Ben X

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Posts posted by Ben X

  1. Posted

    This thread is for folks seeking a team to work with! If you have a particular set of skills and want to contribute to someone else's game, post in this thread, preferably in the below format. If you find a team, please edit your post and note that.

    If you're looking to recruit members for a team, and there's no one here who fits the bill, you can pimp your team in the team recruiting thread.

    And everyone can join the #wizardjam channel on the Idle Thumbs Slack channel for team-building, advice or just live chit-chat while we're working on our games!

     

    Format:

    What I'm Doing: What you're able to contribute and your experience level

    Contact Info: Your contact info (PM, email, whatever)

    And optionally:
    Time Zone: It's probably easier to work with people who aren't 12 hours off from you? But maybe it's fine.
    Portfolio: A link to your portfolio / website / whatever if you have one, so people can check your style.

    [Then whatever else you want.]

     

    Example:

    What I'm Doing:

    Programming; I'm a web developer and don't know any game engines but would like to learn.

    Contact info:

    PM me on the forums or message me on the Idle Thumbs Slack

    Time Zone: 
    EST (UTC -5) but I'm usually up late

    Portfolio:

    I've never made a video game but here's my website! www.puffin.biz

     

    I've been programming for a long time and am a terrible artist, I'd like to team up with someone who has a little Unity experience that can help teach me and also do art. Willing to work 24 hours a day for 2 weeks straight and my cat can do a perfect Wario impression.

     

    Template:

     

    What I'm doing: 

    Contact Info: 
    Time Zone:
    Portfolio:

     

    Thanks to those who came before me and created this thread format. I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

  2. Posted

    This thread is for recruiting team members! If you have a game idea and need help from a reader with a particular set of skills, post in this thread, preferably in the below format to make it easy for people to find you. Once you have enough members, please edit your post and note that.

    If you're an individual looking for a team to join, and there's nothing here that suits, you can pimp your skills in the team-seeking thread.

    And everyone can join the #wizardjam channel on the Idle Thumbs Slack channel for team-building, advice or just live chit-chat while we're working on our games!

     

    Format:

    Pitch: Game Pitch (Try and keep this to one or two sentences!)

    What I need: What you need (Artist, programmer, writer, etc)

    What I'm doing: What you're contributing

    Contact Info: Your contact info (PM, email, whatever)

    And optionally:
    Time Zone: It's probably easier to work with people who aren't 12 hours off from you? But maybe it's fine.
    Portfolio: A link to your portfolio / website / whatever if you have one, so people can check your style.

    [Then whatever else you want]

     

    Example:

    Pitch: I wanna make 'You, Fisher', a 3D stealth fishing game about casting lines without being spotted by security, and catching as many fish as possible before sunrise. I want to learn UE4 and C++

    What I Need:

    3D artist who can animate some fish (and help with design!)

    Audio person to make some sneaky music and fish noises. Smoky jazz?

    What I'm doing:

    Programming in UE4, Sam Fisher impressions

    Contact info:

    PM me on the forums or message me on the Idle Thumbs Slack

    Time Zone: 
    EST (UTC -5) but I'm usually up late

    Portfolio:

    Here's my website with some gifs of other games I've made! www.puffin.biz 

     

    I've been a fan of Splinter Cell since first seeing screenshots of their dynamic shadows in ~2005 and I have a Sam Fisher bust above my fireplace. I'd like the game to have a light stealth system, fully rigged realistic humanoid characters, and a dynamic music system that's entirely early-2000s style drum and bass but made exclusively out of samples of water splashing and seagull noises.

     

    Template:

     

    Pitch:

    What I need:

    What I'm doing: 

    Contact Info: 
    Time Zone:
    Portfolio:

     

    Thanks to those who came before me and created this thread format. I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

  3. Posted

    My thoughts on ROS (for context, I've never been a huge SW fan. I really enjoy New Hope, the rest of the franchise I more admire than out-and-out love):

     

    (hidden for full spoilers and for people who get upset reading negative opinions of stuff they love)
     

    Spoiler

     

    I didn't come out infuriated like I did with TLJ, rather a weird mix of overwhelmed and bored. The film makes some of the big mistakes the other ST movies did - far too complicated story-wise (too many moving parts, too many characters); too much telling-not-showing; I don't really care about most of the characters in it; the same old destroy-the-planet-killer-climax.
    Yet again, I found myself wishing they'd focused on Ben and Rey primarily, with a handful of other characters tied into them (so, Palpatine and Leia would be the big hitters in this movie, you could really get rid of all the others and not lose anything). The whole thing with Richard E Grant is utterly pointless, Poe's love interest and Finn's new ex-Stormtrooper friend are so crammed in it feels like they're backdoor piloting new tv shows.


    There was a lot of stuff that would have been much cooler if it had time to breathe (and, for some of them, if they had been planned for/introduced in the previous two). Two examples:
    - the 'light-jump-skip' sequence. This is a really cool idea but it came right in the middle of an incredibly rushed montage of a million different set-ups. Would have been great if this had some more time to have them jump into a quiet bit of space, for the TIE fighters to need a few seconds to calculate the trajectory and follow them, maybe even being a little more cautious about where they pop out so you get the beats of the Falcon arriving at a new location, reacting, then the TIEs arriving and making their way back to the Falcon etc. Done better, this could have been the climactic action scene - better that than another (surprisingly badly directed) space battle between the same old ships.
    - Palpatine. His return is revealed in the opening crawl, we never get to hear his message, in that same bewildering opening montage Ren tracks him down, he's revealed, his previous plans are explained, his new plan is set-up. It's all so fast and there's no craft to it, no drama. Then he doesn't do much through the movie, then Rey gets to him and he does more explaining then his plan changes and he explains his NEW new new plan. If your character is having to describe things happening as they happen, you've fucked up.


    Overall, I wish Kathleen Kennedy had a) planned some stuff through a bit more, and sunglasses) had the mantra "simplify, slow down, show don't tell" drilled into everyone's heads. I think in ten years time,  out of the PT OT & ST, the ST is going to be the trilogy I least want to re-watch. It's kind of embarrassing that the PT avoided some of the big mistakes that the ST made over and over.

     

     

  4. Posted

    I'm holding off on that (and all these "showrunner walks us through the latest amazing twist" articles) until the series has finished, as they tend to hint at what might be coming up in the next episode or two. But I'm looking forward to listening to all of them, Lindelof's LOST podcast that he did with Cuse (which I also waited to binge once the show had finished) was always fun and thoughtful.

  6. Posted

    We already briefly discussed good trailers for (not universally thought of as) bad movies in the Ep 8 thread, where I mentioned Watchmen and Sin City. I often wish there were some way studios could monetise making amazing trailers for non-existent adaptations of comic books etc, because the trailers are often better and really all you need - you get to see what all your favourite bits of the property would look like in live-action and what the general vibe might be, but you don't have to watch two hours of bad decisions.

     

    On a tangent, as someone who hasn't played any of the games, I liked the Silent Hill movie! It really felt like being trapped in someone's disturbed mind (I'm sure the games did a lot of the prep work there). The only stuff I didn't like was the pointless Sean Bean subplot, which it turns out was forced into the movie by studio execs who didn't want a film with no male roles in it. :fart:

  13. Posted

    If it's the case that they all came in, did good work on Alyx and then make Valley as a VR game, I'm happy with that result even though I'm probably not going to get to play any VR games for quite a while - once I can, will be great to have a new awesome HL game to play and to see what the Campo Santo team can do with a 'walking simulator' game using high levels of VR interactivity and Valve money. And if Valley turns out not to be VR that's fine too. As long as it still gets made (or at least we get a different CS game instead, I guess)! 

  17. Posted

    Also don't burn yourself out looking after/worrying about everyone else - you've got to look after yourself first. I know it can be hard to prioritise yourself over family and close friends when they're having a hard time, but it doesn't help anyone if you end up having a breakdown.

     

    If possible, might be helpful to see a mental health professional (a therapist or whatever) to help you work up some techniques to deal with the new stress factors in your life. You don't have to keep going forever, and if you don't like the first one you try you can keep trying different ones until you find a good fit.

  19. Posted

    Gotcha. Well, not that I have any knowledge of the short film circuit, but my advice:

    1) give yourself a strict deadline for making the new version (a week? You don't want to be tinkering with this forever, better to learn lessons and move onto the next one)

    (Also, make a version with a public domain music cue for later use - even if it's a bit sloppy, better to have something than nothing.)
    2) send it to every festival that fits your criteria but won't accept films that have been online

    3) put it online and promote it as much as possible
    4) send it to all the other festivals that fit your criteria, and at this point I don't see any reason not to send it to every festival going as long as it doesn't cost you anything. Make the most of that music licence! Even if you're not there to see the screenings, something good may come of them.

    5) Make another short film!

     

    Also, you mentioned that having a trailer might be helpful but you're too burned out on this film to make one - do you know (or could you find) any editors in training whom you could ask to make one for you? It would be good experience for them.

  21. Posted

    People who use the term "mystery-box storytelling" - what do you mean by it? Because Abrams' TED Talk use of 'mystery-box' was so broad as to not really mean anything. He called the Darth Vader reveal in ESB a mystery box. He calls movie theaters mystery-boxes. I think some people use it to mean "the enjoyable speculation over a never-explained mystery", but then the term is also applied to LOST which did explain pretty much everything (how successfully is subjective, imo very).

  22. Posted

    Well, it's only a teaser trailer. It's a Christopher Nolan movie that seems to have lots of atmosphere and tension and maybe some narrative timeline tricks. Up to you whether you're excited by that or not!

     

    (If you're confused by it having Russian text, I believe that's because this teaser was only played in cinemas and they've been taking down online versions so it's hard to find one in English.)

     

    I can't immediately think of any favourite teaser trailers that haven't already been mentioned, but I always thought that if this one cut off at the 1 min mark it would have been great:
     

     

  23. Posted

    Agreed on El Camino, Two Ferns and Wine Country. Disagree on Always Be My Maybe, which I thought was the most bland, toothless archetype of a romcom I've seen in a while. I also watched Dumplin' but for some reason I forgot to put a review on letterboxd. It was meh to good.

    I didn't realise Shaft was a Netflix co-production! I should have realised when it came on the service two weeks after theatrical release. I can't be bothered to watch it after the bad reviews, though, even if Roundtree does get more to do than in the last one.