yes, agreed, that's why I'd try to get your theory articles published somewhere -- if it's some random article on your blog, who cares -- but if this is on a big website that someone respects or visits a lot, they're a lot more likely to read it and think highly of it...
"oh, it was featured in game developer magazine // oh, it was a GDC presentation // maybe this is worth reading"
suggestion: submit / pitch these theory pieces to Kotaku or Destructoid or The Escapist or RPS or your favorite games blog thing that'll pay you
- players like learning about craft
- you want to write something that's "generally interesting" / readable by anyone anyway
- if the writing is good, then these sites are likely to publish it
- if you have industry affiliation or credentials, then they're even more likely to publish (assuming that's okay with your employer)
- you'll get some money for your trouble -- I mean, very little, but congrats, you're officially a published freelance writer
- great thing to put on your portfolio, to be affiliated with one of these sites, it means "you matter"?
for example:
- Hamish Todd analyzing barnacle placement for Destructoid http://www.destructoid.com/untold-riches-…es-233589.phtml
- invest in a domain name
- I look at your nexuiz levels and think, "okay blocky arena thing" -- you have all these additional buttons and JS animations that are unnecessary... just do something simple and straightforward like this: http://magnarj.net/ the work should speak for itself
- no one's arguing you have to be a great environment artist, but I think you do have to be a decent one, or know how to arrange props in a pleasing way, if only just to sell your map concepts further than "blocky arena thing" or "random low LoD farcry3 props arranged on a flat terrain"... I don't know if these play well or not, but I look at these screenshots and I don't care about finding out if they play well
the fact of the matter is that they just don't look professional, and an employer would have to invest a lot of resources in training and educating you when you should be training yourself with mods and personal projects anyway... think about who you're competing against
- anyway: don't give up, make more levels, the only way to get better is to keep working and practicing
Also, learn to write and write a lot about games. Writing makes you practice thinking.
I forget where I read it, I think somewhere in the Valve wiki, but it said for HL2 that Valve designers rarely tweaked individual lights: they just made some light presets and used those everywhere, the idea being that subtle tweaking probably isn't worth the loss in time you could've spent doing something else more important, and it'll look good enough anyway.
Or, I guess, you could slightly change the hue of a dim fill-light point-light in a giant room, and rebake repeatedly.
Anyway, that's kind of what I'm struggling with in my own process right now -- learning how to let go of small details that no one's going to notice or care about.
Thirty Flights of Loving ($3.74) has profound mastery of single player first person storytelling in its ~20 minutes. http://store.steampowered.com/app/214700/
English Country Tune ($1.34) is one of the best puzzle games ever; you will feel like an idiot and a genius, dozens of times over. http://store.steampowered.com/app/207570/
(disclaimer: I beta-tested both... but, really, they're both very very good for completely different reasons)
Quote from Senturalove the masks, gameplay looked like it was too much gunning for me
You can totally gun your way through / fall back to a doorway and wait for the AI to walk into your gunfire. The game will insult you for this play-style, but it'll let you beat the game that way, because why not?
working more on Someplace Else Source. feels too dear esther-y, I think I'm going to go for something like henning's interpretation of xen from Nightwatch, more...
But no regeneration, at all, discourages you from taking risks and can slow down the game a lot. I think Halo's healthkit + shield regen buffer was the right balance.
marks:
I had a few paragraphs in part 2 talking about waves of mods (e.g. CS, Urban Terror, Tactical Intervention... or Front Line Force, Hostile Intent, and Firearms... or The Opera, Action Half-Life, and Specialists) but I deleted them because I decided the series wasn't about documenting mods, it was to explain how modders think / why we modded.
I make a gesture to TF in the beginning of part 2, but only for its power in portraying modding as a path to industry ascension.
You're right, this is an omission, but it's a conscious one.
I'm sure it's possible to write 1000 insightful words about CS or TF. I won't be writing it. The closest I've gotten, and maybe will ever get, is an essay about the bridge in de_aztec.
Don't get me wrong -- I played a lot of CS, and I originally got into modding / level design because I wanted to make CS maps -- I just think it's already well-represented in the canon of game history. Everyone knows Minh Le but no one knows Justin Fisher. I felt I didn't need to waste words on telling people that CS is popular and influential.
I do think, though, that CS mods are interesting -- like, surf maps in CS really fascinate me.
I agree "manshooter" is derogatory but it's still so... accurate? The controllers have triggers in them. 99% of your interactions involve shooting men. There are few women in these games, they're very masculinized games built on notions of manliness and all caps block sans-serif fonts and dirt. Manshooter. (RPS writers coined it btw, not me.) I don't know what an RTS equivalent would be. "Strip mine and murder"? If you get to abuse and misuse a word like "pretentious" all the time, then we get to make our own words too.
***
The first line of each article in the series reads: "A People’s History” is a three part essay series that argues for a long-standing but suppressed tradition of amateur involvement in the first person genre -- It's not about Ultima, System Shock vs. Doom (which is what my editor brought up), the Doom clones, Wolf3D, or any of these other important and lovely games -- that's the industry history that people already know, and it's already on Wikipedia.
***
A question: given the importance of FPS mods to the FPS genre, shouldn't modding have a place in history, on the wikipedia page? Now, once you answer "yes, OF COURSE," you have to wonder what that history is, and what that story is.
To me, it's how the first FPS mods -- the Doom WAD scene was so hacker-y and "fuck the man" and everything, but then Quake 1 comes along, and it's eminently more moddable with QuakeC and everything, but a lot of those hackers are gone -- it's people with shitty jobs who play Quake in their lunch hour, or teenagers who play Quake during and after school.
What does this change in modder politics do to mods? What motivates it? As a forum full of modders who are now industry pros, e.g. exactly the people I'm talking about, I think you knew what you were doing -- you were getting a career. Even now, in Polycount and here, full of smart self-taught people, you see the advice for breaking in is "join a mod and get noticed."
But what about the modders who don't want or need jobs? Now there's this split in motivation and goals. What did that do to modding?
It's okay if you disagree with my answers / conclusions, in fact maybe it's healthy to do so... but I think I'm asking the right questions.
Erratic: I was being serious too! "Manshooter" is used almost always in a critical / sly / wink-wink sort of way.
Steppenwolf: I kind of agree, but also kind of not... I think sometimes it's useful to be specific about an FPS having shooter mechanics, like when you're designing a first person shooter... and then sometimes it makes more sense to be more holistic about genre, like when we're talking about history and all these first person puzzle games are firmly in FPS geneology and use the same engines, controls, and art styles but take their game systems from first person adventures / RPGs / Myst. But the acronym is FPS, not FPRPG or FPA.
The series is also NOT about the history of the FPS, it's about the non-industry presence that formed in response, and I started it where the first FPS mod scene sprung up, which was more or less Doom. You're right, there were first person games before Doom, but that's not what I'm talking about, if that's not too much of a cop-out for you.
No, you're right, it's a derisive in-crowd term like dudebro for games with guns and killing.
I've written a 3 essay series for Rock Paper Shotgun. It argues that the perception that "FPSes are generic and the same" accepts the premise that the mainstream AAA game industry dominates FPS design, which is wrong, because the story of the FPS is also the story of modders. It also excludes the many other games that use first person, but we don't think of them as "real" first person games for some reason.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09 ... 1-the-wad/
It's kinda inflammatory / anti-industry in some places -- I think my personal opinion is more nuanced, that the industry is great sometimes and the industry isn't great sometimes -- but right now, I think history is heavily on the industry's side, so I'm going to write from a non-industry perspective to try to balance things out. The "truth" is somewhere in the middle, as always.
Would love to hear your comments and thoughts.
Wow just got about 2/3 through WGH and yeah, seems like hgrunt damage is too high or their accuracy needs to get halved? Also wish they dropped mini health packs like the Combine soldiers. Right now, what usually happens is that I drop down to single digit health, then have to start slicing the pie everywhere with the 357 to get instant headshots / exploiting the AI / camping because I can't take risks anymore... which is interesting, but gets tedious.
Why are people falling off ladders so much? When you +use to dismount, you automatically slide to an info_ladder_dismount entity... well, usually, if the mapper placed them.
Porting Someplace Else to Source, maybe as a BMS mod if they're possible -- which they should be, if it's based on Source SDK Base 2007? or, at least, a custom map people can load via console.
I have to work pretty quickly to meet the deadline for this, so I'm trying to "work smart" and think about what details or changes are important instead of just brute-force remaking everything. I think a lot of the exterior Xen brush geo still holds up, so I'm actually keeping that in place, and I'm awful at displacement sculpts anyway. The tunnels are probably a different story.
The harder part so far has been to think about what high-def Xen should look like. Ideally, given enough time and resources, I'd have all the Xen geo be pulsating underneath as if the terrain is alive, and have fungal / coral growths everywhere, and give tunnels a Giger-ish spinal cord and other weird stuff, and space jellyfish / giant space plankton floating around... but I don't think I have time for that. I'll have to see what Xen assets the BMS build has.
But yeah, I'm remaking a mod by making a mod for a mod. What a beautiful age we live in.
I loved the endgames in HL1 and HL2 for how alien / unexpected they are... look, a crazy organic low gravity asteroid world thing! Look, a blue gravity gun that annihilates everything and gets used by an NPC! Really well done last chapters, not some generic predictable climactic build-up.
Anyway. Great release plan. Yay BMS!
right now I'm hanging in the speaker prep room with indies, working on our talks, if you want to drop by
Whoa I might actually make a TF2 map now!
