  Cubegasm's First Dev Journal Entry | 
Posted - 6/24/2008 12:51:29 AM | In lieu of actually doing any development tonight I, instead, chose to write a gaming article (still no Metal Gear Story; I'm still thinking about that) and then a particularly-lengthy GameDev.net Daily. Now, since I've given up hope of getting work done tonight and have accepted the idea that Battlefield: Bad Company will dominate my nights for the next few days, I'll write about what I'm actually working on for the moment.
I've never worked on a project that had any sort of physics simulation occurring within it before; when I found out that Havok released their SDK that could be used by hobbyists and by any commercial product that retailed for less than $10, though, I retreated from my previous stay at Hotel XNA and back into C/C++ Direct3D9 Land. I didn't want to spend months writing a framework and a rendering engine, though, since I'm currently in the kind of mood where I want to put out a game every two-three months -- a timespan which is variable based on game release dates, occasional social interests and obligations, and work schedules. It is a direct result of this mindset which led me to using OGRE. I spent a few days configuring my project, the engine (and all of the modules for it which I planned on using), and Havok in Visual Studio and then got about implementing a basic Havok simulation and rendering aesthetic worked out.
  
While doing these tests I had envisioned a bright, solid-colored color palette with a very minimalistic lighting scheme for the scene all with a slight HDR/Bloom glow attached. I had the Havok world and the cube objects all set up and working at the time the above screenshots were taken but, in movement, something felt wrong about the way they were interacting with the environment. I looked over all of the environment values that I had set and things looked alright. Then I realized that, when a cube-like entity hit a ground surface with a high restitution value from eighty meters above the surface that the chances of it rotating are, well, almost a certainty. And I wasn't taking an entity's orientation quaternion into account for the OGRE cube graphic whatsoever. So, yeah, fail. The right-most image in the following trio shows that OGRE is having some difficulties maintaining high rendering speeds with all of the cube objects which, really, seems not so good. I'm either adding the entities/nodes to the scene in an unoptimized fashion or the debug rendering runtimes are extraordinarily slow. This is something I'm still playing with at the time of writing.
  
I got back to this codebase about a week and a half after the previous set of images was taken (Metal Gear Solid 4 needed some love and attention) and when I started up my project build I realized I didn't really like the look things were taking. The aesthetic didn't really match the one I had envisioned for my game so, this past weekend, I went about remedying that (with the most current image being the far right one):
  
And, now, I'm just cleaning up the codebase as it exists right now and thinking about what, specifically, I'm going to do for the game. My current idea right now is a sort of Fort Wars single-player game against the AI; each player has a structured composed entirely of cubes and each one is attempting to blow up the other person's fort first to reveal a large target-like item in the center that, when exposed, must be hit a few times before it explodes and, then, ending the match. My idea is to make differing types of cubes that have a variety of effects once they are hit: some will give positive benefits to the player (increased damage radius, multiple launched projectiles per shot, etc.), some will give negative benefits, and some will simply be explosive that can take out a number of surrounding boxes at once. Whether this what I'll actually do for the game is, at this point, completely up in the air. I'm going to code some initial mechanics and play around and see which seems like the most fun for me.
That is, of course, once I devote some time to Battlefield: Bad Company.
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| Grid | 
Posted - 6/23/2008 10:24:42 PM | I know Grid isn't the greatest arcade racing game ever but, goddamn, I love it so much. It has the perfect blend of a career mode where I can make money, buy cars, hire teammates and then merges that with a with a more arcade-like set of racing mechanics. The game has a great sense of speed and an absurdly good damage model that makes events like the Demolition Derby -- an event I haven't played since Destruction Derby for the Playstation -- an absolute blast to play. One of the game's bullet points is an instant replay system which allows players a number of attempts to go back in time in the game (a la Prince of Persia: Sands of Time) and undo whatever mistake was made the first try; this is a mechanic that, at first, I was annoyed by due to the unnecessary menu-work that was required to use the feature but, after some time with the game, it's a fantastic addition to avoid the video game racing gamer's urge to restart a rice a few dozen times to perfect a given event.
  
Story time:
I got my first team driver yesterday. His name was Seth Brown. He didn't even finish the first of our two races in an event. I want to not only fire him, but tie him to a tree in the middle of the forest and make him pay me back for the event winnings he took. The fact that I couldn't is clearly evidence of lazy development but, anyway, I fired him and then replaced him with a much better teammate and then I got an achievement for it.
Tonight that new teammate and I fucking annihilated the Europe rookie cup and took Team Kitten to the top in every race. At one point I was in second and then I got too aggressive on the final turn and flipped over, did a complete 360 in the air, and managed to make it over the railing onto the other side of the turn, beat out the first place guy, and zoomed to a first-place finish. Then I went back to finish the last (sixth) race of the America Rookie cup, finished that, and then beat some jerk that challenged me in head-to-head and got a million dollars.
Then I drove a Lamborghini for another team and failed to finish 24 Heures Du Mans (a twenty-four minute race) since I got impatient and overly-aggressive and, with no flashbacks left, ran head first into a wall which was surprisingly well-built.
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| Metal Gear Gameplay | |
Posted - 6/20/2008 12:52:24 AM | Over the course of the last week I was able to play the final chapter in a franchise which I first played as a rental on my NES way back when I was a munchkin; Metal Gear was a thoroughly confusing game for the four-year-old me. I very much doubt that I made it much past the first few areas as I was not a patient child. I may or may not have played Metal Gear 2. I did, however, play the hell out of Metal Gear Solid for myPlaystation back in 1998. I played it through about four or five times, got Snake's tuxedo on New Year's Eve 1998, and have very fond memories of Psycho Mantis and Meryl and the boss fight with Revolver Ocelot. I would be hard-pressed to think of a franchise which, to this day, I remain so positively nostalgic about aside from Metal Gear Solid (and Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil). So, now that I've completed my first play-through of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, I want to write about the two halves of this game: thegameplay and the story.
  
When the first Metal Gear Solid came out the game was absolutely revolutionary. It merged action, stealth, and cinematic storytelling like no game before it had successfully done. Everything had fullvoiceovers , the graphics were phenomenal, and the violence was realistically gruesome. The series stagnated after this first iteration with the release of Metal Gear Solid 2 riding on the first game's coat-tails and, what's worse, forcing the player to play as someone other than Solid Snake for 75% of the game and containing unnecessarily lengthycutscenes that felt longer than necessary (especially its heavy-handed ending). Metal Gear Solid 3 improved on the Metal Gear Solid formula by leaps and bounds without changing any specific aspect too radically. Much like Resident Evil, the Metal Gear Solidgameplay was still utilizing fixed camera angles and by the time the third iteration of the franchise rolled around gamers began to tire of it -- though Metal Gear Solid was so remarkably well-done that it escaped a large amount of the potential criticisms which could have otherwise befallen it.
Loading up Guns of the Patriots was a fantastic surprise; gone was the top-down camera angle -- ditched in favor of an over-the-shoulder camera -- and the inability to fire weapons from first-person and still move around. Gone, too, was theHUD's radar that showed enemy positions and their line-of-sight. In the first ten minutes of Metal Gear Solid 4 a franchise veteran is suddenly faced with an abundance of viable play styles as nonlethal measures, stealth, and murderous rampages are all interchangeable. The nonlethal and stealth approaches both become powerfully tempting the moment that a key character is introduced that is capable of being used as a weapon launderer at any point in the time. Players no longer will face a dearth of ammunition or weaponry as dozens upon dozens of weapons can be purchased and customized with limitless ammunition for each being a triangle button and some in-game currency away. And, oh, these guns have gravity. Each possesses truly booming sound effects and carry with them a feel of destruction like no Metal Gear game in the past.
The implications of making the gunplay of Metal Gear Solid absolutely fantastic are that the entire flow of the game becomes radically different. Players have a deadly arsenal that puts the greatest weapons in Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3 all to shame and this actually makes an entirely offensive strategy completely plausible. Finishing the game with a large number of kills andheadshots yields different end-game items and badges than, say, a game where no one was killed or a game where a single alert was not set off. From my first personal play through I wanted to be stealthy but once I accidentally killed a private military contractor and heard a group of rebels behind me shout phrases of thanks (one threw me some rations as payment) I realized that I could, instead, kill a bunch ofPMCs and aid the rebels in their fight. This, to me, was a far more enjoyable and worthwhile endeavor than sneaking around both groups of combatants. I also earned a lot more currency to upgrade my M4 into a grenade-launching, silenced, long-range killing machine.
  
There are other subtle additions to Snake's arsenal this time around as well. Snake's camouflage will automatically change the match the environment when he goes prone or presses up against a vertical surface and remains stationary for a few seconds -- a much improved mechanism from the menu-heavy method of performing the same task in Metal Gear Solid 3. The "threat bubble" that pops up around snake when he remains stationary while crouched or prone is also a superb way of highlighting the danger in Snake's surroundings by showing "blips" in the translucent circle that hovers and follows Snake around. And the agme is full of streamlined additions to the tried-and-true gameplay of the series and just serves as further evidence of the ridiculous level of polish present in Snake's final chapter.
For the first time since the original Metal Gear Solid I finished the entire game and still wanted more. The gameplay didn't feel like a means to advance the story or to just make my way to the next plot point; the story provided the impetus to search my environment, kill the PMCs, and make it to the objective that I actually enjoyed reaching. The basic mechanics all function so responsively and the levels are designed to promote both stealth and violence that alternating between the two feels completely natural.
What's more telling than this is that I started up a new game on the hardest difficulty tonight because I wanted to jump back into the game world and play more. Maybe this time I'll actually play through the game without setting off any alerts or attempt for a non-lethal means of progression.
I really, really doubt that will last.
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| A Digitally Distributed World | |
Posted - 6/19/2008 10:54:18 PM | As more and more developers and publishers realize the benefits of distributing their products online, more types of digital distribution applications have been created to benefit the cause. At this point in time gamers have their choice of applications like Impulse (a rebranded and revamped Stardock Central), Steam, Gametap, and EA Downloader (which is now simply the EA Store) and then digital distribution websites like Direct2Drive, Greenhouse, and GamersGate.
Among gamers, though, the most oft-used and oft-mentioned means of acquiring new games is Valve's Steam. First released in September of 2003 as little more than a means for Valve to distribute and update their own titles, the application was widely criticized for an extremely high memory footprint and its sluggish performance. Now, though, the service has been continually updated and refined into an industry-recognized method of acquiring and updating Valve's titles along with a huge assortment of third-party games. The most recent major upgrade that the platform received came in the form of user stats, achievements, a community system (complete with friends lists, groups, and event calendars), an in-game overlay which gave users access to all of Steam's features in any game launched from the Steam game list, and a revamped store. Up until the release of Steamworks most of these services were only properly utilized in Valve's own products but, now, developers partnered with Valve can implement the same Steam-specific features in their games as well. Steam Cloud has also been talked about which would give Steam users a sort of virtual storage space for game save files and preferences.
One of the other digital distribution applications that I install whenever I format a computer has always been Stardock Central. Before I ever even thought about working at the company I was a fan of Stardock's games and a couple of the applications that the company produces. Back when the actual game catalog was slim-pickins all I ever did was launch the program, download a game or an update, let the thing install, and then I shut the program down again until I felt like checking for another update a few weeks later -- all of this was around the launch of Galactic Civilizations back in 2003. It wasn't a very pretty program by any means (though it was a far cry from Stardock's very first digital distribution app, Component Manager, back in 1999), but it didn't really have to be.
Earlier this week Stardock launched Impulse which is more than just a pretty face on top of years of knowledge gained from the development of Stardock Central; the best write-up on the program available was published by Brad Wardell on the day of its release. As a game developer, though, I think of Impulse as being an incredibly open and community-accessible distribution platform unlike any other in the industry. We're developing a set of tools called "Impulse Reactor" which we're planning on giving to third-parties so that they can easily access community features and -- since I'm a gamer and a game developer -- game statistics, matchmaking, achievements, friends lists, and all of the other things that users of Xbox Live have been using and relying on for years.
I play a pretty ridiculous amount of games; specifically, I play a pretty ridiculous number of shooters and strategy games. Valve's multiplayer shooters are the best I've played since the days of Quake 3: Rocket Arena. Last year I played in a giant Shacknews Team Fortress 2 tournament (no, really) and, before that, I put a pretty crazy amount of time into Counter-Strike: Source and, for both games, Steam has been absolutely invaluable. I've taken part in tournament games that our team leader threw into the event calendar and had a little message box pop-up to notify me when and where I should go for a match and, after a game, our entire team joined a group chat room to talk about the match and what we needed to do better for the next game, and so on.
But why aren't there any applications which have this kind of integration for real-time strategy games? The amount of time I've sunk into Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, and Sins of a Solar Empire is, quite honestly, embarassing. This same fact is true of Civilization 4 and its expansion packs. Of all of the digital distribution applications that exist for the PC none of them have the kind of Xbox Live statistics, matchmaking, and general game integration for the genres of games I enjoy the most. In conversations that we've had around the office this is the kind of gap that we want Impulse to fill (and, with Impulse Reactor, give other developers the tools to bring the same features to even more oft-forgotten games and genres).
The only thing that comes from overzealous application zealotry and exclusivity is a lack of competition that brings about new features, more content, and more innovations.
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| The Daily GameDev.net | |
Posted - 6/3/2008 1:38:34 PM | So, yeah, I realize I absolutely fail at updating my own site; luckily, though, I'm excellent at updating other peoples' sites. Like GameDev.net where I can be found writing news entries that have been described as distinctly me (which works out well).
Anyway, here are links to the last nine as of the night of this posting.- June 3rd 2008 -- Konami and Crytek Woes.
- June 2nd 2008 -- Phil Harrison, Ben Mattes, Gabe Newell, and Free Havok.
- May 30th 2008 -- Hideo Kojima's thought on games and movies and quality of life in the games industry.
- May 29th 2008 -- True 3D gaming and the "nearly catastrophic" Playstation 3.
- May 28th 2008 -- The end of disconnected single-player games and in-game advertising failures.
- May 27th 2008 -- Age of Conan, Brett Ratner and games, and Capcom and movies.
- May 26th 2008 -- ESA Failures and the last generation of consoles.
- May 23th 2008 -- Gamestop makes lots of moneyhats and Microsoft on delisting Xbox Live Arcade games.
- May 22th 2008 -- Niko Bellic voice actor complains about royalties and World of Warcraft bots.
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The entries in this journal have all been posted, along with many more, at mittens' personal site at www.polycat.net.
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