The year is 1750 of the Nyarna legacy, the Eastern Sun looks upon the terran planet Lucarnia-Nyarna with great sympathy and rejoice, for its peace has stood throughout the whole era of the current families reign.

Lucarnians are one of the few remaining Polymorphers in the Universe, they shape-shift into their designated fredaemon, creatures that resemble the animals found on non-Polymorpher planets, only difference is that their primary ability is increased tenfold. Imagine a tiger that has augmented claw strength, an eagle that can see as far as the end of the world, a horse who can gallop with the speed of sound.

For order to be maintained fredaemons are assigned taking in consideration social status and family history, this law has been instated by the first king of the present dynasty, Nyarna Umbri. Before this approach, there was no criterion. Chaos was present for thousands of years, seldom legacies lasted more than a couple of days, until the Guardians came and reestablished order. Guardians are the Universes accountants, where there is too much chaos, peace is brought upon the land, and where there is too much peace chaos is unleashed for the amount of time necessary for balance to be present once again. This is the law by which all planets abide. Their plans are flawless, executed in darkness, each time success is guaranteed without the population’s knowledge of external meddling. It is best this way so that the Guardians remain incognito to the eyes of the Universes inhabitants. Their reasons for intervention are unknown, yet what is certain is that Lucarnia-Nyarna will be visited by them once more.

This work by Cristina Bradea is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Along the line you will encounter numerous visits from a little critter called “The Demotivator”, been mentally prepared for him decreases the chances of encountering these unwanted situations, where you just sit down at your desk pondering on whether it can be done or not. People will always doubt the position he or she is in, will always question the correctness of an action, the intensity and frequency of these events depend on the individuals personality and upbringing, there are some who experience it on a weekly basis, some have these kinds of episodes once in a while, point is that you have them and you want them off your back as quickly as possible.  So the problem raised is what to do at an individual level to keep the level of motivation as high as possible? (Note: the following answers are given for a person who momentarily is stuck in a rut and doesn’t know how to get out of there, giving this type of advice to people that have no will-power is pointless)

1. Get out of your own way. Yes, you, step aside right now!  Thinking “I’m not going to make it!”, “I haven’t done anything in a while so why try now?”, “I am never appreciated so why bother?” is equivalent to tying a ten tone cannon ball and throwing yourself in the Thames. The result? Well most likely you will drown, unable to escape a dire situation, which has you as the lead protagonist. Eventually your body will be found years later by a search party, who will ask left and right “Who was this person? Does anybody know him/her?”, sadly no one remembers. So if you don’t want to end up like that, get out of the way and see the path in front of you.
2. Read blogs, book and articles. Gaining knowledge from people that do the type of work you do is always helpful and motivating at the same time, nobody earned his or her title like that, they share experiences they’ve lived throughout their carrier, road blocks that held them back, mistakes that made them stronger and so on.
3. Don’t set your mind on a goal that can’t be accomplished in a given amount of time. Deadlines are important and every day we bump into them, it’s a challenge that gives motive, but also takes it away if the task remains unfulfilled. For example “I want in the next week to ship out a triple A title”, the statement is greatly exaggerate, nevertheless it represents the current trend, do as much as you can in a short time, the world is a jungle because we make it a jungle. Calm down, breathe and think realistically about what you can and most importantly cannot do, don’t try to figure out how something intricate works without knowing the fundamentals, don’t try to paint the next masterpiece if you are unable to think of composition, don’t try to write the next bestselling novel in two days, etc.
4. Find a mentor. Albeit it sounds like I want to enforce a teacher on you, the baffling truth is that having someone looking after you, ready to outline the does and don’ts, praising what you did right, criticizing you every step of the way is on a scale of one to ten, a ten plus plus. We find ourselves not motivated enough because no one bothers to tell us what we did wrong and what could have been done right instead, in a corporate structure there is so little time for these types of conversation, one day you wake up and you are fired, no further explanations. Friends and family really don’t count in this particular matter, so find someone whom you have a platonic or professional relationship with, emotionally involved people compromise the clarity of the judgment.

Motivating yourself is the key to accomplishing whatever you want, it is not ambition we lack , we have plenty of that, what we don’t have is a well thought-out system that can keep us going. There are a lot of brilliant people out there that have no motivation, yet they have potential to be extremely proficient in a given area, we don’t see the skill because nothing is happening and most likely will never happen.

Talking from experience I have successfully applied 1), 2) and 3), 4) is a bit out of my reach, however I find it appropriate for the discussion at hand. So did they work? Well i am still writing  whatever pops into my head aren’t i, so they must have had some sort of impact, whenever I find myself down that all familiar path I do something that pushes  me away from that road and following those guidelines helped me.

Always thought that any close replica of a DoTA game is not worth my time, however one day my boyfriend told me that I was dead wrong and that there is something that I might find interesting in Demigod. After two months since the mention of the game in one of our conversation I decided to join in and play.

After about 15 games I was hooked, it was indeed as my he said a fun game to play, as long as you don’t have players who lie about how good they are. So why was I hooked on a design that I hate? Frankly, it wasn’t what I expected it to be.

You have 8 demigods split up in two factions: Generals and Assassins. Uniquely designed, they can be used either for support or battle. This type of flexibility is exactly what I was talking about a few articles ago, for instance a healer will be used about 75% of the time as a healer, however if you want you can heal your teammates, but also do some damage in battle. Because of how the game is built this freedom of choice can sometimes turn a General into an Assassin, bad design or an exploitable feature? Leaving all other aspects of the context aside I would say the first, the idea of morphing between character classes is over powering, if you want to try it yourself just learn to play Erebus. If it were up to me I would really balance them so that my General remained a commander and not a stomping-crushing unit, this can be solved through damage reduction, items property changes (Note: never change what has already been seen in a game, modify it or like GPG did pull it out, if you are playing Demigod now you will miss on items that were in the original version).

The game unfolds by choosing to be part of the Forces of Light or Dark and accomplishing the goal of the match. You have several types from which you can select, but I think the most relevant is Conquest, where you have to make your way into the enemy base to destroy the Citadel (main building). And here is one of the few flawed concepts: there is a huge discrepancy between the levels of fun that you can find in each goal. I haven’t seen one player that picked a different type of goal other than Conquest for his or her match. The replayability doesn’t suffer because of this, no two battles are alike, however can’t help to notice that this slipped their mind in their meetings: “Which of these goals will the player enjoy?”, “Do we really need the other ones?”, “How can we improve, the ones that have a lower percentage of been chosen, so it would be just as fun as the top ranked one?”.

At first glance the flag system is just a “plus one” design; however looking more closely a great advantage is revealed. Besides gaining XP, they give bonuses (HP/Mana regeneration, cooldown reduction, gold, etc) and increase your teams WarRank, a coefficient that lets you buy upgrades for your base so that it can be more resistant, spawn more powerful units, decrease your Demigod re-spawn time, so on and so forth.

In matches you earn experience by killing enemy units, capturing flags and of course smiting down Demigods. The one skill point you receive at level-up is used to upgrade or take on a new power. Each power is defined by what it does (splash damage, support, interrupt) and by cooldown (the interval of time that takes your power to be active again). An item system is designed to improve your Demigod even further; you get to chose one favor item that you can’t change and an additional 6 items which you can buy using the gold gained from slaying enemy Demigods.

One might think this is easy to play through; the truth is that it isn’t. Designers have created three gameplay systems (skills, items, flags), which combined, form an intricate tactical conglomerate. Moreover for this tactical gameplay to work teamplay must be a common mentality, if you have one player that goes about his business head-on, then I’m sorry but the match is lost.

Let’s talk a bit about the interactivity between players in the game lobby. There is a chat where you can say what’s on your mind, if you like the game settings, if you want the host to change them, but our dear host has so little tools to assure that the game is well balanced and suitable for all, most of the time players leave before he can do anything. Newcomers will always join a lobby without taking in consideration that those who are already there want a quality game, not a 5 second one due to rage quitters or childish tantrums; GPG said that in the next patch they will have a system that allows the players to see stats directly in the lobby; furthermore they said that a list of previous games would be available to discover premade teams. Now this seems promising and all, but why hasn’t this been put into practice earlier, say when they launched the game? The number one thing that must be on every mind of the development team is “How I can implement/design/make this so that the players effort is minimized and his fun level is maximized?”.

Other design aspects that are present, but I prefer not to discuss them in detail are as follows:

• Hands-On Play – when you enter the Multiplayer menu you can choose to join a battle automatically.
• Pantheon Play – to feel that you are in a battle of light versus dark you can pick this mode, only disadvantage is that the pool of Demigods from which you can select has been reduced to four per each side.
• Camera System – flexible, great for viewing battles when you overlap with another player.
• Graphics – suitable for the theme, exceptionally well designed Demigod models, the source of inspiration can’t be pinpointed exactly which enhances their originality, unique minimalistic maps; however I don’t recommend playing it on a laptop or really low end systems.
• Control System – characters are moved using the mouse, while the keyboard is used for shortcuts. You can only control the Demigod and his minions if he has any, reinforcements have a mind of their own, though you can help them in combat by killing the enemy units.
• Alerting the Player – when you are in the middle of battle, thinking what power to use, where should you go next, there are other things that go down on the map, for example if you are not careful enough your opponent can make his way to your base and capture portals from which reinforcements are spawned, this is where the alert system comes in. Whenever something happens on the map you are announced through the voice of the commentator, however when the above example occurs it’s too late to do something, because the announcement is made after the event took place. For that you have the ping, a team-mate can ping a certain area of the map if he or she detects any sort of danger.

My journey still continues (even after 200 hours), despite the crashes, connectivity issues, poor path-finding, overpowered items, power glitches etc. Yes it is buggy, but I like the design and how you can get absorbed into playing it even though it’s clear as daylight that GPG never made any programming department meetings. If you find decent players that prefer their game to be fair I guarantee that you will have a great time.

Screen-shots:

I am a huge fan of John Carmack. Don’t know the fellow? Google him right now, moreover do an essay of 10.000 words with the title “Why I think inverse root square is awesome?”.

Just kidding

All you need to know to read this entry is that John Carmack is one of the pioneers of the industry. Because of him the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre took the PC platform by storm with the release of Wolfenstein 3D, some even argue that he was the one who jump started the game industry, but these are philosophies and let’s face it jabber talk, what truly remains in history is the brilliance of the current technical director at id Software. Wolfenstein 3D is one of the first game I’ve seen and never got to play due to my frail age, I couldn’t understand what was going on the screen, but the movement and expressiveness of both Wolfenstein and other games at that time got me into what I love doing the most, analyzing and designing games.

The franchise had a lot of developers, the original owner remains id Software, but they develop in co-operation with other studios such as Grey Matter (Return to Castle Wolfestein) in 2001. Today Raven Software took the mighty task of bringing fans a new “We need you agent Blazkowicz!” and yes there is a hint of sarcasm. Managed to get a hold it for the PC, but it has many console elements, which obviously means that it’s a port, not a platform specific developed game. I am not sure what elements should I portray as been good or bad, let’s face it PCs will never be consoles as much as consoles will never be PCs as far as game design. You may be wondering how did I manage to see that it’s a port and not a PC version, well :

• The number one concept that gives all PC versions away as been ports, the bloody messy highly easy to use for newcomers: health points regeneration system or in lame terms “shoot me and I won’t die if I make it to the next corner”.  I know why developers use this design on consoles, the save/load system, hard to master controller, etc. Now why do some PC developers use it? *crickets in the background*.  Don’t laugh that is my reaction whenever I hear the question. Firstly the PC controls mouse and keyboard is easy to use and master in comparison to console controllers, secondly the save/load system doesn’t involve checkpoints, we have Auto-saves, Quick-saves and the classical save and load menu. My guess is that either the cost of production had made it impossible for more than one development set of requirements or they wanted to make it easier for the player. It’s argumentative, therefore I will leave it at that and say it’s a bad design chosen for Wolfenstein considering it’s ancestry and as you will see along the way the horrifically stupid enemy AI.

• The Menu – the way you navigate through it resembles the Left-Right schematic on the Xbox360 controller. It’s not that big of a deal, yet I strongly refuse to believe that it was that hard to create a list type menu. Getting to buy something from the Black Market can become a hassle because the way you “click” on it bases itself on a “press the A/Square button”, double click works, but it takes a while to actually make contact and enter sub-menus.

So it’s a port? Is it that bad? Frankly speaking those two elements aren’t even as half as bad as what follows. I’m not the type that judges a game by how it looks, but you can’t seem to wonder why the graphics are “bad”. Oh I don’t know, maybe because it’s based on a 5 year old engine, namely id Tech 4. Outdoors or indoors you will be blinded by bloom, textures are of low to medium quality, the meshes look unfinished, if you don’t believe just take a look at the screens[1]. There is something I like in this game: the appropriate use of the physics engine[2] (Havok) : boxes can be destroyed, things blow up in a beautiful way, limbs are dismembered, all of these aspects make the game more enjoyable than it already is not, when you will reach the cavern level you will know what I mean.

Let’s get on to another aspect of this analysis, namely gameplay and storyline elements. Like in the Velvet Assassin GDA I could summon thousands of paragraphs to come in my aid, but I won’t, I’ll just outline the main aspects that really popped out as bad.

Scripting is a good idea generally, however using it excessively can create what I like to call “Nostradamus effect”, I can foresee what’s about to happen: going in a room throw a grenade, making my way down a silent corridor something will most likely pop out, the game is saving a checkpoint a horde of soldiers are waiting for me, so on and so forth. Losing atmosphere is one of the most common ways to get the fun out and the banalities in.

Another thing that bothered me is the way the story develops; you get your missions from various agencies: Kreisau Circle or Golden Dawn. Some of them are go there, see what’s going on, get back and report, linearity couldn’t have found a better home in my honest opinion. From time to time when a mission starts you are assigned a contact, occasionally he gets stuck , however don’t fret the enemy AI is average, they don’t use any kind of strategy, moreover sometimes they just run into you, waiting for a nice applied head shot. Interesting is that the game increases in difficulty when you reach the farms, by that I mean their bullets find your body more often, not that the AI has grown a virtual brain.  Enemies range from soldiers to evil doctors with super-powers to some pretty ugly monsters, however it really doesn’t matter they are still as thick as a sheet of paper.

Another aspect of this game is the presence of the Black Market. Here, using the money earned from completing missions or by collecting bags of gold, you can buy upgrades for your weapons and powers. Did you say powers? Yes I did. This game gives the player powers, manipulate time, see through dark, be invincible, etc. I really sat down and pondered why designers would present such a concept for implementation; it’s not specific for the franchise. It really makes the game easier than it actually is because you can refill your energy by using the fountains or barrels, which are dispersed in an immense quantity throughout the entire levels.

Storyline like I said it’s linear, moreover it’s surrounded by clichés, I didn’t even have to complete the first mission to know that, the intro reeks of it.

Furthermore along the mission you will be astonished by a humorous side. Namely the “YOU look like an American”[3] and “The Doctor Dance”[4]. Honestly if I were in charge I would really ponder on whom I am going to hire to write scene scripts.

Wolfenstein is a mediocre game without any innovative aspects, it’s really ok to try it if you just want a blind shooter, aim the gun, kill like a maniac, get the reward and save the world. From my point of view the production and release of this games was a last chance to get some money out of the id Tech 4 engine, since in 2010 it will shift to a different license policy, namely GNU General Public License. Furthermore the Zenimax deal means that Activision will no longer do business with id Software, so frankly speaking this was the last boat to catch.

[1]

Flying wierd looking paper

Textures

Uncanny Valley anyone?

[2]

Poor guy.

[3]

Really now?

[4]

STOP! Hammer time!

The Concept

In 2006 with the help of some friends I began to develop a video game, until that time I was sure that gamedev is an easy task that only requires you to know games, a newcomer’s mistake. My job was to do 3D models and animation and plainly spoken I really sucked at it, though my love for this side of game development hasn’t changed and I always appreciate what artists do in games.

The problem back then was that we didn’t have a plan; we just developed as we got further and further into the stages of the game. Why didn’t we have a blueprint, something to guide us and work more efficiently? The answer is easy : lack of experience.  At that time the thought of making a document with concepts was inexistent, as time passed I saw that this thing called concept is a highly vital item for any successful game, sure some still look unpolished and unfinished, however this is not because the plan wasn’t clear enough more than the fact that pressure has become to cease a humongous amount of terrain in this industry.

What is a concept? Why do I need it, when I have it all in my head? Does it really make a difference? To answer these questions I would propose the most common analogy known to the tech industry.

You and your neighbor have decided to construct new homes for your families. Eager to start and all you think that it’s easy to make a house, you get some wood, some tools and voila the house is done; your neighbor on the other hand ponders a bit on the implications of building a house, he sits down in a comfortable chair at his desk and starts writing down schematics and plans: “Do I need this?”, “Can I build that?”, “What can I do to improve these thingamajigs?”, etc.

A few blocks away you are at your construction site, sweating and building your sweet home. Wait! What is this??? You forgot to make room for the pluming. Diligently you start destroying your current creation and build another one in its place; meanwhile your neighbor has finished his “concept” and gets to the building process. Technically speaking you both got a fresh start, let’s see what happens.

After several weeks of hard work both of the houses are done, the results are as we expected them to be. Your dear neighbor’s house looks something like this

while after countless rebuilds you’ve managed to build this

Now you see why planning is so important, you just don’t start off with no experience whatsoever and hope to accomplish something as you move along. You plan, study, research. The analogy wasn’t in vain due to the fact that building software or games is like building a house, every step is calculated, overlooking something can cost you dearly and set the production stages to alpha or even worse.

You need to think outside the box and make your game flexible when adding more content. Don’t stop at “I am doing this period”, what you should say “I am doing this, but I’m going to do it so that in the future I can improve it or build something on top of it”. This thinking saves a lot of crunch time, short term you don’t see it happening, but long term, when that dreaded deadline comes along you will pat yourself on the back for planning it well.

I would like to end this first part of Game Development with the following advice: there is no shame in not knowing something by heart, if you forget something, a concept, gameplay element, review your documents.

I didn’t learn all the slides by heart and forgot some ideas along the way, that could have gotten my colleagues attention. Yes, you read right, i presented in front of colleagues from college. A question that came into my mind before this was : How hard can it be, they are the same age as me? Answer : very hard despite the age. To present 8 slides in 6 minutes in a coherent manner is stressful, the key word here is coherent. And i think that is my biggest problem i have to work on.

The observations i made during the rest of the presentations are as follows:

1. Know the language you are presenting in. Talking on the Internet is one thing, where you can edit, you can’t pause in front of handful of people while you apply the right tense.

2.Know your audience, presenting “Swarovski diamonds” in front of IT nerds is not what i call “relevant to my interests”.

3.Don’t put on your spelling bee face, but your “i am going to present something that may interest you” face. Gestures and voice tone are everything when you are talking at an event.

4.Most students don’t know how to make a presentation. Why isn’t this taught in school? You are going to work for a firm at which sooner or later you will have to make a presentation, so i see this as a prerequisite for programmers or folk in the IT business. Yes you are going to know how to convert from binary to hex, but you will not know how to present it to other people.

I think that every boy and girl who played at least one classical game can naturaly claim that he or she knows a thing or two about design in games. After finishing a couple of missions in VA making this statement poses no regret whatsoever : the people which reside in the above mentioned category know more about design in games than the actual development team. And let me humor you and give you some examples:

1.The GFX is a part of the design and by far the graphics in this game is one of the ugliest i have ever seen since the reinvention of exaggerated HDR in Oblivion. Just take a look at the pics at the bottom of the post.Now if that is realism i’ll chew my keyboard.

2. Okay. Sound. What i really appreciate is the authenticity. Finally the nazis speak german . Tho sometimes it is very frustrating because you don’t know who is talking and you think you might miss out some cool lipsync, WRONG. There is no lipsync in this game.

3.General Gameplay. Now here i could write thousands and thousand of paragraphs and not get bored. First off in any 3rd person shooter, be it stealth or slash. you can run with the gun or in worst case you can walk while aiming, here you can’t. You have to slow down, aim and shoot. When you have a timer which is buzzing you to get the hell out of there before Ka-Boom, it can be very very unwise to have this as a design.

Another thing : no cover system. Even BGE (Beyond Good and Evil) which is a pseudo stealth 3rd person shooter has a cover system.  How can you assume that the player will not need it? It’s absurd. In any game in which your every step counts, seeing what is next is vital to the stealth feeling.

Camera is shaky, i don’t know what the hell those guys in the programming departmenat did with the parameters, but they screwed it up. If i tilt the camera to the right or left i get an unfriendly motion blur, which is painful for my eyes.

Each time you kill an enemy in stealth mode you have a really cool mini-cut-scene in which Velvet makes a quick action, now i agree in general for these specific types of in-game actions, but when i see her use her gun to execute the poor bastard and the number of bullets remain the same, well figure it out.

Throughout a mission you get collectibles, when you gather enough of them, you can upgrade your character, i really see no point in this gameplay decision since it rarely has impact on the way i play.

In morphine mode which is your only way to escape the shadows and kill an enemy right off has one interesting aspect, you can use it to kill exactly one enemy. ONE! If there are two Nazis side by side, the other probably kills you while you execute the other, so what did the player won, oh just a “Load Last Checkpoint”. I am not picky as far as games, but for the love of logic, do something that makes sense.

4. Story-line, i have reached mission 5 out of 12 and by now all i can say is that there is no story-line, go from x to y and kill z. I don’t think if i actually finish the game i will be more impressed then i already am, and on a scale of 1 to 10, i am definitely at 1.

To finish the phrase started at the beginning.

…a complete and utter disaster as far as design elements.

I’ll leave you with a couple of images, i doubt you will like them, just to give you an idea about what are you going to see if you dare play this game and for the love of Sam Fisher PLEASE DON’T.

Sorry for pullling this post last night, but i really wanted to see GameSpots grade and i don’t even want to comment their choice of giving it a 7.5, when other publications have seen what i’ve seen, meaning a waste of time.

It’s called Planescape Torment, i just sank my teeth into it and all i can say is wow. Tho it hasn’t got much voice acting, it has a lot of funny dialogs, just the sheer short lecture of Morte’s replies concerning the “chits” (female zombie workers)  around Mortuary and it got me hooked on for more.

Just a few stats so we can see the picture more clearly: it was released in 1999 by Black Isle, the same company that developed known RPGs like Icewind Dale,Fallout and Baldurs Gate. Unfortunately the plug was pulled in 2003 by Interplay and Black Isle ceased to exist, only on paper.

I didn’t play much, but right now my sincere opinion is this: developers should learn from BI how to create characters. Morte is a delight, even tho he looks something like this :

The villagers of Sigil are pretty well outlined, you will find Halots aka prostitutes, Thugs, Dustmen and Dwellers. I haven’t gone into the deep abyss of this wonderful game but from what i gather Dustmen are some sort of priests, that grant you access to  True Death, because the land i am currently in resembles the idea of purgatory.

With time i will post some screenshots with content that i find to be pretty “smart” and funny. So if you want to see if it’s worth the eye ache, check them out.

Velvet Assassin Music Video Trailer

The music chosen for it seems kinda too teenagerish but i think i can close my eyes on that one.

Also in programming news, i managed to finish the algorithms homework, tho my backtracking takes less time to run then my AC1(Arc-Consistency 1).

I had to solve a CSP with n*n numbers and r restrictions. For 10*10 numbers:

Backtrack was instant and with 15k solutions.

AC1 took some time but went trough fewer solutions. I think i am doing something wrong in the revise function. Got to nibble on it some more.