vimes

After watching The Avengers this morning, I made a detour to one of the Kinokuniya bookshops in Singapore and sort of went overboard: I got Infinite Jest, Forever War, The Book of Grickle, Bone - Complete Edition, Fables - Book 4 and The Man in the High Castle. All of those came this thread, by the way. How interesting! I spent 4 hours reading Bone from cover to cover and my feelings are mixed. On one hand, it's definitely a page turned and I'm really amazed by how well different tones mix. There's no doubt for me that Smith has tremendous comic writing skills. But I feel like they are being misused in this epic storyline. : I'm not sure this makes sense, but at one point, it seemed the story could have branched to something else than 101 medieval fantasy. Something that could have taken a better advantage of the realistic-cartoony juxtaposition. Then again, I can't quite imagine what. In terms of art - and this may not be a fair comparison - I think Franck Cho's work on Liberty Meadows was bette, but then again it's already pretty good . Beside that, I've read the first chapter of Infinite Jest, and it looks like this monster of a book is going to test the range of my English vocabulary and my grap of intrincate sentence structure.

Hello all! What I'm Doing: I'm back here to offer my 2D art skills for people to use. Also, if you want French voice over or French accented English , I'm here for that :) Contact Info: PM Time Zone: GMTPortfolio: I did the paint over over and 2d character art of last year's Uwaki Hittoman. (scroll down the thread to see in-dev screenshot) You can find more of my stuff on https://artonthetjo.tumblr.com and on https://twitter.com/VimesTom/media

anybody has a clip to the mentionned hammond narration? Also, I suspect you guys know this already, but Trespasser was helmed by Renaissance Man - and personal hero - Seamus Blackley who did amazing things in his life and recount them in this great discussion with Warren Spector.

Eh thanks Eh, thanks

I still haven't started thinking about a pitch, but I've put some of my info in the Doc form: I can do code, design and some art

Mentioned by Nick Breckon via twitter; a gorgeous Myst-like set in colourful post-apocalyptic Mongolian landscapes. I suggest you watch the following video WITHOUT the sound. I find the soundtrack horrendous. It evokes vaguely Spielberg's AI and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō.

I tried to find an existing thread about this, but couldn't. So, "COMA: a mind adventure" made the completely shitty decision to start a flexible campaign on IndieGogo - which means they'll get whatever money you'll give them even though they might not reach their target. It makes the project sound unreliable and scammy.... but their demo and track record would point that it's not the case: the game looks and sounds fantastic; and their tentative gameplay pretty interesting since you'd be modifying the time of day and weather in order to change the kind of impact your actions have on the world. So, 25 hours away from its deadline, the project has only reached 45% of its target. I think that it'd be very gracious (and probably über-fair) to ignore to flexible campaign thingy and contribute if you can. If you can't, spreading the word would be cool. http://www.indiegogo.com/Coma?a=829002

There's a million questions and comments I want to make about this podcast, but I'll just stop at saying that this was an excellent, excellent one and that the 'Post South Park cast' is a thing that needs to happen. OK, I'll just say this one thing: it's fascinating to see how the other interest you've got in your lives are informing, interacting or contradicting with the way that you see and make games.

That Primary Colors comparison in the last podcast is insanely adequate - if you're a dev your relation to the gratification and dread of gamedev probably fit one of the main character's stance toward politics.

For the first time in my internet community life, I feel that a moment is deserving of this gif

'xactly. Some of friend of mine said: "Zerg Kirby in Space". The concept is still awesome though.

Amnesia Fortnight is probably my favorite industry event; so I'm super stocked. My top three are: Headlander: the idea is super potent and all I've seen from Petty makes me want to see him helm a full game. Extraterrarium: because it could be one of the few instances of procedurally driven puzzle game. Steed: because I like cool ideas being turned on their head. For the Pen Ward protos, I'm not super impressed but I'll probably pick Dammit Jerry because it's not as crazily specific and impossible to make as the others. The cycle of human/zombie state for No More McDonalds is quite cool though. I've also offered two bundles to some friends so I could buy their vote off - basically giving a strong nod to: Cat in a Box: I can see being a legit interesting game beyond the cat trope. Ether; might have been in my top 3 if it The White Birch hadn't be so disappointing and if i wasn't afraid they'd try to make Journey 2. Parabolic: love the original idea and I can't tell what game it's going to be which is exciting. Breach: because an avatar based, coop version of that loop is super promising. White Witch's Gnome War: because Black Lake was lovely I'm on the fence for Bad Golf 2, Jet Girl & Ghost Dog and Project Xin. Overall the vast majority of the pitches were interesting, but i've realized that the creator mentioning "it's this game meet this game" is a huge turn off for me (even more so when the game is Gone Home and they seemed to show a bad understanding of what made it special ("Gone Home + space horror", " Gone Home + Women in Fridge trope!")). Also, I'm really not into roguelike/procedurally generated game right now. Sorry JP :/

I'm probably over-analyzing, but Space Dandy really feels like Watanabe trying his hardest to destroy Cowboy Bebop aura of perfection so that he can remove the burden that it placed on his career: it takes all the tropes of the Bebop universe - the rubbish technology, the femme fatale, the hyper-ethnic future, the bounty hunter lore, the noir backstory of side characters - and deride them in the most dismissive and dumbed down way possible. It's really sad to see one of the few anime TV directors who take himself seriously giving up on that to go for easy lampooning; but unlike Kill La Kill shit take on fully limited anim' style, it has truly virtuoso animation.

Inside Llewyn Davis was pretty good. One thing that may be of interest to non-french speaker who watched it: the last sentence of Llewyn in "Au revoir" which is the equivalent to "good bye", but in French, it's a contraction of "jusqu'au revoir", which literally means "until we see each other again". Given the Coens craftiness, the film structure and theme, I would be surprised it's coincidental.

By the way, I was in HK late in December and this happened: Bespoke things everywhere.

Maybe it's because but does anybody agree that this is Schafer's best story structure and theme/game structure symbiosis to date?

Great interview! His trajectory from fart jokes to AAA to indie was super interesting and the fact that he completed Flotilla in 6 months is amazing. Also, I completely geeked out on the "tar trap + fire" discussion: that's a gameplay programmer wet dream; adding a gameplay ingredient that because it builds naturally on existing systems, is self explanatory and captures the imagination, can be given to both the player and the designers to add immediate depth to their activity. I freakin live to find out/implement that kind of stuff. Anyway, I admire Brendon Chung because 1) he seems to have incredible self motivation 2) he hasn't done the same game twice and through his successfull explorations of different genres, he still manages to keep a Kubrick-like consistency (i.e. fairly over, but obvious in hindsight) and 3) even when he builds a game around one-off interactions - like in the Citizen Abel series - he manages to present and construct in a way that make them feel systemic - as if the game simply happened to present them to us only once; but they could be used in many other situation.

Just giving my 2 cents about GitS-Arise: I see it as a new take on the characters and universe because it is as different from the TV Series than the TV Series was from the Movies which themselves were very different from the original manga. So the Ghost in the Shell 'franchise' is used to letting the creator shape everything as they want. I actually like that approach a lot but, beside the new explanation of Motoko full synthetical body, Arise has been hugely underwhelming: it feels like a second grade techno thriller with no meat on the story (despite 50 min episodes) and no inventivity in the animation or the direction.

Holy shit, this is awesome! Mushishi is, hands down, my favorite anime of all time.

All the thing you mention are why I love this series and its character development so much: though there is internal consistency in the universe and story, the characters are themselves profundly inconsistent. They are constantly betraying or stirring away from any 'life philosophy' they might have by both the different relationship they have with people and the flow of events. That's why the father resolved not to escape; or why the main character and Benten, who are chasing instant gratification in different ways, find themselves shouldering some significant responsibilities (in their case, it's because they care about some individuals much more than what they'd care to admit). The nice thing is that, the character still believe they are consistent. Anime's are usually very thin on themes, or when they do, it's either buried under a huge amount of rubbish from genre codification or delivered very badly. Uchouten Kazoku is great because it exposes some fantastic questions about human subjectivity and the struggle to come to term with the mysterious choices of people that are close to you, but this isn't what the characters are focusing on or even aware off. They are part of a plot, or at least of unfolding of events, and we get to see these themes because we have a privileged point of view. And that's damn smar for any medium.

Excellent podcast, despite the windy conditions:). I want to agree with the stance that Randy Smith, Clint Hocking and you take on 'think first about player activities not story' but what if you envision first is a story space that you feel only Video game can serve - a bunch of questions, themes or topics you want to expose the player to or want him to express himself in? Can you picture 'reverse-engineering' the activities that would be relevant to that space and make the experience within it meaningful?

Yep, Kyosougiga is the best show this season (along with the second half of Monogatari Second season): it reminds of FLCL in its excellent ratio of crazyness to strong thematic albeit with slightly less bold theme. I really hope they manage to find a satisfying ending to it all... it sorts of disappoint me that they decided to introduce so much lore in the last episodes; it might be needed for the ending they chose, but it feels like resolutions didn't need any of it; or at least not introduced so obviously.

My favorite book of 2013 is a series of 5 short novels(100 pages) by canadian-japanese author Aki Shimazaki called 'The Weight of Secrets' - at least in French. It centers around a Japanese family across 3 or 4 generations (from the 1920s to the 1990s) with each book commiting to one character's point of view. However, since the books are transgenerational but not at all chronological, there are a lot of overlaps and a lot of events that are first described second hand but may at one point be described first hand (say, the grandmother vs. the granddaughter guess). Because of that, the series main theme appeared to me as the drastic bias introduced in our understanding of our relative by the accumulation of things left unsaid. And also, the reasons for which they chose to omit these things. In that sense it is a bit like 'Sense of an Ending', but because of the large cast and the different eras, it is no way as claustrophobic. It also shows more empathy for the characters as well, since most of them are, well... empathetic to others. The neat aspect is that it also explores several shifts in Japan's societal construct over the last century and provided, at least to me, fresh perspective on WW2 and the Japan of the 80s. In any case, it's ace. I'm not sure the series exists as such in English but the books are in order: Tsubaki, Hamaguri, Tsubame, Wasurenagusa, Hotaru. It doesn't really make a lot of sense to only read one though.

Just want to drop that a team like DoubleFine sharing their bi-weekly progress is also extremely valuable for dev in the triple A space, or at least for devs who have been in the same structure/paradigm for a while: it challenges a lot the perception of how a game comes together, how it ought to look at certain stages of the process or when key aspects are commited to. I love it but I've got the slightly irrational fear that trying to educated the players about the process will also make them more willing to accept subpar results because they know it's hard... and frankly, I want players to judge a game by how they experience it vs. putting it in perspective of the process they witnessed. As for the visual look driving Kickstarter, I think that it's very true: even though I nearly always use Kickstarter as a patronage platform (i.e. giving money to people to do what they want), I know that I didn't back Kentucky Route 0 when it came on KS because the money was for hiring and artist and their very target footage's art direction really turned me off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm-v69Dqf_Q Thankfully, they changed it completely (along with the audio direction) and that was for the absolute best. But given the original display and the goal of the funding, I wonder how the backers reacted to the change.

BigJKO @ 12.58 Also, yep, you should populate Goty.cx this year too!