Byzantine Perspective: on IF, adapting it to the FPS

Text is special. It can do things that voice acting can't; it can do things visuals can't. (How? Well, Kenneth Young explains this really well in a post about dialogue in Dragon Age)

I recently played an piece of interactive fiction that can't possibly be made outside of IF -- "Byzantine Perspective." It has a single really great puzzle in it, which it won an XYZZY award for.

The premise -- you're a burglar trying to steal a valuable chalice in a museum. You begin in the vault room and type "take chalice" -- and your hand passes through it. Something's not quite right.

(SPOILER ALERT! Make sure you've either played it or don't intend to play it before continuing...)

Liner Notes: Handle With Care... and borscht

SPOILER ALERT: "Liner Notes" discuss levels in Radiator. You should play Radiator first -- or if you don't care, read on.

I took a creative writing course while working on Handle With Care. Stealing a page from Marc Laidlaw, I wrote a short story to help me decide on a tone for the mod, a story I completely forgot until I was cleaning out my room just now.

As an exercise, I think it helped me immensely -- as a story, I don't think it holds up very well because Dylan's arc / reasons at the end never really come out and the parenthetical monologue thing is a bit gimmicky. However, I still like the ending quite a bit.

Anyway, I just thought some people might be interested in seeing how the story began and how it changed into its current playable form (which I'll detail more in a later post.)

Enjoy, or perhaps subject yourself to unimaginable pain:

"Oh Those Polish and Their Borscht"
by Robert Yang

What kind of a name is Roubicek anyway? (Polish?) I think it’s Polish, I tell him.

“Mmhm,” Dylan murmurs, burying his face in what must surely be a riveting article in that five month old issue of Men’s Health. (Quick six-pack abs! Seduce any woman any time!)

I bet she eats borscht, I say to the topless smiling guy with great abs on the wrinkled magazine cover. My Polish friend Allysia likes that stuff, but isn’t it just a shitload of cabbage?

“Mmhm,” topless inanimate smiling guy murmurs.

Then that lady with the six coats of eye-shadow says Doctor Roubicek will see us now so if we would please just head on in that’d be great thank you. Me and Dylan get up and walk over. I give his ass an affectionate pat but end up hurting my hand, slapping the car keys in his pocket.

“Stop it,” he whispers at me, “Just take this seriously for once.”

I'm a big fat hypocritical liar.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-05/17/hacked-off-how-pc-game-modders-are-evolving

A little fluffy, talks about two issues (the "art mod" and the mod's relation to the game industry) that should be their own separate articles, developed more -- and I thought he was going to interview other modders instead of turning it into a piece on Desura / mod distribution (which seems to be something else entirely in my mind)

But still, a good piece on connecting today's mods to an inexplicable industry shift away from mods and he's a great guy and YAY press coverage for mods.

T-Junctions are the enemy.

I'm nearly done with main level construction and I'm freaking out -- I don't want to hit any BSP memory limits. This is the first time I've had to deal with BSP limits when working with Half-Life 2, and it's a testament to how big and bloated "Much Madness" has become. In terms of level construction complexity, this is nearing Adam Foster-like levels of what the engine can handle.

... and now I've hit a memory limit already and it's destroying me.

At this stage in development, there are three memory limits I'm worried about:

Outdoor Game Design: Foundations

(This is part of a series about the "outdoor game design" course I taught at UC Berkeley. It has notes, lesson plans, and ready-to-use rulesets for games.)

The first semester I taught this course, I planned everything down to the minute detail. I pre-wrote my lectures and my "spontaneous" jokes, allotted a few minutes to each concept for that day, conceptualized learning goals... And then realized that it didn't fit the spirit of the class.

In later semesters, I'd have a rough week-by-week schedule, but that's it. I'd improvise the lesson plan when I got to class and saw what the energy was like. (Also, being in the Bay Area, it'd rain a lot.)

So, some general statements / philosophies that form the foundation of this course:

So... I'm Probably Not Going to Make My April Deadline for 1-3

... Valve recently updated the Hammer level editor and now it's bugging out on me (as well as many others, if the Steam forums are any indication). My internal deadline was to have a release candidate in testing by this weekend, and that seemed doable -- well, until now.

I'm not blaming Valve.

Okay, I am. It's convenient. I'm a dick.

Anyway, see you in May!

So I'm Going to Parsons for a Masters in Video Games

Have you ever heard of Parsons?

The few of you that have -- you probably know Parsons only as the setting for Project Runway. You probably think of Tim Gunn scampering down a hallway. You might be correct for thinking that.

Well, I'm not going there to study fashion. I'm going there to study "design and technology" in a 2 year masters program, partly because the job market for the game industry seems so bad right now, but also partly because... let me explain:

I Should Really Start Using Visgroups

... because this grid view is simply unusable.

I'm glad I don't have to share VMFs with anyone.