Posts by KungFuSquirrel

  • Best Sniper levels from a "fixed" position

    Quote from JAL

    Quake 4 had a few of those railtype vehicle maps. The tank mapsand the one map you actually were using a weapon on some railway

    thingy

    I'd honestly avoid those myself.

    Best one I can think of is the airboat sequence in HL2. Well-paced, broken up nicely between the vehicle and on-foot, great environmental interaction, etc. etc. If you're going to do vehicles, they should kick that much ass.

    I actually had fun on the tomb raider bike levels, too. Simple but entertaining.

    Oh, and if you're doing a sniper mission... never, never, never, NEVER do anything like the one in Perfect Dark Zero. Absolutely terrible.

  • Ouch...

    Dammit, I was just going to look back at my old chat logs with him from a couple years ago and now I might have up and deleted them by accident moving everything to my new computer... Shame.

  • a game developer's life

    Quote from sensee

    Is this the common life of an avarage game developer or just an extreme case?

    I would say both. There are elements that I'm sure many people here would be familiar with, but I think it's also taken to an extreme viewpoint either by circumstance or exagerrated by bitterness.

    Quote

    i heard the pay isnt that great either..

    It can widely vary depending on where you go. Some studios can afford ridiculous salaries. Some can't. Some can but don't give them to anyone anyway. Companies that do offer royalties/profit-sharing bonuses can really skyrocket, too, depending on how many people are involved and how much money is coming back from the game. Lots of variables. Long story short, you'll find good and you'll find bad. It's up to you to decide whether or not you'd be living comfortably and whether or not that's even important

    Quote

    I'd rather be a low level prop churning artist than not work on games. Its my passion and even at later "levels" i'd still love what I'm doing.

    Agreed with Klein. It's a noble stand to take, but that sort of viewpoint is what keeps a lot of people stuck in crummy positions that just drain their proverbial souls and sometimes even literal health over time. It's great to love what you do, and you should, but you shouldn't sell yourself short or trap yourself.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    I actually did a double-take as I was scrolling down the page; I wasn't expecting to see anything for q4, let alone that much of a match for one of our maps. Wouldn't mind seeing some more dramatic lighting more along the lines of the hub maps, but otherwise the texturing and geometry look great.

    Good use of geometry from hub, too, it really helps pull it into that theme but it's not overdone to the point where it feels like a lame ripoff.

    Nicely done.

  • Heavy Rain E3 demo

    Quote from sensee

    Maybe it has something to do with the Uncanny Valley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

    I don't really think it's there yet; it's got just enough of a sort of painted/gamey style that it looked fine - the mouth is just terribly done. Like horrifically. Our lipsync stuff in Q4 matched up and I think even deformed better than that, and it wasn't so good. I paused one frame where she stopped talking - it looked amazing. As soon as the mouth opened, eesh.

    I have no interest in it coming from indigo prophecy, though - I wanted to throw that game -oh, sorry, "interactive movie" away in the middle of the tutorial because the damned "director" (YOU'RE NOT SID MEIER!) kept telling me it looked like I needed a little more practice and should try again, despite doing exactly what I was told over and over and over again. And for all the annoying effort they go to to not call it a game, it's all simon-says minigames. Get over yourselves!

    Yay ranting. Demo and presentation on that was cool, though, I'll give them that much

  • What was your E3 2006 highlight?

    Gears of War's first level. there was a great clip somewhere that had an interview with ol' CliffyB beforehand, too, and it was awesome hearing him talk about how the entire game was built around the idea of 'slamming' into cover and that sort of aggressive presentation instead of the slow shimmying in other cover-based games. Then seeing the evolution of that into that level had me really excited.

    Runner-up: Rainbow Six: Vegas and the tease-tacular Halo 3 trailer (I'm a terrible person for that, I know...)

    I seem to be big on the third person shooters lately. I might have liked PDZ if it had stayed a TPS instead of clunkily bouncing back and forth.

    Other stuff I really liked:

    Microsoft's integration of Live-style goodies across all their platforms, emphasis on PC gaming with Vista and onward.

    pretty much everything Nintendo

    Too Human

    Mass Effect

    BIA, of course

    Company of Heroes

    Viva Pinata

    Quake Wars

    God of War 2

    Naughty Dog's teaser

    Assassin's Creed

    Resistance

    ...yeah. Lots of stuff I enjoyed this year.

  • NDAs...

    Quote from mikezilla

    I think mods always made people agree to not give out information before, it was just simple and about trust.Like a) if you give out our content to other mods I, b) fire you.

    Yeah, with NW we just said "hey, don't put anything out there if we haven't officially released it," but I did make one embarrassing blunder with one pretty talented guy that I really regret looking back.

    That was a little more critical being an SP project, since so much of the enjoyment could be ruined if you showed your entire hand too soon. MP you want to see all the maps, models, game types, etc. beforehand but in our case it was a lot more important that we play our hand carefully and not show some of the key locations and characters.

    NS has a valid concern about PT changelogs getting out since those constantly change and can easily cause undue confusion and mayhem in the community, so they just say "hey, don't talk about anything until we announce an official changelog." But last I checked their 'NDA' that people constantly refer to is still just "hey, don't do this" and people not doing that.

    But yeah, this mod NDA thing is ridiculous. Relax and have some fun, people.