hedgefield

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Posts posted by hedgefield


  1. Yeah some kind of indication that you can wrap your brain around the problem and have a few angles from which to potentially tackle it without necessarily knowing exacly how to would probably convince me that you would be able to figure it out given some time. And I'd be upfront that you're not entirely up to speed yet, for honesty's sake. If I were the 'client', a dedication to problem-solving and a willingness to learn would be more important to me than technical knowhow with no analytical mind behind it.


  2. Man that is a cool-looking game Blambo. From the looks of those GIFs the feel is already really slick.

     

    And SpennyDubz please keep on making that game, I've been dying to play/make a submarine game for forever.

     

    I'm working on a game myself currently, it's a 2D adventure game based on aboriginal mythology and KRZ/True Detective. I'm hoping to have a demo ready in a few weeks to submit to Gamescom, so I will share it with you here then also. In the meantime I plan to blog a bit about the development here.

     

     

    p.s. Lacabra, is the guy in your avatar that fucking guy from Interstate '76? Best game.


  3. DeltaTime took me the longest time to figure out. I still have to think really hard when I explain it to someone but it's basically like this:

     

    Take one second of gameplay from your game and imagine it as a white picket fence (or a timeline in Flash, if you will).

    Each fencepost represents a frame, a still image, so in a regular game your fence would have 30 posts. (30 fps)

     

    If your computer is slower, there are less posts in your fence. This makes the space between the posts bigger. That space between the posts is the deltaTime.

     

    So if you want your guy to move from A to B, and it takes 30 frames to get to B, players on 30fps will get there in one second, and players on 15fps get there in two seconds. Obviously unacceptable, especially in a multiplayer game.

     

    So if you multiply the movement speed with the gap between the frames (the deltaTime), you ensure that every player always reaches point B in one second, regardless of how fast their computer is.

     

    Because when you run at a lower fps your deltaTime is LARGER, because the GAP between frames is larger, and so each movement gets multiplied with a LARGER number, which means your dude will move FASTER so he can keep up with the intended pace of the game.


  4. I did a project in Playmaker a while ago, a big 2D adventure game, and without Playmaker I don't think we could have done it. There was a lot of branching dialogue and having that in front of you visually as a network of connected boxes is the greatest.

     

    You can basically call every script command available to you through Playmaker, and it shows up in a little gui box that tells you which parameters it needs. We made some custom scripts too, like for a dialogue system, which isn't too hard, but for a basic game you can already do quite a bit with the defaults. It's a shame the extention is so relatively expensive. It does also come with a copy of iTween nowadays.

     

    Probuilder is pretty rad for level design without having to touch a 3D program, kinda reminded me of the old level editor that came with Tomb Raider V or whatever. I don't know what else is in the bundle though.


  5. Hitman GO is weirdly fascinating to me. Took me a while to get the hang of it but it's really charming. You could basically strip away the entire visual layer and be left with a nice abstract sliding puzzle game a la Threes or something, but somehow it also tracks with what a Hitman game feels like, weirdly. I think it was a sort of 'Google 20%' project where they said figure out what Hitman on mobile would be like and they came up with this.

     

    I'm really curious about the micro robot bridge-building terror now.


  6. The thing about 2048 that I found infuriating is that each tile slides all the way to an edge when moved, not just one grid-tile over. I don't know, I think Threes got it right. Or maybe I'm spoiled by having played that first. Still, pretty good (you're right - dat lerp).

     

    That said, me knowing nothing about Spelunky and not knowing which monster combines into which monster led me to just mash WASD randomly at maximum speed, resulting in a score of 2332. So I'm pretty pleased.


  7. Jesus that's a good one too. I'm always looking for experiences like that but I bet if that ever happened to me it would ruin my shit forever.

     

    We used to have barbecues at a friend's house who lived in a small village with cow pastures all around, and his parent's house was suficiently large that the garden was huge and deep (and also dark). We used to sit around the fire there and imagine how fucked up it would be if something moved in the big tree above us, or if a cellphone started ringing in the back of the garden by the greenhouse. People can sure come up with some creepy stuff in the right atmosphere.

     

    Also, dat gif.


  8. Rad, thanks for starting a thread about this, I didn't even know the moniker Weird Fiction existed until I saw a blogpost by the developers of The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter yesterday, but it's totally a genre I love and I've noticed the short stories I occasionally write are all starting to fall into this category, where things start off normal but end up in a weird way that's not scary but just weird and eerie.

     

    The Smiling Man and Terrorized For Two Hours are two exceptional real-life accounts from the Let's Not Meet subreddit. There are probably more gems in there but I haven't looked at it too much yet. Similarly, there's Ted's Caving Page (which is not real - spoilers). And I remember fondly the I Found A Digital Camera In The Woods thread on the GTAforums.

     

    I don't know if anyone here watches True Detective but that seems to fall nicely into the same category with the mentions of this Yellow King figure. I actually didn't realize but someone pointed out that The King In Yellow is an actual real book filled with weird fiction short stories that presumably part of the TD story is based on. The mention of Black Stars seems to come from it too. You can grab it for free on the iBooks store.


  9. Hey Paul, it sure sounds like a tough decision for you to face, and I can't speak to the merits of the other two careers you mentioned (all I know medicine takes a long-ass time to learn!) but I've always been of the mind that the thing that excites you the most and the thing that you see yourself doing for years to come is the thing to go after.

     

    I've never really doubted whether I should go into arts/game design after highschool because I just didn't see myself doing anything else. Like, at all. So I went for it and it's been going well for the past few years now, I feel like I made the right choice. I recognize a lot of what you say; I think about games a ton, talk about them, all my friends work in them pretty much, making an animation or writing code energizes my brain, so it sounds like deep down you already maybe have a preference?

     

    Have you ever made any games, or tried to? Going through the process of at least starting a project can tell you pretty quickly whether you like doing it. Not so quick that you can find out by this weekend ha, but I would say computer science is a nice broad field that can lead to lots of things, so you can't go too wrong choosing that.

     

    To answer your questions:

     

    Q - What do you like most about your job?

    A - I like being in a room with other people who are creative and discussing the best way to make something that we thought up out of thin air. I like it best during the prototyping phase, when there's lots of back and forth between the team members and the different disciplines to figure out the best way to build a level editor or which control scheme to use etc. When you finaly get to walk around in a world that you envisioned, that's pretty rad.

     

    The bit in the middle is a little stressful, then seeing the audience respond positively to what you've made in the end is just great.

     

    Q - What do you like least about your job?

    A - I think the hours. When deadlines loom, teams often go into crunch mode, which can be brutal if it lasts too long. I can't really complain, hearing stories out of Camouflaj for instance where they crunch for months, leaving the office at 11 and coming back in at 8. In the companies I worked at it wasn't NEARLY as bad as that, but spending a few evenings in the office doing grunt work can wear you down sometimes. If the project really excites you you may not even notice and want to keep going, but bar being in an AAA studio you'll probably have to deal with a client project you're not 100% excited about, so there's that. Most small companies have flexible hours though, so at least you can come in when you feel the most productive. And now that I'm working freelance I get to set my own hours and that's perfect.

     

    Another thing I guess is feedback. Worrying about what other people think about your personal work in progress can be tough. Though it depends on the person really, and with Early Access and such consumers are understanding better and better what it takes to make a game and that it's pretty much shit for a few months between designing it and going into beta ha.

     

    Q - What would you advise your 19yo self?

    A - Get contact lenses, they rule. Girls will adore you, don't worry. And above all keep doing what you're doing and make some dang games. Make games.


  10. EA have just updated/changed PvsZ2

    "During the fight, I lost a few lawnmowers, which is no big deal in a PvZ game, right? They'll be there in the next level I play... right?

    WRONG!

    With this new update, you now have to purchase lawnmowers to replace them one at a time, and the lost lawnmowers are gone on ALL levels, not just the super hard boss fight where I lost 5/6 of them. They cost about 2000 coins which is A LOT (unless they rebalanced the coin accumulation, which I highly doubt)."

    http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=765017

    That's pretty shocking to me. To actually retro fit this shit into an already released game

     

    Jesus Christ I didn't even hear about this. That is bonkers and gross. Guess we can cross that one of the list of 'doing it well'.


  11. BRECKON.

    Wrecking shit wherever he goes. I love this man.

     

    The flipping of the scores might be because when sitting in the cart looking forward the player on the left is player 1, but they take the picture from the front of the cart looking back, thus flipping the people and their scores. If that's what it is, that's a pretty dumb UX mistake right there, ha.

     

    Also, the way the letters in the Astro Blasters logo get progressively smaller made me read "Ass Blasters" initially, which would have been an entirely different ride.


  12. I think the demo for the Stanley Parable gives you a pretty good idea of how the game plays. The writing isn't that outstanding I would say, but at some point it starts fucking with your head and I always enjoy that, especially down some of the more obscure paths.
     
    I particularly liked

    when replaying a certain path through the level a few times I knew where the switch to the hidden door was and went to press it, and the narrator said "hang on speedy gonzales, you're rushing, here's a minute of classical music to calm you down"


  13. I do not make it a secret that I am not a fan of F2P. When researching it for a game I worked on at my old job my boss had to expressly tell me to install Candy Crush so I could see how they monetize their game, I would never have done it of my own volition. Terms like "fun pain" make my skin crawl. But that doesn't mean F2P is inherently evil. I just think everybody out there right now is using it in a shit way.

     

    The only F2P game I ever loved, and in my opinion the only one where the business model was a boon to the game, was Triple Town. It's a simple game and it was a hard sell for me at first, but I love it. They let you play one level for as long as you have moves left, and then you can put it away for a while. They don't have microtransactions if I recall, only one fee to unlock everything. I was fine not paying that for months, but one day I decided to go for it since I enjoyed it so much, and in some ways it lessened my enjoyment of the game somewhat. Because the amount of moves they gave you in the free version was exactly enough to spend a sizeable amount of time on a game, but provide a timely break when you ran out of moves. With that restriction gone, I could go for more than an hour, sometimes get into a second match for a bit because it was so tempting. But I always felt fatigued afterwards. The limit was no longer the game, the limit was now me.

     

    They're not the sort of games I want to make, but I suppose it's as valid a business avenue as anything else. Like you say, I've seen worse crimes against game design committed for a $60 price tag. If you feel comfortable working in that space, more power to you.


  14. Yep that's the Blacksad volume I have. It's three seperate stories bundled, there's no real 'origin story' or anything if I remember so you could dig in anywhere if you wanted.

    And yeah, agreed on the sexy cat women. But the kooky weasel reporter sidekick makes up for it.

     

    I never really got into using Comixology, is it any good? Reading longform comics on devices still feels a little weird to me.


  15. I like that you brought up Enslaved, I expected little from it but even from the demo I was convinced I had to play it. The writing and acting is super good in it. (unfortunately due to a shitty PC port I still haven't finished it). That Last of Us DLC trailer too, I remember Ellie being very realistic but the other girl seemed EVEN better in this one.

     

    For my graduation project I did some research into dialogue systems and such (you can read more here if you like), and while I don't feel like I found a great solution I can see the industry moving away from the problem areas I indentified, like long lists of responses as if you're filling out a questionnaire, the infinite waiting between responses, being nailed to the ground for the entire conversation etc. It's the subtle things like body language that we can do now.

     

    More to the point of the writing in general, I've always been a fan of environmental storytelling, letting someone figure stuff out for themselves. Gone Home and The Swapper did that really well, as does Broken Age to an extent.


  16. I'm about to dive into Vella's story, I finished Shay in one sitting the other day. When news of Broken Age came out I wasn't super excited initially but I had a blast playing through Shay's half. I used to be deep into adventure games (playing and making them) but nowadays I find that most of the traditional ones just can't hold my attention anymore, but this was the perfect mix of story and difficulty and art that had me hooked and not even thinking of stopping or switching to Vella. It's a really great game.


  17. ​Not sure if mentioned, but Blankets is one of the few graphic novels I have but man it is good. And a TOME. Bad Machinery is also delightful, and you can find it for free on the webs too. And if you're ever in a comic book store of choice and they have Blacksad, don't pass it up. The way this guy draws antropomorphic noir animals is stunning.

     

    affBlacksad-Johns-Bleus.jpg


  18. I'm not much of a real estate mogul myself unfortunately, I have a modest apartment in the southeast district so I don't know a whole heck of a lot about that particular subject, but maybe you can glean some answers from this document by the city council that explains the whats and hows of it. What have you heard? Any reason you'd like to know more about it?