Now, I know what you're going to say: Turncoat! Traitor! Console Terrorist! But hear me out for a sec... as much as I've ranted against the insipid simplicity of console games over the years, you've got to admit... it's hard to beat multiplayer co-op, especially when you can be in the same room with your best friend who has invested in two massive TVs. And it seems that the console market is increasingly starting to understand that people want to play games together once in awhile!!
So what was the reason for my selling out? Mouse and keyboard. I finally found a mouse and keyboard adapter for the XBox, and it works flawlessly. So you might say that I'm actually still representing for PC, especially when I kick the a##es of all my Halo playing, controller fondling friends.
Hey, you think that makes me a double agent? [rolleyes]
Straylight Update
I've been splitting time this week between learning the Torque Shader Engine and art techniques like normal mapping. The folks at Garage Games plan to provide pretty robust support for a wide variety of the shader techniques out there, and I'm way behind the curve on this technology. In case you're interested in this topic, I've found this guy's site to be very helpful (I'd be happy to hear of others you may know of, tho')
Casper The Friendly Ghost?
How would you feel about playing an alien spirit? This might be a severe wrong turn, but for the purposes of story and design I'm considering casting you in the role of an Indwelling, which is an ancient embodiment of a power or ability. Story-wise, Indwellings would be akin to fallen gods, responsible (Illuminati-style) for engineering many events on the Earth, particularly the "nanocaust" that gives the high-tech/post-apocalypse universe you'll start with. As an Indwelling, you'd be able to hijack or possess hosts and you'd be unkillable (no death, no quickload). More importantly, you'd build a dynasty over generations in order to become more and more powerful.
I'm not completely okay with the idea, but it does solve many design problems I've been fighting with (how to eliminate game-over upon death, how to add in a feel of families and bloodlines, how to kill empires via catastrophe, collapse or invasion and keep the game playable).
For anyone interested, there's a thread in Game Design on this. I think the chief problem with the idea so far is that it's hard to relate to a spirt, and that the idea might be a bit too fantasy / New Agey for a sci-fi game.
My goal is to come to a resolution on this by the end of next week.
I was a die-hard PC gamer in the nineties, but I bought a Nintendo 64 in 2000 (roughly about the same time when I was briefly working as a game programmer and tester; I was too sick of PC games back then to play them to relax). These days I think I prefer the console controller, as a good game designer would come up with a control scheme that is intuitive when you first play the game. Frankly I'm sick of rebinding the WASD keys to my left-handed mouse style (plus downloading a patch on day one to get the damn game to run).
Re: Straylight and the Indwellings; I don't have any problem with playing as a non-corporeal being, and it sounds pretty sci-fi to me. Maybe they could just be naturally non-corporeal? Like I wrote in your Game Design thread, it does sound a bit like Stargate, which has parasitic life-forms controlling human hosts.
I don't really have much more to add to that thread (I'm not entirely sure which direction it's going in at the moment), but I was wondering whether you envisioned your Indwellings freely moving between hosts, or "fusing" with a single host for quite some time (such as the death of the host) with a significant cost for switching.