darthbator

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Posts posted by darthbator

  1. Posted

    The idea that ideas and topics that promote extreme "otherising" of people on all sides seem to have seeped into absolutely everything. There doesn't seem to be any content created for the internet these days that doesn't have some kind of "Trump angle" or isn't clearly attempting to state where it exists on an increasingly divided spectrum of social opinion by which people now overtly judge one another. 

     

    I actually love political and social discourse but it's become completely inescapable. It doesn't matter who you are, or what the forum or topic is it has become what I would consider extremely fashionable to overtly broadcast your social opinion and I've just hit a point where in non politically focused media I find it totally exhausting.

  2. Posted

    The choice to not talk about politically motivated subjects is certainly monetary. They directly depend on their audience for revenue via premium memberships. They're not shy in talking about how this is their major income source. Dividing the audience in any way is a sure fire way to lose subscribers and income.

     

    I think it's insulting to insinuate that people "escape" into media that isn't fixated on the current fashion of excessive social and political opinion. So the only thing of concrete worth in human experience is contemporary diversionary politics? That's a sad, sad world.

     

     

       

  3. Posted

    I tend to really enjoy the conference stuff. Sometimes people get hammered and it gets awkward but I don't think it's ever been "bad". I sort of wish they had more opportunities to do stuff like that where the schedule and surrounding circumstances aren't so hectic. It's a neat sort of late night TV vibe that you don't normally get in games. Usually when developers are sitting down on a couch with "games press" there's a TV right there and they're doing what basically amounts to a product demo. I like the extremely informal setting of it all even when it's gone off the rails.

     

    I hope they get a lady on the GBWest team. At this point I don't think you can really cover games well without a female perspective. However I think Giant Bomb's rather grey, hands off, stance on social issues makes it hard to attract that talent. In the era we appear to have entered into I think that continues to be both their biggest strength and challenge. A large reason that GB produces the only gaming podcasts I'm still listening to is because it's one of the outlets that I feel offers quality analysis of games and the industry without a lot of "political opinion". In a time when everyone is basically waterboarded with everyone else's social opinions on a constant basis it's nice to know that at least my video game podcast is still going to be about video games (and peoples house projects and stupid reader mail). However I think that same stance makes it hard for them to attract good younger talent and instead lands them folks like Dan.

  4. Posted

    I used to paint a fair amount of 40k models. I had a pretty reasonable eldar army for a while. I was probably more into painting and fussing over all the miniatures then I actually was into playing the game. It's one of the only hobbies I've pursued where for some reason I trended towards the aesthetics rather then mechanics. I've recently heard some pretty positive things about Infinity wargaming. Has anyone here played that?

  6. Posted

    I actually only stream my game development. However I've gotten into the habit of obsessively recording all of my gameplay and I'm posting that stuff basically every day into youtube. I also have a bunch of martial arts stuff up there that's set to private that I've been looking to do something with. I've also long wanted to try and produce some of those neat game analysis videos I see people make using my raw archive footage! So I guess I do more of a "traditional youtube" thing then game streaming. I guess I could get into that too?

     

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6RSK-HM9v8gQ7D7JzIFG9g

  7. Posted

    So I recently finished replaying the supergiant games and was reminded of how much I REALLY love a well placed vocal track in a game! The examples that really stick out to me are

     

    • Bastion - Zia/Zulf themes
    • Transistor - "The Spine" and variants (or just red humming to the general soundtrack throughout the game while in Turn()!)
    • Red Dead Redemption - Going to Mexico
    • The Walking Dead Season 1 - Credits
    • Special Mention Final Fantasy III (VI) - Opera Scene (cause it never occurred to me a video game could that at that time)
    • Special Mention Final Fantasy VII - Sephiroth (once again never saw that coming but I should have expected it cause you know. CDs)

     

    I've also noticed a more modern practice where games (like moon hunters or axiom verge) incorporate faux vocal tracks using either "computer esq" voices or fake phonetically driven languages. I think this is really interesting cause it adds a sort of diagetic immersion (that song is written in the language of this world) while aiding in the pieces ability to loop as BGM.

     

    What are some of your favorite examples of vocal tracks in games?

  8. Posted

    http://www.youtube.com/user/togaassassin/live

     

    So this is something I'm trying out. Hopefully it's something I can stick with. I'm going to start streaming out some of my game development! For the next 2 weeks my girlfriend is on vacation in Germany and for various reasons I couldn't go :( So I'm going to try and stay home and plug away on a game of the type we like to play together to surprise her when she gets back! 

     

    I also need some ways to force some accountability onto myself. I've grown listless with the scale of some of my personal projects. Around Christmas I realized it had been multiple weeks since I had really worked on ANYTHING. So I figured this would be a god way to stay on target and do something positive coming into this new year!

  11. Posted

    So I've fallen pretty hard for battlerite, the game you would probably logically think of when you hear "multiplayer online battle arena". No lanes, no jungle, no items, no creeps just a battle arena where multiple players battle their lords. I think the game does a pretty amazing job at synthesizing the team fight phase of games like League or Dota2 into it's own game. In between rounds you choose from 3 different "battlerites" that power up one of your characters skills, a super neat way to encapsulate the progression mechanics in traditional Lords Managements. It's in early access now (19.99 gets you access and all the heroes they ever release). 

  12. Posted

    50 minutes ago, dartmonkey said:

    Now they've consolidated their dev teams onto one platform, the need for third parties diminishes. Indie devs should find more than enough power if the install base is sufficient enough to warrant the time investment.

     

    I have 0 confidence that Nintendo will have a sufficient program for indies. That's certainly my hope. I think the occupy a power and form factor sweet spot (and will probably attract a video game centric audience) that is perfect for indie games. But Nintendo has never been the best with working with external developers. 

  15. Posted

    I wouldn't hold my breath for a lot of cross platform. Nintendo is on the "other side" of the CPU divide this time. Everyone else moved to x86_64 and now they're on ARM meaning there will be port work (especially for people outside of Unity/Unreal). I think it looks really awesome and I'm getting one and I'm already excited about it! Did anyone else notice that they never showed them touching the screen? Is it possible this thing isn't a touchscreen? That feels sort of crazy in this era.

  16. Posted

    I've used all kinds of stuff in the past but the system that generally works for me is this.

    Personal

    Evernote - I put basically all my thoughts and things I intend to "long term file" inside of evernote

    Wuderlist - I like tasks lists and checking stuff off. They happened to be the one I liked most when I looked at todo list apps.

    Pocket - I pocket articles that I want to read sometime later (never). When I read one of those and it strikes me as something I might want to refer back to I clip it into evernote.

    My Work

    Docs - Unless I'm sharing something from my internal process I process out stuff that I have been working on in there into a google doc

    Hack n Plan - Is a trello like application that is specifically tailored for game development. Once I get a project out of it's initial prototyping phase or start working with other people I like to manage tasks there.

    I also keep a notebook with me all the time. I tend to put anything I consider valuable there into evernote in case something happens to that notebook.

  17. Posted

    That particular email and the ensuing conversation kinda got to me. I was on my way to work and as soon as I got in instead of working I cooked up this little prototype! (Android only)

     

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/ww4r2pfjxnju6z5/Movement%20Proto.apk?dl=0

     

    It's a basic statement of thesis on that idea. I was thinking about how I would want a "first person adventure" like Gone Home, Firewatch, or even The Witness to play on device and that's what I came up with. The controls are all based on multitouch. Each additional touch layers on an additional capability. 1 finger down looks around, 2 fingers down adds forward motion (while preserving looking), 3 touches down accelerates into a run moves backwards! If your initial 1 finger "look" touch lands over a selectable object that object "activates" (just turns green here for testing). 

     

    I might be wrong, but when people talk to me about this kind of accessibility stuff I always scope it into mobile. If your audience is unfamiliar with FPS style controls their chances of going to any PC game are slim IMO. The future of the broad market is touch screen devices [face_shrug]

  21. Posted

    A lot of really high quality lifting instructors don't charge an arm and a leg (at least from my experiences). Just show up at some meets and ask guys where they're training and who they worked with and it should be pretty apparent who you should talk to. 

     

    I tend to start working out mostly between 1-3pm or 6-7pm. I'm trying really hard to get out of the gym. Trying to reduce expenses and get back to training methods I find more enjoyable. Unfortunately I can't really find good replacements for heavy backsquats, deadlifts, and cleans at least once a week and I just can't justify barbells in my apartment...

  22. Posted

    I actually like slack more as a chat platform. They a have a reasonable API and highlight service integrations and stuff. For things like Wizard Jam that will actually probably be pretty useful. Discord is more for voice chatting and games stuff?

     

    It's insane you can't link your steam to this. Oh they have some black magic that can see what game is running...

     

    Also it doesn't have giphy so it's like immediately inferior right... 

  23. Posted

    The nice thing about slack is that it's something that a lot of people just tend to have open for other purposes anyways. It's a nice kind of side channel I think (also it's easy to get into and there's a way to automate the sign up process). 

     

    I would actually love to get a Discord group as well. While my IRC friends are all heading into slack a bunch of my gaming friends are now on discord. 

     

    Well that's pretty easy I'll put the link for this in the top thread as well. 

     

    https://discord.gg/0beO5YmLScBp2XsF

  24. Posted

    Android is offered totally free without any official association with google through the "open handset alliance" as AOSP (Android open source project). You can easily pull an amazon and basically fork the entire thing into your own ecosystem without any google involvement. The only "google" bits of android are the play store and play services. I have always figured that if Nintendo did base their next console on android it would be some "nintendroid" version of the OS and not something we would easily recognize as android. 

  25. Posted

    If they're really unifying all hardware function around this device I think it's time they pull the trigger and just call this thing the "Nintendo Entertainment System"! 

     

    I believe most of the "super hardware" speculation is centered around the fact that the consoles speculative release window aligns closely with the release date of Nvidias "Pascal" hardware architecture (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7900/nvidia-updates-gpu-roadmap-unveils-pascal-architecture-for-2016) which is rumored to be a monster jump in rendering performance. 

     

    If they plan on building the system based on android (which IMO makes all the sense in the world) going with tegra seems like a no brainier. Mobile hardware tech has already solved the encode and stream problem better then the WiiU. It would be technically intelligent of them to lean on that already superior implementation to kind of just take their current vision to the next level. I just don't really know what that would look like...

     

    I guess what I am imagining is a TV box running some kind of x86/Nvidia Maxwell/Kepler hardware to play "console games". And then the controller some kind of 5-7 inch device with some physical inputs powered by some manner of tegra that can remote play from the "console" on local networks and then play some other tier of game when you're away from home (like normal android games or bespoke DX handheld games). I don't imagine there will be a scenario where you'll be able to run "the same" games on both the handheld component and the TV powered component. Unless the hardware in the handset is the "baseline" and the box under your TV is simply a stream point. However that seems generally less exciting to me. 

     

    Then there's the question of how you price and package something like that? Is it one thing (a controller and a console)? If there's any kind of significant compute power that's going to be real expensive. Is it 2 things that are part of the same "system" (the console with big rendering power and the handheld as it's controller/companion). That allows stuff to be priced more reasonably but also kind of breaks the idea of the 2 pieces creating some whole experience.