Posts by KungFuSquirrel

  • Mario Galaxy...

    I have not been a huge Mario fan over the years; I never owned a console before the Gamecube and had always just played the older games in short bursts (at least, until recently starting some coop super mario world on the Wii VC with ken ).

    This is one of the best games I have ever played.

    It's just... fun. Every part of it. It screws with your head constantly and remains challenging but not impossible. The controls are spot-on, the visuals are stylish and the best on the wii, and I still can't get over how creative some of these levels and general game mechanics are.

    This game is in itself worthy reason to purchase a Wii, and missing out on it is akin to never having played the first Mario. It's fantastic.

  • Assassins Creed

    This is a game I was hugely hyped for at first, then started to get less and less interested in as time went on and I learned more and was reading a couple of the early reviews. Went ahead and picked it up, though, since I could get it for $40.

    I'm pleased to say I was totally wrong. I doubt it'll be considered the best game this year, but it's much closer to what I was originally expecting. It starts out slow, but as the game goes on it fits the style perfectly. After the first segments once you get let out into the open world and you start finding things like the assassin's flags, suddenly it starts to feel great.

    I thought the recon missions I've done so far are some of the coolest things I've done in a game. They're definitely among the more interesting non-combat objectives I've seen in a game.

    Controls feel great; I was worried about this at first but it's spot-on for what the game is. Also, I've never felt like such a badass as I did during the "Go to God!" bit near the beginning

    I actually like the combat. Ok, yeah, sure, guys are just hanging around while you focus on one guy... but the game wouldn't be any fun at all if you couldn't focus on one at a time, and it's not a unique mechanic to this game. The full combat is also, with at least one exception, not the usual case we're familiar with of "fight guys until they die, move on, repeat" - think of it more like GTA's stars. Yeah, you can fight and fight, but the real measure of your success is if you escape or not. Sometimes you'll have to finish an engagement, but a big thing they showed in the tutorial was how to entirely escape a provoked guard. This isn't the focus of the game

    Story's a little tough to follow since they DON'T HAVE SUBTITLES GRR and I have to play with a lot of background noise going on (and have difficulty separating sounds sometimes thanks to a history of ear problems), so I'm a bit annoyed with that... but otherwise it's pretty cool. I can see picking other games over it for the time being with the current holiday schedule (I'd have been set with Mario this month and Mass Effect next month if there wasn't a deal on it), but I definitely recommend checking it out.

  • Pitching an idea.

    Quote from Argyll

    How would one (me) go about pitching a serious idea for a game without the idea being stolen?

    Keep it to yourself until you know you can make it happen.

    Quote from Argyll

    Would they take me seriously? I have Insurgency on my resume.

    They might take you more seriously than most, but I wouldn't expect to see your idea get anywhere without a team of your own working on at least a prototype -

    Quote from Argyll

    Should I approach publishers or developers? Should I approach either or who have already published games in the genre?

    - most developers and publishers have strict rules about not accepting any outside pitches for games due to the resulting legal nightmares. If you don't work for them, don't plan on the idea getting anywhere. In the rare event someone were to take the pitch, don't plan on retaining ownership of it.

    Quote from Argyll

    Is there any future for someone who only has 'skills' for designing and writing and not necessarily more tangible talent (i.e. modelling, level design, animation, etc.)?

    There are people who shift into this sort of role, but generally not without entering by way of one of the other disciplines - often level design, but programmers and artists can go this route too. I think you'll have a very hard time finding an entry-level position in this role.

    Wish I had better news for you - for all I know you're sitting on a brilliant idea, but amongst all the other thousands of people out there coming up with their own game ideas (not even counting the people in studios having a hard enough time getting their ideas considered), I don't think you're going to find many people listening.

  • The Spire (Gears of War MP)

    goddamn I need to hurry up and get this game and dive into the editor. love those assets

    Love what you're doing with that main hallway, looks like the future home of some fun firefights and it's off-the chart as far as detail, but in a pretty nice cohesive way.

    I agree with [HP] that it's a little too much on the brown side, I recall the homey environments in Gears having a bit more of a blueish green tint, though the map I'm thinking of was also in a night rainy setting. Nothing some extra lighting love and/or post-processing passes can't fix, though the lighting that is there is really functional and highlights the paths pretty well.

    What bugs me the most in that second shot is the pillar in front of that arch at the far end of the hallway. It blocks what I think would be a badass visual feature. the way I actually saw it at first I thought there was a solid block of something at the top of the stairs for cover from anyone coming in from over there, but I think that's just floor detail tricking me. Might be something to try, though.

    Did I mention I love these assets?

  • Half-Life: Paranoia

    Quote

    The point I’m making is that it’s easier, or at least quicker to create something which looks and plays good on modern tech than it is on older alternatives. [...] The thing is that 5 months in most cases would encourage far more focus, technical understanding and creativity than the required 5 minutes on a better engine.

    I fully understand and respect the challenge involved in working with older tech (having been involved in a project for quite a while as newer stuff was coming out), but... uh...

    BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

    *ahem* I'm ok.

  • The Spire (Gears of War MP)

    Great turnaround time, looking forward to seeing where you take it.

    My comments thus far:

    Overall I really like the direction you're going. I -love- the central spire with the building on it. However, I really don't think the skybox spires hold up. I think there's a terrific opportunity here to do a more fractured earth sort of thing using the same sort of terrain you've got surrounding the structure. I'm imagining if you pretended that this building had lots more structure in the surrounding area, from walls to statues or even other buildings, and these objects are torn apart on smaller surrounding platforms. I think it'd be a lot more interesting and coherent than the random rock spires right now.

    Building itself looks really cool and the exterior layout looks reminiscent of the mansion level in the game, only less dark. The windows stand out a bit, perhaps literally - are they actually floating? I haven't actually seen those meshes in the editor yet (don't have the pc version yet), but I wonder if you might get better results sinking them into the outer walls just a bit.

    The interior shot you linked I think is by far the weakest of the bunch in all regards. The props are very nicely used but I don't think the lighting pulls off and the floor texture looks worth scaling down by at least 50%. Also, nothing in this room strikes me as very Gears combat-friendly. This is tough to judge from the screen but it looks like one entrance is where you took the shot and the other on the wall to the left. From the spot of the screenshot, that's a lot of space to cover with no cover, and what cover is there is just the breakable couches.

    I think you might get good results out of a couple columns in the middle of the room as well as some pieces of cover closer to each doorway and around the perimeter of the room. Right now I just have a really hard time imagining the Gears combat flow of coming into a room, picking an initial piece of cover, then pressing forward from cover to cover.

  • LEGO BATMAN

    Quote from PogoP

    I could just see these bloody Lego games turning into the next cash cow for whoever makes the games. They could make a Lego game of everything...

    If they have the rights to make Lego sets based off it, they will make the game.

    Get ready for Lego Harry Potter in a couple years.

  • What old games are you playing?

    Recently I've spent some time off-and-on with Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World on the Wii Virtual console, if that counts. Recently installed X-Wing, too... magically works in xp - mostly.

    Also picked up the most recent boxed collections of King's Quest and Space Quest, I need to get around to replaying those.

  • Promises in Crysis

    Short of things that are simply disabled to save space or limit functionality, if a demo or beta comes out less than a few months before a game ships, nothing dramatic will change. Crysis went gold 3 days after the demo released. They're not fixing anything unless it can be easily patched for a day 1 release or it's worth nuking every manufactured disc (and lots of money) to fix it.

  • COD4 Engine

    COD2 was a proprietary engine in the same way that HL1/HL2 is a proprietary engine. I imagine COD4 is an extension of that technology. They still use Radiant as far as I know. (feel free to correct me, IW types )

    3 was built off the Big Red One branch of the tech, not COD2's, and probably more heavily re-written than the others since Treyarch doesn't believe in PCs.

  • PC Gears of War Map Editor Revealed

    Cooking's the core of effective streaming. Loading stuff is ass-slow when you're seeking for every file through a crazy directory structure, loading each one individually, and loading assets in packages that aren't necessarily used in the map.

    Cooking the map packages the map and its assets into one easy-to-find and quick to load package that can be brute-force loaded and unloaded at run-time. This actually dramatically increases file size and often results in duplicate assets between map packages, but is considerably faster and more efficient, particularly in console environments.

    This is my I-just-woke-up morning level designer explanation of it, at least.