BENTROPY

I entered the prototype into the MuseGames IMMUNITY competition.  I’m biased, but I think my game is the best.  Give me all of your gold stars.  I need them.

The way this thing works is you go to Muse Games, sign up, and then vote on any and all of the games you like.  The game with the most votes gets a publishing deal and some dollar bills.  Gosh that would be great, wouldn’t it!?

If you’re keen on helping me out, go to the IMMUNITY competition page and vote for “War Photographer” near the top.  I’ve only been on the site for about a day and a half, so my vote total is still fairly low, but my rate of vote growth has been awesome and I aim to keep it up.

I took a contract that I quite enjoyed and that refilled my cash stores, but now that it is over I’m back to my personal stuff.

I had been churning away in Unreal Engine 3, trying to turn the gross cream that is my coding style into delicious game butter (what a terrible metaphor).  Had I continued to build this game in Unreal, I would have gotten my first feedback right around my OH GOD IT NEVER WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.  Unreal Engine 3 is a perfect engine if you intend to release a game with muddy, realistic textures on a console.  Not so great if you are a single dude who just wants to make some dollar signs off a game whose mainstream appeal might not be immediately obvious.

*ahem*  Anybody ever heard of Unity3D?  Sweet foreign gods, it’s one hell of a piece of tech.  What took me around 8 months to prototype in Unreal Engine 3 I surpassed in about two weeks time in Unity3D.  Oh, and I can embed the game in a web page like a Flash animation.  SO, here is a simple mechanic demo demonstrating what the player might be doing in this game.  Obviously the controls need some refining and there needs to be, ya know, challenges and rewards, but remember that the entirety of this was created in three weeks.  I’ll be back with a playable level in a month.

EDIT: Demo page now has standalone Windows and OS X downloads.

I finally got this level to a point where I am comfortable showing it off as a fly through.  I intend to release it to all of the normal game mod and game design forums, blogs, and such.  An impediment that I foresee in taking critiques will be that it is not a map designed for a well known gametype.  In fact, the gametype for which this map was designed is itself still nascent enough that I don’t feel comfortable showing it off.  Were this a simple deathmatch or capture the flag map, it would be easy to point out lack of z-axis gameplay, inefficient use of space, general lack of continuous player movement, etc.  This gametype has no powerups, or really any placed items.  The level itself is sort of a placed item and a powerup, assuming you use it correctly.

Like all things I have ever created, I’m still not completely happy with it.  I doubt I ever will be.  Whatever.  I cast it off into the internet so that I can concentrate on the gameplay and interactivity for which this level is a test bed.  That’ll be the next video for this embedded photojournalist game.  I’ll probably drop that in a few weeks.

I updated the Embedded Photojournalist Game in my Current Projects.  This will eventually be a chunk of fiction on a mountain road.  The goal will be to take pictures of a rival drug lord’s crop  so as to curry favor with another drug lord and the government with which he is dealing.  Must have certain objects (identifiable land mass, known features, signs, etc.) in the content of picture at the same time as the crop.  Levels of success will be judged upon distance of content in the pictures.  Any success at all moves the player beyond this stage.  Anything after that would be “loot” and “faction”.

This is it.  This is where you can come to hear my nonsense.  Lemme start this off right.

I spent about 24 hours of real work putting this thing together.  Bitch and moan, etc.  Considering how little I know about web design, I’m pretty happy with it.  I took a Wordpress theme I liked, learned me some PHP and hacked together some changes.  All in all, a very good 24 hours.  I learned something and created something in one go.

What’s really intriguing, though, is how little I ate while I worked.  Zero.  I ate zero food.  The only calories that went into my body were from ground coffee beans.  As silly as it sounds, this really was an eye opener.  About a year and a half ago today, my friend Max was drinking so much coffee in front of the computer that he literally started to starve.  I wish I had a link to something of his to prove it, ‘cuz then this blog would really be started.  Long story short, his body started to eat itself and he was getting dizzy spells and all that.  Of course I was a supportive friend, but let it be known that I was secretly feeling superior; I had not allowed myself to starve, after all.

But now I get it.  If you steadily drink a slightly higher-than-normal amount of coffee throughout the day–as Max did one and one half years ago and as I did today–you do not become hungry.  By the time I was getting the been-up-too-long-woozies, I realized that I hadn’t eaten since I woke up 24 hours prior.  Thankfully my chair was underneath me while I worked at the computer in case I were to pass out.  If you are a coffee-naif and work with computers, I can totally see how this happens.

South Central, maybe?