I don't know of many mods with their own Christmas-themed fan art...

... but MINERVA's one of them.


OPEN Fire by ~swirekster on deviantART

Much like Santa, Foster's loyal acolytes await his eventual return, let his name be praised!

Pity the First Horseman

http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Design

"Competition is the basis for most of humanity's progress and evolution."

Unfortunately, the documentation's rife with errors: "Engagement Curve" should be re-labeled as "How to Interfere With The Player's Daily Life and Make Them Worry About Monetizing Their Friends Frequently Enough to Collect Enough Virtual Points to Buy a Re-Colored 128x128 PNG of a Kitten."

Or maybe it's one of traditional gaming's double agents operating in the field, deliberately planting false information like this gem -- "Playtesting in traditional gaming happens very early in the design process" (Wrong. Playtesting in a digital context happens at an intermediate stage, when you finally have a working prototype to actually playtest).

... Okay, I have a penchant for exaggeration when clearly just one foolish individual wrote all this, and most of it is "blah blah blah" but some of it is downright absurd. We're probably falling into that "first we'll make fun of them, then we'll fight them, then they'll win" trap, but hey, we might as well enjoy ourselves before we're competing for NikePoints(TM) by kicking each other in the groin repeatedly.

(hat tip to Andrew Weldon's Facebook profile.)

Resources for Source Modders (Update #4)

(This is an ongoing post that'll get updated periodically with links to tools, texture packs, prop model packs, etc. for Source modders, along with a few remarks on what they're useful for.)
(UPDATE #4, 4 January 2011 -- added Twister and FontForge, check the "Special Teams" section... and a note about using D3 / Q4 textures)

Levels to Look Out For (January, 2011)

These are WIP levels / env art that I liked, and most of them are hopefully close to release / are released. I command you to like them as well.

 > l4d_yama by Mark "the0rthopaedicsurgeon" Edwards
Four years in the making (?) and probably the most ambitious custom L4D campaign being made, surpassing even the impressive I Hate Mountains custom campaign. Whereas "I Hate..." was the work of three very handsome Europeans, l4d_yama is just a one-man effort, which is perhaps even more impressive. I've personally learned two important tricks from watching this map get made: (1) vignette the corners of a texture and add a subtle gradient to make it seem like one of those lightbox signs, as seen in the electric city section of this level, (2) use Propper once you've finalized level geometry to optimize everything, as Edwards did with all those signs in the alleys.

> "Tron Scene" by Joshua "Vassago" Stubbles
I featured the concept art last time, but here's the final product. I chose the wireframe screenshot because I liked the way he did the giant blue laser writer tower things. Specifically, the furthest one in the back is actually a sprite imposter. Final Fantasy XIII did this a lot too, the ol' "real 3D tree close to you but fake 2D sprite away from you" trick -- and here I didn't even suspect it. Also pay attention to his gorgeous use of matte painting in the background... Mobile devices these days, e.g. iPads, seem to have a lot of texture memory but not as much polygon pushing power. Expect more matte painters to find work in mobile games and a shift towards higher production photorealism. (If / when Square Enix does a Final Fantasy game for iPad, it's going to make Infinity Blade look like scribbles.)

I wrote a crap hypertext adventure.

The Circular Ruins.

Not bad for 2 hours -- learning the tool (Twine) and writing whatever popped into my head. Originally the idea would be that making him talk about traumatic stuff would make him depressed and result in a sadder ending, but I couldn't figure out a framework / the code to do it, so the whole thing's fairly generic as far as interactivity.

But anyway, I heartily recommend that everyone try writing one with Twine. It's fun. Give yourself a time limit too.

You should also see what Increpare made for New Years -- another awesome puzzle game in his series of awesome puzzle games, Octat. (And Notch was working on some other game about finding metal pants in forests?...)

Dark Past (part 1): On the immersive sim, mechanics, and mod communities.

Thief has always been a hardcore FPS series: uncompromising, often difficult, with large sprawling levels that you inevitably get lost in -- all designed to maximize emergence and spit on the linear scripting of the modern arcade FPS today.

Games of this breed (System Shock, Deus Ex, BioShock, Arx Fatalis), dubbed the "immersive sim," are supposedly dead, they say. They're probably right. In fact, almost every person interviewed in RPS' amazing "Dark Futures" series makes a gesture towards accessibility and user-centered design. The guy I quote extensively, Randy Smith, is tired of the hardcore 3D game market in general. The future of games is mobile and usable -- prophecy never lies.

But!... Eidos is now working on sequels to the two pillars of the immersive sim, Deus Ex 3 and Thief 4. Consider how much BioShock had to drop in order to be successful: they stripped away basically any system or mechanic that didn't relate directly to shooting someone in the face. Is it worth that price, to preserve this bloodline of game design?

That's why I enjoy the team at The Dark Mod. Currently there's a discussion in the forums about keys attached to NPC's belts, how they're too dark and no one can see them. Yet the brighter and more sensible "after" fix is not being merged into the main build! For some crazy reason, they're not standardizing key brightness -- "some players like it that way."

Well then, I'd say that this supposed "silent majority" can download an optional "key darkener" file, but that's not what the team does. Nope! At the Dark Mod, legacy behavior trumps all.  

I love it. It's such poor design, practically intended to alienate as many new players as possible. It's uncompromising... No, seriously, this is a really awful approach to design. ("This is a problem for many players? But I, personally, like it this way! Oh well, too bad for the players. They can download this tweak and edit all these files to get what they want.")

... In this sense, it's artistic in how stubborn it is. Maybe even poetic. It's the idea that a player should conform to a system rather than the other way around.

Recommended: Dark Mod v. 1.03

I realize this blog is quickly becoming a "Dark Mod" blog with the recent glut (or tangible lack?) of posts lately, but that's because (a) I'm playing a bunch of Dark Mod levels, (b) I'm actually getting a decent amount of design done.

The real game-changing feature in the freshly released 1.03 is the in-game mission downloader; now you can command the game to automagically download and setup levels from the mission select screen, and it works amazingly well. With a few clicks, you've got hours of Thief-y goodness, ready to deploy. (Next step: a rating system so I can make sense of which missions to play?)

If you like Thief games / the Thieves' Guild quest line in Oblivion, you gotta play the Dark Mod. Thief 4 is still years away, Thief 3 is unwieldy and aging, and Thief 2 requires an hour to get working / the leaked code is still incomplete and will require months or years of fiddling.

It's only getting better and better. (It plays nice with the Steam version of Doom 3 too.)

Though, if you want a list of complaints...

Mother Robot

One of these days I'm going to get-in on Ludum Dare / KOTM / all these "make a crappy game and make it quickly" competitions. In the meantime? I'm going to learn from the masters who make fantastic (and complete and polished) games in, like, 48 hours? Geez.

Go play Increpare's Mother Robot right now.