Just woke up… and I don’t like this theme… need to brainstorm for a bit to find something…
There’s lots of different options (since I can’t find any clever way to “corrupt” the theme):
Not terribly original stuff… I’m participating in the jam, so I got a bit more leeway if I can’t find anything decent to do.
Desk photo:
Now to have some breakfast and think about a decent idea…
Hey all!
I know, I know, no updates… Life has not been easy these last months… First I got a new PC (ooooh, shiny!), then went on a small holiday to Barcelona (beautiful city!) and then I had to take care of about a zillion things, with my new job and other stuff at home…
That left me precious little time to write on the blog, and to be honest, I was a bit lazy too…
Anyway, hopefully this will get more regular now, since things are apparently settling down…
Anyway, this weekend there will be a new Ludum Dare 48-hour game development competition… This time, there will be a competition and a jam (the jam has much more relaxed rules and extends until monday, so 72 hours); since I don’t have time to participate on the competition (family visiting…), I’ve decided to skip the stress altogether and participate only on the jam… that allows me to cheat and use my engine and any assets I happen to have lying around in my hard drive! 🙂
Hopefully I’ll have a good game idea and with the additional power of Spellbook I’ll be able to spend more time in game design/balance and polish the game more than I’ve usually done in the past… Or I might find a stupid bug in Spellbook and have to spend the whole time tracking it 🙂 That’s always what happens on these circumstances anyway! 😀
I’ll be posting here the game progress, and on the Ludum Dare site (and some pictures on Facebook aswell, I’m an attention whore!)…
Good luck all involved!
Well, this wouldn’t be a blog if I didn’t come from time to time and apologize for little updates…
But I have a really good reason: I’m changing jobs and it’s been a massive undertaking to do so, and I haven’t had much time to play, watch movies and even work properly…
So, except some updates in the near future, as soon as I get some free time back (probably next week things will be calmer)…
So nobody can’t complain that this wasn’t a real update, check out this trailer of “El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron”… haven’t made up my mind on what I think about it, but it sure looks different:
“Darksiders” is a game by Vigil Games is huge… that’s the best adjective I can find for the game…
For me, the initial draw for this game was the fact that the concept art was being done by Joe Madureira, a comic book author of some renown that I love. Later I found out that the game story was also done by him, which peaked my interest further…
At first glance, “Darksiders” is a God of War clone, in which we control “War”, one of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse… In this story, though, the Riders are like a force of Balance between good and evil, more than the end-of-days characters we’re used.
In the game story, “War” comes to Earth during a huge fight between Demons and Angels, but he is alone… His brothers aren’t with him, and his influence in the events is weighted by the Council that enforces Balance and is deemed that he didn’t have the right to interfere… Because of that, he’s sentenced to death, but he convinces the Council to give him a chance to prove his innocence and is sent back to Earth, 100 years later, devoid of powers and with the mission to find out what really happened, if it wasn’t the apocalypse…
Yep, the story is that hard to follow, but that’s part of the charm of the game! 🙂
Anyway, saying that “Darksiders” is a GoW clone is completely unfair… It’s like comparing a Ferrari with a Mini, because both have wheels… 🙂
While the combat and graphics in “Darksiders” isn’t as good as in GoW3, for example, it makes up in a much better story (GoW’s was a bit simple) and in the amount of things you can do…
I mean it, every weapon and special power that’s ever been in any 3rd person action game is on “Darksiders”… and I mean EVERYTHING! The game is a total whore for getting things that worked great in other games and add it to their own, twisting it just enough to fit the plot and setting… And while the resulting system isn’t as polished as the original one (for example, the time-manipulation thing isn’t as good in this game as it is in “Prince of Persia” or “Soulreaver”), it makes up by not failing completely and having loads of different mechanics and using them combined in puzzles in a very neat way.
The boss fights are huge (and most of them are very nice), riding Ruin (War’s horse) is totally awesome and the graphics have a fresh look to it, being more comic-book like than realistic.
All in all, the game lasted for 12-hours (which is lots of time, considering most games you can finish nowadays with 7 to 8 hours of play), and is excelent value for money (especially if you want to get all the bonus stuff and all).
Of course, the game isn’t without its flaws… The main character doesn’t have that much personality into it (going from dark and broody to dark and broody and homicidal in 5 seconds), although the supporting characters are interesting and well done; adding too much powers and weapons to the game instead of balancing the existing ones, or polishing them a bit more; some nasty bugs regarding collision detection (one of my pet peeves, to be honest).
To be honest, the game’s biggest flaw was that they added so much stuff in it, they didn’t polish what was there already…
So, in summary:
Darksiders
And I’m back… This post: movie reviews…
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen some movies, and I’d like to share some thoughts about them with you guys…
“Taken”: A ex-secret agent gets his daughter kidnapped in France and he wants to get her back… Good visuals, good acting (Liam Neeson is awesome), an interesting story (Luc Besson). The action scenes are great and the view to the sexual trafic business is scary… A suprisingly good movie. 8/10
“Planet 51”: Another very good surprise. It’s an CGI animation movie, and while it’s not “Pixar-quality” level, it’s very good (specially looking at the progress from these guys last movies… the evolution is astonishing). What makes the movie really stand out is the humor and the story… the base line is the arrival of a human to an “alien” world that seems stuck in the 1950’s, with all the mentality of the time (space invasion!!!). Some of the characters are wicked fun, specially “Rover”, the rover-like robot that was sent to the planet before the human arrived. 9/10
“Drag Me To Hell”: A horror movie with a neat story… as all horror stories, you never know how it’s going to end, and this is no exception… It’s not groundbreaking (using the same plot outline as hundreds of horror movies before), but it’s a good one to see late in the evening. 7/10
“Book of Eli”: This movie was utterly amazing… the visuals are awesome (in a post-apocaliptic fashion), the fight sequences are extremely cool (they remind me of the movie “Equilibrium”), and the story is well told and interesting… I wasn’t expecting a very good movie (since lots of friends of mine didn’t enjoy it), but I was completely blown away by it… seriously, it ended and I was staring at the end-credits saying “Fuck… me…”. Really, really, really good… 10/10
“Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time”: Well, this is a very complicated movie for me to say something about… I was a huge fan of the games, so the movie kind of fell short for me… My friends all loved it, but I can’t avoid the feeling that the film was lots of waste potential. So, some notes:
So, basically, just loads of wasted potential, in my opinion, which is too bad, since I was really looking forward to this… 6/10
So that’s it for my reviews… 🙂 As usual, comment at will, give me your thoughts and ideas and let’s get some arguments going! 🙂
Hey all!
I’m finally back, after a short interruption… this was due to the move from my old blogspot blog to my own webspace. This way I get more control on themes and can add some new stuff…
One example is my new gallery at http://gallery.shadowcovenant.com, where you can see some screens of stuff I’ve worked on…
So this entry isn’t just about the website, let me tell you about Alan Wake… 🙂
I picked up the game two weeks ago and played through it in 3 days… not that the game is short (although it’s not JRPG long), but because I found it enthralling…
First, let’s get the bad stuff out of the way… it’s a game that shows its age… Being in development for 9 years wasn’t kind to it in some aspects, mainly the animation (especially the facial). Character movements seem stiff and unnatural and lip-synch and facial animation is terrible… maybe Heavy Rain spoiled me, but for a game so dependent on story development, it kind of fails in the human emotion department…
Thankfully, the atmosphere of the game is amazing, with the forest (where you do spend most of your time) settings looking brilliant, with the interactions of light and darkness giving rise to fantastic tense moments…
The game follows the story of a writer suffering from writer’s block that goes to a small American Midwest-like town for some vacations with his wife… and then his wife goes missing and he finds he has written a book he doesn’t remember writing… Convoluted plot, but completely in synch with Stephen King’s finest… and this is the major flaw of the story of the game, to be honest… I always have the feeling I’ve read this before… but if you’re doing something similar to something another one has done before, do it with style, and that’s what Remedy has done…
The action segments are very well done, I genuinely got nervous every time an axe murdering Taken appeared, and even when they weren’t on screen, sometimes even bushes gave me a scare… The combat system, with the light+bullets approach, works well to enhance this feeling, and the only failure of this system was that the cutscene system always showed where/when the enemies were approaching, which deterred a bit from the “what the hell is that” feeling.
All in all, although the game has lots of faults (including a kind of WTF ending, missing boss fights, terrible facial animation, etc), it was a very good game and I enjoyed playing it very much… Remedy once again that they’re the only ones to be trusted with psycho-plot creation and development…
Unfortunately, I’m not seeing Alan Wake becoming an iconic figure in videogames like Max Payne was… We liked Max Payne, we wanted to be Max Payne… Alan Wake is just a big pansy that writes and whines a lot… 🙂
Anyway, time for numbers:
Alan Wake
May 3rd was the release day for Painted Black’s debug album “Cold Comfort”… and what an album that is!
Painted Black was elected for 3 years in a row “Best Unsigned Act” on the Portuguese heavy metal magazine “Loud!”, and listening to the finished album, it’s easy to understand why.
Categorizing their music is hard, as it is a mixture of styles and influences; you have the agressiveness of death metal, combined with the melancholy and melody of doom metal and several others in-between…
The overall result is 55 minutes of the best music I’ve heard in a long time, capable of triggering emotions of an unusual range.
Special mention must be done to the first track (“Via Dolorosa”), which has an absolute kick-ass feel to it, and the last one (“Inevitability”), which is an extremely strong melodic and melancholic piece.
So head on to http://www.myspace.com/blacktapestry to listen to it, and don’t waste time ordering it, so that you support good music everywhere (this way, we might get rid of all the terrible “comercial” music out there!) 🙂
To the Painted Black lads, I say: Well done… very well done indeed! 🙂
Lately, I’ve been playing “Drawn – The Painted Tower” with my wife, and I must say that once again, the guys at Big Fish Games have done it… And by it, I mean create a casual game that has me entertained for some hours… 🙂
“Drawn – The Painted Tower” is a departure of their usual “find-the-object” gameplay system present in the “Mystery Case Files” series, being more akin to the “static-screen” graphical adventures of old that to that gameplay mechanisms…
It has the usual puzzle-solving (align colors, do a tangram, etc) and graphical adventure (use object A in spot B). My only complaint is that it’s a bit easy so far (haven’t finished it yet)… I’ve only used the hint system once (and I regreted instantly, since I should have tried harder), and although it’s a nice touch, I wonder if it doesn’t spoil the game a bit (having that help there, without any apparent drawbacks seems like counter-game, but they probably know what their player-base wants, since they’ve been doing this sort of game for a long time now).
The game theme is also different from their usual fare: a girl is captive in a tower and we have to find out who she is and how to free her… and while the story is kind of simple, it has that fairytale vibe that seems easy to achieve, but isn’t.
Visually, they eschewed their usual “realistic painting” look for a more “hand-drawn” approach, which works better for this kind of game… in some moments, it kind of reminds me of Tim Burton’s work (for example, the daytime clocktower painting).
All in all, it’s a very fun and entertaining game, that sadly is a bit easy (which makes it a great introduction to the genre for newcomers, to be honest)… and for $7 USD, it’s a steal! 🙂
Happy gaming!
Finally I got a chance watch “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”… After the reviews I’ve saw about the movie, I had low expectations for this, so I was quite surprised to have so much fun with it…
Again, it’s the usual Terry Gilliam mixture of insanity, good storytelling, and above all, leaving stuff to the imagination of the viewer…
The film is as good for what it shows, as it is about what it implies… most of the tale of the Doctor himself is hidden and implied, and as such, we can build his entire story in our minds, which for an imaginative person is very cool…
The reviews were a tad cruel to this one (I wonder what exactly were they expecting, to be honest), but for me, the movie hit the mark, with superb acting (even the workaround with Johnny Depp, Collin Farrel and Jude Law to offset Heath Ledger’s death), and more importantly, a non-conventional story, which seems to go in the direction of the “love-conquers-all” persuasion, but takes a U-Turn and goes to some very dark and unexpected paths…
All in all, I liked it very much and strongly recommend it to everyone…
To finish up this post, just a nify link: http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html … This is for programming geeks like myself, but it’s a good laugh for those… 🙂
Hey everyone…
I know, I know, I’ve been quiet lately… Reason for that was that my World of Warcraft account got hacked last week, and in trying to find how that happened, I didn’t trust any of my computers to log on to anything… :\
Still haven’t figured out how I got hacked (probably a well hidden worm, trojan or keylogger), so I decided to just format all my PCs…
Anyway, I’m back and been super-busy with my all-purpose editor…
Lifting the veil a bit:
What you’re seeing is the 2d map component editor…
What my editor does is handle “components” that have “entities”, which in turn have “properties”. These properties can be class-driven (so out of the box, my “2d objects” have a size, position, etc, etc… You can see the property editor in the right lower corner of the screen.) or custom added by the user.
This type of system has lots of nifty advantages… one of them is that the properties can be edited in a series of you, from GUI components on the property editor, to directly through the viewport. Another advantage is the fact that the undo system becomes way easier to build… I have unlimited undos/redos on this editor, which will make it easier for content creators to access… I’ll probably make a post about my property system in the future, since it has a lot of nifty macro tricks so that adding a property is easy.
All the system is built using the Win32 API (so no MFC, .NET, Widgets or any kind of external tech). Reason for this is that in the past I’ve used my own library (too much work to add stuff, looked ugly, was unwieldy and unnatural) or wxWidgets (and I usually came midway through the project thinking I was fighting wxWidgets more than the actual editor code).
It has been a fight getting this to work at all (since I just use the Internet as source of information on Win32 API), but I think it’s well worth it… I can create a new control type very fast nowadays, after the initial “Where the hell is this?!” or “How can I do that?!?!?!”…
The project managment code was also a bitch to get right, since I wanted this editor not only to encapsulate asset design, but also the project managment part of it. For example, when you want to add a 3d model to the system, you don’t just dump the file in a specific directory, you import it to the project, where he does all sorts of nifty things, before storing it in an easily parsed XML format (which is also good to merge using CVS tools). Later, you can invoke the “compile” command which will turn the files into binaries, for faster loading, etc.
It can also launch external applications (for example, the game executable, so the user can see how the level is playing, for example), or text editors (to edit scripts and such).
All of this took a bit in creating, but I’m very happy with the results so far…
Hopefully I can lift the veil a bit on the inner workings when I get some time to write some tutorials… 🙂
Until then, catch you all later!