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4thNov.2009
09:24 am - more things about borderlands (i really liked it honest)
Borderlands works pretty okay if you play it singleplayer. But cooperative play is basically magic, even if you don't know the people you're playing with.
This is true in spite of the fact that the systems for setting up online games are obtuse or non-existant. There are no dedicated servers, all online games are hosted by players. Hosting games requires you to do port forwarding voodoo to your router - and half the games listed at any time are hosted by people who haven't opened their ports, so there is no way to join these games - and the people running them have no indicator for why it doesn't work.
So, to find a public game that works, you have to keep trying servers until you find somebody who knows what they're doing. Microphone support is broken. In-game chat is pretty useless. Basically: setting up an online game is an insurmountable task. If you manage to get into a game, communicating with other players is hit or miss.
But it still works. If you can get people together, you can play the game. You never really have to say anything. The gameplay is such that everybody always knows what they're supposed to do and nobody gets left behind. This is pretty incredible, and I want to talk about why it works.
The whole world game is split up into zones - there's a bunch of hub zones, with roads that you drive around on; and branching off from those, smaller zones that you have to navigate on foot, these are roughly analogous to dungeons or instances or whatever. The whole group navigates zones together - if someone activates travel from one zone to another, the whole group is pulled into that zone. There are garages scattered across each of the hub maps, where you can spawn vehicles. Each vehicle can seat two players - one in the driver seat, one in the gunner seat - and you can only spawn two cars at a time. The console that spawns vehicles can also be used to teleport into an existing vehicle - so there's no way to leave people behind. This is really effective.
There's checkpoints everywhere at key locations, that activate whenever you reach them; if you die, you respawn at whichever checkpoint was last activated - by any player. If you run off on your own and are overwhelemed by enemies, you're eventually returned to the group.
But you'll generally want to be where other people are. When you run out of health you're down for a while - until a timer runs out, or you kill an enemy to earn a second wind, or somebody revives you. When somebody goes down everybody gets a sharp alarm sound and the pointer for that player's location goes big, and red and blinking - It's always clear when somebody needs help, and roughly where they are, and reviving people is a good idea, because they'll be more likely to help you when you go down. With other players around you can afford to take more risks - working together is the ideal strategy.
The quests are mostly scavenger hunts, or pointers to boss fights. They're in there to give you reasons to explore areas in full. If you're playing solo, you're managing the quests in kind of a standard way - you pick up quests from npcs and job boards, you choose a quest as your active quest, which shows on the compass on your HUD. Once that quest is done you pick another active quest.
In multiplayer, the host manages quests for everybody. The set of quests the host has activated or completed is the one everybody uses, the game state reflects the host's play state. Everybody always has the same active quest as the host. Again, this is really neat. Everybody's always in the same zone, everybody spawns at the same location, everybody has the same objective indicated on the map, everybody wants to stick together and it's impossible to leave people behind.
On top of this, the game is fun. I don't think I can really get into why it's fun, it seems like I could talk about this stuff forever, but it's not really new in borderlands. The way the multiplayer works here is really solid design.
The magic is that multiplayer takes all the work out of the game. You don't have to do anything you don't want to. You don't have to manage quests if you don't want to. You don't have to drive around if you don't want to. You can tag along and just shoot guys and collect loot, or just do whatever you like. It's all dessert.
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3rdNov.2009
07:43 pm - borderlands complainery
I feel guilty asking for more stuff. There's so much stuff in this game.
But I thought it was going to be a lot bigger than it is - sort of in terms of world depth. there are about three towns, half a dozen characters if you are generous. You're fighting the same six bandits the whole game. However: every area has its own unique feel, there are lots of areas, this is remarkable.
But seriously: they should have made characters out of the bosses, and the vendors, more than they did. A couple more settlements would give the feeling that this is a world worth fighting for. If it's a world populated entirely by bandits, then who's to say you're not the villain?
There's only one vehicle, and it never changes. There's a lot they could do.
I hate thinking this way, because I hate the idea that games should have to be super long to please people. But it seems like stuff is missing here. For all it is, it still seems like half a game.
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5thOct.2009
07:46 am
I am kind of interested in The Secret World, Funcom's new MMO. But I want to know how their characters are made up.
The Secret World is set to take place in the modern world, but with monsters. Each player is an agent of one of three secret societies - either the Templars (old world zealots), the Illuminati (revolutionary social darwinists) or the Dragon (mysterious asians). It's not clear at the moment to what extent the faction you choose affects what you can do in game - but almost certainly it affects your start location and what you look like - and probably what weapons you can use.
They said that they won't have levels or classes, so that a player's ability is tied to what skills they've unlocked. Skills unlocked later in the game are not better than ones unlocked early on, but the later skills are more ranged in application. This is a common thing to hear about mmos, but it's not common enough that there is a standard implementation, so there's no way to be sure what it means in this case, there's no examples given.
The game has cabals - which seem to be the same thing as guilds, in every other mmo - and I think there's no restriction against forming a cabal with players from different secret societies, which is interesting. I think that these are just guilds for the story campaign. There's some suggestion that the player versus player part of the game pits the secret societies against one another, but it's not clear if there would be a separate set of guilds for that.
It does suggest that characters from different societies are absolutely equal in their abilities, that it's just a flavour thing. But then they suggest that the weapons you can use are tied to which society you pick - something like pistols for templars, ak47 for illuminati, swords for dragons, and how would that work?
I understand they are running a bunch of ARG bullshit, and that being forthcoming about game mechanics would wreck that, but ARG bullshit is bullshit, and I'd rather know about the game.
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27thSep.2009
05:48 am - i had this idea about classes
rpgs are at their best when they are classless - or, more specifically, if they take a single class and make the game be about that. if we're talking like 'wizard' or 'thief' as classes, then that's been done well before, but other d&d classes - like making a game about being a cleric - expanding on what it is to be a cleric - or a druid or whatever, a barbarian or a ninja or whatever you like, if you made the game actually about that, you get all kinds of cool ideas for games.
but it's kind of problematic if you use these sort of d&d classes because they don't neccessarily work well as pc games, you have to interpret them - what's easier to do is something that associates well established game mechanics, like with team fortress 2's classes. the theory here is you can expand to get cool stuff like infiniminer - which is basically what it is to be an engineer in tf2, but in a game without all those other guys shooting at you - it's what you get if you actually make it about the engineering, sort of. And obviously there are a lot of clones of that game now, because infiniminer basically aches to be made into something more, but all the tf2 classes are ripe for this sort of expansion -you could do it with the sniper, or the scout instead, or anything. make a healgun medic game. a heavy game. a demoman game. the whole thing is fertile grounds for experimentation.
Obviously though, there's more to infiniminer than just a port of gameplay from TF2, and rightly so. You have to add stuff - but it's a fun way to think.
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23rdSep.2009
20thSep.2009
06:27 pm
Captain Forever is pretty cool.
You have to pay for it to play it, at least for now - the real release hits a couple months from now, at which point I think the current beta version will become the demo. So I guess I have to tell you what I like about it.
Basically it's a game where you fly around in space and shoot guys, but the cool thing is that all the ships in the game - the enemy ships, and the player ship - are modular, and you can use bits of destroyed ships to build up your own ship.
This creates an interesting process, where you're attacking ships that are more powerful than you are, specifically so that you can get access to better tech. You have to destroy an enemy's control bit without also destroying his weapons, engines and shields.
Most of the ships that spawn are set to head right for you, and it can get hard to avoid facing multiple opponents. All the ship building is done in real time, and usually zoomed in really close to your ship, so that you can see what you're doing - and enemies will creep up on you if you're not careful.
The other cool thing is the way the placement of modules affects your ship's steering - and rearranging your guns and engines can make a ship that controls completely differently to what you're used to, and you're always trying to add better parts without throwing off your ship's balance. Besides this, you'll lose bits in combat, so you sometimes have to rebuild on the fly or improvise a control scheme to make use of what you've still got.
All up, it's not a bad way to lose a few hours.
I like this nomenclature, from Warning Forever to Battleships Forever to Captain Forever. There's a fine line between a nod to your influences and essentially calling your game "play our game, it's like this other game you like" (examples of doing it wrong: bioshock, and flashback: it's like another world) - but I think it works here.
The other other cool thing is you can export your ship's current state as text, and play again starting with any ship that's been exported - including ships built by other players. This can be kind of terrible though - some late game ships are basically unstoppable, and you can download someone's endship and tear through the whole game in a few minutes.
It's still in beta, and Farbs has said very little about what the final game will be, so the rest of this post is just me wishing for stuff.
there's no factions in the game currently, but there's a lot of in-game flavor to suggest that there would be; warnings about pirates, enemies talk about destroying your ship to keep the peace, and so on. I'd like to see some ingame distinction between different classes of ships, but it might be hard to get right, even just graphically. farbs is using colour to denote the strength of parts, so you'd need something else to indicate faction - maybe something like pirate modules being triangular, peacekeepers round etc. You could mess with having ships choose targets based on what modules they can see.
The problem with this game is that all there is to do is build your ship and shoot guys. There's a lot of depth even in that - experimentation and challenge and a reward structure, with more powerful enemies later in the game. But there's this suggestion of something more - and I think it needs some sort of world-building or story building mechanic to really sell it. This could be something that builds from one play session to another, or something that allows collaboration with other players towards some end. There's sort of the suggestion of something, but it's not all there yet.
I'd like to see what Farbs does with Captain Forever. I hope he does something weird with it.
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4thSep.2009
06:05 pm
reading comics. the only good thing about my ad blocker dying, it opens up a webcomic discovery mechanism i forgot about using - I'd follow an ad from one comic to another, and if the site I'd end up on was a dud, chances are it would link to some of the comics that inspired it - some of which would be brilliant, and new to me. Following ads is risky - paid reccomendations are less potent than actual reccomendations, but sometimes it works as a portal to somewhere uncharted - a new start point - but only because of the interconnectedness you get with webcomics, where every site links to a bunch of others.
Comics tend towards having good stories, because comics sell on stories. Games usually have bad stories and good gameplay, because games sell more on interaction than anything. Similarly, you don't often find comics with good interaction - in the sense of the reader playing with what happens, rather than the author playing with the reader. Free user interaction when it comes to stories is considered gimmicky, and is rare - to be fair, this is rare everywhere, even in games - where interaction is basically the point.
When I say games have bad stories - I mean they lack interesting settings, interesting characters, interesting premises. Everything's been done somewhere, nobody ever makes anything truly new - but this is not a great excuse, bcause other media can manage better stories than games do - in tv serials, in films, in comics, in novels - in the stories we call stories, they manage.
The trouble with doing stories well for games is that you have to also get the gameplay right. The gameplay is the delivery mechanism for the rest of the experience, and it's not enough to get everything else right. If your gameplay doesn't work, you'll end up making the worst kind of game - the game that is interesting but unplayable.
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27thAug.2009
07:48 pm
My ad blocker died but I don't want to update my firefox to get the new version because of bilinear filtering wrecking pixels when you zoom on pictures, I have to choose between the images i want to look at not displaying correctly and the images i don't want to look at displaying correctly even though they shouldn't. I had forgotten how many ads there were.
I have purchased a copy of pro motion, and that means I am a real pixel artist now, rather than just some weird pixel fetishist, which is a relief.
all of the events of my life are basically software-related.
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24thAug.2009
07:39 pm
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13thAug.2009
7thAug.2009
04:50 am
writing fantasy adventures seems hard, it's been bugging me lately because I'm supposed to be writing things and don't know where to begin. but maybe I think about it the wrong way. how hard is it to write a travelogue about a place that should exist but doesn't? it is not hard. how had is it to write a monologue by someone who's mad at the world? the internet is full of those. if you glue that stuff together, that's a story. one of the best things about creative writing is you don't have to be terribly creative - you can write what you know and change it a little and nobody has to know.
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27thJul.2009
07:11 am
adam atomic's written this thing about best practices for hiring (or being) a freelance pixel artist. the core issue here is whether being a pixel artist should pay more than minimum wage. I have very little experience here, and nobody really talks publicly about what they get paid.
pixel jobs that pay what I would call reasonable amounts don't seem to be easy to come by, and when they appear, aren't easy to get, because you're in direct competition with every other competent out-of-work pixel artist.
As well as this, there's the normal weirdness that comes from working with people on the internet, where there's no guarantee that the money - or the pixels - will ever be delivered.
I'm still new to this - probably it gets easier to get paid as you go, because you make contacts and build a reputation. I don't mean to be all doom and gloom about this stuff - there are people who make a living doing pixel art freelance - but it's not an easy scene to break into.
In any case, it makes sense to me that pixel work should pay over $15 an hour, even starting out - I could make about that much as a grocery assistant, and pixel art requires much more specialised skills. But if you send somebody a quote using a rate like that, you won't get that job. They'll go with some other fool who's better than you who wants a quarter as much.
This is bad for everybody in the long run.
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20thJul.2009
01:22 am - anno stuff
anno 1404 (sometimes "dawn of discovery") is a pretty but basically dissapointing city building game from ubisoft. the cities look kind of like real medieval cities, this is the major selling point. You can generate random maps, but every game of anno plays out sort of the same. There's no reason to want to play through more than one or two campaigns. It's not a multiplayer game. The npc advisors are really annoying and they pop up all the time and there's no way to turn them off. It's really slow. Reviews I read before I bought the game all seemed to be in the form "it's kind of tranquil/boring but it's different than anything else out this year and I can't shake the feeling that I haven't got into the real meat of it yet." And it is a truly different sort of thing, a curiosity - but there really isn't any meat to it. The whole game is a tutorial that never ends. You can play it for hours and never really get anywhere. So it seems like a good game for a while but it never really delivers on what it seems to promise.
Screenshots like these: They are pretty, but taken in 'postcard view', which is obviously only for taking screenshots, you can't do anything from this angle except marvel at how good the graphics are.
  
When you're actually playing the game, it looks like this:
 
anno is a game designed to look its best when you aren't playing it.
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25thJun.2009
04:00 am - stealing stuff
For a while now, I've been operating on a vague principle where it's okay to steal stuff. It's okay to steal commercial software so long as it's for noncommercial uses, it's okay to steal tv shows because they're free anyway, and it's especially okay if they don't show them here in Australia, or if they're no longer on the air. It's okay to steal games so long as they're old. It's okay to steal stuff so long as you don't tell people that you steal stuff. These are lies that I tell myself, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone and I'm not going to stop stealing stuff. If you're reading this, and feel up to it, please answer me a few questions. Do you steal stuff? If so, in which situations?
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24thJun.2009
01:49 pm - pikachu
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20thJun.2009
19thJun.2009
08:00 am - ega ramps
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13thJun.2009
6thJun.2009
10:19 pm - according to google
as of just a minute ago: best matthew rundle, second best tocky, fifth best matt rundle, best atoji
I feel guilty about that last one, because there's a flash game developer has that (atoji on kongregate) I think it's his real last name, dude is more prolific than me, deserves better - and I don't really want to be atoji anymore, that dude can be atoji.
would hate to think i'm that dude's white whale.
current white whale: tocky web and graphics, on myspace. grah. i will be the best tocky, see if I don't, tocky web and graphics on myspace.
this has been according to google.
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21stMay.2009
05:31 pm - the promise of games
we will provide a fantastic reality for you to exist within, and it will be everything you expect a world to be, and you will be allowed to mess with it how you want, and it will leave you fulfilled, enchanted. It will make you a better person.
that is the promise of games. this is hyperbole, but there is some truth to it.
there is no perfect game, for these reasons:
-people don't all want the same thing. You can't make a game that hits all these notes, for every person.
-in any case, perfect is really hard to do. Creating a fantastic world to suit the whims one person is not less impossible than to do the same for all people.
But, on average, this promise is my impression of what developers of games want to make, of what players of games want to play. But no such games exist.
And it is true by neccessity that all video games are dissapointing. That is not actually true of books, or films, or music. In other fields you can imagine a great work and then make it, if you have the tools and the talent for it. And - to some extent - you can improve games by inserting powerful prose or film or music into them - and that's normal, and games are better for it - but that's not actually the same as improving quality of the game itself, and no game ever made meets the expectation for what games are supposed to be.
In any case, I am still fond of games, and a great many people are still fond of games, but there is this thing, and it hangs over us, and we still should feel guilty that we aren't there, making and playing those games that we actually want.
There's a lot of money in games, and that obfuscates the issue. People stop thinking about games as a puzzle that has to be solved if they're making a lot of money doing the things they already know how to do.
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