vimes

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by vimes

  1. Posted

    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: GMT
    Portfolio:
    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

  5. Posted

    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. :tup:
     

  8. Posted

    I'm so bummed out by that. I want more Lee Petty games so badly.

    'xactly.

     

     

    I think they talked about a hypothetical game with a similar description. They had a guest on, don't remember who.. They extrapolated the concept for this dream game from some comic. So they basically designed Extraterrarium on the podcast, yes.

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

  9. Posted

    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 :/

  10. Posted

    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.

  11. Posted

    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.

    I wonder if it's a hint that Llewyn might have come to term with his 'mediocrity' and awful shortcomings after realizing them.

  13. Posted

    Maybe it's because

    I completed Shay's arc in its entirety before really starting Vela's

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

    I mean, Vela's ending was just not any twist: it cast a completely different light not only on what I did as Shay, but also on the tiny bits of lore I was exposed to. And it's made even better by the lack of flashback; they respect the player enough to pace the last cinematic in a way that allows enough and mental space to let us come to that realization in parallel. Awesome I'm curious how people who play Vela and Shay in short bursts experienced it.

  14. Posted

    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.
     

  15. Posted

    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.

  17. Posted

    I finished The Eccentric Family, they left a few potholes, but I really enjoyed it despite them.

     

    It's kinda hilarious that the tanuki fear the Fellow Fridays when humans don't believe in magic and their brain eventually convince themselves that something non-magical happened.

     

    It's kinda silly that the tanuki can't transform while in cages, they just claim they have to "inner calm" even though you see one of them practically asleep in one later.

     

    And Benten... I just don't know what to think of her, she ate the main protagonist's father, she's a capricious and kinda evil, but in the end she just switches sides and act like nothing happened? Why she simply returns to her master is never explained... I guess she's so capricious that she simply left the Fellow Fridays because she finds them boring? The whole series seems to revolve on being interesting and having fun.

     

    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.

  18. Posted

    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?

  19. Posted

    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.

  20. Posted

    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.

  21. Posted

    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.

     


     

  25. Posted

    Some random info about AR:

    • you don't really need to have abstract shapes for AR tracker, AR libraries can now detect 'normal' images.

    • actually, if you're just going to integrate simulated stuff over reality, without these virtual object having a 'real world' object counterpart, you don't even need any special pattern or grid to provide the simulation with a reference of what sort of perspective the camera is looking at. PTAM sort of solved that a few years back rather impressively (the creator went on to work at Microsoft, never to be seen again; just like Johnny 'Wiimote hack' Lee)

    • AR has great wayof feeding off from other technologies; like Kinect (or any system able to create depthmap) - it leads to proper occlusion of virtual vs real, relighting of the real environment by virtual lightsources and (possibly) doing physics with the real space (grenade rolling down a tea table).

    I don't know how CastAR deals with occlusion by the way.

     

    RFID would probably be useful in the case of having elements being moved out of any of the players view and still wanting the game logic/simulation to acknowledge it. (stupid example: somebody moves a warrior next to a target, the simulation should start a fight even though none of it is visible to the players).