Various Things

Oddly enough this update has nothing to do with me being bitter and ranting about some odd industry thing that has found a way to tick me off. I know its odd isn't it? But truth be told I have had a pretty uneventful week (aside from the whole Premier Pro issue), well uneventful enough to account for a blog update on its own, but as a collected whole all these events can make for a half decent update on what's going on with me.

For starters, tonight I get to sign the very last papers that are required for my new house to be built. While this would make most people nevous I have oddly enough I have been anxiously waiting to spend a quarter of a million bucks on a new house for myself and my new bride (we've only been married a few months now). Over the past month and a half we have spent a lot of time talking to the bank, picking out all the little details required for the house such as how much hardwood flooring, light fixtures, cabling required, etc. The only frustrating thing from this experiance was that my mortgage specialists father-in-law died during this time so she was unavailable to finalize everything until about a week ago (which normally wouldnt be an issue if the builders weren't getting panicy about where their money was). After tonight I guess I will soon have a nice little hole in the ground (literally) as they get the caterpillar in to dig out 8 feet (or more) of the ground for the basement and foundation for the new house. Expect a lot of pictures though as the construction happens.

Last night I went out to help celebrate a friends birthday. He had had a bad couple of week lately (such as his new girlfriend who he met at my wedding left him to go back home because she missed her family and friends) so we figured a night of food, beer, and gambling was in order. To facilitate this we went to Klondike Days which is a yearly Edmonton event that celebrates the whole Klondike gold rush that went on a hundred years or so ago (apparently Edmonton was the last major outpost and civilized location as people went and ran into the Yukon and Alaska hoping to strike it rich). The whole event though has turned into this wierd fair/expo where you have your usual assorment of carnival rides, attactions and carnies, and on the other side have a business exposition, a casino, bingo, street performers and so forth. We spent probably a good 6 hours at K-days, ate some decent food, had a lot of good drinks, bought some stuff and of course gambled a lot. Pretty much everyone walked out $100 richer at the end of the night (which isn't bad considering what we had done).


Speaking of K-days, my wife and I had gone there on Monday night and found this cool local Alberta painter who does a Dinotopia style of art that is pretty awesome. You should it out if you are intested. We liked the work so much we ended up buying four prints from the guy for our new house (now to find a frame).

Lastly work on Realm Wars continues in full force. The team is working pretty hard at getting a build ready to show off at LoreCon which takes place August 20th in Philadephia PA. You can read more about these update at my blog on GarageGames.

Premier Pro Should be Recalled & Refunded

Today I had to deal with the "peach" that is Adobe Premier Pro, ah hell let me just call a spade and spade and say "rotten, festering peach", which is probably being too good.

For those of you who have never used the Premier line of products from Adobe, what you are looking at is a pretty generic NLA video editing system that is highly overpriced and sorely lacking on features (especially when you compare it with some of the Open Source or Apple NLA editors out there). With ever new verseion that is released I am shocked by how much this application doesn't change and yet somehow manages to get work and become more and more unusable. Worse yet is that their latest version, Premier Pro, borderlines on what I could call "incompetentcy", its just a horrible application.

Why is it so horrible? Well aside from having an interface that is even worse than the preview versions of Premier, such as their project loader which is like hidding a big brick wall at 80KMPH right when you start the application, and a long standing bug where the program doesn't work with QuickTime or QTPro properly (the short story here is just don't use Premier for any QT work, it fails to properly compress the data anywhere near as good as QTPro can), the latest bit of stupidity is its inability to work with any MPeg4 codec. This doesn't just mean that your staple of DivX or Xvid wont work, but the same goes for your QuickTime MPEG4 codec and Techsmith (Camtasia). To see what I mean, just load in a MPEG4 file into premier, drop it into the timeline and export out to a new file, you will end up with a bloated file because Premier Pro refuses to use or work with the codecs properly. There is something just not right with watching a file that should be 100Mb end up being 16GB (thats right, gigs) because poor retarded "timmy" (aka Premier Pro) is too stupid to work like every other video editing application on the market.

Cudos to you Adobe and to the development team of Premier Pro, you have managed to successfully market and sell a lemon onto the market and didn't have to recall it in embarassment like you did with InDesign 1.0. Although if you ask me, I think you guys should recall this lame duck and either get a real version of the program out on the market or refund everyone who bought this god awful program their money back and adjust your marketing to say "well it sort of works, provided you don't want to do most things that an end user would want and expect from a program like this".

Web Site Updating

I haven't actually updated my main site here in well over a couple of years (yikes!) so I decided that I would try to do a little bit of house cleaning over the new couple of weeks and slowly update the site to make it more graphical, alive and most importantly so that it shows off my work better than that old site did.

One important note regarding this change is that I have updated the site for 1024x768 native support (the old site was formatted to be friendly to 800x600 screen resolutions). In regards to why I did this, the biggest reason is that it gives me more space to work in so that everything doesn't feel so crowded.

If you find any errors with the site please let me know. I will try to post updates when I get around to fixing up a particular section or area.

Industry Pushes For Story As Next Key Item...

If you have been following the game news lately since oh lets say GDC of this year there has been a lot of fuss put in the media, and even GDC 05 for that matter, on how storytelling is going reinvent the games market and make everything better once again as if it were some magic formula that will make everyone great once again. I'm sorry to say but I have a bad feeling that this is going to amount to nothing more than a load of crap.

Now don't get me wrong I am not saying that a story or storytelling isn't necessary for a game, but for the most part its not necessary for most of the games that are on the market. Why is that? Well it's simple, look back at some of the older games that have come out oh about eight or more years ago, you know classics like Doom, Mortal Combat, Ultima 4, Final Fantasy 3, Xwing and others like that, the ones that you get all nostoligic for when people say "gee, why don't they make games like they used to?". These were all great games in their time but for the most part none of them really had deep stories and certainly not something along the lines of modern cinema or the monomyth such as Joseph Campbell writes about. So what made these games so great that they are remembered and constantly compared to today's stuff?

If you ask me, what makes these games so great was their lack of story and storytelling devices, because of this, the user went and made up their own stories in the back of thier minds for what was going on to fill in the large gaps between what little story and storytelling that we were given. We created our own emotional responses to these games, we shared our stories, thoughts and ideas with one another and in turn made these products memorable.

IMHO this is what is lacking in games and its also the reason why we as game developers can no longer capture that magic that was one had on the market. We don't craft games where the user creates their own little stories about how they experianced the game and in turn put a little bit of themselves into the product what they talk about it to others. Instead we are spoon fed some sugar frosted regurgitated crap, told that its the best thing to come along since the flavour we were fed last week and smile and nod all the way while wondering, if this stuff is supposed to be so great, why isn't it anything like we had eight or more years ago. There is nothing left to the imagination anymore with our push for realism and hyper realism and our herding of the player through a roller coaster ride of stimuli. Woooo how exciting, for about five minutes.

Creativity is dead in the games industry, its time we realized that, took the time to understand exactly what we are doing, why it works or doesn't work and figure out what the market really wants (as opposed to telling us what they think they want through conditioned respones controlled by the very marketing and accounting gurus who are screwing this industry up). Throw all the story you want at us if you want to think that the idea of the monomyth is what you think will sell more units, you might see some short term gain until people get bored with watching a story unfold in front of them like some dime store novel.

To me I feel that the key is in ensuring that the end user can create their own story in their mind about their experiances in my game. Why? Well to be honest I think its always going to be 1000x better than anything anyone on the market could do even if you gave them unlimited funds and a thousand monkeys at a thousand keyboards to achieve working in a vain attempt to produce something better.

Those are my thoughts on this whole subject of how necessary it is to have story and storytelling in your latest greatest game that you will purchase, so tell me what you think.