Postcards from: "Discipline and Punish"

Here are some work in progress images / footage for "Discipline and Punish", a BDSM spanking game using the Leap Motion. It'll also go into questions of consent, and it'll be mildly educational for those who know nothing about BDSM culture. Character model by Kris Hammes, character shader by James O'Hare.

Much Madness is Divinest Sense.

A couple things got me thinking:

• Source SDK Base 2013 does not require any purchases whatsoever, and is freely available to all Steam users.
• DOTA2 is using Source Engine 2, or at least some substantial derivative of it.

To me, that means Source 1 is definitely nearing the end of its life, and Source 2013 will stand as (perhaps) the last definitive engine fork for Source 1. There's a good chance I won't have to fix up my release ever again because of Valve updating Episode Two and breaking all mod compatiblity: furthermore, anyone will be able to download Source 2013 and play my mod.

Preliminary tests look promising: both chapters of Radiator 1 worked in Source 2013 with just a little massaging. So, contrary to all expectations (I'm as surprised as anyone), I'm dusting off the rest of Radiator 1 and the whole thing might actually get completed now, several years later. I'm cutting a lot of the stuff I planned before (mostly boring puzzle gameplay stuff that I was trying to hack-together using map scripting) and the end is already in sight, it's just going to be a lot of narrative scripting and re-learning the rhythms of working in Hammer.

... And hopefully this'll be the last time I have to edit and update this thing.

(Oh, and I've also updated my portfolio with all the latest trends. HTML5! Bootstrap-whatever! Responsive-whatsits!)

This is what I'm working on, March 2014

What are you working on? This is what I'm working on:

"Get Better Soon" is a VR-powered gay clubbing simulator haiku. Imagine a universe where EA invests heavily in sexualizing men using the latest in DirectX technologies... throbbing, pounding, pulsing bodies -- a perpetual shower. Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die. A commission for Different Games, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Charity" is a procedurally-aided Thief-like set in Ciudad, a vast 13th century Moorish boomtown slowly sinking into the ground. You're a "placer", a freelance thug, an alchemist -- you beat people up and turn blood into money. Will you side with the environmentalist royals, the all-consuming corporation, or the industrial workers of the world? Underground we fought the earth together. Inspired heavily by the high-profile failure of Thief 4.

"Nostrum" is a VR-ish roguelikelikelike life simulator about just war theory. You're a freelance pilot based in the Mediterranean Sea circa 1936... well, you would be, if the Fascists would just quit killing your business with all these silly airspace regulations. Over several years you will befriend several islands' worth of alligators, corgis, giraffes, zebras, and more -- and then watch their homes burn. It's Animal Crossing meets Animal Farm, and you're just the small business owner caught in the middle? The first video game ever made about World War II.

"Radiator" is... I don't even know anymore.

Further notes on developing games for virtual reality.

I'm pretty sure no one remembers that I promised to release Radiator: Polaris at the end of August 2013 (shhh), but here's what happened -- I was asked to join the Oculus VR Jam, so instead I've spent the last 3 weeks working mainly on Nostrum, a Porco Rosso inspired arcade flight sim / narrative-y roguelike. I think I'm going to work on it for another week or so before going back to Polaris.

A lot of my interest stems from VR requiring developers to re-consider a lot of basic ways of doing things in video games.

Radiator 1-2 Handle with Care, Sourcemod gameinfo.txt fix for Steampipe VPK file format shift

In the last few weeks, Valve has dropped the GCF file format. A "GCF" was like a ZIP file containing thousands of game files. They were usually quite large (several GB was common) and so they were prone to file fragmentation, which balloons loading times as games need to load more files and assets. With Left 4 Dead, Valve started shifting their filesystem infrastructure to a "VPK" format -- instead of being stuffed into one or two colossal files, game assets are distributed among many more smaller .VPK files, improving loading times. Valve has now converted all their older games to use the new VPK file format too.

It's great, but it has also broken most Source mods made before 2013. Fortunately, the fix is pretty trivial: it involves editing the "gameinfo.txt" to mount the file assets in a different way / order than before.

If you want to play Radiator (or any single player mod based on Episode Two), just follow these instructions:

I made a video game trailer

I've had this song sitting in a folder (called "trailer music") for about 3 years.

"Handle with Care" at Queer Arcade, July 27-28 in Toronto

The original Half-Life 2 mod version of Handle with Care will be on-display, alongside much better games with queer themes, at the "Queer Arcade" in Toronto near the end of July. They have a solid-looking lineup, including quite a few creators and designers I've never heard of before, so it should be a pretty cool show. Wish I had time to make it out to Toronto, but maybe some day..

Full blurb is below:

Team Vector X VideoFag: Queer Arcade.
July 27-28 @ VideoFag
187 Augusta Avenue, Toronto, Canada
12pm-10pm both days.

Queer Arcade is a curatorial collaboration between game art curatorial collective Team Vector and the Toronto exhibition space VideoFag, which addresses the theme of queerness in video games.

#screenshotsaturday: May 2013

Notes on first person virtual reality / implementation in Unity.

I've been implementing the Oculus Rift VR goggles into my first person projects, and the process has been... interesting.

Valve's excellent introduction to working with virtual reality (per their experiences in porting Team Fortress 2) is the definitive primer to working with VR in a first person context, and more or less the state of the art. However, it also ends with a powerful notion: we're only just beginning with VR, and it's going to take time before we know what we're doing. Here's a very brief summary of general design guidelines, as defined by Valve:

Level With Me, a Portal 2 mod

STARING EYES! It's unofficially Radiator vol. 3, and the only mod I'll have put out in the last two years. Watch this space as release is pretty imminent, and thanks for reading. We'll see if people hate it or love it.

EDIT: It's out now. Try it out. A typical run-through for me is about 30 minutes long, so that means it'll take the average Portal 2 player about 1-2 hours. If you get stuck on the first chapter, then just skip to the second, it's really not a big deal.

Critical Information at SVA, 3 December 2011

Next Saturday, I'll be talking about Radiator 1-2 ("Handle with Care") at an art criticism conference called "Critical Information" hosted by School of Visual Arts in New York City. If you happen to be awake and in Manhattan that Saturday morning, around 10 AM, stop by and drink some complimentary coffee; it's free and open to the public.

You might just end up feeling terribly bored because I'm going to have to explain a lot of game studies concepts / theory that you'd already be literate in -- it's a digital, but non-gamer audience there -- but it should make for an exciting live demo (?!) nonetheless.

Though honestly, I'm a little nervous, as Radiator has always been more of a "gamer's art game" than something anyone off the street can just pick up and comprehend. (Even worse, only gamers understand what a "gamer's art game" might entail.)

I've killed my darling.

It's taken me two years to accept it -- that I'd have to kill my darling.

My darling was a 3000 brush submarine with a non-linear, multi-floor layout and a dynamic life support system, done in a non-photorealistic art style. I kept thinking Design could save it and so I plugged away for months on a bloated concept. Always just one better tutorial, one better puzzle, one better detail prop away from being good. Add more scripting! More complexity, more depth! Always more... Then one month became two and two became twenty-four.

The level was so difficult I couldn't complete it without resorting to cheats -- and I designed the damn thing. So I started stripping things away, digging through the debris and the cancer to rescue the concept. Delete mechanics, close-off rooms, simplify. Get to the bottom in time, quickly.

But it was already dead.

 I've never thrown away so much work before. I'm sure it'd feel even worse to work in an industry that regularly de-funds entire studios and projects, or to spend a decade of your life on a space probe that plows straight into the Martian surface from a minor conversion error.

Still, this is the first time (in a long while) that I've made some real progress. This is what Radiator 1-3 looks like right now:

I hope it's better for it.

And to my darling: I'm sorry. I'm so so sorry.

Preview "Flatlander Woman" at "Illuminating Noir," April 1-8, 2011 @ Parsons

If you find yourself around the Union Square area in New York City in the beginning of April, head over to the main Parsons design building (2 West 13th Street) and check out the noir-themed film / art festival here; in the main lobby, you can play a preview version of "Radiator 2-1: Flatlander Woman." (I mean, you shouldn't go out of your way or anything, but if you're in the area then go for it. You get to shoot a whole lot of virtual people.)



(Unfortunately it'll be running on a computer with an Intel GMA 4500, so I think I'm going to have to disable a lot of effects... Hmm.)

(And dude, they're screening Blood Simple and have booked Frances McDormand. Whoa.)

Nothing to Report

Agenda for 12/19 - 1/22:

• Finish Radiator 1-3, get it out the door. I haven't looked at it for months because of schoolwork, but in the past few months I've learned how to cut corners to finish stuff, so hopefully I'm better prepared to work on it.
• Block out my Dark Mod map, "High Society." The mod's included assets bother me a lot; no consistent texel scale, inconsistent art direction (some textures look straight out of Photoshop with generic bevel and emboss filters) and the Doom 3 engine is really weird in general.
  
  Like, look at my WIP screenshot below -- the skybox should be LIGHTER than the level geometry. That's what looks right in real-life. I think it's minor art direction stuff like that which is preventing the mod from getting more popular... well, that and the fact that no one has a copy of Doom 3 laying around. (I'm pretty sure they're banking on idTech4 going open source in a few years.)

IGF 2011

Stay tuned.

(Radiator 1-3 is NOT canceled... right now it's just huge, complicated and unwieldy. Game dev is never smooth, folks; it's rough, like your lover's stubble.)

MUSIC: The Bird and the Bee - Psycho Killer (only exists as an okay-ish quality YouTube video, no studio recording exists)

FYI.

... as part of a school project, I must finish Radiator 2-1 before finishing Radiator 1-3. I'm sorry. As penance, even though I don't owe anyone anything, I'll once again violate my anti-media release policy and inflict further damage on what little integrity I still have.

Apparently HL2 Mods About Gay Divorce are "Hot Shit"

http://www.news.sjsu.edu/22440/learn-to-play-art-exhibit-brings-video-games-as-art-to-cupertino

Marek Kapolka, president of San Jose State’s game development club and a senior sculpture and experimental media major, helped set up the exhibit and comb through the submissions the exhibit received.

One game that stuck out to him was “Radiator 1-2, Handle with Care,” by Robert Yang, because of the game’s use of gameplay mechanics to communicate it’s meaning.

Kapolka said he thinks the game is “hot shit.”

Thanks for the shout out, Marek. You're simply adorable.

5 in 5: "Dalloway Floorplan" (digital)

"5 projects in 5 days" is part of my coursework at Parsons. The complete rules are here, but my own additional design constraints are (a) gotta be a game, (b) gotta be made in less than 3 hours.

The next volume of Radiator ("Next? You haven't even finished the first!") will be an experiment of sorts in production: I'm going to use essentially the same level for all three episodes. This is great in that I only have to design and build and detail a single map!... And this sucks because I have to account for 3 different kinds of gameplay in the same space -- a heist, a mass murder, and a party. (If you want to spoil the gist of these ideas for yourself, see: heist, mass murder and party.)

Handle with Care: the novelization

So here's what happened: First I wrote a short story. Then I turned it into an HL2 mod.

And now a kind fellow has written a short story based on my mod. (Read his other posts too; because us unread, low-traffic blogs have to stick together!)

The next step? Naturally, a mod based on a short story of a mod based on a short story.

Inception

1) Fantastic movie.

2) I'm scared because it's going to dominate popular discourse on "levels" as psychological architecture. Before, it was an idea relatively unique to video games -- specifically, the awesomeness that was Psychonauts, complete with subconscious censors that try to kick you out, etc. -- but now? Psychonauts will be ripping off Inception. Radiator will be ripping off Inception. We are all now in its shadow.

And that scares me because, quite frankly, I don't think I can craft an experience as satisfying as that film.

Hell, now I feel like I'm ripping off Inception. I wonder why. Did it plant something in my brain?...