Monthly Archive

So in my own mind, I beat Gears yesterday. When I say “beat” I mean I was on a train and all of a sudden a Berserker appeared out of nowhere. Mind you, I was sick of Berserker fights after the second one, and I had just taken down a Brumack ten, maybe fifteen minutes earlier. So as soon as the Berserker appeared, my first thought was, “Aren’t I done yet?!” and then I realized, “Yes, yes I am.” And I exited the game.

Now you may be thinking, “But Dan! That’s not beating the game! You’re chickening out!” Quite the contrary. If there’s one thing I hate in games, it’s recycled material. Remember Prince of Persia: Warrior Within? Remember how it really only had 2 boss battles, 3 if you decided to fight the Dahaka instead? These new chapters in Gears are kind of like that, only more irritating. I wouldn’t say they’re imbalanced; you can only go so far with 5 major kinds of enemies. However, in terms of storytelling, the pacing is awful. Nothing important happens. You go to Fenix’s house. All of a sudden, you leave Fenix’s house. Then you spend the next three hours going through that whole, “Oh we were here but now we have to go there to fix what’s wrong here” format that Gears does over and over and over again. It’s almost like an episode of “Seinfeld,” and Dom’s AI sure doesn’t help much. I actually saw him spinning around at one point. SPINNING! As in ROTATING! I actually had to shoot him to get him to stop. I really prefer being in the group of four, and whenever I hear Fenix say “Me and Dom will go this way” I want to stop playing then and there. Dom’s AI is just THAT BAD.

So basically, the plot is redundant, the bosses are recycled, and the only thing that mixed up the action was the Brumack, and despite the fact that he would have made an excellent final boss, he wasn’t. All that buildup going back to the “Mad World” trailer for nothing.

I will play to the actual end at some point in the near future, but for right now, I’m too pissed off at the game to keep going. It seriously never ends.

A warning to anybody who is a “friend” of mine on Facebook.

If you send me a “My Heroes Ability” request, from this point on, I will remove you as a facebook friend. This application is nothing but spam. Garbage. A waste of valuable internets. This also goes for “Vampires” “Werewolves” and any other application that survives solely on invites. I’m finished hitting the ignore button. I get like 5 of these invites every day and I have to hit ignore on every single one. I have other ways to waste my time.

Check it!

This is actually pretty exciting since now I have a place to dump concept art, screenshots, trailers, new Causation pages, and more when I need to. Dumping them here just ends up with them getting lost in the archives. In a few months time, I guarantee that site will be FILLED with content. Old and new stuff alike. In the meantime, you can find the link up above and on the Links Page.

So yeah. That old theme? Gone. I got sick of the flowers on the side. They just didn’t fit the whole “NightRise” motif. So I’ve gone with a cleaner look. White background, slight changes to the top logo… so far I can’t see anything totally wrong with this theme. Plus it’s good to have the finalized logo up here. And damn has that logo gone through a lot of iterations. Well, at least I finally gave the final touches to the concept art on the right side of the header. Took me long enough.

You know I try not to make this blog personal, I really do. It just so happens that in the last week I’ve been thinking too much, and I mean WAY too much. The last post I made ended with me ranting about my first published game and how I got screwed on it. Well, today I have another story to tell you along the same lines, but this is one that goes down an entirely different road.

About a year and a half maybe two years after “Street Gang” was released, I came up with the idea for a game that combined Texas Hold’em and Tetris. Shortly afterward, my friend introduced me to a programmer at our school who was interested in getting into games. He liked the idea of the game and we began working on it together, with me on graphics and sound, him on programming.  Only a couple weeks later we had a very playable alpha. A lot of the features didn’t work perfectly (like the custom skinning), and there were still bugs that needed to be worked out, but when I had my friends and family play-test it, I couldn’t pull them away from it. My little cousin actually grabbed the table when I tried to pull his chair away from the computer after playing for about half an hour.

I’m not going to go into detail about this next part, but suffice it to say, my programmer quit and I never got the source code. Plus, nobody else was interested in programming it and at the time I did not have the time to learn Java to the extent that he had programmed the game. So I shelved it, deciding to pick it up during or after college.

Fast forward exactly four years. Voidstar Creations has announced “Poker Smash” for XBox Live Arcade, to be released soon. Now I know pretty much everyone who’s reading this is all, “You are so full of s. No way this is the same game you came up with four years ago.” Well, it is. Only problem? They did it a LOT better, and I really want to play it. It’s like someone there had read a word about it four years ago, forgot it, but then subconsciously remembered it later, solved all the problems I was having with it, and gave it HD graphics with incredible particle effects to boot. How am I supposed to feel about that? That’s like a major slap in the face.

I hate to admit it but my 2D Design professor was right: there is no such thing as creativity. I have a friend here at SCAD who came up the exact idea for “Crank” years before it was released. So seriously, take my advice. Whenever you come up with an idea, copyright it, either professionally or the “poor man’s” way (send it to yourself in a dated envelope and don’t open it). It doesn’t matter if it’s a piece of crap. Someone out there is just waiting to rip you off.

That’s pretty much what it comes down to. Yes, there are a few basic concepts that should always be observed: art, balance, fun-factor, but how you achieve those changes every day and I must admit it is difficult to keep up. In the old days, it was fun to watch a little yellow circle eat pellets and run away from ghosts. That all ended with the Pac Man Christmas Special (apologies to those who enjoy it). Then FPS’s were fun, but then they were all “too short.” As hard as it is to make a game fun, it’s even harder to make a long game fun, because at some point you’re going to run out of new things to throw at the player and keep them interested in playing. I prefer short and sweet, but then again, if I’m going to pay $60 for a game, it better have some substance.

I recently finished the book “Persuasive Games” by Ian Bogost. It’s an excellent book, very dense, very informative, and if you haven’t read it, I suggest you do. During the course of the book, Mr. Bogost explores the underlying persuasive and/or political themes of many games, from “GTA: San Andreas” to “Darfur is Dying,” as well as his own “Howard Dean for Iowa Game.” Interestingly, though, nowhere in the book does Professor Bogost hint at any of the games he mentions being any fun. The fun-factor doesn’t factor into the equation. Now I’m reading Raph Koster’s “Theory of Fun” for my Game Crit class and am already halfway through it. Though not as dense as Professor Bogost’s, Mr. Koster’s book does shed some light on what makes games fun and how to keep them fresh as they go on. Yet, by not naming any games in the course of the book, Mr. Koster allows the reader to subconsciously attach his themes to the games the reader has played. Plus, there are pictures every other page, so while not nearly as intricately thought-out or written as “Persuasive Games,” “Theory of Fun” still sheds light on many mysteries of good game design.

Which brings me back to the topic on hand. Raph Koster’s book applies to all games, old and new, and thus covers more general ground that has been, can be, and will probably always be accepted. Meanwhile, Ian Bogost’s book covers specific themes and only current games, mainly of the Indie/Casual/Serious Game variety, and applies his own theories of game design to them. Yet, many themes mentioned in Koster’s book would create games Bogost would probably find too simple. Alternatively, themes mentioned in Bogost’s book would create games Koster would probably find too complicated. It’s hard to determine if there’s a middle ground, an alleyway between the fun and the enticing. Can a game purely meant to be fun persuade us to make a difference in the world? Or, are games that are just fun too watered down to mean anything more to us than another high score to set? In “Persuasive Games,” many of the games mentioned don’t sound like fun, and aren’t really meant to be fun in the first place, since the situations they cover can be, at times, very serious. But who’s to say a Serious Game can’t be fun too? Why shouldn’t the same concepts in Koster’s book be applied to the games from Bogost’s? Wouldn’t that make for a more fulfilling experience?

Moving away from the books but staying on the same topic, why is it that everything I once read in books, articles, and the like, is now obsolete? Has game design really changed that much in the last ten years? Am I running on an old version of the software, so to speak, and in dire need of upgrading my OS? I feel like I’m questioning everything I once learned from “Game Design: Secrets of the Sages” and the articles I used to read daily up on GameDev.Net. The concepts are the same, but their application is different, like if someone suddenly changed the Copy function from CTRL-C to CTRL-Y and didn’t tell me.

It definitely doesn’t help that I haven’t really made a game in the last eight years and have mostly just been studying graphic design and 3D Modeling to apply to eventual game creation. “Street Gang” was a success of naivety. I allowed my publisher to control me and basically steal my 20-25% completed project at the age of 13. Since then I just haven’t wanted to go through it all again. I was excited to see it up for sale online, but I was scared when I saw it at CompUSA on the bargain rack. Not in the bin, thank god, but even still, I knew no one over the age of 5 would play my game, or even enjoy it, or even bother to keep an eye out for any future games I might work on. I wanted to stomp it and break the CD held inside the weak, plastic jewel case. I was embarrassed. I hadn’t even created something remotely good. I could say it’s my publisher’s fault, and that wouldn’t be far from the truth, but in reality I have to face up to the fact that I made a crappy game.

Here’s the part that worries me. “NightRise” will technically be my second game, and even though I’ve now had three years of art school and am in my second year of intense education in game design, I don’t know if I’ve grown. The “Street Gang” issue has been holding me back for a long, long time. After it, I went into advertising design and focused on Photoshop and Illustrator while designing “NightRise” on the side… and never doing anything with it. Now that I’ve started, I can’t help but wonder, am I designing like me now, or designing like me eight years ago? How much of it “old theory” and how much of it is “modern theory?” Is it fun but meaningless, meaningful but boring, or does it run down that alley in between?

I am now 21, have been designing games for 15 and a half years, and am about to head back down to Savannah on Sunday. Let’s see how these next two decades go.