Corwin

It's alright, but even on my beast computer at work I get clear framerate issues when multiple of them update at once and I'm trying to scroll up/down (e.g. when I'm in the middle of the page for the CoD stuff). I don't know if it's just me. I'm on Chrome.

Oh don't get me wrong, I really don't care if it looks like Brest or not! It's your stuff, and gameplay first! It's not like anybody will complain or even notice. Keep up the good work!

You can see the sun from Brest of course, it just shines 8 times a day for a few minutes Also yeah it's a pretty hard stretch to recognize the stuff I've seen so far to be honest. The harbor has a bit more promise, but in general the pics you posted feel a lot more 'french WW2-era village' than 'french WW2-era city'. Which is fine btw, those assets look great! http://www.cparama.com/forum/brest-ports-et-bateaux-t10249.html

I just put in my resignation at work and will leave in about a month back to Britanny in France, as while Germany had some perks, my current commute time, work hours, and renovations were creating a whirlwind of stress and lack of energy, and were damaging my relationship with my wife almost beyond the point of no return. I started trying to come up with a plan to be able to move back home with family and friends, and out of the blue a neighbor showed up at my doorstep and asked if I was selling my house. Turns out he owns a restaurant across the street, will retire next year, and wants the house to turn half of the garden into parking spots for his restaurant, otherwise German law says he cannot rent it and so he'd lose a lot of money over time. So everyone's happy, I don't have to finish the renovations (big load off my back and cuts down on further investments I'd have to make to properly finish it and make it easy to sell), got a good price for it given the state it's in, and 2 weeks after he showed up I've got a contract in hand and am signing it tomorrow afternoon. I'll try to work from home, the area I was raised in doesn't have ANY game companies, but the immediate focus will be climbing back up the hill for my couple and catching up a bit with my kids too. Also being back to the ocean is gonna be awesome, I never really knew what to do with my family around here where there's only forests and hills. The plan is to move back to this area, kinda close to family but still not at the very tip of Britanny where driving to anywhere in Europe takes 5 more hours.

I'm from that city, looking forward to see how you portray it

It's like half of the game releases these days have an implied 'early access' period

I wonder how much Sony played a part in that crap, as in forbidding them from telling that the game wouldn't reach the initial pitched vision before the release to not affect sales etc. If that's the case, it sucks that Hello Games would take the fall for that. I guess it's always scary but often necessary to go with black and white answers: he did actually say in an interview that you could meet other players if you happened to be in the same place, it's not just his comment on 'don't look at it as a MP game' that built that particular hype, but carefulness and experience should have pushed him to say 'our plan is to...' so it at least doesn't seem like a flat out lie when the game comes out. That said, I just think people are being stupid just once more, and it's all about the hype they project onto the game that was never viable. Like the director of Deus Ex Mankind Divided was quoted a few years back saying that bad PC ports were a disgrace and an insult to PC gamers and then they ship a broken ass PC port, but I don't see the internet up in arms because I don't think too many people were fantasizing about having a good PC port for the last couple of years.

Alright here goes then, I was assuming more people around these parts would be into pompous art movies: Also don't believe the trailer, it's nothing like the espionage action movie they make it out to be. @Vilham let's say you won, you're up next

There's a flamenco scene in it, and a blond woman with a transparent umbrella

Nope! It's a pretty obscure one though, sorry, should I give the solution?

No. It's a movie from 2009, if that helps

Nope! I would never dare to use a movie with Christophe Lambert in it!

I love this game for all the crazy shit that can happen in each game. We won that one:

Movie

The Thing? My dad showed me this movie I wasn't even 10, so it left a lasting impression... Assuming this is correct, here's one:

I have concerns that you're going to be super busy then super rich and that you'll vanish from mapcore. I hope it works out dude, good luck!

Shit times

I realize I haven't really answered your questions and it's frustrating when people do that so here it goes: See my previous post and suggestions from others: find something exciting, form a vision from another medium (books, movies, other games...) or from real-life (e.g. go visit an abandoned place, an architectural masterpiece, etc.) etc. I would worry about a portfolio when I've built a few levels I'm happy with. It's nice to vary your experience of course, so feel free to do just what you mentioned. Consider your strengths, weaknesses, limitations (time, engines...), passions etc. and that should help narrow down WHAT to work on. That's one approach, and it's a valid one, although it suits better the profile of the usual indie game developer than that of the AAA industry level designer. Extra experience and skills are never a bad thing, but by trying to tackle too many things at once you run the risk of not managing to sell your core level design skills. For instance, creating final art assets is something you'd pretty much never do as a level designer in many companies, BUT using a 3D package like 3dsmax or Maya can be very important depending on the company (some companies create levels directly in Max / Maya). So it's not necessarily about showing you can build a game by yourself, no-one is going to ask that of you if you apply as a LD. But game and level design are tied so it never hurts to have experience there, scripting too (visual scripting mostly these days). I don't know how much of a newbie you are to level design so it's hard to say. If the goal is to learn level design itself, I would tend to think worrying about the other stuff too early could be detrimental, but I can't know for sure. My suggestion would be to focus first on levels until you feel confident using the editor of your choice and maps for the style of games of your choice, and then (if you so desire, because it seems you are concerned about just building levels being not enough for a LD position, which can be true in some cases) expend on that with extra activities like creating a small non-artistic game where level design is important and mechanics are simple/overdone but that challenges you to not match the level design of an existing game but to come up with your own rules and such fitting those mechanics you decide upon. Nope, it's not a bad thing at all. I don't think there's a particular imbalance between the amount of jobs for MP levels vs SP levels, and the games industry keeps on evolving so it's more important that you learn the skills that are shared by both MP and SP design, which are the more abstract, more experience-based ones that would be hard to tutor. Just build levels you want to build and don't make the mistake of tackling too big of a challenge (it's especially hard in SP design where you tend to want to do a full campaign for instance), and you will learn skills applicable to all types of level design. For instance, there are plenty of level designers that start their career designing race tracks for racing games, that doesn't prevent them from being good at designing SP/MP levels (although they may be a bit rusty on certain skills/concepts specific to a game genre). Don't niche yourself too much.

From reading this it sounds to me like you're approaching the challenge the wrong way. You want to focus on stuff that could get you hired but that doesn't click for you. Maybe you should try starting with things that really excite you? Like what is the last game you played that you felt you really wanted to build a custom level for? Sure you can't always mod your favorite games, but there's a decent panel of customizable games out there that you should be able to find something that motivates you. Cut the 'hmm, I want to focus less on MP', just select what you ACTUALLY wanna do, even if you don't think it's necessarily great portfolio material. Learn the basics by doing that, by fueling it with your enthusiasm for the particular game/genre, then when you have more experience (could be just a few months down the line), you'll be able to approach the tougher challenges of designing levels for games that you're not necessarily crazy about but that you feel would get you a job. Also remember that doing MP levels to get hired but not really enjoying it may very well mean you end up being hired to design more MP levels, so picking what you like can also help orienting your career down paths that you'll also enjoy. Don't design a competitive shooter level because you feel that's where the money's at right now if all you really care about is creating well-crafted SP experiences. At least not as your first few learning experiences.

I bought it before but was just sitting on it to be done because I don't like going through early stuff, cause I know I won't play it again when it's done. Glad to see it completed, will check it out soon

That's some pretty badass hooking action, I always miss those and fail to chain them with a kill when I do catch someone.

Fair point, but I think that's balanced by the fact that if he fails he doesn't necessarily dies, so can keep playing without respawning at the other side of the map like those other heroes. Anyway, I guess I'm not particularly concerned about his ult, I do fail them from time to time but I manage to get kills with most. I think allowing it to explode on getting shot would break the risk/reward system in place here, where you've sometimes got 1 or 2 characters in range but they're shooting at the tire and you have to decide whether to push forward and potentially blow up more of them, at the risk of getting shot and doing nothing, vs. blowing it up now and having those kills for sure. That sort of quick decision making is important for the game to stay interesting me thinks

Not sure that's true, many ultimates rely on precise timing to work (Phara needs to wait for people to be busy or she gets shot down, McCree fails a lot of times because enemies get a chance to move out of view, etc.) and Junkrat's falls into that same category. Trigger it while your team does a push, and not too far from the enemy team so they don't have time to fall back or disperse, and you have as much chance than those other heroes with timing-based ultimates I think. Also the fact that you can keep operating it even after having died means you can do like the other heroes and trigger it in the urgency of an intense battle by sacrificing yourself for the big payoff. I'm more annoyed by Reinhart's ultimate that has the nasty habit of not hitting enemies clearly in its range, because the ground effect does not match 1 to 1 the actual people that are going to be affected (especially on stuff like stairs and slopes) so it's quite annoying to trigger it with 3 people in view to try and save the day and only hit the first one because he's on the exact same plane as yourself.

I think there's a keyboard shortcut too like Ctrl+Shift+R or something to toggle that stuff in-game, like if you wanna record without it or such.