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Well we finally announced the game I’ve been working on since the end of Six Days in Fallujah. It’s hit all the game news sites and also has some walkthrough videos posted here. We’ve received a lot of good press and it looks like all the press demos went very well. Now it’s being shown to the public at PAX East and we’ll see the response from the masses.

Kotaku Hands On
G4 TV First Look

I know, shameless self-promotion … It’s always good to be able to finally show what you’ve been working on. I really believe people will be getting a lot of gameplay for the price :).

thanks,
-pat

It’s always good to take a break when you’re neck deep in development and look at your surroundings.  People often fall into the cycle of losing focus by focusing too hard a small spectrum.  Needless to say I hadn’t really been playing as many games as usual picking up the hits of 5 months to a year ago (Skate2, Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction …etc) rather than jumping on the new fresh games only to be inundated with the cloud of public opinion.

Well I broke down and picked up Mass Effect 2 and Uncharted 2.  I do play snippets of the latest games at work to breakdown UI systems, AI, weapons, script/gameplay logic, movement, controls, camera …etc.  Until recently I hadn’t played many at home for the entirety of the experience.

That said I’ve been mainly playing Mass Effect 2.  I enjoyed the first one and thought the dialog trees and outcome to be well written and well executed.  I always play through twice to test the bounds of the script and “moral” options.  The overall mechanics and gameplay are solid but I still find myself constantly loading from one place to the next.  The shear number of the dialog trees and individual cut scenes is pretty daunting and my hat’s off to Bioware on it.  The nagging feeling I have about the game is that I don’t play or interact enough in it.  It’s cut scene, combat, cut scene, explore, cut scene… wax and repeat.  I’m glad some of the combat mechanics were fixed from the first one but still feel I’d like to actually play the game more.

On a completely different side note:  Here’s a great article on agile development.

It’s been quite some time sense I posted anything out of shear laziness.  I’m not one to buy into all the twitter shitter since I don’t feel it all that important to be in constant contact with everyone.  I also doubt people would want the tweets I’d be prone to write (something about midgets and whiskey related bowel movements).

To all the 10 people that read this here’s what I’ve been playing:

Borderlands

My wife is more of a video game voyeur so she was ticked I got it on the PC rather than 360.  I’m currently a lvl 24 soldier and a little disappointed in the coop support for PC.  Pain in the ass going through gamespy for friends when that’s all built into steam.

In other news the side projects are moving along.  As people might have heard Atomic Games went through a pretty sizable staff cut some months back and I was one of the few that remain.  We’re still very much working on a game and making considerable progress.  It’s always interesting (and often frustrating) how size often clogs the arteries of progress.  This doesn’t reflect on the ex-atomic employees, as we let go of a lot of great talent and I hope everyone’s doing well.

So it’s been a very long time since I’ve last updated anything here.  We recently had the latest Triangle Game Jam and were able to host it at our studio.  Had a blast and, though there were only 2 of us on our team, came away with something to show for it.  I’ve been playing a bit of NeoTokyo, a source mod created by two of my co-workers (among others) over nearly 5 years.

Very well polished mod for the initial release and an overall great game.  Of course I’m a sick bastard and love all things Ghost in the Shell.

I have some independent side projects brewing that I hope to mention something about soon but it’s all about reaching critical mass before then.  I hope everyone’s having a great summer and not sweating your balls off in the northwest.  We should be out there in September for my grandmother’s 90th bday.

It’s most definitely been some busy couple months here.  We recently announced the game we’re currently working on so it’s no longer completely in cognito.  We’re currently working on “Six Days in Fallujah” to be published by Konami.

Six Days in Fallujah

Other than that I finally picked a PS3 to play Uncharted, better hardware but lacking on the software side compaired to the 360.  I’ll be speaking  at the upcoming Triangle Games Conference with the topic of “Designing Organic Systems”.  More of a breakdown of method that can be utilized in gameplay systems and scripting to create a better mousetrap or more enticing gameplay without being obvious to the player.  Should be an interesting talk and hopefully others will take something away from it as well.

Global game jam is starting up today and ending this sunday.  Unfortunately I won’t be able to participate since my wife is threatening divorce if I don’t spend time with her since we’ve been crunching a bit at work recently.  I’m hosting the projects on a subversion server that should be accessible to every with read access.

Attendees should have access with [first initial + last name] for login and the passwords will be given out at the start of the game jam.

Damn it, and I was hoping to use my Korg DS for some sweet ass soundtracks and kickin effects.  I’ll loan it to Scott Jacobs or Carlos Curran so see them to make sweet sweet music.

Well it looks like my server blew up in a server farm far far away (3000 miles away).  I’ve been far too busy with work and in general to get anything back up quickly.  The game servers under hostage-down.net are still up and running but the site is down.  Rather a sad note to the decay of PC gaming from the do-it-yourself nix box counter-strike servers to WoW and massive services.  I’ll keep everyone updated and get things rolling again.  I’ll be participating in the upcoming  Triangle Game Confrence at the end of April and the Global Game Jam at the end of this month.

I hope everyone had a great new years and a happy holidays!  Here’s to fresh starts in ‘09.

-pat