hedgefield

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Posts posted by hedgefield


  1. I found the drawn-out japanese overacted style of cutscenes a bit off-putting but otherwise this looks really interesting. The dialogue system looks especially cool, giving a whole lot of info at a glance. Would play it on Steam.


  2. Thanks for sharing your list! I'm currently going through the Blackwell games, so mystery-themed adventure games are kind of my thing at the moment.

     

    After looking at your list, I was wondering if The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was released early to Kickstarter backers. I've been interested in the game for a while, but I hadn't heard much. If you've played it, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it (beyond what's mentioned in the recommendation).

     

    Thanks! The Blackwell games are pretty good too, really enjoyed those, especially the latest one, and the creator is a really cool dude too.

     

    I've been following along with the development of Ethan Carter but I haven't gotten my hands on the final build yet, but from what I've seen, it's a really competent mystery with interesting mechanics. I wasn't sure about the paranormal stuff at first, but seeing

    put me at ease. I'm receiving my copy tomorrow so I'll be happy to share my thoughts on it after that.

  3. Hey guys, for those of you located in The Nether Lands, tomorrow and friday there's a free games expo at Tivoli in Utrecht, right next to Central Station. Lots of fresh new dutch indie games are playable there, so if you're in the neighbourhood, swing by!

     

    http://www.dutchgamegarden.nl/english/news/detail/play-a-record-breaking-32-new-independent-games-from-the-netherlands-at-indigo-147/

     

    There's some cool stuff to see there (and not just because my game is in the lineup ;) ). Oculus DK2 is going to be there too! Action Henk, Lethal League, other cool stuff. Would be cool to see some Thumbs there.


  4. I'm really digging this, the front page is already a lot more useful to me, and I found the perfect niche co-op game my friend and I had been looking for for a while now (requirements: co-op sneaky horror gunplay like a DayZ, runs on his shitty laptop, is preferrably free or under 10 bucks - result: Cry Of Fear, a HL1 standalone mod). So recommendations seem really good and I dig the whole Follow Curators thing. Really great and much-needed move. I think this makes it much easier to connect fans of specific genres with games they would like but maybe never knew about.

     

    Bonus content: my curator page, if you like narrative-driven adventure detective fiction with an edge of weirdness here and there.


  5. I'm very curious if this is any good. I heard mixed opinions about it, and from cursory glances it does look like another game with rust on the walls and murderous chainsaw butchers with metal objects encasing their heads. But I'm intruiged by the whole delusional reality weirdness that seems to be going on in the detective's head.


  6. This is an allround excellent page so far.

     

    Man UE4 (and dem spaceships) looks amazing. Does it have those shaders out of the box? That's so much better than Unity. And I think I saw Magenta Sunset via Warpdoor or something, cool to see it was made by you Lacabra  :)


  7. Sometimes. Scifi is maybe not super common since most of it is some science-y thing that the translators probably know little about, but they do it sometimes. Fantasy has it worse, they translated every name of a person or spell or place in Harry Potter in Dutch, Lord of The Rings too. But at least they don't dub it and translate the title like they do in Germany. *shudders*


  8. I realized yesterday that the reason I haven't been productive for a few weeks is because my motivation has been drained from this whole GamerGate thing, and whenever I try to focus my brain on making new content for my game it purposefully redirects itself to something else, like it's trying to protect me from making myself a 'target' or whatever. It would be nice to get past that and continue with development instead of moving icons back and forth and polishing up code on the existing content, like some kind of digital janitor.


  9. There's a company called Harry's that apparently makes super great razors and you can have them send a bunch of samples to your house free of charge to try out before you purchase.

     

    I myself use a Braun Cruzer5 electric razor, mostly because it comes with a trimming bit. I sport a beard in daily life but I'm not so much into the wild hobo look, so it's nice to be able to have it snip off about half of what's there instead of everything. If you do have a vendetta against beards it's maybe not the best razor to shave cleanly with, although it doesn't disappoint imo. I think it was about $60? I've been using it for several years now, just rinse it off under the tap and maybe drop some oil on the blades every month or so and you're good to go. Charges pretty fast too. I think you can buy new blades for it too but I usually just end up buying the new version after a few years.


  10. I'm mostly a business buffoon just flailing away in a manner that seems to please people enough to occasionally give me money, but do you have some sort of Chamber of Commerce thing over there? Here in Holland they are pretty cool about doing courses and giving advice about those kinds of things if you're just starting out. I mean you have tons of experience but with writing plans and doing the financing things and such.


  11. I see they decided not to use my suggestion to name it The Rich Tosser after all. Shame.

     

    Well, I'm excited for the optical focus lens that does low-light photography. I'm not excited that it only comes in that brick of an iPhone 6 Plus. iWatch I don't care about.


  12. Yeah that's a cool promotion. I already purchased it before (was only 20 bucks or so) and it was really nice to quickly draw out a room, and with the new features I expect it will be even better. As a man of very limited 3D skills I think I'll use this someday to make a simple and stark scifi game.


  13. What are we even talking about.

     

    It's not like they picked the default five-oclock-shadow dudebro in his thirties voiced by Nolan North (no offense Nolan) as the protagonist, or made him male because they didn't know how to model a female. They could have just as easily chosen Delilah, but I imagine they wanted to tell a story about a mopey middle-aged loner forest ranger guy. And that is exactly the sort of person I would expect in a story about a fire lookout in Wyoming. If he was of another race for the sake of being diverse, it would probably break my suspension of disbelief. His race or whatever shouldn't be dictated a meta issue with games at large for the sake of 'not doing what everyone else is doing', it should be dictated by the story.

     

    Just because this studio's first game isn't immediately groundbreakingly diverse doesn't mean they're frauds. And all we've seen so far is a short demo, it's not fair to judge the whole thing based on that.


  14. After I played Broken Sword I decided I wanted to make games. I'd never really played a game with such a strong sense of place and story, and I wanted more. I still make adventure games, to learn about things I don't know much about (history, sociology, geography) and make stories that stick with people, that tell them something about the world they live in.


  15. I've always enjoyed writing stories and authoring interactive fiction for video games, and feel like I am pretty okay at it, but lately I've been wanting to learn more about it, somewhat as a result of growing anxiety that maybe I'm not as good as I think I am.

     

    Anyone have any must-read books or articles relating to sort of specific things about writing a narrative? I know about the whole hero's journey and show don't tell, and my vocabulary is fairly extensive, but what I'm after are resources that dive a little deeper into specific parts of writing, like how to set the stage or write emotionally troubled characters, how to make characters relatable and three-dimensional, keep dialogue true to life, those kind of things.

     

    If Sean or Jake is wandering these halls I'd also be curious to hear about where or how they learned some of these principles. The writing in Firewatch, from what we've seen, is already really great, and ofcourse the Telltale games were too. I want to try to get on that level, you know.

     

    Thanks!


  16. I have about 250 games in my Steam library too, most of them I've played before I got Steam or before this greenlight shitshow started, so they're more like throphies on my proverbial mantle. I'm glad Steam now allows you to hide games, that helped me get rid of some of the junk that came in bundles or just somehow appeared in my library (promotions? valve's generosity? magic?). Some remain unplayed to this day, a select group of games I still want to get to, but mostly I just play what I'm excited for at the moment and just bought, or TF2.


  17. I started mapping out my dialogue trees per scene for my adventure game with it, but then I got a unity plugin that basically has the same flowchart functionality while at the same time being the system that powers the dialogue itself, so I didn't see a need to maintain it in two places. I do like it though, I'd want to make something small with it someday.


  18. basically wondering if it's worth taking the starving artist path to work on projects I'm not wowed by. I had doubts about even if we had plenty of time.

     

    If you want to take the starving artist path I would say starve while making your own projects. You won't mind the overtime there and as long as you have something on the side to support your rent and such it still feels pretty good to work on cool things even if you gotta eat some ramen every now and then.

     

    That said, internships are always a situation where you have to do the best with what you are given (aka too little time and next to no money), but if you enjoy working with the people maybe stick around, it might get better after the internship is up and you work there for real (if that's how that shakes out. Though they don't sound too organised). Internships are usually better for the experience in working at an office and getting to know tools and clients. And maybe more importantly where you can cut corners to deliver what you envisioned within the budget. But it won't exactly be your best work that you do there.


  19. I shouldn't actually complain too much, I do have a great group of friends. I just need to prioritize seeing them more and not let inertia keep me rooted at home when I don't need to be. 

     

    That's pretty much how I am too. I do have some great friends, not a huge amount by any measure - I do feel insecure about that sometimes in the same way - , but I'm a very self-sufficient person, I can easily sit at home for a week and work on my game. These days especially. I live with my girlfriend so I get a nice amount of social interaction each day anyway whether I seek it out or not, that makes me forget to sometimes just call people up and hang out. It's easy to lose track of that, and hard at the same time to keep those connections fresh. That's why I've always liked (and sought out) to live with other people, from my parents to roommates to now a significant other. Having someone in the house, even if you don't want to talk right now is just kind of soothing and nice. If I had gone to live by myself I think I would have turned into a cat lady-man.

     

    It would be pretty awesome if the Idle Forums were a real location, then we could all hang out. I just went to a dutch Idle Meetup, and I'd advise more people to set up meetups like that, it was great to just banter about games for a few hours over a hot coco.

     

    Which is also nice to see decent humans in the real world and realize that all this meta drama is only contained in our internets. I usually steer away from Kotaku comments but there were a fair number of people in the comment of a recent article that said they didn't really care about gamer culture, they just wanted to play games, and had missed most of the drama. Which I think is a nice reminder that there is still a silent majority of decent gamers out there.