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aabicus

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Posts posted by aabicus

  12. Posted · Edited by aabicus

    I'm disappointed Medical Necessity was cancelled, but I can't say I was too surprised either. For my first attempt at being a creative director, I made a number of mistakes that was affecting the development of the project. I have a post on my private blog that goes into more detail about Medical Necessity and why it failed, but in a nutshell I spent most of my time on the marketing aspect and not enough time leading the team. It's part of the reason I quickly accepted a fulltime marketing position for Major League Magic, since it turns out marketing was my favorite part of developing Medical Necessity, and the role I did best. But I gained a lot of valuable experience from Medical Necessity, and it was a good life lesson overall. 

     

    In other news, two more announcements for the SPUF of Legend! First, we hit 100 subscribers, which qualified us for a custom URL! https://www.youtube.com/c/TheSPUFOfLegend (turns out you don't get to choose that custom URL, YouTube just gives you one with your channel name, but it's still better than the cavalcade of random numbers and letters you get by default). Our latest video is a presentation I gave on Procedural Generated Content in Left 4 Dead 2, which the L4D2 subreddit liked so much they stickied it :D

  21. Posted · Edited by aabicus

    Endless War 3 was one of the games I made my team play to teach them how top-down shooters work. I played so much of that game in high school. 

     

    Ready to have your mind blown TOGE? Watch this GIF of Endless War 3 and then highlight the spoiler text one chunk at a time:

     

    After they watched it, I closed the GIF and asked my team how many animations the player character demonstrated in the GIF. Try to answer the question yourself, how many animations did you just see?

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    My team ultimately guessed four: shooting, idle, moving up/down, moving left/right. The correct answer? Zero.

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    Now watch the GIF again. The player's walk cycle is created by making two little black ovals jiggle underneath the sprite. The gunfire is just muzzle flash. That game managed to completely avoid having to make animation cycles, which is part of why they had so many different sprites for the various factions and levels. Genius animation trick that somehow works perfectly without the player noticing. 

    TheOnlyGuyEver reacted to this

  22. Posted

    Yesterday Medicinal Warlock covered Experimental Games, and today Medic talks about the troubles with Trials and why Warframe doesn't currently give veterans enough to do. I totally agree that mobility puzzles sound really fun, Warframe's very detailed movement systems were one of the funnest parts of the game. 

     

    Regarding Aspie Life and its assertion that every gameplay decision was intentional, that's a dangerous game to play for the reasons Warlock describe. One thing I'm realizing as I make more games is just how important user control fluidity is; you really, really want to make it so the player can perform whatever action they desire with as little conscious thought as possible. I get that some games will break that rule, especially a game with Aspie Life's stated goal, but there are ways to do it while also subtly cluing the player in that the mechanic is supposed to be difficult. Camera angles are a good way to indicate that something shouldn't currently be your focus, as is poor lighting or designing the level to draw attention away from the sprite. If the game makes a big deal out of something (or even worse, locks progress until you figure the thing out) to the point the player is wondering whether a bug is preventing some sort of desired action, there's a very good chance they're going to stop playing and never start back up. 

     

    In other news, somebody Let's Played a game I voice-acted in and I'm super excited because that's never happened before :D

    TheOnlyGuyEver reacted to this

  23. Posted

    I made another in-browser game! This one doesn't use my own art (I only had a few days to make it) and the assignment was to practice level design so I needed to make a bunch of maps with different themes.

    15 hours ago, Silver Wolf said:

    Medicinal Warlock talks about TF2's Workshop and the gems that lie under the avalanche of generic entries.

     

     This is why I stopped looking at the majority of workshops on Steam. It becomes a job to try to find the few gems in pages, upon pages, upon pages of entries. It's a shame.

    I wish TF2 Workshop was like the L4D2 workshop, where you could subscribe to something and it'll appear in-game clientside. I'd love to use certain reskins of TF2 weapons, and it'd stramline the ability for people to play specific maps together. As it is, there doesn't seem to be much point to going on the workshop beyond occasionally voting for something that looks nice. 

  24. Posted

    I wrote that article because I'm hoping to convince my professor to add Half-Life to the syllabus for the Critical Genre Analysis class' section on first-person shooters. I needed to show that everyone in the class could play it for free, hence why I'm covering really basic stuff y'all already know, like installing Steam accounts. You never know with grad students. 

    TheOnlyGuyEver reacted to this
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