Fun Times

So this week got interesting. School decided it hated me on the same week I decided that, ready or not, I was going to finish my next video tutorial.

The upshot is that you guys get a new kind of rushed tutorial, but no game design content because I was busy making said tutorial and handling school. Enjoy.


        --LazerBlade

Storytelling in Games

So you have this great story. It has interesting characters, clever twists, and asks deep and profound questions that make the person who finally receives the story really think. Then, random game pundits in the massive chunk of oddness that is the realm of cyberspace completely forbid the idea of offloading your story to a bunch of cutscenes. "After all, this is an interactive medium," we say, "If we wanted to watch a movie, we would. We are here to play." And no, we-ahem-they don't like the idea of you making the player sit through a bunch of audio logs or pause to read giant chunks of text either.

"Okay, fine!" you say, throwing your hands up as part of your sarcastic concession. "How do I get this amazing story into the game? How can I narrate it? How can I get all of this exposition out without making the player sit through cutscenes or read walls of text?" First, I congratulate you for being truly unique in that you are willing to write a good story for your game, and then be willing to try to find the best way to express it. Second, I would like to answer your question by writing about it in the time when I'm not busy doing school, producing music, creating videogames, experimenting with electronics, or saving the world from trans-dimensional jelly toads.

Infiltrator Part 38 - HUD, EMP, and stability

It seems like I have this internal clock that every few months says "Hey! That HUD could totally be better designed!" I then proceed to completely rewrite the code for it and move everything around. That happened again, but this time I found that I had anticipated this earlier and redesigned the HUD code to be more accommodative to change in the future.

Also, accommodative should totally be a word.

Infiltrator Part 37 - Lightning!

This session was fun but didn't really see a lot of notable outside improvements. It saw one, super cool one.

Rhyme or Reason - Album Art

So I have now officially started creating the album art for Rhyme or Reason. Here is the current version of the cover:

I wanted something different from my normal neon cyberpunk thing, so I went with a yellow-green-violet color theme with simplistic typography and some random retro wireframe terrain rendered in Blender. If you want to know why I chose the terrain, I will say that there is no rhyme or reason to why the album cover is as it is.

Mass Effect 3 - Extended Cut

Awhile back when I did a from-the-hip-by-the-seat-of-my-pants review of Mass Effect 3, I spent an entire paragraph explaining how I wasn't going to talk about the ending. There is plenty of hate for it and some pretty awesome critiques of it that I can't touch. Then, along comes the extended cut. There is also a lot of good writing about the extended cut, but I have a few reasons to want to write about it myself. Before I get into those reasons(and before you hit the Read More button and blind yourself) I would like to warn you that the remainder of this post will obviously contain spoilers for the entire Mass Effect series and universe.

Hardware Fun

Those of you who have spent any marginal amount of time reading my stuff will know that "fun" means ridiculous time consuming issues that one of my personalities can enjoy with a dark sense of humor while I try to get through them. That is pretty much what is going on with my rig right now. And it's so hilarious!

In short: my rig has been having some really interesting problems which I've finally traced to the motherboard. I have to get a new one. That's why there has been a dearth of content for the last week or so. I haven't been able to work on Infiltrator or write up anything about game design or music because my machine hasn't been working. Once this gets worked out I will be back.


        --LazerBlade