Last time I created a texture for the world. It was okay.
 |
The next step is to give this texture a bit more depth and to make it less rigid and mechanical. The first thing I want to do is make the grass edging a little more interesting. I’m going to be basing my efforts on this tutorial. (Halfway down the page.) It shows some grass hanging over onto some dirt. Two things I’m taking away from this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Hex Part 5 – Growing Grass”
Part 4 of my journey into the absurd.
Q: Hey Shamus, where the heck is Stolen Pixels?
A: I’ll let Hamlet answer this one for me:
HAMLET: I have of late,â€"but wherefore I know not,â€"lost all my mirth…
I really don’t know what my problem is lately, but I’m not able to write jokes. I’ve got several more weeks of Shamus Plays World of Warcraft written, so we’re good there. But I can’t do anything with my comic. I’m just not feeling it. So, we’re taking a break until I can recover my mirth.
No more jokes, this is really the start of our Mass Effect 2 series. New format, new editing tools, new video host. Same band of jerks. We’re easing into this slowly.
Since our video is no longer a half hour long, we’ve been able to increase the video quality. Previously we were stuck in 320p, but now the show is available in glorious 720p. Which is a lot more p.
Link (YouTube) |
The changes we’ve made were based on the feedback we got last week. In particular, the leading suggestions were:
Yeah, we’re doomed.
Here is another column that was spawned in the comments on this very site.
I predict 90% of the comments will be: “I can’t believe you left out X! They were an important company!”
If I wrote a 10,000 word essay on this, I would still get this response.
If I wrote a book on this, I would still get this response.
It was educational for myself as well. I wasn’t planning on including Activision in the list, but when I ran into their story I just had to put them in. It’s a great example of how anything can happen in business. A little upstart like Microsoft can paste a giant like IBM. AOL could buy out Time/Warner. AT&T could break up. You never know.
Kind of scary when you apply this thinking to something like Google.
I mentioned last week that I’d pitched the show to the Escapist. Alas, it didn’t work out. It’s cool. The only regret I have is that it delayed the start of our Mass Effect series. It was actually a very educational look into the workings of video on the web. I’m happy.
But during the application process I had to look at how the show is doing compared to my other work. In terms of time spent vs. people entertained, it’s not doing all that well. Introspective navel-gazing follows:
We’re talking about the show again and discussing our frustrations. Josh has his hands on Adobe Premiere, which is letting him do things he simply couldn’t dream of before. (Aside from not crashing every five minutes.)
It’s become clear that one of the problems with our show is the length. We aim for half-hour episodes, and often we run to 40 minutes. Escapist aside, video hosts simply do not like long shows. Many have explicit length limits. (Like YouTube, which recently raised their limit to 15 minutes.) Others have softer limits based on filesize, which allows us to do half hour shows at the expense of video quality. Viddler lets us do it, but every episode comes with reports from viewers who had the episode cut off for them. Also their encode system often chokes on our stuff, which ends up eating a lot of Josh’s time.
The length of the show has been a problem from the start. Our first episode had over 3,000 viewers, and the most common complaint was “Nice, but I don’t have time to watch this.” We have about half that many viewers now and nothing seems to be able to change that. Among all my projects this one has the shortest reach, despite the fact that it’s video with a steady update schedule and popular subject matter. It’s usually easier to get people to watch video than to read a 989 word blog post. This should be a slam-dunk, audience-wise, and yet I think I’d have to say our show has a “cult” following. Given the time and energy going into the show and the easy access we have to a large audience, this show is not doing as well as it should. I like it. You like it. But that’s as far as it goes. None of our shows have really gone viral or been spread around outside of this site. I’m worried that the show is riding the coattails of my other work here instead of standing out on its own.
This lack of growth is especially troublesome given how much talent we’ve got. Even my least popular video from Reset Button is more than ten times as popular as the average episode of Spoiler Warning. Josh, Mumbles, and Rutskarn are all writers in one way or another. We’ve got a good range of ages, diverse gaming backgrounds (aside from our lack of consoles) and four distinct voices. We don’t quite have a professional shine, but in terms of editing we’re light years ahead of most web shows, even ones with far larger audiences. On top of that, Rutskarn has his own audience apart from anything I do here, and he brings them to the table as well. I’m not expecting that we should be some viral sensation, but right now there are an awful lot of folks who have this show staring them in the face twice a week and have no desire to even look at it. And of those that do, few share it. No, I’m not asking people to start spamming the world with Spoiler Warning links. If we were reaching our potential, you’d be doing that already.
Which is a long way of saying that I know some people will rage at pretty much any change we make to the format, but I think we can do better than we’re doing now. It’s probably good that The Escapist rejected the show. If we altered the show after being accepted, then everyone would blame them for “ruining” the show and “forcing” these changes on us.
Nothing is final, but we’ve been kicking around a few ideas. I think chopping the show down to the standard web-length of five minutes would be disastrous. But fifteen minutes might work. If we did a fifteen minute show every day of the week, we’d actually deliver an extra fifteen minutes of content a week. This would get us through games more quickly and give us a better shot at doing a few of the more esoteric games we’ve talked about. More people might be willing to watch if they could do so at 15 minute intervals instead of 30. And the show might spread more easily if it was hosted on YouTube. And we’d be able to have the show available in HD. And I think everyone would prefer it if Rutskarn participated by singing opera-style through the entire show.
The shorter encode times would make it less daunting for Josh to make custom credits for each episode, which were a popular but time-consuming feature. (And as I just learned recently, getting people to watch to the very end is an important virtue for a video. Those jokes at the end of every Zero Punctuation? Yeah. I don’t think those are an accident.)
I don’t know why I talk so much about the show here. Actually, I do. I’m dissatisfied with the show, and that means there are problems. Like with my videogame reviews, I think it’s more interesting to talk about problems that need solutions than to discuss stuff that just works. I don’t agonize over my essays or weekly column, because (aside from occasional bouts of writer’s block) those things just work. If I felt like Spoiler Warning was running as it should, you’d see more episodes and less of this insufferable Cloud Strife styled self-doubt.
Anyway, the plan is to launch the show on Tuesday.
One of the things that ignited this project for me was when Jay Barnson linked to this mind-blowing series on pixel art creation*. I read through it, then through the rest of the site. I dabbled a bit in this sort of thing years ago, but never really produced anything I’d show to other people. These tutorials gave me the itch to try again, and this project seems like a good place to scratch that itch.
* Well, it blew my mind. Your own brains and the blowing thereof is your problem.
In general, the goal is to make a 3d landscape that uses that old-school style. This doesn’t mean I’m actually going for retro technology. I plan to use high resolution, high-polygon, fancy blending tricks, and whatever else I have at my disposal. I’m thinking I want to create a contrast between the 8-bit feel of the world and the modern-ish interface. For example, the landscape will be pixelated and blocky, while the hex outlines will be crisp and blend with the pixels underneath. I don’t actually know how well it will work, but it’s an idea I want to try.
Here is where we left off last week:
 |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Hex Part 4 – 8 Bits is Enough”
Part three of this series is up at the Escapist. No, I don’t know how long the series will run. Yes, it will cover the shift to Cataclysm. No, I’m not running to the end-game. No, I’m not planning on multi-player content – this stuff is hard enough to put together as it is. Yes, I’m aware that your favorite race / class is so much more interesting than the one I’m writing about – I avoided that one because I thought you wanted to write about it?
I’m really flattered by how many people are comparing this series to Terry Pratchett’s work. In truth, I’ve never read his stuff, although I’m aware of it. (My wife is a fan.) If I had to cite an influence, I suppose I’d have to go with Douglas Adams. Particularly his earlier, more playful work. The first two Hitchhiker‘s books were zany, hectic, silly, and clever. After that his books became darker, stranger, and more philosophical. The Dirk Gently books were even more so, to the point where it was hard for me to enjoy them at first. I’d gone in expecting Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and got something quite different. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the books outside of my expectations.
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
T w e n t y S i d e d
