12 in 2012

January 16, 2012 8:30 pmLeave a Comment

So I’m currently enrolled as a student (again) at Full Sail University, a place where education happens at a very accelerated pace. One of the challenges of attending school here is finding time to do anything else that isn’t related to school work. Classes occur everyday of the week and around the clock and it certainly isn’t unusual to find students in class at 1am or 3am working hard on assignments or projects. For some reason this kind of felt like an opportunity to challenge myself and so I shall. I’ve decided that I will attempt to develop 12 games (one game each month) this year and have them published at the end of each month on the Windows Phone market place. Now anyone who’s been through Full Sail will easily tell you that certainly won’t be easy to do, but you never know until you try (and I’m certain something similar has been tried before). That being said, I’d like to introduce the first of the 12 games – The Escape.

The Escape

Early screen

Now first off I’d like to note that the image is from a version still in development and that its also a little bit of a cheat. Work on The Escape started before 2012, but I want to use it as a first game because it will kind of set a standard for the remaining 11 games to come. If everything goes according to plan, a finished and polished version of this game should be up on the Windows Market place by the end of this month. That being said, The Escape is similar to most tower defense games in that its about building and repelling waves of enemies. This particular version has you control a ship which has three defenses. The defenses can be changed and upgraded to suite the situation. I won’t say much more about it because its always easier to just see the game as opposed to reading about it, so expect more updates soon!

Posted in game design, projects, wp7Tagged ,

Star Wars The Old Republic (more ranting)

January 6, 2012 6:50 amLeave a Comment

So as I’ve said before, I appreciate the amount of so called “bold new direction” comments that SWTOR has garnered, but lets be serious here for a moment. The game has been out for less than a month, but somehow its managed to land itself (at the time of me writing this) a Critic Score of 87% and a User score of 6.1/10. Leaving aside the user score (for reasons that should be obvious), the critics who are giving the game scores well above 80% must really be something special.

They have somehow managed to come to the conclusion that the game deserves this kind of score. Usually one would imagine when a review is done, the reviewer has managed to touch a greater majority of the content available, if not all of it. I find it rather hard to believe that people have actually managed to do this in the short span of less than three weeks (some sites have even branded the game as MMO of the year). Now in all honesty, if other MMO developers out there had the kind of resources that EA has undoubtedly blessed Bioware with (voice talent among others), would they really be branding the game as something new and refreshing and worthy of an 87% average?

Posted in gamingTagged , , ,

Gaming laptop check-list

January 2, 2012 10:13 pmLeave a Comment

Prior to building a desktop which serves as both a development machine and a gaming powerhouse, my main machine has always been a laptop. I loved the mobility, the slim keyboards, the relatively low noise output and a list of other things that I personally felt were important. Now a few years down the line I’m on the desktop bandwagon and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d always prefer a desktop for work and gaming, although I’d never abandon my love of laptops. That being said, I recently (about a month ago) acquired a new laptop for school and gaming purposes – the beastly Asus G74SX-3DE (I’ve always wondered who names these things).

Now having used laptops for a while, I have a list of requirements/expectations for laptops which has slowly grown over the years. I’ve been putting this small list together based of new technologies and past experiences and I have to say, the G74SX has really managed to impress on all fronts. First off, as you can see from the specs, it is a really high end gaming laptop with some very impressive hardware. But of course when it comes to laptops and most mobile devices in general, hardware alone shouldn’t be the determining factor when deciding whether or not to invest in a particular device. Based of my list, which I do admit is based off personal preference but also includes reasonable points as to why the G74SX is a winner (at least I think so), I’d like to share some key points which I think really make the G74SX great.

First of all the hardware itself. There isn’t much to be said about it, but all you need to do is look at the G74SX specs and I’d be surprised if you were not impressed. Its a powerful machine and so far the one game that has managed to bring it to its knees (albeit in the ever so taxing 3D Stereoscopic mode) has been The Witcher 2. I will admit though that I was running both those games on the highest possible visual settings (Ubersampling disabled on The Witcher 2). But like I previously mentioned, hardware alone may not be the most important as that seems to be standard in high end machines.

Second on the list is input methodology*. First and foremost is the keyboard layout and style. The G74SX has a complete keyboard as opposed to most standard laptop keyboards. For those who can’t see the difference, the full laptop keyboard features a number pad to the right, where as most standard laptop keyboards don’t. From a gaming perspective, this would be important for obvious reasons (more bind-able keys, quicker access, convenience e.t.c.) and from a developer perspective, having a number pad helps for similar reasons too. I found that for some this is more of a personal preference and I personally prefer the full keyboard to the standard laptop one. One other notable thing about the G74SX keyboard is that it is can be very silent to type on provided you’re not smashing away at the keys, so typing in a crowded library or other places that are usually meant to be silent won’t bother people around you.

The G74SX ships with a five button mouse (left, right, middle mouse buttons and two thumb buttons) all of which are programmable. For most games that sufficient but some people may find that mice with more buttons such as the Razer Naga are better suited to their gaming needs, especially MMOs. One downside to the G74SX is the number of USB ports it has. I found that some games are best played using other forms of input besides keyboard and mouse and in some cases a combination of keyboard mouse and some other peripheral (such as a Joystick or a 360 controller). The G74SX only has three USB ports which in reality is only two because more of then not, you’re mouse is always going to take up one of those three ports. So with only two ports left, you can connect other devices such as controllers or USB headsets, or in my case, devices such as phones or tablet PCs used for development or even just for recharging. As you can see, that’s a lot of devices with few ports to host them all.

The last major thing on the list is one I find most important, air cooling system. Most gaming laptops and laptops in general have all the hot air generated in the laptop blown out the bottom of the laptop. Now as you may imagine, gaming on a laptop generates a lot of heat, and that heat needs to be expelled from the laptop which means if the air vents are at the bottom, all that heat will go straight to your lap (unless you’re using the laptop on a table or have some cooling accessory to mitigate the heat). I’ve always wondered why it is laptop manufacturers keep placing the air vents at the bottom. Someone at Asus must have been thinking about it too because the G74SX has its air vents facing out the back of the laptop so your laps (and other more important reproductive tools) don’t get cooked during peak usage. This means that you’ll experience little if any discomfort from heat generated and you can actually USE THE LAPTOP ON YOUR LAP!

So to summarize, if you’re planning to get a laptop for gaming purposes and intend for it to serve other needs as well, these are some things you may want to consider (some of which I didn’t discuss):

Keyboard layout
- Full size vs. laptop size
Mouse input
- How many buttons accompany the touch pad and what kind of gestures does the touch pad support (e.g. scrolling, zooming, rotation e.t.c.)
USB ports
- How many does it have vs. how many do you need
Air circulation and noise
- Which way does the air flow out
- How noisy does it get during peak performance
Display options
- My personal preference for laptops has always been at least a 17″ display with at least a 1920×1080 resolution
- Does it support 3D content and if so, does it do it on natively or do you have to connect to an external monitor to view 3D content. (Its worth noting that the G74SX-3DE supports 3D content natively)
Battery life
- While it is a gaming laptop and it is designed to run highly resource intensive stuff while connected to an external power supply, its still a laptop and I feel that it should at least give two hours of battery life if its not plugged in and running games or movies.

To wrap up, I think the Asus G74SX (3DE or not) is one of the best gaming laptops out there. Solid hardware and great features and it really complies with my personal checklist and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a gaming laptop.

*I’d like to note that in the middle of writing this, my dishwasher exploded open with all its glory and filled up the kitchen with water and soap, my opinion from here on end may be extremely biased towards dishwashers if I mention any.

Posted in gaming, hardware, laptopsTagged , ,

New Year and new theme

December 26, 2011 9:30 pmLeave a Comment

Well I’ve decided to make it a tradition. At the end/beginning of every year, a mandatory theme change will be enforced. I was hoping to find a dark theme among the very well done library of themes available for word press, but I think I’ll stick with this for now. That being said, Happy New Year to everyone out there.

Posted in misc., pockles.com

Star Wars The Old Republic (from a PvP perspective)

December 22, 2011 6:11 pmLeave a Comment

So, like the countless others out there who all jumped onto the Star Wars – The Old Republic (TOR from here on) bandwagon, I found myself presented with a rather unpleasant message. In order to continue playing TOR on my free 30 day game time, I need to provide my credit card information as select a recurring payment plan (or activate a time card). Now I’m not going to be one to fuel the fire that will probably ignite on the official TOR forum, but my main issue with the game right now stems from some very strange game play design decisions that have left me very perplexed.

First off, I’d like to say upfront that my main goal in TOR was to engage in organized and structured player versus player combat (or PvP). In retrospect, this would seem to be going in the opposite direction that Bioware has trying to innovate and that would be on the story side of things. Presenting authentic, believable and unique story driven entertainment in an massive multiplayer online game seems odd to me simply because some of the best (if not all) story driven games are single player experiences which shine the most in single player. Trying to replicate that in an environment that has thousands of players would probably be quite challenging (then again, that’s just my biased opinion).

So far I’ve been playing a Bounty Hunter/Mercenary and as mentioned before, my main focus has been PvP. Now my experience with the game so far outside of PvP has left me feeling like I’m playing a single player RPG that happens to be in an massive multiplayer online world. The questing remains true to typical Bioware RPGs which involve lengthy voice dialogues and player choice that may affect the outcome of the quest and indeed the player’s overall progression. In a sense, this is innovative or at least unique from most other MMOs which have the standard quest sequence of talk to NPC, go kill X number of Y and collect this and that. I feel that the player versus environment (PvE) side of things delivers a refreshing experience and keeps you wanting to do more because of the great voice acting and story, but as mentioned my issues with the game stem from PvP which I’ll elaborate on.

The first and biggest issue that I find very strange is that Bioware opted to remove level brackets from their war zones (for those who don’t know, a the war zone is simply a PvP match player’s can sign up for and fight against each other). What this means is that the war zones consist of a very broad range of character levels (expect to find level 10 characters being put up against level 50 characters). In order to level the playing field, they introduced a bolstering system, which would in a sense normalize the stats for lower players to allow them to compete with higher level players. In theory, this means that they would be able to give and take more damage. In reality, the disparity between the abilities accessible to players at different levels usually means that the players of higher level have much greater chances of coming out on top on all fronts (healing, damage output, kills e.t.c.). That point could be argued upon but from what I’ve seen and experienced, any player at level 50 who knows what they’re doing will more than likely best a lower level player.

The next thing I found very strange was the lack of crowd control immunity. Player’s can consistently and constantly get bombarded with various crowd control abilities and receive no immunity from them (which the exception of class abilities which may free them for a very brief period of time). This is exacerbated by the lack of level brackets due to higher level players having a wider array of crowd control abilities and lower level players having very few. I would have thought immunity (even if for two or three seconds) after being affected by a crowd control ability would have been a very obvious thing to implement but I’m guessing that must have slipped the design team or they may have deemed it unnecessary.

The last thing I found very peculiar (at least for me it was) was the collision detection, or lack of it. There have been various discussions about feedback in TOR and one of the more lauded feedback systems in the game is how light saber wielding characters actually deflect blaster rounds and make physical contact with other light sabers when engaged in combat as opposed to the traditional MMO system of just having each character do their own swing animations without any awareness of their targets incoming swings (watch this video to see it in action). I thought that was pretty cool, until I realized that players and non player characters can walk through each other. That’s right. They can physically walk through each other as if made of air. Now there could be various reasonable explanations for that (eliminating potential for clogged up passage ways and crowded NPC areas), but it still does feel very odd when other players and NPCs just pass straight through you.

Anyway, just my initial thoughts on the game. Many would say that some of these “issues” will be addressed, but I think that when a game has been in development for five plus years and in public testing for six odd months (correct me if I’m wrong there), some of these things should not even make it into the final build of the game at launch. To anyone that is only interested in PvP and has been considering TOR as an option, I’d recommend thinking very hard about it before buying the game, at least in its current state. You may end up very disappointed.

Posted in game design, gaming

Continued work

November 28, 2011 2:50 pmLeave a Comment

So I’m continuing to do this WP7 development thing. Making games and apps and now enrolled in a Masters degree, my work load has pretty much doubled. Some of the stuff still on the back burner includes Left 4 Dead 2D. To all the people who saw and liked the video on YouTube, my apologies. I’ve procrastinated for a long time on development on that and as soon as I find the time and incentive to continue with the project I’ll post updates as they happen.

Posted in Uncategorized

Windows Phone 7(.5) Frustration

October 19, 2011 7:29 pmLeave a Comment

So another rant incoming. We’re coming up on the one year since the launch of Windows Phone 7 and as both a developer and an end-user, I feel like the platform still lacks many things that other smart phones offer. I believe Microsoft had wanted to do something different and unique, I can understand that but sometimes you have to stop and wonder what if. What if Windows Phone 7 had been initially released with all the features of mango (7.5) instead of waiting over half a year for it. Why were such seemingly important features (copy paste, multitasking, conversations e.t.c.) relegated to a patch-after-release category? Now there’s no fanboy-ism going on here. Everyday I use my Windows Phone 7 for many different things like gaming, e-mail, web browsing, Netflix e.t.c., but at the same time I also have a ViewSonic g-Tablet and during late nights when I indulge in the various forms of entertainment and activities it provides, I keep noticing how many things I don’t have on my Windows Phone 7. I’m sure there are people out there who have used an Android or iOS device and found that Windows Phone 7 still seems to be lacking something.

Posted in wp7

Quite Irritated

October 8, 2011 12:37 pm1 Comment

I’m fairly positive that I’m not the only one who has heard of, seen or experienced this growing trend in the gaming industry that leaves PC gamers very upset. Before I get farther into it, picture this scenario: you go to Best Buy or Sears or Wal Mart and buy a DVD Player, TV, Keyboard or any kind of such device. Take it home, plug it in and find it doesn’t work. The first thing you’d probably think of doing is taking it straight back to where ever you bought it in order to get a refund or a replacement. Now lets move to the digital space. You see a game you think will be great based on trailers, previews and the like and go to pre-order it from your preferred digital distributor (e.g. Steam, Direct2Drive e.t.c.). When the game is finally available, it turns out to be a anything but what was advertised when you made the purchase (a broken piece of crap to be blunt and frank). In this case, it is very rare to get a refund for the money you spent and I’m still unsure why. What I’m trying to highlight here is the growing trend of game companies releasing broken games for PC users while ensuring that their console counterparts receive almost perfect versions of the product due to certification requirements by the console makers.

Now I understand that the PC is whole different beast. There is an almost infinite number of configurations that your game will run under and ensuring consistency across the board can be a monumental challenge. That being said, PC users are not stupid (at least in these cases, there certainly wont be any PBKACs). When a game is released for PC and an issue with the game that no one could have easily foreseen pops up, people will be understanding and tolerate it. But when there are glaring issues that could have easily been avoided had bug testing for the game been done properly, players will get upset, irritated and angry at the developers for coming out with such products. I’m not going to be vague here, I’ll personally say that over the past year or two I’ve experienced such releases (Rage, Brink, Dragon Rising, Red Orchestra 2 to name a few). What I don’t understand is, if these issues eventually get fixed (which they do in most cases), why on earth would you let your products out the door knowing these issues exist? Its very hard to believe that the developers gave the OK-GO oblivious to the facts. When you do this you’re pretty much spitting in the face of your consumers and being very dishonest about it.

So going back to what I said right at the beginning of this post, if you went and bought something in a store and it didn’t work, I doubt you’d be pleased in any way (not at the store of the maker of the device you purchased). Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and realize that we don’t want broken games on the PC. Its difficult to accomplish but then again no one said it was going easy. For the love of everything good about gaming, TEST YOUR DAMN GAMES THOROUGHLY BEFORE YOU RELEASE THEM ON PC.

Posted in gaming

Development update

September 26, 2011 8:52 pmLeave a Comment

Hey thanks to all the guys that wanted to help over with Two Man Studio LLC. We currently have an artist doing some great work and the latest project, The Escape will be done soon. I’m aiming for sometime in October if all goes according to plan.

Posted in game design, projects

Looking for 2-D Artists (Left 4 Dead 2D)

August 5, 2011 6:17 pmLeave a Comment

I’m currently looking for any artists who would be able to produce some high quality art for one of my projects (Left 4 Dead 2D). If you are interested, please feel free to contact me!

Posted in projects