Showing posts with label zobeide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zobeide. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

"Zobeide" at Playing The Game, 27-28 October in Milan


I'm fixing up Zobeide / adding a few features for yet another Lunarcade event, this time at "Playing The Game" in Milan from 27-28 October at Spazio O' Artoteca. If you're around, then you should attend, if for no other reason than to play XRA's mesmerizing "Memory of a Broken Dimension."

Machine translated website copy (from Italian to English) is after the jump:

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Zobeide at Lunarcade Sydney, August 3-9

Zobeide will have its public debut in Lunarcade at Serial Space, running from August 3rd - 9th. The Facebook thing is here if you're into that. Here's the scoop:
Exploration is a universal subtext in games. The ‘fog of war’ and line of sight are emblematic tropes of exploration as well as a persistent motif of video games – almost every game involves the implicit mapping of uncharted virtual or representational territory. However, interpreting exploration has a second approach: we can explore uncharted, artificial territory within a game as well as explore the meaning of a work as situated within the real world – we can explore the video game itself as an artifact for the communication of meaning.

Bientôt l’été – Tale of Tales
Dear Esther – Dan Pinchbeck
J.S. Joust – Die Gute Fabrik
Lifeless Planet – Stage 2 Studios
Memory of a Broken Dimension – XRA
Thirty Flights of Loving – Brendon Chung
TRIP – Axel Shokk
Zobeide – Robert Yang

Opening: August 3rd, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition Hours: August 4th & 5th, 12 – 6 pm, August 6th-9th, 12 – 8 pm
J.S. Joust events – daily at 7 PM
I'm also really honored to be mentioned in the same breath as some of these fantastic games and designers! Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the opening -- I'll likely be locked inside my Brooklyn apartment, frantically putting together my GDC Europe talk together at the last minute -- but have a blast and enjoy some JS Joust, Australians!

Also: Thirty Flights of Loving is one of the most important games made in the last decade, so make sure you play it at some point.

Also: LONG LIVE NARRATIVE, DEATH TO "MECHANICS" AND "GAMEPLAY"! BURN IT ALL!

Friday, July 20, 2012

Return to Zobeide.


To tell the truth, I had kind of forgotten about Zobeide. My Twine / Unity interface experiment, instead of being my own version of Unmanned's interface, was strange and broken. People kept forgetting the text was there. But after conferring with some interactive fiction people at No Show -- where one had an interpretation of the game that made it sound much more fascinating than it really was -- I think I know what to do with this.



Expect another announcement in a few days (or weeks?)...

Friday, March 2, 2012

Stuff I'm Working On, GDC 2012 Edition


Souvenir is a group MFA thesis project at Parsons about exploring your memories and holding onto the ones that mattered most. You start disoriented and overwhelmed, figuring out how to walk on walls and ceilings, but eventually you get the hang of it and start sorting stuff out. We started with Portal as our template, but eventually we came to dislike how everything felt so designed -- go here, go there, find the next step someone intended for you to find... For a more "organic" feel we started building areas around ideas instead: nature, school, and religion.

Zobeide, meanwhile, is a collaboration with sound designers Robin Arnott and Eduardo Ortiz. It's my super secret Proteus-killer. (... Well, not really.) In it, you build cities on top of other players' cities, chase naked women through moonlit alleys, and listen to the music that results. It is also an experiment with combining first person interfaces with hypertext, as a literary ode to Borges' Calvino's "Invisible Cities."

CondomCorps XL did pretty well at Jaime Woo's queer games show in Toronto. Apparently it's going to be on a Canadian TV news program too, or something? I'm going to do some more interface tweaks, add a silly campaign mode / narrative, and then call it done. I'm aiming to mirror the final feature scope of "Fear is Vigilance"... well, maybe half of that.

Radiator 1-3 might get dusted off. When I talked about it a few months ago at SVA, it reminded me how much I liked working on it sometimes. Maybe the San Francisco air will do me some good.

If you want to see any of these at GDC (or at the associated parties) come say hey at me, especially if you're a big important games person. Also, if you'd like to give me a job when I graduate, that'd be nice! My portfolio is here.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Tales from Zobeide

The biggest bottleneck for city generation right now is time; it takes 80 seconds for 2800 buildings. I guess I can just delay the player and make them watch a lot of loading screens? I'm also hoping a "complete" city will have at least 4000, which will probably be about 1.5 million polys -- but they're among the cheapest type of polygon to render, so it'll hopefully be okay. Draw calls seem under control too; I'm merging entire city blocks as combined meshes. (And I'm testing on an integrated card, so it should be fine.)

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Postcard from Zobeide

Zobeide is going to be a hypertext FPS about the danger of desire. I have a decent interface with Twine working, but the seamless level-sharing has been kind of a technical roadblock, with the Playtomic API randomly deciding to fail sometimes. Now I'm thinking I need to have a generic backup city to load in case it can't reach the servers. Next, I need to model some more buildings and think a bit more about the interaction / aesthetic.