Take a look at this game: “Legend of Grimrock”… It’s an old-school dungeon crawler, in the veins of Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder and many more…
I’ve been following the game for a while, and it looks sweet… Got even more psyched when I saw Total Biscuit’s review of it:
Very neat stuff in it, can’t wait to try it!
Well, this was a game I was really waiting for… And (as you may already heard on the internet) it was bittersweet…
First, let’s get the good out of the way:
The game is freaking amazing… it’s probably one of the best games in its genre (and of any genre, to be honest), that gripped me from beginning to end… except for the last 10 minutes, but I’ll go into that in a bit…
The storytelling was the usual Bioware-grade bonanza, with a bit of everything, including some unexpected curve-balls which kept the game interesting!
It was one of the first games where the concept of cooperation as a path to victory didn’t fill me with annoyance, and it really made sense, with tons of difficult choices along the way which made me feel like I was really Sheppard…
I really can’t say anything about the game that hasn’t been said a million times by reviewers and fans all over; it’s a masterpiece of gaming, specially because it makes overlook its faults (the graphics are a bit outdated, the interface a bit clunky sometimes, etc, etc) and pushes you to delve into the galactic war scenario where you’re facing insurmountable odds in name of something larger than yourself… and that’s cool… 
Unfortunately, what would be a 10 out of 10 game is spoiled by the last 10 minutes… the ending is one of the most appalling, badly cooked endings I’ve ever seen, filled with plot-holes and general nonsense that kind of ruins the whole experience… I can’t say more without going into spoilers (and that’s what I’ll do after the break in the post).
Anyway, how do you rate a game like this? A game that made you feel like you were on an epic movie, the game you felt you always wanted to play, a game that you spend 40+ hours enjoying, but at the same time delivered a punch in the stomach in the last 10 minutes that makes you feel like “Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus” was a great coherent movie?
I would be unfair to rate it less that 9/10, but at the same time, the game really made me mad!
My suggestion is that you play it for yourself, even with the pain at the end and come to your own conclusions!
Now, for the spoilers part:
…or toilet, ‘cos toilets are funnier… 
In the weekend I finally took the time to finish this one…
First, lets get the good out of the way: from a production standpoint, this game is utterly brilliant… some of the best graphics I’ve seen in any game out there (with the possible exception of Crytek games), the water and sand effects are absolutely brilliant, the animations/acting are top notch, etc, etc, yadda, yadda, yadda…
The game is a masterpiece of game production…
Yet…
The game fails in a loads of things…
1) Probably due to the fact that they had a huge budget, the game had too many cutscenes (and cutscene like events when I’m playing)… When I was still in the initial part I was getting aggravated because the game didn’t want me to play it! Every time I took a step forward or did any action, there was a cutscene where something happened (a pipe that would break, an enemy that would come round the corner).
2) Related to this, the game threw too much at you… at the beginning, it just seems like that sort of “adventure rollercoaster”, but at the some point in the game, it just feels like too much, like the terrible “A-Team” movie… and when it gets to the end (SPOILER ALERT) a complete ripoff of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with Drake running after a caravan in a desert/canyon like setting, ending up with him dangling on a crane… and the rip-off doesn’t end there, it’s basically littered all over the game… There’s such a thing as “too much”, and Drake goes from being a nicely developed character (from the previous two games) to the guy that’s going to replace Chuck Norris in jokes (“Nathan Drake doesn’t do push-ups… he pushes the Earth down!”).
3) Controls were a little unresponsive… This one is a bit unfair, but remember when games would react immediately when you pushed the controller (character would walk one pixel forward or something like that)? Well, Uncharted reacts immediately, by playing out an animation of Drake turning or something like that… I know that this is more correct and “cinema-like”, but in my humble opinion, it breaks the game a bit, because it doesn’t feel like you’re controlling Drake, just giving me overall directions…
4) The game tries to do everything the predecessors do and adds loads more, with epic environments (the cities are big and extremely detailed, they even give Assassin’s Creed a run for his money), but in this game, it all feels so scripted that the epic-ness gets loss a bit
5) Finally, the storyline… It’s rubbish, generic and predictable… I know that this kind of game is done to capture the “blockbuster” feel, but games are a different medium, and as such have to be treated as such… what might work from a story perspective in a movie where you just want to be entertained for 2 hours and chug some popcorns doesn’t work in a 8+ hour game… Unfortunately, I feel that more and more of the AAA games industry are so busy trying to capture that “movie magic” feel they forget that their games aren’t as short… I can endure (and have fun with) 2 hours of Adam Sandler, 8 hours is just plain torture… The longer the game is, the more it needs to put the player in control of the story, to make him invested in it, or else it will lose him…
I might be alone in my criticism (as the 92/100 in Metacritic seems to show), but that’s how I felt the game:
I might be a bit cruel, since I had some fun playing it, but it isn’t as memorable as the previous two installments… 7/10
I ask because I just figured out something: I invented Minecraft! 
Look at the following pictures:
See?! There’s almost the same! The first screenshot is from an old Ludum Dare 48-hour competition game (theme was construction/destruction/sheep) called Sheepdome. It wasn’t complete, but the idea was to have a first person shooter in which you could build/destroy an environment made out of (you guessed it) blocks!
So, it’s just like Minecraft, eheheh…
So, Notch, if you read this, I could use a million to be able to develop Grey!
——————-
For those that might take what saying above seriously, I know how different Minecraft is from my old game, this is just a joke because I was thinking of Sheepdome the other day when I was thinking on the Aesthetics of Play… Notch’s achievement was an amazing one, at many different levels, and his game is actually an awesome one in that game space.
Of course, if Notch sees this and wants to give me a million anyway… feel free!
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture with James Portnow (of Extra Credits fame), about the Aesthetics of Play.
Summing it up, the aesthetics of play try to answer the question “why do we play the games you do” from a game designer perspective.
It groups up games in categories (aesthetics), and although most games don’t fit in just one category, there’s a main category, which ideally has been the focus of the game designer to explore and develop, and that corresponds with why most players will play that game.
We looked into a subset of 10 aesthetics, like “Discovery”, “Narrative”, “Fantasy”, “Dominance”, etc, and tried to figure out some example games were in each of them.
The interesting part of this is because it adds one more tool in the game designers arsenal, making us think in terms of why the player should play our game, what kind of player will play our game, etc.
Most of the games I’ve ever thought and designed are in the “Narrative” aesthetic… It figures, because I love stories and tales, and its normal for me to have this tendency to push all games towards that.
As an exercise, I tried to make a game design about each of the aesthetics (or remember an old one)… I could figure out one for each except “Discovery”… I’ve never designed a game around that aesthetic (maybe because I’m a conflict kind of guy), except if you count Cursed, which I never felt as a Discovery game (could have worked out that way with some tweaks, I guess)
Anyway, it got me thinking and I drafted (in my head, of course) a new game: “Claim”.
The idea is to have an infinite procedural generated universe and players have to make colonies on the planets, building civilizations. All of these civilizations will increase in might in planets well adjusted for the colonists (for example, humans thrive on Earth-like planets), and having better civilizations will give the player bonuses that will enable him to explore further and further. The idea was to have this multiplayer with online leaderboards, so that players could find out who was the greatest explorer, etc…
The idea is interesting, and if I ever have one week to kill, I might make a prototype of it…
Now this is how you make a good game with little resources: Realm of the Mad God!
A lofi dungeon crawler that you play on your browser, with charming 8-bit art done by Oryx (at least I think I recognize the sprites)…
Give it a try, it’s really cool!
New blog post on Spellcaster Studios about some more consideration on the RPG system…
I’m loving the design of my own RPG system, but it has a downside: every single time I have to work on a new component, it just raises 10000 more questions, from a game design standpoint (will the player like the summons to be instant, or is it better if it has a cast time), from a math standpoint (will this new derived attribute break the existing systems? How does it evolve over time?) and from a technology standpoint (how can the summoned creature access the talents of the summoner creature?). It’s fun, but at the same time you’re always second-guessing yourself…
On another note, video of the day:
Awesome… 
New blog post over at Spellcaster Studios: the first textured model for “Grey”! Sneak preview:
I finished yesterday the health and resource system. In Grey, a “resource” is a kind of expendable pool of something related to the class. For example, for a mage, the resource is “mana”, for a warrior, the resource is “bravado”, for a life shaper is is “resolve”. This works as “fuel” for spells and abilities.
I’ve also laid the groundwork for the ability system (you can see the icons for abilities in the GUI element on the screenshot below). The icons are some I got from the internet, done by user Ails at www.pixeljoint.com, seemingly free to use (you can see them at http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/37532.htm).
The formulas for the health and resolve are pretty simple, but I’ll go into that in a post in the Spellcaster Studios blog when I have more information (like the life-shaping mechanic).
New blog post over at Spellcaster Studios, about the initial work for the RPG system we’re going to use on “Grey”: equations are fun! 
On a completely unrelated note, if you haven’t already, try BIT.TRIP RUNNER… Excellent game, I picked it up with the Humble Indy Bundle 4 and it was worth the money just for this one… Fun game when you have 10 mins to burn in front of your computer, although it can be very frustrating… The integration of music and gameplay just adds to the enjoyment (of course, if you’re not a fan of electronic music, you might get the urge to kill yourself after 10 levels)…
It’s available for Wii, PC, Mac and Linux, so you can choose your platform (would be win on smartphone as well, I think!)
Nothing much to add to the post at Spellcaster Studios… Writing for two blogs is kind of a pain from time to time… 
Spent the last couple of nights working on scripting internal structures, streamlining some functions and inventing a way to pass arrays/lists from LuaJIT to C++ and vice-versa…
My problem was that the raycasting should return a set of intersections (not just the first one)… The way I found to do this was to create a semi-templated class to handle the array itself, get some functions to access it/destroy it and do the conversion in the raycasting function itself…
The end result is something like this:
ffi = require("ffi")
ffi.cdef[[
int LuaIntersectionArray_get_size(LuaIntersectionArray* ar);
LuaIntersection LuaIntersectionArray_get(LuaIntersectionArray* ar,
int index);
void LuaIntersectionArray_free(LuaIntersectionArray* ar);
]]
LuaIntersectionArray_mt = {
__index = {
type = function(a) return "LuaArray<LuaIntersection>" end,
log = function(a,log_type,pre_text) std.log(log_type,pre_text..type(a)) end,
size = function(array) return ffi.C.LuaIntersectionArray_get_size(array) end,
get = function(array,index) return ffi.C.LuaIntersectionArray_get(array,index) end,
free = function(array) ffi.C.LuaIntersectionArray_free(array) end,
},
}
LuaIntersectionArray = ffi.metatype("LuaIntersectionArray",LuaIntersectionArray_mt)
function get_lua_array(c_array)
local lua_array={}
for i=0,c_array:size()-1 do
local obj=c_array:get(i)
table.insert(lua_array,obj)
end
c_array:free()
return lua_array
end
Of course I have to do this for every type of array I want to support on Lua (except the get_lua_array function, that is generic).
On the C/C++ side, I create the LuaIntersectionArray class, with the access methods, using a #define directive that declares all the functions, etc.
Then, on the Lua side, when I want to receive an array of intersections, I can do something like this:
ffi = require("ffi")
ffi.cdef[[
LuaIntersectionArray* raycast_static_mesh_array(LuaRay ray);
]]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Shortcut functions
function raycast_static_mesh_array(ray)
return get_lua_array(ffi.C.raycast_static_mesh_array(ray))
end
It’s not that elegant, can lead to memory leaks (although it shouldn’t happen if I keep things contained like this), but it’s pretty simple to use, since the return of raycast_static_mesh_array (which only raycasts static meshes and returns an array) is a simple Lua array/table (same thing there, really).
On other notes, check out the animation system on the new Max Payne game, it’s fantastic!
I wish I could spend 4 or 5 months just researching IK and animation to do such good looking stuff!