We Made Alpha Now on to Beta

Well congratulations should be expressed to everyone involved in my Senior Team Project. We made our Alpha milestone and the game is a lot of fun. Now we need to buckle down and really see if we can tighten up the (graphics on level 3. Just kidding couldn't resist joking about that silly comercial) game. We still need to balance the game out a bit and make sure that we include the necessity for the player to strategize. But I have a good feeling about it, I definitely think it will all work out.

I offered my Lead Designer and Producer to get in touch with the Vice President of Steam and see if they would be interested in putting our game on their service and they said yes but they wanted to talk to the rest of the team/not in it's current state. So I'll let that sort itself out some more.

I'm still working on my portfolio site. Tomorrow I'm required to have my second piece included for my Portfolio class. I hired a Graphic Designer to help me and he made a wicked sweet logo. He also gave me a business card layout and a gave me a suggestion for what I should try to make my website look like. So right now I'm going to try and get all of my content up there that I want up there, finish my resumé because I need to have it all on one page but looking good, and make my business cards. Then I will try to make a version of my website that looks like what he suggested from scratch. Because I like his layout better I just don't have the time for it at the moment so I need to prioritize getting a website up that looks at least presentable before trying to get it all up perfectly.

As for my Advanced Seminar class. It's going. I'm definitely going to have something done by the end of the semester that I can put in my portfolio but right now Unreal is being a little sassy so I have to make a lamp post from scratch on my own and import it into Unreal. Then I need to make sure that the light mechanic of my level works perfectly with it and then it's just a matter of making it look pretty. So that shouldn't really be a problem.

My C++ class is moving along just fine too. We've started discussing and using classes and pointers. I think after I graduate I might take some online courses to keep learning C++. The reason I'm thinking about this is because I'm in the IGDA QA SIG mailing list, that's actually a bit of a mouth full, but a common thing said in the mailing list is that if you're in QA, or Design I'm inferring, you should know code. So that you can understand and talk to the programmers a bit better as well as point out problems because of how something was coded.

How Champlain College teaches us designers requires us to learn some 3D art skills as well as programming. But I'm startting to think of taking it to the next level. Who knows maybe I'll find myself not getting a job in the industry when I graduate and will have to do the part time job thing while I continue to learn programming and maybe even getting a certificate in it.

Mass Effect 2 for the Xbox 360

I have been looking forward to this game almost as much as I was looking forward to the original. When they announced the original game I knew I would be owning a 360 at some point in the future. So when I had a chance to play the original I knew that my original assumption was right and I have to say the sequel doesn't disappoint either.

Concept: 5/5

Continue the story of Commander Shepard and his crew in an attempt to defeat the reapers. A species of Giant Alien Robots that want to erase all organic life from the galaxy. Pretty simple and everyone that loved the first game will love the second. Plus the second might draw some people in that the first missed.

Graphics: 4/5

The graphics are definitely improved over the original. I love everything about the graphics except for a couple things. The faces. I don't know maybe it's just me but I felt like everyone's faces were kind of static throughout the whole game. To explain, if their character's default face is smiling than I felt that whenever they showed any emotion it wasn't a case of taking a passive version of the face and making it angry, sad, etc. It was taking that smiling face and then trying to make it angry, sad, etc. It just felt off. But who knows maybe this is just a quirk I have and no one else has or had a problem with it.

I also noticed the texture popping come back. For those who don't know what this is: When you're far away from a character or person, in real life or in a game, you can't make out all the little individual patches on a person's suit. So the engine is set up in a way to pretty much say "why bother" with all that detail if no one can see it. So when at long distances it loads a fuzzier version of the suit so there aren't all those patches and it doesn't take up processing power to render something you can't see. But the "popping" issue is when you're standing next to a character and the character has a low quality texture on because the game hasn't caught on that you're standing next to them yet, then it does and you notice the texture visually "pop" into a higher quality.

But by far the greatest visual complaint I have of the new game is that it will fail to position people properly during conversations. The first time I spoke to the character Jacob I was somehow standing next to him not across from him so whenever the game would go to show me a reaction shot of my character there was no one there. It was really weird. Then another time I was talking to another person and someone from my team was standing INSIDE the character I was talking to. This issue was very experience breaking.

Sound: 4/5

Overall the sound of the game in terms of music and sound effects is average. There is no real particular effect or song that I found really amazing. However, this game does have amazing background conversations and advertisements. Walking around an interstellar market place and hearing an advertisement for the latest show of Hamlet staring all aliens, this particular species can't share emotion like we do so they say how they feel, was hilarious. Or hearing about the latest future video game and what the fans are grumbling about. All the weapons sound like weapons and the atmosphere of the galaxy is amazing.

Playability: 4/5

The game plays amazingly well, it plays even better than the first game. The inclusion of heavy weapons really makes the game a whole lot better. Especially since the heavy weapons replace grenades. Because in the first game you seemed to be the only person in the galaxy that could use grenades. Honestly I never once came across another person that used grenades. But in this game every now and then someone else will have a heavy weapon so it doesn't feel like you've randomly developed this skill that no one else has.

Personally I did not like the fact that this game gives you a lot less information than the first game did. You have to kind of guess what everyone's class is based on how they talk to you and what they reveal about themselves. Which is ok I was able to piece together who I wanted in my squad this way but I think it would be nice if they just told you their classes. Also all of the weapons seem to be the same? There's no statistics so I can't tell if one shotgun does more damage than another or if they just reload differently.

Also the whole finding resources on planets, scanning thing? Horrible. It wasn't fun the first time I did it, I don't know if it will ever be fun. But doing it vs. not doing it has gameplay repercussions so I have to tell you to do it.

Entertainment: 4/5

The entertainment is great. I played this game with a friend watching that had never played the first one and she was getting as excited as I was whenever things went down. People that hadn't met Shepard before would be trying to act tough in front of him and my friend would yell "Don't you KNOW?! That's SHEPARD!" it definitely helped the amusement of the game.

No spoilers, but during the last couple hours of the game, this one particular location, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I was so nervous, excited, and energized all at the same time. It was capable of making me that emotionally charged.

X-Factor: 5/5

The X-factor to this game is pretty great. After I played the first game, as a good guy, I wanted to play through again as a badass. But I didn't feel like a badass I felt like an asshole. So I stopped playing. I have tried to play through the renegade side of the first game at least 5 times and I hardly make it past the first mission each time.

This time when playing I was still a bit of a goody two shoes, but I felt my character had evolved a little bit so I allowed him to do some renegade options every now and then and they were so amazing that I plan on playing through the renegade side. Once I catch a break from playing all the other games I need to review for you all.

Overall: 26/30

Insert Witty Title Here

Sorry about the post name, I just have no idea what to call this update for all of you out there in blog-o-land. So instead of lamenting about it I will just let the unwitty title go and continue with letting everyone know what I'm up to.

I've joined a group in my Senior Team Project Class. I am on Project Requiem. It's a vertical shooter game that is choreographed to Mozart's Requiem and I am the level designer so basically it's up to me to choreograph the game or at least a good chunk of it. The other designers (Producer and Lead Designer) both want to keep working on the levels too. It's actually kind of hard to choreograph enemies to be in beat with the music but on the screen long enough to be shot at by the player I'm really enjoying the challenge of it. This is definitely going to be a portfolio piece for me.

Speaking of my portfolio. It's coming along I was happy with some of the progress I had made but after I went to class on Wednesday and so how professional everyone else's sites were I kinda freaked out so now I have a strong desire to work on mine even more and really get it to look awesome. Which is a good thing, it's part of the whole co-opetion model that everyone loves here at Champlain College. So hopefully in the next couple weeks I will be able to get my site to a workable level and share it with you all.

By the way, I am currently sharing this post with you all from the green room of the Champlain College Theater. I am in the Short Works. Which is a collection of One Act plays and short films. So all you theater geeks out there rejoice that the craft isn't dead I guess. And if you're in the Greater Burlington, Vermont area come check it out! It's FREE!

I'm currently taking a C++ class and we just started talking about classes this past couple weeks and all of my programmer friends are so proud of me now that I've programmed some simple classes. They love to talk about how I programmed the internet, in a flash game, so I think they have a bit of a "younger brother" attitude towards me.

Also in my Advanced Seminar class for this semester I'm working on a level in Unreal Tournament 3. It's specifically a maze that the player has to use a mechanic of turning off lights to discover what are dead ends and what is the right way to go. I was kind of inspired by Scott Roger's talk at MIGS when he was talking about using lights to direct the player in certain directions. I spoke to him at MIGS and wanted to stay in touch with him via email but I couldn't think of anything to say so I still have that email sitting in my client as a draft just waiting to be sent. But something tells me it's a little too late. But I'll leave it there as a reminder to never let these opportunities slip me by again.

Speaking of Scott Rogers he just recently released a book about game design and I really want to get it. Because his panel "Everything I learned about Level Design I learned from Disneyland" was so good and the whole time I was thinking "Oh yeah! That makes perfect sense" and "I knew that!" it was just a great panel to attend. So I'm hoping his book is just as insightful and supportive of what I already know. He has a blog on blogger too. It's over at http://mrbossdesign.blogspot.com. You should check it out.

Killing Floor for the PC

Killing Floor for the PC

What can I say about Killing Floor? Let's find out shall we?

Concept: 2/5

They didn't require a whole lot of thought to make this game concept. Hey let's take that hit Left 4 Dead game make a mod where people can do that but with a maximum of 16 players and sell that! That's the concept. They took a preexisting game and added the number of players. Well that's not entirely true but that's a gameplay thing so we'll discuss this in Playability.

Graphics: 2/5

The graphics are pretty poor in my opinion. I'm pretty lenient on graphics too. I think Half Life 2 is beautiful and we don't need to increase our graphics from that level of quality for another 5 years while we wait for our programming and design to catch up. But I feel like the graphics in this game could have been slightly better. All the enemies you fight could have been replaced with a card board cut out with no animations and it would have been fine. Maybe even better if they stylized the game properly.

Sound: 3/5

The sound is average. It does the job with only a couple exceptions of both good and bad variety. First the bad, since there's only one, the siren. She's an enemy in a straight jacket so to solve this problem of not being able to claw the player to death she screeches exceptionally loudly and makes their ear drums burst. I'm not even kidding that's what the game says happens when you die because of a siren. And I will not lie to you. I feel like my ear drums, not my character's but mine, are going to burst every time I hear her scream. On the positive end, I really enjoy the voice acting when the players try to heal each other. I find their comments to each other quite amusing.

Playability: 3/5

In Left 4 Dead the players have to go from point A to point B and survive the hordes of enemies thrown at them. In Killing Floor, the players just have to survive until all the zombies are dead then make it to the trader, buy some more weapons and then do it over again until the 8th out of 7 levels, on normal difficulty. On different difficulties there are a different number of levels but on the last level plus one the players have to defeat a boss character... Inspired. The only thing inspired about this game is the "perks" which are actually classes. You can specialize in certain types of weapons and by killing more things with those weapons they become more powerful, they become more accurate, they get cheaper to buy, etc. You also don't have to BE that class to level up in it which is excellent. So yeah, that's the best thing about the playability really.

Entertainment: 2/5

I have a couple problems with the game. For one, to play it unless you get it via a steam sale you have to pay $20 which is the same as a good game that's been out for a while. Then they ram some commercials down your throat in the lobby while you're waiting for your friends to join so you can start playing. It also has some dlc so you can get more characters you can play as. But the thing is... it's a pure cosmetic thing to change your character and it's a First Person Shooter game so you NEVER see your own character... unless you die or beat the game, for like 5 seconds. So that's just some annoyances. Overall the game is mildly entertaining while you're yelling at your friends to look out behind them but you can do that in Left 4 Dead which does this whole genre better.

X-Factor: 1/5

There really is no X-Factor here. It's fun to play every now and then with your friends, as I've said many times. But it is really a once in a blue moon thing. It's pretty pointless otherwise.

Overall: 14/30 It's Ok...

If you find it on sale on steam for $5 get it. Maybe even for $10. But for anything more? I can't suggest you get this game. And to answer my earlier question... Apparently I can't say much about Killing Floor, it's just that unremarkably good or bad.

A New Year Begins

So a new year has begun and I am back into Senior Team Project.

Unfortunately my project got cut. But as a door closes another one opens... I just don't know which one that is just yet, as I haven't been assigned to another project. If I am assigned to another project I should know by this weekend. If I'm not than I'll be in the QA pool. Which won't be horrible but I'll feel a bit bad because I've spent three and a half years learning something only to not really use it for my senior year. That doesn't sound all that right does it? I'll just have to find a way to make do.

On another note, I'm in Senior Portfolio now and we're talking about what to put into our portfolio, how to host it, how to make the site itself, etc. And I learned that for what I'm doing with the site I've already acquired I could do for free with wordpress.com I would just need to pay like $5 to link it to my domain name. So when my contract with godaddy expires I think that's what I'm going to do.

So here's hoping that I get to work on design on a game this semester and that I can figure out a good hosting experience for after my contract expires.

Mirror's Edge

This time I'll be talking about Mirror's Edge. I have played a bit of this on the console as well as the PC so I will be able to share with you my feelings of the game on an overall scale.

Concept: 4/5

Parkour! That is the concept behind this game. It's a nice and simple concept. Let's take parkour which has been exploding in popularity on the internet and make a game about it. Better yet! Instead of making it a third person camera viewed game so that we can see the person doing all the parkour stuff let's put the camera in the person's head, aka First Person view, so that the player feels like they're the ones doing all these amazing awesome things.

I expect that's how the concept was made. If it wasn't that energy driven then I don't know how they made such an energetic game.

Graphics: 4/5

The graphics are great. I'm a huge fan of the graphics in this game. Basically what they did was made everything very minimalistic and simplistic. In fact everything is pretty much white washed and kind of blends into each other a little bit. UNTIL you add "runner vision." This is a special game mechanic that lets players see what things on the screen are possible for use in jumps, wall runs, climbing, sliding, etc. And when the "runner vision" notifies you of these special environmental objects they turn into a bright primary color, usually red or orange all though not always. This allows you to see a bit of where you're supposed to go and if you get used to the different types of moves you can pull off you can even figure out where that environmental parkour piece is going to send you and look for the next one.

Sound: 2/5

The sound is sound in this game. It does its job. I really have nothing memorable good or bad about the sound in this game except for one thing.

And unfortunately it's a bad thing but I'm also pretty sure that's because I died so much. When you fall from a great height you hear the air rushing passed your head. Which is cool. Except that it's incredibly loud and when you keep dying attempting the same jump over and over again you keep hearing the wind blasting passed your head at an incredibly high volume over and over again. If this sound effect wasn't so loud and obnoxious I probably would have gotten a lot farther in the game a lot faster but it just wore on my nerves when I was stuck on certain parts so I said "Enough!" and turned the game off for a while.

So a sound effect that can get so annoying it makes you want to stop playing the game? BAD!

Playability: 2/5

The game has some great playability to it. Not only can you beat the game but after you beat a level you can go back into the game and play through it again to try and beat a timed score. Basically racing through the game.

There are a couple problems though. For one, there were times when the cops started chasing me and I just died over and over again. Not because the cops were all that hard to avoid but because I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to go and I couldn't take the time to look for the exit with the cops shooting at me. This forced me to fight them... which wouldn't be that bad except the controls are made for running not fighting.

In fact in the 360 version of the game there's an achievement for never shooting a cop in the whole game. So if you can get away with only disarming and avoiding the cops you're rewarded. But the thing is, it was hard to tell where I was supposed to go at times and I found it really hard to disarm in the game. You can disarm when a cop moves to pistol whip you with whatever firearm he has. His firearm will flash red for a moment right when it's time to press the disarm button. But the thing is that I could never time it properly for some reason. Maybe my reflexes aren't sharp enough? Or perhaps it's that I was able to get away with just about everything I had to do in the game by spamming the "jump" button so when I tried to disarm if you spam the button it breaks it and I didn't know and couldn't stop myself.

Another problem I had with the playability of the game is that you have to line up perfectly. If you're jumping from one roof to a pipe on the side of a building next to you, you have to hit the pipe so that it's in the dead center of your screen. If it's just to the left or just to the right, in the real world I'm pretty sure people could grab onto them anyway. So on the 360 I played this game and died over and over again on one section of the game near the very beginning. It may have even been the first level and I just couldn't do it so I gave up on the game. Then when Steam was having a sale I bought the game for the PC for I think $2.50 or $5 something like that. With the keyboard and mouse I had a lot more control and only died twice before making that jump. But it was still a pain.

There is also the added benefit and detriment of checkpoints in the game. I say benefit because you will die often so the game having checkpoints throughout the level is very helpful and keeps you from losing too much progress in the game when you die. I say detriment because the game doesn't just quick save from where you are when you hit the check point. The game loads you back into the game from where it knows the check point to be. So if you were on a wall when you hit the check point you might be loaded back in after you die in the middle of a hallway. It's weird and disorienting when you don't realize you've been in that place before.

Entertainment: 3/5

The game has some good entertainment points. For one the main character is a nice strong woman and the person feeding her intel through a radio is a guy. It's a nice reversal of roles that have come to be expected from video games. I really applaud Mirror's Edge on this.

The story is a bit poor however. The game starts off talking about some riots and protesting and then how the city is completely controlled by the dictatorial mayor's office now... but I have no proof of this actually being the case except for what the main character told me. Seriously, the player never gets a chance to see how the average people are suffering under this dictatorial dystopia.

It's kind of like in the movie "Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace" when you never see the Naboobian people dying or suffering from this trade blockade. When the main characters land on the planet everything seems nice and idyllic, nice lush forests, beautiful cities... No over population... Seriously except for the end sequence during the parade, all the people you see in the Naboobian cities are volunteer guards for the Queen and diplomats! As far as I could tell when the blockade began everyone on Naboo decided to go on vacation and left the planet.

It's the same thing in Mirror's Edge. I saw some civilians walking around street level... once. Otherwise the only people I've seen in this city are runners like me and cops/private military cops people... Where are the suffering masses? Where are the people that need the services the runners provide outside of the system because the government is going to look through their stuff that their shipping? I have no feel for the dystopia. Especially seeing as everything is so nice and brightly light and clean. Except for the occasional rat I see running away.

X-Factor: 4/5

With all my complains about the gameplay and story and sound... There's something that captures you in this game. It's a challenge, like the older games on the NES and such. You may be hitting your head against the wall but you want to. You want to hit your head against the wall until you break it down with your skull. The game makes you want to do this. And for that it has a great X-Factor.

Overall: 19/30 Average

This is an average game through and through. It has some great originality to it and an interesting art style. But the gameplay is lack luster and the story is a bit cliché and contrived. If you can pick this game up cheap do it. But if someone wants you to pay $20 or more I'd say don't bother.

Left 4 Dead 2 for the PC

I'll add pretty pictures later.

Concept: 2/5

So Left 4 Dead 2 has a really simple concept really. It's the Zombie apocalypse and four people have banded together to try and survive it. Nice and simple. Sound familiar? That's cause this is the concept for Left 4 Dead 1. So Valve decided to try and take the best selling game of last November and do it again. I know a lot of people complained about how L4D2 didn't do anything new... but I find most of the people that complained about that and thought that everything in L4D2 could be released as Downloadable content or patches for L4D1 haven't actually played it. Not to say that there are things that couldn't have been included in L4D1 it's just that if they had it would have stolen some of the thunder from L4D2 where there were things that couldn't have been done in the first game.

Graphics: 3/5

The graphics aren't bad. They decided to go in a different direction than the first game. This time around the zombies are a bit more stylized especially the special zombies. But it's not a bad move. Overall I can't really say that the graphics are any better or worse than the first one they're just different. And when not comparing the game to the first just in general, the graphics are OK. There's nothing to say good or bad... not really.

Sound: 2/5

Nothing special to report here. I mean the sound is the sound. It does what it's expected to do. I really dislike Rochelle's scream when she gets knocked down and needs to be helped up though. She screams at the top of her lungs in a high pitched wail and while I'm sure it lets all the other player's know she was knocked down it made me want to hold my head in pain. Otherwise the sound went unnoticed. Ignoring some beautiful voice acting work from the guy that plays Nick and the other two were so southern I was turned off from playing them because I couldn't relate.

Entertainment: 4/5

If you've played the first L4D and enjoyed it you'll enjoy this one too. It definitely got me excited to be a Zombie killer again. There's nothing quite like rolling into an area with a bunch of your friends and slaying untold numbers of undead. Especially when the undead are really cool/don't sparkle in sunlight. Actually thanks to their normal mapping they might sparkle... Oh well I'm shooting them anyway. Plus some of the new finales and horde alert moments in this game a lot more intense than the first one because you have to keep moving and can't just hold up in one corner and slay they while you wait for a timer to tick down.

Playability: 4/5

A lot can be said for the playability of this game. But I'll try to be brief. Each level has a different feel or theme or specific challenge to it. My favorite has you start in one spot go to a certain location and then make your way back through the areas you passed through before. This means you have to ration some of the supplies you take as you're making your way to the target because when you come back through you may not have needed supplies if you took them all the first time. Plus there are witches EVERYWHERE in that level. Witches are a type of zombie that are passive until you get too close or shine a flashlight on them, then they get angry and will attack you and at the very least knock you down if you're not careful. Playing through this area with my friends I had so much fun especially since during the second half a huge rain storm blows in and reduces your visibility. It was probably the most epic time I had playing the game. But while I preferred this mission they're all pretty epic and I'm sure some people liked the other ones more.

X-factor: 2/5

The game is missing a bit of it's X-factor though. I mean once you've played the first one you've played the second one really. There were definitely things that this game added to the franchise. The fact that there is a bit of cohesion to the individual campaigns is nice. The fact that there are now uncommon common zombies are great. More special infected like the Jockey, Spitter, and Charger are AWESOME it makes the versus mode actually feel a lot more flushed out. But other than those things the major differences are underneath the hood of the engine. The section of the programing that decides how difficult or easy certain sections of a map are was overhauled and it definitely helped. The melee's cool too but it only adds so much.

Overall 17/30 Average

In the end the things that they could have added to the original through patches and such. I feel they should have and taken another year or two to release this game. There were definite improvements but they were so small compared to what they were trying to release it really felt like they were just trying to add a 2 to the end of their title since most of their franchises' greatest hits are the sequels not the originals, i.e. Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. I really wish it was better and it's still a solid game if you liked the original pick this one up. If you think you might like playing either of the L4Ds I say pick this one up too. The first one was nice but compared to the second one it's night and day from how intense and epic this one will make you feel.