Posts by FrieChamp

  • Where are all the Level Designers?

    This reminds me of a somewhat controversial statement, from a more experienced level-designer than me (any of us actually). He's about 40 years old, used to work as a city planner before he got into games and got a bunch of fairly successful titles under his belt. This guy used to work crazy over time, I'm talking about work for months straight without any day off. Now he has got a "9 to 5" attitude and I asked him why, he said:

    "Because it's just a game man, even if it actually turns out to be a good one, hardly anyone's going to remember it 10 years from now"

    Kind of a downer isn't it, such a statement...especially when you invest so much sweat and time into a game. Does that mean he's wrong? No, I think this comment shows perfectly how a view on games development can change with experience and age. And although I got lots of respect for those people here who spend both their work- and freetime to craft virtual worlds, I advise them to also spend more time in the real world beyond the screen, just to see what else is out there. Will that make you a happier person down the road? I don't know yet, I'm currently trying to find out

  • Where are all the Level Designers?

    Quote from Jetsetlemming

    Since a lot of industry level designers are posting in this thread, I wanted to ask a question: How many of you have a responsibility in the project to actually create art assets over creating the level geometry, sticking the art assets in and on it, and scripting it all together?

    What makes you think there wouldn't be as many level-designers browsing the forums "outside" this thread than inside? I can understand this question is very interesting, especially to newcomers, but this is a completely different topic we have discussed many times before in seperate threads, so please use those or post a new one. Thanks!

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Hey Paul, great choice of lighting and mood! Love the sky and the city scenery is very nicely done as well, but if you hadn't mentioned that the picture is about the plane, I would not have seen it!

    It's like one center piece is missing, I see the couple and the landscape behind, then in the next picture there is a big explosion, but many people might miss the connection. Also the probably most amazing moment of a plane crash (in movies or digital art) is when the plane is "about to" crash. How detailed is the model? Would it hurt to show it from closer?

    I like that the display of the camera (the rec button) is faded out slightly, as if it was affected by the blast. When you get to add the final touches on the image, I'd suggest to add some more distortion effects to the picture, would make it look even more dramatic

  • "This is not for geeks - this is for everyone"

    Google unveils Playstation Home-like social networking app:

    Quote

    Internet software giant Google today revealed Google Lively, a browser-based online world in which users can design rooms and avatars for chat and other functions.Built with social networking web site integration in mind, Lively allows player-designed rooms to be embedded within a user's page on such sites as Facebook and MySpace. The tool is available now free of charge at the official web site.

    http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/53501

    Gamasutra article/interview:

    Quote

    Guymon's closing thoughts? He believes that "Google is uniquely poised to validate this space for the mass market... this is not for geeks - this is for everyone."

    http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=19333

    Anyone wanna try this out tonight? I'll have a house party in my virtual room and all mapcorians are invited :derp:

  • Game Development Cost

    I guess the truth is somewhere in between, no matter how much you think ahead and how experienced you are, there can always something unexpected happen, something going wrong or nut turning out to be quite as you had hoped it would be.

    Especially when you try to do new things, nobody has been done before - how can you know if it will work?

    I guess the key is to waste as little ressources as possible on unsafe things and prototype everything in small teams, before the whole team is doing something, that gets scrapped later on. You can save a lot of cash when you do things right during pre-production and test your ideas, before you give orders.

    It's also a matter of how well your project manager(s) handle(s) the ideas and decision process, while keeping an eye on the schedule and available ressources. On the other hand, some really good ideas pop up, when the project is in full production - so each time it's a struggle to decide whether the feature is worth implementing, or has to be cut. It's frustrating when it's your idea and you know the game would be better if it was realized, but if this process wasn't controlled, everybody would be tinkering on his pet project and the release date gets pushed out even further.

    Companies handle this differently, depending on their ethic and liquidity - Valve can afford to spend 6 years on a game to "get it right" (according to their vision and high quality bar), while other companies have to play on the safe side and get their game out the door on time.

  • Game Development Cost

    Quote

    The whole process of creating a game is still too unoptimized and a lot of manhours go lost in a project by constantly redesigning and redoing things, thats the reason why a lot of games take so long and therefore cost so much, not because they were so terrible complex to create.

    Bingo!