Posts by Puddy

Very sad news for all the people involved and a shame that the Swedish game industry just became a tad weaker. Wish the former employees all the best and hope they get back on the saddle as soon as possible!

Great idea! I would make it about a guy who can relive someone else's past but only the last 3min 14sec and he has to use that time find a bomb and defuse it and sex up a girl!!!!

In all seriousness, I would enjoy that kind of a challenge. Anything not art related.

In the Syndicate trailer it was a perfect fit (and I actually liked the dubstep in that).

Just finished it. Loved it.

The art was just amazing. My jaw hit the floor on several occasions during the cave- and the beacon section. Every corner of every environment of every chapter felt handcrafted but looked natural. There were no seams, no eye sores and no dull areas. Just consistent, wonderful environments. These environments are masterly lit and the use of audio sealed the deal when it came to immersion. I have not, in recent memory, experienced a game which gave a stronger sense of place than Dear Esther. I applaud the game in this regard.

The music was fantastic. The voice acting and the narrative was pretty strong and I mostly overlooked their shortcomings because the music and visuals were so vivid and gripping. While I'm assuming the story is supposed to be slightly cryptic and hard to decipher, I felt that the narrator introduced too many concepts, characters and analogies to keep track of and that some of the choices of words seemed a bit forced. Despite this, the pieces of the narrative that I did puzzle together created a storyline which I was content with when the game ended. It felt like I just scratched the surface of the game's mystery, but that I understood enough of it for it to be a meaningful experience.

Quote

I was particularly fond of the segment where you drop down into a pool of water and revisit the crash site, albeit submerged.

By playing Dear Esther, I hope mainstream game designers take to heart that slightly longer exploration segments can be really powerful if done right (though they have every right in the world to increase the walk speed).

I commend our fellow MapCorian Rob for his work and I award the game five out of five animated hurgs.

island psychos wub wub wub

Yep, pretty crappy trailer. The game looks pretty good so far though!

Getting my ass kicked tonight by a Czech clan in BF3 4on4. Then Dear Ester.

Yep, that's a huge problem a chamber can have imho. It's probably the most common problem, just ahead of bad puzzle design (puzzles that are just seriously unintuitive, regardless of the learning curve). I'm doing my best to avoid these issues. And since I'm making a sequence of chambers, it's a lot easier to create a nice learning curve.

Yep, it's pretty retarded.

Walking Dead is back and I really liked the last episode

Yup! Gonna be awesome

But got bf3 clan match scheduled 30 min after release

*looks at results*

Oh goddamnit*... I'll have to redesign some segments.

Only 10 replies so far but I can already draw some pretty game changing conclusions (literally). Thanks guys! And feel free to answer the questionnaire if you haven't already! It's really helpful.

Looking forward to it too!

Hey MapCore.

All these damn college-kids with their damn polls must've bit me or something, because I've just put together a poll to help me finish my Portal 2 project.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/vie ... c6MQ#gid=0

It's a questionnaire to help me understand what players value in new fan-made content, which type of sections people generally enjoy, how important the narrative is and if people recognize Portal 2's different characters.

There's no duplicate questions or vague descriptions, no sir! Replies would be much appreciated!

I'll post the results here afterwards too!

An architectural degree sounds like a better fit for environment artists imho. And it doesn't sound half-bad actually. You could provide a very specialised niche by bringing real-world architecture into games in a way someone who hasn't studied it can't. While there isn't a dire need for buildings to be built "correctly" in games, as few players will pick up on that anyway, you can probably bring a lot to the table when it comes to the design and styling of buildings/areas.

I'd await some replies from real environment art people though.

Word. FoV is actually so important. It's a filter which you view the entire game through (and can really prevent players from enjoying the game if it's a bad case). Luckily, there are usually config-files that can be used to get around very low defaults... but not always, and they don't always work flawlessly (reset after cutscenes/game restart etc).

The premise seems a bit forced. Frankenstein-style revive on this franchise imho.

Just finished a brief session with two mates. It was pretty simple and fun! However, we found that the F-ability was't too useful atm and that the hit detection/character movement wasn't always on the mark (could've just been a latency issue). In any case, good work!

Quote from generalvivi

I'm like 99% sure everyone on mapcore could draw the layouts to De_Dust / De_Dust 2 / and Cs_Office ... Blindfolded

... with their toes!

... while skydiving!!!

I totally agree; especially that first shot of the construction site really caught my eye. Really warm and nice lighting!

Really badass.