I know that this blog to this point still is not very popular ( I would be surprised if anyone other than me has even seen it) but if anyone does happen to take a look I wish you a Happy Halloween!
I had a pretty good one but had to cut it short due to needing to study for a history mid term.
I am still working on that Periscope Game project and I am going to attempt to give updates along the way about that but to this point really not much to report. I will be having a meeting with our client on Wednesday so we will have to see how that goes.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
My first game and I am the lead!
Being a senior in my Computer Science major we are all forced to take a senior design class in order to graduate. Usually I would not be so excited about this but the professor had an interesting way of deciding who the team leads would be... he had us all submit resumes. Thanks to my internship at Creat Studios as well as my freelance design work with Gamenauts I was selected to be a lead for one of the 7 teams. This of course means that I have a much higher level of responsibility and will need to do more work but it should look amazing on my resume once I graduate. The next part which I have been excited about is the fact that I will be working on a game for the Navy base in Newport, RI. It is a game which is meant to help men learn how to use the periscopes in the submarines without having to actually be in a submarine.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
I love developers with a passion for keeping fans involved
Some developers give you the feeling that they like churning out new games year in year out just to make a profit, but then if you look deeper you will find companies like Irrational Games. After a few seconds of being on the Bioshock creators website your quickly able to realize that these developers love games and love all their fans. There you can find podcasts, interviews, the games the devs are playing, as well as much much more.
What if Apple had purchased Bungie??
Recently we have been hearing quite a bit about Apple being furious when Bungie was bought out by Microsoft around the time the first Xbox was released. A major part of this is the fact that Bungie isn't only known for Halo; many fans are not aware that they also made the Marathon series for the Mac. Apple must have taken quite the hit by losing Bungie and all of their loyal fans. It is understandable that Steve Jobs would be angry because of this but one part of this story which not many people have been reporting is the fact that Bungie has announced that they gave Apple the opportunity to match the offer made by Microsoft. At this time Apple was not the super power they have made themselves today thanks to the iPod/iPhone/iPad and the resurgence of MacOS but you have to believe they would have had enough money to match the offer. If this is in fact true Apple really has nothing they can complain about..
Update on Internship
I worked at Creat Studios this past summer in an attempt to gain industry experience and I could not be any happier with how everything turned out. I was able to meet a great team as well as learn so many things about the industry. I honestly loved every second of it and didn't want to leave once school started up again. Due to the fact that Creat Studios focuses on PSN / PSP / DSi games I was able to be a part of 10 games in my three month period at the company. I would list all the games here but sadly not all have been released / announced yet so I am unable.
The Internship that I have always wanted!
Last Friday I had an interview in hopes of attaining an internship for this summer and I could not be happier with how everything worked out. I was in the interview for over an hour and was questioned by four different people who in the end liked me enough to offer me an internship for the summer. From the above picture you can see that my interview was at Creat Studios and everyone there is great. I am looking forward to meeting the rest of them and having a great time learning all about what they do. I will be there till the middle of August as a design intern where I will be doing quality assurance as well. To this point I still do not know completely what I will be doing day to day (mainly testing I would imagine) but I should know very soon. on Friday when I went for the interview that is pretty much all that happened to so I did not have a change to get situated and really see how everything was going to work. The best part about Creat Studios is not only are they an established company but they are publishers on top of being developers which just adds another level to the learning process. Creat Studios mainly work on PS3 and PSP games currently (I believe they may work on DS games at some point as well) which sadly I do not own any of at this moment but it should be a great time, who knows by the end of the process I may have to end up purchasing the platforms to play some games I was involved with!
I start tomorrow and I am going to try and track how things go here during the summer. To this point I am hoping to post once a week about how that given week went at the studio and just how it is all going in general. I am very excited about it all and I have a feeling it is going to be tough to sleep tonight 
I hope to go above and beyond the expectations they have for me!
I hope to go above and beyond the expectations they have for me!PAX East: My Bioshock 2 Short Story
At the 2K Booth at PAX East this weekend I was one of the lucky people who were able to play Bioshock 2 Multiplayer which I had not had a chance to play yet. Slightly off topic Tritton headsets are amazing while expensive they were all over the floor at every booth and everyone seemed to love them!
Well after playing the match I was very surprised at how addicting it ended up being. I got up with everyone else and started to walk away as I was approached by a man who asked “so what did you think?” being the honest person that I am I said ” well it was surprisingly a lot better than I expected” he laughed and began telling me that he actually was a member of 2k Marine and did a lot of the Interface design and art.
He was a really nice guy and I had a great time talking to him for about 5 minutes. We spoke of how Irrational Games was not involved in the second Bioshock and how many team members from Irrational were from the West Coast so they were able to move back home and work on the game, he was one of the few exceptions because he is originally from the east coast. We talked about getting into the industry and just games in general. It was a great time and I hope to get to know more developers like him in the future. I told him How I was aspiring to be a game designer and at the end of our conversation we shook hands and he wished me luck in the future.
He is the perfect example of how everyone was at PAX East. Very friendly, enjoyed talking to fans and giving insight to the few that were enjoying the show while still attempting to network a bit for their future carriers.
PAX East: Red Dead Redemption Impressions
Red Dead Redemption stole the show at PAX East this year. After waiting in line for 10 to 20 minutes I found myself being able to walk behind a black curtain and seeing what essentially would be GTA in the Wild West and I mean that in a very good way. After a quick tutorial I was given the controller and able to play one mission. Cameras were not allowed in the private area for some reason, I do not know why the game seemed very polished for still being a few months from release. The only glitch I found was riding my horse off a cliff which the presenter said the horse will stop you from going off large cliffs but my horse just ran down the steep cliff in a very unrealistic fashion.
I was able to play the game for about 15 minutes along with the group of friends I was attending with (we switched off every 5 minutes). We were dropped into a random location at night which looked absolutely beautiful with the star lit sky. I have a lot of random things i noticed about the game but not enough to really give a good preview due to the short play time so I will instead list everything I noticed in a list format.
Feel free to leave comments asking any general questions about the game and if i know the answer ill post it up right away!
PAX East: My First and Hopefully Not My Last
PAX East was this past weekend and it was a resounding success. This marked the first time a large event has come to the east coast for gaming and we now know that it will not be the last. It has been announced that PAX East has already signed up to return for 2011 and 2012.
This year being the inaugural year an estimated 30,000 people were expected to join in on the festivities. The event ended up selling out over a month in advance and 60,000 people were in attendance over the three day period of the convention. For anyone interested in the game community or game development it is a great and we are being told that next year will be even larger to accommodate more more developers, publishers, and attendees. The west coast may have E3 and others but the east coast is starting to make a name for themselves.
It has been known for sometime that California is the largest area for game development and hereby also gets most of the gaming conventions (not to mention the nice weather), but what most people are not aware of is that Massachusetts has quickly become the second largest community for game development in the United States. The two most popular companies consisting of Irrational Games (Bioshock) and Harmonix (Rockband).
The show featured a great mixture of indie games, major developers and future technology. Twisted Pixel showed off Comic Jumper, we saw the finalists for a Boston Indie competition as well as many other great games that showed a lot of potential. As far as major developers we found 2k and Rockstar making a huge splash with Mafia 2, Bioshock 2, and especially Red Dead Redemption which had the longest lines of any booth at PAX. Nvidia and Alienware also showed off some great technology while holding competitions for a variety of prizes. Nvidia was big on 3d technology, I personally thought of it as more of a gimmick before but after playing around with what they brought to the table I could see how it could become huge in the future.
You can find fun for everyone at PAX, like music? go to the Rockband Lounge and watch or become a part of constant concerts as performed by the people of the audience taking turns playing Rockband. Into table top games? well those were all over the place on the first floor and entire area was dedicated to them. You could also go into the main area and play some games that are not even out yet! You also have Keynotes every few hours where you can hear from your favorite developers about several topics or just go up a level and go to a free play area where you can relax, rent out a game and play around for awhile!
I have not even gotten to the free swag either. By going to all of these booths and playing games you can get anything from free t-shirts, hats, keychains, stickers, etc. A friend of mine even won an i7 processor from intel!
Overall I could not be happier with my decision to go to PAX East. My only hope at the time was that it could become larger so even more developers would join in on the fun. Thankfully PAX has already responded saying it is expected to be much larger next year. As seen on his Twitter Cliff Bleszinski (Designer behind Gears of War) has already made noted that he will probably be attending next year (crosses fingers). Now if we could only get Peter Molyneux (Designer behind Fable) to come I would be even more ecstatic than I already am. (Can you tell I am an aspiring Game Designer yet?)
Designing around Load Times
Since video game consoles have gone past the snes days and into the cd/dvd era load times have become a big problem in gaming. To sum things up they completely rip the player out of the environment and all the effort from the developers to engross a player in their environment have been lost because now they are waiting for the game to load the next area. It was thought that this generation with better hardware and installing games to the hard drive of the console this would no longer be a problem but it appears like it is here to stay.
A few different approaches have been used in the past to try and deal with load times. Certain games such as the Grand Theft Auto series prefer to have one long load time before the game even starts mixed in with a few shorter load times depending on the situation. This is good once your in the game but what gamer really wants to wait 3-4 minutes to play a game, usually when we want to play we want to play now. Another method consists of scattered load times throughout the level / area. Many maps for games are now being converted into loading zones so you might deal with many load screens that are not very long (5 seconds or so). This method can be nice but at the same time depending on the load times it can be a problem. The goal is to never pull the player out of the game experience and be sure to never see a now loading screen.
Now UGO.com is claiming they have found the little black book of game design (which i would love to have) and for those of you that have not seen it I will sum it up for you.The answer to the loading problem consists of doors and elevators. The way I interpret it is you basically need to try and keep the player in an area that has little demand on the console for a period of time so that you can load up the next area which is much more demanding. If you put a huge door in a level it will immediately grab the players attention, they will want to see whats on the other end of it and once they approach it you just open up the door very slowly to “build suspense” meanwhile your actually taking that time to load up the graphics intense area behind the door. Pretty well done in my opinion, next time your playing a game pay attention for this you may notice that it happens more than you think (in good games).
This is how they described the situation:
This is how they described the situation:
FOR LOAD TIMES THAT ARE… USE A…
Normal Huge Freaking Door
Long Slow Freaking Elevator
Very Long Really Freaking Slow Elevator
Pretty simple philosophy. The thing that you need remember as a developer is to make the situation still interesting to the player. A few examples of this is in Mass Effect 2 during elevator rides your communicating with other members of your party so that you can still feel immersed in the game even though your not interacting at all. Another method could be using Bioshock as an example when these huge doors are opening or on an elevator it is a perfect time to play voice from Andrew Ryan speaking of how you can never ruin is creation or something to the like. The main point I am trying to get at is that you can’t just put your player on a 2 minute long escalator and expect it to be good just because you did not revert to a black screen with a loading bar on the bottom. Creativity is something that part of the industry is lacking at the moment, you have thousands of possibilities to load in the background while never allowing the player to know its happening.
Images and chart have been provided by UGO.com and their Little Black Book series. If you would like to see the original article click here. I have intentions to follow this series of design choices they are going to be releasing considering I am an aspiring game designer as well as I would love to continue making posts on my thoughts on them!
Downloadable Content Done Right!
Grand Theft Auto 4 is the perfect example of how developers should be doing downloadable content. In the past we have seen many games come out with downloadable content that consists of costumes or a few maps which is not exactly worth extra money to most people. Rockstar North could have easily added a few guns, cars, etc and put a 10 dollar label on it and suckered in fans of the series to make some profit. Thankfully that is not the case, what we did end up with is 2 downloadable contents that could have been considered a good game on their own. In fact Rockstar has been smart enough to release both as a standalone game saying many people precious hard drive space.
The two downloadable contents consist of The Lost and the Damned as well as The Ballad of Gay Tony. In both you will find added vehicles, motorcycles, and weapons but the best part is your getting two very good stories to go along with it all. Rockstar North even went through the effort to tie in the stories of the two dlc’s with each other as well as the original story where you play Niko. They even went as far as to add more side items to do like base jumping in TBOGT and a road rash style racing side quests as well as gang wars in TLAD. You can easily find yourself playing these two for over 20 hours for the cost of 40 dollars, a deal compared to many games being released lately. Did I also mention that your able to buy them both together as a stand alone game and have the GTA 4 multiplayer with added features? well you can, if your on the frugal side you can even look around for deals I have seen it being sold as low as $25 new.
Some design decisions that I really like about the downloadable content are first how they intertwined the three stories to give Liberty City more of a lifelike feel and how a small thing like reskinning the menus, interface, etc make the game feel like more than an expansion. The other main point is the fact that they altered the friend system to how it should have been in the first place, you are no longer bothered by your friends constantly but you are able to call them for things you need (Motorcycles, Weapons, backup, etc). It is understandable that they tried to immerse the player into the game with the friend aspect but that turned out to be the games biggest downfall.
Some items that I do not like on the other hand is that they have yet to fix the camera problems the game had originally. Many times while driving especially the camera will become very sporatic and you could end up with close ups of the back of your car or other bad scenarios like that one. Enemy health is another problem you could unload a clip into an enemy then all he would do is fall down and get back up in a few moments, I am not sure how they calculate it all but it always appeared to be get a head shot or prepare to waste a lot of bullets.
Overall these are small complaints to have considering the scope of the game. If you liked GTA 4 you will love these expansions. Also if you hated GTA 4 because of your friends calling you every second it is now fixed, if you were also in the group that was angry for losing features from San Andreas you can be happy to know that some like the gang battles and base jumping have returned.
Video Game Review: Fallout 3 GOTY Edition
Although Fallout 3 has been released for a few years now it was only recently that the Game of the Year Edition was released. Along with the original game you also have five DLC packs — The Pitt, Operation: Anchorage, Broken Steel, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta. For anyone who did not hear much about the original release of the game Fallout 3 is a free roaming hybrid RPG/First Person Shooter. Bethesda Studios, who brought us The Elder Schrolls Series and most recently Oblivion gained the rights to create the sequel and change it from the top down view the series is used to into the game we see today.
Back story for the game includes atomic bombings being dropped all over the world and turning everything into a wasteland as the game likes to call it. This all happens at some point in the 1950’s. The world has been brought down to the level of people scavenging to stay alive and not even having clean water because everything is contaminated. Throughout the adventure the player will interact with robots, scavengers, ogre type super mutants, and ghouls who have essentially had their skin burned off from radiation poisoning. You start the game being born in a vault (Vault 101 to be exact) with your father and your able to see yourself as a baby and up until your teen years when your father mysteriously leaves the vault. No one is allowed to enter or leave the vault so this quickly becomes a big problem, in the end your character leaves the vault and attempts to find his/her father. The basis of the game is to find your father out in the wasteland of what used to be Washington D.C. The entire government is in shambles and essentially everyone is left fending for themselves. What little is left of the government immediately appears to be corrupt in saying they want whats best for the people but always appear to have an underlying motive.
Gameplay wise your able to play it as a shooter but you would not feel the full experience the game has to offer. Fallout 3 has the Pip Boy which allows you to control your inventory, check updates on quests, hear audio files, as well as lower radiation levels and heal fractured limbs. You also have the V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) system which will allow you to freeze time and target body parts on your enemy with percentages to dictate your ability to hit that body part much like you would expect from an RPG. You will also quickly find out that while the world in Fallout 3 is a wasteland it does have a very lifelike feel to it. If you walk into someone house as 2am you will find them sleeping, stores close at night, open at specific times and people always seem to be busy other than a few static people who are always in specific areas. Another RPG like aspect that many people could miss out are the many conversations that you can have many different kinds of people. You have the option to be the nicest person or the worse person and your “karma” is always looming to show which way your leaning most.
I am a bit dissapointed in the karma system though it never truly feels like it what you do really makes a huge difference other than which achievement you will end up getting at certain level intervals. If you are a nice person occasionally people will walk up to you and give you presents (none of which ever seemed very good) and if your evil certain groups will attack you on sight. What I was looking more for was entire towns running away from you screaming or shop owners refusing you service for being evil, or if your nice groups of people could even begin to worship you as a savior. It seems that games lately have enjoyed adding morality but they never seem to make it in depth enough to make the player really feel that the decision they make matters. It is always simple to know what is the good or bad decision, but we all know in life we do not always know what is best. Sometimes what appears to be the best decision at first could turn out to be very wrong in the end. This morality system reminded me a lot of the first Bioshock when it was only to save or harvest the little sisters to show if your good or bad. In Fallout 3 the depth of the decision is the same only they mask the decision behind a few conversation options instead of just pressing a button blatantly showing the outcome.
RPG’s are known to be notoriously lengthy and depending on how you play Fallout 3 that could be the case but depending on the player you could finish it very quickly. The first thing you must ask yourself is are you the type that runs through a game or are you the type that explores and does every side quest offered? If you run through the game and only play the main story it can be finished in 20-25 hours. If you want to enjoy every bit of Fallout goodness than you will be sitting in front of your controller for awhile to the tune of 60+ hours. One feature that I still have not been able to decide if i like is the fact that during your time searching for your father if you do not follow your quests exactly and begin to explore off the given path you might just end up finding him and skipping multiple quests(the game will flash 3-4 quests as being completed once you enter a certain area). While this is very realistic in that it is entirely possible to stumble upon him in real life the designers are in essence hurting the player for exploring the huge world that is offered to them. I admire the developers for allowing that to happen but I would love to know if it is something they would do again in the future or if it was considered a bad call. The story certainly does feel engaging but even though it will take 20 hours to complete it still just does not feel long enough, you will just be getting into a groove then all of a sudden you see credits roll and are thinking there must have been more to do. Well yes you still have hours upon hours of side quests but most of them feel random and some can get rather repetitive. If your considering this game a shooter its very lengthy and probably has the best story of any shooter you have ever played but in reality it really isn’t a shooter its more on the RPG side. My best recommendation would simply be to hold yourself back a little and play the game linearly for the first 5-10 hours so that you do not miss out on anything. You can still explore to an extent just do not go too far from areas your supposed to know about. I found myself chasing all the outlined arrows for hours wondering what the next place I would discover would be like.
Another element that is a welcomed feature are the activities of lock picking and hacking computers. The lock picking mini game is done perfectly you have a bobby pin and screwdriver and you move both in hopes of opening the lock but be sure to not destroy all your pins they can become hard to find. The computer hacking is more of a guessing game that can become bothersome a more interactive mini game would have been welcomed in its place. Each level you gain (level cap at 20 normal game 30 with DLC) you attain points to apply into these skills (as well as many others) and you are able to choose one perk each level. The perks can range from increased accuracy in VATS to extra gore in battle. You also have medical abilities to help heal yourself in battle and the skills to repair your own equipment so you do not have to pay other waste landers outrageous prices to fix your items.
This game has so much potential for success and as far as sales and overall presentation Bethesda has succeeded in honoring the Fallout name and even taking it to another level. My biggest complaint is the main story I wish that more time had gone into fleshing that out and lengthening it instead of all the time spent to increase the number of side quests. Many gamers once they see the credits will turn off the game and be done with it. By the time you have completed the main story you have only seen about half the world they have created for you. I have about 80 hours into the game and I still have things left to discover. Some options for this would have been spreading out some quests so that you will at least view 3/4 of the world by playing the game following the quests that are given regularly. I am sure what many of you are thinking now is that only means hours of added running with nothing in between but that is not the case, Fallout is filled with things to do all over the wasteland all that needs to be done is some rearranging of the map to have some of the many side quests most will never see in between the main quest locations so that the player always has things to do. The fast travel system also helps a lot in this aspect because the player is able to immediately teleport to any location they have already been to.I would have preferred if this was explained more in the game possibly an item gained after completing a mission or purchased it adds a lot to the realism and keeping the player in the game. These few design changed to the map could have easily doubled the length of playing the main quest and no player would ever feel that useless items were added in order to simply add length to the game.
Things I liked:
Things I do not like:
As you can see the positives outweigh the negatives by a very large amount, I made a point to point out a few negatives because I feel many other reviewers overlooked them. This is certainly a game that everyone can find something to like about it. You will probably never completely “finish” the game simply because of all the side items that have been added to explore but that is ok,it gives the game more of a lifelike feel. I certainly recommend the game my only side note would be to purchase the game for PC if you have one that is powerful enough because you will be able to avoid the frame rate problems that appeared to pop in at the most annoying of times even when installed on the consoles hard drive.
Score: 8.8/10
Back for the first time!
Well... it certainly has been a long time since I wrote anything here. I originally started this blog a year ago when I was planning on having a blog to keep track of my time in school as well as improve my writing skills. I love talking about games as well as game design and I fully intended to do that here. After making that first post I wasn't a fan of how blogger was set up so I ended up paying to have my own website... I am now realizing that the benefit of having my own website was not worth the money being the poor college student that I am. I am now coming back to Blogger and very happy with the changes that have been made since I first started here.
I am hoping to begin posting here a lot about pretty much everything that is going on in my life. This can be based off my day to day life or specifically games and game design.
Over the next few days I am going to attempt to repost some of my blog postings here on Blogger which I had on my website so it doesn't feel like as much of a mistake having left and had that website. I will quickly admit that even on that website I wasn't posting as much as I would have liked (it ended up averaging to about once/twice a month) but I fully intend to change that especially going into the new year!
I am hoping to provide game reviews as well as post pretty much anything I do along the way. I recall having problems posting images back when I first started using Blogger and it would appear that is no longer a problem which is nice!
I am hoping to begin posting here a lot about pretty much everything that is going on in my life. This can be based off my day to day life or specifically games and game design.
Over the next few days I am going to attempt to repost some of my blog postings here on Blogger which I had on my website so it doesn't feel like as much of a mistake having left and had that website. I will quickly admit that even on that website I wasn't posting as much as I would have liked (it ended up averaging to about once/twice a month) but I fully intend to change that especially going into the new year!
I am hoping to provide game reviews as well as post pretty much anything I do along the way. I recall having problems posting images back when I first started using Blogger and it would appear that is no longer a problem which is nice!
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