My latest column looks at difficulty in games by examining the various and wildly divergent entries in the Prince of Persia series.
Also: This weekend is Desert Bus for Hope. Never heard of it? I forgive you. Just read the FAQ.
I’ll be appearing (call in) on the show on Sunday at 4pm EST. We’ll do some sort of interview-type thing. I will try very hard not to ask any members of the LRR cast to marry me, but all bets are off if Paul answers the phone. Just warning you.
I’ve been corresponding with Michael Goodfellow, a fellow coder who had recently begun a blog detailing a game he’s working on. If you enjoy the coding write-ups that I do around here then do make sure to give this a look. He’s actually working on an MMO. A few people have nudged me to talk about the technology behind Minecraft, but his post explains the core concepts. Pay special attention to the stuff on Octrees. An Octree is just a three-dimensional version of a quadtree, which I wrote about way back in February 2006. (Hey! This site turned 5 years old back in September and I didn’t notice!)
I’m a big fan of “coding in public” like this. When you’re working on a solo project you might have to plow months into your work before you even have something playable enough to show off, and those months of working in the dark can be disheartening. I’ve found writing about my work also helps to to organize it in my mind. And it makes for an entertaining read for everyone else.
Do check out Let’s Code and let him know what you think.
Link (YouTube) |
The re-launch of the show went well. The changes seem to have paid off. We didn’t explode into a viral sensation of instant fame and stardom, but we did see a nice increase in viewership and nobody issued us a cease and desist over Rutskarn’s singing. I don’t know what success feels like, but I’ll bet it’s probably a lot like this.
Last time I created a texture for the world. It was okay.
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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.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
T w e n t y S i d e d
