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.
It looks better than before, but it’s still not good enough. I have an erroneous belief that the internet will be kind in its lack of complete information.
A continuation of the Global Game Jam game “What Is Is Not”. Click the picture to play it. The original 48-hour prototype is on my completed games page here.
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”.
I love when something you are working on starts to show its personality. Just a bit ago this was wireframes and ugly.
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.
The Least Equipped is a machinima that explores the role of the protagonist in an interactive narrative. It was an official selection at the Silverlake Film Festival in 2007. Good lord we got some press.
Play the newest version here! Made in 48 hours for the first annual Global Game Jam; was awarded 2nd place in the NYC-Columbia location. Click on the picture to play it, or visit its site (and rate it!) at globalgamejam.org.
Errantry is best described as a Medieval Rap Battle. The game is a combinatorial storytelling engine controlled through a Wiimote driven gestural interface. Players compete to tell the story of a knight’s grandeur in the style of a Chanson de Geste or other Romantic epic. Success or failure is judged by the nobles of a medieval court, and their personal biases and reactions inform the story telling choices the players make. The game itself lives on its own blog, so go ahead and check it out there!
Detective Story was completed as part of the Intermediate Game Projects class in USC’s Interactive Media Division. Play as a pulp detective novelist and the protagonist of your own story at the same time. Based on an experimental idea of emergent narrative, we tried to create a game that would allow the player to tell the story through the eyes of a writer and experience it as the detective at the same time and using the same mechanic. Whether the player achieves success or failure depends on the player’s ability to “connect-the-dots.” Download the game.
RSS Feed