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I dunno, TF2 really benefits, if you're not specifically playing with friends, from the goofy narrative that comes out of its weird characters doing shenanigans. Maybe that's more a product of personality than style.

Also the Jet thing: That sounds like it could be great. I don't know how the game works so this may just not work at all, but if when you steal a jet the other pilot had to eject manually, forcing both players into a game of chicken over who'll eject first, that'd be phenomenal.

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Yeah, fighting your way into the jet is something I'll figure out down the line.

 

TF2 has loads of backstory and side-story stuff but it's all outside of the game. It's stuff that hardcore fans CAN seek out if they want. The art direction in TF2 is all this old vintage-ass look. People don't dress like the Scout any more, and spies don't look like the Spy nowadays- and the music is this

.

The style is a solid one in TF2, but if you don't like that stuff you wouldn't even notice it was there because they've got such a light touch with it. I bet plenty of people never even thought about what decade this was set in. You don't have to like the 30's to like TF2, but with a game that's more overbaring with it's aesthetic: you kind of DO have to like anime to like Asura's Wrath.

It turns out hooking someone into a single-player game is totally different than bringing groups of people into a multiplayer. I wanna make a game that's an easy sell- not FROM ME, but from a player who wants to get his friends to join.

 

TF2 is the perfect example of what I'm talking about, and how to do it successfully. Like anything else though, it's not a hard n fast rule: Warcraft is completely reliant on orcs and elves and that has a billion players.

There's a great GDC talk about how they sacrificed cool, badass art for the function of it being a good spectator game. I want my game to be a good lobby to goof around with your friends in, and I think this is a step along the way to making that a priority.

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Oh I didn't plan that, I just drew the first 4 planes I thought of.

I'm actually changing Bison's plane to more of a jet, I don't want old bi-planes in there. I remember thinking it's funny that these guys are having a pie-fight with multi-million-dollar engineering masterpieces, and I wanna hold onto that.

 

Wolf's is a one-man glider plane just because it has no health and is prone to breaking apart.

I'm writing a bunch of design doc stuff down right now and I wanna just post it on the internet, cos I've never designed a multiplayer game before but I THINK I'm doing it right? I think?

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I had a fly around on my own and quite enjoyed it, imagining Ace Combat super-shredding guitar solos as I mistakenly bail the Bison and plummet into sweet sweet nothingness.

 

Hey maybe this could be a thing, we could all turn up for a Thumb Flypast at some pre-arranged time next weekend?

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I'll update you guys when it's ready for a beta. I'm up in the air waiting on a couple things til then.

I mean really it's that I've never done this kind of multiplayer code before, and I need someone who's good at it.

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I played it with a pal for a few minutes. One of us usually had the problem of spawning as a non-plane in the center of the purple pillar in the middle (presumably the center of the map?) and not being able to get out of the pillar. When we didn't it was pretty cool. It took me a while to notice I could use WASD and flip upside down, that was super cool. I would like to be able to run around if I land on the ground that is not the ocean and maybe grapple to objects maybe. Also I totally saw the plane selection menu on the wall at the base of that pillar, loal.

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Realistically, you should just lift the whole art style of Crimson Skies. No game has ever had cooler looking planes than that one.

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A bit off-topic, but there seems to be a lot of game developers who post in this thread, so I figured I'd mention it here: are there any 2D sprite artists amongst you thumbs? I'm writing a game, and I need someone who can do top-down 2D art for it. It's a bit of a Hotline Miami-esque affair, gameplay-wise, but with a more somber aesthetic set in the Vietnam War. It's got some cool plot twists, and (spoilers) it's going to end up being a bit of a social commentary on PTSD and the way America treats its veterans.

If anyone wants to help out (or knows someone who would), I'd love to get a team together and get this thing made. For now, I'm just working on a design document, narrative/dialogue, some level design, and a friend of mine is on-board to make music for it. The objective would be to release it as a PC game, maybe run it through Greenlight.

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A bit off-topic, but there seems to be a lot of game developers who post in this thread, so I figured I'd mention it here: are there any 2D sprite artists amongst you thumbs? I'm writing a game, and I need someone who can do top-down 2D art for it. It's a bit of a Hotline Miami-esque affair, gameplay-wise, but with a more somber aesthetic set in the Vietnam War. It's got some cool plot twists, and (spoilers) it's going to end up being a bit of a social commentary on PTSD and the way America treats its veterans.

If anyone wants to help out (or knows someone who would), I'd love to get a team together and get this thing made. For now, I'm just working on a design document, narrative/dialogue, some level design, and a friend of mine is on-board to make music for it. The objective would be to release it as a PC game, maybe run it through Greenlight.

 

Does it turn out that the whole thing is just in your protagonist's mind, and he's actually been shooting civilians and police in the USA?

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I co-host a film podcast where we tackle a different director every episode. We cut a wide swath, from Buster Keaton to Park Chan Wook to Tyler Perry.  Also we write a lot of parody songs because we secretly want to be FM radio, I guess. Our last episode was on John Cassavetes and I think it went pretty well.

I only listened to one episode thus far - the several hours long half drunken top-ten-movies-one - and I liked it. Could you maybe post the lists of the movies discussed in this episode - I didn't know all of them and want to look them up, but couldn't find a list on your site and the episode is far too long to just skip through it.

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Hi everyone, I'm not sure this is really plugging as it's not a game or a podcast but my blog. I've been up and down with writing but have been getting my momentum back up and running recently. I'm going to start writing blog posts on Fridays about video games I've wanted to play forever and never got around to playing. Many of them are games I'm stunned I missed when I was playing adventure games regularly in my early teens. All of them are games I bought during a Steam sale and never got around to. The list is on the blog post, I'm starting with The Dig for next Friday. Come on by if you're interested!

 

http://www.theculturalapocalypse.com/home/2013/4/13/adventures-in-video-gaming-and-writing-about-it.html

 

Cheers.

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I spun out a game today, it's about a minute long.

 

FADING

 

It started off as a game where I wanted to have you sync up two metronomes, but that turned out to be completely impossible, and it gradually turned into a game where you silence two metronomes instead!

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A new blog post: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JohnathonSwift/20130422/190995/Games_are_getting_Worse.php

 

Tl;Dr Games today are worse than they were a decade ago. They suck, and haven't gotten any more fun, and have gotten worse, and that's why there's a continuous decline in sales, and all the new consoles and business models in the world aren't going to help unless games that are actually fun are made again.

 

Not all games of course. I'm mainly comparing big name series over the last decade EG: Splinter Cell, Call of Duty, Crysis, Assassin's Creed. They've all gotten remarkably worse as the series has gone on. It's really quite amazing that no one in the games industry seems to have connected the dots, but you can just take a look at the Metacritic score on all these to see what's happening.

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I don't think it's only about getting worse, at some period people are getting bored about the sequels and want something new.

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This is not intended rudely, but maybe you should have someone proofread those. I spotted quite a few grammatical errors/typos.

 

A few on re-scanning:

 

It's no secret that game sales have been going down hill for over a year now

-> downhill

 

But most every sequel in games has gotten worse

-> almost

 

Elderscrolls

-> two words

 

Much of the industry has managed to make a worse and worse and worse games

-> remove 'a'

 

etc.

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This is not intended rudely, but maybe you should have someone proofread those. I spotted quite a few grammatical errors/typos.

 

A few on re-scanning:

 

It's no secret that game sales have been going down hill for over a year now

-> downhill

 

But most every sequel in games has gotten worse

-> almost

 

Elderscrolls

-> two words

 

Much of the industry has managed to make a worse and worse and worse games

-> remove 'a'

 

etc.

 

I hate proofreading, also "most every" is still correct grammar, even if it's a bit archaic, ha!

 

Edit- Also, Elderscrolls can and occasionally is contracted to one word as a commonly accepted slang, and downhill is just a contraction of down hill, and so if the contraction is correct then the non contraction is also correct. 3/4 victory is mine! :devil:

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Frenetic Pony, learn to love proofreading, if you have any plans on being a writer. And by being so defensive against Osmosisch' feedback, you're needlessly pushing yourself in a 'me against the world' position. Accept the critique, learn from it, better yourself.

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Plus, it depends on the site's style guide - they may not have sub-editors to check your work, but they probably have a guide which will tell you whether they prefer contractions etc.

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Style guides! Ugh. If I have to crack open my seventh-edition Turabian to check whether parenthetical publisher information is preceded by a comma in footnote citation, I will drop dead from an aneurysm.

 

I imagine it's not so strict with web publication? You've really got to pick your battles, regardless. Sticking to your guns over some colloquialism is almost never worth it.

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