CEJ

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Posts posted by CEJ

  2. Posted

    Danielle describing The Evil Within as "batshit" made me want to catalogue the meanings we assign to different types of shit in English.

     

    Batshit: (adv.) ridiculously "Batshit insane" (adj.) unbelievable, in a ridiculous or entertaining way "This game is batshit."

    Dogshit: (n.) something of very poor quality "This game is dogshit."

    Bullshit: (n.) lies, often completely disassociated from the truth. "This essay was bullshit" (n.) something that's unfair "This level is bullshit" (adj.) unfair "I hate this bullshit level"

    Horseshit: (n.) lies, often completely disassociated from the truth. "This essay was horseshit" (n.) something that's unfair "This level is horseshit" (n.) something of very poor quality "This game is horseshit."

     

    Anybody got any others?

     

    Shitfaced: To be 'shitfaced' is to be totally drunk.

  6. Posted

    Sean made a game full of branching narrative. He's taking issue with people who claim that in-game choices have no meaning unless they directly map to some big in-world effect; that demand is a very real phenomenon.

     

    My ex-roommate had that exact issue with Bioshock Infinite. Choices like this can give the player pause/food for thought that just wouldn't happen without them. Then there's the megaton choice in Fallout 3, which is clearly superior for its radical in-game effect.

  7. Posted

    Fantastic cast! The Last Express is one of my favorite games. I think the realtime aspect of the game is crucial to my enjoyment of it. However I think the rewind feature is only a necessary function of the fact that the game have fail states. A save and load setup would have been a nightmare for this game. But I do think the rewind feature takes away from the permanence of the player choice/expression and the fact that time is fleeting potentially loses some of its impact. I would like to see a realtime game with a wider possibility space but I do think The Last Express is a source of inspiration of how that would work. The fail states serve to tell a specific chain of events, but without fail states I think that the structure of the game could support something with more nuanced player expression and narrative.

     

    Also Troy or Rob mentioned a few books at some point, but I'm too lazy to scrub through the episode again.. Did anyone write them down? The Guns of August was one of them.

  9. Posted

    I just discovered that movement-speed has a huge impact on perceived scope. I've been overwhelmed by the need to fill the landscape with structures, but now that I slowed the movement speed I need to fill less space.

     

    Huh what are you making? I was actually thinking about this recently. I want to have realistic distances/traveling times/by foot.

    I looked at the

    for Unreal Engine 4 and found out that the movement speed there was dramatically slower then any typical FPS game, but it felt pretty natural in the demo.

     

    Hmm, I guess there's always an wikipedia entry for everything, Preferred walking Speed for humans. 1.4 m/s (5.0 km/h; 3.1 mph).

    This was pretty interesting.

    "Levine and Norenzayan (1999) measured preferred walking speeds of urban pedestrians in 31 countries and found that walking speed is positively correlated with the country's per capita GDP and purchasing power parity, as well as with a measure of individualism in the country's society."

    So who's making a game taking this into account?

  10. Posted

    I guess I'll share something, I just find textures and models from old games very lovely.

     

    This is a texture sheet I ripped from Soldier of Fortune (2000), I didn't manage to rip a mesh so I made one by myself using the original texturemap.

    Anyway, I played this game when it was new and I was a kid and it was amazing. Just the act of ripping assets from game and looking at them is endlessly pleasing and fascinating.

    You observe the thought process, the creative choices of the original creator is there to be found.

     

    Obviously, I can't just share ripped assets from a game, so here's a screengrab.

    sof_glock.png

     

    I agree a bout the broccoli, the actual game objectives was overshadowed by the pretty broccoli and walking into it was intoxicating for a while.

     

    edit: Here's the original SOF Glock model ingame if you're interested.

  13. Posted

    A bunch of movies that I've watched and mostly liked.

     

    Some recent movies that I comfortably recommend. I was surprised how much humor the The Magician & the Seventh Seal had, they looked so grim.

    Volver

    The Magician

    The Seventh Seal

    Frankenstein

    The Bride of Frankenstein

    Wild Strawberries (1957)

     

    When I saw these, they immediately became among my favorite movies, I've seen both of them several times since the first time I saw them 6 months ago, which is extremely rare for me:

    The Spirit of the Beehive

    Cria Cuervos

     

    Difficult to recommend, but I ultimately enjoyed them:

    3 Women

    Picnic At Hanging Rock

  14. Posted

    Hey you guys, I put out some songs that kind of don't really fit together that well but are all pretty cool I think. For fans of ambient/experimental house and downtempo?? I have a hard time classifying stuff but maybe you'd like it. You can grab it here.

    More great music, love it.

  15. Posted

    If anyone needs more music, my album appeared on Spotify today!  Ariskany Records - Heraclitus w/ Boombox

     

    7 tracks, 16 minutes.

     

    Starts with a drone track to whet your palette.  Followed by a strange appropriation of the sound of Miles Davis's "On the Street".  Then an attempt to very clearly underline some base fears in blatant terms.  A short instrumental break.  Followed by a nesting doll of pop construction.  "A bit of nostalgia for the old folks."  Ending with a gentle dissolving.

     

    Recorded in Logic using soft synths and sampled instruments, except for a few stray guitar parts and vox.

     

    My wife tells me I have too much of a penchant for "bad sounding" things in my writing (read:  maybe a bit too idiosyncratic), but this one thankfully still gets her seal of approval.  Phew.

    Consider me a fan, love it, adding your album on my spotify.

  16. Posted

    Yea, one of the tantalizing UE4 carrots is the lighting, Unity Free has ridiculously stripped down lighting/shadow. (and as you said, material editor out of the box)

    The terrain + road tools look interesting. And they are developing UE4 to be pretty dynamic and support games like Fortnite, which also features buildings with tons of geometry. in contrast, Campo Santo, for Firewatch they are extending Unity with a lot of stuff from the asset store and I'm not so keen on going on a spending spree at the moment. Of course they're using Unity pro as well.

  18. Posted

    I have this romantic/naïve idea of making a small rural village in it's entirety by myself and have a game set in it. Last I checked I think the building-count were over 100, which seems like a lot for one person.

     

    Edit: I'm investigating tools and techniques, let me know if you have any ideas!

    Edit2: Art-style is still undecided, but it needs to be feasible.

    Edit3: Considering UE4 over Unity, but still undecided.

     

    city_test.png

  19. Posted

    Wait, not the other way around? I mean, Jaws is technically a PG film since they edited it down from R and PG-13 didn't exist in those days, but you would think that a hypothetical mom would want to get her kid a nature documentary instead of a horror movie.

     

    Maybe she actually knew what she was doing all along and just told you that to fool you.

     

    While that would be hysterical, I'm pretty sure she's only tangentially familiar with the movie as the cultural phenomenon it is. (I'll have to ask her)

     

    I like to imagine she saw it on the store shelf and nonchalantly threw it into the shopping cart thinking she was gonna be the coolest mom.

    Actually, come to think of it, she gave me a VHS cassette of Benny Hill that same birthday. Thanks mom.

  21. Posted

    Listening right now.. I have no idea if this is actually the case, but I've been looking at that Kirby footage for waaaay too long.. And I could swear it looks like it's actual, real clay. The whole thing looks sprite-based, unless they actually rendered it but then decided to limit the rotation of Kirby to 8 or so directions, to make it look.. authentic?

    I don't know, I may be going insane thinking about this..

    Looks like zbrush to me, you can see (what looks like) dynamic shadows and actual 3D geometry on the tree-dude. I feel like we increasingly see 2D-3D hybrids these days (Diablo 3, Broken Age). I could be mistaken though!

     

    Edit: That's a thumbs up!

  24. Posted

    For the game I'm making, I use behavior trees to determine AI behavior. Pretty much you have tree nodes that are either conditions, actions, or selectors. Selectors are what determines how the tree and its children are traversed, the conditions return success or failure based off a predefined condition, and actions actually have the behaviors carried out. This is a good introduction to the concept, http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/02/24/introduction-to-behavior-trees/. This guy explains it much better than I did. 

     

    So how would that look in code? I've written some naive faux-code below for condition and action nodes, is that in the ballpark? The selectors seems to glue together everything. I don't have time think about this very carefully right now so sorry for the nonchalance.

     

    Condition:

    void isPlayerVisible(){
If ( player = visible )
    return true
else If ( player = hidden )
    return false
}
 

    Action:

    void ShootPlayer(){
Play animation
Instantiate bullet
}