Showing posts with label progress report. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress report. Show all posts

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Dreamhouse process diary and prototyping notes + a better retro 3D low precision vertex shader


In collaboration with local NYC-area arcade collective Death by Audio Arcade, me and several other gay / queer artists are making small games for an event at a Brooklyn queer arts space called Dreamhouse / (formerly known as The Spectrum). My contribution is shaping up to be a retro low polygon 3D brawler called "Dream Hard."

If you want to play it, you'll have to visit The Dreamhouse, which will house the only public display of the game in the world (for the time being), starting in late May 2018.

I don't have much time to work on this, so grounding the concept firmly within a clear retro arcade genre helps me work quickly with less realistic visuals and simplified character art, while also engaging deeply with the arcade tradition of game design. Specifically I'm riffing off one of my favorite genres, beat 'em up games like Die Hard Arcade, X-Men Arcade, Simpsons Arcade, or the iconic Street of Rage series, which all offer breezy brawling with strange setpieces and colorful sets.

Here's some prototype GIFs and notes from my development process...

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Road trip sketches; notes on extracting and visualizing Half-Life 2 levels in Maya


So I'm working on (another) article about level design in Half-Life 2. I chose the d2_coast03 map of the Highway 17 chapter, which is the first real "coastline" road trip section of the game, and is probably the most successful. Look at how big and open it is. Would you believe this is a map in a game celebrated as a meticulous roller-coaster? In my mind, it's contemporary with a lot of vehicle-based first-person open world game design trends that started around the same time in 2004, and they even pulled it off in an engine architecture that's still kinda based on Quake 1.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Eyes on the prize...


I've been working hard on my historical bathroom simulator The Tearoom, and I'm desperately trying to finish it within the next couple weeks. Basically, I've been doing lots of art passing and tuning. I've added the two last characters, for a total of 4 possible dude archetypes to encounter in the bathroom. I also have 2/8 possible dicks implemented, I still need to add 6 more, but at least I have the workflow and functionality figured out. In the meantime, please appreciate all the care and detail going into modeling the bathroom stalls -- and enjoy them in their clean pristine state, before I dirty them with layers of graffiti...

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Progress report: Moses


Now that summer vacation is here and I don't have to teach, I now have a lot more time to put into some projects. Here's one of the new ones I'm doing for the summer:

"Moses" (tentative title) is a collaboration between me and Eddie Cameron for the Power Broker game design challenge. It's kind of like 80 Days plus SimCity / Cities In Motion -- you are famous urban planner Robert Moses and you have to drive around New York City and visit various locations around the map, but to make commuting easier, you can also build public works projects like highways, bridges, public housing, a UN building or two, etc. which all interacts with the traffic simulation and public approval. Maybe there will be little narrative vignettes and conversations along the way too.

Eddie has been doing all the complicated math simulation stuff, while I've been writing a lot of the basic game code and UI. We're still basically in the early prototyping stages, trying to figure out a lot of the game as we go along. Here's some of our thinking...

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Report from the field: A MAZE 2016


I was told to look out for things that are stereotypically representative of Berlin -- a poster for a "party against racism", a nearby music venue called "Suicide", a group of children walking a large dog on a rope. Berlin seems a bit like the nostalgic ideal of San Francisco or New York City that 30-40-somethings routinely mourn to any nearby insolent millenials -- because Berlin is relatively cheap, young, and raw. It's basically the place for young creative people to be right now.

A MAZE 2016 began with festival director Thorsten Storno decrying the business-ification of indie games and dominance of commercial attitudes in festivals, and arguing for the necessity of non-commercial spaces in games. Then, literally, flamethrowers began shooting up pillars of fire behind him.


This is a very different tone from most US games festivals, which often try to accommodate monetization-types and commercial indies alongside non-commercial artists and students. There is no such pretense here. Here, there are no posh "meet with Sony" events, no chicken caesar wraps sponsored by Microsoft, not even any bored attendees clutching their Nintendo DS -- instead, that kind of stuff is at "Quo Vadis", a nearby industry-oriented conference that's named after the final dungeon in a Final Fantasy game.

So there's a funny "purity" to A MAZE. It knows what it wants to be, and it has the space and resources to actually be that thing. And apparently that thing is a bunch of artists and game makers huddled around a garbage can fire, clutching tepid 3 dollar beers as the distinct smell of ambient-disco-trance wafts through the air at 3 AM...


I think I kinda miss it already.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

New years resolution, 2016: some more gay sex, and "Maven"


... so, my 2016 New Years Resolution is to make a double-A 7/10 open world stealth game. It is tentatively called "Maven."

Part of my motivation involves wanting a break from my current cycle of sex games, part of it comes from wondering what if I made some gamer-pandering stuff for half of the year and then fiercely not-gamer stuff for the other half of the year and that's a funny contradiction... also, a bunch of stuff has suddenly aligned in my head to make this feasible.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Spring 2014 quarterly progress report

A progress report on "small" projects:

"Intimate, Infinite" is 80% done, and it's for the Series pageant at makega.me. It will be done soon. I've kinda surprised myself with how much I'm putting into it, so I think I'll sell it for pay-what-you-want.


"Vaquero" is about 50% done, and it's for the Space Cowboy Game Jam. It will probably be done soon.


"Peon" is about 50% done, and it'll be a larger project for most of June, alongside prepping Nostrum for exhibition at GaymerX2.