Too Many Ideas

Recently The Angry Video Game Nerd posted a video for his long anticipated AVGN: The Movie. Apparently it has been in development since 2006 and is only until recently, maybe, possibly going to be released sometime in 2013 or 2014. In his latest update he talks about how he feels like he is most excited for his movie to be finished just because he wants to work on other projects. He used the term "creative constipation" in a way where he as a bunch of ideas and he cannot get them all out because he is still working on a project that he started 6-7 years ago. I can relate because I have come up with countless ideas for other games with working on this one. Because of the new games I want to make I feel as if I have to get this game done as soon as I can.

Post-Job Complication

Because this game is based on a business that I previously worked at I am completely unsure how legal making this game is. Most of the player dialogue and choices are based on real scripts from that tele-donation center that I used to work at (which have been obscured by Photoshop filters above). I have been copying text from these scripts and trying to remember, what best I can, what the details of the job were and talking to former co-workers about what their experiences were when I could just go back to the job that I quit in order to take some pictures and copy some of the scrips if they would allow it. I do not think that this game is going to have any political sway about the job or show anything secret towards the public, but I am fearful of them asking me to stop making the game or to change things about it.

Either way, I want to set a deadline for this game to at least have all of the dialogue figured out by the end of next week so I can start fleshing out the design and user interface.

Thoughts on Google Drive Drawing

 

Recently, for my upcoming game about tele-donations I have been creating concept maps and user interface models (as seen above) in Google Drive. Because I feel as though I have used Google Drive's Drawing application enough to give anyone a headache I feel as though I should write a little about some of the cool features, tips, tricks, and what Google could improve on.

Google Drive's Drawing application seems to be made for making concept maps though I have not seen it say that it is explicitly for any other use or for general use, so I have been trying to possibly bend it for my use. Drawing allows the user to add different picture and text objects (graphs, text, a selection of clip art, word art, hyperlinks, and picture files) to a resizable field of space. For the most part, what I have been making are charts for the branching dialogue trees that I will be programing into my game so the programming of the game will go smoother because I will have a set plan.



In my graphs each line of dialogue and each response are represented by different blocks with text with the respective dialogue in each box. These boxes are then connected by different colored lines with arrows. One thing that I enjoy about Google Drive Drawing is that the different ends of the lines can be magnetically connected to the different text and picture objects. This is cool because after magnetically connecting two objects by a line the user can drag either connected object around the field and still be connected. This has been convenient to me because the maps that I have been making have been very complicated. I also enjoy the selection of clipart and word art that they have available; though limited, they are well designed and they satisfy my needs.

As something that I do not think is used very professionally it has its flaws. One of the obstacles that I have been encountering is that it seems to give each line a entire invisible rectangle to select to just select a line based on the size and direction of the line. This is annoying because I frequently end up selecting lines that are no where near the object that I want to select. Another main problem that I run into is the clipboard for copying and pasting information. Sometimes I will want to copy part of a graph from one Drawing document to another. During the copy the graphical information is usually lost. This is probably due to it being an in-browser application, but I feel like Google can find a way around it hopefully in a near future update.

All in all, Google Drive's Drawing application is very useful. Like the other Google Drive applications I enjoy the ability to have cloud storage, multiple user connectivity for collaboration or for viewing purposes, and the close quality to Microsoft Office. With a few more additions I am sure Microsoft Office will have a potential run for their money.

Mountain Dew Game Fuel

Talking about the long anticipated release of GTA V (and how it compares to Saints Row IV (something that I won't get into in this post)) reminds me of when I used to get really excited about games. Feeling as though I am older, now in my early-approaching-mid-twenties, it is hard for me to say which games I am excited for right now. My excitement over the release of new games is probably caused by my exposure to a vast variety of video game and art criticism (appreciation of people like Anthony Burch, Jim Sterling, and Ben Croshow), an evolving taste, the rise of the independent market, the disappearance of Blockbusters (to allow me to rent any console game that came out), and my post-graduation financial situation. Though I am not a huge fan of the GTA series and have approached the series with an amount of skepticism, GTA V looks kind of fun, like something my younger self might have been excited about. However, my reaction to GTA V was, "That's kind of neat, probably won't play it, I bet Saints Row IV will be better, but I won't play that either." Maybe if I had $60 for every game that came out I would be more eager to play them, however 6 years ago I would have gone through many lengths for my fandom.

Halo Origins

Since elementary school I usually favored games that were unique, had interesting mechanics, or had some aspect of adventure, though some of my favorites were competitive games. From hearing about the buzz over the first Halo and having previously played Marathon (an earlier shooter by the people who made Halo (which is still one of my favorite games ever)) I knew that people thought Halo was a great competitive game. At the time, I did not have an Xbox to play Halo on so I had to wait for the PC release which I bought immediately. It was an instant classic in my eyes because it was the first time I had ever played an online shooter. By the release of Halo 2 I knew that I had to get it as soon as it came out, though when I finally got an Xbox I did not have Xbox Live to play online.

By junior year of high school, when the Xbox 360 came out, I finally had a console with online support. I had played Halo 2's campaign mode several times over, but I had not played it online until I got a 360, so I was pretty late to the game (playing online more than a year after its release). One of my best friends, Mike Timko, was pretty pro at most shooters, so I knew I would have to play just as much as, if not more than, him in order to beat him or play with him in a team game. Because of the amount of time we both ended up playing the game and my limited amount of real life and online friends that played Halo, we ended up playing Team Doubles together almost every night. Team Doubles is the variant of online skirmish that pinned two teams of two against each other on small maps in a variety of objectives such as Capture the Flag, Oddball, and Slayer. As we practiced we rose to the point where we were consistently playing against pro players and getting our asses kicked almost every game.

Halo 3

During the summer of 2007 (between junior and senior year of high school) I was obsessed with Halo 3. I eagerly awaited the Bungie Podcast, I tried to follow the AdjutantReflex alternate reality game, and drank a lot of Mountain Dew Game Fuel (which Mike and I called "Grunt Piss" in reference to one of the enemies in the game. I worked a small summer job doing lawn care just so I would be able to afford Halo 3 on my own. I wanted to get it as soon as it came out, but I could not go to the in-store release (being released on a school night), so the day of, as soon as I got out of school, I biked across the highway overpass to the nearest Kmart which luckily had a few more copies of the game (and posters too). I immediately hung up the poster (which is on the wall of my old bedroom to this day) and that night I played for 3 hours straight before doing homework.

When I hopped online I saw that all of the people on my friends list were playing Halo 3. It felt like I was a part of something much larger than myself and as if I could finally relate to so many other people at least on one level. Though many popular games have come out since the release of Halo 3 none have made me feel like the reception has been quite as universal. However, I may be confusing universal reception with hype in the media, clever marketing, record breaking sales though it was an overall great product.

Game Fuel

Game Fuel in retrospect (and at the time actually) was pretty stupid/genius. The reason I say "(and at the time actually)" in parenthesis because the stupid and genius in "stupid/genius" were switched around when I was 17 because I thought it was more genius than stupid; I bought several cases of Game Fuel, and it was all I drank. Not only was it a Halo Mountain Dew flavor, but it was delicious, one of my favorite soda flavors to this day. This flavor was similar to my then favorite Mountain Dew "LiveWire", which was orange flavored, but the difference was that the citrus flavor was "infused" with cherry.

I was so obsessed with Game Fuel that, in anticipation of its limited release's end, I saved all of my empty bottles and washed cans in a few cardboard boxes and tried to save a few full ones for the distant future in my garage's refrigerator. I made sure to tell my immediate family members not to drink them.

One day the one bottle I was able to save went missing. I immediately assumed someone drank it and questioned my grandmother and grandfather. My grandpa told me he was very thirsty and he thought he had bought that specific drink. The drink had been out of stores for several months. At the time I didn't know my grandpa's cancer was back and the Mountain Dew saved him from dehydration. I also didn't know that Game Fuel would come back 2 years later, though with World of Warcraft labels, last October during the release of Halo 4, and sometime this fall.

Hype

Maybe the reason I don't get excited for games quite as much, or in the same way, is because I learned my lesson with Halo 3. While Halo 3 was my favorite multiplayer game, playing it every night for the majority of the three years between my last year of high school and my time at community college, I was a disappointed in the campaign mode. I loved Halo: CE's, Halo 2's, and all of the Marathon game's campaign modes (along with the future Halo ODST's and Halo Reach's campaigns), but there was something that was not as fresh about Halo 3. What I loved about Halo: CE was the feeling of open exploration of the terrain, Halo 2 was the scale, variety, and amount of new environments and enemies, Marathon was the feeling of wonder and mystery. Halo 3 had a lot of iconic moments, but it did not nearly satisfy the hype that preceded it. That feels insane because of how much I still love Halo 3.

Telemarketing Game

What is this game about?

I had a tele-donation job for a month earlier this summer before I made Breaking Bread. The job entailed trying to passionately read off of a script to potential benefactors to convince them to donate money to different sorts of Jewish funded causes. While making Breaking Bread I realized the job I had was very similar to the game that I was making at the time. Based on the scripts, tele-donation statistics, and different stories my friends or I have had I am making scenarios for this game.

Above is a peak of a dialogue chart. Once I have access to my personal computers I will make more progress on actually making the game. For the past month or so I have only been sketching out how the mechanics will work which I have found to be a helpful mode of production. Production on Breaking Bread was different because I just went into making it without any planning or preliminary writing or any preproduction. I have heard of a lot of indie developers (I should cite this with some examples) advocating for not doing any preproduction because the final product is more fluent or something. I think doing these preliminary writings should be helpful and I am sure I am going to make changes while actually working on the game. This preliminary process seems as though it will be helpful because when I am doing actual production because I will have most all of the mental labor done and things will be less confusing.

I don't know, I'll see.

If you want to see the full dialogue chart as it is in progress click this link.

:-)

MolyJam Pt.2

Cool Games

Now that I am looking on the Games section of MolyJam, some of the games that I thought were most interesting are not featured. There was a realtor text based game and another game that had the player resize distorted photos to their correct size that I cannot find. One of them that I did find was "MolyNews". Moly News is a game in which the player plays as Peter Molyneux and has to choose different jumbled sections of actual Molyneux quotes to make complete responses to a journalists questions. Check it out!

"Limbo-esque"

At MolyJamDeux there were several teams that used the term "Limbo-esque" to talk about the game they had made. This bothered me for several reasons. While I think Limbo is a good game I am annoyed about how people talk about it. When people hear that I like freeware, downloadable, or "indie" games people often say, "Oh, have you played Limbo?" This is notable because Limbo has had a clear impact on people outside of the indie community. What I often hear about what people thought was interesting about Limbo was primarily the graphical style. People label it as artsy because the depictions are in black and white, cartoony, and vague. Though the primary gameplay mechanics are never elaborated on and the graphics were very stylish, I still enjoyed the game.

I enjoyed the game for the way story was incorporated with gameplay mechanics; this is not what the people who described their games as "Limbo-esque" meant. I have a problem with this because it equated black and white graphics, platform mechanics, and mood to things that make good games.

MolyJamDeux!

MolyJam2013

Game jams are something I have been aware of since I high school. I was always really jealous of people who lived in bigger cities (New York, places in Canada, places in Europe) because they had game jams and there is not that big of a game making community in Dayton. Now that I have finished college I saw this game jam as a chance to meet people in the game making community, and get experience making a finished game. What we made was "Molyneaux Slope" from a team of programmers, Clint Levijoki and Mark Michaels.

What Happened?

The team changed a few time during production which was difficult. We first started out with Clint, Mark, and I and then three others joined our team. Working with six people seemed to be far too complicated at the start because everyone wanted to design the game. We did a lot of back and forth and just settled on Clint's idea to make a dog park simulator. We settled on his idea because he was the most persistent and had the most tangible idea. Before we settled on his idea we had basically two really solid ideas that we were fighting against. We broke for the day and met the next morning.

By then two of the members from Columbia University had dropped out and we were left with four people. I was on the art direction and left all of the code to the other members. All of the other members of the group work professionally as programmers and none of them had made games on their own (outside of a company) before as I recall. There was a bit of a struggle between what language was going to be used but they all just followed what Clint was doing because during the night Clint had set up a framework for the game. The rest of the day was mostly Clint trying to set up multiplayer and the others trying to learn the language that he was using. I got a bit nervous because our game did not look like much. I had made the character and dog animations as well as some of the background assets but not much was implemented.

The final day was trying to wrap up text commands. Everything became implemented and we finished a little early. In the end we just made a bunch of extra character sprite sheets so not all of the players would look the same.

Tomorrow I will write about some of the games I played at The New School's hosting of MolyJamDeux and what I thought.

In Between Two Games/Where Should I Live?!

Where Should I Live?

So, for the past month I have not had a job in order to finish "Breaking Bread", a few comic book projects left from school, my general portfolio, and to figure out what I want to do career wise. I am now at the dilemma of either staying in Brooklyn, finding a new job, and new place to live, or going home, finding a job, finishing my computer science degree, and then a new place to live afterwards. Either path I take I will either be in Dayton or Brooklyn only for the next year or so because by then I will hopefully be at graduate school (which is something I need to figure out too). I would like to continue making games and such, but for the next few weeks I need to work like crazy because my feeling right now is to stay in New York just because of the amount of jobs, opportunities, and experiences. I have a fear of going back to Dayton because I do not want to go back and become stuck.

The thing is, either place I go I will still continue making games. In Ohio I will possibly have more free time, but the environment will not be as conducive to the process due to the lack of critically thinking people to interact with. In New York, there will be more people to talk to about critical subjects, but there are plenty of distractions, money is harder to make and to keep. Also, the idea of studying computer science again leans me to going back to Ohio, though I could easily study it on my own enough in order to make games.

Finishing My First Game!

I have made plenty of games with my friends from home, but I never finished anything. People would always become busy, or we would not make progress on something for a while, so things would just die off. It feels exhilarating to have finished a game, though made in Klik & Play, a game made by myself in a sense, without a team or partner to directly work with. There was a part near the end of the development where I got caught up and frustrated with some of how the game was working, but it was just a hump I had to get over. That hump was the sort of thing that stopped past projects from being finished, so it felt like a big thing to overcome.

How I Overcame the Hump

"Breaking Bread"'s interaction is mostly dialogue tree based, so things became confusing to edit. My mistake was to only write the dialogue and how the dialogue interacts in the program. During the end of development I started writing down all of the dialogue and drawing out lines to see how things connect. This helped me see how things connected easily! It also helped me write things and edit things in a way where I would not be afraid to edit things just because of how difficult it would be to change them later. This way of working also makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot if I did something out of order or forgot to add in some dialogue. I am starting a few other dialogue based games that are similar in interaction, and I am definitely going to start writing them down beforehand!