Posts by Hourences

Update!

We have been awarded a 45 000 USD development grant by the Scandinavian governments. It was a huge honor for us to be awarded a grant out of the 90-something applications they received! This grant will really help us get this game done, and to make it best possible experience.

[Blocked Image: http://www.theballthegame.com/wp-content/upl…ordicgames1.jpg]

And we have posted screenshots of our brand new "King". Remember that monster with the staff that never attacked you in the mod version? We have totally remade him.

[Blocked Image: http://www.theballthegame.com/wp-content/upl…gcomparison.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.theballthegame.com/wp-content/upl…10/04/king2.jpg]

The release of the full game is set for August!

Our website: http://www.theballthegame.com/

Our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/theballthegame

Our Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheBallgame

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In my opinion the day of needing a degree for anything film, game, graphics, web related are over

The opposite actually. You didn't need one 10 years ago. You are much more likely to need one nowadays. There are now WAY more people who want to get into this industry, and as of such the games industry goes through the same evolution that other industries have gone through long before us, and that is that they need a way to quickly filter through a large number of applicants, and one of the things they will look at are degrees. Furthermore a good education will help the students get in touch with companies. The schools have a big network of contacts, and that is yet something else to fight as individual. It is certainly possible to get into this industry without a degree, but it does become a little harder every year. If someone is starting out with game dev and such, you are looking at at least 3 years of studying (school or mod) before they make a chance of getting a job. What do you expect the job market to be like in 3 years? I believe the demand for proper schooling will go up in 3 years. Will you still be able to get a job without a degree in 3 years? Yes, but you will have to be so good that your skill alone will beat everyone else to it, because it is all you got to convince the company you are applying to. Will you be that good...?

Simple answer: Get a degree in game dev or related, but be sure to work on mods in your free time, and also have a non-gaming backup plan ready as well. Research educations you are interested in well, many game dev educations are pretty bad. If you don't work on hobby game projects in your free time and just attend school, you will not get a job.

50 for six is ok ?

A few years ago no one would have accepted "just six hours" for 50.

I dont really know what to expect of this. Right now it kind of has the image that it is a small and cute but low budget game, so I wonder how they will counter that and what more big things this will offer beyond coop.

Comparison is completely correct. We follow the group without giving stuff further thought or thinking about the long term impact. If people would just think about why they would really need or want to do X or Y, the world would be a better place.

And right now that leads us to people throwing their privacy away in an effort to be like everyone else. X thousand years ago that was the case with religion, or the witch hunt, or whatever you want really.

Quote from deceiver

At some point, we'll probably realize at what point it can be destructive and write it off or just plain tiresome.

We will? Really? We just spent 5000 years killing each other and doing all kinds of totally weird things in the name of something called "religion" and you truly believe that humanity is smart enough to realise that a world like is portrayed here would be bad for them?

It is not about the points or achievements, it is about a big brother society driven by social networking and the internet. Everyone knows what you do, when you do it, how you do it, because you deliberatly give away all your privacy. This evolution already started by Twitter, Facebook, and many similar websites. I do not give a single bit in even the slightest possible sense in any possible way what you ate for dinner or when you go on vacation. Really. Yet the majority of people on sites like Facebook for some reason seems to do use it pretty much only for that... The whole big brother idea will eventually become reality, not because of a police state, not because of terrorists, cold war, or whatever else, but because society thinks the internet is to be used to tell others what they are doing.

And from there on, it is a small step to also throw in some points...

Do you want to have a database somewhere on a server that tracks when you go to bed, when you stand, when you sit, when you eat, what you eat, exactly what you buy, when you buy it, where you buy it, how fast you bought it, how you felt after you ate a product, what you watch on tv, hell perhaps even what your opinions are?

Really?

Oh well, on a much more positive note, I am sure the world will go to hell in 2012

I don't want to live in that kind of world. There are limits.

I am sure it does go into that direction in 15 or so years though.

Quote from e-freak

damn i need to keep on talking my professors into getting you to our school as well. decent price you won yourself there. 40.000 isn't too much but it can help alot especially regarding you can sell the game UDK based.

Yeah, make them hire me for a talk

I am really stepping up my teaching activities, I am trying to go by one school a month.

March 22. Looking forward to that

1st 50.000USD

2nd 40.000USD

3rd 30.000USD

4th 20.000USD

5th 10.000USD

So we just got 40.000 USD richer

It'll all go to our company though. We need some new software, hardware maybe, we need a marketing budget, etc. so it won't make me personally any richer but it is bice to have a comfortable budget to work with. Removes some of the stress of starting a company

Thanks!

Grand Final Results of the Make Something Unreal contest announced!

http://www.makesomethingunreal.com/final_winners.aspx

The Ball takes silver!

Oh I had messed up the youtube tag apperantly. Thing didn't work.

Fixed in any case, check out the first trailer.

The game is based on an existing IP. AVP is one single IP, not two different ones. There were AVP products long before the first AVP game came out. They did not start this, they simply licensed the IP.

Even if they would have started this, it wouldn't have helped them at all. You can't just take two existing IP's, combine them in a new way, and then suddenly get to keep a lot more of the money for yourself? That makes just no sense at all.

If I go make an Avatar Star Wars game tomorrow, I would still have to pay everyone involved in both IP's.

None of this changes my point. This is based on someone's else property (who in turn based it off someone else), and as of such a considerable share of the money will go to the owners.

Using existing IP's makes it easier to market and sell your product but makes it harder to get rich on. It is the safer approach, kind of, but the rewards are unlikely to be as big as if you would have made a successful original IP game.

I don't think they'll get rich on this game. Quality aside, it is a movie IP. A considerable share will go to the movie IP holder, there may be a movie studio or another party who also has a stake in this, for example Gigger himself, and then there is the regular publisher on top who takes a big cut. So after all that, there definitely won't be much left, let alone when you are selling at 20 euro.

So unless they sell a gigantic boatload of AVP3's, they won't be able to sit back and relax I'd say.

But thats the thing, what if youd do a HL sized game in the browser? It is possible. You can rent out the game then in a similar way as onlive works but without the video stream aspect.

Cool. Not working well for me on full screen with two monitors. Mouse moves out of screen one and it minimizes all the time.

Otherwise this is a cool thing. Havent gotten further than those training rooms though, is there any actual level?

Those areas are being added into existing levels and have to fit that level's style and color. The environment changes every two levels on average. The color pallet has to be specific and recognizable so the game gets a stronger identity. Of course it is risky to go too far with this and push it into "boring", but I think we are doing OK with our current balance.

We have two all new screenshots of Oztoc for you. These show the little train station where you begin your journey by train, and "the village". A big cavern with an abandoned (or is it?) village, surrounded by grain fields. A big unfinished pyramid looms in the distance. That pyramid is the entrance to Oztoc II.

[Blocked Image: http://www.toltecstudios.com/theball/media/oztocmines2.jpg][Blocked Image: http://www.toltecstudios.com/theball/media/oztocmines4.jpg]

We also released a Press Kit. The Press Kit contains three high resolution logos, and a presentation that is meant to introduce the game to the reader in under two minutes. This will allow us to contact magazines and websites, and quickly explain them what our game is about. It is basically about making it as easy as possible for the press to talk about us.

[Blocked Image: http://www.toltecstudios.com/theball/newsimages/presskit.jpg]

http://www.toltecstudios.com/theball/th ... esskit.zip

Also on our schedule are some wallpapers, a community kit with some images that can be used for forum signatures and such, and we still have a trailer coming up. We decided to push back the trailer a little, so we can get some new footage of for example Cahua II in. The trailer should be out somewhere in February. February in general is going to be a very exciting month for us. We are awaiting the outcome of the MSU Grand Finals, the ModDB MOTY 2009 awards, and soon after those two we will begin pitching the game to distributors.

http://www.toltecstudios.com/theball/20 ... s-kit.html

You are getting old:)

Problem with UT3 is the very overcrowded art style making it appear much more hectic and hard to see what the hell you are looking at.

TF2 wouldn't work much better on Onlive though. Its environments have more flat colors which may speed up the transfer slightly but it still goes fast with a lot of motion. Same for L4D, with all the mummies and 3 team mates.