faith in Doublefine, things seldom go to plan but they always deliver something different and entertaining.

I'm not sure, probably ones from the 'Excellent' section of this site because I don't tend to keep up to date with this stuff:

Yeah I know it's overdue replacing but it's been great at handling a whole bunch of stuff for the last 6 years, I was (perhaps over-optimistically) hoping I could get another 6-12 months out of it. If it the CPU also needs replacing to get decent frame rate in Fallout 4 then fair enough. I'll just hold off for a couple of months and get the whole lot when a big spend should be less painful.

The time has finally come, my PC can no longer run new games well enough even on low settings. So I need an upgrade, my current spec is an i7 920 2.6, 16gb ram, 5850 1gb and some other stuff. It seems to me that I need a new CPU, board and card but I'm considering just getting a cheap card to tide me over for a bit. Would that work or would the CPU be a bottleneck?

I didn't have much in the way of spare funds for most of the year so I haven't played a lot of what I wanted to but I'll likely get around to them in 2016. 1. Metal Gear V 2. Infinifactory 3. Tales From The Borderlands 4. Helldivers 5. Grow Home 6. Massive Chalice 7. Beginners Guide 8. Everybody's Gone To The Rapture 9. Star Wars: Battlefront 10. Cities: Skylines Stuff I haven't got around to (but may have been on the list if I had): Bloodbourne Witcher 3 Life Is Strange Fallout 4 The award for 'Most conflicted game' goes to Destiny + Taken King etc, I don't think I've ever thought a game was so good and so bad at the same time before.

This is my design so far: Genre(s)/Themes: Goofy Visual Style: Stylised/cartoony Story/Premise/Pitch: The player is in pursuit of a rogue wizard, this wizard has the ability to fly and to create magical doors, combining these powers the wizard will create doors in hard to reach places and fly through them to evade capture. As an officer of the MCPD (Magic City Police Department) the player character has some some abilities, they can manipulate gravity in localised areas. This skill makes them uniquely equipped to catch this particular magical felon. Game: Third person, probably confined to rooms. Change the direction of gravity to create routes to the magic doors and progress to the next area. Objects all have physics so changing the gravity will move the objects around. Some features of the rooms will be fixed so rotation will reposition objects to allow traversal between fixed and non-fixed objects.

Update: I didn't make much progress with the art, I think anything more than boxes is going to be too ambitious given the time limitations. I won't be able to do much on it next weekend so I'm going to focus on getting a relatively stable prototype with one or two puzzles. On a more positive note, re-orientation is working, sort of...

Yeah the gimbal is just not intuitive, I'll change it when the gravity change and reorientation is working. I'm gonna take a break from code, hopefully I'll have more success with code at the weekend. Now I need to decide on the visual style, something I hadn't put much thought it. I'll probably go with something stylised and simplistic so I can get a decent number of things done in time

Thanks guys Progress update: I have the gravity changing working, sort of... You can rotate the gimbal and set the direction, it's a bit crude at the moment but it works. There's some strange bug to iron out but I want to get re-orientation of the player in next then I'll get gravity changing working fully. I'm currently thinking that maybe it's the arrow that should rotate instead of the gimbal, it currently makes a certain amount of sense for someone like me that spends a lot of time in 3D programs but that's not most people. Also there's the question of world and local space, you could make the arrow point in one direction and the gravity change to a totally different one, perhaps it should point in the world direction and be unaffected by local rotation, a bit like a compass. Many things to consider but I'll focus on getting the main systems working before I worry too much about that.

Progress update: You can move, jump and look around, which took me most of yesterday to do, something that would probably take a real coder all of 30 minutes tops Also I made this to help the player see how they're going to change gravity but I'm not sure if it's the right approach yet, maybe it's over-complicating it and some sort of arrow would be better.

I watched a few episodes of the new Aziz Ansari show Master of None on Netflix. Good so far, it's a similar sort of thing as Louie but not quite as 'out there'. If you like his stand up stuff then check it out, it has a lot of the same themes but in a light dramatised story format.