The Power of Matt Compels You To Clear The Lanes!

 Games, Interactive, Life in General, Stuff I Made, Work, Writing  2 Responses »
May 112011
 

You can tell when I am in a zone for basketball these days: I run into, over, or through at least two of my teammates.

Tonight, one of the teams did not show, so that meant our team played the other team twice, in 20-minute games. Which each got 2 wins for the other teams forfeit, but we really needed to work to get any other wins — 20 minutes is quite a bit of a push. The first game we lost as we had a slow start, but more importantly, a slow finish; they pulled away with three free throws to make it 17 to 12. Second game, however, we shut down their drives to the baseline, and topped them by a score of 12-4. Also, in the second game, I really had another good game. I played for about 10-8 minutes at first, and when I can out for my break, I was really tired. Probably the most winded I’ve been in a long time. But, it was great, because I was a monster on defense, using my height and size really well. In fact, I don’t think anyone I was covering ever scored, so that was pretty nifty.

I also jumped into a pick-up game with some guys from work yesterday, and played for about 90 miniutes (60 total playing time, really) and again managed to do fairly well.

It’s worth a thought if I might have missed out on playing basketball in high school, but honestly, I really don’t think so. The big difference between now and then is that I have the motivation to do this, and that only really came about because I was hit by that damn car and broke my leg. As I was grunting my painful way back to recovery, it wasn’t until over a year later that I got clearance to try any sports, and I swore to take full advantage of that. Also, I think a big difference is that rec leagues are more relaxed and fun, whereas playing competitively probably wouldn’t have been quite my thing. Here you can make some mistakes and generally shrug it off. In more structured programs, you get benched — assuming that you even see any playing time.

In any case, summer leagues are signing up, so I’d better grab a few sports. Laura T from work actually is on a soccer team, so I think I’ll try signing up for that. I’d also like to do another basketball season, and maybe football. Just anything to keep playing outside. :)

[ S H E I L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]

So I finally got my 1st byline! The marketing team at work has put out the calls to writers for articles we could send out to various print and online publications, and after a slow start, I wrapped up a short opinion piece concerning the role of reality within games:

http://www.develop-online.net/news/37615/OPINION-The-designers-need-to-forget-reality

It’s nice to finally get something up and in “print,” and I definitely own Tina at work a big thanks, since she’s the one who is contacting all the possible locations for publication. Now, the trick is whether or not I can maintain a steady pace of articles. I have a couple of ideas for more, but the question is whether or not they pertain enough to the business/industry. I’ll need to write up the basic ideas and bounce them off Tina to get her feedback.

If nothing else, though, this was really nice. :)

Wow

 Games, Life in General, Uncategorized, Work  Comments Off
Jan 212011
 

So, Area/Code has been bought by Zynga, and is being established as Zynga New York. This is pretty big news, on a couple of levels.

First off, this may represent the sea change we’ve been waiting for in NYC, where it becomes an established location for game companies. It’s something we’ve been waiting for many years.

But secondly, and much closer to home for me, this is now the second of the “Big Three” of early NYC game companies to effectively disappear from the map. Gamelab shut down, and now Area/Code has been bought. In my original view of NYC game studios, that leaves Large Animal. Yes, I know there are more, but these were the three that everyone I know worked at, or worked with the people in charge: Eric Zimmerman, Frank Lantz, and Wade Tinney. We may well be looking at the end of the early era of NYC game studios, and the start of a new one, one of growth and depth.

More game work

 Games, Life in General  Comments Off
Dec 102010
 

And the game ideas keep coming. Which is quite cool, so long as I can actually finish them all.

We had a meeting today to narrow down some of the ideas for our internal pitches. Both of my favorites got through, so now I just need to flesh them out enough for the 2 minute pitch next week. Due Friday. I suspect I’ll be tinkering around with them this weekend; when I’m not knee-deep in World of Warcraft, anyway.

Also, I had an idea for a sequel to one of our games today — one of those moments that really came out of left field. I bounced it off of some coworkers, and I think it’s got some battleship-class-weight to it. So, I just want to write up a quick draft of the idea so the whole game design team can look it over.

Naturally, I was already planning to work on some other stuff as well, this weekend, so if I can pull it all off, I’ll be impressed.

And tired.

And It Continues to be Easy (For a Change)

 Games, Interactive, Stuff I Made  Comments Off
Apr 272010
 

First off, the link for my “officially completed” UT3 level:

Engine Room

This was a bit of a relief in that I was finally able to wrap things up. As I mentioned in my previous post, being able to test on a separate machine was, indeed, very handy. And, it’s also one of the biggest pains as a game developer — getting playtesters and ways to beta test your work. In this case, not having a separate computer to test on really slowed me down. Consider: if I was not able to test the game at work, I would have had to wait for either someone from the forums to download and test, or one of my friends. in both cases, that could take weeks, if it happens at all. Being able to “cook” the map last night and upload it to the file site, then come in this morning and really quick test it on my work machine was sooooo much better.

This has also been hanging around my “To Do” list since the summer; I last really worked on it during October of last year. Boy, that feels good to strike it down! Smote the sucker! Boom!

Anyway.

I have ideas for a couple of other maps, but I think I might hold off starting anything until I wrap up a number of other creative projects that are floating around; like, for example, the Madness board game. There’s another thing that needs playtesters to fully complete, and hence, that’s why it’s be so friggin’ slow at moving forward.

Interactive — “10 After Midnight”

 Interactive, Narratives, Stuff I Made  Comments Off
Oct 282009
 

10 After Midnight

This was my final project in the Digital Boot Camp session that many of my fellow students and I were required to take before we started Grad School proper. We had about 2 weeks to put it together, and you can see a lot of influence from my earlier work, “Road Stop.” The biggest difference was that here, the player sees all scenes, as very short 10 second snippets. Again, though, the idea is to let the user figure out what had happened.

Interactive — “Road Stop”

 Interactive, Narratives, Stuff I Made  Comments Off
Oct 282009
 

Road Stop

This is an Interactive Narrative piece that I made in 2004, partly just to teach myself a bit more about Actionscript, but also because it was an I idea I had back during my undergrad years that I never got around to fully exploring. (I am the type of person you hates to leave ideas on the table; even if it means hanging on to it for years, I will eventually get it done.) The goal behind it was that the user would actually go through the story a few times, choosing different conversations to listen on, and be able to piece together the actual story on their own. There are actually a number of plotlines going on, as well as some red herrings.

Video — “The ARG”

 Games, Interactive, Narratives, Stuff I Made, Video  Comments Off
Oct 272009
 

For one of my Parsons classes, my friend and fellow classmate Linh teamed up to run an ARG. It was mainly for a small group of fellow students, but did attract some additional players from other parts of the world. At the end of the project, we presented this video to help explain what it was all about.