Sins of a Solar Empire Game Critique #4

The UI of Sins

As I mentioned last time I originally was not going to even do a entry on the UI but after some reconsidering and some poking and prodding from my friends its time for a quick look.

For anything RTS or 4X type of game the UI (user interface) is critical. On the RTS side of things awkward controls can at best make things a chore and at worst make it impossible to play. 4X wise disorganized menu systems, cluttered displays and little thought to screen navigation flows makes you feel not only that you are doing battle for the fate of the universe but also with some sort evil sci-fi themed version of Microsoft Excel.  As a hybrid of both 4X and RTS and additionally given the scale of the game having the right UI is critical.

I am not going to get into exhaustive detail of which buttons do what or how every piece of feedback to the player is delivered. What am going to cover is how the UI design of Sins is slick, approachable and functional. So to that end I am going to start with sound.

Sound

Yes sound. Different games have different UI’s and Sins like many of other titles it is related to have different voice clips to update the player on what is occurring. Each unit when it is produced has a few different sound clips that play as do many other major events. The main point of the audio is let you know that something has happened in your empire.

So you have been alerted to something, your capital ship of doom is done, your planet is being bombed or perhaps you have discovered a hidden technology on one of your planets. How do you get to the appropriate screen or area of the map to interact with associated audio alert?

Reports

As shown above are four boxes that are reports for Planets, Production, Diplomacy or Threats. These four categories highlight and report nearly every event of consequence in your empire.  When an event occurs a picture related to the event will appear in the appropriate box, then click on the box and a list will open of current and past events you can then select and instantly go to the related map area or screen.  It’s simple, elegant and works so your when you hear “Heathens approach one of our worlds!”, you see a icon of approaching ships in the Threats box you click on it, Select the text “Enemies are approaching Tirol” and boom you are there and you can prepare to meet the incoming fleet. Then say you hear “We are exiles no longer” alerting you that a capital ship is finished production, click on the production box and away you go. Lastly the audio does not get annoying thanks to a range of clips and if more than one event happens at one time the audio does not pile up just one clip plays and you still receive the standard text notifications as well as the event being show in the report boxes. In this way you can monitor your whole empire while your attention is somewhere else. Vital is the logging of past events so while you are occupied elsewhere a few more events can occur and you can still easily access a past event. A non intrusive system that actively generates feedback is vital to easily track something as involved as Sins and the combination of audio and reports keeps the action moving.

So you have a great system to react to events in your empire but what about being proactive?

Tactical UI

Battle moment to moment commands or the “micro” part of the game using RTS terminology is kept to the a minimum in Sins. You can move and attack with the mouse and even then you don’t move all that fast so rapid micro won’t win battles but there is still some opproutunity for strategic play. A nice touch is when a movment order is given a line will highlight between a ship and its destination.

The easiest way to manage your fleet is to marquee select the lot and form a fleet with the appropriate type of ship designated as fleet leader. With a carrier leading a fleet it will stay at the edge of gravity well and let its strike craft do the dirty work or if a Captial ship is leading the whole fleet will mix it up. This is discussion about UI not combat so the takeaway is this. With a few key strokes and a marquee select you can change the behavior of your fleet using the units themselves rather than more UI. Ironclad wisely did this to free the player’s attention and input to the rest of game and not get mired in play by play combat.

Also I find handy the three arcs around each planet, rolling over any arc will give you the breakdown of what is around that gravity well. Further the blocks represent strength of the forces and/or structures in the gravity well providing an at a glance tactical overview.

The Action Grid

Up there is the appropriately named action grid. Planets, structure and ship commands are all issued with and indicated by this small panel. Dependant on current selection the contents of these buttons will change. This is excellent UI design rather than have a bunch of sidebars or sub menus why not just have one where the elements change? It reduces visual clutter greatly and for the hardcore greatly increases the speed that you can issue commands. The action grid buttons match a group of hotkeys with “q” being the top left most button. So you can select with mouse on with your right hand and issue commands with the left. I have not got deep into the hot keys but I am sure there are many configurations available.

The Empire Tree

Next is the empire tree which perhaps wins the prize for the best name for a piece of UI. It’s based on the collapsible folder structure similar to any operating system which as this is a PC game is fair ball. The empire tree fulfills two great functions. Firstly it enables another place to click and interact with units, planets and structures without having the main view switch to that part of the map. A double click and you are there in a flash but you could say be directing a battle while queuing up production on a planet on the other side of galaxy.  Myself I only use it for organizing my fleet as there are some great group select commands that work the same as in any PC application (eg CTRL and Shift group select). The empire tree while really helpful is more of a secondary abstraction of the main game but vital not only to play efficiently but not be feel overloaded in directing the game.

The usual suspects

Along top of the screen are game options access to your research, diplomacy and black market screens then ending on the right most top edge with counters for your resources. Of note for the Entrenchment expansion Ironclad elected to move most of the black market menu to live on the main screen. As you need to trade resources frequently and its nice to have a visual indicator of the next pirate attack this was absolutely a positive move.

Lastly you can click on any planet which will give you the functionality for the planet and its associated structures in the action grid or alternately just click on the structures themselves and you can do this in empire tree and on the main view.

Preventing info overload.

For the cavalcade of stats in Sins rollover info cards abound. They zip out of right most section of the lower UI bar when you roll over a unit, planet or structure. This is pretty minor but also a good example of clean UI design. Where is the info? Roll over it and it shows otherwise it does not.  There are not a lot of situations where you would be curious of the stats of a play element if you were not looking at it. So the UI design lesson is if you don’t need permanent UI why not make it dynamic?

Wrapping it all up.

So in the end you have one set of UI elements in form of audio cues and status reports to let you react quickly to events. Next you have an abstract form of all of the interacactable elements in the form of the empire tree that functions independently of the main graphical view thus enabling the player to effect one area of play while looking at another. The action grid keeps everything centralized and is optimized with an intuitive layout of hot keys to enable you quickly issue commands. The main viewport overlaps some functionality with the empire tree and provides another way to access units, planets, structures manage combat and well pretty much everything else.  All of this together keeps the action Sins at on average two or three actions apart from each other so you can spend most of the time actually affecting gameplay not navigating menus. One review I read of Sins said you will spend hours in front of Sins and not even notice. This degree of flow or immersion would simply not be possible Sins without quality UI.  The only gripe I have is that it does not scale correctly at higher resolutions which hopefully will be corrected in the next expansion.

Speaking of wrapping it all up next time the last entry on Sins where its come from and where its going.

Sins of Solar Empire Game Critique #3

The Same but Different: The Three Races of Sins

Firstly a quick apology to you all who have been following this series on Sins. My computer was in dire need of an upgrade and all did in fact not go according to plan. I have however learned some interesting things about CPU and motherboard compatibility.

But the extra time did give me a chance to formulate how I was going to approach this entry which is as tilted about the three playable races in Sins of a Solar empire.   So part of the title of this entry is “The Same but Different” for two reasons the races are the same but different from each other and also the same but different from other playable teams from other games. This entry is the longest yet but if you are a designer or and RTS/4X fan you should find some stuff interesting and/or some stuff you really disagree with.

In the beginning…

So first some history from the genre using two stand out titles from days gone by. The first is the classic Starcraft the second one of the first RTS games in the modern sense Dune II. I chose these two titles as they are giants in the genre and predate Sins by quite a bit.

When you have three of anything in any sort of game the differentiation is usually the tough slow guy, the fast weak guy and the all rounder. Bringing resource costs in to this tried and true differentiation technique in games is apparent in Starcraft with the Protoss being the expensive hard hitters, the Zerg being cheap but weaker and the Terrans being the all rounder. Perhaps after that last sentence South Korea may invade due to flagrant oversimplification but its accurate enough for us here.

For Dune II many of the units were shared among all three factions the Harkonnen, Atreides and Ordos. What they did have however were their special units that were narratively inspired. I will quickly cover a few examples.

The “evil” Harkonnen have the Devastator tank that is very tough and has a self destruct in place of the standard retreat ability.

The “noble” Atreides can use Dune’s native Fremen infantry, that have some stealth ability.

While the “insidious” have the Deviator launcher that fires gas that brings enemy units under your control.

RTS games more or less still follow the two main aspects of differentiation present in the two titles above which are archetypes that influence the units and abilities of the playable team. In short the races or teams or whatever in most strategy games have an overall style that is a combination of established mechanics and narrative. This enables the player to intuitively and quickly grasp what each race/team is and provide an expectation of how that particular race will play. Also for the record there is narrative influence in Starcraft and the Harkonnen are slow pricy guys, the Ordos the weak(er) tricky guys and the Atreides are the all rounder, all potential Korean invasions aside its time to move on.

So then say you want to make Sins a game that moves the genre forward and in a sense creates its own genre.  Firstly the races cannot be so different that they are out of balance or that experience with one race cannot be carried over to another. But yet you have to make it so playing each is a different experience and that exploring the abilities and units of each race are interesting. You know just make them the same but different.

Next you need consider all the games that have come before like Dune II and Starcraft. Those games were very successful and you want your game to be successful. So you need that same type of player and in some cases the SAME players to buy your game. But you don’t want people to play it and have the reviews come back with something like, “Although Sins puts a new twist on the old 4X style of gameplay the races felt cookie cutter and could have easily been the Terran, Protoss and Zerg except with ships.” Tears all around. So you need to put your own twist on the conventions that defined the all playable teams before you. So yeah just make them the same but different.

So how did Ironclad (with some help from Stardock at the end) do this. I have no idea, it took them like three years from what I can tell and if I could come up with one word to describe their design process I would use the word “hard”.

Full postmortem here.

What I can do is report the results. For “research” I have at the moment three games me VS seven hard AI’s in large maps for each of the three races. I am in the mop up stages of all three campaigns and had an eye on the differences of each of the races as I rained beams of superheated plasma down on those that would dare to defy me.

This not a strategy guide but a design discussion so I am not going to go into detail with each race’s units but rather make a big picture design assessment of how each of the three races play which are TEC, The Vasari and the The Advent.

First to quickly get out of the way there is no “stronger” race in Sins. On the face of it the Vasri have the most destructive power, but the TEC have the strongest armor and the advent the strongest shields. Some of the kids in Sins multiplayer scene may disagree but in my opinion the three races are more or less balanced. So with that out of the way to breakdown.

The TEC

The Trader Emergency Coalition unsurprisingly focuses on economics and infrastructure.

Narrative archetype:

The are capitalistic merchants forced to fight due a threat out their control.

The Same

The “all rounder” archetype, least “alien”, like the Terran and the Atridies.

But Different

This race can build infrastructure and units faster than anyone and has the resource tech to back it up. You play your economy well and your enemy will drown in wave of ships.  So a whole section of base gameplay plays differently as the TEC.

So what?

The interesting thing about the TEC is that with a boost to a section of gameplay namely economy if the player minds the store they are flexible to peruse whatever path they want as they have the cash and production capacity to back it up. The player can switch between perusing research, military or infrastructure with ease. This make the TEC very approachable and most likely is designed for new players.

Appeals To

The more casual RTS’er, The Player/Builder archetype.

The Vasari

Focuses on bringing the hurt and straight up domination and having the most bad ass voice acting for its units.

Narrative archetype

They are the invading ruthless militaristic empire builders.

The Same

The expensive/slow archetypes , like the Protoss and Harkonen.

But Different

The Vasari can hurt people the most the soonest. It’s not smart to play turtle with the Vasari but they are best at getting out there and hurting people. Like all races they can research a boost to their resource gathering ability but with a twist. They are the best at. Overall the TEC beats them in economy ,the Vasri only have the edge in gathering crystal and metal, not in credits.  If the Vasari expand fast and hard they can build their pricey toys of doom. Lastly they gain an ability to ignore the layout of the map and transport their units anywhere on the map, albeit by normal speed. At the design meeting that this came about I can almost hear someone saying “You want them to what now?” . Additionally the Vasari can have the largest fleet and late in the game start getting ships for free.

So What?

The Vasari have the most offensive power  be it in numbers or mobility or unit strength. This means  you can be nearly anywhere with the biggest guns. The result is you have a strong even devastating race but you MUST (imho) play them offensively and nearly constantly so or you cannot gain the resources required.  So you have all these advantages but you are a bit boxed in with your play style.  That is how you can have a race that is strong in both unit strength and mobility because Ironclad balances this out with limiting the how it can be played. Whether or not it is sensible to do so the Vasri must stay on the attack.

Appeals To

The Gamer/Gamer archtype, the type of person who must dominate at all costs. You know the pwner.

The Advent

The cyber-religious fundamentalists. They have the edge in technology in culture.

Narrative Archetype

The transcendental  beings that must remake the universe in their image.

The Same

The weak/fast archetypes, like Zerg and Ordos.

But Different

Some folks find the Advent “the hardest” to play. Their primary strength is that they learn technology the fastest. This is huge advantage, those that played Master Orion and MOO 2 know that you pretty much always want to play Psilon for their tech advantage.  The reason The Advent generally does not get out of hand is that mostly in that you need design your whole strategy around maximizing your research.

So what?

On the surface this sounds simple enough but the trick is that for all races research becomes exponentially more expensive. So you want to expand and be as belligerent only as you need to be. To play Advent you must have the most overall understanding of how Sins works to sit your progress perfectly on the exponential curve of your tech expansion. Expand too fast and you get mired in expansion costs and military, expand too slow and you can’t pay the bills. On top that you must balance this against your military too much brains and not enough brawn equals squish. That’s a tall order and on top of that you need to make the most of The Advent’s ability to spread culture to give your empire the efficiency boost that culture gives and slow that of your enemies. Of note newbies generally ignore the importance of culture and hopefully this will be addressed in the next expansion.

Appeals To

The Gamer/Player the type of player that wants to game the system. This sort of player directly plays the mechanics and does not see ships and planets only values and exponential curves.

Wrapping it all Up

All the different combat strengths, the is the Advent’s carriers, The Vasari missile frigates and the TEC repair ships and lots of other stuff I jumped over but my point off all of this is this. What Sins excels at is providing  a play experience for three different types of player.  Further the narrative of the races resonates with their related mechanics, you need to be smart to play the sciency Advent, be offensive to play the militaristic Vasari and be a good administrator to play the TEC. This is not just a design goal but it is a goal achieved. Playing each race is a whole different way to play the game. Sure having races/teams with different abilities leads to different play experiences with Sins it’s a bit different.  To make a hyperbolic metaphor everybody is playing hockey but one team has bigger guys but has two nets (Vasari), another has double the number of players on the bench (TEC), and third team has rocket powered skates that are on all the time (The Advent).

This is how Sins goes one better and moves the genre forward by having the play experience itself reflect the race played. So in the end each race plays the game the same but different.

Next time is because Simon made a good case for it even though I was not going to go over it, the UI for Sins.

Then the final entry on where Sins has come from and where it’s going.

See you next time, thanks for reading.

Sins of a Solar Empire Game Critique #2

Crystal, Credits, Metal and Space Pirates?

So you might have guessed that this entry is all about the resources in Sins. In this entry I am covering briefly how they work and my two cents on some aspects of the design impact of this central system of Sins.  So this one is more for the systems designer types out there.  And later there will be pirates, promise.

You have three resource types in Sins; metal, crystal and credits. Metal and crystal you get from asteroids that typically orbit planets but can be found on their own around gas giants or within plasma storms or other celestial bodies.

Metal

Lava planet’s asteriods only produce metal (other bodies will have both crystal and metal present) and is used in the highest proportion in construction tasks. You need a larger ratio of metal to build structures, planetary upgrades, ships and then research more or less in that order with structures taking the most and research the least. (Capital Ships are this whole other thing).

Crystal

Ice planet’s asteroids only produce crystal and crystal runs the reverse in terms of ratio of required resources for creating things as outlined above with research taking the most and building structures the least.

Credits

You get these from your loyal subjects in the form of taxes. Terran and Desert Planets can sustain the most life. Just like in life you need money for pretty much everything.

You can increase the amount you receive of all resources through various structures and technologies as you move through the game. But let’s look at the way this resource system contributes to game play.

The fact that different celestial bodies (planets, asteroids, plasma storms) have easily identifiable associated resources that are distributed unevenly makes the opportunity for strategic play. To put it another way if you are short a particular resource a celestial body with said resource will have a higher strategic value to you.  Lastly making it these differing resource concentrations easily identifiable serves the player by giving them vital information at a glance.

The Black Market

It would be interesting to find out if in the original design of Sins this system mechanic was considered from the beginning or came further along during the design process. Sins allows you to trade on the black market for resources that you don’t have. Interestingly you always buy and sell crystal and metal in credits. This means if you want metal but only have crystal you have to sell the crystal to gain credits to buy metal and you do so at roughly at 2:1 loss. In other words its takes 2 units of metal to buy one unit of crystal.

Another interesting effect is that if you are short on credits you can sell either resource for a quick boost in cash.  As the loss is only accrued when you sell a resource THEN buy a resource if your are credit poor there is no penalty if just straight up selling resources for credits. The reason I believe there some penalty transferring one type of resource to another and less so just selling for credits is that metal and crystal tend to be acquired unevenly when compared to credits. All that said trying to buy or sell too much metal or crystal in short of periods will cause the price to crash or boom thus providing a negative feedback release valve to prevent the player over using the black market to the detriment of the overall gameplay.

So why design this system this way? The answer is to accommodate many different types of resource distributions that both provide strategic value but do not put undue hardship on the player simply because of the map.  So sure you may be lacking in something but you are only at a disadvantage but not outright screwed. This also makes for a constant stream of secondary goals as players try gain resources in a balanced manner. Now remember where I talking about how different tasks require different proportion of resources? Now considering the black market the player can make a risk a reward calculation and either complete that task sooner via the black market or conversely wait to conserve resources.

A final word on credits

Credits are kind of different than the two resources and generally have a higher number attached to their use. So a ship might cost 250 credits and 20 metal and 10 crystal. They could have say used a lower number but a higher value for credits or higher number for resources. Keeping numerically separate not only makes credits “feel” different than the other two resources it also makes for a bit of incomplete information. Fuzzing up the relationship between credits and the other two resources leads to more meaningful play as you weigh your purchases and your action on the black market.

If all that seemed a bit complicated for a three part system that is because it sort of is. I also ignored the other resource that you are managing, time. But getting into time at this point would take up too much of it. The complexity however is in the design not in the use of the system. As a player you easily notice deficits and do what you can to deal with them.  Casual players will just sell and buy whatever to keep it the wheels turning while advanced players will use the system to its fullest after considering their overall resource base. This is my opinion a foxy bit of elegant systems design. A great deal of depth for those who need it or just a quick bit of utility to keep the action moving for those that don’t.  This sort of system depth gives rise to the very best characteristic in any game, easy to understand hard to master.

This is just some of the thought that goes into well designed system in a modern game and well representative of the depth of thought that has gone into every corner of Sins, I hope you enjoyed it.

Space Pirates

Right! Pirates Spaaaaaaaaaaace Pirates to be exact. Every fifteen minutes (unless you choose to shut them off in the settings) pirates will strike out and attack the player (or AI) that has most bounty on them. Bounty does not get collected unless you are attacked either by other empires or pirates and can be placed by opposed empires. So if the bounty keeps building it becomes more and more expensive to hold them off. This little ebay of doom mechanic is a great addition it gives you one more thing, a bit of a wild card to watch out for and/or sic on your enemies. This functions a bit like the thief in Settlers of Catan and just as fun.  This is a great feature as it tosses things up.

And pirates are awesome.

Like ponies.

But they have those too.

Next time The races of Sins the same but different…

Sins of a Solar Empire Game Critique #1

Your people await

(Header from the back of the box)

First to the disclaimers, I am a bit of a fanboy of this title and of the genre in general. It did win a few awards and has a metacritic rating of 87 so its not like I am out on a limb here. IGN named it the PC game of the year for 2008.  All that said over the next few blog entries I am going proceed with my designer hat on and provide a few insights for what works, what doesn’t and why. Going to start here with how Sins is “epic” then cover the resource management, the races and their tech and close with where the title has been and where it is going. I can’t cover everything as I am sure Ironclad has a perfectly serviceable set of design docs somewhere and there is no need to cover it all. Overall my aim is to provide value for both designers and players alike to show how good design can create a great experience.

There are some people that will not like a game like this and never will which is okay. Instead I will be looking at this title for what is trying to achieve which is to be an amazing niche game rather than be all things to all people. But I am getting ahead of myself…

Bringing the Epic

Many games toss the word epic around quite a lot these days. But what is “epic” anyway? For films I have a simple definition that epic is any film where you had to hit the can before the end despite the most herculean of efforts.

Without splitting lasers here “epic” in games usually means epic scale, an epic story and/or epic situations where the fate of the city/world/galaxy/backyard/magic forest ect rests in YOUR hands.

On the front of my box for Sins the tagline or “X” is, “Real-Time Strategy. Unrivalled Scale.” full stop. This is not just marketing (although it is that) this is the star that guides this whole title. Some titles have a slippery high level vision like “Immersive environments!”  “ Intense multiplayer action!”  ect. . Sins is singularly focused on this design goal and this clarity of high level vision, important for any title, resulted in a polished final product.

So that all sounds swell but how does Sins do this? There are a wack of interrelated ways Sins pulls this off but here I will talk about what I think are the most important, the super scalable Camera and the Pacing of the gameplay.

Camera

The camera is controlled by the mouse wheel. A roll forward or back smoothy zooms the camera in and out.

So fully zoomed out the game looks like this.

But when I am managing my empire and ordering my ships around this works pretty good.

When directing battles though this is a better for a tactical view.

And when you just want to get in close and check out the awesome this view is my favorite. Clicking on strike craft and moving the camera over to a chase view is outstanding. During a particularly intense battle I had this chase view active and a roommate came in to ask me something promptly forgot and remarked after a long pause “There is some stuff going on there eh?” my reply “Yup” as explosions, beams and projectiles filled the screen.

This camera choice  is not only a lot of fun when you are zoomed in but when you are zoomed out you are aware there is a whole ton of stuff going on that you can’t see. This is a pretty neat trick as it engages the players imagination as they play, they may not see everyting going on at one time but down there on some level they know its all there. The result is a massive play space that is easily navigable that engages a players imagination on an almost subconscious level, epic indeed.

Pacing

So it looks pretty cool right? Then comes the other question “Yeah but how does it play?”  The short answer is pretty damn well. As “play” in this context covers the entirety of playing Sins let’s narrow things down a bit. Although the UI is excellent, bordering on brilliant, as promised here I am going to concentrate on the pace of Sins and how it is designed to create “Unrivalled Scale” or if you prefer bringing teh epic.

So the universe can be a pretty big place but as you can see all the action in Sins happens on a flat plane around planets connected by “phase lanes”. This brings the universe down to a size that any potential master of the universe could understand. So now that Sins has given us this board how does it make it feel epic in term of pace?

Sins does this in many ways but lets examine it by looking at the ships of Sins, a major part of the game.  Ships in this game more effort to build compared to say Command and Conquer 2 where a GI takes 8 seconds and a Mirage Tank 40 in Sins the weakest ship of the “weakest” race, the Advent, a scout takes 14 seconds and a Radiance Battle Cruiser takes 68.  So without doing an exhaustive metrics survey generally ships in Sins take a bit longer to build than units in other RTS’s more or less.

But that is only half of it. It takes another chunk of time to move your ships to the edge of a gravity well (play area) of a planet to get them to a point where they can jump along a phase lane to the neighboring system. So to build a fleet and get to where it supposed to be to blow those that would defy you into particulate matter takes a great deal of effort.  Then of course there all the hard earned resources you used to build those ships in the first place. The end result is these units matter to the player each time a player loses a ship they feel a tinge of defeat and with each explodefied foe the thrill of victory.  The combination of time invested as well as the effort to plan, gather, build and deploy creates a very meaningful experience for the player. Or in more player based terminology seeing your enemies smote as result of your grand plan is freaking awesome and the opposite is down right depressing. If players built units faster and/or got them into conflict sooner the pace would be increased a great deal of the epic would be lost.

So we have an excellent camera choice backed by a well constructed meaningful set of mechanics to manage conflict. Or to put it another way “Real Time Strategy. Unrivalled Scale”.

More on resources next time…

Teh Gamers, The Dreamers and Me.

(This is in response to this piece)

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Simon Cameron a few months back and with Kelly Zmak like two years ago. The fact that people, be it developers or fans, want something more from games than male power fantasies is awesome. Several years ago most folks would not have even thought games capable. It just shows that there is pressure to expand what games offer.

Or like I said to Simon as games expand their influence the people seem to be saying, “Hey you geeks are making some pretty cool stuff! When are you going to make stuff for the rest of us?” All that said Gears sold 11 million and counting and Braid much less. The attach rate on the Wii is low. Some people predict then end of derivative works and there will be “burn out” and I bet Halo ODST ,Modern Warfare 2 and Starcraft 2 will sell like a gilljillion copies whilst a bunch of really cool flash games will get lost in the shuffle on Newgrounds.

Gaming is coming more in to its own and it seems that more folks just now getting into it, rather than living games their whole lives, want in. We are starting to see more of academia getting involved which is really cool but also will be interesting as they will not be setting the terms of debate and games moves so fast that they may drown in creating a functional taxonomy although some people have done this already well and others not so well.

A lot of people draw comparisons between movies and games. But games are NOT movies (thanks again for everything Josh Mosqueira wherever you are, the 12s still talk about your lectures) but let’s think about film for a moment. What moved the genre “forward” more “Terminator Two” or “Fried Green Tomatoes ”? Both great films of 1991, the first made almost 200 million at the box office while FGT made 80. The second dealt with a tapestry of complex issues including sexuality, race and the role and place of women in society while the first was one of the best action films ever made. Which has more “value” culturally I dunno but one made 120 million more dollars and that is why we always have space marines to some degree or another.

Now that given games can’t really point to something like an FGT of its own and further people don’t look for that kind of experience from games. Perhaps games are the lesser medium in that respect as there are large dimensions of the human experience that simply are not widely reflected in games. I think that is what people are sort of lamenting the state of games lately and it is also why I am excited about the future.

Games are going to go places and affect players more deeply and in more interesting ways. I don’t think pitching something like FGT would get you development dollars but maybe something with good writing, plot character AND action like say Joss Whedon’s Firefly may be coming down the pipe.

As a young designer I think there is room for all of us who want different things from games. If you want more then by Zombie Jesus go out make the damn things. Don’t get all huffy at Epic, Infinity Ward and Blizzard. Me I could go either way would love to make a game like this or this. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between.

And as always bDontStopBelivin=TRUE;

Movin’

So lemme see. Tempest is coming along and we are moving to closed Alpha testing in two weeks. I have talked to a few folks and yes we will have a Steam group as well as an fb group to help things along.

I gots the Gear ed. so I am looking forward to some single player design with that tool. Also I have the new mastering Unreal tech book.

http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Unreal-Technology-Introduction-Design/dp/0672329913/ref=pd_sim_b_4

Its very strong on the funamentals and about 30% is all new to me so it looks rad. Those guys do great work…

Well its off to Pax next week and that plus the move should be a wild time. New portfolio should be up Monday or Tuesday and features Travis’ Terror and a total redesign.

What’s new in the world.

So some updates on what is what.

The TF2 project I am working on is coming along read all about by clicking on the Tempest link on the blog roll sidebar.

Next thing is construcing a single player experince in Gears of War with the PC tools, should be intersting.

And still want to do the final count down project, starting this week for real real.

Oh and check out my 2 cents o Midnight Club LA just posted it in game critiques.

Keep it real all.

Back to the Blog.

Hey all,

So after a bit of a hatius due to graduation and related chaos I will be giving my blog some much needed attention. As for the Final Count Down video mix I still want to do it but my time lately has been taken up with job search activties.

In other news me and some guys from school are going to give making our payload map a rip. It remains to be seen if Jimmy will quit or Jody will get married.  The blog for that project, working title “Tempest” is up and I should be linked up soon.

I have an ever lovin rant about Midnight Club Four to post so watch for that.

Here is some porfolio machinima work I did recently. It was this whole thing let me know if you have any questions or comments about it.

My “Final Countdown” video mix.

So we all know the death star run from Star Wars, and some of us simlar scenes from the Last Starfighter, Last Exile, Macross and others of the brave heros in there ships and/or flying machines as they take down the big base “O” evil. So using Afteffects, Premier and Resolume my VJ’ing weapon of choice I want to make a video mix all set to Europe’s “Final Countdown”.

Why you ask? For it would be awesome and that truly is a noble goal.

My question what other scenes be it form movies, anime or machinema do you think deserve a place in this project?