Sunday night I was burning some major midnight oil as I progressed through “Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.” To be precise, I did not get to bed until around 4 AM. Good thing I had slept in most of the weekend to bank up some sleep time, eh? Some people have a bedside lamp; I should get a bedside DSi. On second thought, that would be a bad idea – I probably would not get any sleep again. Well, aside from while doing dull things, like driving or listening to people.

Also, this late night marathon highlights my complaint against the asynchronous games that populate Facebook: there are times when I just want to play straight for about 30-45 minutes (or more), instead of the “Ding! Sorry, your five minutes are up; please come back again in an hour to play some more, or shell out $5 to keep playing.” Of course, there are some games that make this work, but they are few and far between, alas.

Anyway, in this case of late night playing, it was largely the same thing that keeps a person wrapped up in a good book: “I just want to see how this part resolves before I call it a night.” In my case, it was the Water Temple; 4 levels of tricky access. See, you can control just how much water fills the temple, and thus, which corridors you have access to. One of things that has drawn me in to the game, especially in the temples, is watching how the levels are designed to provide the player with a large space which still has a linear pathway through out. In the current deluge of games that are claiming “sandbox” and “open world” environment, it’s refreshing to be playing a game that often shows why a linear approach to a level is just as much fun (and more, usually) when designed so that a player can only take one path through while making it feel like a completely natural progression.

I also continue to be amazed at how much I enjoy the reactions of Master (the name of my hero) and the other characters in the game, despite the low poly count and non-existent high-res textures.

Oh, and hey, how cool it is, indeed, to be playing a game with true Boss Fights? The boss fight for the Water Temple also had a way wicked intro sequence, showing things from the monster’s point of view as it snuck up on Master from behind.

Also, there was also a very nice touch of psychological weirdness in one room, where you enter what appears to be the outside, in front of a lake with a mirror reflection surface, and stretches off into a opaque, light fog. Turns out you can run across the surface, and it’s eerily quiet, aside from your footsteps across the water echoing about you. Then, without warning, you are attacked by a dark version of yourself. Now, we’ve seen this in many games, but the presentation of it here was really pretty well done. Honestly, I’m not doing the scene justice, either.

Plus, many of the fights are, so far, balanced enough that you can figure out what the weak spot is and how to win without having to get spattered several times beforehand. Navi acting as a mini hint guide is handy, but since she doesn’t always have the answers, you still have to do some thinking on your own.

Mind you, the swinging camera continues to be a great annoyance, the L-targeting can be mind-bendingly picky about when it will lock on, and the collection of subscreens (map, quest, inventory, etc.) is a pretty sad UI design that was clearly made to “show off” the “3D” abilities of the game. Fortunately, all of this continues to remain merely petty annoyances rather than major pitfalls.

I have been moving back into “Zelda: the Ocarina of Time,” and I am continuously getting impressed with it. I’m still fairly early into the game, but man, there a number of things that I’m just really liking — many of which are also little flair elements that aren’t crictical to the gameplay itself, but go miles into drawing me into the experience and deepening my enjoyment.

Again, for those not aware, this particular game is about 10-12 years old, and the 3D graphics are incredibly simplistic. Still, I’m having much more fun with this game than any number of more modern releases. “Ocarina” has often been referred to as one of the very best games to be released, not just for the Zelda series, but also for the Nintendo library as a whole, and it’s not hard to see why.

So far, the game has been moving along fairly quickly; I was momentarily stumped on one puzzle, but there enough clues and hints around that so far it hasn’t been an issue. Navi, of course, makes a nice way to remind players what the next major objective is, so you don’t have to worry about wandering around lost for ages.

But it’s the little things that have really been making this game come alive: the “rockin’” (so to speak) music in the Goron city, the dry humor that (every now and then) bubbles up in the word balloons, and the various idle animations & sounds that the kid (“Link,” we’ll call him, even though you can name him whatever you want) has which always makes it clear that he is just a little boy.

There are also a lot of things that take place which I find myself greatly amused by; last night, I ran across two separate scenes that actually made me laugh:

1. When Link plays a tune and the Goron King, a big, rock like creature with a big frown, starts dancing like a maniac (maniac!) on the floor (dancin’ like he never danced before….), Link actually slowly backs away from him, which is exactly what I think anyone watching would have thought.
2. Later on, the King is impressed with Link’s help and pats him on the shoulder. However, given that Link is a little boy, the King accidentally knocks Link flat to the ground. The timing was worthy of Laural and Hardy.

I will admit, I have been getting a bit frustrated with the camera swinging around, especially during battles. The Lock-in system works, but a number of times I keep screwing it up and wind up losing track of the enemies. there’s also an odd quirk which is that I can kill spiders up on walls, but then am unable to retrieve the “golden skulls” which I need to complete a side quest. I’m hoping that this will be rectified when I get the boomerage, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Regardless, though, still having a lot of fun with the game. And so far, Link (despite being, like, 6 years old) is as much of a Mack expert as Commander Shepard: already it seems that he has three love interests. Talk about getting started early.

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.

Last night, I finally got around to replacing the texture of the lifts in my UT3 level. I had been putting this off for, well, months, mainly because I just didn’t want to go through the process of recooking and republishing everything. The first time through doing that took quite a long time, and I had little interest in revisiting those aspects.

However, the replacement of the texture went easier than I expected — since the lifts are animated, they require separate “rules” in how they interact within the level, but the static meshes that they are built from are treated like any other static mesh: just place the new material on the base mesh and all instances of it are updated properly.

“Oh. That was easy.”

I then cooked the level, knowing it would take around 5-10 minutes due to the size of the level and lighting, and now just have to make some of those less-fun adjustments to the .ini file and readme info, so that everything is properly updated.

Of course, there are still a couple more things beyond that: I need to upload it all in zip file form to a public FTP site, get Mr. 188 to test it on his computer to make sure it runs properly, and then post a link to the file on the EPIC forums. I’m not expected a world-beater reaction, but it will be very nice to finally get this off my plate, and it also gives a little more ammo for the resume.

Hmm, thought: I have Steam installed on my work computer… I bet I can install UT3 here as well, and then do separate testing without having to bug Mr. 188. That’s handy, eh?

I wrote the following up a while ago, and never got around to posting. So, let’s try it now, shall we?

—–

You know you’re a game designer at heart when you make a Staples run from work to get a pad of Graph paper, a set of mechanical pencils, and a calculator that is not scientific, but durable.

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

I’ve been reading the book “Mastering Unreal Technology for the Unreal Editor 3;” a friend happened to have a couple of copies and loaned me one. Having used the 2004 Edition back when I was in grad school for my Games, Mods, and Code class, I remembered that, while the book had its faults, it also was a handy reference material for some of the more esoteric aspects of the actual programm.

Reading through the current copy, I’m only up to chapter 4, but already it’s pretty clear that this will be no different than the last. I will admit, however, that it’s a little difficult to read. Not because they use too much dry, technical language; quite the contrary. Rather, they try so hard to make the tone conversational that it’s actually embarrassing. In a lot of ways, it’s like reading a series of blog postings from someone who just discovered the Internet: a lot of exclamation points (never more than after a sentence, though), a lot of bad attempts at humor, and some good ol’ fashioned self-promotion. I half suspect that they wanted to include a bunch of smiley faces, too, but the editors drew the line at that one.

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

Having finally gotten my first real paycheck a little while ago, I have since noticed that I have been, in my opinion, burning through cash at a faster rate than normal. A lot of this is just from taking advantage of he extra money and replenishing little things that are nice to have, like hand soap, contact lens fluid, umbrellas, etc.

But this time, I’m actually taking a little bit to enjoying myself, too. After all, after over half a year living off of PBJs and bulk food pasta (as good as that food is), I felt the urge to get a touch more variety in my diet. Additionally, I even had a night out where I decided to just have several drinks and see how weak my tolerance had become. Well, ironically, it had somehow gotten stronger. I was over 10 drinks into the evening before reluctantly admitting that I still was not any closer to the desired state buzzliness.

In lighter news, I’m now finally getting a chance to play video games extensively without guilt. Sure, a number of times during my unemployment I was playing various games because I honestly was researching the different games as a type of market research, but the truth is that, quite honestly, a lot of those games held no interest for me in fact, some of them I just could not stand.

But now, I have not only acquired the time to play, but also a Gamecube controller for my Wii (and a memory card, a somewhat annoying unknown required expenditure), allowing me to finally explore the used Gamecube games I had purchased back about 8 months ago. In addition, I also have been getting into some of the other games that I have yet to complete.

Recently, I finished Prince of Persia (again, the Gamecube edition), and I can easily see why it was such a favorite. I won’t get into the details yet, but suffice to say that it’s very fun, and man, did “God of War” get a vast amount of its ideas from this game. Then again, I can also see a fair amount of Ico in Prince of Persia, so who’s to say which was what inspiration?

Kingdom Hearts II was also wrapped up, finally, and while it was another fun romp through the different worlds of Disney and Final Fantasy, it did suffer from the same ending problem which is clinically known as “Too many f’ing boss fights.” This is something not exclusive to the Kingdom hearts franchise, but man, so far, they hammer on it more than anyone; every time you think you beat the last boss, it’s time for another fight! In particular, there are 2 different bosses that you have to defeat twice.

Currently in the works are Zelda: The Ocerina of Time, Rachet and Clank, and Mass Effect 2. The latter I snatched up on sale at Target — $20 off! Given that used copies at the local Gamestop were only about $5 cheaper than a new copy, I felt justified in the purchase.

Part of my job is researching games; this is actually a frequent request from clients: “Hey, we just played this game and think it’s cool: can we rip off anything from it for our game?”

Recently, I had a chance to look at a game called “Empire Craft.” This is a standard Evony/Quest for Camelot/etc. style game, where you build up a city, recruit heroes, and basically spent about 90% of your time waiting for building projects to be completed. Now, I have to admit, I had a really hard time taking this game seriously, largely because it was painfully obvious that the game was rushed to market without a lot of QA time: overlapping text, buggy UI, and — my personal favorite — translations that range from embarrassingly bad to outright hilarious. The game is originally from China, and I get the feeling that they just ran it through an Internet translator. Case in point is the “Game Info” blurb which is actually on the game’s official website:

The background of Empire Craft tends to western fantasy which an exigency of war world composed of a variety of race. There are Human, Dwarf, Orcs, Merman, Harpy and Devil in the world. For a clash of cultures and interests, there was a state of war between the rivals in a long period. In the age of world to be cruel ruled by Devil, Human Hero player will lead the troops combine with other races to confront Devil and overthrow their rule in the end. Player acted the commander in independent crack force of Human, effort on survive and develop during wartime and join with other players overthrow the rule of Devils.

Ye gads.

“In the age of world to be cruel ruled by Devil….”

I’m still not entirely sure what that means. It’s sort of like a statement Tarzan would make when he’s drunk and has been hit in the head by several heavy, blunt instruments.

So anyway, yeah. Just wanted to share that piece of gold!

Oh, and did I mention that I saw a number of icons that they blatantly ripped off from World of WarCraft? Consider it mentioned.

Given that I have now finished a month of work (well, not really, as I started on the 10th, but c’mon — polka with me, here), I thought I’d write a bit about it. After all, defining what a Game Designer does can actually be rather difficult at times.

Currently, however, it’s quite easy: I do a lot of writing.

I mean, a truckload of writing. A busload — wait! A speeding busload that will explode if it goes under 55 mph! And has to jump a bridge! Yeah!

You get the drift.

Pretty much since I started, I having been hammering away at the keyboard, building up the Game Design Document (GDD). This lovely clump of text describes, at a high level, how the entire game operates. It needs to basically be the equivalent to a TV series Bible. Every question needs to have an answer within; every detail needs to be cataloged; every nook filled with a delicious butter.

This is not as simple as it sounds, because what always winds up happening is that as you start writing up the details of one aspect of the game, you begin to discover ten new elements of the game that need to be addressed, ranging from the programming, to the networking, to the UI, to the actual game mechanics, themselves. And, of course, each of those elements leads to yet another ten things to sort out and settle, at which point you realize that having figured them out, now half of your original statements need to be revised and/or updated to keep everything in line, and so on.

Furthermore, when you write the GDD, you also have to keep in mind that probably about 25% – 50% of what you write is going to need to be adjusted and revised once Q&A starts, and people actually start interacting with the entire system. That’s when you get the explosions of bugs and features that need/should be added, and you suddenly understand why pretty much every piece of software made these days needs a series of patches and updates.

That said, I should note that I’m actually having a ball. I’m pretty much in charge of developing the system; there was some ground work in place when I started, but there has been a lot that has been since added and expanded. Others have been sounding boards and have definitely helped, but still, there are large chunks of the game which, as it currently stands, I can point to as pretty much my idea. That’s both really cool, and really scary. The game’s development time means it will be a while before we complete it, but I’m really interested in seeing this thing developed. It’s a really big project — not so big that it’s overwhelming, but definitely something that is honestly right in the sweet spot of “difficulty.”

This upcoming Thursday is my next big deadline; I’m feeling pretty confident about it, but just need to make sure I don’t get to self-assured. As I mentioned, a lot of new questions might need to be answered as we continue to pour over the GDD for completeness.

By the end of March, we should actually see some of the game in action, and I have this feeling that it’s going to be like when you work for days on a 2-second animation piece, and then see it for the first time. So much time spent for such a brief moment, but that moment is so incredibly awesome that you can’t wipe that idiotic grin off your face.

Well, that’s my gut feeling, anyway. Check back in about a month, and we’ll see!

As I was washing dishes tonight (chores — oboy!), the classic track “Introduction – Manor” from the renown album “An Introduction to AD&D” came on, and as I listened to the adult actor attempting to be a 14-year old boy, the following line caught my fancy: “..you quickly tire of the safe life here in town. Just over the next hill must be danger, wealth, and fame.”

This brought to mind a discussion I had with Mark a little while ago about some of the difficulities I’ve had dating:

“A lot of the girls that I had an interest in, I would lose that, because it seems that they are more concerned with my job status and income,” I explained. Keep in mind that this discussion was happening during my unemployment phase, so I was rather sensitive to a potential date’s money-grubbing tendencies. “And it bothers me to think that this girl, who otherwise seems really cool, would then dump a guy should he lose his job or something.”

“But,” Mark countered, “remember that what a lot of girls are looking for is the stability of a guy with a steady, secure job. Someone who is settled into their career and will be there for years.”

“well, then,” I muttered, “I’m pretty much screwed.”

See, working as a Game Designer is not something that anyone could consider to be a “safe” profession. Not even counting to risk of being in small start-ups (like my last and now current job), even larger studios can be merge and shed jobs, and beyond that, often people, upon completing a long project, will move on to something else. Pretty much straight freelance/contract work, and there’s no guarantee of continued work via that model.

Now, personally, I’m fine with the uncertainty of being a Game Designer. But now I do have to think that maybe in the world of D&D, I would most likely be an adventurer, roaming from gig to gig, never entirely sure where my next meal is coming from, and accept that a path such as mine is fraught with peril and the knowledge that I walk it alone.

The dangers of cramps in my WASD hand are my sole burden to bear.

Why do “hired” and “fired” rhyme even though the words represented diametrically opposed ideas? Very handy for written poems and song lyrics, true, but still….

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

I have been using my WiiFit for about a week and a half solid, now, but I have switched from the strength resistance about a week ago to aerobic training. See, the “Free Step” exercise program allows you to do step aerobics for durations of 10, 20, or 30 minutes while you watch TV. Just set it all up, then switch over the TV input to watch something. In the past I had used DVDs, but do to the dead remote, I have been unable to properly utilize the DVD/VCR player.

But, last week, I had a brainstorm.

I had started playing Kingdom Hearts II, which I have been told that I will never finish because of its “Epic of Gilgamesh-ish” length. Having actually finished the first game (not an easy task, I freely admit), I am determined to wrap this one out, and I released that instead of sitting around for 4-5 hours playing, I could just as easily play while stepping on and off the Wii Balance Board.

Playing Kingdom Hearts II while “playing” WiiFit in the background. Talk about meta-gaming.

Not surprisingly, I’m not doing the Free Step for 4-5 hours; just the 30 minutes. I have, however, upped the challenge for me: rather than just have the balance board sitting on the ground, which means I’m only stepping uo and down by the grand total of 2 inches, I have raised the balance board up on to my futon frame — about 6-7 inches or so. This makes no difference to the Free Step “game,” but certainly makes a difference to me. I’m always working up a sweat this time, and certainly feel like I’m getting a decent workout.

At some point, I should get back into the strength training, but for now, it’s nice to know that I have a system in place that pretty much insures I’ll be getting some exercise every day.

I’m so bloody clever.

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

The first pass at the basic stats for the indie game I’m working on with The Wizard and Curly were wrapped up last night. I need to do some testing with the basic numbers, but then can send those only so that they are ready to be plugged into the game when the programming is ready.

I admit that there’s something of an odd development going on: the job I interviewed for should be getting back to me within a week or so, and naturally I’m still looking into other options. But assuming I get the job, I would then have to proceed to most likely abandon the game because it could fall under a “non-compete” clause of the new job. And it would be a shame to have to stop work on this–

Oh who am I kidding — I would drop it easily. Sure it’s been fun and I think it’s a strong idea, but it also isn’t paying me anything. A job trumps it, easily.

The flip side is that if I do not get the job, this will just be even more motivation to get the game wrapped up ASAP. Right now, I’m wondering if we might be able to hit a testable version of the game by the start of next month. And hey, that’d be some serious progress.

I made a list this morning (well, early afternoon — I overslept again), and actually managed to mark everything off of it:

1) Send out Fireside Chat Log End of the Year review.

2) Follow-up with West Coast game company.

3) Follow-up with a local game company.

4) Catch up on various e-mails.

5) Work on the side game project (this is currently in progress, so I haven’t marked it off just yet).

Not bad for a “shortened” day, and this isn’t even counting my nifty meta-gaming moment, in which I was doing the Free Step on the WiiFit for 30 minutes while playing Kingdom Hearts II on the PS2. And, because just stepping up and down on that balance board is not something that I think is really giving me a respectable workout, I placed the board on my futon frame, so it was about a half foot of the ground. Definitely better workout.

Tomorrow will be another short day, but for good reason: I have an interview in the afternoon, and then that evening will be going to my first basketball scrimmage. Of course, these means that I’ll have my gym bag with me on the interview, as I doubt they would appreciate it if I just arrived in my gym clothes. Still, here’s hoping it goes well, as it’s with a great local company.

As for the basketball game, I just have to remember to bring my ankle brace. Oh, and to try and avoid breaking a finger. I hate when that happens.