ReNo

Oooh hello there Riven, good to see you here mate I've - rather shamefully - still not gotten around to taking a look at the contest maps myself. Need to get on that soon :S

Wow, nicely done Frie! Now we've got our very own nintendog (which I'm hereby classifying the official term for nintendo employees) Now go kick their asses and stop them from delaying games from hitting Europe for so damn long (though on the plus side, at least they seem to be getting better at that)

Also, forgot to mention that I agree with thrik - it's probably best to have an expiry on the "featured artist" status that comes along with having your work spotlighted. I think a month is a decent amount of time. We'll have the spotlight forum to forever chronicle their glory. Would be good to then have - like our old frontpage - some more prominent display of the most recent 5 on the forum homepage.

I guess the fairest way to bring everybody in to the decision making process would be that any thread in the "finished work gallery" automatically has an option/button/thing to let people flag it as spotlight worthy. To stop people voting yes to any old thing we could perhaps limit users to 1/2/3 spotlight votes a week. Obviously you also couldn't vote on threads you had started yourself. After around a week or so we could then assign or not assign spotlight status based on those votes. Not entirely fair, as if a thread doesn't get viewed by many people then the chance of the work it shows being spotlighted is slim. If it's a quiet week at the 'core, or if the site goes down for a few days, or whatever, then there's the chance it'll get overlooked or not have a long enough voting period, and so miss out on its chance to be spotlighted. I guess there's THEN the option of having the number of spotlight votes needed being related to the number of unique members that had viewed the thread, but that may then get really quite complicated! Maybe best to just keep it simple; have a "nominate for spotlight" button that members can press, and that increments a counter. Its then at the moderators discretion whether it should get spotlighted. If something is 2 months old and gets a new vote, its probably safe to ignore it. If its 3 days old and the count is at 28, then it's probably earned its stripes

Ah, glad to see the results of this Looks like you got a pretty good response to it too - ~1000 is a decent number to work off.

EA's first response seems to be one of "our DRM ain't going anywhere", sadly, though a slight silver lining is that Red Alert 3 will allow an ultra generous FIVE installs instead of three http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/54638

Nah, not me. I'm not gonna claim I've never pirated games but I don't like to. If I want something then I buy it. Spore I just don't really want - plenty of other games out that I'd rather pick up.

I've not seen it yet but definately intend to. The trailer looked pretty damn awesome to me - really looks like Del Toro brought his creature design to this one, which I don't remember being so much a focus in the first. Also, I have such a thing for Selma Blair. She can also marry me and not have to change her name. So she might as well

I find it an impressive accomplishment, but it isn't my sort of game at all. I'm sure it'll sell well and garner a fair chunk of praise, but I've never really had it on my wanted list.

Awesome, that was quite a turnout! Glad it went well guys. Now lets see the "chaotic" pics Peris - mapcore carnage!

Geometry Wars 2, Braid, Bionic Commando:Rearmed, and - next week - Castle Crashers. XBLA knows how to pinch my pennies, but I don't mind them going missing one little bit when I'm getting games like these in return

BC:R slapped me silly last night in my wee session with it - pretty damn tough so it is. Enjoyable for sure though. It's gonna take me a bit of time to get really comfortable with the swinging dynamics as they really don't feel very intuitive to me, but I managed to complete the 2 tutorials and the first 8 trial rooms, so maybe after having done that I won't fail the first damn level next time

Pretty sure I saw one of those already, but given the amount that's been shown it's easy to lose track!

I watched it last night, and it really was awesome. Not much to add to what's already been said really, but anybody else think it was pretty damn brutal for a 12A? The pencil "magic trick" and the occasions of putting his knife in people's mouths were really quite violent and nasty I thought. I know it doesn't ever really show much of the violence but the thought is sometimes worse than the visuals anyway. Not that I'm complaining it should have been rated higher or anything, was just quiet taken aback.

Interesting thread to read through My story isn't exactly very exciting, but I'll share it regardless... I found an article in a PC mag about using Worldcraft to make a custom HLDM level soon after the game's release. I was actually more interested in using Worldcraft as an architectural tool as I harboured ambitions of becoming an architect, but after a while I started to enjoy the prospects of game design instead. I kept tinkering with it as a hobby on and off through school, and eventually came to the decision that I wanted to do it as a career. I wasn't ready to be applying for jobs by the time I finished, so I looked for a University course that would support my ambitions, and a BSc in Games Technology seemed like the best fit around. I kept doing level design in my spare time during the course, but became a (somewhat!) competent programmer in the process. A few weeks before the end of my final year there was Games Industry Fair in Dundee. I went along with copies of my CV, spoke to a bunch of companies, and tried to sell myself. While there I met my current boss, who was at the time looking to take on a couple of people for development of The Ship. Given that it was being developed on the Source engine - an engine which I had not only level design experience in but also programming experience - I fit the bill quite nicely. I was asked along for an interview, and a few days after that I heard back from them and was offered the job. I started about 5 days after I handed in my dissertation at uni and I've been at Outerlight now for over 2 years. As a bit of a comment contrary to 2D-Chris's point, being a bit of a jack of all trades was actually quite useful in my case. I wouldn't like to say it is for everybody, but in the case of small companies like Outerlight (~10-20 developers) it stands some of us in good stead to be able to handle a few different tasks. I was taken on to be a bit of a middle man between design and code as I had a good understanding of both, and although I've only done minor programming work for the company I do find my knowledge of programming is useful on a daily basis. You should certainly excel in one area if you plan to get a job in the industry, but I wouldn't trade in my programming experience to have spent more time on level design, personally.

I like the style - very clean and shiny. Reminds me a lot of Mirror's Edge, which is a good thing

I was pretty taken aback - I didn't see that coming at all! I'm rather pleased as a 360 owner, as it was one of not that many games that was tempting me into buying a PS3. I'll still get one eventually, but the more reasons that are checked off the list the longer I can go without I doubt it'll make that much difference in Japan (though it isn't going to HURT microsoft) but in the West this could really turn out to be quite a big deal.

I think Wahlberg looks to have been a good choice after all, to be honest. The trailer shows a lot of potential; I'm looking forward to the movie a whole lot more now than I was prior to watching it so that can't be a bad sign!

Umm....huh? I've seen GITS and Innocence, and some SAC, and I don't really think there's anything whatsoever to get up in arms about. Sure, there's similarities, but nothing even remotely nearing "rip off" territory. They may well have looked at Motoko's character and used her as inspiration for Mirror's Edge's protagonist, but that happens in character design in games companies. She was probably one of dozens of characters from an array of media stuck together on the concept boards from which they developed her.

Pinky drinking - sign of a man with class! Here's a shot of me and one of our programmers Iain, taking in the last of the sun last friday on top of the ship that sits in the river near our office. I'm on the right You actually can't take a photo in Edinburgh at the moment without it looking like a building site - it must really suck for the tourists.

Wait, in-house is out?! I thought Alan Wake was using in-house EDIT: Oh yeah, and in a slightly more meaningful contribution - I think Portal would be the best idea for the next contest, so I'm gonna vote for Source. As much as I'd love to see the contest open to all engines, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure people are actually playing the entries rather than voting for the prettiest screenshots. And if that's the case, people using a non-UE3/CE2 engine are gonna lose by default It also gets hard to pick a theme, as engines are naturally suited to different themes.

I never got that for Weaver despite winning the last contest But then Weaver was fun enough to build that I didn't really care I reckon a Portal map would be a good plan, as I think we'll see quite a few entries. Doesn't need custom content to look good (I reckon most folks will pull off the simple portal style with basically Valve level of quality), and encourages originality in gameplay and design as opposed to just visuals.

The fogging looks good in some shots, but isn't working in others. Seems that the sky colour varies as you look in different directions, and so the fog doesn't match the skybox in places and ends up looking not so great. I'd either try and tweak the skybox to suit the fog colour, or play with directional fog and try to make it suit the different skybox colours. Otherwise looking like it's coming on well on the whole, keep it up

Ouch, unlucky tripl_ecks, you're suffering some rather harsh posts today man! Try not to be too discouraged though, Mapcore can be a little hostile but you'll end up making better levels if you're willing to take on advice and take a few knocks in the process On the topic of ladders; those gameplay vids definately explained why you'd have them! It seems like they make up about 80% of the gameplay in the mod :S I always get a little confused when a game mod doesn't try to theme its levels to suit the gameplay. I mean, CS levels are "realistic" because the gameplay is meant to be based on real world events. The gameplay suits the sort of layouts and architecture you'd find in real life. Despite its name, this Hide and Seek game doesn't really seem to be based on hide and seek at all, but instead based around fancy movement skills. Wouldn't it be better to therefore step away from real world settings and build something more abstract? Then you can start designing a setting where the giant ladders required for the gameplay don't seem out of place. Its gonna be really quite tough to make a believable real world cityscape based level for this mod within the confines of the engine. In future, if you plan on doing more work for this mod, consider thinking outside the box and coming up with a setting that lends itself to lots of tall ladders and straight vertical walls. Remember the HLDM level gasworks? or the CS map oilrig? Maybe something like that could work? Anyway, a little off topic as it's not gonna help you with this project, but just thought I'd say it anyway

No displacements in HL1 Freak - this is a CS1.6 map, judging by the blue masked textures through it. I think something that's gonna be a big problem with this map is that you can access the roofs of very tall buildings, and the world ends at the skybox. That means its gonna be really rather ugly from up there, with views right down on the (actually touchable) skybox, regardless of how detailed or atmospheric you manage to make the main play area. I also think it features far too many ladders, which aren't really the best feature for smooth gameplay. I don't know how this hide and seek mode works, but in future projects I'd encourage you to try and link the different vertical "floors" of the map through ramps or stairs as opposed to just ladders.