Do You Want to Beta a Mech Game on InstantAction?

Lore Aftermath will be entering into its private-beta phase on InstantAction later on today. So if you were ever a fan of MechWarrior, Battletech, Shattered Steel, Gundam, Armored Core, Macross/Robotech or any other series with big giant robots and want to play a pretty cool game (shameless plug) with that sort of thing, then head over to InstantAction, signup and then let them know on the beta forums!

Lore Aftermath Video - Pressure Fault

Here is a video of the mech game Lore Aftermath, a game that I helped develop that we are currently in the final testing stages before release on instantaction.com.


Lore Aftermath - Pressure Fault Game Play from mgtgames on Vimeo.

If you are curious what exactly I worked on here I did everything art related except for the weapons, weapon FX, the Lava particles and the arena wall structures that the player starts in (including mission design).

Pax08 - The Good, The Bad and the Really Late Blog Post

Ok so PAX 2008 has been over for a few weeks now, but unfortunately I got caught up with a bunch of work and couldn't post about it until now. So here is my quick summary for PAX 2008...



The Good
- We demoed Lore Aftermath at the InstantAction / GarageGames booth in the expo hall on Saturday from 4pm to 6pm (closing). Adrian and I figured that we would get a good reception from people at the show, but what we got was an incredible reception. It turns out there are a lot of mech fans out there wanting a true mech game, so when they saw Lore being played on the big screens in the IA booth, they stopped by, tried it out for themselves and really enjoyed what they saw! They didn't care that it wasn't Battletech or Armored Core, they liked what they saw and wanted more of it!
- You know you have made a good game when other developers from the big AAA houses like Blizzard come up, play your game and then tell you afterwards how they liked it.
- We got 2 free meals off of GarageGames... score! ;)
- Our first official PodCast for Lore Aftermath was done after the show with Ian Torrey from IA. You can listen to it here to find out more about the game.
- Gamers got to see what they wanted at the show. Games they could play.
- There were some very cool costumes people came up with.
- Talking to other devs at the show was incredibly easy, there was no snobbish response, or "who the fuck are you and why should I talk to you" responses like you get at GDC when people are running from session to session. Just good honest feedback and talking about games.
- I got to meet a lot of the new faces at GG/IA I had not met yet, and also met some old friends too.
- You could buy items on the show floor if you wanted. As such you could buy games, books, tshirts, gaming devices, etc.
- The show was relatively under control and wasn't anywhere near the headache inducing levels of E3s. Everyone seemed to respect one anothers booths and weren't assholes about drowning out the competition because they had more money to invest.
- I got a chance to check out a few really cool games coming to Instant Action and the PC that I had not seen before. I have to wonder soon if companies will begin to use PAX not to demo finished products but to grab more in-development feedback with regards to their games.
- The coolest thing I got from PAX wasn't the Legions t-shirt, but actually the Fallout 3 "So You Want to Leave the Dome" booklet that they were handing out. Its a really cool and well done booklet that gives you a taste of the Fallout world (and as someone who never played Fallout, I went through this booklet cover to cover and enjoyed it).

The Bad
- Why the hell is the registration booth on the 4th floor of the convention center? As someone who bought his 3-day pass at the show, I have to say finding this thing was a huge inconvenience.
- Please someone give me a freaking map & schedule of events in my hand-outs I get when I register. I missed a number of good talks and wandered around the first couple of hours aimlessly looking for the few posters of the PAX layout. This was not cool guys.
- Some kid thought it would be cool to have a shot of someone else in a Master Cheif (from Halo) costume beating him up... unfortunately it ended up looking like the Master Cheif was gonna tea-bag him instead. I didn't take a picture of this but I am sure if you look hard enough on the internet you will find it, I was simply too disturbed to want to look at it anymore.
- Some game demos had really really long lines to check out. Maybe it was the fact that there were 50,000 people at PAX, but it seemed like some companies were ill prepared for delivering the good. Left 4 dead, DragonAge, Fallout, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King were really bad.
- Free what? Unfortunately because you could buy things on the show floor there wasn't a lot of free schwag to give out.

iPhone Week 3...

Ok so it's now my third week with the iPhone and I figured it would be worthwhile posting a quick follow up to mention what I feel about the device now that the excitement of owning one of these things is gone.

At this point I would honestly say I have mixed feelings about the device. As a phone is above average. As a PDA, once you get the email configured (no fault of the phones), its pretty schmexy, I love not lugging around 15 pounds of laptop. I still hate iTunes and the Apple Store is so woefully inadaquate for selling software that it makes my brain hurt at how a company the general masses think is so "brilliant" can be so stupid at how it sells software (but oh that's right, Apple doesn't really know how to sell software without slagging its competition with TV ads that are outright lies).

The biggest disappointment I have had thus far is the fact that the iPhone SDK requires a Mac. When I got my phone I took a look at the app store and saw pretty much 95% crap/overpriced items on there, but it did inspire me to want to maybe write a few small apps of my own. Sadly this dream is done for until Apple gets off its collective ass and smells the coffee by releasing the SDK for Windows and Linux. I honestly do not know what they were thinking but 95% of the computer work does not use a Mac, so why they chose to cut this massive market segment out from developing for the phone IMHO shows that they are either ignorant and inept or theyre being anti-competative and are trying to force people to buy Macs to really extend the iPhone capabilities and make it great.

A minor disappointment is that for some reason, if I change the ports on my email, it somehow fucks up the phone and prevents it from connecting to the 3G network of my carrier... WTF. So each time this happens (luckily I am done configuring the email) I have to reset the phone's settings. GAH! I had to learn this the hard way by waiting on hold to my carrier for them to give me that 2 minute solution :(

A minor annoyance is the fact that for some reason now, my keypad on the iPhone is horribly laggy. Maybe I am trying to type too fast but I can end up whole sentences ahead of what the phone is displaying on the screen and then I can watch it play cathup. I am not sure what is going on here but it seems like a major flaw to me which makes using the phone for anything more than a quick email response kinda useless. If anyone has any suggestions on fixing this please let me know.

Another minor annoyance is using the web browser and posting in a forum. For some rediculous reason, each type you type a letter in a forum post, the retarded Safari browser decides to scroll the screen suddenly up to the top of the screen and then back down to the forum post. I have found if I zoom out of the forum post (which is a bit tricky because the keyboard for the iPhone takes up so much screen) I can get around this issue... but reading what I have typed becomes a bit tricky :(

As for any new positive things to say about the phone, I haven't really experianced any since my initial post, but if I do I will be sure to mention it.

iDs Rage Requires BluRay For Best Graphics? WTF?

While on the road to my grandfathers 95th birthday I read an article on my iPhone from Gamastura entitled "QuakeCon: Carmack Talks Blu-ray Advantage Over Xbox". The jist of the article as I understand it is that apparently iD's new game "Rage" won't be as good on the PC and 360 because of texture and audio compression.

Now to some people they might be turn this into a PS3 vs 360/PC debate, myself however I have to wonder what the fucking hell anyone should give a shit about whether the data is compressed or uncompressed. Why? Well great games are those that are fun to play. Compressed or uncompressed data has nothing to do with gameplay.

I will tell you what isn't fun though... load times for games, and I can fucking guarentee you that if iD thinks that Rage will be a bundle of joy because of a lack of data compression, what won't be fun is the end user waiting minutes on end for the dammed game to page from the optical disc to their machine, and then their machine trying to figure out WTF to do with all this data. I already hate the amount I have to wait right now for my console games to load, nevermind when I have to page down gigs and gigs of data for a mission environment. I can just see it now, players impatiently waiting as they watch their screen say "Game Loading... estimated time for completion, 30 minutes".

But maybe iD will suprise us and in between load times we can play one of their older Quake or Doom games and completely forget about the fact that this wonderfun technological triumph that is Rage is loading in the background. Then while you are in the middle of a rocket jump, your screen will flash over and say "Rage is now loaded" and the player will respond with "Rage... what the hell is Rage, I was playing Quake! Get me back to my game before that newb guns me down!"

So now Rage loads up and we go and play, shoot shoot, drive your vehicle... let the system page the data as we travel in a fast moving vehicle, surely we won't mind a second or two of lag for the opportunity to see a spec of dirt in such fine HD glory will we? I don't know about you, but I hated Oblivion on the 360 because of this, so I am just dreading the fact that I will be trying to play an action game with any sort of paging going on.

Maybe I could be wrong. But I have a sneaking suspicion I will be right and in the end if iD does go down this route we as the consumer will suffer from broken promises and another boring tech demo of engine technology.

Going from PvE to PvP in WoW

Like most World of Warcraft players I am incredibly bored at the moment with the game. My characters are at level 70 and I have done probably as much raid content as I can considering how god dammed difficult it is to get a 25 man run going when all anyone wants to do is run Karazahn for badges or get their 'Charity Purples' by playing Battlegrounds/Arenas. As such I have started to level a new character but this time I decided to go not on my usual PvE (players vs environment) server but on a PvP (player vs player) server.

I had always been curious to see how this would work out, and as luck would have it a few friends of mine were on a PvP server so it made the hop pretty easy. I entered into this server thinking I would need to watch my back, gain some new and interesting experiances in a game I already knew and have some fun in the process. However the real truth of the matter is far from what I stated.

For the most part PvP on WoW seems more about leveling your character as quick as they can to level 70 than it is about PvP. Once you hit level 70 you go and grief the hell out of everyone else in some vein attempt to make up for those times some level 70 asshole corpse camped your body in some low level town or zone.

Sorry but aside the some pre-pubescent kids living in his parents basement, who exactly thinks this is fun? Where are the raids on the enemy Captial Cities I had heard of, where factions would try their best to nuke off a Leader/Boss of one of the cities? Or the idea of Guilds taking on other Guilds. This is the same lame gametype from a PvE server but with the option of some cowardly player being able to kill you when your back is turned... lame.

Because of this experiance here is what I am finding are the unwritten rules of playing on a PvP Server:

- You do not really PvP until you hit level 70, until then its considered faux paux to PvP in the world against the other faction.
- Players are apparently afraid of karma biting them in the ass if they do PvP some guy on his own. So the general rule of thumb is don't attack someone if they are on their own.
- You never really want to PvP someone your own level, always pick on a guy lower level than you, in a low level town where the guards for the most part will ignore you.
- If your do PvP against someone your own level and lose you should immediately call all your friends for help, or conversely think that you are some sort of genious by bringing in your twinked out level 70 character to extract revenge.
- Never PvP unless you outnumber your opponent. 2 on 1 is always better than 1 on 1.
- If you do kill someone off easily, you should corpse camp them for the next 5 to 10 minutes to remind them of your vast superiority. Add in another 5 minutes if you are vastly higher level to the target you killed.
- Why PvP in the world when you can PvP in a battleground instead?


So what could Blizzard do to make PvP servers more enjoyable?

- Reward world PvP at a much higher rate than Battleground PvP. Give the player 5x more points for killing someone in the world since there is way more of a challenge and risk to do so.
- Create more of a reward for killing the city bosses. Maybe they should drop Badges of Justice, give a ton of honor points, vendors dont sell and/or increase the cost of buying items in towns aligned to that faction? Do something at least to encourage it.
- Make city/town guards smart. No one fucks around with PvP in the Goblin towns because those guards are tough as nails. They lock you down and then beat you stupid. Do the same with city/town guards as well since these places are supposed to be refuges for players not concentrated killing zones.
- Punish corpse camping by giving negative honor. You got the guy. There's no need to sit there and harass the player, there is no honor in that.
- If a player is 20 levels lower than you, make them a negative honor target as well unless they attack you first. With the way that level 70 gear is so grossly overpowered its not even considered unfair PvPing anyone lower than level 50. It's just inhumane.
- Create more PvP gear for characters level 1 thru 59 (Honor points only), nothing fancy just good green/weak blue level, and have one central location for all this gear. Currently players in this level range have to run about and try to find the vendors... something which I would bet 90% of the players in the game have no idea how to do.

iPhone, The First Weekend

I usually detest travelling because it means that I have to lug around a shit-ton of electronic equipment in order to stay connected. Worse yet I am paranoid about moving my equipment around for fear of losing information on the device, so if you saw me in the airport I am one of those guys cluthing the laptop bag as if it were my life... which isn't far from the fact since I work at home as an indie developer and don't necessarily have much for fancy backup systems, just a portable HDD and some DVD-Rs. As such I have been eyeing up PDA devices for the past few years, trying to find that perfect one that meets my needs.



Now I would like to say that I chose to get an iPhone because it's the best thing on the market. But the sad, honest truth of it all is that I really did not consider getting one until I saw that I could get the Torque Game Engine's running on the iPhone SDK. This really excited me because we use Torque a lot at work for the stuff we do, so not only as there a possibility that we could maybe put some of our stuff on the iPhone but now I could convince myself that buying the phone and writing it off was a good idea. All that I had to do was convince my wife, who reminded me that I was entitled to "treat myself" to new things once in a while... which translated from woman-speak meant "sure you can get one, just get one for me as well".

For the most part the phone is pretty sleek and easy to use. Though as a iPod virgin, the lack of any sort of instructions on how the dammed thing operates annoys me (bad Apple, for $350 could you try not to be a bunch of cheap fucks and put in a tiny 50 page booklet on the basics of the phone?), so I am still learning things about this phone today and will probably continue to do so for the next few week.

So here are some of my quick thoughts on the iPhone after using it for a weekend.
- On Syncing the phone to the PC: Using iTunes the device was able to quickly pull over all my bookmarks and contacts... which I then had to go and edit down (since most of my bookmarks and contacts are there for long term storage and not day to day usage) and then disable the syncing of bookmarks and contacts so I don't nuke anything on either device.
- iTunes: I hate it. Once again the lack of instructions here is rediculous (I spent a good hour or two doing the old "hunt and peck" approach of figuring out what the software does) and now I have an invasive Apple brand application trying to take priority of loading various files on my PC.
- The web feature is pretty cool and I like the fact that if there is wifi in the area the device will try to connect to it first. It's also completely WYSIWYG with only a few issues such as trying to type in a forum post when the screen isn't zoomed into the field in a PHP3BB board.
- The email functionality is pretty good too, though setting it all up to work, due to SMTP and POP configurations by the ISPs I use and having to remember my email passwords wasn't much fun but I cannot fault the device for this. Now that it is working its great.
- The app store for the phone is pretty lame. There is no real opportunity to look at demos or screenshots, so IMHO its pretty hit or miss what you are going to get. Though I will admit I am thinking of trying my hand at programming again to maybe create a little app of my own.

That's all for now... more later.