Heads up: In the final segment of the show we spoil the end of Prey 2017. Also: Next week I plan to have SoldierHawk on the show again. If you have any questions for her, the email is in the header image.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #218: British Panel Shows, Prey Ending”
This game is a technological miracle. It’s a miracle not just for what it can do, but also for the fact that the team was able to build it at all.
I don’t think any franchise has ever gone through a more drastic change in such a short timeAt least, not a POSITIVE change.. In 1999 Grand Theft Auto 2 was a technological throwback, a stale mid-90s game with dated visuals and clunky gameplay. And then just two years later we get GTA III, a cutting-edge game with motion-capped cutscenes, solid voice acting, an immense 3D world with a stunning draw distance, tons of content, rock-solid car physics, a huge soundtrack of fictional radio channels, hours of cutscenes, varied gameplay, a working day/night cycle, serviceable shooting mechanics, and all the impressive pedestrian, law enforcement, and traffic simulation the previous games were known for, only now operating in a 3D space.
Even more amazing than the monumental leap in technology and production values is the fact that the developers absolutely nailed it.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Grand Theft Auto III”
Over a year ago, my game was approved for Steam Greenlight. At the time I said:
The good news is that Pseudoku has been approved on Steam Greenlight. I could technically begin selling the game right now. (Well, after filling out a bunch of paperwork, but you know what I mean.)
When I mentioned a “bunch of paperwork”, I had no idea what I was in for. I’ve spent the last nine months or so trying to clear that hurdle. The loop went something like this:
Most of the blame probably belongs to the state I live in, which is still stuck in the mid-20th century when it comes to starting a business. Their website is perpetually broken, so you have to correspond with them via the postal service. All of their forms are designed with the assumption that if I’m a small business then I’m going to be operating a commercial storefront and selling doughnuts to people on Main Street or whatever. There’s literally no way to correctly fill out these forms because I’m running a business out of my house but selling goods globally, and the system can’t comprehend that kind of micro-global setup. Add in some confusing forms, obtuse error messages from Steam, a couple of bank errors, some confusing legalese, and a couple of mistakes on my part, and it took us nine months to accomplish what a lot of developers accomplish in a weekend.
It’s been ages since I looked at the Pseudoku codebase and I can’t even remember where the project left off. A friend of mine converted the rendering backend from OpenGL to Direct X, which will hopefully solve the strange problems I was having. I’ll probably do a public test soon and see what needs to be done.
Of course, if I ever do another game like this I’ll just use Unity. Now that I’ve crawled up the worst part of the Unity learning curve, getting stuff done is pretty straightforward.
I hope to have SoldierHawk on Real Soon Now. Send in any questions you have for her / us. The email address is in the header image.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #217: July 4th, Google Drive, Raytracing”
I really did intend for this to be a more positive stream. I deliberately aimed for doing a quest I liked, but then some open-world busywork got in the way and I spent most of the two hours just picking at things.
Link (YouTube) |
Mass Effect Andromeda is a hot mess of a game, even after all the post-release patches. But underneath the technological jank and cringy dialog are some really good ideas. I’ll be doing a full retrospective on this series at some point in the future, but for now if you want to talk Andromeda with me the best thing to do is just stop by and say “Hi!” in the chat during a stream. I plan to do another stream this coming Wednesday. I’ll have more details later in the week.
GTA might be one of the most successful, big-budget, high-tech franchises in history, but it actually began as a rather sad, cheap, and not-yet-impressive top-down 2D game.
While the screenshots might make you think the game was perhaps isometricIsometric means you’re looking down from above, but the angle is skewed so you can see the sides of things. like Diablo (one of its contemporaries) or even orthogonalLooking directly down an axis with no perspective. like Hotline Miami, the game is actually “3D” in the sense that the buildings are made of polygons and you get some parallax between the stuff on the rooftops and the more distant action on the ground. It does a good job of giving a sense of scale and speed, but it does so at the expense of visibility. You’ll often end up unable to see what you’re doing because a walkway, bridge, or rooftop ends up between your character and the camera.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Grand Theft Original”
It’s a bit of an abridged entry today due to the holiday, but I thought I’d button up some of my thoughts on the first part of the game.
After finally gathering up various macguffins (the phylactery, the incantation to activate it, and a weird baby thing called Uma), Geralt and company are ready to polish off the first half of the game. If you haven’t played The Witcher 3, or even if you have, the parenthetical in the previous sentence might be a bit confusing. It’s still confusing to me, and I’ve played through the game several times.
Basically, we’ve been on Ciri’s trail this whole time, following rumors, gathering clues, and talking to people who met her passing through, trying to figure out what exactly has happened to her and where she is now. This is difficult because Ciri is a child of the “Elder Blood,” also known as the “Hen Ichaer.” I won’t lore dump about this right now, but suffice it so say she has unique magical abilities, chief among them the ability to teleport.
The problem is that she doesn’t entirely have control over these abilities. If she gets into a sticky situation, she can teleport out, but she won’t always know where she’ll arrive until she gets there. This obviously makes tracking her difficult, and it explains why we have to trek all over creation to piece together her story. Now I’m a reasonably attentive person, and I’ve played this game multiple times. However, even I am not entirely sure what exactly happened to Ciri and in what order. I’m going to try and reconstruct my understanding of events, without cheating by looking at the wiki.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Drunk-Megascoping Sorceresses”
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
T w e n t y S i d e d
