Since I trash-talked him in an earlier post, I owe it to him to clarify, even if he’ll never read it: The “incompetent” guy I talked about earlier accepted my apology without a second thought in an absolutely graceful and dignified manner. I feel terrible for having said what I did, as most of the sentiment arose from an earlier time, before many of the issues we’d had had been worked out, and it was unfair and wrong of me to have said otherwise.

So… what’d I do this vacation? I didn’t travel anywhere, and Ei-Nyung was in Atlanta, so I mostly spent it pretty laid back, enjoying a lot of quiet nothingness. Still, I got some stuff done:

• Finished Mass Effect – great game with one or two major flaws, but really does show how good a story in a videogame can be.
• Finished Half Life 2, and Half Life 2: Episode 1 – also a great game, and though the fact that it’s a shooter means the mechanics can get a little repetitive and dull, HL2 also completely redefines how a story can be told in a game. Alyx Vance is hands down the best, most fully realized character in a first person game ever. I’m a bit through Ep. 2, but am not likely to finish it this vacation.
• Finished Undertow – a short, simple Live Arcade game that’s a lot like Geometry Wars with context and a story. It’s getting sadly overlooked, and I can’t find an online game to save my life, which is a shame, because really, it’s quite excellent. The single player game is short but worthwhile.
• Finished The Cuckoo’s Egg, by Cliff Stoll – borrowed this from a friend. It’s a nonfiction account of a guy who ended up chasing a hacker through Lawrence Berkeley Labs’ computer systems in the eighties. It’s a really compelling book – not as good a book as A Voyage For Madmen, but definitely a worthwhile read.
• Did some weeding – didn’t finish the front yard, but did some damage on the weeds with some help from Ei-Nyung. Looking better, for sure.
• Played a LOT of Rock Band – somehow got a lot of 4-player games together, and had big, big fun.
• Picked up and started practicing the bass and the guitar – inspired by Rock Band, I started playing around with the real instruments again. Because of my broken left wrist, it’s tough, but I think I’m able to play bass, at least. Complex chords on the guitar are tough, not only because I don’t have enough practice, but because hitting the strings with my fingers with my limited wrist rotation is tough.
• Went to the optometrist for my regular checkup. Prescription’s drifted a bit, but not enough that I’m gonna get new glasses. Yet. I took a look at a bunch of frames, and the one that “fit” the best was the Oakley Gasket. For some reason, when Oakley frames fit my face, they do so better than any of the other alternatives.
• Took the dog out a whole mess of times to various places. He jumped into the bay at an inopportune time, when it was closed due to an oil spill a month or two ago. Good times.
• Went to dinner at a couple people’s houses. Every time it was awesome. I’m really lucky to have friends who are both great company and great cooks. 🙂
• Went to some friends’ very informal City Hall wedding, which was awesome, heartfelt, and beautiful.
• Cleaned up around the house a bit, chucked all our mix-and-match plastic food storage crap, and bought a single set of stuff. Now all our stuff matches. Everything fits, and works together.
• Sent Super Mario Galaxy back – I’d gotten a defective disc, and it kept crashing at a certain point in the game. Hopefully, Nintendo will send a new disc back.
• Got a new jacket – it’s sort of a blazer-y jacket, but much less “refined” or formal. I think at this point, I’ve got all the jackets I need.
• Tried, unsuccessfully, to do a “quick” Peking duck for dinner one night, but did successfully make some awesome fresh Guacamole from America’s Test Kitchen. Not that that’s hard, but it’s pretty darned good, and a really quick meal.

Yeah. So, that’s about the size of it. Sure, I could use another year or two of vacation, but hey, it was a pretty good time. Not really looking forward to going back to work for a couple reasons, one of which is pretty obvious.

I think I’d like to spend some time working on this text adventure, but at least at this point, I think it needs a little time to mull around in my head. Though obviously, stuff develops successfully most when you start banging on things, starting with an idea that’s really compelling would be good, and I haven’t hit that spark yet. Still, I like the concept of a console text adventure with animated text, and it does seem simple enough to do. Generating the content would be the bulk of the work, but that’s the kind of work that I really, really enjoy anyway. It’s building up the infrastructure, or programming the actual game that is beyond me.

Still, worth looking into XNA – there’s probably even basic examples of how to do exactly what I want to do there already. We’ll see.

Downstairs windows leaking again. All of them. Yeah, this is one of the craziest storms we’ve seen in a good while, but damn. Called the roofers. We’ll see what happens.

Rang in the new year playing Rock Band with Mc, Holly and Max. Awesome times. Rock Band is truly the greatest multiplayer game ever made. It’s always great seeing someone sit down at the drums for the first time, and slowly start to “get it.”

I brought the bass up out of the basement, and as far as I can tell, the bassline for Brainpower is basically actually what they throw up on screen. Maybe if the bass were actually amplified, it’d feel different, but the resonance in the strings felt like it matched what was being played. Wacky fun.

Happy New Year! This year, my two resolutions:

• Get to 200 lbs. or less by April 1. Last year I went from 233 to a current weight of ~215 in three months, and held it there (+ or – a pound or two) for the rest of the year. It seems it’s just the delta that requires thought and some motivation. No motivation as strong as beating Klay this year, and I’ve failed to move the momentum in the right direction a couple times during the remainder of the year, but I’m confident I can make this work.
• Figure out how to get a measure of “creative authority” in my job. Whether that means trying to figure out how to move into a “creative director” type position, or changing what “lead designer” means at my current one, it means finding a way where I have the definitive say on at least matters of the design of the game I’m working on.

That’s it. Good times. I hope this year is wildly successful for everyone.

Too much stuff to do. I want to spend some time playing bass. I want to play some games. I want to do some gardening in the front yard. I want to do some painting. I want to write something. In the end, I’ve managed to only do a little gardening, a little bass playing, a bunch of game playing (finished Mass Effect and Half Life 2, in the midst of Forza 2 and Need for Speed: ProStreet – two remarkably similar driving games).

Bleah. So, instead, I’m writing this and watching some HD music performances on TV. Whee-ha. I have some vague ideas about this text adventure game idea. I think the basic core, just as a start, involves having control on the two analog sticks, and the triggers acting as “confirmation.”

On the left stick, you’d have short “responses” that would translate into more fully-formed responses. Very similar to Mass Effect. On the right stick, you’d have a physical disposition – stuff like “aggressive,” “shy,” and the like. How a person would respond to a line would be dictated by a combination of the content of the player’s response and their disposition.

The game would be simply a black screen with a small HUD at the base of the screen to deal with the sitck inputs. What the player would see on screen would be text that describes what is happening, dialog, and sound effects. So, perhaps if you were in a room, you’d have a short description of the room at the top of the screen. You might also have, for instance, a scraping sound on the door to the left of the room, which you would actually see as text, appearing on the left side of the screen, and animating in a way that mimics the sound.

The game itself would have nothing in the way of any other graphics or audio.

In terms of the story, one question is, “Does this format lend itself to a particular storyline?” Mechanically, I don’t know. I don’t know what kinds of descriptions of environment and what kinds of environmental interactions would feel natural. Clearly, this type of system has been used successfully for conversations in games like Brooktown and Mass Effect, so that’s an obvious fit. I wonder if you could do something like a frantic chase using only text and forcing the player to respond within a set time?

It might be interesting, if a variety of people were interested in doing some writing for it, to have the same story told from a couple different viewpoints – we’d set up the basic environment and plot, but the descriptions of the events for each character would be written from different viewpoints. Objectively, the events would be identical, but it’d be interesting to see if people make different decisions simply based on the perspective of the narrator? I suppose the obvious answer is, “Yes, duh,” but still… be interesting to see how that’d play out.

Not much different, really. I mean, yeah, the blog’s published to a closed audience, which is nice, because that way I don’t have to watch out for the details quite as much, but it’s not like there was a whole host of super seekrit stuff I was holding back anyway. If there was, I wouldn’t have had to have closed the blog in the first place.

For the record, the reason for this is that in the “Blade Runner & Melancholy” post, I mentioned “arbitrary limitations set by someone who’s bascially incompetent…” and of course, the incompetent person in question happened to find my blog online, and sent me an e-mail. Suffice it to say, going back to work on the 7th ain’t gonna be a grand ol’ ball of fun. But it’s my fault entirely, and much as I’d like to be mad at someone or something, the only thing I can be mad at is me.

So, that’s fine. A pain, but what can you do?

In a sort of tangential-ish thing, though, while walking the dog, I was thinking of what I would do if the situation at my current job really became untenable, and the sad problem is that there aren’t that many really great places to work in the game industry, and most of them aren’t in the Bay Area. The sole real exception being Maxis in Emeryville. But even then, I don’t think I’d want to work on Spore ad nauseum, which is what I’m sure they’re going to be relegated to for the next few years.

The thought that I had (and this is one of the benefits of a non-public blog) is that I think it’d be really interesting to write a text-adventure game for the xbox 360. Using a system like Mass Effect/Brooktown’s conversation system, creating a game with essentially minimal visuals. The only real visuals I’d had in mind was some potential Flash-esque text animation, like this sort of thing:

I mean, obviously, text like this would make a game without voiceover really… hard to read. But something along these lines, where the text is delivered in an animated way – I’ve heard that Nightwatch has similar subtitles.

I’ve really enjoyed NaNoWriMo the last couple years (I didn’t do it this year, though). It’s been a really creatively fulfilling process, I write really goddamn fast, and frankly, one of the things that really interests me about games are the interactive stories, so this is a way to hone in on that without the extra baggage of graphics or animation, both of which are huge time/resource sinks.

Anyway. Just a thought, but XNA would allow stuff like this to happen, even possibly co-op over Live, which would be incredibly strange. So, that would probably be a fun side project over the next year or so…

The blog’s been closed to the public. Wacky fun.

In a relatively spectacular blunder, in my last post, I ended up writing about “arbitrary restrictions imposed by someone who’s basically incompetent…”

Well, after five years of more or less lucking out, I got burnt in the most obvious possible way. That’s gonna be fun to deal with when I get back to work. Ah, well. I wrote him an e-mail in response to the one he sent me, and we’ll see how it works out.

Stupid move on my part, hopefully, changing the blog to a more restricted format (I don’t particularly care whether it’s public or not – it’s more of a journal for me, and for people who might be interested) will allow me to actually write what I’m thinking without worrying about the potentially horrible consequences.

Stupid, but whatever. I made my bed. Time to lie in it.

So, I watched another of the special features discs that came with the new, ridiculous Blade Runner set that Ei-Nyung got me for Christmas. Part of me constantly marvels that the movie was ever made. The amount of detail and sheer vision that went into its creation is staggering, and given that it was, in various measures, the “vision” of Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher, David Peoples, Jordan Cronenweth and Philip K. Dick, each competing in some way with each other, the fact that it is so focused and so intricate just boggles the mind.

The problem with it all is that it’s like looking at, well, any piece of artwork in a field or genre that you’re familiar with enough to know that you’re unlikely to achieve that level of greatness. With my job, I have a reasonable amount of creative freedom. The boundaries I have to work in make the job challenging, and in many cases, rewarding. The balance between boundaries and limitations motivating creativity and stifling it can be a tricky one to walk, however…

Then there’s the “vision” thing. I have to ask myself, do I have a *vision* for a game – both the narrative experience and the interactivity – that’s so strong, so total, that I could conceivably marshall a group of people to a destination so grand? No. I’m not entirely sure that anyone does. The question seems to be more, can you look at the landscape and adapt, guided by a purpose or meaning? Can you take information where it comes – integrate it into your view, and still retain the creative values of a great core idea?

I think I can. With games, I think my single strong point is that I can see how a system interacts before it’s made, and picture why it is fun, interesting, or rewarding. I know enough about a wide variety of fields to speak competently about them. Experience with music, knowledge of music theory, experience drawing, film theory, some engineering experience, a strong mechanical background… these sorts of skills have actually happened to be exactly relevant to my job in exactly the right way for me to be in a position of being the person to marshall a diverse team towards a single goal.

Could I make something that I would put next to Blade Runner? No. Not yet – it’d be stupid of me to say that I’m in a position like that. I don’t have enough experience at this point, no question. But over the next few years, I think the goal will be to develop the skills that *will* let me take the reins – to marshall that creative vision and move it forward with the goal of creating something extraordinary – something that can stand next to something like Blade Runner. There’s no sense, frankly, in shooting for anything less.

So, I got Mass Effect a little while back. I’ve enjoyed Bioware’s RPG’s in the past, the narrative mechanics were really similar in concept to something I’d written up for the Sims back in the day, and it looked to be a game of pretty insane scope and scale in a really deep, novel sci-fi universe.

The story, so far, is interesting. It’s sort of “typical” Bioware fare, but it’s well done, the writing’s good, and the characters are intriguing. The graphics are generally pretty decent, as well. The problem with the game is that EVERYTHING ELSE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE. Seriously.

1. The Camera: The camera is about as blunt and unpolished a camera as I can imagine. when you’re walking up and down stairs, it bounces with every step in a way that’s not too different than say, a guy with an epileptic seizure. When you run, the character’s position on screen and the field of view changes in a really unintuitive way. The camera pops and snaps all over the place. Sucks.
2. The Combat: Part of me wants to just say that everything in it is complete crap and be done with it. But that’s not giving it a fair shake.
1. There’s no introduction to the mechanics. You’re left to decipher the UI on your own, after a single wall of text that tries to explain as much of it as possible.
2. I picked a class that sucks. Because you’re forced to choose your class before you have ANY IDEA how the game plays, I picked a sniper. The problem is that in this game, the sniper class is horrifically broken, as enemies can run substantially faster than you can aim, and they can run AT your faster than you can switch to a close-range weapon.
3. There are a substantial number of one-hit kills. These often occur right at the beginning of combat, where I’ll keel over dead moments after the start of combat. In one case, I died before I could even turn around after the cinematic, because I was oriented the wrong way when it started. Good times.

I’m sorry, that’s just a collection of absolutely brain-dead stupid things, and the end result is a game that I’m finding so incredibly frustrating that I’m not sure I want to keep playing, despite all the good things that other people have said. To change my class to a character that could actually be competent in combat would require me to go throw away five hours of game. Which sucks.

But at the same time, this is SO bad that I really can’t see myself continuing to play. I want to break the disc in two EVERY TIME I’M IN COMBAT. The single main mechanic of the game makes me want to destroy the game.

Augh. It’s horrible. Horrible.