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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

-pat