Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

new jam game: Where's the beef


I released a quick little jam game about 2 weeks ago, but I realized I never posted it here, so here it is:
"Where's the beef is a silly little beef-finding web browser game made in zero hours for 0h game jam 2023 (http://www.0hgame.eu/) where we make games in "zero hours" when daylight savings time switches over (in Europe)"

"15 levels of beef finding; literally photorealistic graphics; can YOU find the beef???"

For all the zoomers / teens reading this -- "where's the beef?" was a popular catchphrase in a Wendy's ad campaign back in the 1980s...

Thursday, September 29, 2022

new Quake map: There's a Certain Slant of Light

These are design notes about my process and intent, and it may spoil what happens in the level.

I made my new single player Quake map "There a Certain Slant of Light" for the Quake Brutalist Jam, a 2 1/2 week long map jam focused around making chunky modernist concrete themed levels.

I actually made most of this level around two years ago. I wasn't really happy with it, so I never released it. Though when I fixed it up for this jam, I ended up keeping most of the layout and geometry. Maybe it wasn't such a bad map after all? 

The two big changes I made were the texturing and the monster placement / player flow...

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

"Voluntary Attempts to Overcome Necessary Obstacles" at EFA Project Space, Sept 23 - Oct 29, 2022

My gay historical bathroom cruising game "The Tearoom" is part of a new upcoming group exhibition "Voluntary Attempts to Overcome Necessary Obstacles" at the EFA Project Space in New York City, curated by Nicholas O’Brien. 

The show will run for about a month, from September 23rd to October 29th, 2022. Although I won't be there, since I currently live on the opposite side of the planet, I encourage you to check it out. There's a lot of great people and good stuff.

I've copy-and-pasted the exhibition blurb below:

Friday, August 12, 2022

new Quake map: Breakfast Under The Balloons

I made a new single player Quake 1 map called "Breakfast Under The Balloons" for the community map pack Coppertone Summer Jam 2, where mappers were encouraged to make sunny summer-y themed maps using the popular community rebalancing mod Copper.

I like making sunny maps anyway, and the first CTSJ back in 2020 was when I made my first Quake map, so the event has a special place in my heart.

This post details some of my process and intent, and spoils what happens in the map. You may want to play it first if you care about that.

Sunday, January 16, 2022

Darner's Digest, vol. 3: on the Yarn Spinner v2.0 release + a YS primer

Darner's Digest is a series of blog posts about Yarn Spinner, a free open source Unity dialogue tree plugin.

On December 21st, 2021, the Yarn Spinner project finally made its public YS v2.0 for Unity release

YS 2.0 has gone through six (6!) preview versions / betas over the last few years, with several debates and redesigns that have finally culminated in this version. If you're familiar with Yarn Spinner already, you should go read the changelog for upgrade notes from v1.0 to v2.0.

But a lot about YS and its ecosystem have changed, so it's probably helpful to recap what's going on.

1. What is Yarn Spinner in 2022?
2. When to use Yarn Spinner
3. How to use Yarn Spinner
4. Current Strengths / Weaknesses
5. The Future

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Resolutions, 2022

Well, 2021 was a year, huh? Here's the work in 2022 that I'm looking forward to:
  • Release 1+ gay sex games. I have two projects that have been perpetually stuck at ~95% complete, and two that are 50% complete. It's been tricky to find time (and volition) to sit down and finally finish them. But again! 2022 is going to be the year I bet! I mean, it has to be, right??
  • "Launch" my level design book project. While the book is already open and public, I haven't been talking about it or publicizing it since there's still so many gaps and missing pages. It's a very unstable book, even though I've somehow written 100,000+ words over the past 2 years. But this year I feel like it's finally going to feel complete enough that I can start recommending it to people.
  • I'm going to start streaming again, maybe in a few months. Since my move to New Zealand last year, it's taken me a while to get settled with a more reliable schedule. Now I'm finally on my way to figuring out my routines again.
I also have a few other projects in the works, but those'll get announced later in the year. There's one in particular that's pretty unusual compared to my past work. I've been having a lot of fun making it though.

Good luck everyone, and here's hoping 2022 treats us all a bit better.

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

We Dwell in Possibility as queer gardening simulation

all drawings by Eleanor Davis

"We Dwell in Possibility" (WeDIP) is a new queer gardening simulation game about planting bodies and ideas, and watching them grow into a kinetic landscape. You can currently play it in your browser on the Manchester International Festival's (MIF's) "Virtual Factory" website. The game should take about 5-10 minutes to play.

It was made over several months in collaboration with world-famous illustrator (+ co-designer) Eleanor Davis and Manchester-based rockstar musician aya as a commission for MIF. (Also shout-outs to illustrator Sophia Foster-Dimino and sound designer Andy Grier for their incredible work!)

Some people may be familiar with my past work: uncanny CG beefcake sex games that toy with hardcore gamer aesthetics, which only run on laptop / desktop computers. For the longest time, I've wanted to make a gay mobile game, but I was unsure how to get my queer politics past Apple and Google's anti-sexuality censors. It's impossible to get anything on a phone without their long withheld permission... unless... I made a browser game? 

The history of browser games celebrates the open internet that exists beyond Silicon Valley's sterilized closed garden. However, the photorealistic 3D graphics of my past games are too heavy and slow for a mobile browser, so I need to make a 2D game even though I've neglected my 2D visual skills. Fortunately, MIF's support has made my creative collaborations not only possible, but enjoyable.

NOTE: this post "spoils" much of what happens in the game, so proceed at your own risk.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

new Quake map: Daughter Drink This Water

My fourth released Quake single player map "Daughter Drink This Water" is now out, as part of a community map jam pack called Sinister625 -- where we all made maps that used only 6 textures, included 2 "surprises" (anything more interesting than monsters spawning), and had only 5 monster types, all in celebration of Quake's 25th anniversary this June.

HOW TO PLAY THE MAP PACK

1. Follow this guide to acquiring Quake and a suitable source port (aka game engine) or try the Quakestarter: The Quake Singleplayer Starter Pack (Windows only). Note that Quakespasm-Spiked is currently regarded as the best engine among single player level designers; avoid DarkPlaces, which hasn't been maintained in years. Also note that it is technically possible to get all the necessary game files legally without buying Quake, but for perceived legal reasons, the community does not distribute everything together in a convenient package.

2. Download and unzip the Sinister625 mod, which will already have all the maps and assets configured. Put the /sinister625/ mod folder in the root of your Quake folder, next to the /id1/ folder.

3. Launch Quakespasm-Spiked (or whatever engine you're using) with the mod directory set to "sinister625"... There are two common ways to do this:

- download a launcher tool like Simple Quake Launcher

- OR create a shortcut with the command line parameter -game sinister625... so the full shortcut target line might read something like "C:/Program Files/.../quakespasm-spiked-win64.exe -game sinister625"

WARNING: the rest of this post are my design notes that spoil what happens in the map...

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

MIF commission "We Dwell in Possibility" coming in July 2021


Manchester International Festival (MIF) just announced my upcoming project "We Dwell in Possibility", a queer gardening crowd simulation in collaboration with illustrator Eleanor Davis, to be released in July 2021. It'll be free and playable in your web browser.

This commission has been interesting because I'm learning and trying a lot of work that I don't usually do, which came about as a cascading chain of design constraints:
  • Mobile. My gay games are all well-suited for a mobile format, but tech platforms are increasingly sex-phobic and will block my content from their stores. But if I target a mobile browser, they can't really stop me. (This is the real reason why Apple keeps their iOS browsers so slow and broken: an open internet threatens their control over everything.)
  • Not-Unity, in 2D. If I want it to run well in a mobile browser, then it probably has to avoid lots of flashy 3D. I usually work in Unity and don't get me wrong Unity's WebGL build target is a miracle, but still not quite miraculous enough, so that's why I'm learning HaxeFlixel for this project.
  • Collaboration. I usually prefer to work solo and in 3D, but my 2D art skills aren't very developed. So what if... this time... I didn't... do the graphics? I've admired Eleanor Davis' work for a while now, and I'm super excited to have her here. Also I secretly hope this is just the first of many video game projects she works on.
  • Producers. MIF does something a bit unusual for its commissions -- they provide producers, which is very common for live events and commercial games, but rare in an art games context. For this project, my fantastic producers Shanaz Gulzar and Steph Clarke have been key for figuring out what the heck we're making, and will be instrumental for bringing this to the finish line.
The two takeaways I want to emphasize here are:

(a) even experienced developers / artists are always learning and growing... and according to the artistic-industrial complex, I'm entering a phase known as "mid-career"? oh dear

(b) grants, commissions, and public arts funding are what gives people space and time to do that vital growth... meanwhile, commercial works and solo side projects often force us into our comfort zone, which can act as a ceiling on that growth

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Email subscriptions have been migrated to Mailchimp

Some minor housekeeping here: the free blog-to-email (RSS-to-email) service I use, Feedburner, was acquired by Google some moons ago and thus it is now discontinuing various services... such as its core blog-to-email service. 

So I've been forced to move all email subscribers to Mailchimp instead, which offers its own free blog-to-email service that it too will likely arbitrarily discontinue someday.

But until that fateful day, enjoy the slightly more readable emails. I've tried to disable Mailchimp's creepy marketing tracking as much as possible, but sorry in advance for any inconvenience. If you want to unsubscribe, please use the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email. 

Or if you're reading this post on the website (which is the vast majority of you) then you can choose to subscribe and have new blog posts sent to your email inbox instead. Emails will be rare, and I do not use your address for any other purpose / anyway I don't want to have to login to Mailchimp ever again.

Thanks for your attention and have a lovely day / night.

Saturday, February 27, 2021

Updates from antipodes, year 2021

Hey all, it's been a while. Here's a brief update on my life --

I've successfully moved to New Zealand and I currently reside in Auckland. I'm currently working as a remote contractor on a secret project under NDA, but I imagine we'll probably announce sometime this year if everything goes well. 

I'm still working on some personal projects:

  • I have two gay games that are 95% done, they just need some playtesting and polish, but finding an in-person playtesting group in Auckland has been a bit challenging. Regardless I'll probably be releasing these games this March and April. 
  • This will be the year I attempt to finish my bigger long term project -- a sex work deckbuilder game called Macho Cam. That's about 60% done. I need to redo the card system for the 5th time.
  • For the long-awaited Radiator 3 release, my plan was to wait for Unity HDRP to get finalized before attempting to port the entire Radiator codebase from Unity 5.6 (I know, I know) to Unity 202x. But maybe I should just stick to the built-in 3D pipeline anyway.
  • I've also been contributing a lot to everyone's favorite Unity dialogue system Yarn Spinner and I've been trying to clean up my dialogue tool Merino, all of which might see its official v2.0 public release this year.
  • Most of my Quake mapping is on hold, as I dedicate my level design energies to a different engine-agnostic project. More to announce there when it's ready, which will, again, hopefully be this year.

For those who happen to be in New Zealand, I'll be giving a short in-person talk about sex games at Play By Play, which I'm told is a bit like the kiwi equivalent of the Indiecade conference track -- and it's all part of the larger in-person New Zealand Games Festival in Wellington, April 19-25, 2021. I'll be around for most of Play By Play, so feel free to say hello if you see me... Unless the country suddenly plunges into lockdown that week?

Hope everyone is having a tolerable 2021 so far. Good luck out there.

Monday, October 19, 2020

The year of changes - kia ora Aotearoa

Earlier this year I submitted my letter of resignation as assistant arts professor at New York University, so Fall 2020 will be my last semester as full-time faculty at NYU Game Center.

Working at NYU Game Center has been an immense privilege and honestly it's a dream job for any game developer. I will miss my students, colleagues, friends, and mentors. But unfortunately it was impossible to meld a job about constant meetings with a major life change:

I'm leaving New York City and moving to New Zealand.

I realize I have the rare privilege of leaving the US, at a time when most of the world has shut its borders to US citizens. But I don't think of it as an escape -- NYC will recover and stay NYC, probably, and NZ has plenty of its own problems, so let's just put aside the COVID factor and think of it more as a hiatus... I'm taking a hiatus from residing in the US, and seeing what else life has to offer.

This move also means a short (or perhaps longer) hiatus from being a full-time academic. I'll still try to make myself available to students sometimes and maybe I'll even have the pleasure of teaching some classes at a NZ university, but for now, academia likely won't be the main focus of my life. And while I must stress again that I will miss my colleagues and students dearly, I must admit, I'm also looking forward to new possibilities for my professional and creative life:

First, I have a few commercial-oriented games in the works. Look for the releases next year.

Second, starting in January 2021, I'll be available for hire for work around New Zealand (I have a NZ work visa) or remote work from anywhere. 

I'm a generalist 3D designer / developer who's very experienced with Unity, and I'm familiar enough with Unreal to prototype in BP, build levels, and get myself up to speed with minimal supervision. I'm also available as a level designer + scripter + tolerable environment artist / asset mangler for 3D projects of all types. 

My portfolio is here, email me at yang.robert.w(at)gmail(dot)com if you want to talk. Paid gigs / positions only. CV available on request.

In the meantime, kia ora Aotearoa.

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

fy_iceworld feature for RPS


Hey all. Hope everyone's been doing OK. Remember level design? That's still important, right?

Anyway, I wrote a 2 part feature on fy_iceworld for Rock Paper Shotgun. Part 1 interviewed working level designers about their takes on fy_iceworld, while part 2 will cover my nerdy forensic investigation into who actually made fy_iceworld.

It should be a fun and diverting read, perhaps a useful distraction in these weird times. Thanks to my editor Graham Smith for taking this weird pitch and graciously proofreading it.

Thursday, March 12, 2020

Living in interesting times

Hello all. It's 2020. The world feels... different. Hopefully you're all doing OK!

A recap of what I've been up to --

In these days of social distancing, remote classes, and quarantines, I taught my class about streaming on Twitch... by streaming the class on Twitch. Some writeups:




I'm also getting into Quake 1 mapping. The modern tools are great, the video tutorials are on point, and the community is lovely. Come join us. I recommend Andrew Yoder's comprehensive guide for getting started.


Until next time...
-- R

Monday, November 4, 2019

A MAZE NOT DEAD


Before I attended A MAZE (2016 / 2018 / 2019), I had never met any game developers from Africa. I had attended so many GDCs, but it didn't matter. Imagine an entire continent, more or less shut out of an entire industry! The game industry often pretends it is "democratizing" the means of game development, but the obvious truth is that the "global" game industry still concentrates much of its money and prestige on North America / Western Europe / Japan. (China is a big market, but there is still no major prestigious international video game trade show held there yet.)

That's why community institutions like A MAZE are so vital. While A MAZE runs a flagship festival in Berlin, they also regularly host pop-up events outside of the typical video game industry hemispheres. In the past, they have run events in Croatia, Romania, Palestine, Russia, South Africa, Kosovo, Cuba, and Ukraine. For 2020, they are aiming to run an event in Nairobi. Do you think GDC gives a shit about Nairobi?

When GDC rolls around every year, so many people lament that there isn't an alternative event -- something to pull people and power away from GDC, away from the institutional inequality plaguing games -- well, today is your lucky day, maybe you'll get to do something about it. A MAZE is one of those alternatives that seeks to pull influence away from GDC -- to provide a noncommercial platform to support game developers and marginalized artists from around the world -- and it needs your help.

Back in September, the city of Berlin denied funding to A MAZE. While A MAZE still retains other public funding sources, this particular setback threatens a lot of their plans. They need to crowdfund the rest of the money to secure the future of the festival, and the future of an alternative away from the overwhelming commercial focus of GDC. This isn't to say that commercial games / AAA are necessarily bad, but it is clear that everyone else in games need their own support systems too. A healthy artform needs a healthy diverse ecosystem of many different motives and tendencies; a monoculture will doom us all.

So for 2020, A MAZE is running a Kickstarter. (Note: Kickstarter corporate is currently in the middle of an anti-union intimidation campaign. But so far, workers have not called for a boycott. As we continue to use KS, we should also use the opportunity to pressure their leadership to cease its anti-worker interference.)

If you have money to spare this year, please consider supporting A MAZE. If you don't have the money, OK, but at least consider writing about them or posting about what A MAZE means to you and others.

A MAZE... NOT DEAD.

Monday, September 23, 2019

The streaming life

This year I'm investing a lot more of my time and energy into streaming. For better or worse.

First, I'm continuing my Level With Me project, where I play through games and offer level design commentary by flying around, staring at walls, and nitpicking lighting. To ease myself in from my summer hiatus, I am playing something "easy" that I know pretty well -- I'm streaming fan-unfavorite Half-Life 2: Episode One, broadcasting every Wednesday 2-3pm EST at twitch.tv/radiatoryang.

Second, I'm leading a new streaming initiative at NYU Game Center: our new weekly streaming show Game Center Live premiered on September 19th! As an academic department studying game design, it feels foolish to ignore streaming as the dominant discourse in games culture, so that's why we're running this experiment as a weird cross between a high school yearbook class and college radio for the 21st century. We'll cover school announcements and showcase student work, but we'll also discuss the week's game industry news and host special guests. We plan to broadcast every Thursday 1-3pm EST at twitch.tv/nyugamecenter.

So although I'm blogging much less than before, you can still catch the same ol' Robert with the same great taste. I'll just be talking at you through a screen.

Monday, July 8, 2019

On climate crisis games, for Rock Paper Shotgun


As part of previously announced shifts for this blog, I'm going to start pitching my longer design articles to various outlets instead of posting it here.

The first of these articles is now up -- it's a piece about various climate crisis games and how they play with the idea of environmental apocalypse. I also define a rough taxonomy of different climate crisis game subgenres, like flood games, ice age survival sims, and world sims.

As we all grapple with the ramifications of climate change, it's important for us to imagine stories and worlds about it, because this is how we process life as a society. If you look back at art and media in the 60s and 70s, you'll see a lot of "space age" art and aesthetic, obsessed with rocket ships and moon colonies, essentially giving birth to alien invasion stories and space opera. I think we're in the first half of a similar "green age" wave of environmentalism across art and culture, and there's already a lot of emerging genres and traditions here.

You can read it all over on Rock Paper Shotgun. Thanks to Brendan Caldwell for thoughtful edits.

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Interview(s) with Mashable for Pride Month

Last month I ranted to Jess Joho (for Mashable) about sex games and the industry, and I also did a nice and awkward video interview (also for Mashable) filmed in the lovely Wonderville indie arcade bar in Brooklyn.

If you want to see me squirm, then maybe check out the video -- but whatever you do, definitely check out Wonderville if you're ever in New York City. It has one of those rare and coveted Killer Queen cabinets set to freeplay, it has an amazing Soviet flight sim cabinet where you destroy America (with real vector display), and it's also currently the home of the first queer community arcade cabinet The DreamboxXx for which I contributed my queer brawler defense game Dream Hard.

Happy pride, and have a good summer everyone!

Friday, June 28, 2019

State of the design blog

You may have noticed this blog has been a bit quiet lately. There's a few incidental immediate reasons for that: (a) it's summer so it's nice outside, (b) I'm doing a lot of holiday traveling, (c) my laptop recently broke and I have to coordinate loaner laptops and repairs, etc.

But those are just convenient reasons, instead of the more difficult reason that I'm reluctant to face:

I've decided I'm going to blog here less, and I'm not going to feel bad about it.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Radiator European Tour 2019 (London, Berlin, Milan) + Level With Me hiatus until April 17


In April, I'm going to cram ~6 different events into a whirlwind week of travel through London and Berlin. What's wrong with me? Why did I sign up for all this? There's only one way to find out how much of a wreck I'm going to be...

I'm planning on covering a wide variety of events, both free / non-free, and for gays / gamers / insiders / general public alike, so take your pick:

LONDON, UK
  • April 6: EGX Rezzed at Tobacco Docks, London
    I've heard nice things about Rezzed and I've always meant to go, so now is the time of reckoning. My talk "Designing For Sex Games" will be a short teen-friendly PG-13 introduction to sex and intimacy in game design, aimed at the general gaming public, at around 4:30pm on the last day of the festival.
  • April 7: Now Play This at Somerset House, London
    Now Play This is one of the jewels of the European game festival circuit, and I've always been meaning to go. I'll be presenting at their very very cleverly named mini-conference "A Series Of Interesting Decisions" on the design choices going into my next sex game Macho Cam.