Earlier this month I spent a weekend at my friend Jewel's river house. The purpose of this event was to see her off as she has now moved to Fiji where she will work for the Peace Corps for the next 27 months.

Good luck Jewel!

Around the same time my older younger brother (brother no. 3) just completed boot camp for the US Air Force.

Good luck Chris!

When I returned home, apparently a tornado had come through the area. There was lots of leaves and pine needles and stuff in the road, but generally no big deal. I didn't think much of it until I noticed that in my back yard some random tree landed on my grill. This is very mysterious; there was no debris this size anywhere else and I don't know of any trees of this type even remotely close to my back yard.

WTF?!

Games I'm playing

I've recently found myself distracted by two great games; Cogs and Defense Grid: The Awakening. Defense grid should be coming to Xbox Live Arcade sometime soon. I should also mention I have an ulterior motive; it uses Gamebryo. They both have free demos; try them out!.

It is really good

Also really good

My younger younger brother (brother no. 4) recently got a DS and picked up Castlevania Order of Ecclesia. I would post a link, but Konami apparently can't make a decent webpage to save their life so it's not worth visiting. Anyway, the game is a lot of fun; I would recommend it. I have run into a few problems though:

• I played it for a few hours and my eyes are now totally bloodshot (this isn't the game's fault but it still hurts it)
• There are some mechanics and enemies that make it really frustrating at times
• The official webpage is terrible

Just in case you were wondering.

New project: Comic Game

I've started work on a new hobby project. I told myself I would finish Orbital first and maybe improve Connexus as well, but a few weekends ago I caved and started anyway.

The idea is simply an interactive comic book; kind of like one of the old choose your own adventure stories but you can do more than just branching. Here is an analogy: If an old-school text adventure is like taking a test, playing comic game is like taking a multiple-choice pop quiz where the score doesn't count towards your grade.

click to see a sample story permutation

Here is another path through the same story:

click to see a sample story permutation

THE END

Last week, Mike Lee and I gave a presentation at the Triangle Game Conference entitled "Jamming with Games". The presentation was divided into 4 sections that explained Game Jams (such as the Triangle Game Jam).

We covered:

• Definition & History
• Benefits
• Best Practices
• How to organize an event

Overall, I think it went really well. We had decent attendance considering that we were in the last time slot of the conference and it's a subject that most game developers probably don't care much about. I'm supposed to post the slides so that anyone who attended the talk can reference them. Hopefully those people waited a few days before visiting my site (or just visited Mike's instead). Here they are:

Jamming with Games (PDF, 119 KB)

There is a lot of additional context in the speaker notes if you want more. It got me fired up to start work on organizing the 2009 Triangle Game Jam.

China & Taiwan

I just recently got back from China and Taiwan. It was unfortunate that I missed the first seminar, but it wasn't the end of the world (although it felt like it before I left). The main reason I went was that my company (Emergent) wanted an engineer to attend 3 seminars we were holding in Beijing, Shanghai, and Taipei to give live demonstrations of our new engine: Gamebryo LightSpeed. For each demo I would show our sample game Mangled Metal, then show how you can rapidly change the game using the tools and engine features that come with Gamebryo LightSpeed.

Luckily, right in the middle, I had a few days free in Shanghai. I spent that time with Dave, Joka, and young Trevor. That was great; my favorite part of the trip.

The last leg of the trip was in Taipei, Taiwan. At first I wasn't very impressed with Taiwan; every building everywhere you looked was run down and dirty, but the places we stayed were extremely overpriced and I was surrounded by all this elitist high fashion shopping that I'm basically allergic to. However, I got a chance to visit two customer game studios while we were there and that was really cool. Both places were really nice, seemed to have cool people working there, had interesting games, and tons and tons of toys. The seminar was pretty nice too, and since I left directly back to the airport I left with a better impression than I started with.

Mangled Metal

I keep making allusions to Mangled Metal. This is the sample game that demonstrates the use of Gamebryo LightSpeed. Over the past seven months or so, helping create this sample has been my primary job responsibility. Getting to work on a sample is a double edged blade; there are a lot of fun and interesting challenges and it's a great chance to be creative. However, on the other hand, our company doesn't usually work on projects like this so our development process was pretty immature in a lot of ways. This led to a lot of unfortunate headaches, not the least of which was months of crunch to keep the project on schedule. Hopefully we will do better next time, but I'm a little hesitant to want to work on the next sample after this experience.

Anyway, Mangled Metal is a third person action game set in the War Machine universe. The player controls a War Jack - a steam/magic powered metal robot approximately 2~3 meters tall. The warjack walks through a valley/graveyard area pounding on bad guys until he gets to the end where, after pounding all the bad guys, the game abruptly ends.

You are probably getting bored of Mangled Metal screenshots by now

The player can perform light attacks in a combo while moving, make a heavy attack, or a charge attack if running. The player can also cast an area of effect spell. Some of the technology highlights include 3D directional sound, GFx (flash) UI, dynamically destructible environment props, and physics simulation with ragdoll. The combat mechanics, enemy AI, and triggers/events are all driven by scripted behaviors written in Lua.

It is a really useful sample for showing off the new tools in Gamebryo LightSpeed, it's development provided critical guidance for the work that went into the LightSpeed product itself, it gives our customers a good starting point and reference code for starting their own projects, it was larger than any other demo Emergent has done in the past so it stressed our pipeline in good ways, and an early version of the sample formed the basis of our base game sample application. There is a lot of good stuff about it so I guess I should be proud of having done so much work on it.

When the project was first starting out, before the artists had ramped up and gotten something they could show, I created a bunch of placeholder art just to get things running. We actually ended up shipping a bunch of my placeholder art with Gamebryo LightSpeed in our samples. I'm a little entertained by that; I never intended for it to be used as part of the product, but that is a sentiment that we express about a large number of components of the engine.

This is some of my proxy art we ended up shipping

Gamebryo LightSpeed

Gamebryo LightSpeed finally went gold a few days ago. We are now internally working on preparing the final build for distribution to our (rather large number of) evaluators and customers. This marks a huge milestone for our company and yet another accomplishment that I'm glad to have behind me. It seems like there have been a lot of things that I couldn't wait to be over with recently.

Hello, sexy!

Technically, we (Emergent employees) aren't supposed to be discussing this externally because we haven't announced it to our customers yet. Marketing also wants to make sure that everyone sends the right message about the release. We are also supposed to use a different version of the logo. I guess I just feel like being a rebel today.

Earlier today I realized that I had made a mistake. A very stupid mistake with expensive and tragic consequences. My employers are sending me to China to help with a sales trip; I'm going to give demonstrations of how to use our new engine Gamebryo LightSpeed. This evening I realized that my flight left this morning. For some reason I had been assuming for weeks that it left tomorrow. That's a big mistake. I frantically tried to make new travel arrangements, but the earliest it is possible to arrive in Beijing at this point is half way through the seminar I'm supposed to be presenting in.

I don't have any excuse for this; if I had just been slightly more dilligent I would have double checked the departure time and everything would be fine. Because I didn't take some tiny bit of effort, the seminar won't work out ideally and I have to go through this added expense (and stress) of making new travel plans. I don't feel good about this; I actually feel physically ill.

Fortunately, there is a technical account manager already in China who can stand in for me, so not all is lost.

China

In other news, I get to go to China; that's pretty cool. I'll have a few days in the middle in Shanghai where I can hang out with my brother Dave and his family. I really thought I would have had more to say about this, but I really can't get over that first bit of stuff I was talking about so I'll just leave it at that.

Here is a screenshot that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about

Triangle Game Conference

The North Carolina Triangle area has put together a conference called the Triangle Game Conference. A friend of mine submitted a proposal that he and I would give a talk on benefits and organization of Game Jams and it got accepted. I get back from China in the morning and I'll be presenting at the conference in the afternoon - it's going to be super crazy!

Independent Game Festival

I forgot to mention this last time, but I recently got some feedback on my game Connexus from the Independent Game Festival judges that reviewed it. here is what it said:

"Promising and conceptually interesting - good luck with this project!" - 2009 Independent Games Festival Judge

Wow. Really? I actually would have been a lot happier not having recieved that feedback. At least then I could have continued under the illusion that the judge put more than 30 seconds worth of thought into my game before passing on it. That vague one sentence description could have applied to any entry in the entire festival.

Here's another out of place screenshot

Games

When I went to the Game Developer's Conference last month, I started playing Advance Wars 2 again - that's a great game. It makes me want to make a strategy game. At home I've been playing Battle for Wesnoth again. It's not nearly as good as Advance Wars 2 but has a lot of content and it's free. Hooray strategy.