| Afterlife Blues update. |
[09 Jul 2009|11:52am] |
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mood |
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blue sky in games |
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Over here... no, a little to the left... there you go.
In other news, so why did I spend time getting texture loading and sprite code working in my engine?
( Why? )
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| He did what? |
[06 Jul 2009|11:05pm] |
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mood |
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lol |
] |
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music |
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Paul van Dyk - Fall With Me (feat. David Byrne) |
] |
I've been feeling a bit uninspired with regards to Neon Galaxy lately -- endless fighting with the goddamned polygon clipper will do that -- so I figured it might be a good idea to hare off in a different direction for a little while, just 'till I get my mojo back.
( The results are ordinary. )
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[01 Jul 2009|11:44pm] |
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It's in the usual place. Is that a super-sweet fire truck, or what? Seriously.
( Why is it so sweet? )
In other news, this Year Without A Summer is really dragging me down. As I mentioned on Twitter, I was chatting with someone today and was told that we've had sunlight for all of three out of the last fifty-one days, and I don't know about you but for me frankly that's just not enough. I've also noticed that my general mood, productivity both at work and home, and whiny/crankiness/general throwing my spoon off my high chair quotient seems directly correlated to how clear the sky is. Like, you could graph it, write a paper, and probably get tenure.
So what I'm getting at is: Hey Lazyweb, do any of you have experience with those sun lights used to fend of Seasonal Affective Disorder? 'Cos I'm starting to think I can't afford to wait for the real sun to put in an appearance, and neither can anyone else who has to interact with me every day.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[26 Jun 2009|12:40am] |
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It's here. As I mentioned to Jon earlier, I really need to re-evaluate my workflow. The whole point of this project (well, a whole point anyway) was to be able to produce comics a little faster than MoS, but I've wound up in a situation where it takes just as long to produce a page of AB as it did the previous comic -- with the important exception that I've realized how silly it is to stay up until 4:30 AM to make up the difference. I'd like to get a tablet and go all-digital, but I'm not going to have the spare brain to even consider that for at least a few months. So, um. Yeah.
On the plus side, I've been re-acquainting myself with Mystery Science Theater 3000 while drawing. Ahh, the memories.
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| Is it sad to consider visiting a radioactive wasteland to be delightful escapism? |
[24 Jun 2009|03:28pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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fallen out |
] |
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music |
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Our Tezza - Cooperation Demo |
] |
Ahh, it's all coming back to me now, like riding a bicycle or stumbling over a tripwire and getting a brahmin in the face. It took until the middle of 2008 for me to figure out that Mass Effect was my 2007 Game of the Year. I have just realized that Fallout 3 was my 2008 Game of the Year. I was on Xbox Live, I saw that the Operation: Anchorage DLC was on sale, so I grabbed it since I've been meaning to get back to the game, and then, well, it would be silly not to get The Pitt and of course Broken Steel so I can actually play to level 30... and just like that I was back in the D. C. Wasteland, like I never left.
The scale of this game really staggers the imagination. I won't deny the common complaint that a lot of the places look the same as each other, but that doesn't change the fact that there are a heck of a lot of places and even if they reuse a lot of geometry that doesn't keep them from being designed with simply astonishing attention to detail. Before digging into the new quests, I meandered around to check out some of the locations I never got around to visiting the last time I played the game, and they're packed with stories and atmosphere of their own (the letter to the editor from an angry nerd in the Hubris Comics mainframe, for example, or the crazy radioactive maze underneath the Falls Church metro station with the unique flamethrower as a prize at the end of it.) Even if there were no new quests, an extra 10 character levels to encourage complete exploration would have been worth the money. Uh, nobody tell Bethesda that.
( Review of Operation: Anchorage under the cut, with total spoilers. )
If you're in the mood for more wittering on the subject of Fallout 3, incidentally, you could do worse than to check out this compilation of articles written in gaming blogs about it last year.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[15 Jun 2009|11:18am] |
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Updated yesterday. This has been a very long scene and I'm happy to finally get to the payoff, where Brody gets the first inkling that all is not quite as he has been led to believe.
In Neon Galaxy news, I got positional audio working as well as a general rework of the sound system to better manage multiple sound sources, so that's cool. But I've realized I really need to rework how the player's ship is controlled. It's still been using the old Star Castle controls (rotate left and right plus accelerate) but that control style makes the ship a real pig -- it accelerates slowly, it's hard to control at top speed, and it can't strafe, which makes it just about impossible to take sharp corners. I may be forced to go for the traditional Geometry Wars-style ship control that most games like this use, where the ship is maneuvered with WASD keys and the gun can be instantly aimed in any direction with the mouse, but that feels like a cop-out somehow: it's much better suited for fast action games, rather than something a little slower-paced like Neon Galaxy is supposed to be. Is there a third way to control one's ship in a game like this I should be exploring? I could use some better ideas!
Finally, I've finished Red Faction: Guerrilla. I feel like I should give a one-sentence review of it for anyone who is wavering on whether or not to pick up this game. This one-sentence review is as follows:
Get your ass to Mars.
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| Oh hey! |
[13 Jun 2009|09:12pm] |
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mood |
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bleh |
] |
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music |
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Grinderman - Electric Alice |
] |
It looks like the Suvudu Free Library, which is apparently associated with Random House in some fashion, has put the first novel of John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy, Weapons of Choice, up for free download (scroll down on the Free Library page). Birmingham's an interesting author -- he's an Australian whose main area of work was showbiz detective novels with titles like He Died With A Falafel In His Hand, but in recent years he's built up an impressive side line in crazy fun technothrillers. His books start out with some surreal event (in the Axis of Time books, it's a science experiment gone wrong that throws a near-future naval task force back into the Battle of Midway in World War II) and then remorselessly play out the results, but with a focus on the characters caught up in these events. If that seems like the sort of thing you might like, you really now have no excuse not to check Birmingham out.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[08 Jun 2009|01:37pm] |
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Updated yesterday. On time, amazingly!
Though I still ended up staying up way too late because I couldn't resist playing Red Faction: Guerilla some more. I have to admit that the story missions in this game really shine: they're doing all the standard open-world objectives we've grown used to from years of Grand Theft Auto-alikes -- go here before time runs out, protect this guy, collect this object, blow up this thing, et cetera -- but they've chained them together to do very effective in-game storytelling. In addition, the completely destructible environments and the wide variety of interesting weapons and vehicles available (not to mention the jetpack!) mean there are usually lots of different ways to approach an objective. Really, my only complaint is that there isn't a Saints Row 2-style newspaper clipping board that would let me replay any of the story missions after the fact.
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| You are all ON NOTICE. (3) |
[07 Jun 2009|04:49pm] |
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mood |
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gently chastising |
] |
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music |
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Paul Van Dyk - Complicated (Tom Colontonio Dub Mix) |
] |
Use of the following phrases is no longer permitted:
- "per say"
- "for all intensive purposes"
- "cultural appropriation"
- "teach the controversy"
- "they should release the source code so the community can finish it"
...and any reference to a bingo card, unless you are actually talking about playing bingo. Thank you for your cooperation. (Previously, previously)
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| Woot. |
[07 Jun 2009|03:43am] |
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mood |
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woot |
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music |
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Paul Van Dyk - Far Away |
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I just wrote an animation system for Neon Galaxy. Just like that. Damn, I'm good.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[06 Jun 2009|02:51pm] |
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mood |
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boom crash thud |
] |
Updated yesterday.
Brief notice. Among other things I have recently been playing Red Faction: Guerilla. It has cemented in my mind the fact that if you want a game that's just sick, stupid fun, Volition is your go-to guys. As well, if you're still sad that there was never a sequel to Blast Corps on the Nintendo 64, you should know this game is not a bad substitute -- especially when you uncover the Destruction Challenges, or decide on your own initiative that an enemy checkpoint is really inconvenient and needs to be reduced to pieces small enough to fit in a matchbox.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[02 Jun 2009|12:40am] |
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In the usual place. As I mentioned to Jon I'm actually pretty happy with the infiltration suit effect: it's easy to draw and it's clear what's going on as long as there's a reasonable amount of stuff in the background, which I should be doing anyway.
Neon Galaxy progress report: Still working on Neon Galaxy, still not doing really flashy things. The main thing I accomplished recently was to rework and fix up the child object system, which allows attaching entities to other entities. It was rather half-hearted before, but is now quite robust -- so I can do things like, say, putting turreted guns on an enemy robot and having them swivel independently to target the player, and also allowing the player to destroy them individually. Not sure what to do next; I suspect it'll either be reworking sound sources so positional audio works, or else a simple animation system. I don't expect any kind of graphical animation functionality, but since the SVG format assigns ID numbers to the various strokes that make up an object I can add the ability to find a stroke with a particular ID and manipulate its position, rotation, or scale. That should be sufficient to add simple effects like weapon recoil and whatnot.
Finally, in a move that oddly echoes most of my life, I give you: "Sorry I'm Late."
( Read more... )
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